A Traveller in Time Read online

  A TRAVELLER IN TIME

  by

  ALISON UTTLEY

  Illustrated by

  PHYLLIS BRAY

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW CHILDREN’S COLLECTION

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  A TRAVELLER IN TIME

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  1. Thackers Farm

  2. I Pass Through the Door

  3. The Herb Garden

  4. The Book of Hours

  5. Francis Babington

  6. Gossip in Thackers Kitchen

  7. The Queen’s Locket

  8. I Ride to the Fair

  9. The Secret Passage

  10. Mary Queen of Scots

  11. I Revisit Wingfield

  12. Arabella

  13. The Marchpane Thackers

  14. The Snow Falls

  Biographical Notes

  Copyright and More Information

  A TRAVELLER IN TIME

  In love and gratitude

  to

  Elizabeth Meagher

  Time is

  Time was

  Time is not

  —Sundial Motto

  Foreword

  All my early years were spent at the farm across the hill-side from the small manor-house I have called “Thackers” in my story, and often I climbed to the crest and looked down the well-known fields to the church tower with its emblazoned shields which rose from among the barns and haystacks of Anthony Babington’s birthplace. My father talked of Anthony Babington as if he had recently lived in the old farm-house of his neighbour. He spoke of the secret passages underground which he had entered in his own childhood. The tunnels had been filled in, but the memory remained. Country tradition is strong, and they say that Anthony Babington tried to help the Queen of Scots to escape from Wingfield along these hidden galleries to the little manor farm. This unsuccessful plot took place two years before the great plot which shook England and brought the Queen to the block and Babington to the gallows.

  I paddled in Thackers brook and picked bluebells in Thackers meadows: “Squirrels, Westwood, and Meadow Doles”, mentioned in Anthony’s will. I played with the little girl who lived in the farmhouse and on special occasions I went to the old church among the haystacks.

  Many of the incidents in this story are based on my dreams, for in sleep I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door and wandered in rooms which had no existence, a dream within a dream, and I talked with people who lived alongside but out of time, moving through a life parallel to my own existence. In my dreams past and present were co-existent, and I lived in the past with a knowledge of the future. I travelled into that secondary dream-world, seeing all things as if brightly illuminated, walking in fields and woods dazzling in their clarity of atmosphere. I sat on the stone walls in the sunshine of other times, conscious of the difference, knowing intermediate events. The painted room, the vision through the windows of the house, and many another incident came to me in dreams, and I have woven them into this story.

  1. Thackers Farm

  I, Penelope Taberner Cameron, tell this story of happenings when I was a young girl. To this day every detail of my strange experience is clear as light. I see the beautiful countryside with its woods and gentle hills stretching out infinitely green, and the little brook shimmering with sunlight as it flows under the hazel groves. I hear the murmur of wood-pigeons, sleepy and monotonous in the beech wood, and the warm intimate call of the cuckoo in the orchard by the house. Ice-cold water springs from the mossy earth and I stoop with cupped hands, one clasping the other, to sip the draught, and the taste of that water is on my lips many years afterwards. I smell the hot scents of the herb garden drenched in sunshine, and the perfume of honeysuckle after rain, but stronger than these is the rich fragrance of the old house, made up of wood-smoke, haystacks, and old old age, mingled together indissolubly. All these scents and sounds are part of the story I have to tell, with light and darkness, shadows and tragedy interwoven.

  I was called Taberner after my mother’s family, yeomen farmers of Derbyshire stock, and Penelope is a name which was often given to members of that family in bygone days. I was born in Chelsea, and lived with my parents in Cheyne Row, near the river. My sister Alison was older than I and had different interests, and my brother Ian, who was near me in age, was her companion, so I was left very much to myself. I was a delicate girl, and often had to miss school. I was small, too, for my years, and this separated me from the others who were tall and strong.

