The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  “Mary, it’s time. Wake up,” Cady whispered, shaking her again.

  The old woman came awake with a snort. She was less disoriented this time.

  “Is there chocolate?” she asked.

  “If we get my bag, yeah. But let’s get out of here first.”

  She dug the Altoids tin out of a crevice in the rear wall.

  “You won’t have seen this,” she said, removing the length of saw-chain and offering it for inspection. The fangs of the blades looked positively evil in the flickering candlelight.

  “This is not magic, okay. It’s a tool. I got it from Amazon.”

  “From whence?”

  “Er, a great store. On a mighty river. It’s a long way from here, but look. You thread your fingers through these metal loops…”

  Cady showed Mary what she meant.

  “Then the teeth sort of chew through the log or tree branch you need to cut. In our case, I’m hoping it will get through those wooden bars without too much trouble.”

  Mary took a moment to process that, or maybe just to translate it.

  “I wish you had told me this earlier, Mistress Cadence.”

  “Why?”

  Was there going to be a problem? Cady’s anxiety levels suddenly spiked.

  “Are we alone?” Mary asked, blinking into the gloom.

  “Yes, we are. I don’t know where the others have got to. I… I don’t know where they are,” she said.

  “Mary Eastey and Alice Parker were to be hanged on the morrow. Perhaps they have been hurried to their rest. Goody Faulkner will live for as long as she is with child. Another two months by my reckoning.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Cady muttered.

  Mary slapped her.

  “Do not take His name in vain!” she scolded. “There is blasphemy sufficient to the evils of this day without that we must add to it.”

  Cady’s cheek stung, and she was close to giving the old bag a smack upside the head in repayment, but a memory of Smith stayed her hand. He’d been just as uncomfortable with her swearing and blaspheming, and probably more so with the latter.

  Just chill the fuck out, McCall, she told herself. These people are super fuckin’ uptight about this shit.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in as level a voice as she could manage. Her heart raced and her cheek tingled painfully. “Too much time with ruffians and scoundrels.”

  “Indeed,” Mary agreed. “But you must snip the barb on your tongue if we effect escape this eve. You will draw attendance upon yourself with such free running vulgarity.”

  There seemed to be no heat in the old bag’s delivery and Cady realized she was just giving instruction.

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut. But why did you wish I had told you earlier?”

  It was Mary’s turn to look abashed.

  “My husband, Captain Thomas Bradbury,” she started, but faltered on the next few words. “He… he has arranged with one of his men to set me free this very evening.”

  Cady said nothing. She was stunned.

  “But… but how…” she finally managed.

  “Justice Corwin is not alone in having kin among the village watch. The captain’s cousin but once removed is a sworn officer and he will strike my shackles.”

  Cady noticed she didn’t say ‘our’.

  “The captain’s aide, Mister de Klerk, is ready with a wagon to see me away.”

  Silence fell between them like a shroud.

  Cady shook her head. “Well that’s nice for you, grandma. But I’m still getting out of here.”

  She stalked over to the locked gate of their cell. She was pissed, and not entirely sure why. If somebody was springing Bradbury from the can, the door would swing open just as wide for her. She examined the primitive arrangement keeping them locked up, settled on four places she would have to cut through the bars of their cage, and got to work.

  After slipping a few times, the saw-chain bit and started to slice through the old wood. She cut through the first length in less than a minute. It was a wine cellar after all. Not Alcatraz.

  “Cadence.”

  The voice was quiet beside her. But strong.

  She ignored it. Kept cutting through the second bar.

  “Cadence. I would have you come with us to Maine.”

  The hand-pulled saw-chain made short work of the second cut, and a foot-long piece of wood clattered to the floor. Cady lined up her third cut, but Mary’s hand closed around her arm.

  “You will be safe with us. Look.”

  Mary was pointing through the bars.

  Cady, still upset with her, looked up.

