Beswitched (17 page)

The four younger girls were to sleep in the old nursery, which was now Dulcie’s bedroom. It was a long room with a low ceiling, and a wide window looking out over the sea. There were shelves of old toys and books, and a framed picture of a man in armor crouching at the feet of a ragged girl—
King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid
, Flora remembered. There was also a large photograph of Dulcie’s dead parents on their wedding day. Three more beds had been brought in. One was a camp bed.

“I’ve got this one!” yelled Pete, flinging herself down on it and making it creak alarmingly. “Dulcie, I think you live in heaven!”

Dulcie beamed proudly. “Isn’t it fun that we’re all together? It’s as if our school bedroom had flown away to another house.”

“Where’s Virginia?” asked Flora.

“In the spare room, next to Granny. She’s too nearly grown-up to sleep in here.”

When she first arrived at St. Winifred’s, Flora would have envied Virginia for having a room to herself.

How I’ve changed
, she thought.
Now I’d much rather be in here with my friends
.

They left the curtains open, to gaze at the view while they put on their pajamas. Night had fallen, and the horizon slowly disappeared in an inky wash of darkness.

After Dulcie had switched off the lamp, Flora lay on her back in the soft bed, looking drowsily at the beams in the ceiling and listening to the sound of the waves. Pete, on the camp bed beside her, had fallen asleep—after dancing the cancan in her knickers, until they all nearly died of laughing.

I’ll miss her when I go home
, Flora thought.

The time was coming. She felt it coming. Any day might be the day she discovered what she had been sent here to do.

15
One Last Spell

T
he morning was glorious—it was incredibly exciting to wake up to blue sky and sunlit sea. The four younger girls could hardly wait to finish their breakfasts and run out to the beach. Virginia said she was tired and would stay in the house, but Flora, Pete and Pogo couldn’t wait to start exploring. At last, when Dorsey decided they had eaten enough, they were free. Flora’s parents always took their holidays abroad, in places where the beaches were flat and white and hot, and she had never explored the British seaside.

There were no deck chairs on this beach, or shops, or cafés. It was simply a small patch of pale sand, surrounded by piles of rocks that were bearded with clumps of seaweed. Dressed
in her comfortable games clothes, Flora climbed the slippery rocks and paddled in the boisterous, freezing sea. Here was another example of how she’d changed—the old Flora might have wanted cappuccino and high-factor suncream, and yearned to bask like a lizard in searing heat. The new Flora loved the climbing and the messing about in rock pools. She had never felt so adventurous, or so free.

Dulcie’s granny thought they should run around outdoors from dawn to dusk, without being bothered by grown-ups, and it was the first time Flora had ever climbed anything higher than a flight of stairs without someone shouting, “Be careful!” On their second day, Lady Badger announced that she had borrowed three extra bicycles, and they could all go cycling. Flora could ride a bike, but not very well, and her first, wobbling efforts made the others giggle.

“My parents don’t let me ride on the roads,” Flora explained, “because there’s just too much traffic in the twenty-first century. Are you sure we’re allowed?”

“Gosh, of course we’re allowed!” Pete said. “Where else would you ride a bike?”

“Well, I don’t know …” Flora looked doubtfully at the bike she had been lent. At home, the pale green bike she sometimes rode in the park was as light as a feather, bristling with gears, bells and reflector strips. This old monster had a very heavy dark blue frame and no gears. There was a big, square wicker basket between the handlebars. Stopping and starting were much more of an effort. But she didn’t want the others to see that she was nervous.

The roads around Merrythorpe were narrow and winding, with absolutely no traffic except the occasional tractor or farm cart. Flora did her best to keep up with the others, and quickly gained enough confidence to love the sensation of shooting along the gray ribbons of road with the wind in her face. Once you got used to the differences, they didn’t seem to matter. She was soon jumping on and off almost as nimbly as Pete.

As the days passed, they explored up and down the coast, and all the nearby villages. Dorsey sent them off every morning with a huge packed lunch, and they picnicked whenever they felt like stopping—usually fairly soon after they had set out, owing to the ferocious appetites of Dulcie and Pogo. They cycled for miles, and by the time they returned to Merrythorpe for tea (Dorsey was always looking out for them, and always accusing them of being late), they were bone-tired and ravenously hungry.

Flora spent her days in the open air, being battered by the winds, baked by the sun and scoured with salt and sand. In the evenings she was too exhausted to do more than lie on the rug beside the fire, with her arm round one of the dogs, while Lady Badger read the
Just So Stories
aloud. Sometimes, she wondered about the other Flora. If she was staying on for an extra term at St. Winifred’s, the other Flora must be staying on at Penrice Hall. What was she doing?

I hope she’s made friends
, Flora thought.
I hope she’s as happy as I am
.

* * *

One morning there was a letter for Pogo at the breakfast table. When she read it, she let out a cry of joy. “It’s from Neville! He’s staying with some chums from his college—he says they’re only about three miles away from here!” She looked shyly at Lady Badger. “Would you mind if my brother came to see me?”

Lady Badger said she would be delighted to meet him. “And ask him for tea, dear. Young men are always hungry. Will that be all right, Dorsey?”

“Hmm, I don’t know,” said Dorsey. “I don’t generally approve of young men.”

By now they all knew Dorsey well enough to know that this meant yes. Pogo hastily scribbled a postcard, inviting Neville to tea the day after next, and they cycled down to the village post office to send it off. Flora was glad he was coming. He was nice, and it was ages since she had talked to a man—at St. Winifred’s it was sometimes hard to remember that men existed at all.

