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170 pages

English

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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?

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	08 octobre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781800467040
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 Mark Roland Langdale

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador
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Email: books@troubador.co.uk
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Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 978 1800467 040

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Dedicated to Lindsey and Iain Cadle “Mr and Mrs History”
Rosie Lowe, Andrea Johnson and Sophie Morgan.

Charlotte Eliza Walshe, and Lucy Worsley and the History Girls and Boys on television.

Thanks for bringing history alive.

“Dreams are true while they last,
and do we not live in dreams?”
Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be
quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”
William Dement

In 2015, it was the 500-year anniversary of the
building of Hampton Court Palace, which is
where the idea for the story came from.

Contents
1
Merlin’s Maze
2
The Old Gatekeeper
3
The Mazy Paths of History
4
Time Is Out of Joint
5
Shadow Dragons
6
The Labyrinth
7
The Crystal Palace
8
The Dream King
9
Conjuring the Dream
10
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
11
The Dream Cartographer
12
The Ice Mirror
13
The Dark Energy
14
Hats Off to the Dream King!
15
The Return of the Old Gatekeeper
16
The Moonlit Masked Ball
17
Merlin’s Mechanical Maze
18
Moonlight Magic
19
Royal Stargazers
20
The Mirror Maze
21
A Doll’s House Fit For a Princess
22
Illuminations
23
The Mad Royal Tea Party
24
Maze Fever
25
The Looking-Glass Graveyard
26
The Conjurer of Shadows
27
The Sun King and the Moon King
28
The Mad Gardener
29
The Golden Hourglass
30
A Maze Inside a Maze
31
A Penny Farthing for Your Thoughts
32
Mapping Your Dreams
33
The Moonstone Maze
34
The White Elephant
35
The Queen Bee
36
Maze Magic
37
The Plague Doctors
38
A Battle Royal
39
The Great Maze Race
40
Deja Vu x2
41
Back to the Past
Epilogue
Other books by Mark Roland Langdale are as follows:
Coming Soon

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 500 th 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 we