The door opened, and there, thrown into relief against the dark passageway, stood three children, strangely dressed and dazzlingly fair. They wore long robes after the style of the London apprentice, but tied by silken cords, and their cleanliness, in seventeenth-century London, seemed not of this world. Their skins shone, and Emelius's quivering nostrils detected a delicate fragrance, as of fresh flowers strangely spiced.
Emelius began to tremble. His knees felt unsteady. He wanted to sit down. Instead he looked unbelievingly toward the paraphernalia of his spell. Could two dried frogs and a bunch of henbane do this? He tried to recall the gabble of Latin he had said over them.
"We are lost," said the female child in that strange foreign voice, clear-cut as rock crystal. "We saw your light burning, the street door was open, so we came up to ask the way." "Where to?" asked Emelius in a trembling voice.
"Anywhere," said the female child. "We are quite lost. We don't know where we are." Emelius cleared his throat. "You are in Cripplegate," he managed to say.
"Cripplegate?" said the female child wonderingly. "In London?" "Yes, in London," whispered Emelius, edging away toward the fireplace. He was terribly afraid. From whence had they come if they did not know they were in London?
The elder male child took a step forward. "Excuse me," he said, very civilly, "could you possibly tell us what century we are in?" Emelius threw up trembling hands before his face as if to ward off the sight of them. "Go back, go back," he implored, in a voice broken by emotion, "from whence you came." The female child turned pink and blinked her eyelids. She looked round the dim and cluttered room, with its yellowing parchments, its glass vials, the skull on the table, and the candlelit clavichord.
"I'm sorry," she said, "if we are disturbing you." Emelius ran to the table. He picked up the bowl with oil, the two frogs, the twisted henbane, and with an oath he threw them on the fire. They spluttered, then flared up. Emelius rubbed his fingers together as he watched the blaze, as if to rid them of some impurity. Then he turned, and again his eyes widened so that the whites showed. He stared at the children.
"Still here?" he exclaimed hoarsely.
The female child blinked her eyes faster. "We will go at once," she said, "if you would just tell us first what year it is-" "The twenty-seventh day of August, in the year of Our Lord 1666." "1666-" repeated the elder male child. "King Charles the Second-" "The Fire of London will take place in a week's time," said the girl child brightly, as if she were pleased.
The elder boy's face lit up too.
"Cripplegate?" he said excitedly. "This house may be burnt. It will start at the king's baker's in Pudding Lane, and go on down Fish Street-" Emelius suddenly fell on his knees. He clasped his hands together. His face was anguished. "I implore you," he cried, "go, go ... go. .. ." The girl child looked at him. Suddenly she smiled, with kindness, as if she understood his fear. "We won't harm you," she said, coming toward him. "We're only children -feel my hand." She laid her hand on Emelius's clasped ones. It was warm and soft and human. "We're only children-" she repeated. "Out of the future," she added. She smiled at her companions as if she had said something clever.
"Yes," said the elder boy, looking pleased and rather proud. "That's what we are, just children out of the future." "Is that all?" said Emelius weakly. He got to his feet. He spoke rather bitterly. He felt very shaken.
Now the youngest child stepped forward. He had a face like an angel with dark gold hair above a white brow. "Could I see your stuffed alligator?" he asked politely.
Emelius unhooked the stuffed alligator from the ceiling and laid it on the table without a word. Then he sat down in the chair by the fire. He was shivering a little as if with cold. "What else is about to come upon us," he asked gloomily, "besides the fire that will burn this house?" The little girl sat down on a footstool opposite him. "We're not awfully good at history," she said in her strange way. "But I think your king gets executed." "That was Charles I," the elder boy pointed out.
"Oh, yes," said the little girl. "I'm sorry. We could go back and look it all up." "Do not give yourselves this trouble," said Emelius glumly.
There was a short silence. The little girl broke it.
"Have you had the plague?" she asked conversationally.
Emelius shuddered. "No-thanks be to a merciful Providence." "Good show," exclaimed the elder boy heartily.
The little girl, asking permission, poked the fire to a brighter blaze. Emelius threw on another log. He stared miserably at the broken bowl blackened by burning oil. The old necromancer had doubly deceived him, for he, Emelius, quite by accident, had found a spell that worked. These children seemed comparatively harmless, but another mixture, lightly thrown together in the same irresponsible way, might produce anything-from a herd of hobgoblins to Old Nick himself.
And it wasn't as if he knew the antidotes. Whatever came would come to stay. He would never feel safe again. Never more would he dare throw sulphur on the fire with muttered imprecations; never more would he dare boil soups of frogs' spawn and digitalis; never more reel off Latin curses or spin the globe of the heavens into a dizzy whirl of prophecy. His uncertainty would manifest itself before his clients. His practice would fall off. His victims might turn against him. Then he would have to fly, to hide in some filthy hovel or rat-infested cellar, or it might mean prison, the pillory, the horsepond, or the rope.
Emelius groaned and dropped his head into his hands.
"Don't you feel well?" asked the little girl kindly. • Emelius kicked the log farther into the blaze. Then he raised haggard eyes to the little girl's gentle face.
"A child . . ." he said wonderingly. "I never knew"- he dropped his voice sadly-"what it was to be a child." "Oh, you must have known!" exclaimed the elder boy reasonably.
"Did you always live in the town?" asked the little girl.
"No," said Emelius, "I lived in the country. I should have said," he went on, adventuring into truth, "that I had forgotten what it was to be a child." "Well, you're pretty old," remarked the elder boy consolingly.
Emelius looked stung. "Thirty-five summers!" he exclaimed.
"Have you had a sad life?" asked the litle girl.
Emelius raised his eyes. A sad life. Ah, he thought to himself, that's what it is-I have had a sad life. Suddenly he longed to tell of his life. The years of fruitless labor, the dangers of his profession, its loneliness. He could talk with safety to these strange children who (if he managed to hit on the right spell) would disappear again into the future. He pulled his fur-trimmed robe up over his knees away from the fire, showing coarse yellow stockings, which hung upon his legs in wrinkles.
"There are few lives," he began rather gloomily, but as if he might be going to warm up later, "sadder than mine...." Then, in quaint words and phrases, he told the children of his childhood, the childhood he said he had forgotten; of how he had been sent out, an an early age, to gather herbs and simples; of the old schoolmaster who had taught him; of May and Maying; of a man who had stood in the stocks for poaching; of being beaten for stealing sugared plums; of how he had hated the nine times table and had worn a dunce's cap for Latin. Then he went on to his apprenticeship in London, the hardships and the disillusionment; the fear of starting on his own; the terror in which he lived; and the people who wouldn't pay their bills.