Ruby Red (9 page)

I thought about what fun it had always been, sitting on the sofa in Lesley’s house watching DVDs. Sometimes we used to mute the sound and synchronize our own words with the pictures.

“Are you feeling dizzy?”

I shook my head. Now I knew what it had been like for poor Charlotte these last few weeks. Being asked all the time whether I was dizzy really got on my nerves. Particularly when I was always sort of listening to myself and waiting for the dizzy feeling.

“If we only knew when it will happen again,” said Lesley. “I do think it’s unfair. Charlotte has been prepared for this for ages, but you’ve been thrown in at the deep end.”

“I’ve no idea what Charlotte would have done last night if she’d been chased by the man who was sleeping in our built-in cupboard,” I said. “I don’t think the dancing and fencing lessons would have been much use there. No horse in sight for her to ride away on, either.”

I giggled, imagining Charlotte in my place, running all over the house to get away from the angry young man called Walter who slept in the cupboard. Perhaps she’d have snatched a sword off the wall in the salon and slaughtered all the poor servants.

“No, silly, of course those things wouldn’t have done her any good. But they wouldn’t have happened to her, because that chrono-thingy would have sent her somewhere else. Somewhere nice and peaceful. A place where nothing could harm her! But you risk your life instead of telling your family they’ve been teaching the wrong person.”

“Maybe by now Charlotte has traveled in time as well. Then they’ll have what they wanted anyway.”

Lesley sighed and began going through the stack of paper on her lap. She had prepared a file of useful information for me. Well, more or less useful. For instance, she had printed out photos of vintage cars. According to them, the car I’d seen on my first journey through time dated from 1906.

“Jack the Ripper was haunting the East End in 1888. The stupid thing is, no one’s ever found out who he was. All sorts of people have been suspected, but there’s never been any proof. So if you ever lose your way in the East End in 1888, any man you meet is potentially dangerous. The Great Fire of London was in 1666, and there was plague in the city practically all the time, but 1348, 1528, and 1665 were particularly bad years. Then there’s the Blitz in the Second World War. The air raids began in 1940 and left almost all of London in ruins. You’d better find out if your house escaped being hit. If so, you’ll be safe there. Otherwise St. Paul’s Cathedral would be a good place, because it did get hit once, but almost miraculously, it stayed standing. So, you could hide there.”

“It all sounds dreadfully dangerous,” I said.

“Yes, I always thought of time travel as more romantic. I mean, I kind of imagined Charlotte in her own historical films. Dancing with Mr. Darcy at a ball, falling in love with some sexy Highlander. Telling Anne Boleyn it would be a really, really bad idea to marry Henry VIII. That kind of thing.”

“Anne Boleyn’s the one they beheaded?”

Lesley nodded. “There’s a great film with Natalie Portman. I could borrow us the DVD.… Gwen, please promise me you’ll talk to your mum today.”

“I promise. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Where’s Charlotte?” Cynthia craned her neck to look around the tree trunk. “I wanted to copy her Shakespeare essay. Er—I mean I wanted to get a few ideas from it.”

“Charlotte’s not well,” I said.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Diarrhea,” said Lesley. “Very bad. Spends all her time sitting on the loo.”

“Ew, spare us the details!” said Cynthia. “Can I look at your essays, then, you two?”

“We haven’t finished them yet,” said Lesley. “We’re going to watch
Shakespeare in Love
again first.”

“You can read my essay,” Gordon Gelderman said in his deepest bass voice. His head appeared on the other side of the tree trunk. “All out of Wikipedia.”

“I might just as well look up Wikipedia for myself,” said Cynthia.

The bell rang, and break was over.

“Double English,” groaned Gordon. “For a man, that’s torture. But I can see Cynthia slobbering already when she thinks of Prince Charming.”

“Shut up, Gordon.”

Everyone knew that Gordon never shut up. “I can’t imagine why you all think Mr. Whitman is so great. I mean, he’s such a poof!”

“He is not!” Cynthia said indignantly, standing up.

“He’s definitely gay!” Gordon followed her to the entrance. He’d be needling Cynthia all the way up to the second floor.

Lesley rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, and gave me her hand to pull me up from the bench. “Off we go for our date with Prince Charming Squirrel!”

We caught up with Cynthia and Gordon on the stairs up to the second floor. They were still talking about Mr. Whitman.

“You can tell from that weird signet ring he wears,” said Gordon. “Only gay guys wear that sort of thing.”

“My grandfather always wore a signet ring,” I said, although I didn’t really want to get mixed up in this.

“Then your grandfather was gay too,” said Gordon.

“You’re just jealous,” said Cynthia.

“Jealous? Me?”

“Of course you are. Because Mr. Whitman is the best-looking, most masculine, cleverest, straightest guy ever. Next to him you look like a silly, weedy little boy.”

“Thanks very much for the compliment,” said Mr. Whitman. He’d appeared behind us, unnoticed, with a stack of paper under his arm and, as always, breathtakingly good-looking. (Even if he did also look a bit like a squirrel.)

Cynthia went even redder than bright scarlet in the face, if that’s possible. I actually felt sorry for her.

Gordon grinned nastily.

“As for you, Gordon, maybe you ought to do a little research into signet rings and their wearers,” said Mr. Whitman. “I’d like you to write a short essay on the subject by next week.”

Now Gordon went red. But unlike Cynthia, he could still speak. “For English or history?” he squeaked.

“I’d welcome it if you would concentrate on the historical aspects, but I leave you an entirely free hand there. Shall we say five pages by Monday?” Mr. Whitman opened our classroom door and smiled brightly at us. “In you go.”

“I hate him,” muttered Gordon, sitting down.

Lesley patted him consolingly on the shoulder. “I think it’s mutual.”

“Please tell me that was just a bad dream,” said Cynthia.

