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“Oh, shut up, Juliet,” I said, pressing my finger firmly down on the needle.
When I took my next breath, my mouth was full of flannel. I hastily spat it out and switched on the flashlight. It was a bathrobe, right in front of my face. The wardrobe was crammed full of clothes hanging in two rows, and it took me some time to scramble to my feet in there among them.
“Did you hear that?” asked a woman’s voice outside the wardrobe.
Oh, no. Please not!
“What is it, darling?” That was a man’s voice. It sounded very, very hesitant.
I was transfixed with fright.
“There’s a light in the wardrobe,” said the woman’s voice. It sounded the opposite of hesitant. In fact, to be precise, it sounded very much like my aunt Glenda.
Hell! I switched off the flashlight and cautiously retreated behind the second row of clothes until I could feel the wall at my back.
“Perhaps you—”
“No, Charles!” The voice was more imperious than ever. “I am not imagining things, if that’s what you were going to say.”
“But I—”
“There was a light in the wardrobe, and you will now kindly get up and investigate it. Or else you can spend the night in the sewing room.” Charlotte had obviously inherited her mother’s way of hissing. “Or no—wait! You’d better not—if Mrs. Langdon sees you there in the morning, Mother will ask me whether our marriage is going through a bad patch, which is the last thing I want, because our marriage is not going through a bad patch, or not my marriage anyway, even if you only married me because your father wanted to be related to the aristocracy.”
o;Aunt Maddy! You haven’t gone and told Violet anything about the chronograph, have you?” cried Nick.
Aunt Maddy’s friend Violet Purpleplum was much what Lesley was to me.
“Of course not!” She looked at him indignantly. “I swore by my life not to breathe a word! I told her the light is better for needlework up here, and Arista can’t disturb us. Although one of your window frames needs repairing, Gwyneth dear. There’s a draft coming from somewhere. I could feel a breath of cold air all the time.”
Xemerius looked guilty. “I don’t do it on purpose,” he said. “But the book was so exciting.”
My thoughts were already busy with the coming night. “Aunt Maddy, who was sleeping in my room in November 1993?”
My great-aunt frowned thoughtfully. “Let me think—1993? Was Margaret Thatcher still prime minister? If so, then … oh, what was her name?”
“Oh, dear! Your old auntie is getting it all confused,” said Xemerius. “You’d do better to ask me! That was the year Groundhog Day hit cinema screens—I’ve seen it fourteen times—and the affair between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles went public, and the name of the prime minister was—”
“It doesn’t really matter,” I interrupted him. “I only want to know if I can travel back from here safely to 1993.” I suspected that Charlotte might have dug out a black combat suit and was now lurking in the corridor all around the clock. “Was anyone sleeping in this room at the time or not, Aunt Maddy?”
“Lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,” cried Aunt Maddy. Xemerius, Nick, and I stared at her, baffled.
“Now she’s gone right off her rocker,” said Xemerius. “I thought as much this afternoon, when she kept laughing at the wrong places in her book.”
“Lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,” repeated Aunt Maddy, beaming happily and popping a sherbet lemon into her mouth. “That’s the name of our housekeeper’s hometown in Wales. No one can say I don’t have a good memory.”
“Aunt Maddy, I only want to know whether—”
“Yes, yes, yes. Our housekeeper at the time was called Gladiola Langdon, and at the beginning of the nineties, she slept in what is now your mother’s room,” Aunt Maddy interrupted me. “Surprised, are you? Contrary to general opinion, your great-aunt has a fully functioning brain. At the time, the other rooms up here were used only occasionally, as guestrooms; the rest of the time they were empty. Gladiola was rather hard of hearing, so you can get into your time machine and climb out of it again in 1993. There’s nothing to worry about.” She giggled. “Gladiola Langdon—I don’t think we’ll ever forget her apple pie. Poor soul, it never occurred to her to core the apples and throw the cores and pips away.”
* * *
MUM HAD A RATHER guilty conscience about the flu I’d claimed to have. Falk de Villiers himself had called her in the afternoon and passed on Dr. White’s prescription of bed rest and plenty of hot drinks. She told me about a hundred times how sorry she was she hadn’t listened to me, and she squeezed me three lemons with her own hands. Then she sat beside my bed for half an hour to make sure I finished the hot lemon drink. I must have made my teeth chatter rather too convincingly, because she wrapped me in two extra blankets and put a hot-water bottle down at my feet.
“I’m a terrible mother,” she said, stroking my head. “And you’re having such a difficult time at the moment anyway!”
She was right about that, and not just because I felt like I was in a sauna. You could probably have fried eggs on my tummy. For a few seconds, I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity. But then I said, “You’re not a terrible mother at all, Mum.”
Mum looked, if anything, even more upset. “I do hope those old men won’t make you do anything dangerous. They’re so obsessed with all their mysteries.”
