The guard lowered his walkie-talkie.
‘What do you know about Denise?’
I was dreaming fitfully. It was the Crimea again; the crump-crump-crump of the guns and the metallic scream that an armoured personnel carrier makes when hit. I could even taste the dust, the cordite and the amatol in the air, the muffled cries of my comrades, the directionless sound of the gunfire. The eighty-eight-calibre guns were so close they didn’t need a trajectory. You never heard the one that hit you. I was back in the APC, returning to the fray despite orders to the contrary. I was driving across the grassland, past wreckage from previous battles. I felt something large pluck at my vehicle and the roof opened up, revealing a shaft of sunlight in the dust that was curiously beautiful. The same unseen hand picked up the carrier and threw it in the air. It ran along on one track for a few yards and then fell back upright. The engine was still functioning, the controls still felt right; I carried on, oblivious to the damage. It was only when I reached up for the wireless switch that I realised the roof had been blown off. It was a sobering discovery, but I had little time to muse. Ahead of me was the smoking wreckage of the pride of the Wessex Tank: the Light Armoured Brigade. The Russian eighty-eights had fallen silent; the sound was now of small arms as the Russians and my comrades exchanged fire. I drove to the closest group of walking wounded and released the rear door. It was jammed but it didn’t matter; the side door had vanished with the roof and I rapidly packed twenty-two wounded and dying soldiers into an APC designed to carry eight. Punctuating all this was the incessant ringing of a telephone. My brother, minus his helmet and with his face bloodied, was dealing with the wounded. He told me to come back for him. As I drove off the spang of rifle fire ricocheted off the armour; the Russian infantry were approaching. The phone was still ringing. I fumbled in the darkness for the handset, dropped it and scrabbled on the floor, swearing as I did so. It was Bowden.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, sensing something was not quite right.
‘I’m fine,’ I replied, by now well used to making everything appear normal. ‘What’s the problem?’ I looked across at my clock. It was 3 a.m. I groaned.
‘Another manuscript has been stolen. I just got it over the wire. Same MO as Chuzzlewit. They just walked in and took it. Two guards dead. One by his own gun.’
‘Jane Eyre?’
‘How the dickens did you know that?’
‘Rochester told me.’
‘What—?’
‘Never mind. Haworth House?’
‘An hour ago.’
‘I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.’
Within the hour we were driving north to join the Mi at Rugby. The night was clear and cool, the roads almost deserted. The roof was up and the heating full on, but even so it was draughty as the gale outside tried to find a toehold in the hood. I shuddered to think what it might be like driving the car in winter. By 5 a.m. we would make Rugby and it would be easier from there.
‘I hope I shan’t regret this,’ murmured Bowden. ‘Braxton won’t be terribly happy when he finds out.’
‘Whenever people say: “I hope I won’t regret this”, they do. So if you want me to let you out, I will. Stuff Braxton. Stuff Goliath and stuff Jack Schitt. Some things are more important than rules and regulations. Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time. I would give everything to ensure the novel’s survival.’
Bowden said nothing. Working with me, I suspected, was the first time he had really started to enjoy being in SpecOps. I shifted down a gear to overtake a slow-moving lorry and then accelerated away.
‘How did you know it was Jane Eyre when I rang?’
I thought for a minute. If I couldn’t tell Bowden, I couldn’t tell anyone. I pulled Rochester’s handkerchief out of my pocket.
‘Look at the monogram.’
‘EFR?’
‘It belongs to Edward Fairfax Rochester.’
Bowden looked at me doubtfully.
‘Careful, Thursday. While I fully admit that I might not be the best Bronte scholar, even I know that these people aren’t actually real.’
‘Real or not, I’ve met him several times. I have his coat too.’
‘Wait—I understand about Quaverley’s extraction but what are you saying? That characters can jump spontaneously from the pages of novels?’
‘I heartily agree that something odd is going on; something I can’t possibly explain. The barrier between myself and Rochester has softened. It’s not just him making the jump either; I once entered the book myself when I was a little girl. I arrived at the moment they met. Do you remember it?’
