The Derring-Do Club and the Year of the Chrononauts

by David Wake

  “Yes.”

  “And radio waves?”

  “Tesla, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right; and the bulky devices of your day have been distilled down to this contraption that you wear like a headband.”

  “How wonderful.”

  “You are concerned about your Uncle Jeremiah,” Mrs Frasier said. “Don’t worry. There are mitigating circumstances. He and I… He helped design all this and, well, he was led astray.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Sadly no, but I assure you that he is alive and well. I would not see any harm come to him.”

  “And–”

  “Boothroyd is also safe and sound.”

  “I would still–”

  “It is not the purpose of your visit. You have a duty here that you must perform.”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “Are you ready to start?”

  “I am, directly.”

  Mrs Frasier came out from behind the desk and she was wearing trousers!

  Mrs Frasier saw Earnestine’s shocked expression and laughed: “Women wear trousers. Not all, but most. What was the word that we used to use… rampant… what was it?”

  “Rampant bloomerism.”

  “Bloomerism, yes, as if we needed to control our flowering.” Mrs Frasier chuckled as she opened the door for Earnestine. “Indeed, we have flowered. Women have complete suffrage. Look at me, the woman in charge.”

  They went down a long corridor and reached a doorway. The place was something of a maze.

  “This is the future,” Mrs Frasier announced. “We can’t stay long on account of the poison from the war.”

  They went through and outside.

  There was a square, open to the sky, and guarded by men in breathing masks that looked at odds with their black frock coats. Down the long alleyway, Earnestine could see the blue sky and, distantly, extraordinary glass towers soared above the skyline dwarfing the distant Houses of Parliament. High up, a strange Zeppelin hovered.

  It was utterly fantastical.

  “Use these,” said Mrs Frasier and she handed Earnestine a pair of opera glasses.

  Earnestine put them to her eyes, adjusted them ever so slightly and was able to look along the Thames to the Palace of Westminster. The optics were so good that she could read the time on the distant clock of Big Ben accurately showing this future hour, so different from her own fob watch.

  “May we go and walk the streets?” Earnestine asked, taking down the opera glasses. “I would like to see what Zebediah Row looks like now.”

  “Perhaps, when we’ve finished our duties, but it is forbidden to interact.”

  “How can people live out here, if one has to use a mask?”

  “The people of this time are used to it, adapted so to speak, whereas those from other times, yourself for example, would have illnesses when exposed to too much of the aerial poison.”

  “You are from another time?”

  “Another time from this one, yes.”

  “That’s–”

  “Camera please.”

  Earnestine jerked like a school girl caught with her hand in the candy jar. Mrs Frasier took it off her. Earnestine had taken one picture and had been struggling with the anti–clockwise mechanism.

  “I’ve not seen one of these in years,” said Mrs Frasier, turning it over in her hands. She wound it on, expertly, and then waved Earnestine over towards the quad.

  “Smile!”

  Earnestine didn’t feel like smiling: she tried, but she was sure she was grimacing. And one didn’t smile for a daguerreotype as it was unseemly. Mrs Frasier took a picture, moved around and took another. She motioned again and took a third, and a fourth – the profligate expense was astounding.

  “Let me get the Zeppelin in,” she ordered and clicked again. “Perhaps one with both of us.”

  One of the guards came over to Mrs Frasier’s beckoning.

  “There,” she instructed. “Mask off to see through there.”

  She stood next to Earnestine, both of them with their hands crossed neatly in front.

  The man clicked.

  “Take another!”

  He did, then he looked confused.

  Mrs Frasier took the device off him and checked it: “Ah, only twelve plates on the strip – never mind. We’ve been out long enough as it is.”

  She gave the camera back to Earnestine, who dropped it in her bag feeling guilty.

  “There’s no need to be the spy, we’ve nothing to hide,” said Mrs Frasier. “Quite the contrary.”

  Back inside the building, Mrs Fraser took her to a study or small library constructed of wood panelling, high book shelves and a large central table.

