by Mark J Rose
The real story of Scarlet Palmer, aka, Rachel LaPorte, aka, Catherine Dunmeade, was so much better. She was brilliant, beautiful, and had no constitution whatsoever when it came to reaping the rewards she felt she deserved. Every man in London was attracted to Scarlet, at least until they learned what she was, and then even sometimes after that. An event or person in Scarlet’s past compelled her to believe that the world owed her a massive debt. In the six months Brian had spent with Scarlett, she had never volunteered an explanation, and he had never cared enough to ask. He was curious on occasion to know precisely what it was that motivated her.
Brain had met “Mrs. Palmer” on his second trip to London. He arrived with a pocket full of synthetic diamonds that he wanted to convert to cash and selling even one had proven difficult. His accent had immediately sown distrust among the jewelers. His diamonds were so perfectly clear and cut that the jewelers had rejected the stones outright. During one particularly boisterous negotiation, Brian had watched an attractive woman in a low-cut dress casually slip a ruby ring down the front of her bodice. She looked calmly back at him, smiled to acknowledge his complicity, adjusted her cleavage, thanked the jeweler, and calmly walked out of the store.
Brian recognized her power right away; he could almost see the energy field she cast that bewitched everyone around her. He had spent days looking for this magical redhead. Their six months together hadn’t been without incident, but you expected that when you were cheating people. Incident, Brian thought, was the crux of their relationship and it kept them intrigued.
Brian had come a long way since they had run him out of Oak Ridge Laboratories after he’d lit up NORAD monitors across the continent by opening up a hole in space-time to pull Matthew Miller back to the twenty-first century. Brian had rolled the dice, like all pioneering men in science should, and he had lost. Those government bastards even considered trying him for treason and manslaughter. In the end, they gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse because there were too many secrets to risk going public. Brian took a generous severance to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating that he’d never work on Chernenko-Einstein particles again.
Unbeknownst to Brian, his signature represented a trial and a conviction that made it impossible for him to pass a federal background check. It wasn’t until his third job offer had been rescinded that one hiring manager had thought to tell him that they didn’t hire convicted felons. Brian’s wife, a successful lawyer in the US State Department, soon followed with her own severance. Besides not wanting to be married to an unemployable man, her continued association with a convicted felon would keep her from ever getting a security clearance. She moved out one morning while he was at another unsuccessful interview. She took the furniture, the cat and eventually half of his money.
Sitting on a folding chair in his empty condominium one night, Brian made a decision. He packed a duffle bag, drove that ridiculous Prius his wife had convinced him to buy to the Toyota dealer, dropped the keys into the mail slot, and took a taxi to the train station. Brian rode the train from city to city, taking odd jobs only long enough to refill his wallet. He was tending bar in St. Louis when it finally occurred to him that Dr. Brian Palmer was dead. He was no longer a man who wanted to chase after the next major scientific discovery or change the world for the better.
Brian made plans, and left St. Louis, not stopping until the continent ended. Americans who had run until there was nowhere else to go, filled Los Cabos, and so the city was surprisingly receptive of an outsider from Tennessee. He’d laugh when he thought about how screwed up everyone in the Cabos seemed to be and how he fit in perfectly. Brian got in with a group of friends that he affectionately called, the End of the World Gang. There were plenty of women among them, and they, too, were receptive after he had a little practice in the art of seduction.
Brian had an advantage in that he could not have cared whether the women of Cabos were interested or not, and more than a few seemed to respond readily to a man who had other things on his mind. He stayed in Cabos for three years, shacking up with various women, working and partying, and he almost forgot his past. One night though, while drinking tequila and high on mescaline, the secret to harnessing Chernenko-Einstein laid itself out perfectly in his mind. He saw a way to use the particles without detection, and he knew how to travel across time.
