by K. Velk
“Well,” Miles ventured, “uhm, Jack, could you tell me, what’s the date today?”
His new friend gave Miles a searching look. “Maybe we shouldn’t be talkin’. Maybe you should be savin’ your strength.” They were coming out of the woods and onto a wider, paved road with green fields on either side. “You could just rest here – it’s not so lonesome by the road. I’ll fetch the doctor and be back in half an hour.”
“No. No. I think I’m all right. So, what is the date? I just can’t seem to remember.”
“It’s Sunday, the twenty fourth of June. St. John’s Day as a matter of fact.”
No wonder it was so hot. It was summer. He had no idea what St. John’s day was, but that hardly mattered at the moment.
“And what year?”
“You’re jokin’.”
“No…” Miles knew that it was after 1918 since the First World War was obviously long over, and before 1939, because that’s when the Second World War had started in England, and Jack clearly had no idea about a second war with Germany. “I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.”
Jack stopped again. “I can see forgetting the day of the month, but the year? That’s another matter. How many fingers am I holdin’ up?”
Miles saw and reported three fingers.
“Hmm. All right. You ‘ent lost all your senses. Still, there’s a farmhouse up past this field. They got mean dogs there, and Mrs. Clark is almost as mean as her dogs, but I’m pretty sure even she would help you, under the circumstances…”
“No. No. It isn’t far now is it? I was just confused. Never mind. I can keep going fine.”
“So,” Jack said, “what is the year then, you tell me.”
Miles cursed himself. Stupid! They would be in the village soon. He could have stolen a look at a newspaper or a calendar at the doctor’s office. Already he was talking in a way that would make Jack wonder about him. The Professor and Mrs. Davies had warned him, he must be as inconspicuous as possible on this side of the Gate. “If you’re going where I came from, being an American boy will already make you as exotic as a jungle macaw,” the Professor had said. “For God’s sake Miles, try to fit in. Don’t go blundering about exciting curiosity about yourself.”
Now, barely into his mission, Miles had got himself into a spot where he had to guess what year it was. Jack might be alarmed, or worse, suspicious about him, if he got it wrong.
There were no cars on the lonely country lane. If there had been, Miles might have been able to make a highly educated guess.
He had built his model train layout, his village of Dibden, as it would have appeared in the summer of 1930. He had always thought that he had plucked that date out of thin air. He had never known why he had felt compelled to model an English village of that era. He had always said that it was really the past that interested him, rather than model railroading specifically. Of course, until a few days ago, he had never considered “the past” a place he was likely to visit.
Still, his research into Dibden, and his determination to get the historical details correct, meant that he was well prepared to try to guess the date, if only there were some cars or a train going by. Was he now in 1930? The Gypsy had said that Miles was to go to the place where Professor Davies had come from. And Professor Davies had left England in 1918. But the Oak Gate had obviously been quite changed from what the Professor had last seen.
“1928?” Miles ventured finally.
“Well you don’t sound that sure of it, but a’ course that’s right,” Jack said with a doubtful huff.
Miles breathed another sigh of relief. He must avoid such clumsy mistakes. He was to find the girl and the secret and get back home, all as quickly and quietly as possible.
“1928.” Miles said again, trying to sound more confident. “Of course. It’s coming back to me. But maybe I shouldn’t try to talk. I have a terrible headache.”
5. First Walk in Another World
“You can’t make an empty sack stand up, Miles.”
That was something Professor Davies had said one day last summer in response to Miles’ shouted announcement that he was quitting his job at the bicycle shop. Miles’ decision to quit had been forced by Sanjay, the shop mechanic, who had just insulted Miles again.
“But,” the Professor had added as Miles was heading for the door, “you are not an empty sack, are you?”
He had asked that question as though he were really trying to work out the answer. Miles hadn’t known the answer himself. The question had been enough, though. He had gone back to help Sanjay and to endure his scorn. Was he an “empty sack”? He still didn’t know, but as he trudged along behind Jack Peppermore, with his head bleeding and no real clue as to what he was to do next, Miles was feeling very empty indeed.
