Amazed!

By Mark Roland Langdale

On a very usual day, on a very usual school trip to Hampton Court Maze, there is a very unusually named girl called Victoriana Elizabeth Alice Royal. While her name is unusual, Victoriana herself always feels very boring indeed - invisible to all. She often dreams of when she can be like the History Girls on TV and make history come alive for everyone, but for now she's stuck at school. At least she can concentrate on history on this school trip and learn new facts as she wanders the maze. But little does Victoriana know that history will come alive for her today in a way it never has before...

Following the proverbial white rabbit down the rabbit hole by getting lost in the Maze with her friends, Victoriana is soon indeed lost in a history Wonderland - meeting none other than Princess Victoria, eventually to be queen of England, and under the thrall of the Dream King. But as she tumbles into adventure after adventure, learning AMAZING facts you won't find in the history books, a vague worry begins to itch at the back of her mind. She is after all keen on history, but does she really want to be stuck in the past forever?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800467040

Mark Roland Langdale

Mark Roland Langdale has had a varied life and career. He has worked with children and teenagers, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in an effort to fundraise, travelled down the Amazon and is a longtime member of Greenpeace. Mark likes to write modern day fairytales with an undercurrent of real life issues such as mental health, environment, dyslexia which he suffers from himself, and autism.

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Contents

1

Merlin’s Maze

‘Come on, everybody,’ a frazzled-looking school teacher bellowed, counting the heads of the schoolchildren on a tour of Hampton Court Maze. The teacher, Mr Peabody, was trying not to think of all the queens who had lost their heads, as this was the sort of horrible history he wanted to try and avoid a repeat of. Mr Peabody, being a history teacher of thirty years’ standing, knew all about history repeating itself, both on the television and in his classroom. The year was 2015, the 500th anniversary of the building of Hampton Court Palace, so the palace was heaving with tourists.

‘Mr Nobody is missing!’ cried the class comedian, Byron Shelley, so named by his parents for they were both poets. Unfortunately, Byron wasn’t a poet or much of a court jester either, for this jest largely fell upon deaf ears.

Somebody however was missing, a girl with the rather unusual name of Victoriana Elizabeth Alice Royal, and with such an unusual name you would imagine she would be the first to be missed, not the last. The trouble was, nowadays unusual names were the norm; Persia, Anastasia, Chrysanthemum wouldn’t have looked out of place in Wonderland Gardens, along with Daisy and Pansy. In the Victorian era, children were given the oddest of names, like Spoon, Pea, Feather and Cabbage, boiled cabbage, a dish like revenge that was best served cold to the parents who had given their children such horrible-sounding names. Although Victoriana’s name was unusual, as far as she and everybody else was concerned, she was anything but unusual. She was usual, plain, so ordinary she might just as well have been off a production line of Victorian dolls made in a toy factory.

The usual suspects was a phrase that often cropped up in schools when the same old faces found themselves outside the headmaster’s office, the Horrible History Boys as Victoriana had named them, the ones who loved to re-enact horrible history and preferably do it when the teacher’s back was turned.

At times, Victoriana felt like the Invisible Girl, like a million other Victorian women must have felt in the time of Queen Victoria. Victoriana’s dream was to be one of the History Girls as she had named TV historians, the ones who brought history alive. Victoriana’s favourite subjects at school were history and science. Perhaps that was why nobody remembered her face, for they rarely saw it, as it was hidden in a book.

Victoriana’s teachers said she was a closed book or she was hard to read. This, Victoriana thought, was a funny thing to say. Why would anybody want to read her or why would she want to read herself? If she did, she would need a good looking glass. ‘Where to look for a good looking glass?’ mused Victoriana. An antiques shop, an auction house, or perhaps Wonderland might be a better place to look. Yes, Wonderland. She would look for a looking glass in Wonderland and if she was lucky she would pick up a glass admirer (otherwise known as a hand mirror) at the Looking Glass Fayre. If only all of life’s little problems were that easy to fix!

