The Derring-Do Club and the Year of the Chrononauts (30 page)

Georgina picked up the book nearest and skimmed the words, and then flicked through others, but, if she was completely honest, none of the actual words made that much sense and the volumes were old, dreadfully old.

She picked another at random. It had been first published in 1882 and updated in 1895, this edition 1897, which may only be a handful of years ago for her, but this was the future. It was as if this book was written in 1800 before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1884, the Great Reform Act of 1832 and all the other great advances of her own century. It was useless against this Chronological Judiciary. If the last hundred years for her meant that married women gained the right to own property, and the whole electoral system was overhauled, then what would the next hundred years have brought? Perhaps even women’s suffrage was possible. It was as if she were trying to play chess, but knowing only the rules of draughts. It just wasn’t… cricket.

Something chimed in her head, something just on the edge of her mind like a half–remembered dream.

Charlotte snuffled and shuffled.

It was gone.

Georgina tried to recover it, thought about cricket, chess, cricket… but it wasn’t there anymore. It had vanished as if to another time.

“It’s impossible,” said Charlotte. “Do you really want to spend all day going through some dusty old books?”

“Knowledge is king,” said Earnestine.

“Bleurgghh.”

Charlotte picked up Earnestine’s umbrella and swizzled it experimentally like a sword.

“LOTTIE!” Earnestine yelled. “Oh, Gina, take her somewhere please.”

Georgina ushered Charlotte out and back to their rooms. There were Peelers on duty, but they didn’t escort them.

Once they were back in Georgina’s room, unlocked during the day, and Georgina had taken the umbrella off Charlotte to stop her playing with it, they sat down. Charlotte perched on the bed, fiddling with a yellow book, and Georgina chose the chair.

Georgina checked Arthur’s watch. She really ought to help Earnestine, return her umbrella, but… oh, that fidgety girl was so distracting. She never did anything useful.

“Charlotte, did you take that from the library?”

“No.”

“Well, either read that or put it down!”

“I’ve read it. Ages ago.”

“Well, read it again.”

“It’s Uncle Jeremiah’s.”

“Really… I beg your pardon?”

Charlotte handed it over.

“Where did you get this?” Georgina asked.

“It was in Mrs Frasier’s bag when we arrived.”

“You stole it!?”

“She took it off Uncle Jeremiah.”

“Charlotte Deering–Dolittle,” said Georgina, utterly beyond exasperation, “how could you steal such an item
and then keep it a secret!”

Charlotte made a face, but Georgina ignored her and examined the book. If this was Uncle Jeremiah’s book and if she could find his patent application, then…

It was ‘
The Time Machine
’ by H. G. Wells – a novel of all things and disturbingly ironic considering what was going on. That was probably why he had chosen it for whatever it was he’d chosen it for. She flicked through it. She’d read this when it came out and remembered the yellow cover with the simple sphinx motif in the centre.

Ah ha!

She had it: this title was an aide memoire and inside he had hidden the answer.

Holding it upside down and flicking through the pages did not produce the hoped for secret letter. She then riffled through the pages from the back, even pages first and then looking at the odd pages. There was no hand–written marginalia.

“I’ve done all that,” said Charlotte.

Georgina carefully opened the first few pages.

“And that.”

On the flyleaf was written ‘
To J. J. D. Love C. M.
’, but there were no other apparent annotations. The book didn’t fall open at any particular page when she dropped it slightly on its spine. The binding hadn’t been interfered with. It appeared to be an ordinary copy of… who was ‘C.M.’? And ‘Love’? ‘J. J. D.’ was Jeremiah James
Deering, Uncle Jeremiah.

“Gina, why is your bed lumpy?”

“I hid my bag under the mattress.”

“Who’s C. M.?”

“You’re the detective.”

“Oh, yes, can I get a deer stalker hat?”

“If you solve this, I’ll buy you one.”

“Oh yes, please.”

They dropped the book on the simple bed between them, squaring it so they could consider it as an object.

“Perhaps it’s a cipher key,” Charlotte said.

“A what?”

“A book used to encode secret messages. If so, it’ll have little marks on some pages where the decoder counted words.”