His thoughts turned to a picture his mother kept on her desk. It featured Miles, aged two, riding – well, pushing with his feet – a fancy Italian tricycle. A rod extended from the back of the trike so that an adult could do the actual steering. Chuck McTavish’s hand was just visible at the top of the frame, firmly holding the rod. Little Miles was smiling at the camera from the Dallas-flat sidewalk. A fat helmet encased his toddler’s head and was securely fastened under his chin. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry thinking of that picture now. If his parents could have wrapped him in bubble wrap they might have done it. Now look at him. Somehow, he managed a little smile at his own expense.
He supposed he and Jack had walked about a mile, not talking. They hadn’t seen anyone or heard anything except bird song and the slow rhythm of the bent bicycle wheel scraping the front fender. A sway-back white horse looked up at them once, rotating his lower jaw and regarding them for a moment, then lowering his head back to the grass. No other living creature paid them any notice.
“I hope the doctor’s in,” Jack said apprehensively. “I think you’ve stopped bleeding but you’re going to need a few stitches.”
Stitches? Of course! He should have thought of that. But Miles had never before had a medical emergency. At home he saw Dr. Patel for yearly check-ups and on the few occasions when he had a high fever or stubborn cough. No cutting or sewing of skin involved! He hadn’t even needed a shot for years. And what kind of doctoring did they have in England in 1928? Did they have anesthesia? What would it cost? Was his twelve pounds any good? Was it enough?
“Do you have any idea what this doctor might charge?” Miles asked.
“Hmm. I guess I don’t know… but it won’t be more than you can pay. Dr. Slade’s our hero round here. Moved heaven and earth to help my sister. Took it personal that neither he nor any of the others he sent her to could cure her.”
“What’s wrong with your sister?”
“She’s blind. Stone blind this last year. Came on gradual though. Dr. Slade and Lady Fisher sent her down to London and up to Edinburgh to see the top eye men, though no one could help.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Miles wondered if this could be the girl he had been sent to find. Maybe she could be cured in the 21st century? How was he supposed to figure that out? The Gypsy had offered no clue other than the girl had “a gift” and had been “born out of her time.”
“Susannah’s all right though,” Jack continued. “We get on fine now. With me working up at the kennels and she’s got a bit of work herself. The family’s all right.”
They crested a hill and Miles saw the little village of Westfield below them, tucked into a valley. There seemed no movement at all.
“Is it always so quiet?” he asked.
“Westfield’s just a hamlet and it’s Sunday dinner time, and hot today too.” Jack said, sounding slightly embarrassed to be associated with a place so inert. “There’s more doing over to Tipton, cinemas and such.” Miles could have drawn a street map for Jack showing the location of the various businesses in Tipton, but of course he said nothing.
At the center of Westfield they reached a low, rambling, vine-covered house with three curved windows and two entrances. Next
to one entrance was a small black sign with white letters that announced simply, “W.W. Slade, MBBS, M.D.” Miles thought the building looked like someplace where you might find the Seven Dwarves or some smurfs, but definitely not a doctor’s office. Jack banged the doorknocker.
“I can’t leave my bike out here,” Miles said when he realized that there was no way to bring it in and no place to store it safely.
“Why ever not?”
“Well, it could be stolen.”
Jack laughed. “No one in Westfield is going to nick your bike. And, a’ course it’s broken.”
There was nothing else to do so Miles unhooked the handlebar bag and tucked it safely into his haversack. A gray-haired woman in a dark dress opened the door with an irritated air. She took one look at Miles and waved them in.
“Wait here.”
The waiting room was small, about the size of the closet in Miles’ bedroom. It was crowded with wooden chairs and a few little tables where battered magazines were arranged in neat piles. Apparently, some things never changed. The ashtrays, however, were unexpected. The boys stood in the small space just long enough to wonder if they should sit down when Dr. Slade burst in upon them. He was buttoning his white coat with one hand and covering a yawn with the other. An angry red scar covered the back of his buttoning hand. His fingers, however, moved deftly.
