Gideon the Cutpurse Read online

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Peter asked.

  ‘This is my valley,’ she said in a faltering voice. ‘I thought I was imagining it last night. This is the way the school bus comes – it’s so obvious from this direction. My house should be beside the stream where we spent the night. This is my valley but there’s nothing here. There’s nothing here!’

  Peter saw Gideon glancing over his shoulder at them and realised that he was not going to wait for them. Kate stood with her hand over her mouth, her grey eyes filling with tears. He pulled her by the arm and attempted to reassure her while keeping her moving.

  ‘How can that possibly be?’ he said. ‘I guess one valley must look pretty much like another.’

  ‘What do you know?’ cried Kate. ‘You’re just a townie! Don’t you think I’d recognise my own valley?’

  ‘Okay, okay. Have it your way. There’s no need to shout. Just hang on until we reach a phone – one call and all of this will be sorted out.’

  They walked without speaking, never letting Gideon out of their sight, putting one foot in front of the other through fertile summer meadows, treading over fresh green grass and clover and cow parsley and wishing that someone would pull them out of this bad dream.

  Peter’s mother flew back to England from California on Sunday. She arrived in the early hours of Monday morning, only just in time for the press conference that had been hastily organised in the assembly hall of Kate’s school in Bakewell. It was a grim homecoming.

  The television cameras focussed in on Detective Inspector Wheeler, who announced to the press that the children had disappeared without trace from the research centre six miles away at midday forty-eight hours earlier. He said that there were now serious concerns about their safety. Dr and Mrs Dyer and Mr and Mrs Schock sat in a forlorn row behind a long table. To be sat in these circumstances in the same place as she had seen Kate singing her heart out at the Christmas Carol concert only one week earlier was more than Mrs Dyer could bear.

  Police telephone numbers and images of the children flashed on the big screen and were beamed to televisions across the country: there was last term’s school photograph of Peter with a silly grin on his face and a video of Kate training Molly to shake hands.

  At the end of the press conference Peter’s and Kate’s parents hurried away from the spotlights to cope with their anguish in private. While the cameramen packed up their equipment Detective Inspector Wheeler stood staring out of a window, chewing the end of his pencil. He was perplexed. An experienced policeman, he could usually rely on his gut instincts, but with this case he felt he was receiving confused messages. When he had met Peter’s parents for the first time, the unmistakeable scent of money which wafted around them made him suspect a kidnapping. Yet no ransom note had been delivered – at least not to his knowledge. Could Mr and Mrs Schock be hiding something? And then, there was Dr Williamson’s machine, not to mention the representatives whom NASA was sending over from Houston. Why would they do that for some worthless bit of equipment? And, bizarrely, Detective Inspector Wheeler felt in his bones that both children were safe and sound and that, sooner or later, they would turn up. He would have liked to share his optimism with the distraught parents but he could scarcely tell them to stop worrying because he had a funny sort of a hunch that Peter and Kate were all right …

  He chewed his pencil and stared absentmindedly at the playing field outside. The watery sunshine had melted most of last night’s hard frost but there were still lingering patches of ice under the branches of the ancient cedar tree which towered over the soccer pitches. Something caught the policeman’s eye and he swung his gaze over to one of the far goalposts. The sun, already low in the sky, dazzled him yet he was sure he could see a figure lying in the mouth of the goal. He squinted in the sunshine. It was a girl, wearing what seemed to be a long, green evening dress. She was lying on her back with her knees up, the dress tucked around her legs. Her long, red hair streamed out behind her on the muddy pitch.

  ‘Good grief,’ he exclaimed in his soft Edinburgh accent. ‘She looks like the Dyer girl!’

  He dropped his pencil and immediately ran out of the school and onto the soccer pitch shouting at two constables to follow him at once. When they reached the goalposts she had disappeared. Detective Inspector Wheeler turned around slowly, in a full circle, his breath turning to steam in the chill air as he carefully scanned the grounds but there was no longer any sign of the girl who looked like Kate. He crouched down to search for fresh prints in the half-frozen mud between the goalposts and he felt all the hackles rise on the back of his neck.

