TIME QUAKE (9 page)

‘Since when,’ hissed Lord Luxon, ‘did I take advice from a common sergeant?’

‘As you say, sir.’

The shadow of a slight figure passed noiselessly in front of the blinds. Everyone stepped backwards. The contour of a head which pressed against the window was clearly visible. She was trying to see inside. No one moved. Then Sergeant Thomas whispered into Lord Luxon’s ear.

‘If we do not harm her then we must at least frighten her off.’

Lord Luxon nodded.

A few moments later Sergeant Thomas was crouching behind the door. With one hand he silently turned the door handle. With the other he clasped together the jaws of his oversized mongrel. When he judged the moment was right he whispered something into Sally’s ear, flung open the door and pushed the cross-eyed bitch out onto the fire escape. Concealing himself at the back of the room, Lord Luxon caught a glimpse of shining, chestnut hair and Alice’s petrified face as the hound knocked her to the floor and stood over her growling, front paws on her shoulders. Alice screamed and kicked and hit the dog hard on its nose with her heavy bag. But Sally would not be put off. Alice leaped up and ran to the ladder, hoping that the dog would not follow. Sergeant Thomas had his pistol trained through the blind at Alice’s head as
she climbed down. Sally’s staccato barks were deafening and all of Prince Street looked up to watch the commotion.

‘You only have to say the word,’ Sergeant Thomas said to Lord Luxon over his shoulder. ‘If not here, I could follow her to a quiet place to do the deed . . .’

Lord Luxon joined him at the window and peered through the blind. He rested his hand on the soldier’s pistol and pushed it down.

‘No. She may well be the instrument of our victory.’

Sally continued to bark like a mad thing.

‘As you wish,’ said Sergeant Thomas in a flat voice.

Lord Luxon flinched as Alice seemed to look straight back at him, wild-eyed, as if her gaze had penetrated the blind, before sprinting away towards Sixth Avenue and safety.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

The Oracle

In which it is the Tar Man’s turn to bare his teeth
and Kate proves her worth

Other than a sharp intake of breath, the Tar Man did not permit himself to react even though Kate’s incisors had broken his skin. Instead, with his free hand, he calmly leaned over and pinched a nerve in her neck. The acute, electric pain this simple gesture caused made her cry out. The Tar Man retrieved his throbbing hand and pulled both of Kate’s arms behind her back. She felt a cord tighten around her wrists. Kate tried to spit out the taste of the Tar Man. She felt sick to her stomach.

‘If you wish me to treat you civilly, Mistress Dyer, I recommend that you mend your manners – although it was scarcely gallant of Master Schock to leave you unaccompanied. Does he not know that Bartholomew’s Fair is teeming with rogues who would prey on those such as yourself?’

‘What do you want with me?’ Kate cried.

‘All in good time.’

Kate opened her mouth to scream for help but her cry was instantly smothered when the Tar Man slapped his fingers over her
mouth. The fool’s antics were still attracting the attention of the crowd and only one man noticed this minor disturbance on the edge of the circle of onlookers. It was the fortune-teller’s gatekeeper. Kate, still wriggling like a fish on a hook, opened her eyes wide and looked at him beseechingly. He ignored her silent pleas. The Tar Man, too, fixed the big man with a stare and, with a jerk of his head, indicated that the fellow should remove himself from his sight.

‘I believe you have urgent business elsewhere, Mr O’ Donnell.’

‘Yes, Master Blueskin, indeed I do.’ The tall, turbaned figure sidled off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run.

The Tar Man dragged Kate backwards into the fortune-teller’s tent. The woman, still shaken from her sighting of Kate, was sitting at a small table and drinking gin from a pewter mug. She looked up expectantly, composing her face into a pleasant smile for her latest customer. The smile withered on her face.

‘I’ll thank you to hold your tongue, madam,’ said the Tar Man, holding the struggling Kate in one hand and the point of his knife to the woman’s throat with the other. The woman looked from Kate to her attacker and back again and an expression of such abject terror came to her face that even the Tar Man was taken aback. She pointed a trembling finger towards them and then made a curious sign in the air that Kate could not decipher.

‘The Oracle!’ she breathed.