Victoriana’s father often said that one day Victoriana would get so lost in a story that she would end up as one of the characters in a book. Victoriana had a book given to her by her grandfather, literally a piece of Victoriana given to him by his mother. It was a Victorian pop-up book of Hampton Court Palace. Victoriana imagined she was the giant queen who presided over this small world. As a young child, she took the book everywhere with her, as if it were a mobile home, or palace in this curious case, having serious conversations with the characters as if they were real. It is amazing how the mind can create and conjure up worlds at the drop of a hat. At times, it was as if we were all holding a magical kaleidoscope in our hands. Twisting the scope this way and that, fantastical stained glass worlds of the likes of Alice Wonderland, Dorothy Oz and Lucy Diamond would appear then disappear before our very enchanted eyes, exactly like magic.

In today’s modern world of technological wizardry, the word magic has become so commonplace that the word magic itself has lost its magic.

World building was all the rage in Victoriana’s time, worlds within worlds created by the storytellers of this world, worlds we were all happy to get lost in, as it meant escaping the real world. That was until the real world came sharply back into focus, the colourful glass worlds of the kaleidoscopic imagination cracking into a thousand pieces, almost taking our eye out. Alternatively, the glass disintegrated and we were left with ground glass in our eyes, or sand of which glass was made.

Victoriana’s mother had a slightly different vision of her daughter’s small world, as she saw her daughter trapped in a glass bubble, like the royal family were said to be, or a glass paperweight. Victoriana couldn’t get out and nobody could get in, or so the child psychologist told her mother after a short spell on the psychiatrist’s couch.

Perhaps it was this experience that made Victoriana want to find out more about the subconscious mind as she read everything Freud and Jung had ever written on the subject. Then she bought a dream journal, the first of many. Victoriana now had a stack of dream journals so high that she imagined she could stack one on top of the other then climb all the way to the moon.

Victoriana was special, said to be a gifted child, a girl wonderer. Her parents sent her to a child psychologist on the advice of her teachers and here she was diagnosed with autism, Asperger’s Syndrome. Victoriana didn’t want to save the planet; she wanted to save history. She wasn’t quite sure how she was going to save history; that bit needed some serious figuring out. An abacus wouldn’t do. She may need Countess Ada Lovelace, the Countess of Computing and Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine to pull off that trick, or Merlin the Magician.

To save history, one had to become either a historian or an archaeologist or both, and that was why Victoriana always had her head in a book, for if she wanted to achieve these big dreams she knew she would have to work hard in school. Her fondest wish was to be as bright as Lady Jane Grey, a queen for a day. Unfortunately, this was horrible history, for Lady Jane Grey lost her head in more ways than one! Another great female mind lost to the immoral maze of history.

‘Right, try not to get lost, although this is such a tiny maze, not much bigger than a miniature maze!’ cried Mr Peabody, fearing he was going as mad as mad King George III was said to have done. In truth, King George was no madder than the Hatter, and we all know there was method in his madness.

The head royal gardener would be mad if he saw what some of the boys were doing to the maze footpath, digging it up with their shoes and throwing the sods at the girls. One or two of the girls, who could be said to be little princesses, were now screaming as if they too had seen a ghost. Perhaps this was the ghost of Lancelot Capability Brown, the head gardener to Queen Charlotte and King William III, wielding not a lance but a pair of sharp gleaming shears!

‘Originally, in Tudor times, the maze at Hampton Court had four mazes, until it shrunk like Alice in Wonderland or so I’d like to imagine. The truth might be that it was either King William III or Queen Anne who first planted the maze. It is somewhat of a mystery, lost to the mists of time, appropriately so, given the fact it is easy to get lost in a maze,’ muttered Victoriana from her safe house behind the small wooden shed-like office as the tourists flocked into the gardens as if she were the official tour guide. Victoriana had been around the palace so many times that she could have guided tourists and school parties around in her sleep. An old man sat in the wooden hut taking money to enter the maze. In truth, the original maze disappeared completely, as if by dark magic. However, at a later date it was replanted in the same place where the original Tudor maze was constructed in the Wilderness Garden. The present-day Hampton Court and grounds would have been the same size as the Wilderness Garden, which had also shrunk over time, along with the maze.

