The footman cleared his throat. “Grub’s up, Contessa.”
“Thank you, James.” She stood, took Jake’s hand, and led him to the table.
He said, “Contessa?”
“Got to have a moniker, Jake, for this con. Like the spread?”
He sat, surveying the silver teapot, the plates of cakes and scones and sandwiches. For a moment he felt as if he was at a children’s tea party, the chairs too big, the food pink and sweet.
“It’s all for you Jake? It’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Great, Moll.”
“Go on, dig in. I know you’ll be starving.”
He was still hungry, but first he sat back and put both hands on the table and looked at them. Then he raised his head. “Why did you really bring me here?”
She buttered a scone. “You and me, Jake, we’re going to pull off the biggest, most sensational, most daring heist ever in the history of the world. A real adventure. Just like in the old days.”
“But—”
“Just listen, okay? On Midsummer Eve 1798, while Paris is all in riot, a bloke called the Vicomte de Sauvigne goes ahead with the Midsummer Ball at his château. He’s the owner of a stonking great necklace called the Sauvigne emeralds—big heirloom, costs a king’s ransom. At the ball, hundreds of guests, entertainment, fireworks, you name it. But that night the mob come marching out from the city and the château gets burned to a crisp. The Sauvigne emeralds are never seen again. Which is where we come in, Jake luv.”
He couldn’t believe it. “Are you crazy, Moll! All I want is to find my father, that’s all I’m thinking about, and you snatch me here for some stupid, what . . . jewelry theft? In one of the most dangerous times in modern . . .”
He petered out, because her face was so bright and excited.
“It’s going to be such fun!” She dropped the knife with a clatter and leaned toward him. “It’s not just the loot. It’s you and me, out there, plotting and planning and escaping. I’ve dreamed of it, Jake, for years, and now it’s here. We’ll have such a time! And”—she sat back—“of course there’s something in it for you. I’ve journeyed, Jake, been lots of places. Seen stuff. Found things out.”
He stared at her. “You mean . . . ?”
“Spot on, cully.” She took a huge bite of scone. Indistinctly, through the cream she said, “You help me out. In return, Jake, I tell you where I saw your dad.”
Wharton was lying on a striped recliner on a pile of sand among the trees. On his right was a round table and on the table a glass of bright orange fizzy liquid, a knotted straw angled in it. Next to that was a plateful of sticky cakes topped with icing, and an ice-cream sundae.
He frowned.
“What?” One of the Shee that Summer had assigned to look after him darted immediately from nowhere. There were four of them. His jailers. “What? What’s wrong?”
“My ice cream’s melted.”
The Shee, a pretty female in a brown dress as ragged as a moth’s wings, stretched a dainty finger and touched the glass. A cold crackle of frost solidified it immediately.
“Better?”
The Shee, Wharton was beginning to realize, like children, took everything to extremes. They knew nothing about subtlety. He gazed at the impenetrable mass of ice and said, “Thanks for that.”
The moth-creature looked relieved. “Anything you want, mortal, you just say.” It turned sideways, became a patch of bark on a tree-trunk. Then he couldn’t see it at all.
He wondered how many of them were all around, watching him. He reached out for the orange drink, and drew back. He broke off a lump of cake, crumbled it warily on the plate, and looked at it.
Best not.
All the folktales said if you ate the fairy food you were doomed to be in their power for all eternity.
Besides, the cake had the texture of mushy leaves.
He pushed it away. Lying back in the seat, he gazed up at the flawless blue sky and thought about that word. Eternity.
How long had he been here? Had years passed in the outside world? He dared not think that. To him it seemed like an hour or so, but nothing had changed; the sun had not moved by a fraction. Presumably he hadn’t grown even a second older, though, which was one good thing. He was in a timeless non-place, with no past or future, just an endless now.
It must have been like this for Gideon.
He pulled a face. He knew there was little chance of the boy coming back. Couldn’t blame him. No, he, Wharton, had to take charge of the situation. He was a prisoner of war. He’d seen all the training films. He knew what he had to do.
