Persistence of Memory

by Winona Kent

  He’d promised himself he wouldn’t…unless it was vitally necessary.

  But what was more vitally necessary than Charlie’s life?

  “It’s Charlie,” he said. “She’s here. In Stoneford. But not now. She’s here…in the past.”

  “In the past?” Sam said, as a man dressed as a fool, on a unicycle, rode past, juggling shiny blue and red balls.

  “1825,” Nick replied, also watching the juggler. “Something happened with her computer. Some kind of malware. Lightning struck the old oak tree. Sprites and tachyons ran amok. Nanobits exploded. And she was…relocated.”

  The juggler dropped one of the balls, and it bounced across the grass, rolling into the stone wall.

  “Simple. Really.”

  Nick reached down and tossed the ball back to the juggler, who carried on wheeling, barely missing a beat.

  Sam looked at Nick.

  “This is a joke, right? And if Charlie’s in 1825…who is Mrs. Collins?”

  “I wish it was a joke. I’ve spent the better part of today trying to work out how to bring Charlie back. And that is actually Mrs. Catherine Collins. Our distant cousin from the past. She and Charlie seem to have switched places.”

  Sam shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Believe it,” Nick suggested.

  “Charlie’s in 1825 and Mrs. Collins is here and they’re two completely different people.”

  “Yes and Charlie’s stuck in 1825 with a kidney stone. Or an ovarian cyst.”

  Sam took a few moments to digest it all.

  “And you’re in touch with her. On your phone.”

  “I am,” Nick confirmed.

  “What the hell,” Sam decided. “I’m married to someone who spends his weekends re-enacting 19th century battles with otherwise sane men in full Napoleonic gear. Anything’s possible. Ask Charlie if she has rebound tenderness, or if the pain lessens if she lies on her side with her knees up.”

  Quickly, Nick keyed Sam’s questions into his mobile, and touched Send.

  Across the centuries, as darkness fell, Charlie lay on her left side on the grass beneath the oak, reading Nick’s message.

  She pressed in on her right side, then let go.

  “Ow!”

  Typing quickly on the little keyboard, she transmitted her answer:

  Yes to rebound. Yes to lying on my side—what is it?

  Only a few yards away, but separated by the tyranny of time and distance, Nick held his mobile up so that Sam could read Charlie’s answer.

  Sam frowned.

  In 1825, hugging her side, Charlie read Sam’s diagnosis.

  Appendicitis.

  The worst possible news.

  She’d once had a conversation with Sam about burst appendixes. There was no cure. They had to operate. And in 1825, there was no such thing as a routine operation. Internal surgery had yet to be successfully attempted.

  And even if she could convince the village surgeon to try, he had neither the knowledge nor the skills, nor the implements and access to sterilizing techniques. And there was no anesthetic. Ether and chloroform wouldn’t be usefully recognized for another twenty years.

  Much as she wanted, needed, to stay…she would have to return to the 21st century. Her life depended on it.

  I don’t want to die, Nick, she typed. Do your best to bring me back. Thunderbirds are Go.

  Two hundred years into the future, Nick read Charlie’s reply aloud to Sam.

  “And she’ll be coming here,” Sam checked, nodding at the festivities on the green. “In the middle of all of this.”

  “Hopefully,” Nick said.

  “She’s just going to…materialize. Without splashing everyone with cosmic ectoplasm, and completely unnoticed.”

  “That’s the general idea.” Nick said. “As soon as I can sort out exactly how to do it.”

  Sam considered the oak tree. And then their chronologically deposed cousin, who had returned at last with three bags of Smoked Monterrey Chili with Goats Cheese crisps, and was hungrily dipping into the first.

  “And Mrs. Collins…?”

  “With any luck they’ll switch places again—and she’ll go back. In Charlie’s place.”

  “Jolly good,” Sam said, just as some sort of commotion erupted behind them, from the general direction of Poorhouse Lane, where a car could be heard racing away at great speed, and a lot of people were beginning to shout.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Palmer!”