Charlotte set about examining it.

Maybe, thought Georgina, the clue wasn’t in the book, so maybe it
was
the book.

Uncle Jeremiah read the novel, he was inspired by it and therefore he invented a time machine. That made a kind of sense. After that, logically, he’d have filled in a patent application and this in turn must have ended up at the Patent Pending Office, thus involving Mister Boothroyd, and then it had been side–tracked to the more nefarious divisions of the civil service and so on… until at some point in the future someone had actually built it and used it to come back in time.

Although the Chronological Conveyor wasn’t so much a carriage as a… well, there wasn’t a word for it as there wasn’t anything like it. Any form of transport required one to be in, or on, something, which was usually connected to a horse or a steam engine, and one needed to physically journey through the intervening space.

With this device, one simply stayed put – literally.

It was hard to see what physical property could gather one up and convey one to another place, let alone another year. However, many marvels were fathomed, created and reported all the time. She herself often read a number of scientific journals during her visits to the library and was suitable amazed by various propositions.

However, Uncle Jeremiah wasn’t an engineer or an inventor, he didn’t know one end of a steam engine from the other and he used to say ‘yes dear’ a lot when Georgina explained the daguerreotype process.

So someone else, not Uncle Jeremiah, invented the temporal process and came back in time, etcetera, etcetera – perhaps pretending that Uncle Jeremiah had invented it – and if so, what was the point of this book!?

Would being unable to invent a time machine prove Uncle Jeremiah’s innocence?

Had some devious future engineer framed him?

Charlotte was still going through it page by page. She could be quite studious when she wanted to be and–

“Hopeless!”

Charlotte pushed it away, the sphinx tilted at an angle.

Sphinx – the riddle of the sphinx.

Georgina felt an icy chill. She couldn’t remember the story.

“What’s the riddle of the sphinx?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh think, Charlotte, think.”

“It’s… oh, what has three legs for breakfast… no, it’s what has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?”

“What?”

“A man!”

“How can it be a man?”

“When he’s a baby, he crawls on four legs; when he’s grown up, he walks on two legs, and old men use a walking stick, which is three legs.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s the answer: a man. A baby crawls on four legs, a man walks on–”

“I know what a baby does!” Georgina snapped, rather more sharply than she intended. Why, why, why did Uncle Jeremiah want them to know about the Sphinx? Perhaps it… “Charlotte, what’s the story of the riddle, not the riddle itself, but the story?”

“It’s Greek.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t do Greek. Only Latin and French –
yuk
– but I’ve read about their battles, Alexander the Great, the three hundred Spartans and–”

“Yes, thank you Charlotte.”

“There’s another riddle.”

“Yes?”

“Two sisters: one gives birth to the other, who then gives birth to the first.”

“And?”

“It’s the second riddle in some versions of…. Oedipus!”

Oedipus, of course, Georgina remembered: a man who killed his father, married his mother and put his own eyes out. Uncle Jeremiah’s brother was their father and married their mother. There were three Derring–Do sisters… or four now, not two. The riddle had nothing to do with them that she could understand.

“What’s the answer to the second riddle?”

“You have to guess.”

“Charlotte!”

“Night and day, each gives birth to the other. The words are feminine in Greek – why do languages have genders for words, it’s stupid?”

“It’s so that we can have lessons in school.”

Charlotte made a face.

Three sisters in the Derring–Do Club: a baby, an adult and… but Earnestine didn’t use a stick, but she did have an umbrella. The child, the virgin and the crone, but Georgina had been married. The crone, the mother and the child, like Mrs Jago, Mrs Falcone and Miss Millicent, but Georgina herself couldn’t be a mother without storks and gooseberry bushes. They were all sisters and there were four sisters now: Earnestine, like the day, begetting the night that was Mrs Frasier.

Georgina threw her arms wide: “This is impossible!”

“I did say.”

Miss Charlotte

But, thought Charlotte, when you’ve eliminated the impossible, then only the possible is left. That didn’t sound right.

“Allow me,” Charlotte said.

“Be my guest.”

“I get a deer stalker hat, a magnifying glass and a pipe.”

