A Traveller in Time (15 page)

“Lie down and bide quiet, my child,” said Aunt Tissie and she gave me a drink of hot water and ginger. Then she peeped in the oven, for I heard the clang of the iron door as I lay in my room, and she went back to church.

But through the trembling air came a whisper: “Penelope!”—no sound at all, but the echo of some long-dead call. I rose from my bed and crept along the landing, past the oak chest to the wall. My hands glided over smooth stone, and I could find no opening. From the kitchen I could hear Uncle Barnabas whistling a hymn tune and the words came from the church over the garden.

“Our God our help in ages past,” they sang. Then I touched a cold latchet, and once more found myself looking into the small, panelled room, where I had first been a visitor. Anthony Babington was there, seeking feverishly in the oak coffer, turning papers and books. His face was pale, he muttered to himself. Without noticing me he went to the fire-place and twisted a leaf carved in the foliage of the mantelpiece. A door swung back, a secret door which disclosed a priest's room with the crucifix on the wall. He knelt on the floor and prayed. Then he came out again, closing the panel so that the small slit of a room disappeared, its lines concealed in the walls.

He saw me standing in the shadows, hesitating, for I could not return by the way I had come, and I had no wish to disturb him.

“Penelope Taberner! Find my jewel,” he cried, and he seized my hands and held them as if he feared I should fade away. “My jewel. I've lost it, I can do nothing without it. You have strange powers, so find it. Tell me where it is.”

“The locket of her? Of Mary Queen of Scots?” I asked.

He groaned. “Yes, it's my talisman. It is lost. I meant to take it to Paris and it has gone.”

“Master Anthony, I don't know where it is,” I cried in distress, but he would not believe I had no knowledge. I promised to search in fields and woods, and do my best for him.

“If ever you find it, you will tell me. You will come and tell me,” he insisted, and his blue eyes looked as fierce as a hawk's as they stared into mine. I gave my solemn promise, and left him there among his books, for I wanted to see Francis. I went down the kitchen staircase, intending to cross the alleyway by the still-room, but the door of the kitchen was wide open and a company sat round the table and sprawled on the forms listening to one who addressed them. Their talk was of the Scots queen, for a pedlar had got a glimpse of her riding with her guard on Sheffield moor, and a carpenter had seen her portrait. He was describing it as I passed, and I waited to hear the news.

“There it hung, a grand painting, done by Her Grace's embroiderer, Master Oudry. He's a Frenchman and he makes the designs for the broideries of the queen and her ladies. He showed it to me and I saw it with these very eyes.”

“How did ye manage to get in?” asked Tabitha. “I'd give a deal to see a portrait of Her Grace.”

“I wouldna,” said another, “I'd give naught at all,” but they silenced him.

“'Twas this way,” said the first speaker. “I had a small dealing with Master Oudry. I made a box to hold the skeins of silk which he has. Fifty little places to keep the skeins separate, all in a good oak box, smooth as silk itself. It was a pretty piece of work, I may tell ye, and he paid me well. He was excellently pleased with it, so I up and spoke to him. ‘Master Oudry,' says I, although I ought to have called him Mounseer Oudry. ‘Master Oudry,' says I. ‘Will ye grant me a favour? I've heard tell ye've painted the Queen of Scotland. I've never set eyes on her, but if I could get a glimpse of your picture, I should reckon it a great honour.'

“Well, he hesitated for a bit and then he took me in my working clothes into the castle apartments, past the guard, explaining I was the carpenter, and into a room where it hung. It was a good 'un, a big picture, large as life and as true maybe, although she wasn't as purty as I expected.”

“What had she got on?” asked Dame Cicely. “I always wonder what kind of clothes queens and all uncommon mortals wear. Master Anthony has a white satin doublet for court, and a deal of trouble I had cleaning away a grease spot from the sleeve.”

“Her clothes were finer done than her face, for I expects Master Oudry was cleverer at them, being his trade, so to speak. She had black, drop earrings, and black jet beadwork on her bosom, and a fine ruff edged with point lace. It had a bunch of pearls to fasten it, not ribbons like ordinary folk. There was a gold crucifix hanging by a velvet ribbon from her neck and a cross and beads at her girdle, all painted glittering and real as life. There was a cloak of lawn on her shoulders, not for warmth, just for beauty, all transparent and made very soft and light.”

“Well, you've seen something we others haven't seen,” observed Dame Cicely, and the others all began to talk of the queen and her sorrows and her captivity, arguing and quarrelling among themselves.

I went out of the house by the great porch, and round by the church. I passed into the yew walk and beyond it I saw Francis. “Ho! Penelope! Did you hear me call you?” he asked. “Did you know I wanted you?” and he swung his long legs over the wall and came to meet me.

“Penelope! You are dressed like a princess, like a Spanish princess at court. Where's your boy garb?”

He looked at me admiringly as I stood shyly waiting, at my best green dress with the hanging sleeves, and my dark hair tied with a green ribbon. He put his arms akimbo and began to sing a song to me, half mocking, half joyful, as if he were glad to see me again.

“That's the latest London song,” he informed me, “which Anthony brought back with him.”

Then he called to me to follow him and he promised we would have fine sport. There were owls' nests to find, and deer to watch, and the great bull to tease. He would fetch his hawks and let me see them bring down a bird from the sky. He had a new falcon named Hover, and I should have it for my own. He would fetch his bow and shoot an arrow which would cleave the white wand set in the far fields for the Sunday games. Did I know of Robin Hood, he asked.