  “I have some books,” said Mrs Frasier. She went to a particular shelf and brought down a variety of leather bound volumes of different weights and sizes. “Read these… this one would be the best to begin with.”

  Earnestine sat at the table and opened the first volume that Mrs Frasier had selected. There was a daguerreotype image of three ranks of soldiers, the officers at the front were seated and those behind stood to attention. They all had the same stern expression. No smiling for this picture. The caption read ‘Sandhurst Passing Out Parade, Year of 1912’. She was looking at the future a dozen years from her own time and it was history, preserved and strangely sacred.

  Earnestine felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Mrs Frasier.

  “I am sorry that you have to grow up so quickly,” Mrs Frasier said before leaving.

  Earnestine was alone.

  She began reading, first looking at the pictures, then the captions, the newspaper clippings and finally the articles and journal entries. At first she couldn’t make sense of it. There were daguerreotypes of young men in military uniforms, strange mechanisms and machines, mud, explosions, and it was all such a mess of information.

  However, slowly, the pieces fell into a sequence in her mind. It was the same story, repeated over and over, relentlessly, until Earnestine felt that she had lived in these trenches and flown these aerial machines and dived beneath the cold waves, and still the terrible events went on and on and on.

  Part of her wanted to push the books away, shut their heavy covers to deny the dreadful horrors within. She wanted to return to the picture books of her youth, the innocent adventure stories that Uncle Jeremiah had made up, but she knew her duty was to learn.

  But there was just so much of it and there was no peace.

  Just endless war.

  Bombs.

  Shelling.

  Bullets.

  Armoured land ironclads.

  Poison gas.

  Massacres.

  Starvation.

  Disease.

  Execution camps.

  Death, always death.

  The flower of youth, all those brave young men who had stood so proudly in ranks were plucked from their pictures to be ruined on the battlefields of Europe and the rest of the world.

  She felt sick, drained utterly.

  “Here,” said Mrs Frasier, giving her a glass of water. Earnestine had not been aware that she had returned, she’d slipped in behind her and she must have been watching for some time.

  Earnestine blinked: “It tastes…”

  “It has chemicals to replenish the blood.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have someone who would like to see you.”

  “See me?”

  Mrs Frasier showed an old man in. He doddered, his hair white and he looked to Earnestine like someone’s Uncle. Not hers, not Uncle Jeremiah, but someone familiar and–

  “Mister Boothroyd!”

  “Ha, ha,” he said, “yes, yes, such a long time ago, you haven’t aged a day, not a day I say, it feels – oh my dear, like yesterday and yet… and yet.”

  “They say… no, please sit,” Earnestine showed him to a seat and he gently settled. Grey streaks had now conquered the man’s pate completely, and when she saw him close up, she was shocked by t
he ragged appearance of his skin.

  “You…” Earnestine looked to Mrs Frasier. “Is it the poisons?”

  “No Ness,” Mrs Frasier replied, “not the poisons.”

  “The years,” said Mister Boothroyd. “So many.”

  “Were you… guilty of…”

  “Genocide. Yes. The evidence was incontestable.”

  Earnestine stepped back: “Oh my!”

  “I have been lucky,” Boothroyd said. “The Chronological Committee commuted my sentence and I’ve been able to serve. My ideas have been used to rebuild the world, do you see, and make amends. It’s been how long? A decade? Ten years, imagine… and to see you, bright and new like a polished coin, after all this time.”

  “That’s good,” said Earnestine.

  “If I had my time again… Miss Deering–Dolittle, make them see, make them understand,” he said, his eyes alight with fiery energy. “You can go back. Change it. Save the world.”

  “Yes, Mister Boothroyd, I will.”

  Mister Boothroyd looked to Mrs Frasier: “Have I done the right thing?”

  Mrs Frasier nodded.

  “I’ve made up for it then, done my penance?”

