§ § § - October 5, 1965
Leslie wasn't sure what she had expected when she pushed the door shut behind her, but she was a little surprised to find herself standing in a classroom. It looked remarkably like all the elementary-school classrooms she remembered from her early years, with desks in neat rows, a poster of the alphabet mounted on a bulletin board, a message written in blue chalk on the blackboard, a flag hanging from a wall-mounted pole. But the alphabet contained three extra letters; the message was in another language; and the flag was butter yellow with a pale-blue cross and a red crown silhouette smack at the intersection of the cross' two bars. She was definitely in Lilla Jordsö. The room was mostly empty but for a woman who appeared to be in her mid- to late thirties shuffling through a stack of papers and three or four children sitting in their desks, one of them still wearing a dripping rain hat. Leslie peered out the window behind her and realized it was pouring; the day was dank and gloomy, and it appeared to have been raining hard for some time, as the playground outside the window was studded with puddles.
She was reading the jordiska message on the blackboard, which said, Today is the 5th of October. It is raining and cold. Yesterday was National Day for Lilla Jordsö, when she heard children's voices nattering outside the hallway and a crowd of kids burst in, most of them shaking water off raincoats, hats or umbrellas. They were all babbling excitedly, and Leslie found herself trying to fend off creeping xenophobia; she picked up the odd word here and there, but the fact that they were all chattering in easy, fluent jordiska gave her a sense of isolation for some absurd reason. I wish I'd asked Father about that translation trick he uses for fantasies where someone goes someplace where they don't speak English! She supposed he probably hadn't bothered because she was fairly proficient with jordiska by now; but the nattering voices were carrying on much too rapidly for her to follow.
A few boys detached themselves from the crowd at the door while the teacher got to her feet and began trying to impart order. They pulled off rain hats and, with one exception, slung them onto the floor, unbuttoning raincoats, looking at one another with secretive grins. One of them, the pale-blond boy, carried a paper bag; another was discernibly chubbier than the others and had ash-blond hair that stuck up in spikes along the top of his head. The third had hair the color of wet sand hanging into his eyes and kept shooting furtive glances at the teacher.
But it was the fourth boy, the dark-haired one, on whom Leslie's eyes fastened themselves. Oh, my love, you don't change much! Seven-year-old Christian Enstad had the same facial features, rounded and softened but still attractive, hinting strongly at the heartthrob status he'd attain in less than ten years. He nudged the boy whose hair was sticking up and murmured something to him; the latter boy, who Leslie realized had to be Ernst Wennergren, shook his head violently, whipping his hair around and causing the tufts on top to wiggle back and forth. Christian snickered and turned to the boy with the paper bag, who raised said bag just enough so that the others could see it. That has to be that troublemaker Ivar Claesson, Leslie deduced, which meant the other boy was Pelle Fågelsang. She remembered Christian blaming Ivar for bringing in the fishtail and realized with a grin that he hadn't been kidding. Even as she stood there staring at them, the two boys grinned conspiratorially at each other before Ernst wormed his way around them and headed for his desk, as if trying to distance himself from all the trouble he knew his friends were about to get into.
Christian—the only one who hadn't tossed his rain hat onto the floor—shook out the hat now, sending water droplets flying across the room. He shrugged off his raincoat, going to a desk and hanging the coat over the back of the chair while Leslie watched, unable to take her eyes off him. She could see that he was much the same mischievous little boy she remembered watching in the video of his father's coronation, just a little taller and with a touch more leanness in his face. She couldn't resist rounding the desks and pausing a couple of feet or so away so she could feast her eyes on this young incarnation of her husband.
Christian spoke in jordiska, of course, but fortunately his speech was clear enough that she understood it. "Come on, get in your desks before she notices," he urged.
Ivar sauntered over with the paper bag. "She's busy with those other kids," he said. "It's gonna work, don't worry. Boy, I can't wait to see her face."
"You're gonna really get it," piped up Ernst from the desk directly behind Christian's.
"Scaredy-cat," Ivar taunted.
"Hey, Pelle, you remember what to do, right?" Christian prompted.
Pelle sighed. "You already told me fifty times, Christian," he said in a weary voice. "I throw up and she takes me to the nurse, and Ivar sneaks the fishtail in her desk."
