“You can’t order me. I’m not under your command.”
“This is war, sir.” The revolver was raised, just a fraction. “Step outside.”
Allenby glanced at Jake. He drew himself up. Very formally he said, “I’m sorry Mr. Wilde. There’s nothing I can do. Good luck.” He reached out and dropped the key into the officer’s outstretched hand.
Then he ducked through the tent flap.
At once they moved. Venn grabbed Jake tight. “George! Stand close! Close!”
Jake took one last look around. Wharton was staring out at the street, his eyes wide. “This is amazing!” he was muttering. “Bloody bloody bloody amazing.”
Venn grabbed him and yelled at the mirror. “We’re coming now, Piers!”
The sound rang out like a gunshot across the bomb site. Allenby swore, threw down the cigarette, and ran, all his men stumbling after him.
He flung open the tent door and stared in astonishment.
The mirror stood in its tilted splendor. Apart from that, the tent was empty.
Gasping behind him, the sergeant’s breath was hot on his neck. “Bloody hell! Where did they go!”
Allenby had no answer. “More to the point,” he said, grim, “where did they come from?”
“Are you all right?” Sarah hurriedly unlocked the handcuffs as Jake stood on the floor of the lab as if in a daze.
“Fine. I gather Gideon got back, then.”
“Eventually. You must have been terrified.”
He wasn’t listening. Instead, so slowly and deliberately that it scared her, he reached out and took the greasy key-fob that had been Allenby’s out of her fingers and stared at it. It was old, well-worn red leather. On it was the metal image of a fox, with a mouse dangling from its grinning mouth. Johnson’s Car Repairs, it said, Black Fox Lane, High Holborn.
“What?” she said, anxious.
He looked at her, disbelieving. As if he couldn’t trust what he saw.
“The Black Fox will release you,” he whispered.
Cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?
11
Of course my marriage was a failure from the start. Moll saw to that. Moll with her cheeky urchin ways, with the run of the house, with her increasingly bold plans to find us a bracelet, to travel to the future, to find Jake Wilde.
I had also grown far too fond of the little scrap.
When my wife said, “She goes or I do,” I’m afraid it was not a difficult decision.
Diary of John Harcourt Symmes
SARAH SAT ON the end of her bed and stared at the open pages of the notebook.
Downstairs, in the sleeping house, a clock pinged three silver chimes.
With the black pen she had scrawled:
What’s happening there? Tell me!
No answer. The writing faded before her eyes.
This was the third time tonight she had begged him, increasingly despairing, and she knew he had read it. Far off in time, surrounded by his empire, powered by the ferocious energy of the mirror, Janus was tormenting her with silence.
She flung down the pen and went to the window. It was a wild, windy night. Since Summer’s furious tempest, the weather had been a constant gale; now the lawns of Wintercombe were silvered by a moon half hidden in streaming cloud.
Tugging the dressing gown around her, she hugged herself, staring out stonily at the storm. Janus was the future, but for everyone else, he didn’t exist yet. For Jake, Wharton, even for Venn, that world was only a possibility, something that didn’t need to be thought about. For her it was real.
Her past.
Her life.
Her parents.
It was as real as standing here, or that Blitz-shattered London Jake had told them about around the fire last night, his hands, still red from the manacles, tight around the battered mug of coffee.
She thought about this house in that century to come, its ruined state, the collapsing wings, the charred timbers of the fire-blackened roof. That was Wintercombe too.
And in that time the mirror was consuming the world.
She turned, alert.
From the corridor outside had come the very faintest of creaks. Holding her breath, still as a shadow, she listened.
Someone was padding, very quietly, past her room.
She crossed barefoot to the door, opened it, and put her eye to the slit.
It was Jake. He was wearing his gray striped dressing gown and had the monkey on his shoulder. As she watched he stopped at Wharton’s door, tapped on it softly, and slid in.
She didn’t hesitate. Deep inside her mind was the switch that would make her invisible. Janus’s gift, that she hated to use. But now she let it operate, felt its warm itch flare in her skin.
She slipped out quietly.
Wharton’s bedroom was the last in the corridor, near the servants’ stairs down to the kitchen. Crossing the landing, under the owl-faced grandfather clock, she felt a cool draft from the dark spaces below move against her bare legs.
The bedroom door was not quite closed. Voices murmured inside, but even with her ear pressed against the gap she couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she edged it wider, turned sideways, and slipped in.
Wharton was sitting up in bed looking bleary. “For God’s sake Jake, can’t it wait . . .”
“I can’t sleep! I have to talk to someone.”
“Tomorrow . . .”
“No, now!” He dumped the monkey irritably; it jumped into an open drawer of the tallboy and began to rummage through Wharton’s carefully matched socks.
“Oh stop that,” the big man growled.
Jake was a shadow on the window seat, crumpled and morose. Wharton clicked on the reading lamp and looked around sleepily. As his glance swept across her, Sarah flinched, but it was clear he saw nothing.
So she slid down and squatted by the door.
Wharton said, into the silence, “Must have been tough for you in that place. Locked up. Handcuffed!”
“It’s not that. I could handle that.”
Yeah right. Wharton allowed the thought to yawn through him. “Don’t be so ridiculously heroic, Jake. You went through a terrible experience and it would have been hell, not knowing if you’d ever get back. There’s no shame in that. I tell you, even the brief half hour I spent in . . . the mirror . . . shook me to the core.”
He could hardly believe it even now, the alien, oddly wrong smell of the wartime past, the disconcerting loss of certainty there, the utter disbelief that had almost frozen him.
Jake snorted. “Where did Venn get the uniforms?”
“Piers produced them. I don’t know where he keeps all that stuff.”
“Piers has a lot of abilities we don’t know about.” Jake’s whisper was low and grim. “It’s clear he’s some sort of Shee himself.” He stood up and came toward Sarah so abruptly she knelt up, alarmed, but he just closed the door firmly and turned the key in the lock. Then he went back and sat on the bed.
“There’s something I didn’t tell the others. About the children.”
“What children?”
“Three kids. Three identical boys. They looked about ten. They were in the Underground station where I slept. There was something really weird about them. They knew my name.”