The woman’s face had turned ash-grey and an instant later she fainted clean away, her head landing with a thump on the table. The Tar Man, who was accustomed to his victims using all manner of ruses to escape his clutches, instinctively questioned the authenticity of the woman’s fainting fit. He therefore pushed at the woman’s chair with the sole of one foot and continued to lever it over until the laws of gravity caused the woman to collapse out of
it like a sack of potatoes onto the hard ground. Kate winced as she heard the woman’s head knock against a table leg.

‘Oracle?’ the Tar Man repeated. ‘What did the wench mean?’ It was a rhetorical question given that his hand was still clamped over Kate’s mouth. He kicked out at the woman’s back, without any particular relish, to confirm her unconscious state before diverting his attention back to the matter at hand.

He leaned over, picked up the fortune-teller’s chair and pushed Kate into it. He stood looming over her. Kate managed to return the searchlight of his gaze for only a few seconds. She looked away but could still feel his eyes burning into her. The Tar Man’s presence was powerful, knowing, unpredictable . . . Joe Carrick, the vicious leader of the gang of footpads, had terrified her, too, in the same way that a mad dog would, but at least she had the measure of him. With the Tar Man she felt that she was floundering out of her depth. Gideon’s words came back to her.
I suppose he is fearless because he has faced the worst a man can face and still survived. Most rogues’ hearts are not completely black but his heart is buried so deep I doubt it will ever see the light of day
. . .
Beware of him, children, he is always two steps ahead of you while appearing to be two steps behind
. Surely he and Gideon couldn’t be brothers,
could
they?

Why was the Tar Man just standing there, looking at her without saying anything? Kate stared fixedly at her lap, steeling herself for whatever was about to happen. She would be brave. Or at least she would try. A dog barked outside the tent and, for one blissful second, she convinced herself that it was Molly, and that her dad had travelled across time to rescue her. But it was not to be. She was alone, where none of her friends would think to look for her, with Lord Luxon’s wicked henchman, who did not care if she lived or died. Who could help her now?

Finally the Tar Man broke his silence. ‘I have grown fond of
your century, Mistress Dyer,’ he said in a half-whisper, too close to Kate’s face. ‘I had a secret that was the envy of every villain in London. A secret that you and I share, do we not? Each morning I arose to look out over a world where
anything
was possible. I am not a man inclined to fancy, but in truth, I often travel back, in my mind’s eye, to my home high above the Thames with all of that other London laid out before me for the taking; I ride in my airborne carriages and fly wherever my desire takes me over land and sea; and sometimes I like to recall the expression on young Tom’s face when first he witnessed me fading back into my own time—’

Kate forgot her fear for a moment. ‘Tom! Tom who was with the Carrick Gang?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Tom
is in the twenty-first century?’

‘Was. He died there.’

‘Oh no! Not Tom . . .’ Tears pricked at Kate’s eyes but she blinked them back. ‘But how?’

‘On account of a reckless girl of whom he was overly fond . . . He allowed sentiment to rule his actions.’

The Tar Man paused for a moment, and the frown between his black eyebrows deepened. Kate risked snatching a glance up at him and she wondered what thought was going through his mind. He exhaled heavily and looked at her again.

‘And so, in short, I am bent on returning to the century which is now also my own, and, I assure you, I shall balk at nothing until I succeed. Moreover, I desire
you
, Mistress Dyer, to help me in that resolve.’

‘How am I supposed to do that?’ Kate exclaimed. ‘
I
don’t know how to get back! If I did I’d be there already!’

The Tar Man replied in a voice so low and silky Kate had to
strain to hear. ‘But you forget that I have the means to return. The machine is in my possession. It could take both of us home.’

Kate scrutinised the Tar Man. She did not trust him for a second.

‘So . . . what do you want
me
to do?’

‘Your father built the machine, did he not? With the handsome Dr Pirretti? You were no doubt privy to certain information. I want you to tell me the secret code.’

‘But I don’t know it!’

The Tar Man put his hands on the arms of the chair and lowered his face towards hers so that she could see every pore of his weather-beaten skin.