  “Yes, Boothroyd, you have. The new future will thank you for it. I’m proud of you.”

  He clasped his hands, stared ahead in an ecstatic, religious fervour: “Oh!”

  “You should both rest now,” said Mrs Frasier.

  “Yes… no, wait,” Earnestine said. “I should get back – warn everyone! As soon as possible!”

  Mrs Frasier laughed: “We travel in time. We could drop you five minutes after you left, or a year, or three months earlier.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Earnestine, trying to get her head around the idea.

  Mrs Frasier opened the door: “Come.”

  “Good night, Mister Boothroyd,” Earnestine said. “I’ll do the right thing.”

  Mister Boothroyd nodded: “I know you have. Thank you, my dear, thank you.”

  Mrs Frasier led Earnestine back to her room with a kindly arm around her shoulder to guide her.

  “I’ll say good night, then,” said Mrs Frasier. “I’d say sweet dreams, but I know what you’ve read. It is worse for us, we have experienced some of it at first hand.”

  Earnestine nodded, aware of the images jostling for attention in her memory as they queued to become nightmares.

  Mrs Fraser got out her key.

  “Do I have to be locked in?”

  “It’s for your own safety.”

  “My safety?”

  “You are too important to me to allow anyone to hurt you. You and I have enemies, even here and now. We must be cautious.”

  Earnestine prepared for bed, her mind buzzing with everything she’d seen. It was eight o’clock when she’d finished reading in the small library, a meal had been brought in, and on her watch it was eleven o’clock by the time she was undressed and washed. Eleven o’clock in the morning, she thought, but it was night. Night here, but morning back in her own time. Her mind felt befuddled. She was exhausted, her mind was like an over–stuffed travelling trunk, and she was almost asleep before her head hit the pillow.

  Mrs Arthur Merryweather

  The first that Georgina knew was the sound of shattering glass and the shrieks of the maid. She found her robe and ran barefoot downstairs to see what all the commotion was about. As she turned on the stair, she saw something flicker through the hallway, a crashing of glass, and she heard a deep crump of a noise as a heavy object hit the hallway table. Earnestine’s umbrella danced in its stand. A brick lay on the floor amidst the shards of debris.

  She hesitated – the tiles were covered in glass, red and blue from the porch, glinting with a fiery light.

  The maid redoubled her screeching.

  What was she called?

  It was night and Georgina hadn’t woken yet.

  “Mary, Mary…”

  The screeching stopped abruptly: “It’s Jane.”

  “Jane, what’s–”

  Another object bounced off the door.

  Georgina could hear shouts outside, deep and indistinct, but numerous and angry. Georgina risked going down to the first step, felt a shard of glass beneath her foot depress in the stair carpet, and hunkered down to look.

  There was a crowd in the street, shaking raised lanterns and brandishing sticks. The tiny garden gate that squeaked and was in need of paint, kept them at bay by force of demarcating the property line, but it was clearly little real protection.

  A cheer went up – another object hurled at the house arced through the air.

  The mob was stirring itself like a wild animal building its courage towards a tipping point.

  “We’re done for,” said the maid, “all because you’ve sided with them Chronies.”

  “Chronies?”

  “Chronologics, them Peelers wot take innocent folk.”

  “Mar– Jane, don’t be ridiculous.”

  The noise outside hushed. Somehow this was more frightening than the shouting. The central cohort parted, gathering around a gap, and into it stepped a woman.

  Her voice was strident, livid with rage: “This is the house of those who plot against you!”

  The mob ‘aye’d and ‘yea’d.

  “Should we stand idly by, while our loved ones are taken from us?”

  “Nay, nay.”

  “We should act, act and protect ourselves!”

  “Here, here.”

  The woman turned, screamed something incoherent as she pointed at the house.

  Georgina recognized the ring–leader, and she wasn’t going to take any more of this nonsense.