Brian was living with Alejandra at the time. She was a Latin goddess, ethereal, sweet and sexy and she should have been enough for him to forget his obsession with making Matthew Miller pay. His old ambition jacked him up though, day by day until his head was too high to breathe. He took all the money he had, found the “right” yacht off the coast of Cabos and was soon on a ship to Taiwan where a fully equipped laboratory awaited. The Taiwanese were interested in harnessing a nearly limitless energy supply and weaponizing it against the mainland.
Brian was able to construct a working reactor soon after arriving in his new country, and it wasn’t much longer before he could scan the timeline. The most recent Quantum signal was from 1771. He hoped that Matthew Miller had achieved success beyond his wildest dreams. Brian slept little for the two months that it took for him to construct the time portal and the automated mechanism that could bring him home. When he left, he had expected to transport to the colonies but woke in a London alley.
Brian had never considered that he’d find Patrick Ferguson. The fact that Ferguson had survived his trip through the wormhole made Brian seethe even more. Matthew Miller had ended Brian’s dreams by refusing to come back to the twenty-first century and prove that time travel was possible, and so instead of receiving the Nobel Prize, they’d pushed Brian from the herd. Matthew Miller had ruined his life, and he was going to pay.
Brian’s first visit to London lasted four weeks. He had programmed the reactor to return him home by opening a wormhole at the location of the transmitter he carried. Brian supported himself during that first trip by selling tools he had brought with him in a pack. He explored London and learned as much as he could about Patrick Ferguson, hoping that there was a way he could help locate Matthew Miller. His first clue to Matthew Miller’s whereabouts came on his last day in London and had nothing to do with Ferguson. Brian was sitting in a Tavern to drink enough to cushion his trip home through the wormhole when he saw a display for Miller Head and Stomach Tablets. He transported back knowing he’d found his clue.
Scarlett was the one who had identified that Ben Franklin was the English distributor for these tablets and that Franklin had a house in London. Franklin, as intelligent as Brian considered him to be, was no match for the charms and cunning of a fetching woman in a low-cut dress. She had funds for a large purchase, and it hadn’t taken much for Franklin to brag that he knew the inventor of these fantastic tablets. Matthew Miller was traveling on a ship called the Norfolk and was expected in London by early summer.
Chapter 42
Night at the Opera, Part I
Knocking on the door woke Matt up about one hour after sunrise. It was a week since they’d hired David Sutton to investigate Ferguson’s list, and Matt, expecting Sutton, was anxious to learn if he had found anything. Matt hopped from the bed, put his robe on and bounded down the steps knowing that one else was available to answer the door. Polly and Margaret were in North London visiting family, and Franklin, who woke sometime before the sun, would already be on the second-floor at his desk. Franklin usually sat in some form of undress with the windows open, based on what he believed were the health effects of the fresh air. He called them air baths.
Matt continued down the next flight to undo the night chain that served as a second lock, and then he swung the door wide open. “Wake you, did I, Mr. Miller?” Mrs. Milton said. Her smiling face warmed him, and so Matt made a concentrated effort to drop his disappointed frown that it wasn’t Sutton. She handed Matt a steaming basket of bread. “Fresh out of the oven,” she said. “Mrs. Stevenson let me know she and Polly would be gone.”
Matt reached to the table at the side
of the front door and grabbed the purse that Franklin kept there. He dropped a shilling and a few extra pennies into her palm. “Thank you, kindly,” Matt said. Mrs. Milton curtsied and stepped away. Matt closed the door once she had reached the street. “Breakfast’s here,” Matt called to Franklin. He wanted to give Franklin plenty of time to dress. Matt could convince the older man of very little, but he had insisted that Franklin be fully clothed in his presence.
Matt walked into the dining room and set the basket on the table. It was colder in this room, so the loaves were steaming through their cotton towel wrappings. Matt grabbed a pewter plate from the cabinet, unwrapped a loaf, pulled it in half and put one piece on his plate. He rewrapped the other and returned it to the basket. The basket also had butter, peach jam, and some cold, cooked sausage. “Ben,” Matt called again.
