The Derring-Do Club and the Year of the Chrononauts

by David Wake

  The Clerk of the Court quietened matters, fluttering his hands up and down to direct people to settle, but the damage had been done.

  “Look at all this,” said the Judge, referring to the litter and mess thrown from the Public Gallery. “Your kind brings nothing but chaos and destruction. You are finished. Scrutiniser Jones, keep him quiet, I say, keep him quiet.”

  Scrutiniser Jones, sturdy in his uniform and impassive behind his white glasses stepped forward. Foxley was subdued.

  “Now, members of the Jury,” the Judge said. “You have heard the evidence, you have heard the accused himself attempt to overturn law and order, please consider your verdicts… no, I insist, please retire and discuss your verdict even if you feel you have made up your minds already. Give to this man that courtesy and consideration that he and his kind so malevolently denied millions of others.”

  The Foreman stood, nodded, and the jury, the twelve good men (and women) and true, filed out.

  “I’m not guilty,” Foxley shouted. “Not guilty.”

  A man next to Georgina shouted abuse.

  Charlotte sniggered: “He used the ‘B’ word,”

  “Charlotte, language!” Earnestine warned.

  The Clerk busied himself with his papers and the lawyers, both Prosecution and the redundant Defence, put their documents away. The Judge simply stayed in his position impassively. No–one had to wait long; Georgina was just looking at Arthur’s watch when the Foreman led the Jury back to their places.

  Once they were settled, the Judge addressed them: “Members of the Jury, have you reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honour.”

  “Is this verdict unanimous?”

  “It is, Your Honour.”

  “And what is that verdict?”

  There was no pause between the Judge’s question and the Foreman’s answer. It was immediate and certain, but the heightened tension in the court room was such that it seemed to take an age to arrive.

  “Guilty.”

  The Public Gallery erupted with shouts: “Yes”, “send him on his way”, “the rope”, “hang him”, but this hushed when the Judge placed a small square of black cloth upon his head. Foxley seemed to fold in upon himself like a figure in a pop–up book when its part was finished and the covers were closed shut.

  “There can be only one punishment for your crime: death! You will be taken…”

  The Judge paused.

  Mrs Frasier had attracted his attention with a slight raise of her index finger. She leant over to whisper to him.

  “Ma’am,” said the Judge, “you are too… wonderful.”

  The Judge coughed and addressed the court again.

  “Mrs Frasier of the Chronological Committee – the very person you accused of being a Dictator – has kindly consented to give you the chance to redeem yourself. It recognizes that you are like a serpent in an egg, unformed in your evil. So, even though you are legally guilty, the Committee will generously allow you to seek redemption and make amends.”

  “Anything,” said Foxley, a man clutching at straws.

  “So, will you diligently work for the Committee to make reparation?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Very well, you accept any labours given to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter what may come to light in the fullness of time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Done… make him sign, I say, make him sign and take him away.”

  Scrutiniser Jones took Foxley by his collar and led him away. There were jeers, but already people were collecting their belongings and making for the door.

  “I’m glad he was found guilty,” said Charlotte. “Horrible man.”

  “Uncle Jeremiah can’t go through this,” Georgina said in a low voice.

  “He might have done already,” Earnestine replied.

  “Excuse me?” Georgina said to the woman next to her.

  The woman appeared very nervous: “Miss?”

  “Ma’am. Has Unc– Doctor Deering been tried yet?”

  “Doctor Deering?”

  “Yes, his case. Has it happened?”

  “No.”

  “And Mister Boothroyd?” Earnestine asked.

  “Oh, yes…” said the woman. “Guilty I’m afraid, but given reparations.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman darted away and Earnestine, Georgina and Charlotte joined the exodus, conscious of the glances in their direction. They were known by everyone.

  Once they were clear of the crowd, Earnestine pulled Georgina to one side. Charlotte followed. The eldest sister tilted her head to one side, a tiny jerk, and they followed her. She led them to a small room full of book shelves.

  “This is the library where I saw all the histories. I thought it might be a good place to prepare a proper legal case,” Earnestine explained. She went over the Law section full of bright new volumes. “We need books.”

  “Will this be those presidents?” asked Charlotte, already swinging her arms about in boredom.

  “Precedents,” Earnestine said.

  “We need case law from this age too,” said Georgina.

  Earnestine had already put three heavy volumes down on the table.

  “This is impossible,” said Charlotte.

  “No, it isn’t, Charlotte,” said Earnestine. “We can’t compete on case law; we aren’t lawyers, so we will have to base our argument on legal principles: Habeas Corpus and so forth.”

  “Do they still apply?” Georgina asked.

  “No civilised nation would discard Habeas Corpus.”

  “What’s Habeas Corpus?” Charlotte asked.

  “It’s a writ that brings a prisoner before the judge.”

  Charlotte made a face: “Paperwork, yuk.”

  “Important paperwork: if a legal process is not followed, then it is invalid.”

  “There’s Magnus Carter,” Charlotte suggested.

  “Magna Charta.”

  “And Deus Ex Machina.”

  “That’s Aristotle.”