Once upon a time, in Richmond Palace there was a wooden building called Merlin’s Cave, which had mysteriously disappeared into the mists of time. Victoriana had always re-imagined the wooden hut where you paid your money to enter the maze as Merlin’s Cave. The old man, who never appeared to age, taking the money was Merlin the Magician. It was said King Henry VIII imagined himself to be King Arthur, so no doubt imagined his court magician was Merlin the Magician. This was another re-spinning of history, a tale no doubt conjured up by Thomas Cromwell to get into Henry VIII’s good books.

Victoriana lived in Hampton within spitting distance of Hampton Court Palace and according to her parents was there most of the time, to the point where they felt Hampton Court Palace was her second home, or even her first home. Victoriana certainly felt right at home there. She always received a warm welcome, the staff recognising her and laying down the red carpet for her as if she was an honoured guest. The exact opposite happened when she was at school or at home or anywhere outside the magic circle of Hampton Court Palace, when she felt largely invisible. Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite motto was I have to be seen to be believed. How the queen, all queens and kings as well sometimes wished they had the power of invisibility.

At this moment in time, time was getting away from Victoriana as it was from her teacher, who was far from sure whether he had enough time to show the school party around Hampton Court and be back in time for tea. In truth, the poor put-upon teacher, Mr Peabody, was imagining he was in charge of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party!

Thankfully, Victoriana bit her tongue in the nick of time, for she was happy to play the part of the Invisible Girl, at least for the Greenwich Mean Time.

Victoriana waited for the teacher and the children to disappear into the maze then she came out of hiding. Being unremarkable-looking had its advantages, as you could hide in plain sight or disappear completely. Victoriana found an old wooden bench and sat down, deciding the best way to pass the time was people watching, imagining the people who passed by dressed in various outfits from history. She then got out her diary from her pocket, except it wasn’t her diary but her dream journal. In her hurry to get to school on time, Victoriana must have picked up her dream journal instead of her diary.

Victoriana smiled as she flicked through her dream journal as if speed reading it, and it didn’t take Victoriana long before she fell headlong into a dream, a daydream. Before she knew it, in the blinking of an eye, the daydream turned into a nightdream, one she hoped was every bit as magical as William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

2

The Old Gatekeeper

Victoriana was curled up on the bench asleep like a cat. A bright golden moon was out but nobody else, not even Mr and Mrs Nobody. Victoriana was in what she called the da Vinci Position or the Foetus Position. Here, she could relax, so her mind was receptive to the big idea. The idea came to Victoriana after seeing the sketches at the Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition in Hampton Court Palace, the anatomical sketch of a foetus in a walnut. At least that was how it appeared to Victoriana’s anatomical and imaginative mind.

Hampton Court Palace had closed its giant golden gates hours ago. Most people were now in bed and if Victoriana began her normal night routine of sleepwalking, she may find herself sleeping in a flowerbed. Still, if you’re going to sleep in a flowerbed, what better flowerbed to sleep in than a royal flowerbed?

A cloud passed over the full moon, cloaking it as if in a giant celestial conjuring trick; now you see it, now you don’t. To separate the facts from the fiction, the full moon was in fact a blue moon, a rare astronomical event. Not that rare, as it happens; a fact Victoriana was well aware of, for a blue moon appeared on average once every three years. Of course, one had to factor the magic number three into that fact as Lewis Carroll, logician and magician of the written word, said once upon a time, ‘What I say three times to be true.’

