‘This is an escape?’ She flapped a hand and adjusted her phlogiston-filled satchel on her shoulder. ‘Out of the frying pan, I’d say.’
‘Where are we?’ Kingsley had trouble working his mouth. Since arriving in the stinking dark cave, his brain had felt as if it had been pumped full of water and squeezed. Thoughts were heavy and imponderable and he had trouble articulating the simplest thing.
In addition, his wild self was terrified – the smoke and the grinding, thunderous sound filling the air made him want to either flee or hide.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Evadne said. ‘Keep your wits about you.’
‘This way,’ he mumbled.
Together they stumbled into a street of two-storey, half-timbered buildings that jostled side by side with each other. In the narrow gap between them was a churning sea of frightened people.
Men, women and children shouted and screamed, pushed and clawed at each other. Kingsley coughed, and grimaced at the dark and smoky air. Then he looked up.
The sky was orange, and black, and red.
‘The world’s on fire,’ he muttered.
Evadne wrapped her scarf around her face, pushed back her satchel and then dragged at his arm. He nearly tripped, but shambled with her to a crooked lane between two buildings. They climbed over a pile of broken pots, then Evadne had to stop and cough.
Kingsley leaned against rough timber. Muck and cobblestones were underfoot. Low, old buildings leaned towards the middle of the alley like conspiring gossips.
Noise nearby – shouting and the roar of . . . artillery?
Without thinking, he took Evadne around the waist and, bent double and coughing, they hurried through the smoke. A terrified hound caught up to them and raced past, howling. Part of Kingsley wanted nothing more than to join it.
A bone-aching concussion rocked the ground nearby. They were nearly bowled over by a man and woman who were adopting much the same mode of locomotion as they were, but were simply much better at it. Their wooden shoes clocked on the cobbles as they fairly sprinted past, just ahead of a tide of ash and hot air.
Evadne cried out and dropped to all fours. ‘My spectacles!’
Kingsley stopped dead, acutely aware that his next step could be the end of Evadne’s seeing, at least for the moment. He held out his hands, ready to ward people off. ‘You said you carried extra sets.’
‘The Neanderthals took them,’ she said, almost weeping.
Another roar, then Kingsley shuddered at the shrieks from nearby. Someone – man, woman or child, he couldn’t tell – was both terrified and without hope, but unwilling to stay silent in the face of whatever was coming for them.
‘I have them!’ Evadne cried but when she put them on she made a sound of disgust. ‘I must find water. I can hardly see.’
Kingsley was starting to think more clearly and had a notion that water might be in short supply.
Another explosion nearby. More people pushed into the lane behind them and hurried in their direction. Kingsley and Evadne pressed against the half-timbered wall and let them past.
‘This is bad,’ he said softly as a welter of details impressed themselves on him. They were insistent, demanding that they be taken together to make a whole, but he shied away from them and their implications. Of all the times in London to be sent back to . . .
Evadne gripped his arm. ‘What is it? I can hardly see.’
‘Nothing.’
‘As bad as that, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘People only say “nothing” to a question like that when the answer is dire.’
Kingsley flinched as a gigantic crash reverberated down the lane. They both had to shy away as a wave of dust, ash and smoke swept past them. ‘We seem to be on fire,’ he said.
‘I can tell that, even with only a tiny patch of unsmeared vision, but something else bit you. What is it?’
‘The people hustling past us. Unless they were from a nearby theatre, their clothes are hundreds of years old. But they’re new. If you see what I mean.’
More hot ash and embers were driven at them. Kingsley turned away again, shielding Evadne. He screwed up his eyes. When he opened them again, she’d tilted her head and was looking at him through one corner of her spectacles. ‘Thank you. I couldn’t see that coming.’
‘We need to get away from here.’
‘Follow the strange dressers. They seemed to know which way to go.’
‘Good idea.’
‘In an emergency, I don’t care how people are dressed, as long as they’re helpful.’
Kingsley would never have said that he knew every street and byway of London, but he quickly admitted to himself that they’d emerged into a district that he’d never been in before. In the smoke and grit whipped up by the wind he couldn’t make out any landmarks, either, but the nature of the buildings and the clothing on the panicked pedestrians confirmed the conclusion he’d come to.
Evadne rebelled against her almost helpless state, but after smearing her spectacles even more badly, she gave up and allowed Kingsley to drape his arm and pull her close, steering the way through the panicked streets. Explosions continued to punish the air, sending up sparks, dust and a chorus of shrieks with every detonation.
Sometimes, Kingsley thought, all it takes is one point to fix a bearing. In London, a few marks were unshakeable and he saw two of them at once – the river and the Tower. Immediately, he knew they were north of the river, not far from the City. If that’s the case, he thought, fending off a man who was carrying a rooster, where are the Houses of Parliament?
They weren’t there. Instead, a rambling pile of buildings, grand enough but rather ramshackle, sprawled along the riverbank. Then his eye was dragged back along the river. ‘Tower Bridge isn’t there.’