  After two hours of hard walking under a hot sun Gideon came to a halt and pointed. ‘The River Wye. We’ll be in Bakewell within the hour.’ Gideon looked at Peter’s and Kate’s red, shiny faces and drooping shoulders. ‘We can rest here a moment and drink,’ he said.

  He led them to a grassy riverbank where dragonflies of metallic blue swooped over the water. Kate kicked off her trainers and unpeeled her socks from her aching feet. Peter followed suit and they both dangled their toes in the icy water. Gideon filled a leather water bottle and offered it to the children before drinking himself. Then he stretched out luxuriously on the grass and put his three-cornered hat over his face.

  ‘We will soon reach Sheepwash Bridge, if I am not mistaken,’ said Gideon from under his hat.

  The effect his words had on Kate was electric. She leaped up and started to pull her socks onto her damp feet.

  ‘I know Sheepwash Bridge. It’s at Ashford-on-the-Water. My friend Megan lives there. We can telephone from her house!’

  She set off at a run while Peter struggled to get his trainers back on.

  ‘Mistress Kate!’ Gideon shouted after her. ‘Ashford is in that direction.’

  Kate turned round and started to run in the direction Gideon was indicating. She forgot her tiredness and sprang through the soft grass. Peter soon caught her up and after ten minutes they spotted a cluster of stone houses and a pretty bridge spanning a river.

  ‘Look!’ cried Kate. ‘That’s Sheepwash Bridge.’

  They did not slow down until they were standing on the bridge and then both of them came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Kate in a crestfallen voice. ‘This can’t be happening.’

  They were standing on cobblestones. A dirt road led from the bridge through the village of Ashford-on-the-Water which Kate thought she knew so well. Some of the mellow stone cottages seemed familiar but not much else. It was not just the absence of tarmac, road markings, street lamps, pavements, cars and the hotel where she had once had lunch that was so upsetting, it was also the appearance of the villagers themselves. They saw an old man driving a cart and horse. White, thistledown hair reached past his shoulders and he wore a large, soft-brimmed hat and a filthy black coat and knee breeches. Enormous buckles decorated his shabby shoes. Three barefooted boys in rags were teasing a cat that was backing, hissing, into a doorway. A woman in a straw bonnet and a long, low-cut dress that displayed her ample bosom was carrying a basket of carrots. Soon each of the villagers had stopped what they were doing and were staring open-mouthed at the strangers on the bridge. If Kate and Peter thought they looked weird, the feeling was clearly mutual.

  It’s a film set. It has to be a film set, thought Peter, who had occasionally been allowed to see his mother at work. He looked around for the camera crew.

  ‘We must find you some respectable clothes if you are not to make a spectacle of yourselves,’ said Gideon in a low voice from behind them. ‘Let me go ahead.’

  He pushed in front of them and bowed to the women with the carrots and the old man on his cart in turn. ‘Good day to you’ he said, pulling off his hat. ‘’Tis fine weather we are enjoying, is it not?’ Peter looked down self-consciously at his T-shirt and jeans and adjusted the anorak that he had tied around his waist. The wretched cat had escaped its young tormentors while they recovered enough from their surprise to start pointing and jeering at Peter and
Kate. Gideon marched through them, threatening to cuff one of them around the ear and making as if to kick another’s bottom.

  ‘Mind your manners if you don’t want to feel my boot on your behinds,’ he warned.

  Peter waited until they reached the other side of the village before asking the question that was on both children’s tongues: ‘What is the date today, Gideon?’

  ‘It must be the eighteenth, no, the nineteenth day of July.’

  ‘And the year?’ Peter asked.

  ‘The year?’

  ‘Yes, the year.’

  ‘Why, the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and sixty-three.’

  ‘1763,’ mouthed Kate silently.

  The shock of it was too much for Peter to take in and for a moment he felt no emotion at all. Then he had a strong urge to giggle but found himself instead sinking to the ground. Kate kept repeating 1763 to herself as if to hammer the meaning home. She turned very pale and then said, ‘I feel a bit dizzy,’ and collapsed at Gideon’s feet.

