“Get on,” she said. “And shut up.”
Wharton heard the roar of the bike; he ran to a window and saw the dark machine slither down the flooded drive.
“Jake!” he yelled stupidly. “Jake!”
What the hell was happening to everyone? Had they all gone mad? He turned and cannoned into Piers. The little man was almost in tears, his small hands clasped together, clutching at his scarlet waistcoat.
“George! Venn’s going in after her! Do something!”
“After Sarah? But . . .”
“He’ll take me with him, I know he will! To the Summerland! Oh, I can’t tell you how much I hate it in there! Last time they almost tore me to shreds! I’m a homebody, George, a brownie, a cook, a pwca that lives under the stairs! I’m not for the big adventures. You have to talk to him!”
“Wait. Let me think.” Wharton turned, anxious. “First I have to open the gates. Jake’s gone out on the bike.”
“MY bike!”
“Will you stop thinking about yourself, Piers, for just one tiny second! Open the gates! Please!”
Piers huffed and turned. He stalked down the kitchen corridor and into the scullery with its rows of surveillance cameras and bells, and flicked a switch.
The gate camera lit. Rain trickled relentlessly across its screen.
“There they are,” Wharton muttered.
Blurred and dim, the bike approached slowly, skidding around fallen branches.
“Who’s with him?” Piers said. Then: “That girl! Didn’t expect that, did you?”
Wharton hadn’t, but he made no sign. “Let them out.”
“But why . . .”
“The replicants. He’s going to find the replicants. He needs to know what they mean.”
Silent with surprise, Piers reached out and pressed the button for the gates. Together they watched the metal barrier jerk open, water dripping from the wrought-iron arabesques; watched the grainy image of the motorcycle flash through, speeding up.
Faintly, Wharton thought he heard a yell of acknowledgment.
As the gates closed, Piers said somberly, “I wish I could escape that easily. I wish I could just fly out of the window, like Peter bloody Pan.”
“Well, you can’t.” Venn’s voice was arctic.
They turned, and saw he was standing in the doorway, his dark coat on, wearing boots, a small pack on his back. “You’re coming with me. We have to find Sarah before she gets to that coin.”
Piers clutched his hands together. “Excellency, I beg . . .”
Venn’s face was white. He lifted his hand, pushing up his dark sleeve. “Don’t you see?”
Piers groaned. For a bewildered second Wharton didn’t understand; then Venn said, “She stole the bracelet when I was asleep. It must have been her.” He was strangely calm, as if the betrayal was too terrible even to think about now. “You’re coming, Piers. I need you.”
To his own surprise Wharton stepped forward; Piers ducked behind him instantly.
Wharton said, “You need him here. You can’t leave Maskelyne alone with the mirror. And the manuscript—it has to be deciphered.”
Venn gave him a ferocious stare. “Who asked you, teacher?”
“Take me instead.”
Piers gasped.
Venn’s eyes narrowed. “What? You’re a mortal.”
Afterward Wharton never knew if he had said it for her sake or his own.
“So is Sarah. If you’re going after her, I want to be there. I don’t want anything to happen to her. So take me.”
Of course I had to cancel the séance.
I hastily drew the curtain on the mirror, pretended illness, had all lights lit, the astonished and chattering clients ushered out. I was so flustered I could barely speak, so my discomfort at least would have been convincing to them.
Because all the time, even with the black silk veil flung over the glass, I knew he was still there.
The new disturbing apparition.
Watching me.
Finally, when I was alone among the scattered chairs and the discarded handkerchiefs, I locked the door and stood staring at the shrouded surface.
“And who is Janus?” I whispered.
No answer.
So I reached out and removed the veil.
He was sitting in a dark room, sideways to me. A slight man, not old, not young, wearing some neat uniform like a Hungarian hussar. Small round lenses covered his eyes. His hair was lank, just a little too long.
He said, “I have wondered about you. About Symmes. There was a young girl he took to live with him, did you know that? Her name was Moll. . . .”
I drew myself up, indignant. “She was just some urchin of the streets. I am Symmes’s daughter.”
“So you don’t know what happened to her?”
“She probably ran away.”
He smiled, infuriatingly calm. “I could tell you. It would astonish you.”
“I don’t have the least interest.”
“Really?” He raised both hands and joined the tips of his fingers together. “Do you know where I am, Miss Symmes? I am so far in your future that I am almost another species. I am no ghost, no vision. I am the ruler of the world.”
Such a peculiar apparition. Whatever he was, I found him most unappealing.
He leaned forward. “I calculate that you will already have received a message from David Wilde. This is known to be the year he spoke to you. What I want to know is where he is and what message he has asked you to pass to his son. A simple request.”
I smoothed a stray hair from my brow and managed a vinegary smile. “I am not in the habit, sir, of breaking the confidences of my . . . spiritual friends. Or of obeying the orders of strangers. Certainly not gentlemen who claim to be tyrants in some future realm.” I thought that quite a neat turn of phrase, and maybe my complaisance showed, because he seemed to gather himself, drawing back slightly, like a snake before it strikes.
“Where is David Wilde? In what era is he hiding from me?”
I sighed, and turned. “I will cover this glass, sir. As a ghost I find you tiresome, and you frighten my clients away. I trust you will have the goodness to disappear before I return to it.”
I reached up and took the dark cloth and it was then, as I laid it deliberately upon the obsidian mirror, that I knew I was lost.
Because his hand came out of the glass and caught my wrist.
“I think not, madam,” he whispered.
At first it was just ordinary woodland.
Bare trees under a gray sky, the undergrowth of brambles and bracken, the tiny green points of early spring bulbs hiding at the foot of white willow trunks. Sarah followed Gideon silently, her ears alert for every snapped twig, every fleeting bird.
Overhead the sky was a leaden lid, windblown showers gusting from the moors.
Her boots crunched a frozen puddle; then the bare trees were around her and she ducked under their branches.
Gideon walked warily. The path led downwards, as if the Wood followed some deep hidden combe; gradually she saw banks of exposed earth, hollowed with rabbit holes.
At a turn in the path darkened by a thicket of holly, Gideon stopped.
“What?” she whispered.
He glanced around; she saw his anxiety. “I don’t understand this. We should be inside by now.”
“Inside?”
“The Summerland.”
She remembered the other time she had stepped fleetingly into the Shee dimension, the strange instant transition from winter to a world where the summer never ended. She stared into the trees. “Does it change? Does the border move?”