“What have we here? If this is one of your friends, Jack, I’d hate to see your enemies. I’m Dr. Slade as I am sure our dubious friend Jack has told you. Come through, come through. And who might you be? Do you feel faint?”
He waved the boys into a white-tiled room lined with a lot of glass-fronted cupboards. The floor had a drain in the center, which gave Miles the creeps. Did they hose gore off of it, like in a slaughterhouse? A white curtain covered the room’s one window. It bellied inward on a summer breeze, revealing a sunlit meadow beyond where three brown cows stood placidly. That didn’t seem very hygienic, Miles thought, although at least there was a screen on the window. Miles introduced himself.
“Well, well a Yank. That’s unexpected isn’t it? What’s happened then, Miles?” The Doctor was washing his hands with wild energy at a sink in the corner. The scarred hand was joined to a forearm, equally red and scarred.
“I was riding my bike, and I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going. I hit my head on a tree branch.” Miles said.
“There’s a cautionary tale for you. Must look before we leap, or pedal as the case may be.”
Dr. Slade steered Miles to the examination table at the center of the room and directed him to lie down. He covered a piece of gauze with a solution of something red and began examining the wound.
He ran Miles through a set of questions, how many fingers, again, the date, the Doctor’s name. Fortunately Miles had the right answers, until he asked, “and who is the King?”
This wasn’t a piece of information Miles had needed to build Dibden.
“I, I, I, can’t remember.”
“All right. Who is the President of the United States?”
“Uh.”
“Hmm. Does ‘Calvin Coolidge’ ring any bells?”
“Oh. Right. Of course. Calvin Coolidge. It was on the tip of my tongue.”
Dr. Slade went to a drawer and pulled out a curved needle and some thin black thread.
“How long have you been in England, Miles?”
“I, I’m not sure just now. Let’s see … about a week. It’s all confusing.”
“Where did you say you were from?
“I didn’t, did I?”
“No, actually you didn’t.”
“He’s from Texas,” Jack said. “Have they got cowboys and Indians there still?”
“Thank you, Jack, but I’d like to ask the questions. Have they got cowboys and Indians still in Texas, Miles?” Even Miles laughed.
“Yes, but they aren’t fighting so much these days.”
“And, Miles, where are your parents? I ought to get some word to them before I start stitching on their boy.”
“I’m an, I’m an, orphan,” he stammered. “I came here to find my father’s sister. But, I couldn’t, haven’t yet, anyway.”
“McTavish? Hmmm. You probably want to be looking in Scotland, don’t you?”
“McTavish” was, actually, a bit misleading. An official at Ellis Island had applied it to Miles’ great-great grandfather who had arrived in America in 1878 as “Jan Mekcheck.” “Mekchek? That’s not American,” said the official, who, according to family legend, was of Scots origin himself. “McTavish will do for America.”
Miles’ father had long ago stopped correcting people who thought the family was Scottish. He was a banker, and he said many people still liked the idea of Scottish bankers. “Lots of people, especially older ones, still think of the Scots in America as wealthy and careful with money,” he had once told Miles. “Like Scrooge McDuck.”
“No, no, the family all left Scotland long ago,” Miles said. “My father had only a sister. She lived in London, last we knew… I went to the address we had for her, but they, the neighbors, said she and her husband had gone away, to New Zealand.”
This was the story he had worked out with Mrs. Davies back in Texas. His father did have a sister – alive and well and working in Seattle. (Mrs. Davies had advised that it helped when lying to keep some truth in there). The bit of rehearsal had helped too. Miles was surprised to find how easily this story now rolled off his tongue.
“Well, that’s dashed inconvenient,” the Doctor said. “How old are you, Miles?”
“Fifteen.”
“Hmm. And how did you get here?”
“On a steamer… from New York.” This seemed a safe answer. How else would anyone get to England from America in 1928?
