Jake saw that Moll was there, but not the others. And he knew this street. He had seen it in Victorian times, when John Harcourt Symmes had lived here, and he had seen it bombed into oblivion when Symmes’s daughter, Alicia, had gripped his hand from under its rubble.
But today it was just a quiet, moonlit London square, its trees shadowy, its chimneys silver, its cobbles wet from a recent shower of rain.
David breathed out. “Moll,” he said. “What have you done?”
“It’s not another kidnap, cullies. Just a little detour,” she said breezily. “Just want to show you the old gaffe, Jake. Won’t take a sec.”
She ran across the road.
“What’s she up to?” David whispered.
“You really never know.” Jake went to follow, then saw her suddenly step back into the shadow of a lamppost and wave them into stillness. A sturdy policeman was plodding down the pavement, rattling the area gates and closing any that were open, humming tunelessly under his breath.
What year was this? Jake guessed, by the clop of distant carriages and the dim advertisements, that it was possibly only a few months before Alicia would come to claim her inheritance.
When the man had turned the corner, they flitted noiselessly across and up the three steps to Symmes’s front door.
Moll took out a key and slid it into the lock, turning it quickly.
Inside, the hall was dark; she lit the gaslamp and turned up the flame until it was steady and they saw the dim tiled hall and the stairs.
“Good Lord.” David looked around fondly. “Never thought I’d get to see this house again. I was here with Symmes, Jake, for at least a year, working on the mirror.”
“Yes. I know.” Nagged by a growing unease, Jake was watching Moll. She grinned, and slipped her cold hand in his. “Come on.”
The rooms downstairs were dim, the furniture shrouded with ghostly coverings.
She led them to the familiar door of Symmes’s study, and opened it. On the threshold she stood back with a proud smile. “There you go, Jake. Cop a load of that.”
“Hell fire!” David whispered.
The room was ablaze with light. It shone from the lamp on the desk, and it was reflected in the jewels. They lay carelessly on the desk and chairs and carpet, spilling from boxes and caskets—a diamond necklace, a set of emeralds, a purse of gold coins arranged in elaborate stacks as if a child had played with them like bricks or counters.
“For heaven’s sake, Moll.” David walked over and took up a ruby tiara. The precious stones shook in his hand. “These alone must be worth millions! Did you . . . ? Is this all . . . ?”
She shrugged, modest. “All my own work, David luv. Well, the gang too, of course. Not that we bother much with it. Tough to fence, some pieces. Just stacks up here, a bit.” She took out the Sauvigne emeralds and tossed them among the rest.
Jake shook his head. He was dazed with the thought of what she had done. “Moll, look. None of this is here when Alicia comes. The house is bare. We need to pack it all up and . . .” And what? He thought about taking it with them, but that appalled him. Crazy ideas about putting it all back slid through his head. “Maybe in our own time we can . . .”
He stopped.
Moll was sitting on a small stool, watching him with her steady, measuring gaze.
He said, “Once I promised I’d come back for you. I never did. That was wrong. So now . . . now I am asking you, Moll, to come. Back with us.”
“To the twenty-first century?”
“Yes.”
“Where there’s all those machines and not much disease?”
“Still disease. But better than here.”
“Where girls get educated?”
“Yes.”
His father was watching, sitting silent at the table.
“And you really want me to come. That so, Jake?” Moll tucked her hands under her knees.
Something was wrong. He blundered on. “You can’t carry on doing this. It’s far too dangerous. Jumping about in time, doing what you want. It’s mad. Anything could happen. “
“That’s what I like about it,” she said softly.
“Moll . . .”
“No, Jake. It’s time for you to listen.” She sat back, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. “See, I’m not the little urchin now, cully. It’s Moll the pirate-princess now. And I like it. We can’t go back Jake, not with all the time machines in the world, we just can’t. That’s something I’ve learned.”
