Tregarthur's Crystal: Book 4 (The Tregarthur's Series)

by Alex Mellanby

  We arrived at an impressive building in a broad street. It looked more like the sort of building that should have been a library. Probably would become one in our time, a library or town hall, big enough. We waited across the street. HG rang the bell and they let him in. No questions asked, no one bringing out guns or telling him to clear off. We waited and waited.

  ‘Must be going alright,’ Jenna shuffled her feet on the pavement. ‘He’s been in there for ages.’

  Not long after she said that the front door flew open and it didn’t seem to be going well at all.

  ‘Leave me alone. LEAVE ME ALONE.’

  HG left the house to the sound of shouts from inside. ‘Don’t do it, you stupid man,’ HG shouted back.

  Two other men appeared. They had to be servants because they were wearing uniforms similar to the ones that the guards had been wearing at his other two houses – how many houses did he need? The servants definitely didn’t look friendly.

  HG left at a quick walk, looking back over his shoulder as he joined us. ‘Quick, we need to get away from here, get away from that crazy, stupid, man. He’ll kill us all.’

  As we hurried off HG kept repeating: ‘He’s crazy, awful terrible notions he has, so dangerous.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’ Jen sounded frantic. ‘Did you find out anything?’

  ‘Terrible things,’ HG muttered and carried on walking quickly.

  I stopped him, ‘What about Miss Tregarthur?’

  HG tried to push past me, ‘We have to get away.’ Again he looked back at Masterson’s house. ‘But we have to get that thing away from him, must take the book, must stop him. Have to make a plan.’

  He tried to push against me. I didn’t budge. ‘Miss Tregarthur? We don’t move until you tell me.’

  ‘Who? What?’ HG seemed to have forgotten. ‘Oh her. He said she’d gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ I shouted.

  ‘Gone … well … gone,’ HG muttered.

  ‘Where?’ I grabbed his jacket and shook him.

  ‘Into her time machine, that’s what the crazy man said, into her time machine, you’re all barking mad, there’s no such thing.’ HG paused. ‘Is there?’

  I guess it felt like everything stopped, as though the three of us and HG were standing in a separate silent bubble, not hearing the horses, the shouting, any of the noise going on around us. No idea how long that lasted.

  HG broke in eventually, ‘Is there? No such thing.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Jenna said, staring at a pile of horse dung in the road. ‘We’re stuck here forever. No way home even if we had got the crystal to work again. She’s gone, must have gone into the tunnel, found a way to make it work for her again.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Demelza said into Jenna’s face. ‘Eh? What?’

  I could see Jenna was about to blow and I didn’t care. Instead Jenna found a use for the horse dung and with a shove Demelza sprawled into the steaming pile and started howling. We walked away.

  HG stayed and pulled her out, gave her a handkerchief and shouted after us, ‘She’s coming back, if you can believe it, coming back through time.’

  ‘What?’ I turned on him. ‘Why didn’t you say that before?’

  I didn’t get too close, you could smell Demelza from a distance and as she wiped off the horse dung with HG’s handkerchief, I could see she was thinking about throwing bits in our direction.

  ‘Crazy story, time travel indeed.’ HG had also taken a few steps away.

  ‘What did Masterson say about her coming back?’ I asked.

  ‘Your weird woman has Masterson in a dreadful state. She really frightened him.’ HG shook his head although I think he liked using the word “weird”. ‘He made no sense. He said she was coming to make sure he’d done what she told him.’

  HG wouldn’t say any more until we arrived back at the coffee house and he had bought a change of smock dress for Demelza. We had a different table on the first floor.

  Downstairs a rowdy mass of people were jostling and shouting. I heard more mention of Masterson’s name along with shouts to buy all sorts of things: tea, coffee, wool and some mention of iron works. And, of course, politics, which flew right over my head.

  Jenna is everything to me but she isn’t what you’d call a natural beauty like Demelza who was swishing herself through the throng of people and enjoying the looks and calls before we found our table. The new dress helped.