  A young man stood there. Vaguely familiar. Had she seen him in court that morning? She thought she almost certainly had. And then she recalled him delivering a pot of ink to the priest who was acting as the court reporter. He was also staring at Cady and the mess she’d made of the bars with frank disbelief and alarm. A large key ring dangled from his hand.

  “Come, Michael,” Mary said, waving at him to approach. She snapped her fingers and it seemed to break him out of his trance. He bustled down the length of the cellar and gestured for Cady to step away from the bars. A turn of the key and they were free.

  “You should have told me,” Cady said, looking directly at Mary.

  “Nor did you avow any intention to use me as your pack mule. You incensed a riot in the court and loaded my skirt pockets with your contraband.”

  The light of the single flickering candle that still burned was dancing in her eyes.

  “Well. That’s different,” Cady said.

  “Please! Let us be elsewhere, anon,” cousin Michael implored. He sounded the most unsettled of them all.

  “I don’t need telling twice,” Cady muttered.

  And finally they slipped away.

  15

  “Whoa there, hoss,” Smith said, holding up his hands.

  Koffler glanced furtively across to the booth full of SS men, but they were more interested in their beer and the fried sausages and potatoes piled high on a plate in the middle of their table.

  “Why would you be comin’ with me?” Smith said. “That could end up being a mighty complicated arrangement. I figure you just point me in the right direction and I’ll get there fast as I can.”

  Koffler seemed to take Smith’s rebuke without rancor or even surprise. The only thing he offered by way of retort was a tired smile.

  “Smith,” he said. “As I understand it, and believe me I do understand, you have been traveling the centuries for a little over a month now. Correct?”

  “Pretty much so,” Smith confirmed, if warily.

  Koffler leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I have been preparing for this for my whole life. I have been prepared for this, my whole life. By the Society.”

  “And what society might that be, sir?”

  Cady had made mention of it in her letter, but she had not elaborated.

  “The Colonial Historical Society,” Koffler said. He drew in a breath, as though he were about to take a deep dive into a cold lake. “When Miss Cadence came to understand that you would not be returning with all dispatch, she hoped and assumed it was because you were unable to, for whatever reason. She knew that you made good your escape from Salem with the second watch, the timepiece you had from Chumley.”

  Smith said nothing. Koffler went on.

  “Miss Cadence herself knew that might be a complicating factor because of the somewhat different control schemata of the second watch. She surmised it could send you anywhere, but determined it was most likely to deliver you to one of the destinations last visited by the Apprentice from whom you had it.”

  “And how did she figure that?” Smith asked.

  Koffler smiled again. The room was returning to normal. Fewer patrons stared at them and a small number of couples were dancing again. Not in any way Smith had ever seen anyone dance in a genuine saloon. But that was not the point here, he conceded.

  “If Chumley’s watch was different
, it was for a reason. And Chumley’s reason for using the watch was hunting you. It seemed a sensible conclusion that it might somehow track your path through the years. Syncing watches, Miss Cadence termed it.”

  “That’s a long stretch, Professor.”

  “Indeed,” Koffler agreed. “Which is why I consider myself so fortunate to be the Society member who found you. I have colleagues in different times and places who will live their whole lives in frustration and doubt because you did not arrive.”

  Smith wanted to stay silent, to let the quiet between them grow so big that Koffler would feel compelled to fill it up. But in the end, he sighed and shrugged. His need to know what happened to Cady, and what he might do in mitigation was too strong.

  “This Society of yours. You better tell me about it,” he said.

  “Of course,” Koffler answered. “But of course.”

  He took another deep breath, preparing himself.

  “When Miss Cadence understood she was most certainly trapped in the early colonies, she resolved to make use of her knowledge of the period and its future; to make her sojourn as comfortable as she might, but also to fashion the means of escape, if at all possible.”

  Smith nodded slowly. That sounded like something Cady might do.

  “And this Society, that’s her means?”