“It was only a dream,” I said obligingly. “Mr. Whitman didn’t really hear a word about you thinking he’s the sexiest man alive.”

Groaning, Cynthia sank into her chair. “Earth, kindly open and swallow me up!”

I sat down at my place next to Lesley. “Poor thing—she’s still as red as a tomato.”

“And I think she’ll be a tomato to the end of her school days. Was that ever embarrassing!”

“Maybe Mr. Whitman will give her better marks now.”

Mr. Whitman glanced at Charlotte’s place and looked thoughtful.

“Mr. Whitman? Charlotte’s not well,” I said. “I’m not sure if my aunt called the school secretary’s office—”

“She has diarrhea!” bleated Cynthia. Obviously she felt an urgent need not to be the only one with something to be embarrassed about.

“Charlotte is excused,” said Mr. Whitman. “She’ll probably be absent for a few days. Until everything has … returned to normal.” He turned around and wrote
THE SONNET
on the board in chalk. “Can someone tell me how many sonnets Shakespeare wrote?”

“What did he mean by
returned to normal
?” I whispered to Lesley.

“I didn’t get the impression he was talking about Charlotte’s diarrhea,” Lesley whispered back.

Neither did I.

“Have you ever taken a close look at his signet ring?” Lesley whispered.

“No, have you?”

“There’s a star on it. A star with twelve points.”

“So?”

“Twelve points—like on a clock.”

“A clock doesn’t have points.”

Lesley rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t that ring a bell with you? Twelve! Clock! Time!
Time travel!
I bet you … Gwen?”

“Oh, no!” I said. My insides were going on a roller-coaster ride again.

Lesley stared at me, horrified. “Oh, no!”

I was just as horrified. The last thing I wanted was to dissolve into thin air in front of the entire class. So I got up and staggered to the door, my hand pressed to my stomach.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” I told Mr. Whitman. I didn’t wait for his answer. I flung the door open and tottered out into the corridor.

“Maybe someone ought to go with her,” I heard Mr. Whitman say. “Lesley, please would you…?”

Lesley came racing after me, firmly closing the classroom door. “Okay, quick! Into the girls’ toilets. No one will see us there. Gwen? Gwenny?”

Lesley’s face blurred before my eyes. Her voice seemed to come from very far away. And then she’d disappeared entirely. I was standing on my own in a corridor papered with magnificent gold-patterned wallpaper. Instead of the school’s ugly linoleum floor tiles, beautiful wooden floorboards stretched ahead of me, polished to a high sheen, with elaborate patterns in the wood. It was obviously night, or at least evening, but candleholders with lighted candles were fixed to brackets on the walls, and chandeliers hung from the painted ceiling, also with candles burning in them. Everything was bathed in soft, golden light.

My first thought was
Great, I didn’t fall over this time
. My second thought was
Where can I hide around here before anyone sees me?

Because I wasn’t alone in this house. I heard music from below. Violin music. And voices.

A lot of voices.

The familiar school corridor was almost unrecognizable now. I tried to remember the way the space here was divided up. Behind me had to be my classroom door, and in the room opposite, Mrs. Counter was now teaching geography to Year Six. Next to the Year Six classroom was a stockroom for equipment. If I hid in there, at least no one would see me materializing when I came back.

On the other hand, the stockroom was usually locked, so it might not be a great idea to hide there after all. If I traveled forward again through time and landed in a locked room, then supposing I found a way to get out, I’d also have to think up some plausible explanation of how on earth I got there in the first place.

But if I hid in one of the other rooms, when I traveled to my own time again, I’d be materializing out of nowhere in front of an entire classroom, including a teacher. Explaining that would probably be a lot harder.

I thought maybe I should just stay in this corridor and hope it wouldn’t last long. After all, I’d been gone for only a few minutes both times I’d traveled into the past.

I leaned against the brocade wallpaper and waited hopefully for the dizzy sensation. Confused voices and laughter drifted up from down below. I heard glasses clinking and then the violins playing again. It sounded as if a lot of people were having a good time down there. Maybe James was at the party. After all, he used to live here. I imagined him very much alive, dancing somewhere downstairs.

A pity I couldn’t meet him. But he probably wouldn’t have been pleased if I told him how we knew each other. I mean how we
would
know each other some day, long after he died … er, long after he would be dead.

If I only knew what he’d died from, maybe I could warn him.
Listen, James, on the fifteenth of July a tile will fall on your head in Park Lane, so you’d better stay at home that day
. The stupid thing was that James didn’t know what he’d died of. He didn’t even know he was dead. Er, was going to die. Would be dead.

The longer you thought about this time travel stuff, the more complicated it got.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. Someone was running up them. No, two someones. Dammit, couldn’t you even stand around here for a couple of minutes in peace and quiet? Now where? I decided on the room opposite, the one that in my own time was the Year Six classroom. The door handle stuck. It took me a couple of seconds to realize I must push it up and not down.

When I finally managed to slip into the room, the footsteps were quite close. There were candles burning in brackets on the walls here, too. How careless to leave them alight with no one in the room! At home I’d be dead if I forgot to blow out a tea light in the sewing room in the evening.

I looked around for somewhere to hide, but there wasn’t much furniture in this room. Some kind of sofa with curvy gilded legs, a desk, upholstered chairs, nothing you could hide behind if you were any larger than a mouse. So all I could do was get behind one of the floor-length golden yellow curtains—not a very original hiding place. But so far no one was looking for me.

I could hear voices out in the corridor now.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked a man’s voice. It sounded rather angry.

“Anywhere! Away from you, that’s all,” replied another voice. It was the voice of a girl, a girl in floods of tears, to be precise. To my alarm, she came right into the room. And the man came after her. Through the curtain I could see their shadows moving.