"Hey," Ivar protested then, "I'm not doing it. I did my part already—I brought the fishtail." He brandished the paper bag at Pelle, who pinched his nose shut and backed off a few steps. "Somebody else has to put it in the desk."
"Not me," Ernst said immediately.
"I'm throwing up," Pelle put in.
Ivar grinned slyly at Christian. "That means you gotta do it."
Leslie watched Christian shrug. "Okay." He slid into his desk with an utterly unconcerned air about him, and she rolled her eyes and grinned reluctantly. She remembered Christian mentioning that their teacher had never found out who left the tail in her desk, but that didn't make the whole thing any less risky. "You have no idea how lucky you are that you never got caught, Christian Enstad," she scolded the oblivious young prince, tossing Ivar a glance as a thought crossed her mind. "Then again, you're probably even luckier that Claesson there didn't end up double-crossing you and tattling on you."
Just then Ernst asked, "Are you really gonna throw up, Pelle?"
Pelle shrugged. "I have to. If it wasn't real, it wouldn't work."
"How'll you do it?" Christian wanted to know. Leslie couldn't resist a delighted smile at his little-boy voice, so utterly unlike his current alto-baritone.
Before Pelle could tell him, the teacher succeeded at last in getting the rest of the class to disperse to their seats; she peered at Ivar and gave him a curt order to sit down, and Pelle hastily took his own desk before she could tell him the same thing. Leslie, standing in front of the class like a guest speaker, had to remind herself that no one here could see or hear her; she felt on display, despite that no one was even looking in her direction. The last few kids took their seats; the teacher then came up to stand a few feet to Leslie's left and gestured at a photograph on the wall that Leslie had somehow missed when she first scanned the room. It was of Christian's parents, looking much younger in a black-and-white portrait. "Rise and bow or curtsy in honor of King Arnulf and Queen Susanna," the teacher ordered.
Leslie burst into surprised laughter when every child in the room except Christian got up and executed the requested movement. Automatically she looked at the teacher, but either the woman didn't notice Christian's lack of obeisance, or understood the likely reason for it. She planned to ask her husband about it when this memory had run its course. Meantime, she wanted to know what this teacher was like that had brought on enough dislike on the part of Christian and his friends to play this prank on her.
The teacher waited till the children had resumed their seats, then cleared her throat and announced in businesslike tones, "We will now have a test: addition for the girls, spelling for the boys." Groans rose from the class, and Leslie peered in amazement at the teacher; she knew full well that jordisk primaskolan began at the age of seven, which would make this the equivalent of first grade. Trying to figure out whether it was the era or the local practice that was responsible for what was essentially a pop quiz, she missed a few seconds of the children's activities and had to pull herself back to the moment—just in time to see Pelle Fågelsang withdraw something from his shirt pocket and cup it in one hand, eyeing the teacher as furtively as he could.
The teacher turned her back on the class to retrieve a stack of papers from her desktop, and Pelle reached across the aisle and poked Christian, who sat at his left. The movement also caught the attention of Ernst and Ivar, as well as five or six other kids who sat nearby; Pelle grinned, pointed at his cupped hand, then clapped it over his mouth and began to chew. Almost instantly he made a series of grotesque faces; Ivar began snickering, Christian grinned widely, and Ernst's jaw dropped.
The teacher began to walk the rows, placing a stapled set of papers on each desk from one of two stacks, according to whether the child in question was a boy or a girl. Leslie saw Christian make an urgent hurry up pantomime at Pelle, who squeezed his eyes closed, made a last few ferocious chewing motions and then swallowed hard, with a fierce grimace. He stuck out his tongue with disgust, then froze in his chair, slammed both hands over his mouth and seemed to go pale. Christian's grin faded noticeably and he leaned away from Pelle; Leslie snickered at his reaction.