Two men in gorgeous velvet knee breeches ran past. They were carrying a small barrel on a sling between them. Their hats were wide brimmed and dashing. Their hair was long, as were their cloaks, and their beards were pointed. Scabbards flapped at their sides.
A man dressed in a leather apron staggered past, singing with more gusto than talent. He had a tankard of beer in each hand. Hardly thinking, Kingsley pointed past him. When the drunkard followed the direction of the gesture, Kingsley relieved him of one of the tankards. ‘That woman!’ he shouted in the man’s ear. ‘She’s calling you!’
The man clearly had trouble understanding Kingsley, so Kingsley leered, then winked. The man leered back and swayed off, swinging his shoulders and swimming through the crowd.
‘Here.’ Kingsley gave the tankard to Evadne. ‘Use it to wash your spectacles.’
She made a face when she smelled it. ‘Beer?’
‘Ale, I’d say. It’s most likely cleaner than the water around here.’
She made another face, but carefully dipped the spectacles in the beer before using her handkerchief. ‘Better. Smelly, but it will do for now.’
‘I want you to tell me I’m not dreaming.’ He slapped at his shoulder, which had started smouldering, the victim of a drifting spark. He pointed. ‘You see the Tower. What’s on the river near it?’
‘Boats. Lots of them.’
‘Any bridges?’
Evadne put a hand to her mouth. ‘Where’s Tower Bridge?’ She swung her gaze. ‘Where’s Big Ben?’
‘Remember how you told me to keep an open mind? It’s your turn now.’
Ash and embers swirled about them. The people in the tiny crossroads were undecided about whether to panic, to sing or to pray, so they were doing all of them at once.
Evadne looked at them and then at Kingsley. ‘Tell me.’
‘I think we’ve landed ourselves in the Great Fire. Welcome to 1666.’
‘I’m willing to accept that the Neanderthals have a working, phlogiston-
powered time machine that’s shot us back almost two hundred and fifty years,’ Evadne said. ‘What I’m keenest to discover, though, is a way for us to get back home.’
They’d made their way across London Bridge, along with thousands of others, in the hope that the river would provide a barrier from the fire beast that was consuming the world. From their viewpoint, on the walls of the dilapidated and rambling maze of buildings that a weeping man told them was Winchester Palace, they could see the explosions as the city authorities did their best to make firebreaks to stop the spread of the conflagration. The velvet-clad cavaliers that Kingsley had seen earlier were no doubt King Charles’s men, running gunpowder for the desperate task.
Unlike all those around them, Kingsley and Evadne had the small comfort of knowing that the city would survive. From where they were, however, that appeared most unlikely. The entire vista was afire. Flame rolled across rooftops like a stormy ocean, wave on wave sweeping across London, devouring with a hunger that was unquenchable. Boats made the perilous crossing, ferrying passengers across the ash-laden water.
The wind roared towards the fire from the east, sucked into its greediness, but the fire itself outroared it, a vast grinding underlying a hissing and coughing that sounded like a great jungle animal. Nothing could stand in its way. It would consume and continue to consume until the world ended.
‘Have you read Mr Wells’s novel?’ Kingsley asked Evadne as they gazed at the catastrophe.
‘The Time Machine? Of course.’
‘It looks as if we’re living what he dreamed,’ he said.
‘Two hundred years.’ Evadne put her satchel on the parapet beside her, then she stood with her arms wrapped around herself.
‘Nearer two hundred and fifty.’
‘A new London will rise from this.’
He gazed at the shabbiness of the old bishop’s palace. The whole edifice had an air of neglect – tumbledown outbuildings, shrubs and small trees rooting in the cracks between stones, ivy questing indiscriminately. No-one had protested when they, along with hundreds of others, had mounted the walls to gaze at the inferno across the river. ‘The old London looks as if it won’t be missed.’
‘It will be, but it will mostly be forgotten.’
‘Time does that.’
‘And what are we going to do?’
‘I’ve never met a trap I haven’t been able to find my way out of.’
‘I’m reassured.’
‘It’s just a matter of thinking about basic principles, looking for weaknesses, taking opportunities . . .’
‘And multiplying platitudes?’
‘I love a multiplying platitude,’ he said solemnly. ‘So fulfilling.’
She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them to cover her mouth when she yawned. ‘I’m tired.’
‘You should be. You haven’t slept for two hundred and fifty years . . . Negative two hundred and fifty years. A long time.’
‘Then sleep would appear to be a solution.’
‘And food.’ Kingsley gazed across the city. Were they, indeed, trapped? He glanced at the wan Evadne. A small smudge of soot marred one cheek.
He saw how she was fingering the chain of her pendant. ‘Are you missing Clarence?’
‘Clarence?’
He gestured at her hand.
‘Ah.’ She drew out the pendant and clicked it open. She studied it for a moment before sliding it back under her collar. ‘I was thinking that he’d enjoy it here. He’s a scholar of Stuart drama.’
‘A remarkable fellow, Clarence. I couldn’t invent someone so accomplished.’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘Far be it from me to suggest anything. I simply bow down in front of Clarence. Or his picture, in any case.’