You formed an escape plan. You dug a tunnel, made a disguise, fooled the guards. Made a run for it. He had to try something like that. Get a grip, think clearly, not be bamboozled by the bloody Shee.
Get back and find Jake.
Suddenly, the sunlight was blotted out. He opened his eyes, jerking awake from the surprising snooze, to find Summer smiling down at him.
He sat up.
“Were you dreaming, George? I couldn’t quite see any dreams.”
“You can see them?” The idea appalled him.
“If I want to. I like to peep into the dreams of mortals, George. They’re so wild and whirling, so colorful and confused! I can flit and wander and crawl into the darkest, craziest corners. The Summerland has nothing on them.” She tucked her arm in his. “Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you my lovely country.”
He was hot and worried, but it would be useful to know the lie of the land, so he stood up and said, “If you say so. I’m your prisoner, after all.”
“My guest.” There was the tiniest edge of steel in that word.
“Whatever. Lead the way.”
Afterward, if there was such a thing as afterward here, he was not sure they had actually gone anywhere. It was more as if the world had moved past them, fracturing into a crazy kaleidoscope of smashed and splintered places, piled up around each other.
She took him through an empty Santa’s grotto into the deserted spaces of a big store’s furniture department, where some of the Shee were holding a wild dance, leaping hand in hand over the settees and beds and sofas, trampling the cushions and tangling in the curtains.
“Good Lord,” he said.
Summer danced a few steps. “Join us, George?”
“I’m . . . not much of a dancer.”
“You will be. Gideon trips a merry mazurka these days, I can tell you.”
Then she whisked him through a curtain and he was on a boat, a cruise liner, and he was wearing a white uniform and a peaked cap and she was twirling a parasol on the sun deck and staring out at the blue ocean. “You know, George, it’s not all dancing. We can go anywhere, do anything.”
The breeze was cool and fantastic on his sticky skin. He took the cap off and wiped his brow with an immaculate handkerchief. “So I see.”
“We could work together,” she said.
“We?”
“You and me.”
“How?”
“Venn is wasting the mirror. He’ll never get Leah back. If it was yours, you’d use it more wisely.”
She had plucked the thought from so deep in his mind, he only recognized it with a shock.
“Well. Maybe. But—”
“Think about it.” Summer leaned on the white rail. “Mortals get old, George. They get all wrinkled and crabby. Their teeth fall out. Their brains go. They end up as parodies of themselves. You don’t want that, do you?”
He tried to smile. “Summer, you’re leaving out all the good things about—”
“Old age?” She looked up at him. “Nonsense. What sort of old age do you face? Some cold and lonely little flat in Shepton Mallet. Just you and the television.” She smiled, and her lips were red and full. “But what if you could live for as long as you liked? If you f
elt a bit bored, or weary, just go back a few years. A decade maybe. Or even to the time you were twenty. Think of that, George, being young again, but with all the knowledge and wisdom you have now! Think of having your life over again, but so much better!”
He knew what she was doing. It wouldn’t work on him.
But, just for a moment, a fatal moment, he allowed himself to think of it. University. Well, he’d pick a better one than that flea-pit he’d gone to. And the exams! Easy for him now. Man of the world, confident, instead of that bluff, cringe-making idiot he’d been in those days. Women . . . well, he wouldn’t make those mistakes again. That girl in Devizes. He closed his eyes in dismay.
Summer watched, sidelong. She said softly, “You wouldn’t be a teacher this time.”
“No way! Nor the army. I’ve always wished I’d gone into pictures.”
“Pictures?”
“Paintings. Art. Not as an artist—I can’t draw for toffee. But as a dealer. Had my own gallery. Bought and sold. Big money in that, and I’ve always loved art.”
She nodded. Then she walked off the deck onto the sea and said, “Something like this?”
He gaped. They were in a room with white walls, and on the walls hung glorious Monets, a Rembrandt, some pastels by Degas, a van Gogh.
