Beswitched (23 page)

“Hurry up! I haven’t got all night!”

Harbottle had snapped on all the lamps and stood in the middle of the bedroom floor. The long sleeves of her shabby black gown looked like the folded wings of a bird of prey. Flora sat up in bed, her heart drumming. What was going on? This was not a dream. Pete, Pogo and Dulcie were sitting up in their beds, too shocked and sleepy to do anything but gape.

“I want the book,” Harbottle said. “I know you’ve got it. Give it to me at once.”

The girls all looked at each other in astonishment.

“Yes!” Harbottle snapped. “I mean THAT book—the volume with which you have been playing your foolish games. Please don’t try to deny it. The book happens to be my property.”

“We thought it belonged to Dame Mildred Beak,” Flora said.

“She left it to me in her will—does that satisfy your legal mind, Miss Fox? Good gracious, child, this is no time to argue! In the wrong hands, that book is more dangerous than a loaded gun!”

They all looked at each other again. The game was well and truly up. Pogo got out of bed and knelt on the floor to pull up the loose board. She took out the battered old book of spells and Dame Mildred’s notebook, and handed them both to Miss Harbottle.

“This, too!” Harbottle peered at the notebook. “Dear me, I haven’t seen this for years! It’s my fault, I suppose. I ought to have known.” She was talking to herself. “Someone was always going to find them. She warned me! Why didn’t I listen? Who can calculate the harm that might have been done?” She glanced up sharply, at the pale faces of the girls. “Put on your dressing gowns and slippers, switch off your lamps and come to my study.”

They obeyed her in silence. It was known all over the school that no girl or teacher had ever been inside Harbottle’s study. Ethel had told them that only the oldest of the maids was allowed inside to clean it. Flora had stopped being scared, and felt herself getting incredibly curious. What could the old bat be hiding in there? She wouldn’t put anything past her.

Miss Harbottle’s study was across a landing at the very end of the bedroom corridor. She jerked open the door, and the four girls walked into a cave of jumbled shadows—Flora’s first impression was that Harbottle lived inside a junk shop. As her eyes got used to the shadows, she saw that the room was stuffed with things. The walls were covered with books, and there were heaps of books all over the floor. There were also glass cases of fossils, and a dusty Roman head with no nose. The only light came from one lamp on the desk, and its reflection in the big mirror over the fireplace. Though it was summer, a small coal fire burned in the grate. Flora was hot in her dressing gown.

Harbottle stood behind her desk, and the four girls lined up in front of it—Pete managed to knock over a pile of
books. She turned bright red, but Miss Harbottle did not seem to have noticed. She was looking hard at Flora.

“You were summoned from the future, weren’t you?”

She knew
.

Flora shivered. Somehow, the fact that Harbottle knew her secret made it more real, and less like a game. “Yes,” she said quietly.

“What a blind old fool I’ve been! I know the look of a person who has been summoned,” Harbottle went on, “and I knew there was something odd about you—I simply didn’t put two and two together. I should’ve had my suspicions when you predicted another world war and wrote that essay about the next century, but I didn’t think about magic until the business with Ethel—the Elliot gel babbling about spells—then it all fell into place. You’d better tell me what other spells you’ve been mucking about with.”

Pete said, “Ethel was the last one. And before that, Flora’s summoning was our only bull’s-eye.”

“Thank you, Daphne,” Harbottle said. “That is a great relief. I’m not going to punish any of you—though you richly deserve it—because it’s partly my fault.”

“Your fault?” Flora didn’t understand.

“When Mildred Beak died,” Harbottle said slowly, “she made me promise to burn all her father’s books about magic. I was surprised—I thought she’d destroyed them years ago, after the rather disturbing success of our early experiments.”

She paused, as she did in class when she was waiting for an answer.

Flora was puzzled. She didn’t see how Harbottle could have done any “experiments” with Dame Mildred Beak. Harbottle was ancient, but surely not old enough to have known the old sorceress.

“Of course!” Pogo cried out suddenly. “I know who you are—you’re Celeste!”