  When I was kept at home through illness I pored over many leather-backed books from my father’s shelves, and found my own friends in the pages. I read legends and folk-lore, books of poetry and stories of knights in armour, antique tales which had been forgotten and lay thick with dust under piled-up newspapers and periodicals. My favourite occupations were drawing and modelling, and I worked with my pencil, and a lump of clay, spending hours with them when I ought to have been out of doors taking exercise.

  Our house in Cheyne Row was little and old, with four steps leading to the green front door, and a little flight going down to the basement. We had the furniture brought by my Grandmother Penelope from Derbyshire, ancient oak chests with inlaid bands and carved initials, Bible boxes, tables riddled with worm-holes, and a great arm-chair with scrolls along the front and a hinged seat which held a score of books inside it.

  In the oak presses and the writing-desk were queer musty smells, and from my earliest days I used to lean over them and breathe the strange mildewed odours which seemed to rise from them like incense.

  When we were allowed a special treat, and it was my turn to choose, I always asked for the pleasure of rummaging in a great oak chest. My mother gave me a worn, heavy key, and I unlocked it, using both hands for it was stiff and the lock in the carved hollowed panel was unyielding. Then as the key turned I lifted the lid and stood for a moment smelling rapturously at a delicate odour of musk and old linen, and the smell of long-ago which came out of the dark depths—for it was pitch-black in that deep chest. Then I plunged in a hand and drew up first one object and then another, and I laid them on the table by my side. As I reached down in the chest I had to bend so low I nearly fell inside and I was fearful lest I should slip and be shut up there. So after the lid was opened a heavy cudgel was propped inside to keep the massive top from dropping upon me and making me lost for ever.

  Sometimes Ian and Alison came to help, for they loved the chest as much as I, but I had an advantage. I could invent tales about the things we found—or perhaps I should say I told the stories, certain that they were true. As I picked up the cashmere shawls, the silk-embroidered waistcoats, the pistol with its mother-of-pearl and incised roses and leaves, I seemed to hear a voice telling me about them. Then even clever Alison listened to me.

  “Come and hear Penelope,” she cried. “Quick! Quick!” and they sat with wide eyes as I told the tales and Ian clapped his hands and made me blush with pleasure.

  Then I folded the dresses and smoothed the silks and twisted the tarnished ribbons and tassels, and I replaced all as I had found them, for although I was untidy with my own belongings, I never dared misuse these ancient possessions.

  There had never been much money in our house, with three children to feed and educate. Father wrote scientific articles which nobody printed, and Mother did all the housework except the scrubbing which was done by stout Mrs. Jakes, our charwoman. Alison and I always made the beds, and Ian helped to wash up, but even then it was a busy household, and there was always some task waiting. I was the lazy one, but Alison usually disc
overed me hiding in the dark basement kitchen, reading in the corner, and up the stairs she fetched me, an unwilling helper, to dust and tidy the rooms.

  I always answered the front door bell, it was my special privilege. Footsteps walked along the pavement in front of our house, people going to see Mr. Carlyle’s house farther up the street, people going to the Embankment to stare at the great barges on the Thames, people hurrying for buses, or sauntering on pleasure, and I listened to these steps, imagining their owners, inventing adventures for them. Somebody would walk up our five steps, which were stoned with sand as in Mother’s country childhood, and the bell clanged and rattled. I opened the green door very gently, just a crack, with intense excitement, wondering if a fairy godmother would be waiting there. It was usually a flower-woman with a basket of tulips on her head, or a man selling muffins, and nobody like the magician I had imagined. Once a boy came with bunches of cowslips, great golden balls smelling of honey and wine, and this excited me very much. I ran helter-skelter down the crooked narrow stairs to the basement calling: “Cowslips! Cowslips from the country. Oh Mother!” but I slipped in my hurry and sprained my ankle. This was another expense for us, and I had to lie for days on the couch without even the pleasure of door-opening.