She came over and took one of the necklaces and held it up. Tiny rainbows shimmered in the diamond drops. “I never took all this stuff for what it’s worth, Jake. I told you. Adventure, danger, the sheer fun of it—that’s what I want. I want to be someone unique in all the world, a rip-roaring girl, a wild, free, fierce lady with no one saying Moll do this and Moll do that.” She put the jewels down and suddenly she had his hands, both of them, and was grinning up at him. “I’ve heard all about your machines and your wars and your laws and it ain’t for me, cully. Far too prim and proper. Far too scary.”
“Moll . . .”
She spun him around, and he had to gasp out a laugh. “Moll, see sense! I want—”
“No you don’t.” She stopped suddenly. “You don’t, Jake. Or you would have come before. And I don’t blame you anymore either, because you’re right. We can be big friends, you and me. For always. Just like this.”
She let him go and stepped back, her face suddenly a little red. “Don’t want you to see me get old, Jake. All crabbed up and rusty. Not that I’m planning to get like that! Going to do things my way, you know?”
He nodded. Watching her, he thought that he had known it would be like this. From a small friendless child she had become someone who could be anything, do anything. That was a freedom no one would give up, least of all this small, feisty, cheerful girl he loved.
He said, “I get it, Moll.”
“Knew you would, cully. Knew you would.”
“But, you have to promise me to be so careful. And . . . maybe . . . in the future—”
She said, “No promises, Jake. That was where we went all wrong last time. But you’ll take a few presents. I like presents, David, don’t you?”
“You’ve already given me my son back,” David muttered. “Nothing else is that precious.”
Moll grinned. Taking a handful of the jewels, she selected the finest—diamonds, sapphires blue as the sea, emerald drops fit for a queen’s ears. “Maybe. But I want you to take these. You can use them for money, or give them to your lady-loves.” She thrust them into David’s hands.
“Moll . . .”
“And something else, Jake. Just for you.”
She opened a drawer in Symmes’s desk and took out a small diary, in black leather, its pages held with a tiny lock, the key taped to it. She looked at it a moment, then held it out.
He took it.
MOLL’S DIARY was scrawled on the front.
He said, “I’m not sure I should read this.”
“Up to you, cully. Only don’t get all puffed up when you do, because I was just a kid, Jake. Don’t let it all go to your head.”
He said, “Does it tell me how to journey without the mirror. Because you did that, going back to save Venn.”
She shrugged. “It’s all in there. And one big thing in there you’ll need. Or Venn will. The back pages are the work Symmes and I did about journeying to the future. After he met you and Venn it was all he thought about, and he learned loads. It’s possible. It’s how I came and snatched you.”
He stared. “The future? But . . .”
She eyed him. “You’ll need it. When you go after Janus.”
For a long time there was only silence in the room. Then Jake came over and carefully kissed her on the forehead. “Love you, Moll.”
A little red, she
stepped back. “Love you too, Jake. If you want a bit of thieving, any time, mind, you just ask. And I’ll come.”
She lifted her wrist and touched the bracelet, and looked back at him.
David stood, the jewels in his hands, as time rippled.
“Okay?” she whispered.
“Okay,” Jake said.
24
If any man can make a promise and keep it, Venn is that man. His willpower is all that has brought him through many encounters with danger. He is said to have despaired for a while, following his wife’s death, and for me that will have contributed to what later happened to him, the bizarre event of the lost days. He would have bitterly resented the waste of time.
Jean Lamartine, The Strange Life of Oberon Venn
“DON’T WORRY. They left with us. They’ll get here.” Venn flung a furious look around. “But what’s happened to my house? You, Piers! What the hell sort of protection do you call this!”
Piers got no further than opening his mouth.
Wharton snapped, “It’s not his fault the Shee are all over us. If anyone’s, it’s yours.”
Venn swiveled a frosty glare at him, but Gideon’s cool voice broke in. “Mortals waste a lot of time arguing. The Shee never argue. Maybe that’s why they live so free and easy.”
