The House of Arden, E. Nesbit [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

a chap’s neck.” He crumpled his starched frill with hot, angry fingers.

“Mine prickles all round, too,” Elfrida reminded him, “and it’s lower, and you get bigger as you go down, so it prickles more of me than yours does you.”

“Let’s go back to the attic and try and get back into our own time. I expect we just got in to the wrong door, don’t you? Let’s go now.”

“Oh, no,” said Elfrida. “How dreadfully dull! Why, we shall see all sorts of things, and be top in history for the rest of our lives. Let’s go through with it.”

“Do you remember which door it was⁠—the attic, I mean?” Edred suddenly asked. “Was it the third on the left?”

“I don’t know. But we can easily find it when we want it.”

“I’d like to know now,” said Edred obstinately. “You never know when you are going to want things. Mrs. Honeysett says you ought always to be able to lay your hand on anything you want the moment you do want it. I should like to be quite certain about being able to lay our hands on our own clothes. Suppose someone goes and tidies them up. You know what people are.”

“All right,” said Elfrida, “we’ll go and tidy them up ourselves. It won’t take a minute.”

It would certainly not have taken five⁠—if things had been as the children expected. They raced up the stairs to the corridor where the prints were.

“It’s not the first door, I’m certain,” said Edred, so they opened the second. But it was not that either. So then they tried all the doors in turn, even opening, at last, the first one of all. And it was not that, even. It was not any of them.

“We’ve come to the wrong corridor,” said the boy.

“It’s the only one,” said the girl. And it was. For though they hunted all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and tried every door, the door of the attic they could not find again. And what is more, when they came to count up, there were fifty-seven doors without it.

“Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven,” said Elfrida, and ended in a sob⁠—“the door’s gone! We shall have to stay here for ever and ever. Oh, I want auntie⁠—I do, I do!”

She sat down abruptly on a small green mat in front of the last door, which happened to be that of the kitchen.

Edred says he did not cry too. And if what he says is true, Elfrida’s crying must have been louder than was usual with her; for the kitchen door opened, and the two children were caught up in two fat arms and hurried into a pleasant kitchen, where bright brass and copper pots hung on the walls, and between a large fire and a large meat screen a leg of mutton turned round and round with nobody to help it.

“Hold your noise,” said the owner of the fat arms, who now proved to be a very stout woman in a chocolate-coloured print gown sprigged with blue roses. She had a large linen apron and a cap with flappy frills, and between the frills just such another good, kind, jolly face as Mrs. Honeysett’s own. “Here, stop your mouths,” she said, “or your granny’ll be after you⁠—to say nothing of Boney. Stop your crying, do, and see what cookie’s got for you.”

She opened a tin canister and picked out two lumps of brown stuff that looked like sand⁠—about the size and shape of prunes they were.

“What’s that?” Edred asked.

“Drabbit me,” said the cook, “what a child it is! Not know sugar when he sees it! Well, well, Master Edred, what next, I should like to know?”

The children took the lumps and sucked them. They were of sugar, sure enough, but the sugar had a strong, coarse taste behind its sweetness, and if the children had really not been quite extra polite and kind they would have followed the promptings of Nature and⁠—But, of course, they knew that this would be both disgusting and ungrateful. So they got the sugar down somehow, while cook beamed at them with a wide, kind smile between her cap-frills, and two hands, as big as little beefsteak puddings, on her hips.

“Now, no more crybabying,” she said; “run along and play.”

“We’ve got to take granny’s letter to post,” said Edred, “and we don’t⁠—”

“Cook,” said Elfrida, on a sudden impulse, “can you keep a secret?”

“Can’t I?” said the cook. “Haven’t I kept the secret of how furmety’s made, and Bakewell pies and all? There’s no furmety to hold a candle to mine in this country, as well you know.”

“We don’t know anything,” said Elfrida; “that’s just it. And we daren’t let granny know how much we don’t know. Something’s happened to us, so that we can’t remember anything that happened more than an hour ago.”

“Bless me,” said the cook, “don’t you remember old cookie giving you the baked apple-dumplings when you were sent to bed without your suppers a week come Thursday?”

“No,” said Elfrida; “but I’m sure you did. Only what are we to do?”

“You’re not deceiving poor cookie, are you now, like you did about the French soldiers being hid in the windmill, upsetting all the village like you did?”

“No; it’s true⁠—it’s dreadfully true. You’ll have to help us. We don’t remember anything, either of us.”

The cook sat down heavily in a polished armchair with a patchwork cushion.

“She’s overlooked you. There’s not a doubt about it. You’re bewitched. Oh, my pretty little dears, that ever I should see the day⁠—”

The cook’s fat, jolly face twisted and puckered in a way with which each child was familiar in the face of the other.

“Don’t cry,” they said both together; and Elfrida added, “Who’s overlooked what?”

“Old Betty Lovell has⁠—that I’ll be bound! She’s bewitched you both, sure as eggs is eggs. I knew there’d be some sort of a to-do when my lord had her put in the stocks for stealing sticks in the wood. We’ve got to get her to take it off, my dears,