Harbottle’s thin lips puckered into a smile. “Yes, I’m Celeste. You read about me in this notebook, I daresay.”

It took a second for Flora to remember that Celeste was the girl in Dame Mildred Beak’s diary—the one who let Miss Beak do the summoning spell on her because she wanted to stay at school. This was incredible. She stared into Harbottle’s wrinkled old face, searching for the unhappy, motherless girl in the diary. She had wondered what happened to Celeste, and she’d been under their noses the whole time. How had she turned into Horrible Harbottle? Perhaps she wasn’t so horrible after all—when you looked really closely, you could see how she must have been when her fuzz of hair was black instead of white.

“Miss Beak was a true mother to me,” Harbottle said. “I shouldn’t have broken my promise to her—but when it came to the point, I couldn’t bear to burn valuable old books, and I had them bricked up in the attic room. I should have known one of you little monkeys would think of climbing in through the window! Heh heh! I was just such a monkey myself, when I was a gel.” She let out another grating chuckle. “Well, I’ve learned my lesson. The bricks are coming down and those books are going on the nearest fire. And you’d better forget about magic as fast as possible. I know
that’s hard when Flora is here—but I have a feeling she won’t be here much longer.”

She smiled at Flora, and Flora’s heart leapt with hope. Suddenly, she wanted her real home so intensely that she could hardly bear it.

“You three gels from the present,” Harbottle said, “may go back to bed. Miss Fox, you will stay here.”

Afterwards, when she tried to remember the midnight hour she spent alone with Harbottle, Flora was not sure how much of it she had dreamed. Once Pete, Pogo and Dulcie had gone, the scary old barnacle sat Flora down in a soft armchair beside the fire, and made her a delicious cup of sugary cocoa. Harbottle herself had a glass of sherry, from a bottle she kept in her desk. It was as if she had declared a truce in the eternal war between girls and teachers. Sipping her drink, she asked all sorts of questions about the future.

Flora answered as well as she could. It was not easy, because Harbottle kept asking about politics, and international relations, and people she had never heard of.

“Oh well,” Harbottle said, “you can’t be expected to know about the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Just tell me anything you can remember.”

Flora told her about the war and the first landing on the moon. She was pretty sure there had been a woman prime minister before she was born—Harbottle was particularly fascinated by this. Flora did her best to describe twenty-first-century things, though she couldn’t find the right words, and they sounded rather silly in 1930s language.

But she needn’t have worried. Harbottle loved it all. “I do
wish I could live to see—what did you call them? Knee-tops?”

“Laptops.” Flora was so relaxed that she smiled at this. Somehow, half hidden in the shadows, Harbottle no longer seemed ancient. It was almost like talking to another girl. It was almost like traveling back in time and talking to Celeste. Suddenly, she knew exactly what the schoolgirl Celeste had been like, and wondered if you could unlock all old people to find the young selves they had hidden away.
I wish I’d tried that with Granny
, she thought.
I never made any effort to know her
.

“My guess,” Celeste Harbottle said, “is that you’ll go home when you have finished turning Daphne Peterson into a decent sort. There is already a vast improvement.”

Impulsively, Flora said, “I wish I could do something for Virginia.”

“Virginia Denning? What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t want her to go back to Vienna.”

“Why? Is it about to be destroyed by an earthquake?”

“I don’t really know. I just have a really bad feeling about it,” Flora said. “I sort of remember that something terrible is going to happen to Jewish people.”

Harbottle’s eyebrows went up. “Jews? Why?”

“I don’t know!” Flora had the sick feeling of dread again. “Look, Miss Harbottle—before you burn the magic books, couldn’t you do something to keep her here?”

“Hmm.” The wrinkled tortoise face was thoughtful. “You’re not afraid of asking difficult questions. As a matter of fact—and I trust you never to breathe a word of this—I do
still perform the occasional small spell. I studied Miss Beak’s books in secret, and made my own notes.”

Wow
, Flora thought,
she looks like a witch because she IS a witch
.

“I’d better burn those, too—it would be a fine thing if I dropped dead suddenly, and some nosy gel found them.” The old witch sighed. “But I’ll see what I can do about Virginia. Have you any other requests?”

