Finally, the day had come for Natty and me to visit Nancy's family and their home. We were to stay at Kerrington Manor over the weekend and return to St. Albert's on Sunday late afternoon.

I had expected that we would go there by train, or maybe by bus. Instead, on Saturday morning we were picked up by a limousine, no less. Nancy addressed the chauffeur, a distinguished man in his fifties or so, as 'James', and he addressed her as 'Miss Nancy'. What's more, after Natty and I had been introduced to him he insisted on calling us 'Miss Natalie' and 'Miss Catherine'. It was all a bit disconcerting. Little did I know that this was just the beginning.

After a three or four hours' drive we arrived at a huge manor house surrounded by forests, parks and fields. From the car window I could make out horses in a meadow, and stables.

At the manor house we were greeted by Nancy's mother, Lady Kerrington, and by Liz, Nancy's 'little sister', as Nancy affectionately called her, although Liz was merely two years younger than her.

Lady Kerrington also introduced us to some of their staff. In addition to James the chauffeur there were a cook, a butler, an overseer as well a large number of servants and maids, all of them in service to Lord and Lady Kerrington.

This was perhaps the first time I fully realized that I had been sent about two and a half centuries back in time, to an entirely different temporal era. Back home in the 23rd century, the very notion of people being 'in service' to the Lord and Lady of the Manor would have been considered ludicrous.

And it got even stranger than that.

"This is Liz and Nancy's governess, Ms Cavernough," Lady Kerrington told us as she introduced a middle-aged woman who, as opposed to the rest of the staff, was not wearing any uniform.

"A governess?" Natty asked, with an incredulous grin.

Nancy's cheeks turned bright red.

"Technically speaking, Ms Cavernough is not really our governess," she started to explain, but her mother cut her off in mid-sentence.

"But darling, of course she is your governess." She turned towards Natty and me. "Ms Cavernough is responsible for teaching my daughters proper manners and behavior, and she is responsible for administering discipline as well. Why, only last week she had to ...".

"Mother, really," Nancy's sister cut in, blushing furiously.

Lady Kerrington shrugged. "There is nothing embarrassing about having a governess, is there now?"

None of her daughters deigned to respond.

I watched, puzzled and bemused. A chauffeur, a butler, servants and maids, and even a governess: all that appeared to me like a setting out of a historical novel.

We had narrowly missed lunch, but Nancy's mother urged us to to sit down at a large wooden table to have cookies and coffee. Her husband joined us. Lord Kerrington was a distinguished middle-aged gentleman who did not show a trace of arrogance when he talked to us girls.

Nancy's parents did not strike me as 'the very image of a stuck-up aristocrats', an expression Nancy had used to describe them. They talked to us about our life at St. Albert's and wanted to know how I liked my new school. While we were having coffee and cookies, a maid was unobtrusively lingering in the background, watching out for empty cups and bowls of cookies to be refilled.

When we were done talking about our school, the topics of conversation gradually turned to affairs at the manor, and from there to politics. From the heated discussions that ensued I gathered that Lord and Lady Kerrington supported the Tories, a conservative political party, whereas both Nancy and her sister favored a party called Labour.

I had noticed early on that Nancy and her sister appeared to be in a mode of permanent confrontation when it came to talking with their parents. They were ever ready to contradict them, provoke them and to put down their political opinions.

Natty and I listened in uncomfortable silence. While in principle we would have been inclined to take Nancy and Lizzie's side, we were guests here at Kerrington Manor and we would have considered it rude to verbally attack our hosts the way Nancy did.

This went on for some time, with Lord and Lady Kerrington attempting to ignore and play down their daughters' increasingly aggressive comments and remarks.

Natty and I were relieved when Nancy's father put a stop to that by suggesting that Nancy and her sister might want to show Natty and me around the estate before it was going to get dark. Both girls enthusiastically agreed.

A special attraction for both of us were the stables. Or rather, the horses. Neither Natty nor I had ever sat on a horse, but we gamely attempted to follow our friends' instructions as they gave us a practical introduction to the basics of horsemanship. I enjoyed making contact with those big, friendly animals, stroking and petting them, feeding them apples and carrots.

Later that day we sat down to watch some television – in black and white, if you can believe it. The 1960s' TV shows we watched were for the most part Western films, with titles like 'Bonanza', or else they tended to feature certain oddly intelligent animals that always saved the day, such as a dog named 'Lassie' or a dolphin called 'Flipper'.

The other guests were to arrive very late in the evening, when Nancy, Lizzie, Natty and I would already have gone to bed. As Nancy had told us, they were Sir Colin Firth and his wife, with their son Ian and their daughter Francine, both kids approximately our age, and Lord and Lady Belling, with their sons Kenneth and Thomas. Ken and Tom had been Nancy and Lizzy's playfellows when they were younger, and the four of them were still good friends.

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A / N :   Thank you for reading this. It has to be a strange experience for a girl of the 23rd century to visit a place like Kerrington Manor, don't you think so?    

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