THREE
September 20, 1888, Wessex, England
A constable appeared outside my door after Gordon left. I needed some time alone anyway. Either I really was one hundred and thirty years back in time or I was in the hands of intelligence operatives who had gone to a lot of trouble to fool me. As unlikely as that second option seemed, it was at least physically possible. But time travel? Absolutely unbelievable . . . except for the coin.
The coin. Reggie’s ring had made it through with me, and my allphone sort of had. What about the coin? Gordon hadn’t mentioned it, or anything else that might have come through.
I picked at my dinner, which was a small meat pie—some sort of bird, I assumed, since the top of the pie was garnished with its little amputated feet. Nice touch. It was okay, but there were too many things on my mind for me to have much appetite. Was it time travel, or was I enmeshed in the gears of the most complicated and improbable intelligence scheme I’d ever heard of? Never in my life had I so wished to be in the clutches of ruthless and diabolical villains; the alternative really sucked.
If I was in the past, which past was I in, mine or that coin’s? There was the business with the Royal Military Academy being at Woolwich instead of Sandhurst, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that proved anything. I didn’t know where it had been a hundred and thirty years ago—why not Woolwich?
I’d been thinking about the war talk as well. We’d never gone to war with Britain since the War of 1812, but we’d had some diplomatic bumps. I just wasn’t sure if any of them were this serious—or if this one was as serious as Gordon had portrayed it. He hadn’t said there was a war, only that he expected one. Maybe that was just his wishful thinking. This might still be the unaltered past.
But if the event wave hadn’t hit my present, how had I gotten here? Possibly the malfunction at WHECOL was simply that, a massive accident which I’d managed to survive. If so, this was my unaltered past and I was, as Reggie’s SAS troopers in Afghanistan used to say, proper fucked. No one in my unaltered past would have the means of building a high-energy particle accelerator, even if I had any idea how to go about doing it. My only hope was the event wave had already passed and altered this past enough to give me something—anything—to work with.
But if it had, why did I still have my memories? Why did I even exist? Was the event wave still someplace between 1888 and 2018? If so, how long did I have before it caught up to my childhood, my life? When it did, would it wipe me out? Or would those early memories fade first, one at a time, until it got to the Wessex event itself and then erased whatever was left of me.
When the nurse took away my dinner dishes, I asked for paper and pencil. I thought that if I could write down the critical information, then I could read it and keep acting, even if my memory of those events started to go. Or if it was going to snuff me out, I should write about that world I’d lived in, leave some concrete record of it having existed. The paper and the graphite in the pencil were from this time; the event wave wouldn’t erase them. It wasn’t a living, intelligent being, just a force of nature, like an avalanche.
For a long time I stared at the blank paper. Where should I even start? What was there to say about the entire history of a world that stood in danger of extinction? What was it about that world which made it so important I had to preserve it? Finally I picked up the pencil and began to write.
Dear Sarah,
I can’t imagine you will ever read this, but just writing it makes me feel closer to you, across the unimaginable gulf which separates us. There are things about me I need to tell you, should have told you before I left for England, but I put them off out of fear and shame. But as I sit here and think of you, of the young woman you have become, I know you are strong enough to hear them. . . .
* * *
Two days later Gordon returned with a suit of civilian clothes. I was already up and in my robe, but he tossed the clothes on the bed.
“Put those on. We’re taking the express to London.”
I’d grown impatient, was anxious to start on whatever journey lay before me, but despite that my heart sank a bit. There had still been the faint possibility I was in my own world and had simply been fooled into thinking otherwise. Now that possibility was gone. Someone could have dummied up a hospital room to look like a century ago and hired a dozen actors to play their parts—London was a different proposition. So I was in the past. Now the question was, which past?
“Hurry up, damn you,” Gordon snapped. “We haven’t got all day.”
“A little touchy today are we, Captain?” I asked as I started to dress. “Have the boys upstairs overruled your plans for a hanging?”
“Never fear, you’ll have your trial and then we’ll hang you. It will be closed door, of course; we have some experience dealing with spies. But first there are some gentlemen who would like to ask you a few more questions.”
“I’ll be happy to talk to your people in London,” I told Gordon, “but I’ve already told you everything I know. I don’t have much more to give.”
He didn’t answer me; he just smiled. Actually it was a nasty little smirk, which wasn’t a good sign. I’d read enough Flashman novels to know what that meant. Those old-time Brits had a code of honor and standards of behavior, unless they didn’t think you were a gentleman. In that case they didn’t feel much need to act like gentlemen themselves, so this could get pretty ugly. Making a run for it started sounding good.
