The Captive was sitting disconsolately looking out of the window into the empty courtyard below.
She had no idea where she was, though she knew she was in England, probably in London, and definitely in the past. At least, to her it was the past, because she lived in the twenty-first century. To everyone living here now, it was the present.
How had she come to be in this place? She went over it again in her mind. What exactly had happened?
She had been in her little bedroom, in her big rambling house; an old house, a house that contained many secrets. A house that had been in her family for hundreds of years. In a way, she lived in the past every day, because the house was so old.
She had been reading a book and fallen fast asleep, but then she had woken quite suddenly out of a dream where a boy she had never met, who said his name was Jack, was knocking at the front door and asking her to come and help him.
The second she woke up, she heard knocking at the front door. Without thought and without fear, she had gently shoved aside her big ginger cat that always slept on her bed, and got up and crept downstairs. The house was deathly quiet; everyone else was asleep. She had gone to the huge oak front door and opened it. A great gust of wind blew in, but there was no one outside, and the large untidy garden was night-time quiet.
A dream . . . always a dream.
As she had turned to go back upstairs, she had noticed a light coming from the library. She wasn’t scared at all – this was her house, and she loved it. Its name was Tanglewreck, and her ancestor Roger Rover had built it in 1588 on land given to him by Queen Elizabeth the First. This was where she felt she belonged, had always belonged, and there was nothing to fear.
She had gone straight into the library.
She was astonished by what she saw.
The fire in the big stone fireplace was burning bright and high, lighting the whole room. Over the fireplace the portrait of her ancestor, Sir Roger Rover, in the ruff and jewelled doublet, seemed to be watching her closely. As she walked towards the fireplace, she saw that inside the fire, or made of the fire itself, was a golden city – domes, bridges, spires.
‘What’s this?’ she said to herself, but out loud. ‘Is this another adventure?’ For truth to tell it was not the first time that the girl had found herself at the start of a strange situation . . . she was that kind of girl, and the house was that kind of house.
As she watched in wonder, a drawbridge, flaming and shining, lowered itself from the fire, into the room, and stood at her feet. The bridge seemed solid, but also molten, like something from a volcano. None of this fire burned; rather, she felt cool, like night, like rain.
As she looked into the fire, she saw the figure of the boy in her dream. He was beckoning her, and she felt hypnotised by his clear burning eyes.
She stepped forward, on to the flaming drawbridge, into the city, through the fire, and walked unscathed into another room, another fireplace, where a woman, half-stone, half-flesh, seemed to be sleeping where she stood, and where a man so dark that he seemed to be his own night, sat at a stone table reading.
‘I am the Magus,’ he said, standing to his feet as she appeared, ‘but who are you, and who called you here?’
She could not tell him because she did not know, and some instinct warned her to say nothing of the dream of the boy called Jack.
After the Magus had questioned her, and after she had explained that she lived in the twenty-first century, and had walked through the fire to come here, without knowing why, the Magus had brought her to this high upper room, and locked the door. She had tried to escape by every means possible – she had even climbed halfway up the chimney and met an angry jackdaw sheltering from the rain. But the chimney narrowed, she could see that, and she could not climb further.
And now she sat, covered in twigs and wood soot, staring into the rainy courtyard.
Where on earth am I? she thought to herself.
The door flew open and in hopped Mistress Split with a beautiful black spaniel at her heel.
‘And who on earth is this?’ said Silver out loud.
‘Woof!’ barked the dog, running to greet her.
‘Boojie Boojie Boojie!’ sang Mistress Split, crashing the tray of food down on the table in front of Silver.