  At night, when I was in bed, I had a private joy. I slept in the front attic, a little room with a view sideways to the river. Alison’s bed was in a corner and mine by the window. In cold weather we had a fire in the high fireplace with its two hobs, and we roasted chestnuts or made toast and pretended we were at boarding school or caravanning, and I felt on an equality with Alison. But when my sister was asleep, at eleven o’clock or later, a fiddler used to play at the little inn across the way. I always awoke when he began, and as he walked out of the inn down the street to the river-side, I in my thoughts danced after him on tiptoe, swaying to the music, swinging in the air. Then strange and entrancing visions came to me, flowering trees waved their branches before my eyes, lilies sprang from the earth and blossomed as I watched them, and misted dream-like figures seemed to float up the streets moving and speaking to one another, and I was with them, living another life from my own.

  One day I met one of these people of my dreams on our own stairway. Ours was a steep, crooked stair, with a handrail on one side, very narrow, with rooms leading off it so suddenly that it was easy to fall headlong as one stepped from a doorway. We had a Morris wallpaper with leaves on it, like a green wood in spring, and I used to sit on the stairs, pretending I was in a forest far away from London with birds singing round me. I was sitting there one evening, with my feet tucked under me, in the blue dusk, waiting for the lamplighter to come whistling down the street to bring a gleam to the stairway. There was a street lamp near, and this shone brilliantly through the fanlight over the door and saved us from using our own gas-lamp. We had no electric light, the landlord refused to have the old house wired, so we put pennies in a slot for our gas.

  I was suddenly aware how quiet it was, never a sound, I might have been the only person in the world. Even the clock stopped ticking, and the mice ceased rustling in the wainscot. I turned my head and saw a lady coming downstairs from the upper floor. She was dressed in a black dress which swept round her like a cloud, and at her neck was a narrow white frill which shone like ivory. Her eyes were very bright, and blue as violets. I sprang to my feet and smiled up at her, into the beautiful grave face she bent towards me. She gave an answering smile, and her deep-set eyes seemed to pierce me, and I caught my breath as I stood aside to let her pass. I never heard a footstep, she was there before I was aware. She went by as I leaned against the wall, and I pressed myself against the paper to leave room for her full floating skirts which took all the stairway. I never felt them touch me, and this gave me a curious sensation. Soundlessly she swayed down the stairway, and I stood watching her, smelling the sweet, faint odour of her dress, seeing the pallor of the hands which held her ruffled skirts, yet hearing nothing at all.

  I leaned over the rail to watch her, and suddenly she was gone. The clock ticked loudly, the sounds of the street came to my ears, the lamplighter’s whistle, clear and round, fluted through the air, and the bright gleam of the gas danced through the fanlight upon the patterned wall. I ran downstairs and pushed open the door into the sitting-room, expecting to see her there. The room was empty, and I went thoughtfully down to the basement where my mother was cooking, and asked about the lady.

  “There is no one, child,” she exclaimed. “You’ve imagined her. It is easy to think you see some one in the dusk with flickering street lights falling on the walls. It was the shadow of somebody in the street perhaps.”

  I was positive I had seen the lady and I described her little pleated frill and the way her skirts hung over a quilted petticoat like the skirts in the oak chest.

  Mother was very quiet, as if she were thinking what to say next. Then she changed the conversation, asking me if we would all like to make treacle toffee that night, for soon it would be Guy Fawkes’s Day, and we should have fireworks as usual in our little paved yard, where the water-tank stood and the tubs which we made into flower-gardens each spring.

  We made the toffee, and burnt our fingers as we picked up the little streaky coils which lay in alluring shapes at the bottom of the cup of cold water. I thought no more of the lady, nor did I see her again, but my mother looked at me sometimes with a curious glance, as if she were anxious about me. I overheard my father say very impatiently: “Nonsense, Carlin. I don’t believe such moonshine, for moonshine it is. You with your country superstitions! You say she has inherited second sight from your grandmother, but I think she needs a complete change from London. All three of them ought to go away for a month or two, and breathe fresh air, and these things wouldn’t happen. Now let me hear no more of this.” He muttered “second fiddlesticks” and banged out of the room.