Bowden looked sheepish and stared out of the sidescreen at a passing petrol station.
‘That’s very cheap for unleaded.’
I guessed the reason. ‘You’ve never read it, have you?’
‘Well—‘ he stammered. ‘It’s just that, er—‘
I laughed.
‘Well, well, a LiteraTec who hasn’t read Jane Eyre?
‘Okay, okay, don’t rub it in. I studied Wuthering Heights and Villette instead. I meant to give it my fullest attention but like many things it must have slipped my mind.’
‘I had better run it by you.’
‘Perhaps you should,’ agreed Bowden grumpily.
I told him the story of Jane Eyre over the next hour, starting with the young orphan Jane, her childhood with Mrs Reed and her cousins, her time at Lowood, a frightful charity school run by a cruel and hypocritical evangelist; then the outbreak of typhus and the death of her good friend Helen Burns; after that of how Jane rises to become a model pupil and eventually student teacher under the principal, Miss Temple.
‘Jane leaves Lowood and moves to Thornfield, where she has one charge, Rochester’s ward, Adele.’
‘Ward?’ asked Bowden. ‘What’s that?’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I guess it’s a polite way of saying that she is the product of a previous liaison. If Rochester lived today Adele would be splashed all over the front page of The Toad as a “love child”.’
‘But he did the decent thing?’
‘Oh, yes. Anyhow, Thornfield is a pleasant place to live, if not slightly strange—Jane has the idea that there is something going on that no one is talking about. Rochester returns home after an absence of three months and turns out to be a sullen, dominating personality, but he is impressed by Jane’s fortitude when she saves him from being burned by a mysterious fire in his bedroom. Jane falls in love with Rochester but has to witness his courtship of Blanche Ingram, a sort of nineteenth-century bimbo. Jane leaves to attend to Mrs Reed, who is dying and when she returns, Rochester asks her to marry him; he has realised in her absence that the qualities of Jane’s character far outweigh those of Miss Ingram, despite the difference in their social status.’
‘So far so good.’
‘Don’t count your chickens. A month later the wedding ceremony is interrupted by a lawyer who claims that Rochester is already married and his first wife—Bertha—is still living. He accuses Rochester of bigamy, which is found to be true. The mad Bertha Rochester lives in a room on the upper floor of Thornfield, attended to by the strange Grace Poole. It was she who had attempted to set fire to Rochester in his bed all those months ago. Jane is deeply shocked—as you can imagine—and Rochester tries to excuse his conduct, claiming that his love for her was real. He asks her to go away with him as his mistress, but she refuses. Still in love with him, Jane runs away and finds herself in the home of the Rivers, two sisters and a brother who turn out to be her first cousins.’
‘Isn’t that a bit unlikely?’
‘Shh. Jane’s uncle, who is also their uncle, has just died and leaves her all his money. She divides it among them all and settles down to an independent existence. The brother, St John Rivers, decides to go to India as a missionary and wants Jane to marry him and serve the Church. Jane is quite happy to serve him, but not to marry him. She believes that marriage is a union of love and mutual respec
t, not something that should be a duty. There is a long battle of wills and finally she agrees to go with him to India as his assistant. It is in India, with Jane building a new life, that the book ends.’
‘And that’s it?’ asked Bowden in surprise.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, the ending does sound a bit of an anticlimax. We try to make art perfect because we never manage it in real life and here is Charlotte Bronte concluding her novel—presumably something which has a sense of autobiographical wishful thinking about it—in a manner that reflects her own disappointed love life. If I had been Charlotte I would have made certain that Rochester and Jane were reunited—married, if possible.’
‘Don’t ask me,’ I said, ‘I didn’t write it.’ I paused. ‘You’re right, of course,’ I murmured. ‘It is a crap ending. Why, when all was going so well, does the ending just cop out on the reader? Even the Jane Eyre purists agree that it would have been far better for them to have tied the knot.’
‘How, with Bertha still around?’