  It was Gina, the barmaid from The Dog’s Watch, out of breath from running.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Palmer, but there’s a bit of an emergency over the way. Emmy Cooper’s been knocked down. PC Smith has rung for an ambulance. Can you come?”

  Nobody in the village, including Nick, could remember Emmy Cooper joining in on anything. She kept her own company. When she ventured out, it was to Paddy McDonald’s down the road, to buy three apples, two potatoes and a cucumber. And then she’d wander off, and could most often be found sitting on the old wooden bench at the top end of the green, holding animated conversations with the pigeons as she tossed them yesterday’s crumbs.

  Which was why it was such a profound shock for Nick to discover that 89-year-old Emmy Cooper had put on her best lavender petal hat and emerged from her flat to join the barricade at the top end of Poorhouse Lane.

  And even more of a shock to see poor old Emmy Cooper now, crumpled and unconscious on the cobblestones, her lavender petal hat spattered with blood, being attended to by Sam while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.

  Nearby, PC Kevin Smith was taking statements.

  “We all saw him!” Kirsty Parker said. “It was Ron Ferryman.”

  “Black BMW,” her brother, Jack, volunteered. “Convertible”

  “He’d sent one of his trucks round to try and drive through to the vacant lot at the back and we weren’t having any of it,” said Susan McDonald. “So he came round himself in his car and was trying to intimidate us.”

  “He was revving his engine,” Jack added. “We thought he was going to drive over us.”

  “That’s when we dared him,” Susan said. “We all sat down.”

  “Thinks he owns the road,” said Jack.

  “I mean, we know he owns everything on either side of the road. But not the right of passage.”

  “He put his engine into reverse,” said Kirsty Parker, “and it was like he was going to drive off…but then he came at us, full out.”

  “And we all managed to scramble out of the way except for poor old Mrs. Cooper,” Susan said, her voice beginning to shake. “And the corner of his front fender caught her as she was trying to get up…and her head hit the pavement.”

  “And then he reversed out and sped off,” said Mrs. Oldbutter, who had hated Ron Ferryman ever since he’d bought the house next door to hers and planted giant leylandii along their shared property line in the back. “Didn’t even stop to see if she was all right.”

  PC Smith paused in his note-taking, and glanced down at Sam, who was kneeling over Emmy, looking very concerned. “Still unconscious?”

  “I think she’s got a broken hip,” Sam replied, “but I can’t tell what else. Her breathing’s very shallow and her pulse is a bit dodgy. Can someone fetch me a blanket? I don’t want to move her in case anything else is broken.”

  Chapter 28

  Charlie was sleeping. And dreaming.

  It was a very peculiar sort of dream, because in it, Jeff had come to visit her. And while she was quite used to Jeff invading her dreams in her future—two centuries hence—it seemed most odd that he should have followed her all the way back to now, and the past.

  But then, dreams and memories were not really confined to space and time, were they? Dreams and memories travelled with you, contained in their own transparent spheres, attached, but detached, orbiting like moons and planets.

  In her sleep, Charlie tried to make sense of Jeff, dressed in the simple trousers and shirt of a farm la
bourer, swathing hay in a field on the other side of the rise, not far from where a flock of sheep were grazing.

  As she watched him wield the sickle, he paused, and looked up. And then he raised his hand, as if to wave. And he said her name, very clearly:

  “Catherine.”

  This confused Charlie. Because she was not Catherine, she was herself, and it was odd, and then downright completely annoying, that he should not recognize her as such.

  But then he said it again, this time with a sense of urgency, and the “Catherine” was accompanied by someone standing behind her, lightly touching her shoulder.

  The third time did it, and Charlie woke up.

  It was not Jeff calling her name, but Sarah, just as it was Sarah’s hand that had been touching her shoulder, gently at first, but now with persistence.

  “Catherine,” she said, bending down so that her voice did not wake the children in the next room. “The Dog’s Watch is on fire.”

  Smoke from the flames had cloaked the entire village by the time Charlie and Sarah had dressed, and run from the cottage to the top end of the green where the inn stood. The smoke billowed up into the night sky, blotting out the moon and the stars. It drifted between the houses and along the roads and lanes, pungent and insidious.

