"Perhaps tomorrow," said Jagged.
Munroe made his stately way up Whitehall.
Light began to touch the tall buildings.
"Oh, look!" cried My Lady Charlotina. "It's a proper old-fashioned dawn. A real one!"
The Duke of Queens clapped Jherek on the shoulder. "Beautiful!"
Jherek still felt he had earned the Duke's esteem rather cheaply, considering that he had done nothing at all to produce the sunrise, but he could not help indulging an immensely satisfying sense of identification with the wonders of the 19th century world, so again he shook his head modestly, but allowed the Duke to continue with his praise.
"Smell that air!" exclaimed the Duke of Queens. "A thousand rich scents mingle in it! Ah!" He strode ahead of the others who followed him as he turned along the embankment, admiring the river with its flotsam, its barges, its sheen of oil, all grey in the early dawn.
Jherek said to Mrs. Underwood. "Will you now admit that you love me, Mrs. Underwood? I gather that your connection with Mr. Underwood is at an end?"
"He seems to think so." She sighed. "I did my best."
"Your singing was marvellous."
"He must have been fairly unstable to begin with," she said. "However, I must blame myself for what happened."
She seemed unwilling to speak further and, tactfully, Jherek shared her silence.
A tug-boat hooted from the river. Some gulls flapped upwards into a sky of soft and glowing gold, the trees lining the embankment rustled as if awakening to the new day. The others, some distance in front of Jherek and Mrs. Underwood, commented on this aspect and that of the city.
"What a perfect ending to our picnic," said the Iron Orchid to Lord Jagged. "When shall we be going back, do you know?"
"Soon," he said, "I would think."
Eventually, they left the embankment and turned into a street Jherek knew. He touched Mrs. Underwood's arm. "Do you recognize the building?"
"Yes," she murmured, her mind evidently on other things, "it is the Old Bailey, where they tried you."
"Look, Jagged!" called Jherek. "Remember?"
Lord Jagged, too, seemed abstracted. He nodded.
Laughing and chattering, the party passed the Old Bailey and paused to wonder at the next aspect of the period which had caught their fancy.
"St. Paul's Cathedral," said Donna Isobella, clinging to Bishop Castle's arm. "Haven't you seen it before?"
"Oh, we must go in!"
It was then that Lord Jagged lifted his sensitive head and paused, like a fox catching wind of its hunters. He raised a hand, and Jherek and Mrs. Underwood hesitated, watching as the others ran up the steps.
"A remarkable —" Bishop Castle vanished. The Iron Orchid began to laugh and then she, too, vanished. My Lady Charlotina took a step backward, and vanished. And then the Duke of Queens, his expression amused and expectant, vanished.
Donna Isobella sat down on the steps and screamed.
They could hear Donna Isobella's screams from several streets away as Lord Jagged led them hurriedly into a maze of little cobbled alleys. "We'll be next, if we're not lucky," he said. "Morphail Effect bound to manifest itself. My own fault — absolutely my own fault. Quickly…"
"Where are we going, Jagged?"
"Time machine. The one you originally came in. Repaired. Ready to go. But the fluctuations caused by recent comings and goings could have produced serious consequences. Brannart knew what he was talking about. Hurry!"
"I am not sure," said Mrs. Underwood, "that I wish to accompany either of you. You have caused me considerable pain, you know, not to mention…"
"Mrs. Underwood," said Lord Jagged of Canaria softly, "you have no choice. The alternative is dreadful, I assure you."
Convinced by his tone, she said nothing further for the moment.
They came to an alley full of bleak, festering buildings close to the river. At the far end of the alley, a few men were beginning to move boxes onto a cart. They could see the glint of the dirty Thames water.
"I feel faint," complained Mrs. Underwood. "I cannot keep us this pace, Mr. Jackson. I have had no sleep to speak of in two nights."
"We are there," he said. He took a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock of a door of mouldering oak. The door creaked as he pushed it inward. Lord Jagged closed the door, reached up to take an oil lamp from a hook. He struck a match and lit the lamp.
As the light grew brighter, Jherek saw that they stood in quite a large room. The floor was stone and the whole place smelled of mildew. He saw rats running swiftly along the beams in the roof.
Jagged had crossed to a great pile of rags and debris and began to pull them to the ground. He had lost some of his composure in his haste.
"What is your part in this, Mr. Jackson?" said Mrs. Underwood, averting her eyes from the rats. "I am right, am I not, in believing that you have to an extent manipulated the destinies of myself and Mr. Carnelian?"
"Subtly, I hope, madam," said Jagged, still tugging at the heap. "For so abstract a thing, Time keeps a severe eye upon our activities. I had to be careful. It is why I adopted two main disguises in this world. I have travelled in Time a great deal, as you have probably guessed. Both to the past — and the future, such as it exists at all in my world. I knew about the 'End of Time' before ever Yusharisp brought the news to our planet. I also discovered that there are certain people who are, by virtue of a particular arrangement of genes, not so prone to the Morphail Effect as are others. I conceived a means of averting disaster for some of us…"
"Disaster, Jagged?"
"The end of all of us, dear Jherek. I could not bear to think that, having achieved such balance, we should perish. We had learned, you see, how to live. And it was for nothing. Such an irony was unbearable to me, the lover of ironies. I spent many, many years in this century — the furthest back I could go in my own machine — running complicated checks, taking a variety of people into the future, seeing how, as it were, they 'took' when returned to their own time. None did. I regret their fate. Only Mrs. Underwood stayed, apparently virtually immune to the Morphail Effect!"
"So you, sir, were my abductor!" she cried.
"I am afraid so. There!" He pulled the last of the coverings free, revealing the spherical time machine which Brannart Morphail had loaned to Jherek on his first trip to the Dawn Age.
"I am hoping," he continued, "that some of us will survive the End of Time. And you can help me. This time machine can be controlled. It will take you back to our own age, Jherek, where we can continue with our experiments. At least," he added, "it should. The instability of the megaflow at present is worrying. But we must hope. We must hope. Now, the two of you, enter the machine. There are breathing masks for both."
"Mr. Jackson," said Mrs. Underwood. "I will not be bullied any further." She folded her arms across her bosom. "Neither will I allow myself to be mesmerized by your quasi-scientific lecturings!"
"I think he is right, Mrs. Underwood," said Jherek hesitantly. "And the reason I came to find you was because you are prone to the Morphail Effect. At least in a time machine we stand a chance of going to an age of our choice."
"Remember how Jherek escaped hanging," said Lord Jagged. He had by now opened the circular outer door of the time machine. "That was the Morphail Effect. It would have been a paradox if he had died in that particular way in this age. I knew it. That was why I lent myself to what appeared to you, Mrs. Underwood, to be his destruction. There is proof of my good-will. He is not dead."