Wharton glanced at him sidelong. Venn turned quickly on Sarah, and Maskelyne. “We have another problem. Janus has an . . . artifact. A purple flower. It’s a spell that will give him some . . . well, not control but”—he flicked a glance at Wharton—“some sort of hold over Summer. We have to get it back. If he joins forces with her, we’re finished. Ideas?”
Rebecca stared at him in dismay. “How did he get that?”
Both Gideon and Wharton looked uncomfortable. Maskelyne stood quickly. “That was mine.” He spun on Gideon. “You took it from my book.”
Gideon shrugged an easy shrug. “Sorry. I thought it might help us against Summer.” But he didn’t seem sorry at all, Rebecca thought.
“Only if you want her besotted with you,” Maskelyne snapped. “It has to be recovered! At once.” He was standing by the mirror, and she saw again how he had no reflection in it, but was tall and dark as it was. And she felt it was some copy of him, some dark double.
Sarah paced the floor in agitation. “I can’t believe this! Janus and Summer! Together! That’s unthinkable!” She spun on Maskelyne. “We have to get him here. Call him. He’ll come.”
“Then what?” Rebecca said.
“Can we hold him in some way?”
“No. He has complete power over the mirror.” Maskelyne’s voice was husky and sour; he reached up and touched the scar on his face with light fingers, a thing he rarely did.
“But . . .” He paced, thoughtful. “It may be possible for me to destroy the purple artifact. I’d need at least five minutes. To invite him here is dangerous, and possibly deadly. It’s you, Sarah, he wants. You’ll have to keep him talking.”
She nodded, thinking anxiously of the coin, safely hidden in its hiding place on the roof. If Janus found out where that was, it was over for them all. She would die rather than tell him. But the coin had to be the bait.
She looked up. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
They cleared a space. Horatio swung shrieking into the vaults and sat on a gargoyle’s head, watching. The cats crawled away and hid themselves under tables and benches. Gideon carried the cradle as far from the mirror as possible, and placed it safely against the wall, looking down on the sleepy baby. The creature fascinated him, its wild wails, its constant hunger, its strangely attractive shape and smell.
The Shee had nothing like it.
Maybe that was why they stole such small, soft humans.
Why they had stolen him.
“Ready?” Venn was asking.
He dragged his thoughts back. “Yes. Ready.”
He took out the glass weapon and held it behind his back.
They gathered in a silent, nervous semicircle around the dark glass. Venn cast a quick glance around. The tangled brambles in the corridor outside glimmered with the curious peeping eyes of the Shee. He turned away from them. “Right. Sarah. It’s up to you.”
She took a breath and approached the mirror.
In it she saw a girl wearing a dark dress, her fair hair tousled and windblown, her face still smudged with the dirt of Paris. She looked into her own eyes, at her own complexity and her own fear. As she called out, she saw her own mouth making the words. “You, Janus! You, lurking there at the end of the world. I want to talk to you!”
Nothing.
Not even a ripple of the surface.
At the controls Maskelyne muttered, “He hears. Try again.”
With both hands Sarah gripped the unreadable silver letters of the frame. She felt between her fingers the power of the mirror, the plummeting depths within it, the eternity it contained.
She said, “I have what you want. I have the half coin, the coin with the head of Zeus. The coin that will destroy the mirror.”
Wharton stared. Gideon’s green eyes widened. But Venn, she saw, was not surprised. And neither was Maskelyne.
Doubt stabbed her.
Then, just before the mirror shimmered with eagerness, in its dark reflection of the lab, she saw something that made her catch her breath. Peeping from the pocket of Rebecca’s light summer cardigan, was the tiny curious eye and wooden beak of the talking bird.
She turned her head, fast as a cat.
Maskelyne looked up.
Their eyes met. She knew he had the coin.
But Janus was already in the room.