The cloud passed over the moon or the hand of the giant magician as Victoriana often imagined it, and when it did a single beam of searing moonlight struck the astronomical clock in the gatehouse of the inner court, also known as the Clock Courtyard, lighting it up like a Catherine wheel. Roman numerals, letters and zodiacal signs, painted in blue and gold around the clock face, appeared to change places with one another as the three copper dials of the astronomical clock moved backwards and forwards as if time was moving backwards and forwards, as if searching for the right time before stopping. In the time of the Tudors, when the clock was first designed and built, the earth was at the centre of the clock face, making it a pre-Copernicus, pre-Galileo clock. Thanks to astronomical clocks, those in the Tudor court were able to tell the time and the tides. Some said the clock was able to predict the futures of kings and queens, using the zodiacal signs to create a horoscope. To say the astronomical clock could predict the future may have been a stretch of the imagination, or perhaps not?

The beam of moonlight deflected off the astronomical clock and off several walls as it took a maze-like path in the direction of the maze itself. The luminescent beam struck the maze, bathing it in an electric-blue neon light. The light was so bright that it appeared to wake the nocturnal creatures sleeping within it. The neon light also woke Victoriana from her slumbers, or at least it made her turn over and then get shakily to her feet. Victoriana did not open her eyes but walked slowly towards the maze in a trance-like state of deep sleep. If anybody had seen her, they would surely have imagined they were seeing a ghost. Victoriana had been around the maze so many times that she said, trying not to be boastful, that she could do it in her sleep. Well, it looked as if she was about to put that claim to the test!

The next thing Victoriana knew, she was inside the maze, wide awake, or at least she imagined that to be the case until a giant stepped into the picture. ‘Hey, giant, what on earth do you think you’re doing?’ Victoriana exclaimed in true Alice-like fashion.

‘I don’t think I’m doing anything. I’m a giant. Giants aren’t big on thinking, they’re more big on doing,’ huffed the giant, puffing out his chest in true giant fashion as if he imagined, being a giant, this was how he was supposed to behave.

‘Now what on earth are you doing?’ Victoriana further exclaimed, hanging upside down as her world turned upside down, literally. For you see the giant had picked up the maze and put it under his arm. (Yes, I know that’s unbelievable, but please suspend your disbelief, for as far as the unbelievable goes, that, dear reader, is just the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg in a maze, now that really would be amazing. Can’t say if that happens in this farfetched wonder tale, don’t want to give the old game away now, do I? All I can say is in a winter wonderland, anything is possible.)

‘I’m moving this here maze to the Kingdom of the Giants. It’s just over that hill over there,’ bellowed the giant, shaking the trees and the buildings of Hampton Court Maze to their foundations. This caused bats and birds to fly here, there and everywhere, although where everywhere was, was anybody’s guess.

‘I think you’ve got the wrong palace. You want Buckingham Palace,’ Victoriana replied, imagining the giant was the BFG from out of Roald Dahl’s storybook. At least Victoriana hoped this giant was friendly; otherwise, her dreams would be crushed, as would she as this dream turned into a nightmare. Victoriana had just turned thirteen. She had seriously considered hibernating for a whole year, thirteen being said to be an unlucky number, but parents, school and life did not allow for this. Like it or not, you had to live in the real world, not if this was a dream world like Alice’s Wonderland or Dorothy’s dreamland you didn’t!

‘Oh, sorry, miss, my mistake. Thanks for the heads-up!’ the giant beamed as he gently put the maze back down onto the ground and went on his merry way.

Something dark flew past Victoriana’s head, what she knew not. Perhaps it was a bat, hopefully not a vampire bat, or a raven out of the Bloody Tower of London. By this time, Victoriana’s hair looked exactly like a bird’s nest, so perhaps a bird had mistaken it for just that: a bird’s nest. Edwardian women were known for their bird’s nest hairstyles. Victoriana could see she needed peripheral vision or that of a magical dragonfly, known in nature as a Time Warper for its ability to slow down and stop time, as if it had a magic lantern in its head. She would also need eyes in the back of her head while she was trapped inside the maze, something all teachers wished they had.