  It was the single-storied drinking establishment which was burning, not the two-storey hostel adjacent. Smoke poured from its broken windows and open door. Sparks danced into the night sky.

  It seemed the first to respond to the fire were Lemuel and Clara, who, roused from their sleep, had run into the burning building in order to try and save what they could. But the smoke had proven to be too thick, and Lemuel had staggered out, followed closely by Clara, who had collapsed on the ground and could not now be revived.

  “Let me help,” Charlie said. “I know what to do.”

  It was true. She had taken an advanced lifesaving course in Southampton. She knew about rescue breathing and CPR.

  She quickly removed Clara, limp and unresponsive, from Lemuel’s cradling arms, and arranged her on her back. She felt for a pulse, and determined that her heart was still beating, though faintly. She made sure Clara’s airway was clear. She pinched Clara’s nose and began to blow into her mouth to re-inflate her lungs.

  And then, she paused.

  They didn’t know much about artificial resuscitation in 1825. If you stopped breathing, you generally died—as Clara most likely would, if she did not start supplying oxygen to her brain again soon.

  And if Clara died, she would not give birth to Marcus Ferryman, and there would be no descendants.

  There would be no Reg Ferryman to inherit The Dog’s Watch, and no Ron Ferryman to go digging through archived records to claim ownership of the disputed ground.

  There would be no Ferryman Bros (Property) Ltd.

  No poisoning of the Village Oak, no threat to the Village Green or Poorhouse Lane. No office to break into, no laptop to smash.

  Charlie looked at Lemuel Ferryman. He was weeping.

  And then she looked down at Clara.

  If she did nothing, history would unwind differently. Unimpeded. Uninterfered-with. Un-nudged.

  Stoneford, two centuries on, without the Ferryman brothers, would be a very different village.

  But if she interfered…and took action…all would unfold as she knew it.

  Charlie thought for a few precious moments more.

  She could not let someone die when she had, within her, the means by which to save their life. It went against everything she stood for, everything she valued, everything she knew.

  She could not. And would not.

  And so, she began to breathe for Clara again. She forced the air into her lungs, watching her chest rise and fall, until she coughed, and was sick, and was breathing on her own again.

  “There you are,” Charlie said, to Lemuel Ferryman.

  She got to her feet. Hard work. But worth it.

  “What sorcery is this?” Lemuel replied, confused.

  “There has been no sorcery, sir. Make sure she has plenty of fresh air. She will recover.”

  Charlie left Clara to Mr. Ferryman, and walked back to Sarah.

  Nearby, the villagers had organized themselves into two snaking lines and were passing buckets of water hand-to-hand from the communal pump at the confluence of roads near the green. They appeared to be gaining ground on the flames. But smoke and steam still rolled from every opening, and Charlie could see the inside of the inn was charred black.

  “You appear to have learned things in London which in Stoneford are uncommon knowledge,” Sarah remarked. “I was once told of experiments upon dogs who had ceased to breathe. I was not of a mind to believe what I had heard, yet you have proven it true. You have my admiration, dear Catherine, for your bravery as well as your skills. I fear I should not be nearly so courageous as you.”

  “I may yet live to regret it,” Charlie answered.

  She spotted Mr. Deeley’s friends, Mr. Wallis and Mr. Cole, in one of the bucket lines, and then Mr. Rankin, from the manor. And then Mr. Deeley himself, grimy with sweat and soot as he helped to swing the water forward.

  “Hello,” Charlie said, thinking she might take the place of a young boy behind him whose energy was flagging.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Deeley replied, with a smile.

  Charlie grasped a full wooden bucket with both hands, meaning to pass it along to Mr. Deeley. But the bucket’s progress was interrupted by Lemuel Ferryman and a stout gentleman that Charlie wouldn’t have wanted to run into on a dark night on her own.

  “There is your man,” Mr. Ferryman said. “You may seize him, Mr. Reader.”

  To Charlie’s horror, the stout gentleman fixed his thick fingers around Mr. Deeley’s arms, and dragged him from the bucket line.

  “What have I done?” Mr. Deeley protested.