Wharton saw how the man came quickly, striding eagerly again down that long corridor that seemed to open in the glass. Grasping Gideon’s elbow, he muttered, “It will be a Replicant, so if there’s any sign of it taking Sarah, you blast it to bloody bits. I’m not having her sacrificed to solve Venn’s problems. Got that?”
The changeling nodded. His face was pale as ivory. But his hand was steady.
Venn moved up quickly and stood beside Sarah.
Janus came out, his footsteps the only sound. The moment of his stepping through the glass was silent; there was only the faintest spiteful spit from one of the hidden cats, and a rustle in the roof overhead. Then there he was, small and self-contained, his arms at his sides, boldly standing among his enemies.
Wharton had to admire the man’s guts, until he remembered it was only a Replicant.
Janus watched Sarah, his eyes secret behind the blue lenses. “You have the coin?”
She shrugged.
“You, and not Summer?”
“Not Summer.” She held him with her fierce defiance, willed herself not to be daunted by him, to remember that she hated him.
He smiled. “And, I suppose, you’ll just give it to me? I’m not a stupid man, Sarah. I hardly believe that.”
“We’ll trade it,” Venn snapped.
“What could be as precious to you?”
Venn was silent.
The room hummed. From the corner of his eye Wharton glanced at Gideon’s hand. It held the weapon tight.
The Replicant lifted its fingers to the flower in its lapel. It touched the purple petals. “Is this what you want, Venn?”
Then it happened, and it happened too fast.
Perhaps Maskelyne wasn’t ready, perhaps whatever energies he had managed to gather were not enough, because the bolt of light that flashed through the mirror was barely a shimmer. Even so the room rocked, a glass fell and smashed. Wharton grabbed the edge of the table.
Pure energy, the flare surged up and crackled around Janus. He looked startled, but then gave a small laugh and stood still; when it snapped away and left both him and the flower unharmed, he met their dismay with a nod of the head.
“Well. I didn’t think you were this desper
ate. Of course I can see you wouldn’t want me to be with Summer. But such jealousy, Venn! It shocks me. And your wife still so lost, still so dead! I’m beginning to think you can’t love her at all. You who don’t make agreements with tyrants.”
Venn stood silent, his skin Shee-pale.
“I’m afraid I don’t believe they would ever let you give me the coin, Sarah. But come back with me now, into the mirror.” Taunting, Janus held up the flower. “They can have this in return for you.”
She was still.
Alarmed, Wharton watched her, his whole body poised to grab her if she even moved a finger, because he knew she was considering it, her cropped head to one side, knew she was thinking of some desperate, despairing final journey.
But it was Maskelyne who moved. He stood up and Janus twisted, alert at once. “Ah! My friend the scarred man. You tried to destroy me once before and failed. I should have dealt with you then.”
The Replicant seemed to do nothing, but Maskelyne froze, seemingly caught for a second in a strange moment of memory.
“Let him go!” Rebecca snapped.
Janus shrugged. At once, as if the movement had released him, Horatio swung down from the dark. Hanging from his tail he snatched the purple flower from the Replicant’s fingers, leaped onto the top of the mirror, and clung there, chattering with joy.
Janus immediately grabbed Sarah.
Gideon whipped the weapon up, but before he could fire, Maskelyne snapped one icy command.
The Replicant’s eyes widened. It shattered like glass; became a stinging hail of fragments. Wharton dodged; Sarah flung herself back, one hand over her eyes. The pieces tinkled and fell on the table and workbench and floor, and they were pieces of a vitrified man, fingers and slivers of his face, sharp shards of his hair and eyes, a creature of smashed glass.
With a clash and clatter the last sliver rocked. They watched in appalled silence. Venn helped Sarah pick herself up. She shook glassy fragments, in horror, from her hair.
Then they all looked at Maskelyne.
The scarred man stood rigid, his eyes dark as the mirror. He said nothing as the marmoset, shaking in terror, dropped into Sarah’s arms, and clung to her, its tiny splayed fingers grasping tight to the dark rough sleeves of her housemaid’s dress.