“Getting dressed,” Franklin replied. “Though it should not be necessary.”
“It’s necessary,” Matt called back.
Matt went to take a bite of the steaming bread but heard the knocker on the door again.
“Damn it,” he whispered at his meal. He set the bread down on the pewter plate and walked back down the hallway to the front door. He undid the latch to see a teenage boy holding a wax-sealed packet.
“Yes?” Matt said irritated. Matt thought that if he hurried things along, his bread might still be hot when he sat back down at the table.
“Delivery for Dr. Franklin,” the boy announced. He looked past Matt to the staircase, maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of Franklin who had become a celebrity in London.
“I’ll take it,” Matt said, reaching out.
“I’m only supposed to give it to the Doctor,” the boy said.
“He’s getting dressed,” Matt replied as he held his hand out again, this time with intent.
The teenage boy gave him a disappointed glare, looked past him, and then reluctantly released the letter. Matt reached again to the side table for the purse, grabbed a few pennies and dropped them into the boy’s open palm.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. The boy looked at the staircase one last time, turned and left.
Matt closed the door and redid the latch. He was resolute in returning to his bread, so walked back to the dining room, tossed the note on the table and sat back down at his plate.
Franklin finally walked in. “Who was that?” he asked.
“You got a letter,” Matt replied.
“I wasn’t expecting anything,” Franklin said. Matt’s mouth was now full, so he pointed at the packet.
“I was hoping we’d hear from Sutton today,” Matt mumbled through his food. “We should be doing something else in the matter.”
“I’d expect to give this young man, Sutton, another day or two, before going off half-cocked,” Franklin replied. “You said he was beyond reproach.”
“He’s the one person in the city that I trust.” Matt heard the pride in his own voice.
Franklin reached for the sealed letter while he was still standing, opened it and began to read. Matt pulled another chunk of bread from the basket and reached for the knife. Noticing Franklin standing and reading the letter, Matt motioned to the bread. “Better get some before I eat it all.”
Franklin set the opened letter back where he had picked it up, pulled a chair out to sit and reached for the food. “Sir Ferguson has invited us to opening night at the opera,” he said as he rummaged through the towels for the second loaf. “Four seats in a luxury box. You, me, Sarah and Thomas.”
Matt’s vision went haywire. Something about the mention of an opera had triggered a memory. He shook it off and looked back at Franklin. He had trouble explaining to the man exactly how he could perceive the future, but could not predict specific events. “He knows we have the list,” Matt said simply.
“Perhaps.”
“We’re not going,” Matt said. “Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. We’d be walking right into the wolf’s lair.”
Franklin rolled his eyes. “We’ve been through this,” he replied. “I know you have more than an academic understanding of future events, but malice lurks everywhere in London. In the end, it should not deter our leaving our apartments.”
“Something bad is going to happen,” Matt repeated.
“Tell me.”
“Everything having to do with Ferguson is cloudy.”
“The house will be packed,” Franklin said. “The seats are the finest in the building, and there is nothing inherently perilous in our attending. Covent Gardens is hardly the wolf’s lair, but take a dagger if you like.”
“We should be making our own plans rather than playing into his,” Matt said. “The fate of the western world lies in the balance, and we’re going to the opera?”
“Do citizens of the United States, those in your time, oft put the normal course of human events in such context?”
Matt shrugged.
“You’ve seen no famine, no plague, and no smallpox. You told me that you didn’t even fret about bombs that could destroy your whole city. Neither one of us has lived through a time when the world was in the balance.”
Matt replied to Franklin with a dirty look.
“Covent Gardens is only a short walk from here,” Franklin said
Matt recognized the determined look on Franklin’s face. “Can we involve the authorities somehow?” Matt asked.
“To solve what crime? Would you build a case with your list of unknown colonists that you wrote with your own hand, or would you shew them a picture of the original list on a magical device that no one has ever seen.”