‘You
do
know it,’ he growled. ‘Why else would you and your friends come after me like hounds after a fox? You want my machine! But as you can see, I am not about to let you have it! Don’t act the fool, Mistress Dyer! I’ll warrant you wish to return to the future even more badly than I! Would not your parents be overjoyed to see you once more? Tell me the code!’

‘I can’t! We were going to worry about finding the code once we’d got back the machine!’

‘You lie!’ he shouted, so loudly that Kate jumped involuntarily. ‘Tell me!’

Then the Tar Man seemed to lose all self-restraint. Never had she seen him in such a passion. He drew his knife from his belt and pushed her roughly forward. Kate felt him untie the cord that bound her wrists. He took hold of her left arm, forcing her elbow open and laying out her hand flat on the table, splaying out all her fingers. He clenched the knife and the fearsome blade hovered an inch above her trembling knuckles.

‘You have five chances until I start on your writing hand!’

Kate was so terrified she could not focus, she could not breathe, she could not speak.

‘Tell me the code!’ he bellowed.

There was an unbearable pause whilst every sinew in the Tar Man’s arm tightened as he gripped the knife in his clenched fist. Kate’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She felt the hysteria rise up inside her. The blood seemed to roar in her temples. The blade was pressing into her skin! She felt something trickle down her finger! He was going to do it! She hit out at him uselessly with her free hand. The monster was actually going to cut her fingers off one by one! Suddenly the words exploded from her throat.

‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!’ she shrieked.

The Tar Man stood back and observed Kate’s face dispassionately, like a doctor searching for symptoms. He was perfectly calm.

‘No,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘It appears that you do not.’

The Tar Man lowered his knife and paced up and down for a moment, deep in thought. The adrenaline still pumping through her veins, Kate did not know what to do with herself. She sat panting and trembling and was conscious of her face screwing up into weird shapes as she refused to give in to tears. She squinted at her finger, half-expecting to see it hanging on by a thread, but, in fact, her tormentor had not even drawn blood. He had not needed to. Her own fear had invented the nick in her skin . . . A surge of anger boiled up inside her. But if he’d been convinced that she
did
know the code, would he have cut her finger off, then? Yes, she thought, the Tar Man would not have hesitated for an instant.

‘No matter,’ said the Tar Man, still pacing. ‘’Tis a pity. But your father will not refuse me when the time is right . . . And now, Mistress Dyer, please be so kind as to remove your shoes.’

‘What?!’

‘I desire your trainers. You could not, in any case, call them dainty slippers. You would do well to choose more elegant attire.’

While Kate merely sat bewildered and motionless, the Tar Man grabbed hold of her ankles and pulled at the heels of her trainers. They both dropped to the floor. For a brief moment he paused and looked quizzically at Kate’s flesh and then, holding out his hand, compared it to his own. He made no comment, however, and began to push the trainers into his jacket pockets. Kate closed her eyes. Was he going to cut her toes off now? She wished she could faint away like the gypsy woman, and escape into another world where he could not get at her. And when she opened her eyes again Kate found that, in a way, her wish had been granted.

Kate sat down in a heap on the back of an open wagon to nurse her feet which were sore and bleeding after walking barefoot for so long. Newgate Lane – and her friends – were proving difficult to find. She glanced around her at this sterile world scattered with living statues. In spite of her mind telling her that it was the accelerated speed at which she was passing through time that accounted for this state of affairs, Kate still had the impression that some terrible sorceress has passed through the world, blasting all living creatures with her wand and turning them to stone. Next to her, just passing by, was a young lad, younger even than her brother Sam. She guessed that he was a link-boy, hired by the middle-aged couple who walked at his side to light their way through the dark streets. No doubt they were headed for the fair. The man was dour-faced, while the woman – his wife, Kate supposed – wore a shapeless grey dress, and her thin lips were parted, as if she were about to speak. The boy’s flaming torch lit up their lined faces and cast a glow on the inside of the wagon. Kate had thought her resting place was empty; now she could see that it was not. The driver
of the wagon was nowhere to be seen but a small child, probably a girl, although it was difficult to be sure, lay curled on top of a bulging sack of grain in the corner of the wagon. Her hair tumbled over her face in soft, golden ringlets and she sucked her plump fingers. Kate reached out to stroke the child’s cheek but her flesh felt cool and hard, not like living flesh at all.