‘I don’t know; she could die or something. It is a problem, isn’t it?’
‘How do you know it so well?’ asked Bowden.
‘It’s always been a favourite of mine. I had a copy of it in my jacket pocket when I was shot. It stopped the bullet. Rochester appeared soon after and kept pressure on my arm wound until the medics arrived. He and the book saved my life.’
Bowden looked at his watch.
‘Yorkshire is still many miles away. We shan’t get their until—Hello, what’s this?’
There appeared to be an accident on the carriageway ahead. Two dozen or so cars had stopped in front of us and when nothing moved for a couple of minutes I pulled on to the hard shoulder and drove slowly to the front of the queue. A traffic cop hailed us to stop, looked doubtfully at the bullet holes in the paintwork of my car and then said: ‘Sorry, ma’am. Can’t let you through—‘
I held up my old SpecOps 5 badge and his manner changed.
‘Sorry, ma’am. There’s something unusual ahead.’
Bowden and I exchanged looks and got out of the car. Behind us a crowd of curious onlookers was being held back by a Police Line Do Not Cross tape. They stood in silence to watch the spectacle unfold in front of their eyes. Three squad cars and an ambulance were on the scene already; two paramedics were attending to a newborn infant who was wrapped up in a blanket and howling plaintively. The officers were all relieved that I had arrived—the highest rank there was Sergeant and they were glad to be able to foist the responsibility onto someone else, and someone from SO-5 was as high an operative as any of them had even seen.
I borrowed a pair of binoculars and looked up the empty carriageway. About five hundred yards away the road and starry night sky had spiralled into the shape of a whirlpool, a funnel that was crushing and distorting the light that managed to penetrate the vortex. I sighed. My father had told me about temporal distortions but I had never seen one. In the centre of the whirlpool, where the refracted light had been whipped up into a jumbled pattern, there was an inky black hole, which seemed to have neither depth nor colour, just shape: a perfect circle the size of a grapefruit. Traffic on the opposite carriageway had also been stopped by the police, the flashing blue lights slowing to red as they shone through the fringes of the black mass, distorting the image of the road beyond like the refraction on the edge of a jam jar. In front of the vortex was a blue Datsun, the bonnet already starting to stretch as it approached the distortion. Behind that was a motorcycle, and behind this and closest to us was a green family saloon. I watched for a minute or so, but all the vehicles appeared motionless on the tarmac. The rider, his motorcycle and all the occupants of the cars seemed to be frozen like statues.
‘Blast!’ I muttered under my breath as I glanced at my watch. ‘How long since it opened up?’
‘About an hour,’ answered the sergeant. ‘There was some kind of accident involving an ExcoMat containment vehicle. Couldn’t have happened at a worse time; I was about to come off shift.’
He jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby on the stretcher, who had put his fingers in his mouth and stopped yelling. ‘That was the driver. Before the accident he was thirty-one. By the time we got here he was eight—in a few hours he’ll be nothing more than a damp patch on the blanket.’
‘Have you called the ChronoGuard?’
‘I called ‘em,’ he answered resignedly. ‘But a patch of Bad Time opened up near Tesco’s in Wareham. They can’t be here for at least four hours.’
I thought quickly.
‘How many people have been lost so far?’
‘Sir,’ said an officer, pointing up the road, ‘I think you had better see this!’
We all watched as the blue Datsun started to contort and stretch, fold and shrink as it was sucked through the hole. Within a few seconds it had disappeared completely, compressed to a billionth of its size and catapulted to Elsewhere.
The sergeant pushed his cap to the back of his head and sighed. There was nothing he could do.
I repeated my question.
‘How many?’
‘Oh, the truck has gone, an entire mobile library, twelve cars and a motorcycle. Maybe twenty people.’
‘That’s a lot of matter,’ I said grimly. ‘The distortion could grow to the size of a football field by the time the ChronoGuard get here.’
The sergeant shrugged. He had never been briefed on what to do with temporal instabilities. I turned to Bowden.
‘Come on.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve a little job to do.’