  I was overcome with wonder and amazement when Peter first told me he had come here from the future. Then I saw the fear in his face and I realised that his journey through the centuries had made him an orphan just as surely as I had been orphaned by the fever.

  The Life and Times of Gideon Seymour,

  Cutpurse and Gentleman, 1792

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Hospitality of the Honourable

  Mrs Byng

  In which Peter and Kate make the acquaintance of

  the Byng family and Peter demonstrates his soccer skills

  Kate was unconscious for barely thirty seconds. When she came round her face was drawn and her skin was white as paper. She felt sick and weak and all she wanted to do was to close her eyes and escape from a reality which she was not ready to face – at least not just yet. Gideon carried Kate to a shady spot well away from the road and laid her gently on the grass. He took a shirt from his bag and folded it into a pillow for Kate’s head. Then he gave his water bottle to Peter, saying: ‘Stay with her. We are close to Baslow Hall, Colonel Byng’s house; I shall fetch a horse and will return as soon as I am able.’

  Peter took the bottle like a sleepwalker. His world had temporarily flicked out of focus and he was quite happy for it to remain that way.

  ‘Peter,’ said Gideon, putting a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. ‘Where have you come from?’

  Peter looked up at him and realised he was going to have to decide whether to tell Gideon the truth. Could he trust him? He decided to follow his instincts.

  ‘If this is really 1763,’ Peter said in a halting voice, ‘then everyone I know is living hundreds of years in the future. Kate and I come from the twenty-first century. I don’t understand how we got here. And I don’t see how we can get back. I …’

  Peter couldn’t find the words to say anything else. He suddenly felt desperate.

  Gideon’s face did not betray what he was thinking. He nodded slowly and paced up and down for a couple of minutes before answering him.

  ‘I mean no disrespect when I say that I can scarce believe what you have told me is true and yet … my heart tells me that you are not lying. Fate put me in that hawthorn bush to witness your arrival, and I promise you that I will do what I can to help restore you and Mistress Kate to your families.’

  Peter felt a surge of relief and gratitude welling up inside him. Tears pricked at his eyelids. ‘Thank you,’ he replied finally. ‘I’m not lying to you, Gideon – I don’t understand how any of this happened but I swear to you I’m not lying.’

  Peter watched Gideon stride away to Baslow Hall. He set to wondering if his mother, so far away in California, had been told that her son was missing and what she would do. He had not seen her for nearly two months. Would she drop everything, tell the film studio that they would have to do without her and get on a plane? Would she miss him if he got permanently stuck in 1763? Then it occurred to him that if he’d had a father who kept his promises he wouldn’t be in this situation now.

  The shadows were lengthening by the time Kate heaved herself up on her elbows and helped herself to some water.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Peter. Kate nodded.

  ‘Lost in time,’ she said after a while. ‘Why couldn’t I see it before? Everyone in fancy dress and speaking funny.’

  ‘I thought that’s how people spoke in Derbyshire,’ said Peter with a grin.

  ‘Watch it,’ said Kate. ‘And before you ask, my dad and Dr Williamson at the lab are not trying to invent time travel. That only happens in stories. They’re studying how gravity actually works.’

  ‘Will,’ corrected Peter. ‘They will study how gravity works.’

  An air of unreality descended on them while they sat in the warm, still air, waiting for Gideon. Peter sat obsessively folding and unfolding a slip of paper that he had found in his anorak pocket.

  ‘You’re like Sam, you’re a right fidget!’ snapped Kate, irritated. ‘What is it anyway?’

  Peter unrolled the grubby scrap of paper and read: Christmas homework. To be handed in to Mr Carmichael on Jan. 8th. Write 500 words on: My Ideal Holiday.

  They both burst out laughing but soon fell silent. Chance had thrown Peter and Kate together and, whether they liked it or not, each was now a key person in the other’s life. But, of course, they had known each other for less than a day and a half and neither had yet earned the other’s trust.