Matt remained quiet, thinking that Franklin was right. One missing member of the British Parliament was hardly a reason to mobilize Scotland Yard. Matt wondered if there even was a Scotland Yard, yet, in England.
“Constables are investigating the disappearance of Sir Maynard,” Franklin said. “A handwritten list of names wouldn’t have any effect on them.”
“Fine,” Matt replied resigned. “What time?”
“Three o’clock. Wear your best suit. Where will Ferguson be sitting? Maybe in the same box?”
Chapter 43
Night at the Opera, Part II
It was opening night at the opera and Patrick and Celia Ferguson were sitting across from each other at an elaborate Jacobean table. They were riding in the most elaborate carriage Ferguson Industries built. The benches on each side of the table were a plush black leather, framed by glossy smooth wood. The outside of the carriage was a rich burgundy cherry decorated with paisley trim painted in metallic gold. The two drivers, trained as bodyguards, were dressed in clothes appropriate for sitting atop Ferguson Industries most expensive carriage. They controlled four stallions that pulled the heavy vehicle through London’s cobblestone streets.
Celia was a boisterous and religious attendee at the opera, while Patrick was anything but. Trent and a few escorts usually accompanied her, but she had convinced Patrick to come at the last minute. Patrick had started avoiding most of the events at the Covent Garden Theatre since they had begun offering half-price tickets to the “footman’s gallery.” These cheaper tickets attracted a different station, and these new fans had no problem heckling performers or rioting when a play or opera didn’t end as they hoped. They also had the bizarre ritual of banging on cowbells, which made Patrick’s headaches worse.
Celia had convinced Patrick that it was the perfect time for London society to see them again after the success of the masquerade. She had insisted that they dress in their finest clothing and ride in their most elaborate carriage. Patrick was wearing a light blue suit with a brilliant white cravat to play the part of a London aristocrat, but it was nothing compared to the deep blue gown worn by his wife. Her bare neck glistened with sapphires that sparkled brightly against her skin whenever the sun was able to catch them through the open windows of the carriage.
Patrick didn’t like playing the “gentry game” as he called it, mostly in that he wasn’t very good at it, but he did
; first, because he appreciated its importance for political sway and second because his wife insisted. Celia was a juggernaut when it came to building social prominence. Power games aside, his wife was one of the most elegant and captivating women he had ever seen. Thinking of this, he pondered her face as she sat across from him on the leather cushion. Her blue eyes shone with a brilliance that easily competed with the glow of the jewels around her neck.
Catching him watching her, she smiled. Patrick looked slowly from her eyes down to her full lips and white teeth as she opened her mouth to speak. “What is it?” she asked softly.
Looking into her eyes again, he said, “You look radiant tonight, my dear. You may be the most enchanting woman in all of London.”
“I do not know if this is true, Husband,” she replied, “but I am at once becoming the most fulfilled.”
“You like the opera that much?” Patrick replied, joking.
She looked back seductively and smiled. “I like what we have become, you and I, and I like the future that is being made for our children. There is much to be thankful for.”
“All it took was one successful party?”
She squinted and shook her head. “We have struggled to take our place among the noble families for many years. I did not think it was possible to rewrite expectations steeped in hundreds of years of tradition. I believe my father was a man of much foresight.”
“So ‘twas your father that made all this possible?” Patrick ran his fingers across the rich black leather of his seat. He did it to emphasize his point and for the smooth and soft feeling of the hide against his skin.
“I did not readily accept our marriage,” Celia said.
“And now?”
“My father had much wit. I look forward to all that our children will accomplish for our family and England.”
Patrick reached out across the table and took her fingers. Hers was an arranged marriage to a man who was willing to bid a very high price. Early on, she had done her duty to follow through on the business deal her father had made. Patrick had made it his goal to court and romance her, and more so after she had their first child. Patrick knew he was a good-looking man, but it had been vital for him to seduce her mind. Through hard work and sheer will, he had finally gotten her to look at him with love in her eyes.