  “Yes,” Koffler confirmed. “Miss Cadence lost her belongings attempting to flee with you. They were recovered by your pursuers and, as best we can tell, destroyed as profane instruments of witchcraft.”

  “Or made to disappear by the Apprentices,” Smith offered. “They do that.”

  “They do,” Koffler agreed. “But Miss Cadence was never able to determine which was the case. As you might imagine, after escaping Salem and Massachusetts she did not soon return.”

  “How’d she escape?”

  “With the help of a witch.”

  “The hell you say!” Smith protested, his immediate indignation threatening to flare into something hotter and more dangerous.

  Koffler made a placating gesture.

  “I joke, Smith. I joke. We both know there were no witches in Salem. As did Miss Cadence. That alone enabled her to forge an alliance with one of the accused, an old woman, Mary Bradbury. The matriarch of a family of some means and good connections. They escaped together, but went their own ways at first. Following some difficulties, Miss Cadence sought out her old friend and proposed a business arrangement.”

  “What nature of business?”

  Koffler looked around the room again, checking for eavesdroppers. The evening was getting on and the club was busy. As newcomers arrived, the air of unpleasantness dissipated. Soon, Smith knew, it would be as if nothing had happened here. He wondered what the ‘Gestapo’ was doing with the brownshirts. Cady had made mention of them Gestapo fellers once or twice in Seattle. She didn’t much like them, and it seemed those fellers was everywhere.

  “Trade, of course,” Koffler said, interrupting his memories. “Miss Cadence presented herself as a merchant trader. She offered the house of Bradbury knowledge of simple foreign wares and tools that were of immense value in the early modern period. The Bradburys provided the capital to develop these goods—binoculars, paper clips, water rollers… chocolate.”

  “Water rollers?” Smith asked. He had no trouble imagining Cady insisting that somebody, somewhere find her some chocolate, even if it didn’t exist yet. But he had never heard of water rollers.

  “Hauling water from a well to a kitchen is heavy and time-consuming work, no?” Koffler said. “Often done by women and children no less. Miss Cadence proffered a solution; a barrel attached to the handles of a plow as though it were the wheel, so that it might be pushed or pulled rather than lifted.”

  The professor shook his head as though impressed by the genius, even hundreds of years later.

  “Miss Cadence was possessed of quite advanced engineering and scientific skills. Her knowledge of history was not as well tutored, but she effectively turned what she knew of the mechanical arts and the life of the early colonies to profit from these advantages. With this capital she very carefully and quietly grew more capital, and with that quite considerable fortune she established the Society. On the face of it, an association of learned fellows interested in the early colonial period of the New World. In reality, a covert cabal dedicated to one end: to finding you, sir, and returning you to that field in Massachusetts as close to the moment of your first arrival as possible.”

  The room was growing rowdier, and Smith was having trouble hearing Koffler over the noise. He leaned in toward him.

  “To what end, Professor? Explain her reasoning.”

  “Miss Cadence believed…” he paused as if searching for the right quote, “she believed it would reset the level. As it did when you returned to Seattle after Rome.”

  A shiver ran up Smith’s back. Every time he thought of that return, it was like recalling a meeting with his own ghost. He and Cady had seen themselves, or something like a reflection of themselves, arriving from old London town. And he had seen that reflection fade away, like a ghost before the dawn.

  In fact, Cady had called the apparitions ‘quantum ghosts’, but she had never been able to make him understand exactly what she meant by that.

  “So, she thinks if I get back at the right time it’ll sorta be like startin’ that chapter all over again?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But, Professor. That’s what I was a-gonna do anyway. I was all set to return to the street where I dropped into Berlin, at least an hour before the golden minute of that arrival. There weren’t no reason for no Society or for you to go to all this durn trouble.”

  Koffler regarded him with an almost mournful expression.