“This isn’t the time to make demands.”

Charlotte folded her arms.

“Very well, but no pipe.”

Charlotte drew herself up to her full five foot two: “Facts!”

“You know the facts.”

“Why don’t we ask him?”

“Ask who? Sherlock Holmes? Conan Doyle?”

“Uncle Jeremiah.” Charlotte raised a silencing finger to Georgina’s gathering objection. “There may be visiting hours.”

“What if we’re stopped?”

“We say we’re going to visit our Uncle in prison.”

“What if they don’t allow visits?”

“We say ‘oh, that’s a shame’.”

“This is your trick, isn’t it? To have your excuses worked out beforehand.”

“No.”

“What if he doesn’t want to talk to us?”

“Gina, we could always wrangle another story out of him. He can’t say ‘no’ to us.”

“You have a point.”

“He might have macaroons.”

“In prison!?”

“They have to eat something other than gruel.”

Georgina opened the door and peeked out: “No–one about.”

Charlotte picked up the umbrella and opened the door properly.

“What are you doing with that?”

“Protection.”

“Give it to me, Lottie,” Georgina chided. “You could take someone’s eye out with that.”

They set off, down the corridor and into the canteen. They knew that this wasn’t the way to the prison; the walls had very clearly marked labels directing people to the Judiciary, the Prison and Temporal Engineering. However, the canteen made a useful psychological base camp. It had biscuits too, hard oatcakes that were dry and again fit the bill for an expedition. Once they’d sat at the rude tables long enough to see a few people enter and leave, they decided, without a word, that it was now or never.

At the Rotunda, they turned left towards the Prison section.

Charlotte leant again the wall to peer along the various corridors.

When she was sure, Charlotte said, “It’s clear.”

“Thank goodness.”

“This is cold.”

“What’s cold?”

“The wall.”

“Well, of course it is.”

“It’s slightly damp.”

“I dare say this glorious new world has a few building problems same as any era.”

They went straight ahead, fighting both the impulse to stride purposefully and to shuffle furtively. At the end, there was a stone staircase, wide and open, leading both up and down. Charlotte followed the stair up to the landing, where it backed around to go up to the next level. There was a barrier across the landing, heavy wood with iron reinforcing. Looking down, there was a similar obstruction below, but this was just wooden.

“Why is their security heavier to leave than to keep people in the prison?” she asked quietly.

“I was wondering that. There must be something upstairs. The cells are down.”

They went down.

Although the barrier was all the way across the half–landing, there was a normal sized door cut into the middle and this was open. They went through, crossing the line between simply pretending to be lost and genuinely trespassing. On the wall facing them, there was a curved mirror designed to allow the Desk Sergeant to see up the staircase. It also allowed them to see that the man was reading a penny–dreadful.

Georgina started to ask the obvious: “How are we going… Charlotte?”

Charlotte sauntered over to desk.

“Hello,” she said.

The Sergeant started, his feet jerking off the desk and his chair nearly capsizing.

“Miss… I…”

“That’s
Half–penny Marvel
, isn’t it?”

The man glanced at the cover of his lurid magazine: “Yes.”

“Is there a Sexton Blake story?”

“Yes.”

“Is it good?”

“I’ve not read it yet.”

“Oh, but it’s the best bit.”

“I think so too, so I leave it until last.”

“Georgina and I shouldn’t be long.”

“Right you are, Miss.”

As she went past, Charlotte saw Georgina smiling at the Sergeant with a crookedness to her mouth as if her face didn’t agree with the deception.

“Excuse me, Miss, but–”

“Ma’am,” said Georgina. “I’m married.”

“Sorry Ma’am.”

They rounded the corner.

It was all they could do to stop themselves giggling with excitement and relief.

Further on, they found a Warder.

“Excuse me,” Georgina asked. “We’re here to visit Unc– Jeremiah Deering, a prisoner.”

The man considered them suspiciously, but he went to a ledger and checked.

“Deering… Deering… Let me see. Carstairs, Conway, Danton, Deering – Doctor Deering, here we are. No, I’m afraid no visits are allowed.”