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I told Kevin this was much earlier than I was used to getting up and that my blood sugar levels felt a bit low, but all he did was hand me a broom.

Sweeping a floor is actually not that bad an activity. To tell you the truth it comes with a good bit of job satisfaction—seeing something that has been dusty getting clean and clear just because you drag a broom across it.

After a while this enormous clock in the hall started clanging away, and Kevin said, “Oh, drat. Cordelia's breakfast.”

It turned out that Cordelia was a Corporamore, and even though she was only a kid, like around eleven or something, anyone who was a Corporamore had to be obeyed, no matter how young they were. Kevin was meant to get breakfast ready for her at exactly eight o'clock every morning. And even though it would have been “most irregular” for a boy like Kevin to bring breakfast to any of the Corporamores in the
old days, now there was no one else to do it except for Mrs. Kelly, who was working her fingers to the bone and whose bad knee made climbing the stairs to Cordelia's room pure torture. So Cordelia was waiting for breakfast, and apparently it was extremely important that Kevin was never late.

We sprinted to the kitchen, and Kevin fried five slices of bacon. He gave me one—it tasted pretty nice. He curled one into his own mouth and chewed, closing his eyes and humming for a second at the deliciousness of it. Then he put the other three onto two pieces of buttered toast. He stirred creamy scrambled eggs in a pan on the stove and tumbled them out onto a plate. Then he spooned jam into a little carved glass container, quickly and carefully arranging everything on this massive hard-to-carry tray.

He made sure that the knife and fork and spoon were all perfectly straight and that the napkin was folded in this precise way, as if he was someone with a serious case of OCD. He saw me staring at him. He explained that it had to be exactly like that every morning. If he didn't want Cordelia to become very out of sorts, he needed to be sure that he had everything arranged perfectly.

“She sounds pretty demanding,” I said. He said I should come on up with him so I could see for myself.

So I followed him along more creaking hallways with faded pictures and dusty mirrors hanging on the walls. We stood outside another closed door. Kevin organized his face into a new expression, smiley and round-eyed and
exaggerated. He knocked gently at first, but he didn't get any answer. He banged a bit harder.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” said this little skinny piercing kind of a voice from the other side, even though the person whose voice it was must have known.

“Miss Cordelia, your breakfast,” he said.

“Oh, for goodness' sake, come IN, will you?” she whined.

“Stay here,” Kevin whispered to me, and he shoved the door open with his shoulder and left me standing in the corridor, with paintings of people in ancient clothes gazing down at me.

I could hear him saying good morning and being fabulously polite.

In all the time I'd known my Granddad Kevin, which was my whole life, he'd never said anything about Blackbrick and he'd never once mentioned that he had been a slave. I personally think he should have told me important things like that.

The voice was the voice of the highest-maintenance kid in the history of the world.

“
You
were supposed to be here at eight o'clock,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Cordelia. I'm sorry.”

“What's taken you so long?”

“Well, I've had quite a lot to do.”

“Well,
I
really must tell my father how useless you are. You're always late. You never do my breakfast the way I like it.”

“I know,” he said. “I'm sorry, Miss Cordelia.”

All Kevin did was apologize and agree, and agree and apologize, and then he backed out of the room kind of bowing, like someone with zero self-esteem.

“You shouldn't let anybody talk to you like that,” I said when we were back in the kitchen drinking tea. But according to him it was part of his job to let her talk whatever way she wanted, and anyway he said he didn't really take much notice. According to him there were advantages to being on Cordelia's breakfast duty. For one thing, you got to swipe a few slices of bacon. And that was quite handy because of it being in the middle of the war. There were massive food shortages, leading to quite a restricted supply of basic foodstuffs. And anyway, he said that as soon as he'd brought up that stupid tray to her and put up with her whining, by far the worst part of his day was over.

He was right. After that it was kind of a great day. The whole time I kept on thinking that very soon I'd be coming face-to-face with my granny Deedee. And I hummed away to myself all through the polishing and sweeping and cleaning and dusting and vegetable preparation.

And before long it was time to go to the stables. He told me it was a famous place. He said that twelve horses used to live there, but now that everything was being cut back, there were only two left.

The paint on the stable doors was split and peeling.
There was hay and sawdust and pieces of flat wood underfoot that cracked and snapped as we walked along, and the horses made these warm, low, muffled noises of welcome, and I could feel something going all calm inside me. Kevin opened the stable doors and led the horses into the courtyard. Their backs were sleek and shiny, and they nodded their lovely heads and Kevin said, “Shh, shh, you two. I want you to meet someone.” He talked to them as if they were people. “This fellow's name is Cosmo.”

I reached out my hands and stroked their noses.