  “And–”

  “Charlotte, be quiet! You don’t know your French tenses, so how are you going to know your Latin legal terms? All that time you complained that Latin was useless; well, now you see how vital it is. It’s not possible to run a proper law–abiding country without it.”

  The books were piled high on the table in irregular groups. They were leather bound volumes, red, black and blue, and looked like piles of bricks ready for an ornate wall to be built.

  “The answer is in here,” Earnestine said, leaning forward and putting her fists down on the table.

  Georgina picked up the book nearest and skimmed the words, and then flicked through others, but, if she was completely honest, none of the actual words made that much sense and the volumes were old, dreadfully old.

  She picked another at random. It had been first published in 1882 and updated in 1895, this edition 1897, which may only be a handful of years ago for her, but this was the future. It was as if this book was written in 1800 before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1884, the Great Reform Act of 1832 and all the other great advances of her own century. It was useless against this Chronological Judiciary. If the last hundred years for her meant that married women gained the right to own property, and the whole electoral system was overhauled, then what would the next hundred years have brought? Perhaps even women’s suffrage was possible. It was as if she were trying to play chess, but knowing only the rules of draughts. It just wasn’t… cricket.

  Something chimed in her head, something just on the edge of her mind like a half–remembered dream.

  Charlotte snuffled and shuffled.

  It was gone.

  Georgina tried to recover it, thought about cricket, chess, cricket… but it wasn’t there anymore. It had vanished as if to another time.

  “It’s impossible,” said Charlotte. “Do you really want to spend all day going through some dusty old books?”

  �
�Knowledge is king,” said Earnestine.

  “Bleurgghh.”

  Charlotte picked up Earnestine’s umbrella and swizzled it experimentally like a sword.

  “LOTTIE!” Earnestine yelled. “Oh, Gina, take her somewhere please.”

  Georgina ushered Charlotte out and back to their rooms. There were Peelers on duty, but they didn’t escort them.

  Once they were back in Georgina’s room, unlocked during the day, and Georgina had taken the umbrella off Charlotte to stop her playing with it, they sat down. Charlotte perched on the bed, fiddling with a yellow book, and Georgina chose the chair.

  Georgina checked Arthur’s watch. She really ought to help Earnestine, return her umbrella, but… oh, that fidgety girl was so distracting. She never did anything useful.

  “Charlotte, did you take that from the library?”

  “No.”

  “Well, either read that or put it down!”

  “I’ve read it. Ages ago.”

  “Well, read it again.”

  “It’s Uncle Jeremiah’s.”

  “Really… I beg your pardon?”

  Charlotte handed it over.

  “Where did you get this?” Georgina asked.

  “It was in Mrs Frasier’s bag when we arrived.”

  “You stole it!?”

  “She took it off Uncle Jeremiah.”

  “Charlotte Deering–Dolittle,” said Georgina, utterly beyond exasperation, “how could you steal such an item and then keep it a secret!”

  Charlotte made a face, but Georgina ignored her and examined the book. If this was Uncle Jeremiah’s book and if she could find his patent application, then…

  It was ‘The Time Machine’ by H. G. Wells – a novel of all things and disturbingly ironic considering what was going on. That was probably why he had chosen it for whatever it was he’d chosen it for. She flicked through it. She’d read this when it came out and remembered the yellow cover with the simple sphinx motif in the centre.

  Ah ha!

  She had it: this title was an aide memoire and inside he had hidden the answer.

  Holding it upside down and flicking through the pages did not produce the hoped for secret letter. She then riffled through the pages from the back, even pages first and then looking at the odd pages. There was no hand–written marginalia.

  “I’ve done all that,” said Charlotte.

  Georgina carefully opened the first few pages.

  “And that.”

  On the flyleaf was written ‘To J. J. D. Love C. M.’, but there were no other apparent annotations. The book didn’t fall open at any particular page when she dropped it slightly on its spine. The binding hadn’t been interfered with. It appeared to be an ordinary copy of… who was ‘C.M.’? And ‘Love’? ‘J. J. D.’ was Jeremiah James Deering, Uncle Jeremiah.

  “Gina, why is your bed lumpy?”

  “I hid my bag under the mattress.”

  “Who’s C. M.?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  “Oh, yes, can I get a deer stalker hat?”

  “If you solve this, I’ll buy you one.”

  “Oh yes, please.”

  They dropped the book on the simple bed between them, squaring it so they could consider it as an object.

  “Perhaps it’s a cipher key,” Charlotte said.

  “A what?”

  “A book used to encode secret messages. If so, it’ll have little marks on some pages where the decoder counted words.”

  Charlotte set about examining it.

  Maybe, thought Georgina, the clue wasn’t in the book, so maybe it was the book.

  Uncle Jeremiah read the novel, he was inspired by it and therefore he invented a time machine. That made a kind of sense. After that, logically, he’d have filled in a patent application and this in turn must have ended up at the Patent Pending Office, thus involving Mister Boothroyd, and then it had been side–tracked to the more nefarious divisions of the civil service and so on… until at some point in the future someone had actually built it and used it to come back in time.

