Talisman Chapter 18

Chapter 18 Once Perdita had taken the guerdon from me, I had time to look around. “Everywhere looks so different! And so do you!”
“Yes. Ship has been able to rejuvenate me completely.”
“Oh! I know what else I meant to ask you. The time I’ve just been back to – well, nearly all the old house was pulled down to make way for the new one. Did that affect Ship at all?”
Perdita’s face clouded over. “Yes. It was dreadful. It happened so fast, Ship had no time to prepare, to pull herself out of the stone. And we lost so much power – up until then, Ship had been keeping herself and us healthy, and slowly improving her reserves. Another hundred and fifty years, and we’d have been able to leave. Now she had to draw on her reserves to keep all of us alive. It was obvious we wouldn’t all be able to survive. I was the youngest – the others all voted for Ship to save me. And they aged and died as you would.”
That sounded awful, and I began to feel real pity for Ship, despite all she had put me through. I changed the subject.
“It’s lucky the guerdons all came back to this place at some point.”
Perdita laughed. “No. Not luck – they are drawn back here, and sooner or later, they will draw their owners here. With this one back in place, we can begin to repair the engines now.” Alys’s time had been interesting. I wanted to remember it. I sat down and begin to write furiously.
I recognised the chest of drawers in the middle of the room! It had belonged to Sir William. I felt a bit guilty about the way I’d treated it, sliding the carcass down the stairs. If I’d known it was as old as that, I might have shown it a bit more respect.
But what had happened to Alys next? When my hand was too stiff to write any more, I went in search of the Professor. As usual, he filled me in on the details while we played chess (and, as usual, claimed that I was trying to put him off!).
“Alys Malherbe. Now there was a dashing girl: and very much her father’s daughter, when it came to enterprise and daring. She ran away to marry her true love – got herself all the way to Spain and found him there. And then she went with him all the way to Toulouse. When the war ended, they couldn’t go back to England, for Alys’s father was still angry with her for not marrying Lord Askham.”
“Toulouse? I thought the war ended with Waterloo?”
The Professor did that eye-roll thing that he did whenever I said anything dumb. “No! Napoleon went into exile. Then he escaped. Then he raised his army. Then Wellington met him at Waterloo.”
“So were Peter and Alys there as well?”
“Yes, and that’s when she saved his life. After the battle, she went and found him injured on the field – and saved his life by attending promptly to his wounds.”
So all that first aid she had learnt from the doctor had come in useful! We played on for a while, and when we’d got to the usual stage of me having four pieces to his six, I asked him if Alys ever came home again.
“Now that’s another story. And quite a sensation in its time. Lord Askham – you know, the man her father wanted her to marry – married someone else instead. Sir William’s diaries are quite bitter about this, and how he considers Alys has betrayed him, and then he says he will never mention her name again. And he doesn’t. In the run-up to Waterloo, all the diary entries are about the effect the war is having on the stock market – and then suddenly, in the middle of all this, there’s just a few lines.
“I fear I may have misjudged my daughter. It seems she was a better judge of character than I was. It might have been my Alys at the centre of this scandal.” And that’s all he wrote. “What scandal? What happened?” I had conceded defeat, and we had started a new game, but I wanted to know more.
“You don’t know from Sir William’s diaries, but I was intrigued. So I did some research, and found out all about it from some letters.
Lord Askham married a young girl, of good birth, but with no family apart from an elderly aunt. Or so he thought. He didn’t know that she had a much older brother, who had been cast out in disgrace when he was only sixteen – before she’d even been born. Anyway, this brother came back, now nearly forty, and wanted to see his sister. But he didn’t dare approach her under his own name, so he got a job as a groom at Lord Askham’s country place. And – so the tale went – one night he heard screams from the dungeons, followed the noise, and saw what Lord Askham was doing to her.” “What happened next?” I had forgotten the chess game – this was far more interesting.
“He knocked Lord Askham down, and chained him up. Then he rousted the local justices out of bed, and made them see what Lord Askham had been doing. And he spread the story – Askham was ruined, socially, and had to go and live abroad.”
“And his wife?”
“She was ruined socially too – imagine the gossip about her!”
That seemed a bit unfair to me, and I said so.
“Her brother took care of her, so she wasn’t totally abandoned. Now, you seem remarkably ignorant about Wellington and Napoleon – here, read this.”
