Once Every Never

  “Queen of the Library?”

  “Funny. Try Queen of Britain.” Al’s eyes never left the screen.

  “All of it?”

  “Well, a chunk of it, at least.” Click, click, click … Al paged through article after article, giving Clare the Coles Notes version as she went. “This was back in the first century ad and Britain was like a whole bunch of counties all ruled by different Celtic tribes. Boudicca’s tribe was called the Iceni and she ruled from a place that—in later years, once the Romans took over—was called Venta Icenorum … I don’t know what the Iceni called it. Anyway, it says here she was married to some guy named Prasutagus and had two daughters. Prasutagus was what they called a client king to the Romans, who were busy invading and taking over the country one tribal territory at a time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that, instead of getting conquered and enslaved, he paid Rome tribute and they basically let him keep the appearance of still being a king.”

  “So he was like a puppet.”

  “A live puppet, yeah. He made the deal and kept his head on. Apparently Mrs. Prasutagus wasn’t very happy about it.”

  “Boudicca.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The queen.”

  “Yeah. She was definitely a queen.”

  “Okay, okay.” Clare reluctantly gave in. “Whatever. I don’t need her life story. I just want to know what the hell a queen was doing bombing down a lonely river path in a chariot late at night, whipped half to death, with no king, no bodyguard, and only one hot dude and a dead chick for company.”

  “Not sure.” Al kept right on reading. “But if this Roman historian guy, Tacitus, is even half-right I’m guessing it had something to do with her inciting her tribe to ‘Rebellion Against the Armed Might of Imperial Rome.’”

  “Wow.” Clare knew enough history to know that Imperial Rome had indeed been mighty. And heavily armed. She also knew enough to know that, back in the day, those guys had conquered pretty much the whole of the civilized world. With swords and sandals. She tried to imagine what it would take to make someone rebel against that kind of power. Clare shouldered in closer to Al to get a better look at the screen. “What else does it say?”

  “Well … it says here that she was a—”

  “Clarinet!”

  Both girls jumped at the sound of Maggie’s sharp, annoyed tone.

  Clare’s aunt was bearing down on them from across the Reading Room floor like a ship in full sail. “Honestly—the single most unlikely place in this whole building where I’d think to find you and here you are. I’ve been searching everywhere. The next time you run off like that, young lady … oh, good lord!” Maggie stopped short, her eyes bulging huge over the rims of her half-specs as she gazed at the images on the screen. “Is it the End of Days? Is that actual history you’re reading about?”

  “Uh …” Clare blanked on a good comeback. “Yes?”

  Al was quicker on the draw. “I have a summer school assignment.” She rolled her eyes in feigned boredom. “Clare was just humouring me—don’t worry, Perfesser, she’s still normal.”

  “I’m assuming by ‘normal’ you mean still utterly untouched by intellectual curiosity. Well, thank Heaven, I suppose. I haven’t a notion as to what I’d tell your parents …” As always, the sarcasm dripped in jolly gobs from Maggie’s words. “All right, girls. The installation consult is taking a bit longer than expected. Clare, if I give you cab fare, can you and Alice manage to find your way back to the flat?”

  “No!”

  Maggie’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “No?”

  “I mean, yeah. Of course we can,” Clare amended. “But it’s okay. We don’t need cab fare, Mags.”

  “You don’t.”

  “No.” Clare turned and gave Al a look. “Al was going to call her cousin to come get her, and I’m sure he can drop me off on the way. Right, Al?”

  “Uh … right.”

  Maggie eyed her niece with thinly veiled skepticism. “No detours, no stopovers, no ‘retail therapy,’ no random shenanigans?”

  “None of the above.” Clare drew an X over her heart.

  “All right then. I’ll be home in time for dinner. Shall I pick up a curry on the way?”

  “Sure. Make it butter chicken and I’ll love you forever.” Clare stood and gave her aunt a hug. “You’re the best, Mags.”

  “I know, dear.” Maggie patted her fondly on the back and turned to leave. “Stay out of mischief, you two,” she said over her shoulder as she went.

