Even before she could get hold of Michael again, Tarquin was across the room and rattling the handle. “Walk out of this building,” he raged, “and all offers are withdrawn. The Empire won’t last a dozen years without our help. You won’t last a day at liberty in this country. Come back in here and let me save you and the Empire.” He rattled the door again and shouted in English at the priest. “Michael!” he roared. “You can and will be killed on sight if Hooper’s people don’t get to you first—and that won’t be good for you either. If she survives, the girl will curse the day she met you. Come back here—please, Michael, come back…” His voice turned to pleading, before fading away as Jennifer led Michael through the front door into the darkness and silence of the street outside.
Chapter Twenty Nine
“It began last August—August in my world, that is,” Michael said, his voice trembling with the mortal shame of a confession he’d been left with no choice about making. “Everyone thought it was the one incident. We made the three thousand miles between Constantinople and London without any sign of its return. It can’t come back now—not now!” He looked up at the brown, faintly glowing, canopy of the sky. He looked down to where he imagined the slow and oily waters of the Thames must be flowing past the beach. Because they sat in the darkness of an embankment, he didn’t need to worry if his tears could be seen. Jennifer took her arm from about his shoulder. He felt her press another of the paper towels into his hand. He blew his nose, and wondered if he could get away with a comment about the effect of coal smoke. But she had her arm about him again just as he gave way to a little sob.
Suddenly, she sat up. “Oh, Jesus!” she cried. She got out Tarquin’s communication machine. Obviously, she’d forgotten all about it in the panic of nearly carrying Michael away from the house, and then explaining to him that any return to the tunnels was out of the question—“They’ll be watching every single exit before dawn,” she’d breathed in his ear. Now, as they sat on the northern shore of the Thames, the machine had lit up and was buzzing like a box filled with summer insects.
“Can’t you send it to sleep again?” he asked, his voice reasonably back in order.
“The police can find us anyway,” she answered, stabbing repeatedly at one of the buttons. When this failed to darken the display, she ripped the machine from its leather case and pulled its back off. The machine was now in three pieces. She stood up, and the little stones of the beach moved under her feet as she threw the pieces away with all her strength. He heard two splashes as they landed in the River. She reached down for Michael’s hand. “We can’t stay here.”
“Where next?” Michael got up without help. Beyond the flight of steps that had brought them down here, the street lighting came on. Still in the shadow of the embankment, he looked up at the reflection of light from the now orange clouds. He’d been wondering about the tall metal structures that lined many of the roads. He could see he’d been right about their function, though hadn’t expected the brightness of their collective glow. He looked about and came to a decision. “Keep against the wall, and try not to make a noise on the shingle.”
They hurried downstream, passing under the forbidding spans of two of the bridges. Above them, on the left, perhaps the whole of London was lit up with a wondrous glow he dearly wanted to go up and behold. At irregular intervals, Michael stopped and listened. Once or twice, he might have heard someone walking along the embankment. But he had no sense of being followed. At last, the girl got a stone in her shoe. He helped her under the arch of another bridge and sat down.
“It was a stupid plan,” he said, voicing his own thoughts, and, he had no doubt, hers too. “I should have guessed the driver would be questioned.” He stopped himself in time from regretting that he hadn’t cut Tarquin’s throat and trusted the priest not to let on there were two of them. He heard a scrape of feet on shingle. He strained to see in the darkness. “Who are those men over there?” he asked sharply. He got noiselessly up and reached for Jennifer.
She listened, then relaxed. “They’re speaking French,” she said. “I think there’s a big refugee settlement behind us. Perhaps they’ve come down to catch fish.” Still not sitting down, Michael tried harder to see through the gloom separating them from the shoreline. With an uncertain glimmer, the men got a fire alight. They raised a subdued cheer and jabbered away again in a language that wasn’t English. He hadn’t seen them come down from the embankment. Nor, though, had he been aware of anyone keeping pace on their right while he’d hurried her along the beach. Perhaps they’d been down there all along. There was a gentle glow as the fire took hold of the driftwood, and then a cheerful cry in their language. Jennifer wasn’t moving. Unless they wanted to continue along that beach until—for all he knew, late the next morning—they passed right out of London, there was nowhere left to go. He sat down again and stared suspiciously at the fire. Now it was properly alight, he could see there were three men about it. They were bigger than any vagrants he’d ever seen. Then again, until about the time he was first visited by the epilepsy, they might have been men of some importance. The Break, he knew, had caught out multitudes of travellers in each direction.
He put his arm about Jennifer. “It wasn’t a complete waste,” he said, trying to raise two sets of spirits. “At least we can be sure that I am the one you heard Abigail Hooper discussing last night. We can also be sure that I’d never have been with Tarquin on that flying machine to Constantinople.”
Or could he? Like a bubble, pushing its way through a dense medium, he could feel a further thought working its way from the depths of his mind. He looked over to where the southern shore might be. “But, Jennifer,” he asked, “didn’t Tarquin imply that he was not working for Hooper?” He frowned and thought back to just before his latest moment of disgrace. “If you don’t come back with me, it will be Hooper’s people who pick you up”—that was what Tarquin had said. It might be worth asking about the conversation he’d heard Tarquin having through his machine. If it really had been with Hooper, or her people, why so long for any evidence that he was being chased? Why had they been able to run for miles through London before anyone thought to put on the street lighting? The answer was obvious, and, if he’d only been a proper man, there wouldn’t now be any question. All that remained was to ask if he should raise his voice to the girl.
“Michael, I’ve been thinking,” Jennifer said rapidly. “I don’t know if you’ll believe me, or even understand. But I think I’ve worked some of this out. Plainly trying for the right words in Latin, she took a deep breath. “Hooper’s been running something called the Gateway Project. Her people have found a way to open a crossing back into the world we left behind last year. She’s got in touch with representatives of the big power of which Britain was a province—or a satrapy, I think, is a better word. Perhaps her idea was to escape through this gateway in time. But she’s had someone come into our world to look about, and she hasn’t gone back with him.” He listened as she drifted from this crisp statement of the outrageous into a circular and increasingly depressed mumble about how, if Hooper were in touch with her own world some time before The Break, she hadn’t already been aware of The Break and been better prepared for it.
Michael gave up on thoughts of harshness. If she’d opened with the assumption that all this was too deep for a poor Greek to follow, the girl couldn’t have read any Plato—nor heard him explained by Michael Psellus in a classroom of sceptical boys. And Psellus hadn’t been anything like the first to talk about multiple universes. Look at those wordy neo-Platonists Michael had been forced to read before he was let into the Diplomatic Service. “I understand you perfectly well,” he said, “and, considering what has already happened, I’ll take it as a good working hypothesis.” He put his thought bubble out of mind. Its contents might not be so important.