  “But there was. Remember, Smith, Miss Cadence has been dead for many hundreds of years. Whatever your intentions, you did not return to her. Perhaps because you were kicked to death on the floor of this club, no? That is why I brought reinforcements.” Koffler nodded at Dittrich and his men. “It is why I have pretended to be a loyal follower of their Führer’s cult from the beginning, an old campaigner. I knew I would need them.”

  Smith’s heart dropped and his balls climbed up into his body, as though they intended to meet somewhere in the middle. It must have shown on his face.

  “Tut-tut-tut,” Koffler said, wagging his finger. “I speak harshly, but I speak true, Smith. Just as I do now when I tell you the Society has survived because Miss Cadence entrusted it with the sole mission of survival. Hers. I have prepared for this my whole life, Smith. I have written books on the Salem witch trials. I am an expert on the period and the locale. I am not the only one. But I am the one who will be your guide. I will take you to her. It is a… let me see,” he smiled as if in fond remembrance, “what she might call a Groundhog Day deal, yes? You can start again. I will guide you, and we will have no adventures. We will pass a very quiet twenty-four hours in hiding near Salem, and then together we three will leave, returning to Seattle in her time, and starting again. Having stepped out of time’s flow with you, I will not be affected by any change. But I will have had the opportunity to examine my life’s work up close, and to see the future, if only briefly, before I return here. Do you know what that means to a man of history, Smith? For all of us in the Society, this was our promise, our grail, that we might be the one chosen to effect her grand design.”

  Smith regarded the man with caution. The more he talked, the crazier he sounded. But his story also rang true because the reality of the last month was crazy enough to eat the Devil with his horns on.

  “Where would you go then?” Smith asked. “When you were done with us?”

  Koffler’s eyes lit up at the question. “Why, with my family to America, of course. And thence to Salem. But I would do so in my here and now, to warn against the danger of the Nazis.”

  “Nazis?” Smith said.

  “Your new best friends, Marshal Smith, who look very pleased with themselves over there. And th
irsty. I am afraid we will have no choice but to rejoin them.”

  16

  “I cannot go to Maine with you,” Cady said.

  Cousin Michael held aloft a hooded lamp, the only source of light, as the wagon driver helped Mary up into the wagon, virtually lifting her on his shoulder as though heaving a heavy bag of potatoes aboard. Her husband, the resourceful Captain Thomas, had sent his man, de Klerk, as promised. Dude looked kind of Amish to Cady, which would be right. Those uptight nimrods would fit right in here. He didn’t move to help her into the wagon, though. Whether he thought Cady was a witch or just a bitch, he didn’t seem to want to look at her, or even to be around her. Like cousin Michael, however, she had seen him earlier today. It was the small, stoop-shouldered man who had helped Mary in court. The one Corwin had kicked away. He was wearing the same stupid hat.

  He must have passed Mary word of an escape plan at the same time Cady was loading her up with chocolate and wiresaws.

  Man, this old girl was an original gangsta. It was likely you didn’t get to her age in this rolling shit show without having some moves, Cady thought. She stood looking up at Mary, who arranged a folded blanket as a cushion for herself on the hard wooden seat of the horse-drawn wagon. It was parked at the rear of the inn where they’d been held. Not a soul moved in the near perfect dark of night. Apart from cousin Michael’s hooded lamp, a single candle burned in the window of the jail. Otherwise, the streets of Salem Village were dark and empty. That was one good thing about being held captive by Puritans, Cady thought. As soon as it got dark, they wrapped themselves up in tight cocoons of bed sheets as proof against anybody having a little fucking fun, and kept their eyes squeezed tight shut until morning.

  Mary frowned at her from high up on the… the buckboard? The rumble seat?

  Cady recalled Smith using the word ‘buckboard’ a couple of times. Her thoughts kept wandering back to him, and the chances of him getting back to her. They seemed to be growing smaller by the minute.

  “I do gravely fear that you will not long remain at large, Cadence,” Mary warned her. “You should come with us. Please. I beg of you.”