They heard Neville before they saw him—his motorbike roared along the quiet lanes and through the gates, before coughing to a halt outside the front porch.

“Nev!” Pogo cried. “How frabjous!”

Neville hopped off his motorbike—he had Pogo’s quick, neat way of moving—slapped his sister’s skinny back and shook hands with her three best friends.

“Well, this is a piece of luck—I could hardly believe it when I found you were going to be so close. Crikey, what a
view!” He smiled his friendly monkey-smile at Dulcie. “This place is beautiful. It’s awfully decent of your grandmother to invite me.”

“Come and meet everyone.” Pogo grabbed his hand and tugged him into the house.

Lady Badger and Virginia were sitting in the grand but shabby drawing room. Paul and Silas instantly jumped up and threw themselves at Neville, and Lady Badger had to say, “Sit, you naughty boys! Sit!” several times, before the dogs went back to their place in front of the fire.

“Oh, Mr. Lawrence, I’m terribly sorry—how very nice to meet you, dear.”

“And this is Virginia Denning,” Pogo said. “She’s in the sixth. She’s here to get over the measles, just like me and Dulcie.”

“Hello.” Neville shook Virginia’s hand.

“It’s not time for tea yet,” said Lady Badger. “Why don’t you girls take Mr. Lawrence down to the beach? And you should go too, Virginia. I don’t want to send you back to school with those pale cheeks.”

“We’ll take the dogs, if you like,” Neville said cheerfully. “It seems mean to leave them behind.”

“Oh, you are nice!” Lady Badger said, beaming just like Dulcie. “Especially when they’ve just covered you with hair!”

They left the house in a gang, with Paul and Silas circling round them. Virginia was quiet at first, but couldn’t help laughing at the excitement of the dogs—and the excitement of Pete, who kept trying to turn cartwheels and falling in a heap.

“I’m here with a couple of chaps from my college,” Neville said. “We’ve borrowed a cottage for a fortnight, and the general idea is that we’re studying, but we’ll probably spend most of our time reading detective stories.”

The beach was at the bottom of a flight of rickety wooden steps, and Neville offered Virginia his hand as if she were an adult. Flora thought Virginia looked pretty, with the wind blowing her dark hair into her eyes. Neville seemed to think so too. He took his jacket off and spread it on a rock for her to sit on. At home in the future, Flora would’ve said that he fancied Virginia, but nobody talked about fancying in the 1930s.

It was weird to think that Virginia might fancy Neville, and it made Flora a little shy with him. But this wore off when he began a lively game of throwing sticks into the waves for the dogs to fetch, and Flora and the other girls were soon soaking wet. He could skim pebbles so they bounced across the water, and they all tried to copy him, until it was time to troop back to the house for tea. He seemed to have injected them all with energy.

“Look at the state of you!” Dorsey groaned. “Don’t you go trailing all that sand anywhere near my tea table!” She ordered the four girls off to the cloakroom to wash it off, which took some time owing to the ton of sand in Pete’s hair. When they arrived at the table, Neville was in the middle of telling Lady Badger and Virginia about how he had been thrown into the fountain in his college because he was a communist.

“I’m a threat to the old order, you see. They won’t accept that the world’s changing and the old order’s dead. Sooner or
later, the workers will rise up to reclaim the means of production. The Russians have shown us the way.”

He ate a mountain of crab sandwiches, three scones and two large slices of fruitcake, and told Dorsey she was a genius. “I ought to kidnap you and take you back to our wretched cottage—none of us can cook anything except baked beans.”

Dorsey was so pleased that she pretended to be furious and wrapped more slices of cake in greaseproof paper, for Neville to take back to his friends.

“Well, Pogo,” Lady Badger said, after he had left, “what a charming young man. Do ask him again.”

Over the next week, the last week of the girls’ holiday, Neville visited every day. He brought his two friends over once—a very loud and jolly occasion—but mostly he came on his own, to mess about on the beach with the girls. Lady Badger grew fond of him, and said it was nice to have a man about the place again. He often talked about politics, and alarmed Dorsey with his predictions. One afternoon, he told her that when the revolution happened, the King would have to be executed, and Dorsey was deeply insulted. “This is a respectable country. Things like that don’t happen here.”

Lady Badger said she was interested in the revolution. “What will happen to me, Neville, dear?”

“Frightfully sorry, Lady B.,” Neville said. “I’m afraid you’ll be strung up from the nearest lamppost.”

“Oh, but there aren’t any lampposts here,” she said comfortably. “You’ll have to shoot me.”

“Don’t worry,” Flora said, with her mouth full of chocolate cake. “There won’t be a revolution.”

“You sound very certain,” Virginia said. “How do you know?”

Pete gave her a warning pinch on the leg, and Flora felt her face turning hot. She had blurted it out without thinking. “I just—I don’t think—it’s not very likely, is it?”

Neville was interested. “It’s possible, though—that’s enough to go on for the moment. Obviously, I don’t really want to shoot people. But there will jolly well have to be some way of making things fairer. We can’t have any more children going without shoes, or people dying because they can’t pay for doctors.”

“People won’t have to pay for doctors in the future,” Flora couldn’t resist saying. “It’ll all be free, no matter how poor you are.”

Neville whistled. “You’re an optimist, Flora. I doubt any of us will live to see that.”