The Wizard of London

with the luggage, but a gimlet stare delivered by Mem’sab made him change his mind.

The seats right next to the windows were the most desired, but no one disputed the right of the girls and their birds to have two of them. Sitting across from one another on the high-backed wooden benches, with the cages held on their laps, Nan and Sarah pulled up the covers on the window side of the round brass cages so that the birds could see out.

The train pulled out of the station with a metallic shriek of wheels, the final warning hoot of the whistle, and a lurch. It quickly picked up speed to the point where Nan was a bit uneasy… she had never traveled this fast before. She hadn’t known you could. She wasn’t entirely sure you ought to. She had to keep glancing at Mem’sab, sitting beside Sarah, calmly reading a book, to reassure herself that it was all right.

The city gave way to the suburbs, houses each with its own patch of green lawn, set apart from its neighbors rather than crowded so closely together that the walls almost touched, or actually did touch. And then, out of the suburbs they burst, into green space that Nan immediately and automatically identified as “park,” except that it went on as far as the eye could see, it was somewhat overgrown, divided by fences, walls, and hedges, and—and there were animals in it. Herds of sheep, of placid cows, even of goats. All of them browsing, or occasionally raising their heads to watch the train pass.

Nan was beside herself; this was the first time she had ever seen a cow, a sheep, or a live goat. Until this moment, they had only been images in a picture book. She was surprised at how big the cows were, and when she saw the woolly sheep with their half-grown lambs frisking alongside, her fingers itched to touch them. Horses, of course, were everywhere in the city and she knew horses quite well, but it was the first time she had ever seen a foal, and the lively awkward creatures made her exclaim and forget her fear of how fast they were going.

Grey was excited and interested; atypically, she said nothing in words, instead, “commenting” on the passing scenery with little mutters, whistles, and clicks. Sarah, too, kept her attention riveted on the landscape, which surprised Nan, considering how far her friend had traveled, until Sarah said, in a surprised voice, “This is nothing like Africa—”

“It ain—isn’t?” Nan replied.

Sarah shook her head. “The trees are different; the leaves are smaller, the trees aren’t as tall or as green. There are big vines with huge leaves everywhere in the jungle. The bushes are different, too. Even the cattle are different; the cattle in Africa are leaner, with longer horns. We don’t have sheep. The goats are the same, though.”

Grey whistled.

Neville yawned, doing his best to look blase. Nan laughed.

“Nothing flusters his feathers,” Sarah said fondly. “You’d think he journeyed by train every day.”

“Well, he has done just about everything else,” Nan replied reflectively. “An’ it’s not as if he don’t know what countryside looks like. Reckon he’s flown out to look at it a time or two.”

All four of them continued to watch the landscape fly past with great interest. Nan wondered fleetingly what a longer trip would be like; they were due to arrive, so Mem’sab said, before noon, and would be at Highleigh Park by that hour at the latest. Did you eat on the train? She supposed you could sleep on it, the seat was more comfortable than many other places she had slept. But what did you do about a loo? Did the train stop so that everyone could traipse out, use one, and come back aboard?

This was not a “special,” and it made several stops along the way. The little towns and villages surrounding the railway station were picture-book perfect, so far as Nan could tell; so perfect it was hard to believe people actually lived in them. She wondered what life would be like in one, so small that everyone knew everyone else, and all about everyone else’s business, too.

Finally, at just about the point where she was beginning to wish she could get up and move about, the conductor announced their village. “Maidenstone Bridge. Maidenstone Bridge!” And to Neville’s disgust, Nan dropped the cover over him again and prepared to leap to her feet to get out, for she had a sudden panicked image of herself not managing to disembark before the train pulled out of the station, and the train leaving with her trapped on it.

She needn’t have worried. The train remained in the station for a good long while after they all poured out and their luggage was sorted out and piled, once again, on pushcarts. But as Nan surveyed the quiet village street, without seeing a sign of an omnibus, she had another feeling of repressed panic. Now what? Were they supposed to walk to this place pushing the handcarts before them?

That was when the first of the wagons came around the corner.

There was a veritable parade of them, big commodious farm wagons, and when the first driver hailed Mem’sab, it became clear the carts had come for them. One came with an empty bed for the luggage, and the rest had been padded with a thick layer of hay for the children to sit on. With the wagons came a set of burly farm workers, smelling of tobacco, horse, and hay, who tossed the children up into the back of the wagons as if they weighed nothing. When they came to Nan and Sarah, they lifted each of them, cage and all, over the back of the wagon to settle at the rear. A more dignified charabanc had been provided for Mem’sab, the teachers and some of the servants, though the ayahs were happy enough to be helped in alongside their small charges in a third wagon just for the little ones.

Wisely, the farmers had separated the boys and the girls into separate wagons. They boys were able to tumble about in the hay and roughhouse as much as they pleased without getting into too much trouble over it.

In Nan’s opinion, they were missing the best part of the journey with their skylarking. There was so much to look at, she felt as if her whole body was filling up with new sights. It was all like something out of one of her books; all those things that had been described in words now suddenly had things attached to them. The lane they traveled down, with thick hedgerows on either side, was nothing like the thoroughfare called a “lane” in London, and now she understood, really, how one could get tangled in a hedgerow and be unable to get through it. When they traveled down a part of the lane where the trees formed a dense green archway above it, so it was as if they were traveling in a long, living tunnel, she was practically beside herself with pleasure as she recalled just such a description in another book. The horses’ hooves had a different sound on the soft dirt of the road than they did on the paved streets of London, and the scents! She had never smelled so many wonderful things! Flowers, and new-cut hay, a fresh green scent of water utterly unlike the smelly old Thames, wood smoke and things she couldn’t even begin to identify. Birds sang and twittered everywhere, the hedges were alive with little birds, and there were rooks twanging in trees everywhere. Even Neville forgot to look bored.

And then, they found themselves passing beside a wall, a very tall cream-colored brick wall topped with an edge of white stone, exactly like the one around the school, except this went on for a very long distance. It was covered in ivy, and craning her neck, Nan saw a gate in the wall, a gate made of wrought iron like the one at the school. The charabanc ahead of them turned and went into the gate, as a man stood there holding the gate open. Right inside the gate there was a house of black timbers and white plaster with a thatched roof, and at first Nan was horribly disappointed, wondering how all of them were supposed to fit into that house, because it didn’t look as if it had more than two or three bedrooms at best—

But the charabanc and then the wagons kept going, and that was when the word “gatehouse” connected in her mind with the house at the gate, and she stared at it in awe, realizing that here was a house just for a man and his family to live in so he could tend the gate. And that was all he did!

The cavalcade continued on up a twisting lane that led through wooded and meadowed land that looked exactly as well groomed as a park, and then turned a corner—

And there it was, and Nan blinked in surprise and even shock at the place that would be their home for the next month.

It was a chaotic, glorious pile of a place, a mishmash of styles and eras, and if Nan could no more have named those styles and eras, she could certainly tell that the blocky stone tower with its slitlike windows that anchored the left was nothing like the mathematical center of more cream-colored brick and tall, narrow windows, which was in turn, nothing at all like the florid wing thrown up on the right. The only unifying force was that except for the square tower, it was all built of the same mellow cream-colored brick of the wall, and that was all.

And it was enormous. Easily three times the size of the school.

Nan looked around her, and so did the rest of the children, eyes as wide as they could stretch—at manicured parkland that could easily hold three Hyde Parks and then some—at the huge pile of a building, that promised