“Right,” said Josiah, “except now you’ve gone and told him about the future.”
“It won’t be a problem,” said Sam. “Robin Goodfellow has explained about his journeys through time. I’ve often considered writing it all into a poem, but I fear it would be considered too fantastical.”
Josiah coughed theatrically. Freddy heard the word “Albatross!” in the middle of the cough.
Sam steepled his fingers and tapped them gently against his chin. “Your life seems an interesting one to me. What I wouldn’t give to visit the days of Julius Caesar or witness the fall of Troy. But it sounds lonely, too.”
“She’s not lonely. She’s got me,” said Josiah.
“Even so, Master Mustardseed,” said Sam. “She isn’t built for such travels.”
“I’ve done all right so far,” said Freddy, a little stung.
He smiled. “Of course you have. You’re young; the journey is exciting. But now you have walked into a stranger’s house and unburdened yourself for no logical reason. The melancholy has crept up on you, as it often creeps up on me.”
His smile turned rather sad. “I have found some recourse in laudanum, but I wouldn’t recommend this solution for you. I would say you badly need to return to your own time.”
“Oh, really?” said Josiah, who seemed unable to stay out of the conversation. “We would never have guessed it. We would return if we could. If there were any way of making sure we were connecting to our Three … but we don’t even know who it is.”
“I would also suppose you need to talk about what happened on your last excursion,” said Sam. “The story you heard—”
“—means nothing,” said Josiah.
“I wonder,” said Sam. “I think it may mean everything. Oh, damnation!”
He stood up and pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. “Weave a circle round him thrice … and close your eyes with holy dread … for he on … on honey-dew hath fed … and drunk the milk of Paradise. That’s all that’s left. The sunny dome! The caves of ice! All vanished into air. How fleeting are the realms of fancy! You have broken my poem.”
“I’m … I’m sorry,” said Freddy, taken aback. He had seemed relatively normal until the ranting had begun.
“It’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ you ninny,” said Josiah from behind the curtain. “We came in at a bad moment.”
“‘Kubla Khan,’” repeated Freddy. A stately pleasure-dome decree …
“You know the name? Queer,” said Sam. “I had three hundred lines fast in my head, but your visit has banished most of them. No matter. I’m not sure I would have missed your story, even for a poem.”
“A poem,” said Freddy. The plan that had been tiny and formless just before was growing, taking shape. Her hands curled again into fists. Maybe …
Josiah came properly out from behind the curtains. “What’s wrong with you? Why do you keep repeating everything?”
“Shut up,” said Freddy. “Mr. Coleridge … you said something about a dome.”
“Oh yes.” Sam’s hands went up to his forehead again. “The pleasure-dome. Glorious image come to me in a dream!”
“An opium dream,” said Josiah under his breath.
“Shut up,” said Freddy, “really.” The day of the crash. The book on the pile. If only she could just …
“Mr. Coleridge,” said Freddy, fighting to keep her voice steady, “I’d like to hear your poem.”
“What? No,” he said, lowering his hands. “It will never be finished now. It will never be any good—”
“I don’t think that’s true,” said Freddy. “Could we just hear the first few lines? I really like that image of the pleasure-dome.”
He paced the length of the room, then back again. “It’s no good. Vanished forever! There was something about a tree. Oh, very well.”
Sam stopped in place and recited:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man—”
“—Down to a sunless sea,” said Mel.
14
The voice had come through the kitchen window. Freddy seized the astonished Josiah’s hand and pulled him past the purple smoke bush and through the back gate and into the lane, then over to the side yard of the house on Grosvenor Street. They stopped next to the cedar hedge, and Freddy threw herself down on the grass and started to laugh.
After a while, the laughter became problematic, and she had to reach into her bag and close her fist around her key. Josiah sat down beside her and watched her as if she were a scientific experiment, possibly one involving marbles and inclined planes.
“Did you just get us back?” he asked eventually.
“I think so,” said Freddy. “I remembered about Coleridge. Does this mean Mel is Three?”
“She was reading the poem aloud,” said Josiah. “Who was in the room with her?”
“Well … Roland. And me.”
“Then it could still be any of you. Damn. At least we’re back.”
But now something else was occurring to Freddy. “We’re back back. Over three weeks back.”
“I know,” said Josiah. “I’ve known all along this would happen.”
Freddy let out what probably counted as a wordless yelp of rage. She seemed to have boarded the emotional roller coaster shortly after listening to Mika’s story. “You’ve known all along? You knew we would get back, and you didn’t tell me?”
“Ssh!” Josiah cast a nervy look at the hedge and dropped his voice. “You and your fellow ducklings aren’t really all that far away from us at the moment, so please keep it down.”
“But you knew,” whispered Freddy, “and—”
“I keep telling you,” said Josiah. “It’s better not to know what’s going to happen. That way, you don’t second-guess yourself all the time.”
“But you knew we were going to get back,” said Freddy, staring at him. “Didn’t you even see how worried about that I was?”
“Oh. Were you?” said Josiah. “I suppose you would have been. Are you going to strangle me again?”
She wrestled with herself for a moment. “No.”
“That’s a bonus, at any rate.”
“But three weeks,” said Freddy. “Isn’t there any way we could … well, get closer to the proper time?”
He sighed. “You’re being obtuse. You want to jump back into the time stream? We can’t chance it. Even this was a hundred to one against. If we try again, we could end up bouncing around through time for years. Frankly, I can’t believe we managed to make it back only three weeks early. It could have been years early … or years late.”
“I know,” said Freddy. She was being obtuse. And it was her doing they had got here at this time, at any rate. But it was frustrating. She had been wanting to get home for more than a year, and now she was home, but there wouldn’t be a place for her until September twenty-seventh.
Josiah eyed her sidelong. “I knew about this because you and the other me were living with us for weeks.”