She looked so friendly that Flora felt brave. “Yes, but it’s not about magic. I’ve taken the place of another Flora Fox, and when we swap back—you see, she’s been in a very modern school in the next century—”

“And you want me to go easy on her.”

This made Flora smile. “She’s probably picked up a few modern habits you won’t like much. And I think she seems quite cool—nice, I mean. Her memories are nice.”

Harbottle chuckled. “Poor child, she’ll be starting another new school back in the Dark Ages, with not a knee-top or ear-pod in sight!”

Flora spluttered on the last sip of cocoa. “What I mean is, could you give her a bit of time to get used to being back in the past?”

“Very well, I’ll make a few allowances.” Harbottle swigged the last of her sherry and poured herself a little more. “Here, I’ll show you something. Stand up, and go to the mantelpiece.”

Flora went to the mantelpiece beside the hot fire, and watched Harbottle curiously. Her brisk little claws dug in the drawers of her desk, pulling out a number of small, dusty
bottles. She set these in a row and produced a small brown bowl.

“Earthenware,” she said. “Nothing else works as a conductor.” Even when she was dabbling in magic, she couldn’t stop being a teacher. One by one, she took the stoppers off the bottles and put a pinch of whatever was inside into the bowl. “These are herbs—common garden herbs—that must be dried and preserved in a particular way. Look into the mirror over the mantelpiece.”

Flora turned to face the big mirror.

“What do you see?”

“Your study. You. Me.”

“Keep looking at your reflection.” Harbottle muttered something—Flora thought she heard Latin—picked up the bowl and threw the herbs onto the glowing red coals.

There was a strong, musty smell, like a cupboard nobody has opened for years. The mirror misted over.

“Keep looking!”

The mist cleared. Flora cried out in amazement. The reflection in the mirror showed a different room, and the face of a different girl.

“Now what do you see?”

“I—I—” She couldn’t reply. The girl in the mirror stared back at her in equal amazement. It was Flora’s own face—sort of. But this girl’s brown hair had blond streaks, and she was wearing eye makeup and gold earrings. Flora knew those earrings. Mum and Dad had given them to her for her last birthday. “It’s the other Flora!”

Across the yawning gulf of years, the two Floras stared at
each other. At this very moment, far away in the future, the other Flora stood before a mirror in Penrice Hall, gazing into the distant past.

“Yes, I see her,” Harbottle said, “but only just—it’s still misty. Can you see the room behind her?”

The two Floras had been staring into each other’s faces. “Yes.”

“Your vision is clearer than mine. Please describe it.”

Flora looked behind the other Flora and saw a small bedroom, with purple walls that were covered with posters. “I can see a desk—and that’s my laptop! And my hoodie—one of my shoes—my big jar of Pampering Body Cream.” It was odd to see all her stuff.

“She can’t hear you, I’m afraid,” Harbottle said.

This was frustrating, when there were so many things Flora wanted to say. The two girls smiled at each other. Flora mouthed, “Hello.”

The other Flora mouthed, “Hi!” She lifted her hand and put it against the mirror. Her palm was flat and white, as if the mirror were a window. Flora put her own palm against it. The glass was cold, yet she thought she felt a kind of warmth passing between them.

The vision lasted for about five minutes. The mist rose up again, and when it faded, the reflection in the mirror had changed back to Harbottle’s cluttered study. Flora was touching hands with her own reflection, and Harbottle stood behind her.

They were both quiet, stunned by what they had seen. The
brass clock on the mantelpiece whirred loudly, and let out a single chime.

“One o’clock—you’d better go back to bed.” Harbottle seemed to shake herself awake. “Please don’t talk about any of this—not even to the girls in your dorm. Once you are called back, they will forget a great deal.”

“I hope they don’t forget me,” Flora said wistfully, thinking how much she would miss her three friends.

Harbottle patted her shoulder, with surprising gentleness. “Oh, they won’t forget you. True friendship is stronger than the strongest magic. Sleep well, future-girl.”

20
The Ten-Bob Note