He turned on Venn. “We have to go for him! Right now!”
“No.” Venn’s voice was low. “Not until Maskelyne is sure . . .”
“Give me the bracelet. Let me try! If—”
“Jake.” Wharton came up to him. “Think. We can’t risk it. As soon as we’re ready . . .”
“You too?” He stared around at them all. “Look at you! All of you! Paralyzed by fear! And my father might be dying back there. But you don’t care about him, do you, you just care about Leah, who’s dead, and you, Sarah, about a future that hasn’t even happened yet! I loathe and detest the lot of you! And if I have to, I’ll get him on my own!”
He slammed out of the door.
Wharton sighed. “Sorry, everyone. Sorry, Sarah. He’s just . . .”
“I know.” She went and stood in front of the dark and silent mirror. “I’d be just the same if it was my father. But believe me, I don’t have the answers.”
Piers cleared his throat. “Well. Do you want me to run it again?”
“Once was enough.” Venn went to the fire and thrust another log on, gazing down at the resin bubbling and crackling through the gray ashes.
He stood there, thinking for a moment, then said, “At least we know exactly where David is. If we could be certain of configuring the mirror accurately, of being as exact as we were with the Blitz, we could get in there and pick him up as easily as we did Jake.”
He turned on Maskelyne. “You’re the expert. What do you think?”
The scarred man had turned and was standing silently by the window, his dark eyes fixed intently on the rain-beaten lawns and the dark tossing trees of the Wood. Now he said quietly, “It’s not that easy. Accuracy decreases exponentially as you go back. 1940 was recent enough to be sure we would arrive within days, at least, of Jake’s whereabouts. A date seven hundred years before, that is almost impossible to hit. A journeyman might arrive years later or before, and the difficulty of retrieval is . . .”
“I don’t want the problems,” Venn growled, “I want the solutions.”
Maskelyne gazed out at the rain through the reflection of the lit room. Then he turned and faced them. “These are my conditions. I have completely free access to the mirror. I have a room here in the house, and I work without any hindrance or interference from anyone.”
Venn’s eyes narrowed. “Not the bracelet. That stays with me.”
“Agreed, for now. Piers gets me what I need. And when I succeed, and we get David Wilde back, and your wife, I take both of the bracelets and the mirror as my reward. I take them, I go, and you never see me or them again. That is my price.”
Wharton pulled a face. Sarah scowled.
It was Rebecca who said: “Sounds fair to me.”
Venn snorted. “Does it.” He tipped his head and gazed at Maskelyne with cold curiosity. “You think the mirror will respond to you, more than anyone else? That it recognizes you?”
The scarred man laughed, a light, soft sound in the dim room. “I know it does.”
“Then you’d better get on with it.” Venn turned.
“My conditions . . .”
Venn spun back and glared at him with cold fury “If you can get David and Leah back alive, then as far as I’m concerned, you can have the whole damned estate and the souls of everyone in it! But if you’re lying to me . . .” He stepped forward. “If you’re wasting my time for your own selfish—”
An enormous clang made them all jump.
Piers had dropped the film reel onto the floorboards. “Oops,” he said, deadpan.
Venn gave him a venomous glare. “Have you got something to say?”
“Just . . . well, let’s not get hasty. Remember the Dee page, Excellency. I’ve been working on it and I think there may be things to help us there. Mortimer Dee may not have invented the Chronoptika, but he knew many strange things about it.”
Maskelyne’s whole body seemed to be shocked into sudden movement; he came straight from the window in two steps. “Dee? You’ve found his papers?”
“Sarah found them,” Wharton said, thinking that would please her.
It didn’t seem to; she glared at him. Then she said, “One page of unreadable mess. Scribbles and drawings.”
“That might be just what I need! Where is it?”
Piers raised an eyebrow at Venn. “In the safe. But . . .”
“Give him a copy.” Venn watched as Maskelyne made eagerly for the door. And as the scarred man reached it, Venn said icily, “But the bracelet stays with me, and if you fail, I’ll throw you to the Shee and let them torment you for all eternity.”
Maskelyne paused. Then he went out.
“Oh goody,” said Piers, picking up one of the cats. “And now lunch, I think?”
Wharton went to find Jake.
He was in the cloister, the monkey clutching around his neck. It was chattering right into his face, but he was taking no notice of it at all.
Wharton took one look, then flung him his coat. “Forget Piers’s cottage pie. We’re going to the pub.”
Jake didn’t move. “The Black Death,” he said.
He was white and still with fear.
Wharton, his arm halfway down a sleeve, paused. Then he pulled the duffel coat roughly on and did the toggles up, concentrating on them too carefully. “Don’t give up, Jake.”
“I’m scared. Is that so strange?”
“No. Not strange at all. But you’re Jake Wilde. You’re the crazy kid who stabbed Patten in the wrist just to get out of the school. You don’t give up. That’s why you’re such a pain. And that’s why you’ll succeed. We’ve got Maskelyne on our side now. He’s a strange man—I don’t know what to make of him. But he knows about the mirror. Let me tell you about the deal he’s made with Venn.”
Jake nodded, barely listening. Then he stood, and Horatio screeched and swung upside down in relief. “All right. Let’s get out of here. I need to think.”
Sarah watched the car start and judder into gear and slur down the flooded avenue. She sat knees up on the broad sill of the study window, until the bare black branches of the elms hid it from sight. For a moment a flicker of pain went through her. They hadn’t even asked her to come.
Jake’s outburst had hurt. He was such a spoiled kid! He had no idea of what she had seen, of what lay in the dark future, and she couldn’t even tell him, not about Janus’s terrible experiments, or the secrets of the ZEUS organization. He only thought about his own problems. And Venn was just as bad.
She shook her head, finished tying the laces of the walking boots Piers had given her, and pulled on the red raincoat, a little too big, that he had found. Forget them. The coin. That’s what she should concentrate on. Getting the coin.
She slipped out of the house by the side door to the sunken garden, closing it carefully so that the row of metal shears and bars hanging from it clinked only softly. Piers had a camera here, but she knew he was too busy cooking to be checking it now, and she ran quickly along the gravel path, around to the back of the house.
Wintercombe Abbey led into a tangle of courtyards and outbuildings. In her time, most of them were ruined, but now they still had roofs and odd oriel windows. One, which Piers called the Abbot’s kitchen, was an octagonal gothic structure with a vast central chimney, where the long-dead cooks of the medieval abbots had no doubt concocted great feasts at Christmas and Easter.
It stood deep in nettles, its walls smothered in ivy, thick twisted bines loaded with glossy leaves.
She ducked under them, hands feeling for the wall. The stone was wet and crumbling, rain cascading off the leaves onto her hair, down her neck.