  ‘I could almost believe you, after speaking to him.’ HG had plonked himself down in a chair.

  ‘Not as easy as you thought, getting to talk to him?’ Jen was scowling at Demelza.

  ‘Oh that was easy enough, to get in there and ask him questions. Most of the conversation went well. When we turned to politics it became a little sticky, and when he started spouting on about war machines, I really couldn’t listen to him without telling him the truth.’

  ‘Which is?’ I asked.

  ‘War never works, we need peace,’ HG said, as though it was obvious. ‘Making new war machines will make it worse.’

  I wasn’t going to disagree with him, but I couldn’t see why we’d got on to war. ‘What did he say about Miss Tregarthur?’

  ‘We need to know or you won’t get that story,’ Demelza slurred, she had stopped flirting and was slumped in her chair and yawning. I suppose it was the hangover, from whatever they’d given her yesterday, that had caught up with her.

  HG gave her an odd look, not like the slobbering ones before. ‘Masterson said we’d all get the same treatment as Demelza.’

  ‘What?’ Was it me or Jenna who shouted?

  ‘He knew what happened to Demelza?’ I said, slowly. ‘Thought he might.’

  ‘Wasn’t my fault,’ HG said, as though we were accusing him of abduction as well as everything else. ‘I had no idea she was going to be unconscious.’

  I leant across the table and grabbed his arm. ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She?’ HG squirmed, my grip was stronger and more painful than I meant.

  I let go. ‘Miss Tregarthur. What did she do to him?’

  HG rubbed his arm. ‘She knows all about you, arranged for Demelza to get kidnapped, thought you’d all follow. She had planned to kill you all, so you’ve got me to thank for getting you out of that place.’

  I didn’t feel HG deserved any thanks for anything that had happened at the brothel. But maybe he was right, it wasn’t only the fire we had escaped. I did wonder why the men who kidnapped Demelza had gone back to the place. Surely they had done what they had been asked and delivered her to the brothel. Perhaps they had gone back to wait for us. They probably knew we were watching the Captain Kidd, knew we would follow them. We must have just escaped when Jenna was so quick to push us into that room.

  ‘Why did she want me dead?’ slurred Demelza. ‘Haven’t I done everything she asked?’ And she almost sobbed.

  If she hadn’t been in that semi-conscious state, Jenna would have found some more horse dung. But Demelza had a point. Why did Miss Tregarthur want to kill her? I knew she was determined to do away with me, but why Demelza?

  Jenna must have been thinking the same and whispered to me, ‘That must be because she knows something that we don’t.’

  ‘How would she know Demelza hasn’t told us already?’ I whispered.

  ‘I guess that if we knew what it was, then we could be doing something else that actually worked. There must be another way, something we don’t know yet that means Miss Tregarthur can use the time tunnel again.’ Jenna looked at the snoring Demelza. ‘We have to get it out of her, but later.’

  A group of men in the coffee house came and spoke to HG. One of them, a man with a huge beer belly, wanted to know if he could be included in his next book. HG said he’d try and they left.

  ‘What he doesn’t know is that he’s already been in one of my stories – he wouldn’t like the character I wrote about,’ HG laughed. ‘A bit too close to how he is in real life.’

  HG was dreaming
about writing and it was difficult to hold him to our questions.

  Jenna slapped her hand on the table, ‘Did Masterson know why she left?’

  ‘Masterson showed me her book,’ HG didn’t sound as though he wanted to talk about it. ‘He said it was the most important book in history, but the way he held it showed me he was terribly frightened.’

  ‘What book?’ I said.

  ‘Told you she had a book.’ Demelza knocked over a mug of coffee.

  ‘A book of terrible ideas,’ HG answered after we’d cleared up the mess. ‘Actually it was only a portion of the book, ripped out pages held together by the cover, your woman must have kept the rest.’

  I shot a puzzled look at Jenna.

  Demelza slipped from her seat on to the floor, bashed her head and grunted, ‘OW.’ Before sitting up, rubbing herself and saying, ‘Told you she had a book, told her what was going on, like an encyclopaedia.’