Then Pelle half stood up, lurched over the top of his desk and vomited with enough noise and force to rivet everyone in the room, including the teacher. Ernst and Christian gaped at him in amazement; even Ivar looked impressed. The teacher dropped the rest of the test papers and rushed to Pelle's assistance. "Calm down, Fågelsang, we're going to see the school nurse," she said. Helping Pelle out of his desk, she swept a warning look across the rest of the class. "You are expected to behave while we're gone," she informed them. "Kollman, you will pass out the rest of the tests—math for the girls, spelling for the boys." A girl with waist-length blonde braids nodded and got to her feet, gathering up the dropped papers and beginning to pass them out. Christian and Ivar exchanged an incredulous glance, as if they had thought that Pelle's being sick would somehow have excused the entire class from the pop quiz.
Pelle, clutching his stomach, submitted to the teacher's less-than-gentle prodding toward the door, but managed to shoot a glance over one shoulder in his friends' direction before he was removed from their view. It took only a few seconds for complaints to rise from the children about the tests; the girl with the braids shrugged helplessly and continued to dole them out. Ivar sneered at her when she got to the front of the second row, where Pelle had been sitting. "Inger Kollman, teacher's pet," he singsonged.
"I hope you fail the test, Ivar Claesson," the girl shot back, and Leslie snickered, thinking, Good for you! The girl's name sounded familiar and she tried to figure out why, but had to give up when it wouldn't come to her.
Inger dropped a spelling test on Christian's desk and worked her way down the row he sat in; Ernst dodged the paper that landed on his desktop, then asked, "Where's the fishtail? Now that fru Hedefalk's gone..."
Ivar grinned and pulled the paper bag out from under his chair, thrusting it at Christian. "Your turn, Enstad," he said, as if in challenge.
Even at seven years of age, Leslie discovered, Christian had already been capable of donning that cool, controlled mien that came so easily to him in public. Without a word, with no more than a steady stare and the slightest of smiles at Ivar, Christian accepted the bag and got up, skirting the puddle of vomit in front of Pelle's desk with some care before circling around the teacher's desk and peering across the back of it. After a minute he chose a drawer, pulled it as far open as he could, sucked in a deep breath and held it, opened the bag, then upended it over the open drawer. Something fell out and landed with a muted thud in the drawer. Christian slammed it shut and backpedaled from the desk, wadding up the bag and throwing it into the garbage can beside the door. Only then did he release his breath in an explosive gust and return to his desk. Leslie shook her head; he had never bothered to check to see if anyone was watching. Not that it seemed to matter, for the class had long since descended far enough into disorder that only a few children, mostly girls, were actually trying to work on the test. Inger Kollman had just handed out the last one; as she crossed along the front row of desks, Ivar reached out and gave one of her braids a hard yank. No shrinking violet after all, Inger retaliated with a good whack across the top of Ivar's head that actually made him squawk, eliciting laughter from Christian and Ernst, the latter of whom was another of those laboring over the test.
Ivar got up and appointed himself lookout beside the door, while Christian picked up his test and looked it over before shrugging unconcernedly and beginning to answer the questions. After he'd gotten through three or four of them, Ivar yelled, "Someone's coming!" and every kid in the room scrambled back to his or her desk, bending heads over test papers. Ivar alone remained where he was, then snickered loudly and taunted, "Fooled ya...it's only the janitor."
An older man entered the room with a cart full of cleaning supplies while the class looked up; some kids glared at Ivar or called him names, while many others watched the janitor start to mop up the mess Pelle had left behind. Christian, who had one of the best views in the room, merely made a face and concentrated harder on his test; Leslie grinned.
The janitor was gone before Ivar gave warning that someone was coming, by which time most of the students had gone back to their horseplay. Leslie had watched Christian throughout; he'd dutifully answered every test question before turning to Ernst and trying to start a conversation. Ernst was having some trouble, so Christian lent assistance, warming Leslie. While they were occupied, Leslie had gone over to Christian's desk and checked the pages he'd completed; of course, all the spelling words were in jordiska, but her husband had taught her well enough that she knew all of Christian's answers were correct. "Incorrigible little rogue," she murmured affectionately, watching the seven-year-old prince point out an error on Ernst's test paper.
"Teacher's coming," Ivar sang out.
"You better not be fooling, Claesson," someone yelled from the back of the room.
Ivar smirked, sprinting to his desk. "Just watch!"