  Although the Chronological Conveyor wasn’t so much a carriage as a… well, there wasn’t a word for it as there wasn’t anything like it. Any form of transport required one to be in, or on, something, which was usually connected to a horse or a steam engine, and one needed to physically journey through the intervening space.

  With this device, one simply stayed put – literally.

  It was hard to see what physical property could gather one up and convey one to another place, let alone another year. However, many marvels were fathomed, created and reported all the time. She herself often read a number of scientific journals during her visits to the library and was suitable amazed by various propositions.

  However, Uncle Jeremiah wasn’t an engineer or an inventor, he didn’t know one end of a steam engine from the other and he used to say ‘yes dear’ a lot when Georgina explained the daguerreotype process.

  So someone else, not Uncle Jeremiah, invented the temporal process and came back in time, etcetera, etcetera – perhaps pretending that Uncle Jeremiah had invented it – and if so, what was the point of this book!?

  Would being unable to invent a time machine prove Uncle Jeremiah’s innocence?

  Had some devious future engineer framed him?

  Charlotte was still going through it page by page. She could be quite studious when she wanted to be and–

  “Hopeless!”

  Charlotte pushed it away, the sphinx tilted at an angle.

  Sphinx – the riddle of the sphinx.

  Georgina felt an icy chill. She couldn’t remember the story.

  “What’s the riddle of the sphinx?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh think, Charlotte, think.”

  “It’s… oh, what has three legs for breakfast… no, it’s what has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?”

  “What?”

  “A man!”

  “How can it be a man?”

  “When he’s a baby, he crawls on four legs; when he’s grown up, he walks on two legs, and old men use a walking stick, which is three legs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That’s the answer: a man. A baby crawls on four legs, a man walks on–”

  “I know what a baby does!” Georgina snapped, rather more sharply than she intended. Why, why, why did Uncle Jeremiah want them to know about the Sphinx? Perhaps it… “Charlotte, what’s the story of the riddle, not the riddle itself, but the story?”

  “It’s Greek.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t do Greek. Only Latin and French – yuk – but I’ve read about their battles, Alexander the Great, the three hundred Spartans and–”

  “Yes, thank you Charlotte.”

  “There’s another riddle.”

  “Yes?”

  “Two sisters: one gives birth to the other, who then gives birth to the first.”

  “And?”

  “It’s the second riddle in some versions of…. Oedipus!”

  Oedipus, of course, Georgina remembered: a man who killed his father, married his mother and put his own eyes out. Uncle Jeremiah’s brother was their father and married their mother. There were three Derring–Do sisters… or four now, not two. The riddle had nothing to do with them that she could understand.

  “What’s the answer to the second riddle?”

  “You have to guess.”

  “Charlotte!”

  “Night and day, each gives birth to the other. The words are feminine in Greek – why do languages have genders for words, it’s stupid?”

  “It’s so that we can have lessons in school.”

  Charlotte made a face.

  Three sisters in the Derring–Do Club: a baby, an adult and… but Earnestine didn’t use a stick, but she did have an umbrella. The child, the virgin and the crone, but Georgina had been married. The crone, the mother and the child, like Mrs
Jago, Mrs Falcone and Miss Millicent, but Georgina herself couldn’t be a mother without storks and gooseberry bushes. They were all sisters and there were four sisters now: Earnestine, like the day, begetting the night that was Mrs Frasier.

  Georgina threw her arms wide: “This is impossible!”

  “I did say.”

  Miss Charlotte

  But, thought Charlotte, when you’ve eliminated the impossible, then only the possible is left. That didn’t sound right.

  “Allow me,” Charlotte said.

  “Be my guest.”

  “I get a deer stalker hat, a magnifying glass and a pipe.”

  “This isn’t the time to make demands.”

  Charlotte folded her arms.

  “Very well, but no pipe.”

  Charlotte drew herself up to her full five foot two: “Facts!”

  “You know the facts.”

  “Why don’t we ask him?”

  “Ask who? Sherlock Holmes? Conan Doyle?”

  “Uncle Jeremiah.” Charlotte raised a silencing finger to Georgina’s gathering objection. “There may be visiting hours.”

  “What if we’re stopped?”

  “We say we’re going to visit our Uncle in prison.”

  “What if they don’t allow visits?”

  “We say ‘oh, that’s a shame’.”

  “This is your trick, isn’t it? To have your excuses worked out beforehand.”

  “No.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to talk to us?”

  “Gina, we could always wrangle another story out of him. He can’t say ‘no’ to us.”

  “You have a point.”

  “He might have macaroons.”

  “In prison!?”

  “They have to eat something other than gruel.”

  Georgina opened the door and peeked out: “No–one about.”

  Charlotte picked up the umbrella and opened the door properly.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “Protection.”

  “Give it to me, Lottie,” Georgina chided. “You could take someone’s eye out with that.”

  They set off, down the corridor and into the canteen. They knew that this wasn’t the way to the prison; the walls had very clearly marked labels directing people to the Judiciary, the Prison and Temporal Engineering. However, the canteen made a useful psychological base camp. It had biscuits too, hard oatcakes that were dry and again fit the bill for an expedition. Once they’d sat at the rude tables long enough to see a few people enter and leave, they decided, without a word, that it was now or never.