This time, Victoriana knew she was wide awake. This most certainly was not a dream because it was a nightmare. She knew the distinction between a dream and a nightmare only too well. A dream was a pleasant experience and one by and large you were happy to be trapped in, like a warm blanket. A nightmare on the other hand you were anything but happy to be trapped in and wanted to get out of as quickly as humanly possible. Victoriana often found herself doing battle with imaginary figures of the night, trying to fight her way out of the dark cobwebbed nightmare which made her feel as if she were trapped in a Victorian Night Terror. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry, girl. There are plenty of nightmares to go around,’ laughed the shadowy figure leading Victoriana on a guided tour of the nightmare.

‘A gate! What’s a gate doing at the entrance of Hampton Court Maze? That wasn’t there before, unless this is a new thing. I really wish they would leave things alone, including history. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. But that’s the modern way. People can’t leave things alone, they just can’t. Feng shui this, feng shui that. Mind you, Mother Nature isn’t any better in that respect!’ Victoriana half exclaimed and half cried. This was something all Victorian characters in storybooks did, and so often. Was it any wonder half of them ended up in the Victorian madhouse!

Victoriana turned the ringed black handle of the gate and pushed, but the gate did not open so she tried again. Still the gate would not budge. ‘Three is the magic number. What I say three times to be true, the gate will open. The gate will open one-two– three. Hey presto!’ Victoriana repeated this short mantra but the gate did not open. In frustration, Victoriana kicked out at the gate with her left foot then beat on the gate as if it were a living thing. Victoriana felt as if she were trapped in a nightmare and was in the process of trying to wake herself up. There were times when one knew they were in a nightmare and did not particularly want to awaken, for fear of not getting back off to sleep. But the subconscious mind was so strong that it seemingly did not allow the sleeper to override this command or listen to the plea from the dreamer. It was like having someone else in your head that was both you and not you. At times, it felt as if you were going mad or that you were your own worst enemy.

‘Please, miss, that’s the property of the realm. You don’t want to end up in the Bloody Tower of London with the ravens and the spirits, do you?’ cried an unseen voice. Victoriana could not see a body to go along with this voice, disembodied voice, she presumed. The nightmare she was in must be a most vivid one, as clearly she was still trapped in it. After all, gates could not talk, or at least not unless they were gates in a surreal fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen.

A man suddenly appeared by Victoriana’s side out of thin air, exactly like magic. ‘Who are you?’ stuttered Victoriana, looking as white as a New England ghost pumpkin.

‘I’m one of the Old Keepers, or Gatekeepers as some refer to us,’ the old man replied, who appeared to be in the process of sticking something to his face, old man’s beard, the flower and not another old man, because that really would have been weird without the wonderful!

‘Good, then you can open the gate and let me out of this maze. No disrespect to you and the builder of this fine maze but it’s a nightmare,’ Victoriana replied, wanting to swish her long black nightdress and flounce out of the maze and the nightmare. Victoriana was doing a passable impression of Queen Victoria in her not-amused phase, another untruth spread by the media that Queen Victoria was a miserable old woman, when the truth was that she was always splitting her sides. More horrible history, I’m afraid!

‘Sorry, miss, can’t let you out of the maze. It’s against the Maze Law of 1555, page 313, paragraph 3, subsection 333, put in place by Henry VIII. If an Old Keeper were ever to break this law, he would not only lose his position but his head too!’ said the old man, grimacing. ‘Think of it this way, miss. The next corner of the maze might lead you into a dream world.’

‘Stop me! You and whose army?’ Victoriana blurted out, losing her cool, although she may well have lost her mind before she lost her cool.

‘Whose army? Well, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, of course,’ the Gatekeeper replied, grinning from ear to ear.

‘Cromwell’s New Model Army! I’d never enlist their help. I’m on the side of King Charles I and his Royalist supporters. I’d rather die than join Cromwell and his band of Roundheads,’ Victoriana spat.

Two skeletons said to be Roundheads were found when excavating in the Fountain Court in 1871. Victoriana hoped their ghosts were not haunting this part of the maze!