  Quickly, she stepped across the hallway, ignoring the sharp stabbing pain on her icy feet, and went out. As the door opened, the crowd divided between those jeering and those quietened into guilty silence. Georgina was half–way down the path when the woman, who had her hand on the unlocked gate, turned to look.

  On the hockey pitch, Georgina used to shout louder than everyone else: “Mrs FalCONE!”

  The crowd shushed itself into an audience.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  Mrs Falcone smiled, her opportunity had come: “You sell people out to the Temporal Peelers.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “It’s true.”

  “Evidence!”

  “We know all about it.”

  Georgina realised that she was never going to convince this woman. In an instant she knew that they were mortal enemies even before they’d met. Georgina represented something to this woman and, whatever it was, there was no changing it. So Georgina changed tack.

  “You would damn people on the word of this woman, without evidence, without trial, without a jury.”

  “We’re a jury,” came a reply from the back.

  “Then be a jury! Be twelve good men and true.”

  “Aye.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Mrs Falcone yelled.

  “So, this woman does not allow a defence, she does not allow a fair trial, she does not allow you, good men and true, to reach your own verdict before she, and she is no judge, pronounces sentence.”

  “She’s trying to trick you,” Mrs Falcone said. “Smash the house, take your revenge.”

  The gate opened.

  “Are you English?”

  “Yes,” came a shout from another direction, and then another. “And we won’t stand for this.”

  Mrs Falcone stepped back; of course, she wasn’t going to do the dirty work, and three men barged forward. They crossed the property line and took a stride along the garden path.

  Georgina had one last throw of the dice: “Is this cricket!?”

  The men stopped.

  “No,” said the leader.

  “There are rules!” Georgina said, using her most outraged tone.

  “Yes, there are,” the man admitted, and he stepped back, almost as if the beefy workman had been woken from sleepwalking.

  “These rule
s are here for everyone’s protection, yours and mine,” Georgina said, using her best schoolmarm impression. “We’re in England, not some foreign clime where the foreigners don’t understand justice and fair play. We don’t throw things at people’s houses, we bowl. We don’t shout and scream, but we accept the word of the Umpire and walk calmly to the pavilion. We don’t brawl, we box. We don’t hit someone else, unless for a roquet. There are rules: Marylebone Cricket Club’s or the Marquis of Queensbury’s or John Jaques’.”

  The men nodded as did those around him.

  Georgina waggled her finger like a vexed, but loving mother: “Let that be a lesson to you.”

  The man nodded, forlorn and apologetic. He took his cloth cap off and rung it in his hands.

  “Most sorry and apologise, Miss.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “Sorry, Ma’am, of course, Ma’am. And apologies to Mister Deering–Dolittle too.”

  “Well, be off with you then.”

  The man left, stumbling and the crowd dispersed.

  “Come back, come back,” Mrs Falcone pleaded.

  When they were all gone, Georgina went to the garden gate, closed it with a click and then, when she was confident no–one could see, she punched Mrs Falcone.

  Miss Charlotte

  Charlotte was absolutely flabbergasted: Georgina, of all people.

  “That was fantastic,” she said to her sister. The crazed woman had gone down like a felled tree – one punch. “Marvellous.”

  Georgina pushed straight past her.

  Charlotte waved Earnestine’s umbrella at the empty street: “Ha ha!”

  She caught up with Georgina in the kitchen throwing up into a bucket.

  “Every morning,” Georgina said.

  “Brilliant,” Charlotte said.

  “I’ve broken my hand.”

  “You’ve probably broken her jaw.”

  Georgina looked like she was praying, kneeling on the tiles with her hands holding her dark hair away from the bucket and her feet sticking out from under her robe and nightdress.

  “You’ve cut your feet,” Charlotte said.

  “Oh… have I? Oh, I have too… ow! Ow!”

  Charlotte bent down: “Here, let me.”

  She eased a piece of glass out, and another. Little dribbles of red gathered, threatened to flow and then did, trickling as a stream along the arch and then welling up in a lake between her toes.