“Oh yes! Oh good Lord, yes. Fantastic! But where . . . ?”
“We’re in a private house in New York. A collector’s house. Do you like them, George?”
He stared at the riot of color that was van Gogh’s Irises. “They must be worth millions,” he breathed.
She put her arm in his and for a long moment they admired the painting together. Then, without taking his eyes off it, he said, “Just as a matter of interest . . . no commitment of course, just vaguely curious . . . what exactly would I have to do?”
She tugged him forward and with a small gasp of delight he went with her, and they walked right into the painting, and stood among the brushstrokes, the blue and gold and yellow.
She said, “Sarah has my half coin. The Zeus coin. She has it hidden somewhere in Venn’s house. Get it for me, George. Just get it for me. And the mirror and all the time in the world can be yours.”
8
The black glasse erupts from the deep heart of the erthe. Molten and twisted, it is as if hell itself hath bled and this is what emergeth. It is erthe’s wound.
When I found it I wept with delight.
Or was this all a dreme the Mirror made me dream?
From The Scrutiny of Secrets by Mortimer Dee
Moll’s diary.
So then. Me and JHS went across to this posh hotel opposite the museum and he ordered lunch. He said, “My dear Moll, we must celebrate!” and made the waiter bring champain.
We tapped our glasses. JHS took a swig, gasped a bit, and said, “We have seen our precious bracelet, my dear, and have given the fools that own it no sign of what power it holds. The next question, is how we get hold of it.”
He looked at me, and raised his eyebrows.
I’d already been thinking, you can be sure of that. I sipped the bubbly—it goes right up your nose, Jake—and I said, “Well, it’s a museum. We can’t just buy it. Let’s not mess about. You and I know it has to be nicked.”
He got all aeriated. “Moll! I’m not a thief!”
“Well, we could argue that one. But I am. And I know plenty more. Right?”
JHS squirmed. “I can’t say I find it a very ethical situation.”
“So you want to leave the bracelet there?”
He almost went electric. “Of course I don’t! Good heavens. To get my hands on it I’d pay a small fortune. But robbing the Ashmolean is not really something I thought I would ever have to do.”
“You don’t have to.” The waiter had brort the food and I was stuffing it down me as fast as I could. “You don’t have to do anything, cully. Just put up the dosh.”
“Dosh?”
“Lolly. Ackers. Money.”
“Ah.”
“I sort out the rest. I know plenty of people—”
“I’m sure you do.” He held up a flabby white hand. Nervous. “But maybe it’s best if I don’t hear any of the details at all, Moll. One of us has to stay clean.”
I saw it all then. If we was took, he wasn’t in on it, he wouldn’t know anything, would shake his head all sad about me, and say, “I dragged up the urchin from the streets and did what I could for her, but oh, officer, look how she has repaid me.”
Fair enough.
That’s the way the world rubs, Jake.
So I said, “A hundred should do it. In cash.”
He nearly choked on his guinea fowl. “What!”
Heads turned. I muttered, “Keep it down, JH. Think about it. It ain’t the Bank of England, but we still have to get in. Breaking a crib like that ain’t easy. I’ll need a cracksman, a carriage with fast horses, two, maybe three strong-arm men. They don’t come cheap.”
He chewed a bit, thoughtful. Then he wiped bread round the last gravy, swallowed it, and said, “Very well. But not a penny more, Moll.”
So much for the small fortune.
“And I must demand”—now he came over all hoity-toity—“that you ensure your friends do no damage. The hallowed portals of such a temple of learning . . . its exhibits, priceless to science . . .”
“They won’t have time.”
“And nothing else is to be stolen. I insist.”
The waiter came. “Would miss like dessert?” Miss would. Miss ordered the most expensive one. When he’d gone, I sat back and gave it to the old sod straight. “Can’t be done, cully. If only the bracelet is gone the rozzers’ll ask about who showed any interest in it, and they’ll be knocking on your door before you can say Wormwood Scrubbs. Best take a few more bits and pieces too—gold, mostly. Just to keep the law thinking these were just thicko thieves.”
