A Chase in Time Read online

  “That’s—” said Ruby.

  “My Great-Uncle Atherton,” said Aunt Joanna. “He was my grandfather’s younger brother. I must have told you about him. He brought back half the furniture in this house from his travels. He was a great collector. He had some idea of exhibiting everything, I think – of course, the War put a stop to all that. He was killed in Gallipoli in 1915. Do you know about the Gallipoli Campaign? It was what was called a glorious disaster – such a nonsense, of course, but at the time it was considered rather a noble thing to be involved in, like a last, desperate stand, you know.”

  Alex looked at Ruby. He was relieved to see that she too looked rather shaken. The young man in the grey flannel suit had only lived another three years after they’d seen him. It was a strange, sobering thought.

  “And Mary?” he said.

  “Oh yes.” Aunt Joanna turned back a page. There was another studio portrait, Mary this time, surrounded by photographer’s props – a velvet armchair and an empty birdcage – looking, like Atherton, very formal and long ago. “She was an administrator in a women’s hospital in Egypt. Quite a remarkable woman, by all accounts. She was killed in the War too, when the liner she was travelling home on was torpedoed. They died within a few days of each other. My grandfather always hoped that Atherton never knew what had happened to her – but he always wondered, of course, if that was why—”

  “He died of a broken heart,” said Ruby solemnly.

  “Well, no,” said Aunt Joanna. “He was killed by the Turks. But, perhaps… Well, anyway! It was a long time ago, and not worth worrying about.”

  She meant, Alex knew, that perhaps Atherton had stopped caring whether he lived or died after Mary was killed. He wondered if she was right. He thought of the young man in the top hat, beaming at Mary as she came down the aisle.

  Like Uncle Edmund, Alex hoped he hadn’t known.

  “But what about Dora and Henry?” Ruby was saying. “What happened to them?”

  “Oh, well.” Now Aunt Joanna was smiling. “Uncle Oswald emigrated to New Zealand just before the War. He got a very important job at a university, teaching ancient British history. The whole family settled over there. Let me see…”

  She put the photograph album back on the shelf and pulled out another, more recent, album. This time she found what she was looking for almost immediately.

  “There!” she said.

  It was a picture of a family party, the sort that were always held at Applecott House. A small, white-haired woman sitting in a chair, a plate with cake on it on her lap. Alex was sure he had never seen her before, and yet…

  “That was 1985,” said Aunt Joanna. “Dora brought her family over from Christchurch to show her children the house where she’d grown up. She was eighty-six! Another remarkable woman. She had two children of her own, and four war orphans that she’d adopted. But then,” and she smiled at Ruby, “Pilgrims always did live adventurous lives.”

  1985. Not really very long ago at all. Dora had grown up into a world with pop stars, and televisions, and aeroplanes to Christchurch. He wondered what she’d made of it all.

  “But what happened to the Cup?” said Ruby.

  “The Cup, dear?”

  “The Newberry Cup!” said Ruby. “I told you. We rescued it from the robbers, and we hid it in the secret compartment in the drawing room, until Atherton could get his collection of antiquities together!”

  “Goodness!” said Aunt Joanna in her what-a-lovely-game voice. “I was born in this house, and I never knew we had a secret compartment. How exciting!”

  Alex and Ruby looked at each other.

  “You don’t think…?” said Alex.

  “Come on,” said Ruby. And she grabbed Aunt Joanna’s arm and dragged her out of the living room and across the hall to the drawing room.

  Dora and Henry’s drawing room, in Aunt Joanna’s house, was given over to the bed-and-breakfast guests as a sitting room. There were two of them in there now, an elderly couple reading on the sofa. They looked up in mild annoyance as Ruby barged through the door and over to the corner.

  “S’cuse me, s’cuse me, terribly sorry, terribly important secret panel discovery work going on here, thank you.”

  “Ruby, dear, is now the time…?” said Aunt Joanna.

  Ruby and Alex ignored her. They were too busy pulling the armchair away from the corner. Ruby hopped down on to her knees and began pushing at bits of the wooden panelling with more optimism than success.

  Alex said impatiently, “Let me.”

  He crouched down and felt around for the place Atherton had shown him, a few minutes and over a hundred years ago. He found it easily and pushed. It was rather stiff, but it did push. The panel moved.

  “Good heavens!” said one of the bed-and-breakfast guests.

  Aunt Joanna said, “Alex! However did you find that?”

  Ruby, always impatient, yanked on the panel.

  Alex said, “Be careful! It probably hasn’t been opened in a hundred years.”

  “I bet it jolly well hasn’t!” said Ruby, and began to giggle rather hysterically.

  Alex ignored her and slid the panel aside. Inside, the little hole was dark and cobwebby. Alex reached in. There was something there. Something bulky and heavy and covered in spiders’ webs, and wrapped in dark cloth.

  It was the Newberry Cup.

