“I’d know what to do” was all Charlotte said, still smiling.
I hated myself for admiring how cool she was right now. To me, the idea of suddenly landing in the past was totally terrifying.
The past would have been awful, no matter what period you landed in. There was always some horrible thing lurking there—war, smallpox, the plague. If you said the wrong thing, you could be burnt as a witch. Plus, everyone had fleas, and you had to use chamber pots, which were tipped out of upstairs windows in the morning—even if someone was walking along the street below.
But Charlotte had been carefully prepared to find her way around in the past from the time she should have been rocking dolls in her elegant arms. She’d never had time to play or make friends, go shopping, go to the cinema, or date boys. Instead she’d been taught dancing, fencing, and riding, foreign languages, and history. And since last year she’d been going out every Wednesday afternoon with Lady Arista and Aunt Glenda, and they didn’t come home until late in the evening. They called it an introduction to the mysteries. But no one—especially not Charlotte—would say what kind of mysteries.
Her first sentence when she learnt to talk had probably been “It’s a secret.” Closely followed by “That’s none of your business.”
Lesley always said our family must have more secrets than MI5 and MI6 put together. She was probably right.
Normally we took the bus home from school. The number 8 stopped in Berkeley Square, and it wasn’t far from there to our house. Today we went the four stops on foot, as Aunt Glenda had told us we should when Charlotte had a dizzy spell. I kept my bit of chalk at the ready the whole time, but Charlotte never disappeared.
As we went up the steps to our front door, I was somewhat disappointed, because this was where my part in the ordeal came to an end. Now my grandmother would take over, and I would once again be exiled from the world of mysteries.
I tugged at Charlotte’s sleeve. “Look! The man in black is there again.”
“So?” Charlotte didn’t even look around. The man was standing in the entrance of number 18, opposite. As usual, he wore a black trench coat and a hat pulled right down over his face. I’d taken him for a ghost until I realized that Nick, Caroline, and Lesley could see him too.
He’d been keeping watch on our house almost around the clock for months. Or maybe there were several men who looked exactly the same taking turns. We argued about whether the man was a burglar casing the joint, a private detective, or a wicked magician. That last one was my sister’s theory, and she firmly believed in it. Caroline was nine and loved stories about wicked magicians and good fairies. My brother, Nick, was twelve and thought stories about magicians and fairies were silly, so he figured the man must be a burglar. Lesley and I backed the private detective.
If we tried to cross the road for a closer look at the man, he would either disappear into the building behind him or slip into a black Bentley, which was always parked by the curb, and drive away.
“It’s a magic car,” Caroline claimed. “It turns into a raven when no one’s looking. And the magician turns into a tiny little man and rides through the air on the raven’s back.”
Nick had made a note of the Bentley’s license plate, just in case. “Although they’re sure to paint the car after the burglary and fit a new license plate,” he said.
The grown-ups acted as if they saw nothing suspicious about being watched day and night by a man wearing a hat and dressed entirely in black.
Nor did Charlotte. “What’s biting you lot about the poor man? He’s just standing there to smoke a cigarette, that’s all.”
“Oh, really?” I was more likely to believe the story about the enchanted raven.
It had started raining. We reached home not a moment too soon.
“Do you at least feel dizzy again?” I asked as we waited for the door to be opened. We didn’t have our own front-door keys.
“Just leave me alone,” said Charlotte. “It will happen when the time comes.”
Mr. Bernard opened the door for us. Lesley said Mr. Bernard was our butler and the ultimate proof that we were almost as rich as the Queen or Madonna. But I didn’t know exactly who or what Mr. Bernard really was. To Mum, he was “Grandmother’s lackey,” but Lady Arista called him “an old family friend.” To Caroline and Nick and me, he was simply Lady Arista’s rather weird manservant.
At the sight of us, his eyebrows shot up.
“Hello, Mr. Bernard,” I said. “Nasty weather.”
“Very nasty.” With his hooked nose and brown eyes behind his round, gold-rimmed glasses, Mr. Bernard always reminded me of an owl. “You really ought to wear your coats when you leave the house on a day like this.”
“Er … yes, we ought to,” I said.
“Where’s Lady Arista?” asked Charlotte. She was never particularly polite to Mr. Bernard. Perhaps because, unlike the rest of us, she hadn’t felt any awe of him when she was a child. Although, and this really was awe-inspiring, he seemed able to materialize out of nowhere right behind you in any part of the house, moving as quietly as a cat. Nothing got past Mr. Bernard, and he always seemed to be on the alert for something.
Mr. Bernard had been with us since before I was born, and Mum said he had been there when she was still a little girl. That made Mr. Bernard almost as old as Lady Arista, even if he didn’t look it. He had his own rooms on the second floor, with a separate corridor in which we children were forbidden even to set foot.
My brother, Nick, said Mr. Bernard had built-in trapdoors and elaborate alarm systems up there, so that he could watch out for unwelcome visitors, but Nick couldn’t prove it. None of us had ever dared to venture into the out-of-bounds area.
“Mr. Bernard needs his privacy,” Lady Arista often said.