  With a sigh of relief, Clare turned back to find Al staring at her, her head tilted to one side.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m just impressed by your ability to multitask,” Al mused, a half-smile ticking at the corner of her mouth. “With everything that’s happened to you today, you’ve still got Milo on the brain.”

  “I figure it this way,” Clare said dryly, plucking Al’s cell phone up off the table and handing it to her. “Now that I’ve crossed ‘Paranormal Phenomenon’ off my life-experience todo list, I might as well start working my way up to ‘Close Encounter.’”

  Al laughed. “Are you saying my cousin is an alien?”

  “I’ll let you know when I get close enough to find out.”

  Clare grinned at Al, but a chill crawled uncomfortably up her spine. Only a determined effort kept her gaze from straying back to the picture of the warrior queen who, even in that artist’s rendition, glared so fiercely out at the world, a wrath-filled Fury, frozen forever in time.

  5

  “So it’s Celtic, and it’s called the ‘Battersea Shield’ …”

  “Yes.”

  “But they found it in the Thames River?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because they found it in the part of the Thames that runs through Battersea.”

  “And when—”

  “Clare. Dear.” Maggie straightened up abruptly from her task. “Alice’s cousin didn’t give you any drugs, did he?”

  “What? No!” Clare jumped back, startled, from the work-table where she’d been leaning on her elbows, eating the remains of their takeaway dinner straight out of the foil container and peppering Maggie with questions. She hoped she wasn’t blushing too furiously at the mere mention of Milo. Clare was still inordinately pleased with herself just for having managed to form complete sentences in his car on the way home. Geeks were not supposed to make her feel weak in the knees. And they certainly weren’t about to start supplying her with illicit substances, if that’s what Maggie was implying.

  “I was just wondering, duckling …” Maggie shrugged and returned to dusting the pottery shards she’d laid out on her table.

  “What on earth would make you think something like that?” Clare asked.

  Maggie lifted her gaze over the rim of her glasses. “You do realize that you are in my work room, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you have been here for some time?”

  “Yeah.”

  Maggie put down her brush and straightened up, the arch of her eyebrow creeping skyward.

  “Mags—”

  “And that, during this extended tenure in what you have hitherto referred to as ‘the Basement Apartment in Downtown Deadsville,’ wherein you are normally loath to set one dainty purple-painted toe, you have asked a series of questions of, dare I say it, a decidedly academic—albeit grammatically suspect—nature.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Insofar as I am aware, your intellectual life has up to this point remained unsullied by queries regarding the nature of ancient archaeological artifacts.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve also never observed any particularly keen interest on your part in the veracity of noted historical chronicles. Or, as you so eloquently put it, ‘that Tacitus dude’s story about the bitchin’ redhead queen-chick’ …”

  “I don’t really talk like that, you kn
ow,” Clare muttered. “And I was just wond—”

  “I smell a rat.”

  “We are in a basement …”

  “Clarinet.” Maggie’s eyes sparkled fiercely. “What in the name of St. Helen’s holy underpants are you up to?”

  “It’s nothing. I swear!” Clare protested hotly as Maggie’s eyes glittered some more. “I just … I saw some stuff today that made me curious, okay? That’s all.” She pouted a bit for dramatic effect. “After all … you’re always telling me to open up my ‘TV-addled’ mind, y’know. I thought you might be happy …”

  Direct hit. Sunken battleship.

  Maggie’s stern expression melted and she stepped over to Clare, enveloping her niece in an only slightly awkward embrace. “Oh, my—oh I am! Clare, my dear, of course I’m pleased.”

  “Uh … good.” Clare returned the hug with a pat on her aunt’s shoulder. “Cool.”

  “It’s just that you’ve seemed—well—altered since this afternoon.” Maggie held her at arm’s length and peered into her face with genuine concern. “Are you certain you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine, Mags.” Clare nodded solemnly. “Really.”