  After a while Peter said: ‘You know, it’s got to be something to do with that machine thing that Gideon told us about. It might not be a time machine but it’s all we’ve got to go on. We’re going to have to find the Tar Man, aren’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate replied. ‘Maybe it would be better to wait here … My dad will work out what happened. I know he will. He won’t stop until he’s found us.’

  Peter did not feel quite so optimistic about Dr Dyer’s ability to travel back through time. But he also felt a pang of jealousy – he wished the feelings he had about his own dad were less complicated.

  ‘I didn’t blur when I fainted, did I?’ asked Kate.

  ‘No you didn’t, why?’

  ‘Just checking.’

  Gideon arrived not on horseback but sitting in an open carriage drawn by two glossy, chestnut mares. Beside him sat a pretty, plump young woman in a severe black and white dress. She was perhaps twenty years old and she was balancing a basket covered with a muslin cloth on her knee. Golden curls escaped from beneath a cotton bonnet and tumbled over her rosy cheeks. The driver sat perched high up on a box seat. He held his back as straight as a soldier on parade and wielded a whip which he cracked over the horses’ heads as they strained up the steep track.

  When they came to a halt Gideon helped the young woman out of the carriage. They hurried towards the children. The woman dropped a neat curtsy in Peter and Kate’s direction.

  ‘This is Hannah,’ announced Gideon. ‘Mrs Byng’s personal maid. She has brought you refreshments and a cloak each to cover your barbaric garb.’ Then he raised his voice and, fixing them with his dark blue eyes, he spoke slowly and very pointedly to Peter and Kate.

  ‘I have spoken to Mrs Byng of your travelling to England from foreign parts and of your terrible encounter with an armed highwayman in Dovedale who made off with all your clothes and possessions. I have also enlightened Mrs Byng as to your intention of travelling to London. I explained how you became separated from your uncle who has doubtless made his way to Covent Garden where he has urgent business.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Peter in such a stilted voice that Gideon had to turn away to hide his smile. ‘A terrible highwayman stole all our clothes in Dovedale.’

  ‘You poor, wretched children,’ said Hannah sympathetically. ‘Mr Seymour told me that you were forced to wear whatever you could lay your hands on yet I do declare I have never set eyes on a more outlandish get-up. Why, a person would be ashamed to be seen in such clothes in respectable company. But Mistress Kate,
you are not well. Let me help you to the carriage. Here, give me your arm and lean on me.’

  Kate did what she was told and looked over her shoulder quizzically at Gideon and Peter as she was manoeuvred into the coach. Gideon leaned over and whispered in Peter’s ear. ‘I do not think it wise to be open about your predicament. I fear that half the world will think you mad and the other half that you have been bewitched.’

  Tucked up in woollen cloaks, and swayed by the motion of the coach, Peter and Kate listened to the groaning of wooden axles and the rhythmic clop, clop, clop of the horses’ hooves. The wild Derbyshire landscape, mellow in the setting sun, seemed to glide by. Hannah’s basket, stuffed with hunks of bread, salty white cheese and roast chicken, easily satisfied the children’s ravenous appetites although Hannah seemed to regard it as a small snack. She wanted to know if the highwayman could have been Ned Porter and if he was handsome. Thinking of the Tar Man, Peter told her that he was as ugly as a pig, with a big nose and greasy black hair, and that he stank. Hannah seemed very disappointed.

  Peter heard Kate’s sudden intake of breath and felt her hand on his arm as the broad, stone façade of Baslow Hall came into view. Symmetrical and well proportioned in the same way that good doll’s houses always are, the mansion was an impressive sight in the setting sun. The long, curved drive cut through a great park, well stocked with stately elms and home to perhaps a thousand sheep.

  ‘This is my school!’ she exclaimed softly into Peter’s ear. ‘This is where I go to school! I can’t believe it!’

  The coach crunched to a standstill in front of a flight of steps leading to a pair of imposing gilded doors. ‘Wow,’ said Kate to Peter under her breath. ‘It doesn’t look this good now.’

  ‘It won’t look this good …’ corrected Peter.

  ‘You will get very annoying if you carry on like that,’ she whispered back.