“This is Somerville.” Kevin patted her neck. “And this is Ross,” who was the bigger of the two.

I put my cheek up against Ross's face and my hand on Somerville's strong shiny back, and we stayed like that for ages standing very still, breathing in and out.

Eventually Kevin said we'd better get on with things. I looked down and lifted one of Ross's legs, and Kevin lifted one of Somerville's, and in exactly the same way I traced my fully intact finger and he traced his stump of one around the grooves, and we both felt the little bolts to make sure they were fine and tight.

There was something magic about us doing exactly that same thing at exactly the same time like that, and I think he noticed it too.

“Who are you, Cosmo?” he asked.

“I thought I wasn't allowed to talk about that anymore,” I replied.

“Fair enough, then,” he said, and he smiled and looked down again at the horses' feet.

Hitching horses to a cart is a difficult thing to do, especially when there's not much light left and there are only two people available to do it, and one of them doesn't know how to, but I watched him really carefully and tried to remember everything.

“I thought you said you were a horseman,” said Kevin. He reckoned it was weird that I didn't know anything about carts. I said nobody learns everything all in one go.

Afterward I drew a few sketches and wrote all the details down in Ted's notebook because you never know when information like that will be useful.

I did my best not to think too much about the present, but it wasn't easy. It kept floating into my head in the middle of conversations with Kevin, and I kept picturing John and wondering how he was getting on in his new home and thinking about how much I needed to see him. But I was committed to spending at least a few days in the past, and okay, it was weird that I was there and everything, but I had to stay calm, and I had to keep it together. When I did think about what Ted and Granny and Granddad might be doing now that I was probably an official missing person, I started to feel sick. I just hoped that when I got back, they'd be so relieved to see me that they'd forget about how raging
they were. I wondered if Mum had been ringing, and if so, what the heck they were all going to tell her. But I couldn't let myself get too distracted. When you're studying your own ancestors' childhood and taking as many notes as I was trying to—well, it's a full-time job. You have to stay focused. You can only take care of one time zone at a time. That's something I've definitely learned. It's a useful thing that everyone should know.

So when Kevin said, “Well? You ready?” I said I was. A hundred percent.

The animals snorted and whinnied at us. Kevin patted them and said, “Easy, girl. Easy, fella,” and then we all went out of the courtyard and those horses were excellent, all serene and obedient. John would have gone mental if anyone had tried to attach him to a cart like that.

Ghostly fingers of fog had started to drift around the trees again. Kevin had brought a blanket, and the two of us climbed up onto the cart, and he said, “Go on, go on,” and Ross and Somerville started trotting along, as if being hooked up to a cart with two nearly full-size humans on it was perfectly grand. Kevin spread the rug over our knees, like we were old people.

There was nothing old about the way we took off. We picked up a load of speed, down a new and different driveway. This was the way to the north gates, he said.

Soon we were rattling along, tearing down to the end of that drive with this new gateway staring us in the face. I
scrunched up my eyes, half ready to cross back over some time threshold or other as soon as we went out onto the road. I was on the brink of saying good-bye. But when I opened my eyes, we were already outside and the roads were made of mud. I laughed a bit. The wind was getting stronger, and I could feel the cart wobbling as gusts of it invisibly belted against us from all directions.

“Wow, I'm still here,” I whispered.

And Kevin went, “Of course you are. Where else would you be?”

It turns out that it's easier to talk to someone who's on a fast-moving cart than it is in practically any other situation that exists.

“Hey, Kevin, I hope you don't think this is a personal question or anything, but how did you lose that finger?”

He looked down at his hand and he went, “Good God! My finger. It's missing!”

It must have been the first time he'd ever cracked that particular joke, because he laughed for ages, and it was kind of infectious. When we calmed down, I said, “No, but seriously, what actually did happen?”

“I'm a stable boy, aren't I? Finger loss is an occupational hazard. All it takes is one moment of daydreaming, and whack!”

He did this big exaggerated mime of a hammer banging down on his hand. “Learned a good lesson, though. There
are times for daydreaming, but then there are other times when it's not such a good idea.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Well, it is a bit of a nuisance when I'm trying to point at something, but apart from that I get on fairly well without it.”

I told Kevin all about how my mother had left me to go and work in Australia, even though I hardly ever discussed that with anyone because nobody usually knew what to say. As far as I know, it's not that usual for someone's mother to go off to a whole other continent. He listened to me very carefully. He didn't go into bogus sympathy mode like some people do when you tell them stuff like that, and he didn't interrupt or ask me how I felt about it or how I was coping or any other useless thing at all. He waited until I'd finished, and when I had, he said it sounded like I missed her quite a lot, and I said yes I did, sometimes.