  “You know you can always come to me if you have a problem, duck.” Maggie squeezed her shoulders gently and then turned briskly back to work. “Real problems, mind. I’d rather not hear sordid details about fashion gaffes or runny mascara or the uckiness that is ‘the teenage boy.’”

  “No sordid uckiness. I promise.”

  She bid her aunt a good night and headed out of the basement workshop. At the top of the stairs she absently stuffed her hands in the front pockets of her jeans—and gasped at the feeling of cold metal pressing against the palm of her hand. The sensation cut through a sudden, dizzying vertigo that threatened to send her plunging back down the stairs to Maggie’s lair. The house wavered and blurred like mist all around her and Clare felt herself starting to fade out of existence, just like back in the museum.

  Before that could happen—before she felt the lightning-bolt jolt that would send her once more hurtling through time—she jerked her hand out of her pocket and out of contact with whatever was in there. Clare gripped the banister as the walls around her resolidified and the sensations of smoke and sparkling dissipated.

  A cold sweat sprang up on her brow.

  Panting like a scared animal, she ran through the kitchen and up the stairs to her room. Slamming the door, she pushed the bolt lock closed. Then she stripped off her jeans and hopped about with her feet caught in the pant legs, pulling one sock half-off in her haste. Wide-eyed, she grasped the jeans by the cuffs and held them upside down over the bed. A gentle shake and the metal object that Clare had felt in her pocket tumbled out and onto the pastel meadow of her floral bedspread.

  “Oh God …” Clare moaned, stricken. “I’m a kleptomaniac …” She sank onto the bed and stared down at a round metal brooch decorated with the same kinds of swirling patterns that had adorned the bronze shield and the great golden torc in the museum.

  “Great.” Clare snatched up a chiffon scarf that was hanging off her bedpost and threw it over the brooch as if covering up evidence. “Now I’m a freak and a thief.”

  AL’S CELL PHONE rang straight through to her voicemail.

  “Al, it’s Clare. Call me back. Now!”

  Less than a minute later she called back again. “NOW!” Three minutes of hard staring at her phone did nothing to increase Clare’s incoming call ratio. An added five minutes of pacing produced less than fruitful results. Al was obviously incommunicado. Maybe screening her calls. Probably having a good chuckle with Milo over Clare’s pathetically dorky behaviour—

  She almost jumped out of her skin when the phone rang. Clare lurched across the room, knocking it off the side table and under the bed. She had to dive for it before it went to voicemail. Lying half under the bed, spitting at a dust bunny stuck to her lower lip, she shouted, “Hello! Al! Hello!”

  “Clare?”

  “Yes!”

  “Stop shouting.” It was Al. Rock solid, cucumber cool. Clare had never doubted her for a second. “What’s going on? In your message you sounded like you were being attacked by rabid badgers.”

  “Nothing so recreational,” Clare snorted. Then she poured out the details of finding the brooch and how it had almost sent her on another inexplicable time trip.

  “Maggie is going to murder me when she discovers I’ve gone all sticky-fingers on her. My mother already has her half-convinced I’m some kind of juvie just because of that stupid party …”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Al’s voice crackled with cell-phone hiss. “I don’t think you stole anything.”

  Clare blinked at the phone for a second. “Hello? Brooch?”

  “Look, Clare, I’m telling you,” Al said. “I was watching you the whole time—well, that is, when I could actually see you—and you didn’t touch anything even remotely broochlike.”

  Clare had stopped listening. “Oh God …” she moaned, certain of impending doom.

  “Clare … Clare! Get a grip.” Al’s voice finally penetrated Clare’s panic fog. “Jeezus. You’re gonna sprain something.”

  “Okay. I’m okay.” Clare struggled to keep from hyperventilating. Al’s reasoned tone helped. A little. “Oh God …”

  “Describe the brooch to me.”

  “Uh …” Clare hesitated. She didn’t even want to pull aside the scarf that covered the thing.

  “You don’t have to touch it,” Al coaxed. “Just look at it. Tell me what it looks like.”

