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.
Of course, what did I expect? Of all the rooms up here, they had to choose the one where I was hiding.
“Leave me alone,” said the girl’s voice.
“I can’t leave you alone,” said the man. “Whenever I leave you alone, you do something rash without thinking first.”
“Go away!” said the girl again.
“No, I won’t. Listen, I’m sorry that happened. I ought not to have allowed it.”
“But you did! Because you had eyes only for her!”
The man laughed a little. “You’re jealous!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Oh, great! A couple in the middle of a lovers’ tiff. This could go on forever. I’d be kicking my heels behind this curtain until I traveled back and suddenly materialized in front of the windows in Mrs. Counter’s geography lesson. Maybe I could tell her I’d been doing a physics experiment. Or I’d been there all the time and she just hadn’t noticed me.
“The count will wonder where we are,” said the man’s voice.
“Then he can just send his Transylvanian friend looking for us, that’s what your count can do. He’s not even really a count. His title’s as much of a fake as the rosy cheeks of that … what was her name again?” The girl gave an angry little snort through her nose as she spoke.
Somehow or other, I knew that sound. I knew it very well. I cautiously peered out from behind the curtain. The two of them were standing right in front of the door, with their profiles turned to me. The girl really was only a girl, wearing a fantastic dress, midnight blue silk and embroidered brocade, with a skirt so wide she’d probably have trouble getting through a normal doorway in it. She had snow-white hair piled up into a strange sort of mountain on top of her head, with ringlets falling to her shoulders. It had to be a wig. The man had white hair too, held together with a ribbon at the nape of his neck. In spite of having hair like senior citizens, they both looked very young and very attractive, especially the man. He was more of a boy, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. But staggeringly good-looking. A perfect masculine profile. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I leaned much farther out of my hiding place than I really meant to.
“I’ve forgotten her name already,” said the boy, still laughing.
“Liar!”
“The count’s not responsible for Rakoczy’s behavior,” said the boy, serious again now. “He’ll certainly be reprimanded for that. You don’t have to like the count, you only have to respect him.”
The girl snorted scornfully again, and again it sounded strangely familiar. “I don’t have to do anything,” she said, abruptly turning toward the window. That meant turning to me. I wanted to disappear right behind the curtain, but I froze mid-movement.
This was impossible!