The book he gave me was called The Autobiography of Sir Harry Smith 1787-1819. A classic story of love and war. And it was all about Harry and Juana – the girl who had so fascinated and inspired Alys! It was lovely to be back, tending my own garden. But I wished Ship would let me out! I wanted to see the village – see what it looked like now. I phoned Sapphire and chatted enthusiastically to her, telling her about the garden I was helping to tend, and the book I was reading about the peninsular war. She asked after the invalid lady I was supposed to be looking after, and I thought of Perdita and answered, quite truthfully, that she was getting much better, and they’d said it was all thanks to me. “Tallie, it’s getting difficult at this end. Brett wants to know where you are. He wants to visit you. What am I going to say to him?” “Tell him there’s no way he’d be allowed to visit. Child Protection. No un-CRB checked adults allowed within a five-mile radius of the place. People are paranoid enough these days that he should believe that. And that’s why you’ve not visited either.”
Alys Malherbe had escaped Lord Askham at a time when girls had far fewer rights and freedoms. Brett wasn’t having me – and he wasn’t going to spoil things for Harry and Sapphire either. Like Alys I had the beginnings of a plan – once I got away from here, that is. Sapphire giggled like a girl.
“Nice one, Tallie. Are you still enjoying yourself?”
“Yes. It’s been really hard work at times, but, yes, I’ve enjoyed it. It’ll be nice to see you both again though – I’ve missed you.”
“Must be lovely being out in the country though. I do envy you.” My plan was very simple. I wanted to live here – here, in Ship House where so many of my namesakes had lived. The only minor trouble was money – even I could see that the house needed a small fortune spending on it. Small we could do, financially – but not fortune. I finished cleaning the hall floor, and Lissa’s memories didn’t haunt me so strongly this time. I actually felt that I could bear to find out what had happened to her. I asked the Professor about Lissa during one of our chemistry sessions. He told me to concentrate on the experiment in hand, and then he’d tell me: I couldn’t measure accurately, nor observe rates of change if my mind was on something else. But he wasn’t cross; in fact, he was in an unusually good mood. I commented on this, and he said that his brother would be here soon!
“Jupiter?”
“Yes – he’s been very ill for quite a while, but now he’s well on his way to recovery. Now concentrate!” When I’d finished the experiment and written down all my results, then he relented, and told me about Lissa.
“Now that was a classic piece of village justice. The Malherbes had always been good landlords, and well-loved ones too.”
I thought about the guerdon that was somewhere here at Ship House, encouraging the best in them.
“When the village found out what had been happening to Lissa, they took matters into their own hands. They put Ruth and Beatrice into the stocks on the village green, and I believe they got well-pelted with rotten vegetables and the odd egg. Then they ducked them in the village pond to clean them up. Then they sent them to London, to their father’s house there. The lawyer himself delivered them, together with a suit against Lissa’s uncle for the monies stolen.”
“Cool!” I loved the idea of those two in the stocks, being pelted with rotten fruit. “Did her brother come home?”
“Yes – and married, and raised a happy family. Lissa married nearby as well, and saw him often, and their children grew up playing together at each other’s houses.” I was pleased to know that Lissa did have a happy ending. After the chemistry lesson (and before a geography session) I went into the orchard to look at clearing that next.
This place was so run-down in parts! Great gaps in the wall were filled in with chain-link fence. There was a lot of work to do here, and it would need money. Once again, I wondered where the money was that the family had once had. Not here now, that was for certain. The place was amazing for wild life though! I was just watching the butterflies, when Perdita came out in search of me. And that was unusual. She didn’t tend to leave the basement much, never mind the house.
“Tallie. You must be careful. This next time is going to be really dangerous. Listen. With the other guerdons now back in place, then with this one, all you have to do is touch it. You don’t have to lift it, or hold it. As soon as you find it, touch it! Don’t wait! I can’t stop Ship sending you after it, but I can warn you.” And then she ran off, leaving me puzzled – and a little afraid – among the butterflies and brambles. “I suppose,” I reflected, as I weeded and watered my little garden, “Perdita remembers what happened in the next time Ship is sending me to. But she’s never been worried before – and I thought some of those other times were pretty rough. So…” and I never got to finish my thought, because at that moment, Ship pulled me away from my present time, and thrust me back into an earlier one. “Come on, Talisman Mallerby.” And the scornful way they said Talisman Mallerby had to be heard to be believed.
“Get those crates shifted. And then get yourself back here and get those stones moved.”
I was cold, I was hungry, I was muddy up my legs and my arms past my elbows. What had Ship landed me in this time?