Victoriana was imagining two giants: one a Roundhead, the other a Cavalier, playing war games with model soldiers as they re-enacted the Civil War. Then the models sprung to life and instead of fighting one another they banded together to defend the gate, so it was impossible for Victoriana to fight her way through. Perhaps she could enlist the dashing, charismatic, tall King Charles I and his band of Royalists to fight her corner. After all, her surname was Royal; that had to count for something.

‘Just leave the door open a crack, turn your back and I can sneak through. I’m sure nobody will notice. I won’t say a word, I promise,’ Victoriana replied, theatrically sealing her lips with her fingers but not with wax, as politicians and royalty used to seal letters. A further truth and most certainly history of a horrible nature was that lips were often stitched together as a punishment for slandering the king or the queen. History was a dark place, every bit as dark as a nightmare. No wonder Victoriana had nightmares, her mother would say, grimacing. Victoriana did not seem to be enticed by the prospect of turning a corner and entering a dream. As far as she was concerned, all mazes were nightmares. The dream world was back from whence she had come; the world of reality may be a nightmare at times. Victoriana may have been a bit of a dreamer but the real world was still her reality, and in that reality Victoriana had big dreams. She knew she could only fulfil those dreams if she was living in the real world.

‘Nobody looking, nobody looking! The whole world and his wife are looking, or at least the whole of the nocturnal kingdom is watching. If I let you in, I will lose my job as a Royal Gatekeeper,’ exclaimed the Old Keeper, as if about to suffer a rare case of Victorian spontaneous human combustion as he looked around wildly, a thousand blinking eyes appearing out of the dark of the night.

‘So what am I supposed to do? I can’t stay here forever. I’ve got homework and chores that need finishing,’ sniffed Victoriana, hoping to play on the sympathetic side of the old man’s nature. This time, a tear really did appear in the corner of her eye.

‘Whyever not? I’m here forever. Forever isn’t such an awfully long time, you know. It will pass in the blinking of an eye. Nothing lasts forever, not even forever. Besides, the dream needs finishing. You can’t start a dream and not finish it. Call yourself a dreamer, you should be ashamed of yourself. Still, I suppose that’s why they call your generation the snowflake generation. Can’t finish anything, not even a dream,’ gabbled the old man, his face as straight as Excalibur’s blade. The old man’s leather-beaten face then began to stretch as far as it was able as a smile as wide as a moon river appeared upon it. ‘Look, why don’t you sit down for a moment while I brew a nice cup of tea? After all, I presume you are looking for tea and sympathy.’

‘Yes, tea. I must get home in time for tea and like I said, I’ve got homework to do. I don’t want to be expelled from the Dream Academy. Otherwise, I’ll never become a historian. I’ll be lucky if I get a job sweeping chimneys. And as far as history goes, I’ll be history and in no time at all, according to you, ancient history at that!’ spat Victoriana, the weight of the world on her young shoulders. She wasn’t sure why she had called her academy the Dream Academy, other than that it was her father’s favourite joke. She was beginning to wonder if she’d ever see her mother or father again. By the time she got out of the maze, the only home she would be heading for was the madhouse!

‘You can go home, miss, so please turn that frown upside down,’ the Old Keeper cried, cheerily changing his tune and his story.

‘I can… I can go home because home is where the heart is. I can see I have misjudged you. I’m sorry, for it is clear you have a big heart,’ Victoriana cried, her eyes lighting up like two crescent moons.

‘Yes, of course, after you’ve completed the maze,’ the old man retorted, raising his bushy beetle eyebrows as the crescent moon smile turned to a wicked grin.

‘That’s easy. I can do it in my sleep. I probably am doing just that right now, although I can see if I’m in this dream much longer, it could well turn bad,’ Victoriana said, trying to see through the looking glass. or in this case the dream, hoping it wasn’t concealing a nightmare. Victoriana was still not completely convinced this wasn’t an Alice or Dorothy-like dream.