  Mother was very kind and gentle with me, as if she realized my solitary life for the first time. When I went to bed she came upstairs with me, pretending she had nothing else to do. She sat for a long time on the window-sill, talking of nice comfortable things, like Christmas presents, and pantomimes, singing happy songs of her own childhood, but I wasn’t lonely, and I curled down in bed content.

  That winter was very long and trying, but to me it was like other winters, with days of dreariness when things went wrong and the rain soaked me to the skin and my throat was sore, or the fog choked me as I fumbled my way to school, and days too of radiant beauty when snow fell and the church at the bottom of the street nearby wore a white bonnet on its tower. Then the gardens and trees of Cheyne Walk were like a fairy-tale and I ran along the paths with Alison and Ian throwing snowballs and shouting with excitement in the clear whiteness and the sharp frostiness of the air. To me it was meat and drink and I wanted to stay out all night, looking up at the sparkling stars above the Thames, catching their glimmer in the whitened boughs of the planetrees, stepping through the blue shadows on the trampled snow. But the street-cleaners came every morning and swept away the beauty so that the dark pavements were bared. The wintry days passed, the sky dropping its burden of glittering crystals, the dustmen carrying it off as if it were something wicked.

  My mother lighted my bedroom fire, and I sat by its glow with her, we two crouched on the hearthrug, the woollen curtains drawn over the window, and a kettle singing on the hob for cocoa. As she told her stories of her own girlhood, how she used to toboggan down the hills by moonlight, steering the wooden sledge past the holly bushes and by the wild brook to the last dip, how she cooked potatoes in a wood fire under the stars, and walked with the shepherd up the snowy fields to take care of the lambs, I could hear the faint sound of the fiddle in the inn across the road. It seemed to be part of her tales, and I thought of the little girl she described in scarlet tam-o’-shanter and scarlet shawl tied round her body, riding triumphantly down those lovely great hills with a fiddler tall and thin and outlandish playing fantastic icy tunes to her from his seat in the holly bu
shes.

  But I got one cold after another, and then I was very ill. I don’t remember that clearly, except the visits of the doctor and whispers behind the screen, and the crackle of the fire as I lay in bed with Mother sitting by me. When I came downstairs I was strangely weak and wretched, and I wanted nothing at all.

  “Penelope must go away,” my mother said firmly. “All three of them are ill with this terrible winter of snow and fogs.”

  “We haven’t any money,” my father groaned. “Where can we send them?”

  “I’m going to write to Thackers Farm and see if Aunt Tissie will have them for a while. She won’t charge much, there are plenty of spare rooms, and the children will enjoy it.”

  “Oh Mother! Can we all go?” cried Alison. “What is it like? Is it real country?”

  “Shall I be able to ride and shoot?” asked Ian. But I said nothing.

  “I don’t even know if Aunt Tissie can take you, children, and I doubt if there will be much riding. Your Great-Aunt Tissie is not young, and she’s old-fashioned in her ways.” My mother pondered, as if she were thinking of reasons to persuade her aunt to have three careless young people suddenly thrust upon her.

  “Tell her that I can darn and mend,” cried Alison, “and I will help with the cooking.” It was noble of her for she hated sewing and cooking.

  “And I’ll help Great-Uncle What’s-his-name. Mother, what is his name, your uncle?” asked Ian.

  “Uncle Barnabas. Yes, he might be glad of help, if it is real help and not hindrance,” my mother agreed.

  She spent a long time writing the letter that night, and I sat waiting to take it to the pillar-box. I wanted to push it safely deep down with a little prayer that Aunt Tissie would accept us. Mother was offering £2 a week for the lot of us, board and lodging, and we were a hungry three, but that was all she could possibly afford. We always knew about money in our house, just what everything cost, and that made us more careful.