[told by Sir Andrew Aguecheek]

'I thought you said your uncle lived near here,' said Malvolio.

'I don't even know where "here" is,' I protested. 'I said his country house was a couple of miles from where we were supposed to get off the boat, and there was a pony-trap service to take our luggage...'

'There were people to take our luggage,' Malvolio pointed out. 'Six large men with cudgels and daggers. I suppose it didn't occur to you that, considering you're supposed to be a knight, you might have thought of drawing your sword to put them off the idea?'

'If I had, they'd have stolen the sword as well. It's quite an expensive one. But anyway, my uncle is the magistrate for this – for where we meant to get off, and when we give a description of the robbers to the police, and the police catch them, I'm sure my uncle can sort everything out.'

'Have you seen a policeman since we landed?' snapped Malvolio. 'Or do the English police traditionally disguise themselves as trees? In the five hours that we've been tramping through dense forest since we got off in what you said was the right place...'

'Well, I couldn't see properly. It was only just dawn, and anyway I was too seasick to notice where we were.'

'In the past five hours, we haven't seen a single human being except those robbers, nor any human habitation, and our total wealth now consists of – well, what did you have in your pockets when we ran away?'

I checked. 'A hairbrush, a bottle of shampoo with the lid off, a Portuguese dictionary soaked in shampoo, a pocket mirror, and my notebook for writing down interesting words. What about you?'

'Three wax candles, a box of matches, a pencil and paper, and a copy of Silas Marner. Which, incidentally, was first published in 1861.' Malvolio paused dramatically.

'That's interesting,' I said politely.

'If you wouldn't mind lining up your surviving brain cells, sir, can you remember the date when we left Illyria?'

'The beginning of February...' I began to see what Malvolio was driving at. 'Yes, that is odd, isn't it? I mean, we didn't seem to be on the boat for more than a couple of weeks, and now it's the middle of summer. Do you think we've been kidnapped and brainwashed and then made to forget it?'

'Never mind the month – what year was it?'

'1600 – no, wait, 1601.'

'Exactly. And yet I own a book written two hundred and sixty years in the future. And you remember that old man we were talking to, the night before we set sail?'

'You told me I dreamed all that!'

'The next morning, I saw an obituary of him in a London newspaper.'

'That's quick. How did they find out so soon that he was dead?'

'I don't know,' said Malvolio, 'but it was a very old newspaper. It was printed in September 1415.'

So we had seen a ghost. I had even held a ghost in my arms, and he hadn't felt at all ghostly: sweaty and shivering and tearful, heavy and flabby and smelling as if he hadn't washed for a while, but definitely not like anything eerie or unearthly. 'Maybe someone kept the paper to try to finish the crossword,' I said. 'That'd be awfully difficult, doing a crossword from two hundred years ago, because they had different spelling then. But anyway, what did it say about him?'

'Not a lot. I imagine that either he was a shadowy figure and the reporter didn't know much about him, or the tabloids had been so full of every detail during his lifetime that it wasn't worthwhile for a respectable newspaper to repeat it all. But apparently he was a soldier – even an officer, though goodness knows who'd put someone like that in charge of anything! He fought at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1406, and claimed to have killed some rebel leader, but nobody knew whether that was true or not. What was definitely true was that 98% of the soldiers he'd led into battle got killed, and his only comment was that they were as good for filling a pit as better men. He sounds a nasty piece of work.'

'It was probably just a joke,' I said. 'Maybe he was upset about what had happened and didn't want to admit it.'

'Don't you believe it! He was very pleased with himself over having supposedly killed this enemy leader, and he said he wanted to be made a duke or at least an earl as a reward, as long as it didn't mean he had to lose weight or adopt a healthy lifestyle. People like that aren't capable of caring about anyone except themselves.' After a slight pause, Malvolio added, 'By the way, what exactly is an earl?'

'It's sort of the English equivalent of a count,' I explained.

'So he was aiming for the same rank as we were?' Malvolio shook his head as if to dislodge this thought, and went on: 'But anyway, that doesn't explain why someone who died in London in 1415 should suddenly turn up in Illyria nearly two hundred years later.'

'Maybe ghosts just appear when they feel like it,' I said. 'Maybe he'd been murdered and wanted us to find out who did it. I wish I was in a murder mystery.'

'But you faint at the sight of blood,' Malvolio pointed out.

'Ah, yes, but if this was a murder mystery, I'd secretly be a genius detective who only looked like a useless twit,' I said. 'Or if it was a farce, you'd be an incredibly suave butler who knows all about everything from Greek philosophy to the racehorses at Ascot to how to get my friends to admit to being in love with each other when they're so shy that she only wants to talk about fairy-tales and he only wants to talk about newts. You're not, are you?'

'Certainly not,' said Malvolio. 'I'm an honest man, and I have no intention of metamorphosing into a cross between Pandarus and a racing columnist.'

'Well, if things are going to be this confusing, it'd help if one of us was a genius,' I said.

'Andrew! Malvolio! You took your time over getting here!' called a familiar voice. 'I've been walking with King Arthur these past two months, shouldering packs with him in the hot sun and keeping his spirits up on the trek to the Lair of the White Rabbit, and you two just turn up when it suits you!'

By this time we had rounded the bend in the path and come face to face with Sir John Oldcastle and a tall, armoured man who could easily slice us into shreds. 'Still, Arthur,' Sir John continued, 'shall we forgive them and let them come with us anyway? They were probably just too shy to ask, when they saw you before.'

King Arthur looked puzzled. 'Have we met?' he asked. 'When?'

'Don't you remember?' persisted Sir John. 'When I was dying and you came to summon me? They were keeping me company then. The lad with hair like mouldy straw was giving me a cuddle.'

