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

earnestly, and thoroughly wish that it should come right.

“Our clothes,” said Elfrida.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Edred, “I was forgetting.”

“You may as well go on forgetting,” said his sister, “because the clothes aren’t here. They’re the other side of that twisty-twiny, inside-out, upside-down shakiness that turned the attic into the tower. I suppose the tower would turn back into the attic if we could only start that shaky upside-downness going⁠—wrong way before, you know.”

“I suppose it would,” said Edred, stopping-short, with his fingers between the buttons of his doublet. “Hallo! What’s this?”

He pulled out a folded paper.

“It’s the thing about cricket that Cousin Richard gave you. Don’t bother about that now. I want to get back. I suppose we ought to make some poetry.”

But Edred pulled out the paper and unfolded it.

“It might vanish, you know,” he said, “or get stuck here, and when we got home we should find it gone when we came to look for it. Let’s just see what he says Kent did make.”

He straightened out the paper, looked at it, looked again, and held it out with a sudden arm’s-length gesture.

“Look at that,” he said. “If that’s true, Richard has dreamed our times, and no mistake. And, what’s more, he’s brought things back here out of our times.”

Elfrida took the paper and looked at it, and her mouth dropped open. “If it’s true?” said she. “But it must be true!” The paper almost fell from her hand, for it was a bill from Gamage’s for three ships’ guns, a compass, and a half-dozen flags⁠—and the bill was made out to Mr. R. D. Arden, 117, Laurie Grove, New Cross, London, S.E. On the other side was the pencilled record of the runs made by Kent the previous Thursday.

“I say,” said Elfrida, and was going on to say I don’t know what clever and interesting things, when she felt the fur coat creep and wriggle all through its soft length, and along its soft width, and no wriggle that ever was wriggled expressed so completely “Danger! danger! danger! You’d better get off while you can⁠—while you can.” A quite violent ruffling of the fur round the neck of her coat said, as plain as it could speak, “Don’t stop to jaw. Go now⁠—now⁠—now!”

When you say a lady is a “true daughter of Eve” you mean that she is inquisitive. Elfrida was enough Eve’s daughter to scurry to the window and look out.

A thrill ran right down her backbone and ended in an empty feeling at the ends of her fingers and feet.

“Soldiers!” she cried, “And they’re after us⁠—I know they are.”

The fur coat knew it too, if knowledge can be expressed by wriggling.

“Oh, and they’re pulling up the drawbridge! What for?” said Edred, who had come to the window too. “And, I say, doesn’t the portcullis look guillotinish when it comes down like that?”

Through the window one looked straight down on to the drawbridge, and as the tower stuck out beyond the gate, its side window gave an excellent view of the slowly descending portcullis.

“I say,” said Elfrida, “my fluffy coat says ‘Go!’ Doesn’t yours?”

“It would if I’d listen to it,” said Edred carelessly.

The soldiers were quite near now⁠—so near that Elfrida could see how fierce they looked. And she knew that they were the same soldiers who had hammered so loud and so hard at the door of Arden House, in Soho. They must have ridden all night. So she screwed her mind up to make poetry, just as you screw your muscles up to jump a gate or run a hundred yards. And almost before she knew that she was screwing it up at all the screw had acted and she had screwed out a piece of Mouldiwarp poetry and was saying it aloud⁠—

“Dear Mouldiwarp, since Cousin Dick
Buys his beautiful flags from Gamage’s,
Take us away, and take us quick,
Before the soldiers do us any damages.”

And the moment she had said it, the white magic coats grew up and grew down and wrapped the children up as tight and as soft as ever a silkworm wrapped itself when it was tired of being a silkworm and entered into its cocoon, as the first step towards being a person with wings.

Can you imagine what it would be like to have lovely liquid sleep emptied on you by the warm tubful? That is what it felt like inside the white, wonderful cocoons. The children knew that the tower was turning wrong way up and inside out, but it didn’t matter a bit. Sleep was raining down on them in magic showers⁠—no; it was closing on them, closer and closer, nearer and nearer, soft, delicious layers of warm delight. A soft, humming sound was in their ears, like the sound of bees when you push through a bed of Canterbury bells, and the next thing that happened was that they came out of the past into the present with a sort of snap of light and a twist of sound. It was like coming out of a railway tunnel into daylight.

The magic coverlet-coat-cocoons had even saved them the trouble of changing into their own clothes, for they found that the stiff, heavy clothes had gone, and they were dressed in the little ordinary things that they had always been used to.

“And now,” said Elfrida, “let’s have another look at that Gamage paper, if it hasn’t disappeared. I expect it has though.”

But it hadn’t.

“I should like to meet Dick again,” said Edred, as they went downstairs. “He was much the jolliest boy I ever met.”

“Perhaps we shall,” Elfrida said hopefully. “You see he does come into our times. I expect that New Cross time he stayed quite a long while, like we did when we went to Gunpowder Plot times. Or we might go back there, a little later, when the Gunpowder Plot has all died away and been forgotten.”

“It isn’t forgotten yet,” said Edred, “and it’s three hundred years ago. Now let’s develop our