‘And so you should.’
Evadne gazed back at the spectacle of the fire and Kingsley turned to gaze at her. A thought came to him, unasked for and surprising. It wasn’t hard to imagine, if things went sour and they had to remain in 1666, building a life here with this mercurial, accomplished and dauntless young woman.
He actually blinked at the idea. It wasn’t one of those that sidled up edgewise. No, this was the equivalent of a mental blow between the eyes, but as he did his best to recover, he was already seeing its possibilities. Without Clarence – mythical or otherwise – together, surely, they could make something out of this seventeenth-century city with their twentieth-century knowledge and a satchel full of phlogiston. Besides, a city like this was bound to be less civilised than King Edward’s London. He may have more chance to let his wild side run free. It could be a relief from constantly trying to keep it in check. He could, strange as it might sound, reach some sort of accommodation with himself.
As long as he didn’t think about what was happening in 1908, he might be comfortable here – but he couldn’t banish the memory of the plight of his foster father, nor the knowledge of the Neanderthals’ plans.
It made his head ache to contemplate, but what would happen if the Neanderthals in 1908 went ahead and constructed their time machine, went back and exterminated the early humans? Would Evadne and he immediately be surrounded by a Neanderthal-populated London? Or would they simply disappear? If so, when? And did that last question make any sense at all when time itself had been turned inside out, or stood on its head, or twisted into something fiendishly knotty and impossible to undo?
A gust of wind from the east made Kingsley squint, but his eyes still watered from the windborne smoke. The scene across the river smeared, with the orange light becoming red and dire.
‘The Immortals.’ A notion had struck him with enough force to make his ears ring. ‘You said they have time travel.’
Evadne’s hands were on the stone battlements, white against grey. ‘I said they messed about with time and space, whatever that means.’
‘And that Neanderthal woman. When she was leaving the Immortals’ place, she was talking with that man about what she called a Temporal Manipulator.’
Evadne yawned. ‘I fail to see the importance.’
‘If these sorcerers are actually immortal, that means that they might be here, now, in 1666. With a time machine.’
Evadne swung around to face him. ‘Kingsley, that is an outstanding piece of brainwork.’
‘D’you think so?’
‘Indubitably. Here I was, thinking through the implications of setting up here with you while you, quite brilliantly, find an escape.’
‘You were thinking about what? Setting up here?’
Evadne put both hands to her mouth. ‘And I’ve had an equally brilliant addition to your plan. Do you remember my telling you about Demimonde groups opposed to the Immortals?’
‘I – Yes, I remember.’
‘I’m sure they were active this long ago. I’d say they’d know where the Immortals are in this time, and might be persuaded to help us.’
Soames revelled in being lord of the manor. Taking possession of the Immortals’ lair was right and proper; it was a fitting place for him to reside and assume a position in the world that was his due.
At last, Jabez, a place worthy of you!
He explored, wanting to know his estate and its facilities. He found a complex of corridors and rooms leading off the main hall. Stairs led down to the cells beneath. Once he confirmed to himself that they were empty of the children his underlings had sent the Immortals, he promised to inspect them at another time.
The library was a happy find. It was windowless, naturally, but that meant all the more room for books. No concession was made to the decorative, either. It was simply a long, narrow room with books floor to ceiling. A line of back-to-back shelves ran down the centre of the room, to increase the intense bookiness of the place. It smelled of leather and paper, dust and knowledge.
Not
many people would know what to make of this, Jabez, he thought and began to applaud himself. The echoes made it seem as if an enormous crowd were paying him homage. You were born for this!
Soames was both delighted and daunted. The key to the Immortals’ longevity would be in here, he was sure, but where? Starting at ‘A’ and working his way around would be the work of a lifetime or two. He could hire assistants. He knew a dozen Demimonders who would leap at the chance, and would probably pay for the privilege, but did he want to share this treasure with anyone? Who could he trust?
No-one.
It was a shame, and he had much to sort out. The Immortals’ time in India, for instance. What had they been doing there? The shipment he’d arranged for them would be well on its way. He was looking forward to seeing what they needed so eagerly.
And then there were the devices he’d had his underlings place around the Olympic Stadium. He really should get hold of one to see what was going on there and what he could make of it.
You’re a busy man, Jabez, he thought, but a busy Jabez is a happy Jabez!
He continued his explorations.
Hours later, he came across a small room. It was cosy, carpeted and rather too working class for Soames’s taste, but he took it as evidence that he wasn’t the only ordinary human that the Immortals employed. He settled himself in an armchair, after carefully brushing it off, and appreciated the more human scale of the room. It would make a fine temporary office. He’d have a desk brought in, and some filing cabinets. When he was accustomed to the main hall, he could move everything out there where he belonged.
Soames was sitting back, looking about the small room and estimating where best to locate a bank of pigeon holes, when he heard the noise.
At first, he assumed it came from rats. He wrinkled his nose. He detested rats and their dirty, smelly ways, but he accepted that most underground – and many overground – domiciles were rife with them.
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