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

either of us learn to draw well enough to rebuild Arden by; not before we’ve found the treasure, I mean. Perhaps we might meet a real artist, like the one we saw drawing the castle yesterday⁠—in the past I mean⁠—and get him to draw it for us, and bring the picture back with us, and⁠—”

“Oh,” cried Edred, jumping up and dropping his masterpiece, and the calf-bound volume and the pencil. “I know. The Brownie!”

“The Brownie?”

“Yes⁠—take it with us. Then we could photograph the castle all perfect.”

“But we can’t take it with us.”

“Can’t we?” said Edred; “that’s all you know. Now I’ll tell you something. That first time⁠—a bit of plaster was in my shoe when we changed, and it was in my shoe when we got there, and I took it out when we were learning about ‘dog’s delight.’ And I flipped it out of the window. And when we got back, and I’d changed and everything, there was that bit of plaster in my own shoe. If we can take plaster we can take photographs⁠—cameras, I mean.” This close and intelligent reasoning commanded Elfrida’s respect, and she wished she had thought of it herself. But then she had not had any plaster in her shoe. So she said⁠—

“You’re getting quite clever, aren’t you?”

“Aha,” said Edred, “you’d like to have thought of that yourself, wouldn’t you? I can be clever sometimes, same as you can.”

It is very annoying to have our thoughts read. Elfrida said swiftly, “Not often you can’t,” and then stopped short. For a moment the children stood looking at each other with a very peculiar expression. Then a sigh of relief broke from each.

“Fielded!” said Edred.

“Just in time!” said Elfrida. “It wasn’t a quarrel; nobody could say it was a quarrel. Come on, let’s go and look at the cottages, like the witch told us to.”

They went. They made a tour of inspection that day and the next and the next. And they saw a great many things that a grown-up inspector would never have seen. Poor people are very friendly and kind to you when you are a child. They will let you come into their houses and talk to you and show you things in a way that they would never condescend to do with your grown-up relations. This is, of course, if you are a really nice child, and treat them in a respectful and friendly way. Edred and Elfrida very soon knew more about the insides of the cottages round Arden than any grownup could have learned in a year. They knew what wages the master of the house got, what there was for dinner, and what, oftener, there wasn’t, how many children were still living, and how many had failed to live. They knew exactly where the rain came through the rotten thatch in bad weather, and where the boards didn’t fit and so let the draughts in, and how some of the doors wouldn’t shut, some wouldn’t open, and how the bedroom windows were, as often as not, not made to open at all.

And when they weren’t visiting the cottages or exploring the castle they found a joyous way of passing the time in the reading aloud of the history of Arden. They took it in turns to read aloud. Elfrida looked carefully for some mention of Sir Edward Talbot and his pretending to be the Chevalier St. George. There was none, but a Sir Edward Talbot had been accused, with the Lord Arden of the time, of plotting against His Most Christian Majesty King James I.

“I wonder if he was like my Edward Talbot?” said Elfrida. “I would like to see him again. I wish I’d told him about us having been born so many years after he died. But it would have been difficult to explain, wouldn’t it? Let’s look in Green’s History Book and see what they looked like when it was His Most Christian Majesty King James the First.”

Perhaps it was this which decided the children, when the three days were over, to put on the clothes which most resembled the ones in the pictures of James I.’s time in Green’s History.

Edred had full breeches, puffed out like balloons, and a steeple-crowned hat, and a sort of tunic of crimson velvet, and a big starched ruff round his little neck more uncomfortable even than your Eton collar is after you’ve been wearing flannels for days and days. And Elfrida had long, tight stays with a large, flat-shaped piece of wood down the front, and very full, long skirts over a very abrupt hoop.

When the three days were over the door of the attic, which, as usual after a quarrel, had been quite invisible and impossible to find, had become as plain as the nose on the face of the plainest person you know, and the children had walked in, and looked in the chests till they found what they wanted.

And now they put on ruffs and all the rest of it to the accompaniment, or, as it always seemed, with the help, of soft pigeon noises.

While they were dressing Elfrida held the Brownie camera tightly, in one hand or the other. This made dressing rather slow and difficult, but the children had agreed that if it were not done the Brownie would be, as Edred put it, “liable to vanish,” as everything else belonging to their own time always did⁠—except their clothes. I can’t explain to you just now how it was that their clothes didn’t vanish. It would take too long. But it was all part of the magic of white feathers which are, as you know, the clothes of white pigeons.

And now a very odd thing happened. As Edred put on his second shoe⁠—which was the last touch to their united toilets⁠—the walls seemed to tremble and shake and go crooked, like a house of cards at the very instant before it topples down. The floor slanted to that degree that standing on it