My only real hope was things had actually changed here, and done so in a way that left me some sort of return route. I knew next to nothing about physics, and when you know that little, anything is possible, right? So my first priority was figuring out if this really was my own past or that coin’s. I specialized in ancient Rome and the Near East, not nineteenth century Europe, but I knew more than the average Joe on the street. Reggie had picked me in part because I had an instinct for little things not quite right. I’d need to focus that, look for subtle differences, something the average person might miss.
Gordon included a long overcoat with the clothes, but it seemed like a nice day and so I carried it over my arm. Gordon and I, with two big constables in tow, walked out the front door of the hospital. I felt a breeze, heard the drone of machinery; a shadow fell across the broad stone steps ahead of us. I looked up.
Three hundred meters above us was . . . an ironclad? It was big, really big. It had too many surface features to be a balloon, things that looked like gun mounts and observation platforms, with shining brass railings and evenly spaced rows of massive rivets, the kind that hold steel girder bridges together. The drone grew louder as it passed overhead. Black smoke escaped from a stack in the rear, dispersed into a dirty gray wake by three large propellers that apparently drove the ship forward. I had no idea what held the damned thing up. An intense downdraft enfolded us, and piles of dried leaves on the lawn exploded into a swirling red-brown blizzard.
“Okay,” I said to no one in particular, “so much for subtle differences.”
I don’t remember much about the carriage ride. I suppose I was still dazed, but I started paying attention again once we got to the train station—a little place out in the countryside called Creech St. Michael Halt. The locomotive hissed and throbbed nervously, reeked of hot rusty iron and sulfurous coal, and looked longer and more powerful than I remembered Victorian steam engines looking in Sherlock Holmes films.
Sherlock Holmes films? Flashman novels? And I called myself an historian? This was getting pathetic. Why couldn’t this event-wave thingamajig have dropped me in fourth-century BCE Achaemenid Persia? At least I knew my way around there.
Gordon led the way with the Bobbies to either side of me. The one on my right slipped his hand around my elbow—not making a show of manhandling me, just letting me know he was there. Gordon looked through the open doors until he found an empty compartment and motioned us to follow him in.
The compartment was pretty much what I expected: dark wood paneling and brass fittings, a gaslight overhead, and a well-thumbed copy of The Times left on the overstuffed seat. Gordon sat facing me while the constables sat opposite each other by the windows.
“Where in London are we going?” I asked.
“You will see in good time,” Gordon answered.
“Who are these gentlemen I’ll be talking to?”
“All in good time.”
“Look, if you could just—”
“Do be quiet, Fargo. There’s a good spy.”
Be quiet. Sure. I was on a train about to take me to an interview with people Gordon had broadly hinted were going to torture me—if necessary—to find out what I knew. Since I didn’t know anything they were interested in, it was hard to see how this was going to end happily for anyone, but especially for me.
I picked up The Times and looked it over. Doing a quick scan was hard—these guys still had a lot to learn about newspaper layout, things like headlines and organizing from most to least important.
A penny had been removed from the pendulum counterbalance of Big Ben, which would slow the clock by four-tenths of a second per day. Seems it had been running slightly fast. No one knew why, but a panel of study was being formed. Swell. There was a report on the Royal Horticultural Society’s flower show, another grisly murder in Whitechapel—when was Jack the Ripper running around?—and a letter from an unnamed correspondent about a Fenian Army massing in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. It also alleged several acts of sabotage against the Canadian Pacific Railroad near Vancouver.
Fenians—Irish separatists. I remembered there had been a border incident after the Civil War when a bunch of Irish veterans got together and tried to invade Canada, hold it hostage for an independent Ireland. Not much came of it, although it had been a big deal at the time. It seemed to me it had been earlier than the 1880s, though; weren’t Civil War veterans getting long in the tooth by now?
Then another article caught my eye. The Foreign Office announced its acceptance of the credentials of General William Ransom Johnson Pegram as the new ambassador to the Court of St. James from the Confederate States of America. General Pegram had expressed his government’s sympathy with Great Britain’s current difficulties vis-a-vis the United States of America.
“Son of a bitch! Those assholes actually won?”
Gordon and the Bobbies eyed me with disapproval, and I tossed the paper aside.
The train started up, gathering speed quickly.
I couldn’t believe it. The South won? I wasn’t just in an altered history, I was in some stupid “Lost Cause” wet dream. If this place had taken a pass on emancipation, what other horrors had it decided it just couldn’t part with?
This place? As if there were somewhere else? No, this was all there was now. This was it. I had already spent too much time in a hospital bed. Whatever trick I was going to perform to fix all this, I had better get going on, and right away.
Son of a bitch.