King Arthur shook his head. 'I think you must have dreamt that. I've never seen these gentlemen in my life.'

Sir John breathed heavily a couple of times, then roared: 'You kings are all the same, aren't you? You'll be friends with a man as long as it suits you, then disown him without a moment's warning! Now you're trying to deny that Malvolio and Sir Andrew were sitting with me when the three of us had nothing left but our failures and disappointments, and shared those. Well, at this rate, how long will it be before you swear three times before the cock crows that you've never met me either? You're just like all kings, and I don't want to be your friend ever again!'

King Arthur waited for him to pause for breath, and then said, 'Jack, you know I love you, and I'm sure these friends of yours are good men and they're welcome to join us. I just meant that when I met you, there were different people attending you: a woman, and a boy of about twelve or thirteen, and a man with a very red face and an army uniform. I don't think they could see me, though.'

'We couldn't see you, either,' I said. 'We heard your voice at first, and then we didn't.'

For a moment we all stood around, trying to make sense of this, and then Sir John said: 'Of course! Do you remember Cheiron explaining about how things smaller than atoms are in two places at once, and don't decide where they are until someone looks at them? But I'm much bigger than an atom, so there was enough of me to be in three places at the same time. I was in an inn in London in my world, with Robin, my page; and Bardolph, the man with a face that looks like Hell-fire; and Nell, who was the owner of the inn where I was staying, and the wife of another of my followers. But at the same time, I was in a room in a different inn in Illyria, with Sir Andrew and Malvolio, and also in a clearing in a forest somewhere with you and Cheiron. But you had to look at me for me to choose where I really was, like an electron. And I'm sorry I shouted at you, Arthur.'

'I'm not,' said King Arthur. 'If I'd been behaving as shabbily as you thought, I'd have deserved it.'

'Well, I'll introduce everyone. Arthur, this is Malvolio of Illyria, who is probably brave, honest, and responsible, which is a lot more than I am. This is Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who is young and might be innocent for all I know, which is more than any of us is, and who has streams of sweet sympathy running through his heart, if you can drill through the strata of stupidity, vanity, and prejudices, to get at them. And this is King Arthur, the utterly memorable King of Britain, who pulled the sword out of the scone and is definitely not to be confused with Alfred the Cake.'

'But we don't even come from the same era,' complained Malvolio. 'We're from the seventeenth century, you're from the fifteenth, and goodness knows when King Arthur was supposed to have been alive – if you'll forgive my discourtesy, your majesty, but there really isn't any evidence that you ever existed.'

'Well, of course there isn't!' said Sir John. 'We're not in a history any more, so it doesn't have to be any particular century. It was the same when I was staying in Windsor: as far as I could find out, the king was still Henry V, but all the hit pop songs were by a king called Henry VIII, like Greensleeves and Pastime With Good Company. And there was a wonderful restaurant specialising in exotic foods from the New World. Now, I don't see how turkeys are ever going to replace a good capon, but potatoes are the finest vegetable ever invented, especially roast, and chocolate gateau is just amazing. Only it was a while before I even found out where 'the New World' was – for all I knew, it could have been a colony on the moon.

'And there were actors who sometimes came there to act all kinds of plays in Windsor Park – or at least, they did when people like Malvolio didn't stop them because their plays were so godless. Well, in my day, practically all the plays had been about Bible stories, but these plays were about anything except Bible stories: plays about fairies, plays about usurper kings, plays about star-crossed lovers or identical twins or girls disguised as boys – whatever the author felt like writing and people wanted to see. But the point was, there were history plays about kings who'd lived after my time but before whenever it was in Windsor, and those had a specific place and date. But if the play was a comedy, it didn't remotely matter if it was about some modern-day English workmen putting on a play for a king in ancient Athens.

'So you see, the story I was living in while I was in Windsor must have been pure comedy, rather than a historical comedy drama, which meant nothing too bad could happen to me while I was there. But as soon as I went back to London, I was back in the cycle of history plays, which meant I could die, and so, when I died, I finished up here in Arthur's world. And so have you.'

'That doesn't even begin to make sense,' said Malvolio.

'Well, no,' I said, 'but then, things didn't make much sense in our world, either, did they? Meeting identical twins who are a brother and sister doesn't really make sense, unless we were in a play by someone who's obsessed with twins and with transvestites. And maybe we shouldn't have been so horrible to you for being a Puritan, but we had to be, if we were written by a playwright who was angry with Puritans for making it difficult for him to make a living.'

'Is there anyone sane I can talk to?' groaned Malvolio. 'Someone who can tell us how to get back to our own world?'

'I don't know,' said King Arthur, 'but I think your best bet is a friend of ours called Cheiron. We're just on our way to meet him, as it happens – if I remember rightly, we should be only two or three miles away from the meeting-point now. So if you'd like to come with us, we'll see whether Cheiron can send you home.'

'That's if you want to go home,' added Sir John. 'I can't go back to my world, because I'm dead there, but you two have probably got the option. But have you got anything to go back for? Or anyone who wants you back?'

'I've got' – I paused to consider – 'an uncle who pays me three thousand ducats a year not to come near him, another uncle who lets me come and visit his estate and ride his horses and hunt in his deer-park but he's usually away when I go to stay there, and a third uncle who just likes to be left alone in his library. And there's an aunt who keeps asking me when I'm going to get into university, and another aunt who thinks I ought to get married. They've been taking it in turns to put up with me since I was eleven.'

'You're an orphan, then?' said Sir John. 'No parents to nag you about getting drunk and starting fights?'

'He's got me now,' said Malvolio. 'And I'm not going to let you corrupt this boy.'

'I'm not trying to corrupt him! Since I've been here, I've been such a paragon of virtue that I hardly recognise myself, haven't I, Arthur?'