“You’ve done your research,” said Churchill. “But weren’t they subsequently moved to England?”
“Not until February 16th, of 1805. They were loaded aboard the British vessel Lady Shaw Stewart, Royal Transport Number 99. So between that date, and the date of the final recovery, all the crates were simply kept right there on the beach at Kythera, covered with sand and brush, and kept under daily guard. So the Selene Horse is there—right there, in late 1804. If that passage in St. Michael’s cave holds true and delivers a traveler to that time, then we can go and find that key before it ever reached England.”
At that, Churchill raised an eyebrow. “How would that be possible, because it clearly did reach England. How else would it have been loaded onto the Rodney with the rest of the marbles?”
“An interesting point,” said Elena. “However, since 1804 predates the arrival of the Marbles in England, there is no reason why I would not find it there.”
“Yes, but if you do so, then you never had reason to come here looking for it aboard the Rodney. Yes?”
“Possibly,” said Elena. “It sounds like a little paradox, but we think we have the answer. The rift crosses the line to another meridian of time.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Well let me put it this way… In all the history I know, the Germans never occupied the Rock, nor did they ever reach Moscow. This is an altered meridian, and that rift is reaching one where no change has contaminated it. I could go there, retrieve that key, and why would Time object? I had no idea the key I was given, or the device I discovered at Delphi, would move my ship here. I had no knowledge of this other key, nor any thought of the Earl of Elgin in my mind at all when our displacement first occurred. So there is no paradox of intent being foiled by the fact I already possessed the key.”
“I suppose that’s sound enough reasoning,” said Churchill. “But suppose you do send those gentlemen of yours through.”
“You mean my Argonauts?”
“Yes. Very handy fellows. Suppose you send them and they bring back this key. What then? What would you do with it?”
“Another good question. All I know is that there are seven apertures on the device in my cabin aboard Argos Fire, and one is most likely reserved for that key. If we’re ever to solve this mystery, I’ll need to go and fetch it. Would you have any problem with that?”
“If you’re asking for my consent, it is given. But Miss Fairchild, I was told that all these alterations you spoke of first originated in the year 1908. Now here we are talking about a little jaunt to 1804, over a hundred years earlier. Might I advise caution while you are there. I know your Argonauts are quite effective, but a bullet in the wrong place might have some alarming repercussions. You might shoot someone’s grandfather, if you fathom what I’m getting at.”
“Understood,” said Elena. “We’ll be as cautious as we can, but the mission must succeed. The order will be that no one of that era is to be harmed, but we may have to make a show of force if stealth and guile won’t serve.”
“Show it if you must,” said Churchill, “but be a little reticent to use it.”
It was more than someone’s grandfather on the chopping block of time. Fairchild had taken hold of a rope that was leading her to a most dangerous place. It didn’t start off that way. In the beginning, it was just a little competition between two men with more time, money and accompanying ego, than common sense. It was the sort of thing that sent them to hire experts to go and fetch ashes for sport, and those of Mister Churchill himself had been collected at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon. The substance of his very being had been gathered up, compressed, and made into a trophy diamond to garner little more than bragging rights in a selfish contest between two very powerful and vain men. What the Prime Minister might think or say about that would be something to hear.
The man behind that little caper was one we have met long ago, and perhaps forgotten, but he has been about his business all this time, a keyholder, and one that has remained hidden from the Watch, Elena Fairchild, and even avoided the scrutiny of a man like Director Kamenski.
That man was, of course, one Sir Roger Ames, the Duke of Elvington, and his secret trip to Lindisfarne was undertaken, in part, to do exactly what Miss Fairchild was now about. The Duke knew more than he ever told, and was aware that other keys existed in this world that could open some very well hidden doors. His was but one of them, and it turned out to be a most useful key indeed, for it delivered him to a most fateful time and place, the eve of one of the great battles of modern times—Waterloo.
Duke Elvington had something to do there, someone to kill, as he put it to his so-called footman, and it was all a part of the same game he had been playing with his rival, one Jean Michel Fortier a wealthy French industrialist like Ames. Fortier had no love for England, dubbing it the bully of the 18th and 19th centuries.
“The world would have been so much better off,” he claimed, “if the British Empire had died at Waterloo instead of French Imperialism.” The man claimed he was directly related to the French Capetian King Philip IV, The Fair, also called the “Iron King,” for it was he who had completely annihilated the order of the Knights Templar in his time. Ames never knew whether that lineage held true, but it hardly mattered. The deprecating remarks Fortier would constantly make about England quickly set the two men in opposition, and history was to be the shuttlecock they would slam back and forth at one another.
They had competed in everything since that moment, wheeling and dealing as they attempted to gain advantage over one another in their business ventures. They competed for the same real estate, sought investment control over the same companies, and when their economic sparring had run its course, they jousted for the favors of the same elegant and well placed women. The competition led to some very odd games. Fortier once also boasted that he would one day wear Churchill on his little finger. Ames had countered by saying he would secure the remains of Bonaparte himself, fashion them into a pendant that he would dangle around the neck of the woman Fortier was obsessed with at the time, and take her away. Then he had commissioned a resourceful man to secure Churchill’s ashes before Fortier could get to them, and he fashioned the diamond himself.
And so went the game.
Now, however, it was getting quite serious, for the key that the Duke had acquired gave him what he first believed to be an unassailable advantage—Lindisfarne. It opened the doorway to a hidden passage within that ancient coastal keep and monastery, and it led to a most remarkable place. He had explained it to his hired man, Mister Thomas, when the real truth of what had happened as they traversed that hidden tunnel became evident.
“Few men or women will know what I will now tell you.” He began. “To put it simply, the world we have just come from is in real jeopardy, not just with that war brewing up like a storm on our near horizon, but because it seems time itself has simply run itself down there. Things are starting to come apart and it’s about to get very strange, which is why it was necessary that we go somewhere else.”
“I don’t understand, sir. How could we move in time?”
“Of course you don’t. Let me see if I can explain it. You are given to thinking of time as something you always have, and always spend, like these shillings in my leather pouch here.” He cupped the pouch under his waistcoat and went on. “You think of your life as beginning at birth, when you are handed a nice big bag of coinage in time, and you spend two pence a day until you run out. You move through time every day. Yes? But you always move in the same direction, forward. The thought that you might ever take a step back, to unsay an ill made remark, or correct some other misjudgment often crosses every man’s mind, but it’s not something he can ever do—or so he believes. You’ve heard the poetry by Omar Khayyam: ‘The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’ So it has seemed to be true for most of our lives. Yet I have found it to be in error, Mister Thomas. Other men have too—though they are very few in number.”