  Clare reached out, gingerly snagged a corner of the scarf, and jerked sharply, pulling the cloth away as if a venomous tarantula hid beneath. She was almost surprised to see that the object was really very pretty and not the least bit threatening. Just a little open circle of gleaming bronze, the ends flaring out as they came together—not quite touching, interrupted by a hinged, straight pin that cut across the diameter of the circle. “It’s … uh … it’s round. Ish,” she said.

  “‘Ish’?”

  “Yeah …” Clare peered even more closely. “Not totally round, but close. Like a broken circle …”

  The whole of the design, she went on, was accented with twisting, knotted lines and a deep red stone was set at the top of the curve. Clare’s words trailed off as she looked closer and closer.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah … I’m still looking. Hang on …” Clare leaned in further, intrigued now in spite of herself. Up close there was nothing to be afraid of, it seemed. Not that she was going to touch it or anything.

  “Can you tell what the design is? Does it look like anything or is it abstract?”

  “Um … well … there’s these bits that curl around and stick out like … uh … oh, I get it! Those are wings. It’s a bird. I mean, it looks like a bird that’s been all kind of stretched out and rolled up and tied into a spirally knot like a pretzel.”

  “A pretzel bird?”

  “Yeah … kinda. I think the stone is its eye …”

  “You’re lousy at description. Look—take a pic and message it to me.”

  “Hang on.” Clare aimed her phone’s camera at the brooch and with a few clicks sent off a picture to Al.

  After a moment Al’s voice came back on the line. “That,” she said quietly, “is cool.”

  “It’s very cool,” Clare agreed. “I stole something very cool. From the British freaking Museum.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because it’s the truth.” That tone of utter assurance again. “There was nothing like this on the table. Nothing.”

  “Well then how—”

  “I have no idea. All I know is that, wherever you got that thing? It wasn’t from the restoration room.”

  CLARE GOT UP and went to the bathroom to splash some water on her face.

  She and Al had promised to meet the next afternoon. Al said she had something to show Clare that would put
things in perspective, but she wouldn’t say what. She’d made Clare promise not to do anything stupid until then.

  However, Clare quibbled silently to herself, she hadn’t specified what that stupid something might be …

  Padding back into her bedroom, Clare changed into a pair of yoga pants and a tank top that she could move in easily. She added a warm, fleece-lined hoodie—just in case—and slid her feet into her favourite high-top sneakers, lacing them up tight. If she’d had anything made of bulletproof Kevlar she would have put that on too, she thought, remembering the muscle-knotted arms of the thuggish soldier and the wicked-looking sword strapped to the belt of the handsome chariot driver. She shook her head and glanced up to make sure she’d locked the bedroom door. And then, holding her breath, she reached out to take the brooch in her hand …

  Sparks crowded around the edges of her field of vision and, just as before, Clare felt suddenly, giddily, light as a feather on a breeze. Every inch of her skin tingled and she braced herself for the impending jolt that would send her travelling through space and time. But the shock still took her breath away when it hit. The walls of her room wavered and then disappeared altogether in a haze of flickering ruby light, and Clare found herself spinning out once more into a void of darkness.

  6

  Before she could see anything, Clare heard a tiny metallic clanging sound—ting, ting—like the tolling of a miniature bell.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dimness she found herself sitting cross-legged on a hard-packed dirt floor in some kind of hut with rough stone walls and a sloping thatch roof. A long wooden workbench stood in front of her. She grabbed its edge and hoisted herself up, peering through the dusky air … and froze. Less than two feet away hunched the figure of a man silhouetted by the fiery glow of what looked like a forge. He was built like the icebox in Maggie’s kitchen, not overly tall but almost rectangular, with thick muscles, a great bullish head, a wild red tangle of hair, and a beard that looked as though it had been routinely singed in places. He wore a belted, sleeveless leather shirt laced up the sides and marred in places with dark scorch marks. His hands were monstrous things, meaty and almost pawlike, but as Clare watched, fascinated, his great thick fingers manipulated a tiny hammer and needle-nosed tongs with delicate precision.