“Yes, I've read the ballads of Robin Hood and Little John,” I told him.

“You shall be Maid Marion to my Robin Hood,” said Francis. “He lived in Sherwood Forest, not fifty miles away. I'll show you a great hollow oak where I keep my hunting-knife, so that I can cut up the deer I slay. I'll give you a pair of antlers after my next kill.”

He promised sport indeed if I would come away to the woods, just as I was in my green dress.

I shook my head. “I came because you called,” I said.

“It was for Anthony's locket. Did he tell you? The queen herself gave it to him, and he would rather lose his right hand than her gift.”

I explained that I didn't know where it was, I had no powers, I was no witch-girl.

“But you see into the future,” he protested. “Can't you see it lying somewhere, can't you find it, Penelope?”

Even as he spoke he grew shadowy and dim before my eyes, his hand slipped from my arm, the warmth of his voice, the new friendliness of his glance, ebbed to nothing. I heard his voice again, vainly whispering. “Penelope. Don't go. Penelope.” But mingled with it was the triumphant hymn which rang from the old church across the grassplat.

“O God our help in ages past,” they sang. The cedar-tree had vanished, the yew hedge had gone like vapour, and only the old oak-tree and the mighty yews remained as witnesses of the past. “O God our help.” The words seemed to be uttered by the great tower itself, which had stood sentinel for generations, shadowing the rich and the humble ones who stood by its walls asking for aid against unseen foes. I looked up at that emblazoned tower and said a prayer for those other ones, who were near to trouble.

Then I went indoors, knowing I was going to my real home, and not the kitchen of long ago with its tumult and anxiety over the Scottish queen. By the fireside in his arm-chair sat my uncle. A long-handled spoon was in his hand and he basted the sirloin, just as the boy Jude had turned the spit in other days.

“What! Are you all right, my dear?” he smiled at me. “Come and sit by an old man and I'll tell ye a tale as I've thought on, a tale that's been simmering in my mind many a year, and never come to light.”

So he talked of the woods and a curious happening there, and soon the others came home from church. The tale ended; I was quite well. It was only a faintness from standing so long, they said, and I agreed with them.

The long holiday had ended, and Mother wrote that we must return. We had missed enough schooling, but she hoped we had learned some lessons not to be found in books and made friends with those who never walked the pavements of towns. Indeed we had! Ian's bosom friends were Jess the ploughman, who talked like the Elizabethans, and never went farther than Blackpool once a year, and Jake the gamekeeper. He spent many an hour with Jake who took him into the preserved woods and showed him the hens brooding young pheasants in hencoops along a green drive. Together they kept watch for poachers, and tracked the foxes and made a game-keeper's larder on an oak-tree. Certainly the game-keeper did not walk city pavements. There was the rat-catcher too, a man with many a tale of the cleverness of rats.

“You know that rat virus we had,” said he one day when I was there. “Well, it shines in the dark, sort of luminous like herrings' heads. What do you think those darned rats did? They never tasted it! Oh no, they was too fause, for it would have poisoned them dead. No, they carried it away and put it along their dark passages like lamps, so that they had a well-lighted road! I seed it with my own eyes.”

Alison had different friends, for all the little children in the village knew her. As for me, after Uncle Barny and Aunt Tissie there were those others, the hidden shadowy ones, who went about their own affairs in a world unseen by us; but their life was compact with sorrows and joys so intense that I marvelled the barrier was not broken down with the flood of their emotions. The air of house and barn was throbbing with the memory of things once seen and heard.

We went to the old deserted quarries to say goodbye, to see once more the broken stone huts whose floors were carpeted with the finest grass, in whose crannies ferns hung like green curtains, and over whose walls were tapestries of moss and lichen. We always crept softly up to these relics of bygone days, for we never knew what we should find. Ian expected a vixen and her cubs, or a badger remaking his holt. Alison thought we might see a tramp with billycan and savoury stew of rabbit. We saw none of these; only the queer listening silence pervaded the place as if woodland creatures and dim ghosts were watching us. We visited the meadows for the last time, and I said good-bye to my favourite fields, Westwood, Squirrels, Meadow Doles, and Hedgegrove, and as I walked there I remembered they were Anthony Babington's beloved fields which he mentioned by name caressingly.

There was Betty to go back to Bramble Hall and Uncle Barnabas said I should take her. I rode her up the long grassy lane which was a highroad in olden days. Strings of packhorses laden with “pigs” of lead from the mines in the hills once ambled down this winding lane, and country women rode to market over the crest, with pannier baskets filled with butter and eggs and fat hens hanging by their legs. Further back in history the shaggy British ponies came there with Roman lead from those ancient workings. Now all was grass-covered, rabbits scuttered along the path between the black walls, and pheasants cried
cuck-cuck
as they flew over from the woods. I rode past the little witch-wood, where the rowantrees flourished and bilberries grew, to the hamlet of farms and cottages. I trotted up to Bramble Hall and drew rein for a moment to look through the gateway at the old doorway. People were walking on the lawn, two men were playing bowls, another admired a monkey which a girl carried. The girl was handsome and petulant, and she tossed back her red-gold hair and impatiently teased the little cowering creature in her arms. She turned away to meet a lady with wide skirts of vivid blue who came slowly down the rounded steps from the open door of the house. At the same moment I saw the farmer come out from the side door and walk across the lawn to put a chicken-coop out in the sunshine. Each set of figures kept distinct, neither was aware of the other, and the farmer walked through them as if they were films of smoke.