  ‘It had pictures of awful machines,’ HG said. ‘Things that never should be made, and it told him how to make them.’

  ‘Machines?’ I frowned.

  ‘Machines of war. Huge guns and rockets and something called tanks and … and … submarines,’ HG said.

  We had to stop again as another group of men came over to HG and started talking about writing and stories. We waited, wondering what Miss Tregarthur had been doing. It just couldn’t be good. Eventually the men left. I think they had been disappointed. HG had said so little. He was a man in shock. Whatever had been in this book had not just frightened Masterson. Part of me didn’t want to find out.

  ‘She said he had to build them,’ HG said after they had gone. ‘Had to.’ His face creased; were those tears in his eyes? ‘It’s the war. She told him that there was going to be a war of the whole world. Terrible.’ HG leant forward with his head in his hands. ‘Don’t ask me anymore, please.’

  It took us more hot chocolate and long pauses to get the whole story. And it was a crazy story, the sort we’d come to expect from Miss Tregarthur.

  ‘I get it now,’ Jenna said. ‘This book was written in our time, so having it in this time means it tells of the future. These war things haven’t been invented yet.’

  ‘And I won’t let them ever be invented.’ HG sat up again. We must get the book, we must.’

  ‘Is it just the money? Remember that crazy idea she had before, with her brother or whoever he was, making gas pipes or whatever?’ I said.

  ‘Surely there’s more than money, let’s go,’ Jenna stood up.

  We walked back to the inn. HG had left us and perhaps we should have asked him more questions, but the thought of being here forever was stuck in our minds.

  Demelza demanded another bath and after that was more awake and wanted to join in trying to make sense of what HG had told us. ‘Miss Tregarthur wants to make all these guns and rockets and things and sell them when the war starts.’

  ‘This can’t be just money,’ Jenna frowned. ‘Can it?’

  ‘It’ll be the First World War,’ Demelza said, as though that was obvious.

  ‘Do we care?’ It wasn’t obvious to me.

  ‘HG said there was something even worse in the book,’ Jenna’s voice cracked. ‘Much worse, a big cloud, a mushroom cloud, that book has details of how to make a nuclear bomb.’

  That took a few minutes to sink in. A nuclear bomb in the First World War? Even I knew about that war. A war with horses and mud and trenches and so many deaths, millions. What would happen if a nuclear bomb was used in that war?

  ‘Bad enough in the second world war,’ Jenna said.

  ‘But if they had a nuclear bomb, couldn’t they have stopped the war happening?’ Wasn’t that a good idea? The trouble was I didn’t believe there was anything ever good about Miss Tregarthur’s ideas.

  ‘What, nuke Germany?’ Jenna said, as though it was obviously a stupid idea. ‘She won’t stop there. Imagine Miss Tregarthur with a nuclear bomb. And there’s something worse.’

  Jenna was interrupted by a loud knock at our door, HG barged in. ‘We’ve got to stop him. We must stop him.’ HG dropped a heavy bag on to the bed. It fell open. Iron bars and other tools. The sort of things you might imagine could be used for breaking into houses. ‘We have to get that book.’ He picked up one of the bars and smacked it into the palm of his hand. ‘We must destroy it.’

  I wasn’t sure if getting the book was our problem. The tunnel was more important. If we made it back to our own time, then … but … wait … if Miss Tregarthur started using nuclear bombs in the First World War what would happen to our future? Would the future change if she changed the past?

  I was still surprised when Jenna said, ‘He’s right, we have to get the book. What has HG brought in his bag, Alvin?’ She looked at me, as the expert.

  I emptied the bag and picked over the contents. Reluctantly, well probably reluctantly, I shared the things I had overheard at home. Of course I’d never been involved in house breaking, too young for my dad and my brother to use me for that – even though they’d wondered if I could slip through windows – but Mum had stopped that while she was still around.

  HG was a bit deflated when I told him his bag of tools were probably useless. He had wanted to break the door open at night, creep in and take the book. It was probably the sort of thing that happened in his books.