‘You’re crazy!’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Can’t we wait for the ChronoGuard?’
‘They’d never get here in time. It’s easy. A lobotomised monkey could do it.’
‘And where are we going to find a lobotomised monkey at this time of night?’
‘You’re being windy, Bowden.’
‘True. Do you know what will happen if we fail?’
‘We won’t. It’s a doddle. Dad was in the ChronoGuard; he told me all about this sort of thing. The secret is in the spheres. In four hours we could be seeing a major global disaster occurring right in front of our eyes. A rent in time so large we won’t know for sure that the here-and-now isn’t the there-and-then. The rout of civilisation, panic in the streets, the end of the world as we know it. Hey, kid—!’
I had seen a young lad bouncing a basketball on the road. The boy reluctantly gave it to me and I returned to Bowden, who was waiting uneasily by the car. We put the hood down and Bowden sat in the passenger seat, clutching the basketball grimly.
‘A basketball?’
‘It’s a sphere, isn’t it?’ I replied, remembering Dad’s advice all those years ago. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Ready,’ replied Bowden in a slightly shaky voice.
I started the car and rolled slowly up to where the traffic police stood in shocked amazement.
‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ asked the young officer.
‘Sort of,’ I replied, truthfully enough. ‘Does anyone have a watch with a second hand?’
The youngest traffic cop took his watch off and handed it over. I noted the real time—5.30 a.m.—and then reset the hands to twelve o’clock. I strapped the watch on to the rear-view mirror.
The sergeant wished us good luck as we drove off, yet his thoughts were more along the lines of ‘sooner you than me’.
Around us the sky was lightening into dawn, yet the area around the vehicles was still night. Time for the trapped cars had stood still, but only to observers from the outside. To the occupants, everything was happening as normal, except that if they looked behind them they would witness the dawn breaking rapidly.
The first fifty yards seemed plain enough to Bowden and me, but as we drove closer the car and bike seemed to speed up and by the time we had drawn level with the green car we were both moving at about sixty miles per hour. I glanced at the wat
ch on the rear-view mirror and noted that precisely three minutes had elapsed.
Bowden had been watching what was going on behind us. As he and I drove towards the instability the officers’ movements seemed to accelerate until they were just a blur. The cars that had been blocking the carriageway were turned round and directed swiftly back down the hard shoulder at a furious rate. Bowden also noticed the sun rising rapidly behind us and wondered quite what he had let himself in for.
The green saloon had two occupants; a man and a woman. The woman was asleep and the driver was looking at the dark hole that had opened up in front of them. I shouted to him to stop. He wound down his window and I repeated myself, added ‘SpecOps!’ and waved my ID. He dutifully applied his brakes and his stoplights came on, puncturing the darkness. Three minutes and twenty-six seconds had elapsed since we had begun our journey.
From where the ChronoGuard were standing, they could just see the brake lights on the green saloon come languidly on in the funnel of darkness that was the event’s influence. They watched the progress of the green saloon over the next ten minutes as it made an almost imperceptible turn towards the hard shoulder. It was nearly 10 a.m. and an advance ChronoGuard outfit had arrived direct from Wareham. Their equipment and operatives were being airlifted in an SO-12 Chinook helicopter, and Colonel Rutter had flown ahead to see what needed to be done. He had been surprised that two ordinary officers had volunteered for this hazardous duty, especially as nobody could tell him who we were. Even a check of my car registration didn’t help, as it was still listed as belonging to the garage I had bought it from. The only positive thing about the whole damn mess, he noted, was the fact that the passenger seemed to be holding a sphere of some sort. If the hole grew any bigger and time slowed down even more it might take them several months to reach us, even in the fastest vehicle they had. He lowered the binoculars and sighed. It was a stinking, lousy, lonely job. He had been working in the ChronoGuard for almost forty years Standard Earth Time. In logged work time he was 209. In his own personal physiological time he was barely 28. His children were older than him and his wife was in a nursing home. He had thought the higher rates of pay would compensate him for any problems, but they didn’t.
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