Sure enough, fru Hedefalk entered the room with Pelle, who still looked a little pale but seemed to be in better spirits. The teacher gestured Pelle to his desk, then took in the entire class. "If anyone has finished his or her test...which I doubt," she muttered, "please bring it to my desk immediately." So saying, she took her chair behind said desk, and Leslie saw that Ivar, Christian, Pelle and Ernst were all peering at her as surreptitiously as they were capable of at that age, clearly waiting for her reaction.
A few girls and a couple of boys got to their feet to take their tests to the desk; to Leslie's surprise, Christian was one of these, taking Ernst's paper up with him. He let some of the other kids precede him there and reached the desk just as the girl nearest fru Hedefalk's chair sniffed and wrinkled her nose. "Something smells nasty," the girl said.
"Yeah," said another girl. "Ewwww." Leslie giggled; apparently the expression was the same in jordiska as in English. As if compelled, she went to the desk to stand behind Christian; she too could detect a whiff of rotten fish.
Fru Hedefalk clearly noticed it too, for she stilled and frowned, then tugged open the desk drawer in front of her. Shrieks went up and every child at the desk backed away at sight of the half-rotted fishtail; fru Hedefalk recoiled and instinctively slammed the drawer. "Who is responsible for this?" she shrilled. "I want an answer immediately!"
All over the room children denied knowledge of the prankster's identity; Christian, having contributed his own false denial, tossed the test papers onto the desk and retreated to his own, holding his nose. Ivar burst into helpless giggles when he saw Christian's reaction, and that attracted fru Hedefalk's attention. "Claesson!" she thundered.
Ivar bolted upright in his chair. "What?" he blurted out.
"You will address me as fru Hedefalk!" the teacher ordered, enraged. "And there's no doubt in my mind that you're the one who must have done this! All year long you've been responsible for countless disruptions. Just wait till I speak with your parents!"
"But I—" Ivar began.
"He had a paper bag with something really smelly in it, fru Hedefalk," chimed in Inger Kollman from the middle of the first row. "I saw it!"
"But I didn't put it in the desk!" howled Ivar in disbelief. Strictly speaking, it was the truth, but Leslie was amazed to see that no one in the class seemed willing to turn in Christian as the culprit. Christian himself was gaping at Ivar, along with Pelle and Ernst.
"You did so," volunteered a boy, the same one in the back who had warned Ivar not to try to fool them with a false warning of the teacher's approach. Leslie shook her head in laughing disbelief as the boy announced, "I saw him go up front and dump out a paper bag in your desk, fru Hedefalk."
"Yeah," several girls chorused, "he did it! I saw him!"
Ivar gawked in shock at each child as more and more support for his culpability cropped up; Christian, looking shocked for an entirely different reason, turned to Pelle, who could only shrug. Behind Christian, Ernst started giggling, trying to hide it with a hand over his mouth. In the end fru Hedefalk quieted the class, gave Ivar five extra assignments in several different subjects, and vowed to call the senior Claessons about their son's shenanigans before stalking out of the room, presumably to get hold of the janitor.
"But Christian did it!" Ivar finally shouted, trying to make himself heard above the inevitable chatter that arose as soon as the teacher had left. "He put it there, not me!"
"It was you, you dirty old bug," snapped Inger Kollman, and was immediately seconded by a crowd of girls all over the room.
Even a few boys agreed with her. Someone actually warned, "You're not supposed to get the prince in trouble, or you'll go to the dungeon!" That made Leslie collapse against the wall with laughter. She caught a glimpse of the astonishment on Christian's face and found herself laughing even harder; in fact she was so consumed that she barely noticed when the scene faded around her and a door appeared from thin air.
She had to pull herself together to some extent before she could open the door; in the other corner of the time-travel room sat Christian, whose expression seemed faraway. He came alert, though, as soon as she emerged, and arose in surprise. "What's so funny?"
"That undeserved happy ending you got back in sixty-five," Leslie said, still giggling. "Oh, my love, now I think I know why you wanted me to see that. It was hilarious!"
Christian grinned, though he was still mildly puzzled. "How much did you see?"
"I saw enough to find out that your teacher put all the blame on Ivar Claesson and you got off scot-free," she said merrily. "What a farce. It's a wonder the rest of the class didn't rat you out...although you probably deserved it."