  ‘He’ll always have people there. Those men in uniform. You’ll never get past them,’ Jenna said.

  ‘Suppose so but …’ HG was still trying to talk up his plan. ‘We can use these,’ and he produced a sock filled with sand. ‘Hit them over the head.’ HG smashed the sock down on the side of the bed. ‘Like this.’

  The sight was ridiculous, but at least it made us laugh.

  ‘Distraction,’ I explained. ‘What we need is a big distraction.’

  It took several days of planning. We were all taken up by planning our great house breaking adventure. I could see that HG was lost in a sort of fantasy world, as though he was writing about house breaking rather than actually planning to do it.

  ‘You could go out and keep track of Masterson,’ Jenna suggested, to give him something safer to do because he kept suggesting we got hold of a few guns, which would have been a seriously bad idea.

  HG must have realised why Jenna made the suggestion but he still did it and came back to us with news: ‘Masterson’s asking all sorts of merchants how to get hold of things they have never heard of. They say he’s gone crazy, needs help.’

  I guess asking around in East London for nuclear bomb making materials would be crazy.

  ‘Don’t believe they’ve even discovered radiation in this time,’ Jenna said.

  Radiation? That made me think. Made me think there was more going on. Did radiation have something to do with the crystal? I decided to keep that thought to myself for the time being, there were too many other details to work out – like house breaking and the distraction.

  The Riot

  -9-

  It was easier than I thought to organise a distraction in that time in history, providing you had enough money. HG was so driven to stop Masterson and get the book of horrors, as he called it, so driven that he would have spent everything he had. But, as it turned out, there were people prepared to have a fight and the money was just an added bonus to them.

  All I had to do was go out into the streets of East London and ask. I mean we, because Jenna came as well. We went down to the river, a place of dirt and smells and men standing around with no work, no food and no plans. They didn’t believe us at first.

  ‘We need broken glass, shouting, horses going berserk, a cart pushed over, set alight,’ Jenna said to a group of men who looked both dangerous and desperate.

  ‘And you’ll pay us for that?’ One man asked as though it was something they did all the time for free.

  We nodded, keeping an eye out for a quick escape in case they decided to practise on us.

  ‘Fine,’ they said. We fixed a price.

  ‘More if yo
u want us to kill someone,’ one said seriously.

  ‘No need,’ I said quickly.

  They wanted all the money up front. I gave them just enough to make it happen, promising the rest on results. I made sure they knew I didn’t have all the money with me at the time – they might like the idea of a street battle but taking the money from me without having to do anything would have been just as good an option.

  I offered to find more people, another group to make sure a fight actually happened but they laughed and said they knew lots of people who they wanted to have a go at.

  ‘Not a problem, at all,’ the one who suggested murder said with a smile. We had the makings of our distraction. They had a riot in mind.

  Demelza did nothing to help. Jenna tried to get her involved but she just huffed and walked away. She was doing a lot of walking away, out on the street. When we did meet up she was more interested in telling us what she had seen.

  ‘It’s a whole circus out there,’ she said, cutting into our planning meeting. ‘You should see it, men with animals doing tricks, women selling food – like eels. Can you imagine it?’

  ‘If you aren’t going to help, just shut it,’ Jenna turned on her.

  Not having her involved made planning easier, and I certainly thought she wouldn’t be any use in a street fight. So we let her spend the time wandering around and bringing back her tales. We had too much to worry about without worrying about Demelza. I should have realised that was a mistake.

  HG insisted that he came with me on the break-in because he knew the layout of the building. He said Masterson would keep the book in his library. I could see that having him with me would be a disaster. I had no idea how HG would behave, probably get into an argument about words rather than trying to escape.

  ‘Everybody knows you,’ Demelza said. ‘Whatever happens anyone can just come and find you afterwards, even if it works out.’

  ‘But …’ HG said, but I could see his mind working, Demelza was right, he’d give us all away. I wondered what had made Demelza suggest it.