“So you didn’t catch a ride with Miss Earhart? Ripping about her, isn’t it?”
“Amelia Earhart?”
“Naturally.”
Miles wasn’t sure what the Doctor meant about her being “ripping.” It didn’t fit with the only thing he knew about Amelia Earhart, which was that she had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and had never been seen again.
“Yes, uh, ripping,” he agreed.
“First woman across the Atlantic in an aeroplane. And just a year after Lindbergh. You Americans are world-beaters, aren’t you? Of course, as she said herself, she was only a passenger – called herself a ‘sack of potatoes.’ Still, I think she’s marvelous. But that’s hardly our business right now is it? Have you no one else to help you? What about your mother’s people?”
“My mother was an orphan too,” Miles said, though in fact his mother’s parents were alive and well. It seemed to him evil to make up a lie about such a thing but he had no choice. “There’s no one on her side of the family at all.”
“Well that’s a shame. You’re at a bit of a loose end now, aren’t you?”
“Yes, well, yes, but we had a family friend in Texas,” Miles said, brightening. He was pleased that this treacherous line of questioning had led him out of a thicket and right back into his cover story.
“This friend of ours, he’s also from England, and when I told him my plans, he told me that if I got over here and didn’t find my relations, I should get to Quarter Sessions Park in Tipton and look for a job. He’s given me a reference. That’s why I came here, I was riding to Quarter Sessions this morning.”
“Well why ever didn’t you say so? I work at Sessions!” Jack exclaimed.
“Did you tell me that?” Miles asked. “I can’t remember. Anyway, my friend said that his parents worked there when he was a boy, before he went to the States.” This, again, was actually true.
“So who’s this friend of yours?” Jack asked. “Maybe we know him.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Miles could see Dr. Slade trying to poke some of the dark thread into the eye of the needle.
“Morgan Davies?”
The Doctor almost dropped the needle.
“I say, you’re not joking are you? Morg
an Davies? Taffy and Maryanne Davies’ boy? Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
6. Professor Davies, Once Upon a Time
“No,” Miles said. “I’m not joking. Professor Davies is a close friend of ours. My father and mother are, were, cyclists and I worked with the Professor, in a bike shop, where he works, on the side, when he’s not busy being a professor.”
Maybe he wasn’t so good at lying after all! What kind of professor works at a bike shop “on the side?” Back in Miles’ own time, Professor Davies was a retired professor of English, and his bicycle shop, the Britannic Wheelman, was his retirement project. In 1928, Professor Davies would have been just twenty eight years old – had he not been sent through the Gate. Luckily, however, Dr. Slade didn’t seem to regard a twenty-eight-year-old professor with part-time work in a bicycle shop as at all strange.
“Professor Davies is it?” The Doctor looked as pleased as if he had won a prize. “My God, what has that boy been up to? I am not surprised he’s still a wheelman. His father was mad for cycling. When Morgan disappeared, common opinion was that he’d hopped on his father’s cycle and pedaled right off to London. Won’t they be surprised to learn he pedaled his way to America!” The joke was uncomfortably close to reality.
“I ain’t never heard of any Morgan Davies,” said Jack, sounding vaguely resentful. “Who’s he?”
“Well, he’s been gone for ten years or more now,” said the Doctor. “And the Davies were a just a small, working family. It’s not surprising someone your age never heard about them. Still, at the time, Morgan’s disappearance was a bit of a nine-days wonder. Of course, he had no other family but his parents, and they were both dead when he went missing so there was no one left to care very much about it – except Lady Fisher. And me, oddly enough, since I’d never met him.”
“Why should she care?” asked Jack.
“Morgan had lived his whole life at Sessions.” The Doctor replied. “And as you have cause to know, she takes an interest in all the local people, particularly those in service at Sessions. I understand Morgan had always been a particular favorite of hers. He was very bright, you see, and she had given him the run of the estate library. It was an unusual step in those days, given that he was the son of a gardener and a cook.”