“Ah. Yes. I see. Well. If you think so.”
Dear old JHS. The poor old bird doesn’t have a clue. He sipped his coffee and sat back, gazing round the big room with its waiters and la-di-dah diners. “If only they knew, Moll! That we were planning a robbery right here, and as a result of it we will journey far into the future!” His bald head glistened, his eyes were wide and greedy. “We will achieve such things, Moll!”
“Course we will,” I said, folding my napkin on the table. Got to confess, Jake, luv, I was thinking of you.
Finding you.
Venn stepped back; Maskelyne grabbed the black pen from his hand and stared at it with something like horror. “Are you mad? You have no idea—”
The mirror gave a great crack.
For a moment they all thought it had broken; then it sparked and seemed to ripple. Gideon leaped away, Shee-swift, sure it would explode. Piers gave a moan of terror.
The black glass was gone. Instead, inside the silver frame they saw a sudden endless tunnel into utter darkness, and the tunnel was hung with lanterns, a small flame guttering in each.
“What’s going on?” Venn stared, fascinated. “This is not how it usually works.”
Maskelyne seemed frozen with dismay. “You asked him a question.”
“What?”
“Janus! You asked him. Did you think he wouldn’t answer? He’s coming.”
And now Gideon could hear them, the footsteps, softly approaching down the tunnel that led to the future, could hear them coming calmly and resolutely, and somewhere tiny in the distance a shadow began to flicker past the lanterns.
Venn snapped, “Piers. The glass weapon!”
The small man swore and raced for the safe.
“That will only kill Replicants.” Maskelyne ran to the controls. “Don’t you see, maybe this is really him. If he gets in here, he’ll have an open channel to send anything through. His Time Wolves and his distorted creatures. His Adjusted Children
.”
“Like Sarah?”
Maskelyne spared him a haunted glance. “Worse. You have no idea.”
“What do we do?”
“Stop him. We have to stop him.”
The scarred man was stabbing at the controls. The mirror darkened; a few of the lanterns flickered. But the passage stayed open. A strange, cold draft of air gusted from it. Gideon took a step closer, curious despite his disquiet. He could smell the future down that tunnel, and it was a metallic, toxic smell, the smell of a bitter and windy November day, somewhere without sunlight. There was an absence in it, a lack of life that made him shiver.
Piers had the glass weapon. Venn took it from him.
“I told you that won’t stop him!” Maskelyne’s voice was bleak.
“Then close the mirror.”
“I can’t.”
“Rub the writing off!” Gideon ran forward and lifted his sleeve, but then, if Venn had not grabbed him, he would have plunged straight in; the glass was a vacancy and the written words hung in the air, demanding an answer. And the approaching figure was clear to them all now, a small man in a neat uniform, his graying hair tied back, his eyes hidden behind round blue spectacles.
“Don’t come any closer.” Venn lifted the gun.
Janus kept coming. “Don’t you want to know the answer to your question, Venn? I’ve done nothing with Jake. I have no idea where he is. Such a risk for such a useless answer.”
“Stay back.”
Janus did not even pause. He paced steadily toward them, past lanterns that flickered in his draft. In the lab, all the alarms triggered; lights flashed urgently on the panel.
A ripple ran through the Abbey walls; one of the columns shifted. Dust cascaded from the roof.
Piers clutched his hands together. “Do something! Excellency!”
“Shut up!” Venn swung a savage glare on Maskelyne. “You! This thing responds to you! Close it down! Now!”
Maskelyne was still. Only his fingers danced on the controls. The scream of the alarms was deafening; Gideon wanted to cover his ears in agony. Instead he grabbed a knife from the desk and stood shoulder to shoulder with Venn. His heart was pounding. Strange joy was surging in him. This was something he had never known in the Summerland. He felt terrified, exhilarated. He felt alive.