  It was very much later. The children had been put to bed, the bed-and-breakfast guests had stopped exclaiming excitedly, and Aunt Joanna’s antique dealer friend in Cambridge – with whom she had been organising the sale of most of the furniture – had finally stopped calling Aunt Joanna back about the Newberry Cup. The antique dealer was a musty, fussy sort of person, who never said “Ooh!” without adding a “But…” Aunt Joanna had never seen him anywhere near as excited as he’d sounded when Ruby had sent him the pictures of the Newberry Cup. It was only with great difficulty that she’d prevented him from getting into his car and driving to Applecott House that very night. He was coming tomorrow morning with several expert friends of his to examine the Cup properly, but if it was genuine – and he seemed to think that it was – it was clear that Aunt Joanna would never have to worry about money ever again.

  It was all a little bewildering.

  Aunt Joanna sat in the living room with a cat on her lap, and a glass of Madeira, and tried to make sense of it. She still wasn’t sure how the children had found that compartment. She supposed they must have been playing at detectives, and pressed the secret place on the panel by mistake – although she would have thought they’d be getting too old for that sort of game. Of course, they must have remembered the family names from the photograph albums. Or perhaps their parents had been telling them stories. Either way, it was most unlike them.

  The photograph albums… There was something worrying Aunt Joanna about the photograph albums. Something half remembered. Something that didn’t quite fit with this very logical view of the affair.

  She put down her glass of Madeira and went over to the bookcase. Which album was it again? This one? No, this. She turned the pages until she came to the picture she wanted. Ah.

  A group portrait. A wedding picture, taken outside the little village church. Atherton Pilgrim and Mary Flynn, August 1912, read the caption. The bride and groom stood in the centre of the picture, wearing rather stiff smiles, surrounded by wedding guests in all their Edwardian finery. Aunt Joanna had never paid much attention to the picture before. But she was almost sure…

  At the edge of the photograph, half hidden behind the other guests, a boy and a girl. The girl’s face was half in shadow, and the boy, rather inconveniently, was looking to the side. And of course, these old photographs… But still. The resemblance was rather disconcerting.

  Aunt Joanna gave herself a mental shake. Family resemblances were peculiar things. Of course, the children in the picture must be distant Pilgrim cousins, although right now she couldn’t put her finger on which ones exactly. It wasn’t so surprising that they should look like her great-niece and great-nephew, was it?

  It didn’t mean their story was real.

  She closed the photograph album firmly and put it back on the shelf. Time for bed.

  The hall was quiet, with the peculiar stillness of a sleeping house. Aunt Joanna stopped by the long mirror against the wall. Her own reflection frowned back at her. She was getting old. She had been getting old for a long time now.

  There had always been strange stories about that mirror. Something about a witch, wasn’t it? Or a French countess? Or a countess who was a witch? Something like that. You would have thought a story like that would be frightening, but Aunt Joanna could never be frightened of the mirror, even as a child.

  She shook her head. She was too old to be thinking about fairy tales. Time for bed. Time for bed.

  As she turned away to go upstairs, the reflection in the mirror changed. The picture it now showed was of another, older Applecott House. The hallway was dim and tiled, in a rather sombre pattern of black-and-white tiles. There was a green umbrella with a duck’s-head handle in the umbrella stand, a ration book on the table and a Meccano model of a crane, half constructed and abandoned on the floor.

  If anyone had been there to look – but nobody was – they would have seen a small figure running headlong across the hall. It was a little girl in a brown coat, much darned, green gumboots, and a pink knitted hat, gloves and scarf. Her hair, peeping out from under the hat, was fair. There was snow on her boots and on her gloves, and she was crying. She ran straight past the mirror and was gone.

  The picture rippled. Now it showed the twenty-first-century hallway, just as it always did. But something in the movement had caught Aunt Joanna’s eye, and she turned. Was there something there?

  No. No, there was nothing. Just the familiar, sleeping hallway. Of course. Of course.

  Such foolishness, Aunt Joanna thought to herself, and climbed the stairs to bed.

  OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  WAYS TO LIVE FOREVER

  AN ISLAND OF OUR OWN

  THINGS A BRIGHT GIRL CAN DO

  MAKE MORE NOISE!

  (contributor)

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in the UK in 2018 by Nosy Crow Ltd

  The Crow’s Nest, 14 Baden Place

  Crosby Row, London, SE1 1YW

  www.nosycrow.com

  ISBN: 978 0 85763 898 4

  eISBN: 978 0 85763 899 1

  Nosy Crow and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Nosy Crow Ltd

  Text copyright © Sally Nicholls, 2018

  Cover and inside illustrations copyright © Brett Helquist, 2018

  Typography © Joel Holland, 2018

  The right of Sally Nicholls to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of Nosy Crow Ltd.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A

  Papers used by Nosy Crow are made from wood grown in sustainable forests

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  Sally Nicholls, A Chase in Time

 

 

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