‘There is one thing I should probably tell you, and that is that the maze is slightly bigger than it was before,’ said the Old Keeper as if an afterthought as he produced a kaleidoscope from out of a pocket in his baggy, oversized coat as if by magic.

‘Before what?’ Victoriana exclaimed in true Alice fashion.

‘Before Old Father Time stretched it,’ the old man replied, trying not to smile as he twisted the scope of the instrument Victoriana had always called the kaleidoscope a lied-a-scope, for it twisted the truth.

‘You mean it’s an optical illusion caused by the moonlight?’ Victoriana said innocently, her eyes as wide as Bambi’s.

‘Not quite… the maze is a four-dimensional maze in time and space, although in truth the space hasn’t moved, although if that giant you dreamt about earlier had got his way, it would have been moved to God knows where!’ The Old Keeper chuckled, theatrically pinging his braces back with his hands.

‘You can read my dreams?’ Victoriana gasped.

‘Read and write them,’ the old man replied proudly. ‘I got my degree from the Dream Academy five hundred years ago. Merlin presented it to me himself. It’s hanging in the hut over there.’ The old man pointed proudly to the wooden hut where people paid their admission price to enter the maze, as if the hut itself was a palace made of crystal. Victoriana imagined the hut was draped in cobwebs and if it were a palace, it was a haunted one.

‘Merlin, but he’s… he’s…’ Victoriana stammered, not sure how she saw or pictured Merlin. As a real man or simply a character out of an ancient storybook? A most illuminating storybook, like the illuminated manuscripts and historical books illustrated in gold leaf that Victoriana had seen in the British Library.

‘But he’s not real. That’s what you wanted to say, wasn’t it?’ said the old man, sounding like any number of fairytale characters out of old fairy tales.

‘Yes, yes, that’s what I wanted to say. I suppose you’re here to tell me otherwise, tell me that Merlin was a real man who could do the most amazing magic, conjure up things we cannot see or believe, a mystical man, the greatest magician the world has ever known,’ said Victoriana, getting a lot carried away without any help from the fairies at the bottom of the maze.

‘I wasn’t going to say all that. A third of that would have sufficed, child, but one thing I can tell you was that Merlin did exist, and that’s not alternative history, that’s a fact!’ huffed the Old Keeper grumpily as his smile turned on its head as he scowled at Victoriana as if she was a village idiot. Those from high society had cruelly nicknamed Queen Charlotte Muckleberry Strawlitter for not being as well educated as other royals, such as Lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth I.

‘You said he did exist, past tense?’ Victoriana added, sounding like an old Victorian school mistress, probably a spinster.

‘Some say he still does exist. Some say Merlin is immortal like the gods. Some says he lives in the Realm of Shadows, a moonlight shadow realm. Some say he was just a man, a great magician, a brilliant man, a polymath like Leonardo da Vinci. Some say Merlin died years ago and he now resides in the spirit realm. Stories, so many stories I could write a book, or at least a ghost writer could.’ The Old Keeper sighed with a faraway look in his eyes, as if he was at some other place, an ancient place, possibly Stonehenge or Avalon, where once upon an ancient time King Arthur set up home. ‘Anyway, can’t hang around here all day chewing the fat with a halfwit child, for more of your conversation would infect my brain. Now you must go and reach the goal, the heart of the maze, its centre. Turn around and come back. After which you’ll find the gate open and you can go home. Frankly, it’s money for old rope and I can assure you, unlike the present-day maze, you will get your money’s worth,’ gabbled the old man, making it sound simple. ‘Now have a nice yesterday,’ the Old Gatekeeper added, winking theatrically at Victoriana, who scowled for all she was worth. At least the old man didn’t add salt to the wound by saying, ‘Have a nice nightmare!’

Victoriana wondered if this Old Keeper was the famous William Dodson from 1898 who was an Old Keeper for over forty years, collecting the penny entrance fee come rain or shine. Moonshine or moonbeams