"Rat me out?" Christian echoed, brows shooting skyward.
"Tattle," Leslie explained, giggling. "Tell her who really did it."
"Ah." Laughing himself now, Christian shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged in a slightly self-conscious motion. "I'm sure I did deserve it, but Ivar had already become known as the class troublemaker after only a bit more than two months in school, and it was probably inevitable that he ended up taking the blame for the entire scheme. I suppose I should have said something, but I knew it would have gotten back to my parents. I knew Father's temper all too well already, and I wasn't willing to face it. Pelle had no intention of admitting to being in on it either, so we let Ivar take the fall all alone."
"Shame on you," Leslie teased. "But it was still funny. Some questions, though. First of all, what on earth did Pelle eat that made him throw up like that?"
"We asked him that after school that day," Christian remembered, grinning. "He told us that some cousin of his had brought back a box of chocolate-covered ants from a visit to the US, and he thought that stood a good chance of making him sick—but, just to be truly certain, he said he poked a hole in the top of the chocolate he brought with him and poured in a little of the cod-liver oil he claimed his mother was always trying to feed him and his little brother. As you obviously saw, it worked perfectly."
"Sure did," Leslie agreed, shaking her head with amusement. "Next, there was a girl named Inger Kollman who got appointed to pass out the tests..."
Christian nodded, breaking in, "She was the one whose braids Ivar was always trying to tie together. Occasionally Pelle or I tried to do it too, but mostly it was Ivar."
"That's right, I remember Ivar saying something about it when you and he had that confrontation last year. And also...right at the beginning, when class started, your teacher told everyone to get up and bow or curtsy as a gesture of respect to a portrait of your parents on the wall." She saw Christian's expression change and giggled again. "They did—all but you. How come you were exempt?"
This time it was Christian who burst out laughing. "To tell the truth, I'd almost forgotten! But you're right—this was something required in every school in Lilla Jordsö for well over a century and a half. It may interest you to learn that Arnulf, Carl Johan, Anna-Laura and I were the very first royal children who were sent to schools outside the castle, rather than being educated at home by tutors as my father and all the foregoing generations had been. I seem to recall that Arnulf bowed to the portrait like all his classmates; I expect that Carl Johan and Anna-Laura paid their respects as well, though I don't know for certain. However, I saw no reason to make such obeisance to my own parents. Fru Hedefalk spent three weeks demanding that I do it, in vain, before she sent me home with a note which I gave Mother. I can still remember how she laughed when she realized I was rebelling. She wrote a response on the note, excusing me from having to bow, and sent it back with me; and that was the last time fru Hedefalk—or any teacher, for that matter—objected to my remaining seated."
"Do they still do that?" Leslie asked, laughing with him.
"No, it died out sometime during the 70s. I think I was about to finish primaskolan at the time, and I remember being relieved for it because the fact that it was being done at all, and that I was exempt, merely called unwanted attention to me." He let out a last chuckle and shook his head. "I'm happy to see you found it so amusing, my Rose. But then there was your memory. Eight years old, in a strange place you'd never been to before and would never see again, and you still went exploring? You were intrepid!"
"Well, I didn't really see it that way," Leslie admitted. "It was because I was still so mad at Michael for wanting to take us away from mormor's grave so we couldn't visit her and leave flowers for her. I'd seen that little foal when we stopped off for gas, and when I realized they'd left without me, I decided it was my only chance to see what it felt like to be right up close to a real live horse, and whether their noses were really as soft as I'd always heard." She sighed. "I just wish I knew what happened to the poor little guy. When that lightning bombed the place..."
"I looked," Christian said softly. "I couldn't bear that terrified look on your face, so I went to the end of the porch and tried to find out. I could just see all the horses rearing and screaming in their paddock—including your foal. He was all right, my Leslie Rose, I promise you. His owner was correct about that much."
She brightened with amazement and hugged him. "Oh, my love, thank you for doing that! By the time we left that house, all the horses had run off somewhere else, and I never did see that foal again. I wondered for years what had happened to him. Thank you."
Christian hugged her close and stroked her hair a few times. "Quite enlightening, this, don't you think? I look forward to the rest."
Leslie grinned. "Me too. I can hardly wait."