“How right,” said Mum. “I think we could all of us do with some of that.” But she said it so quietly that Lady Arista didn’t hear her.
“Your grandmother is in the music room,” Mr. Bernard informed Charlotte.
“Thank you.” Charlotte left us in the hall and went upstairs. The music room was on the first floor, and no one knew why it was called that. There wasn’t even a piano in it.
The music room was Lady Arista’s and Great-aunt Maddy’s favorite place. It smelled of faded violet perfume and the stale smoke of Lady Arista’s cigarillos. The stuffy room wasn’t aired nearly often enough, and staying in it for too long made you feel drowsy.
Mr. Bernard closed the front door. I took one more quick look past him at the other side of the street. The man with the hat was still there. Was I wrong, or was he just raising his hand almost as if he were waving to someone? Mr. Bernard, maybe, or even me?
The door closed, and I couldn’t follow that train of thought any longer because my stomach suddenly flipped again, as if I were on a roller coaster. Everything blurred before my eyes. My knees gave way, and I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling down.
But as quickly as it had come on, the feeling was gone.
My heart was thumping like crazy. There must be something wrong with me. Without being on an actual carnival ride, you couldn’t possibly feel dizzy this often without something being terribly wrong.
Unless … oh, nonsense! I was probably just growing too fast. Or I had … I had a brain tumor? Or maybe, I thought, brushing that nasty notion aside, it was only that I was hungry.
Yes, that must be it. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. My lunch had landed on my blouse. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Only then did I notice Mr. Bernard’s owlish eyes looking attentively at me.
“Whoops,” he said, a little too late.
I felt myself blushing. “I’ll … I’ll go and do my homework,” I muttered.
Mr. Bernard just nodded casually. But as I climbed the stairs, I could feel his eyes on my back.
Back from Durham, where I visited Lord Montrose’s younger daughter, Grace Shepherd, whose daughter was unexpectedly born the day before yesterday. We are all delighted to record the birth of
Gwyneth Sophie Elizabeth Shepherd
5 lbs 8 oz., 20 in.
Mother and child both doing well.
Heartfelt congratulations to our Grand Master on the birth of his fifth grandchild.
FROM THE ANNALS OF THE GUARDIANS
10 OCTOBER 1994
REPORT: THOMAS GEORGE, INNER CIRCLE
TWO
LESLEY SAID OUR HOUSE was posh as a palace because it was so big and full of paintings, wooden paneling, and antique furniture. She suspected that there was a secret passage behind every wall and at least one hidden compartment in every cupboard. When we were younger, we went on journeys of exploration through the house whenever Lesley came to visit. We were strictly forbidden to snoop around, which made it even more exciting. We worked out increasingly crafty strategies for not getting caught. In the course of time we really did find some secret compartments, and even a secret door. It was in the stairwell behind an oil painting of a fierce-looking fat, bearded man who was sitting, with his sword drawn, atop a great white horse.
According to Great-aunt Maddy, the fierce man was my great-great-great-great-great-uncle Hugh sitting on his bay mare, Fat Annie. The door behind the picture hid only a few steps that led down to a rather unimpressive bathroom, but the fact that it was a secret passage made it exciting—well, to Lesley and me anyway.
“You’re just so lucky to live here!” Lesley always said.
Personally, I thought Lesley was the lucky one. She lived with her mother and father and a shaggy dog called Bertie in a comfortable house with a cozy garden in North Kensington. There were no secrets there, no mysterious servants, and no relatives to get on your nerves all the time.
We used to live in a house like that ourselves: my mum, my dad, Nick, Caroline, and me. A little house in Durham, in the north of England. But then my dad died. Caroline was just six months old when Mum decided to move us all to London. Probably because she felt lonely. And maybe she was short of money as well.
Mum had grown up in this house herself, along with her sister, Glenda, and her brother, Harry. Uncle Harry was the only one who didn’t live in London now. He lived in Gloucestershire, with his wife.
At first the house had looked like a palace to me too. But when you have to share a palace with a big, annoying family, it doesn’t seem quite so big after a while. Even though there were a lot of unnecessary rooms that didn’t get used, like the ballroom on the first floor stretching the entire breadth of the house.
The ballroom would have been a great place for roller-skating, only we weren’t allowed to. It was lovely, with its tall windows, its stucco ceiling, and all those chandeliers, but there’s never been a ball there, or not in my lifetime, not even a big party.
The only things that did happen in the ballroom were Charlotte’s dancing and fencing lessons. The musicians’ gallery, which you reached by climbing up steps from the front hall, was also totally useless, except maybe for Caroline and her friends, who used the dark corner under the stairs when they were playing hide-and-seek.
My mum, my brother and sister, and I lived on the third floor, just under the roof, where a lot of the walls were slanted, but there were two little balconies. We each had a cozy little room of our own. Charlotte was envious of our big bathroom, because the second-floor bathroom had no windows at all, but ours had two. Another reason I liked our floor was that Mum, Nick, Caroline, and I had it all to ourselves, which was often a blessing in that madhouse.