  “As you may know, sir,” Mr. Ferryman replied, “arson is a heinous crime. In fact, I believe it is a hanging offence.”

  “Arson! I know nothing about arson!”

  Mr. Ferryman waved a partially burned red handkerchief at him.

  “I discovered this upon the floor, inside the door. It belongs to you, sir. You cannot deny it—I have seen it knotted around your neck many a day.”

  Mr. Deeley struggled—unsuccessfully—to free himself from Mr. Reader’s strong hands.

  “But as you may recall, sir,” he said, with patience, “that particular article was not knotted around my neck yesterday. And this night, you will have discovered me asleep on John Wallis’s floor.”

  It suddenly dawned on Charlie what the lesser Monsieur Duran had been doing in Mr. Deeley’s bedroom.

  “I think you should ask Monsieur Duran where that handkerchief came from,” she said, boldly. “I believe he removed it from Mr. Deeley’s wardrobe and placed it there so that Mr. Deeley would be blamed for the fire.”

  The two bucket lines fell silent.

  Mr. Ferryman considered Charlie with a less-than-generous look.

  “You are accusing Monsieur Louis Duran of theft? As well as a conspiracy? And arson?”

  “I am,” Charlie replied.

  Mr. Ferryman laughed. “Your imagination does you credit, Mrs. Collins. But I fear your earlier exertions must have addled your delicate constitution. It would be better for you to confine your opinions to those more befitting your sensibilities, such as embroidery and household accounts. And leave the more consequential subjects to the gentlemen, who are better equipped to debate them.”

  “Excuse me?” Charlie replied. “Embroidery and household accounts? I saw Monsieur Duran go into Mr. Deeley’s bedroom.”

  “And there, you beheld him removing this handkerchief?”

  “No,” Charlie had to admit. “I didn’t see that.”

  “Well then,” said Mr. Ferryman. “I rest my case.”

  He addressed his constable.

  “It is clear that Mr. Deeley broke a window glass to gain entry, and then deliberately set the inn a
light. He dropped his handkerchief in haste. You may remove him to the lockup, sir.”

  Mr. Wallis had, by this time, shouldered his way through the gathered crowd. He presented himself before Mr. Ferryman and Mr. Reader.

  “I shall swear on the Bible, sir,” he said. “Mr. Deeley was in my house all night.”

  But again, Mr. Ferryman interrupted.

  “There were plenty of witnesses to Mr. Deeley’s unpleasantness at the inn yesterday, sir. And you are Mr. Deeley’s ally, not his alibi. If you were asleep in your bed, then you could hardly know when Mr. Deeley was in your house, and when he was not in your house. In the end, sir, Mr. Deeley’s distemper appears to have got the better of him.”

  “Why won’t you listen to Mrs. Collins?” Mr. Deeley said. “There is some weight to her argument. Monsieur Duran is unhappy with me, and would stop at nothing to see me removed from the village.”

  “Is my testimony required?” the lesser Monsieur Duran himself replied, as the crowd of villagers parted once more, allowing him to come forward. “This night I have watched Monsieur Deeley with my own eyes, running from the inn. And then from the inn, I have watched the smoke. And then, the fire.”

  “Then you are surely mistaken, sir!” Mr. Deeley shouted, his good-natured patience exhausted at last. “I was nowhere near the inn this night!”

  “I know what an unpleasant person you are,” Charlie said, to the lesser Monsieur Duran. “And I wouldn’t have credited you with this before, but I saw how nasty you could be with your own father. And I heard you talking to yourself as you wandered in between the cabbage rows, plotting how you would send Jack and Tom to a boarding school and Mary to France to look after your invalid cousin.”

  The lesser Monsieur Duran stared at Charlie, his expression unmoved.

  “You mock me,” he said, at last. “And where were you concealed that you witnessed my speakings? Underneath the lettuce? Curled up like a hedgehog?”

  He laughed at his own joke, and was joined by Lemuel Ferryman, who had also evidently decided to find his friend’s comment humorous.

  “And what is my reason for burning the inn? I have no quarrel with Monsieur Ferryman.”