by Winona Kent
Shaun drank his tea without comment.
“I’ll show you something else, then.”
She gave him a large brown envelope, which she’d carried into the room with the tea tray.
“When I was going through the other drawers in the sideboard, I found that. Mum had paid for the funeral of a young woman who’d perished in 1940. And then she’d paid for her burial plot, and her headstone, and for the ongoing maintenance of her grave. All through the years, up until now, she made sure the payments continued and the grave was tended. Look at the name of the young woman.”
• • •
It was the end of time.
It was the end of life itself.
Shaun sat in the passenger seat of Wendy’s car. Numb. Not believing.
But it was there in plain writing. Inside the brown envelope were the documents. And a photograph of the headstone, and the number of the plot, so that it could easily be located in the graveyard.
This was where Wendy was taking him now, in her car. The same cemetery he had visited with Mrs. Collins on Friday.
A lifetime ago.
As Shaun sat in the car, staring out of the window at the buildings and buses, it was obvious to him that something had happened to cause a rift in reality. That was the only term he could think of to describe his circumstances. It was the present, but not the present he had inhabited before. There could be no other explanation.
He recalled the journey he had undertaken with Mrs. Collins, the one that had brought them both to that time and place. He had abandoned 1825—and certain death for both of them—cradling her in his arms in the pouring rain. He recalled the anguish he had felt at the thought of losing her. And the terror that had accompanied the lightning and thunder, the massive surge of something that had transported both of them, together, from then to now.
And the horrible hours in the hospital after that, when it was not known whether she would ever wake up.
And then…his relief when she had at last opened her eyes. Unaware of where she was—and in what time—she had seen him, and asked, “Are you here… or are you there…?”
And his response, accompanied by a tender and reassuring kiss: “I am here.”
In the solid reliability of here, he had found shelter and love in her little cottage. His life had been protected in her village by the sea.
I am here.
Suddenly, here had become unreliable.
Suddenly, he was lost and alone, and without the knowledge needed to mend the tear in the fabric of time.
“Did your sister not marry a gentleman whose last name is Duran?” Shaun asked, trying again to make sense of what this here consisted of.
“I haven’t got a sister,” Wendy replied. “There is only me.”
“But you married Toby Weller. And you have a son, whose name is Nicholas.”
“Yes, that’s right. And a daughter. Julie.”
“And another daughter? Natasha?”
“No,” said Wendy. “Just the two. Julie’s a TV producer and Nick’s a physicist. He lectures at Wandsworth University. And spends his in-between times in Stoneford.”
Shaun didn’t say anything. Mrs. Collins, who had apparently died in 1940, was the daughter of Wendy’s sister, who apparently had never existed. How was it possible?
“Here we are, then,” Wendy said, driving the car into a place where they could get out and walk.
“What of your father?” Shaun asked, as they made their way along the paved cemetery road. “What is his name?”
“His name was Peter Lewis,” Wendy replied. “He passed away in 1970.”
That, at least, had not changed.
They located the grave, using a map from the cemetery office.
“Here we are. Not so difficult to find.”
Shaun read the inscription on the little weather-beaten marker.
In Loving Memory
Charlotte Duran
14th October 1940
Carved into stone. Indisputable.
Shaun looked for somewhere to sit and located a bench beneath a tree. As he sank down onto its slatted wood seat, he realized this was exactly the same bench, in exactly the same spot, where he had discovered Mrs. Collins on Friday, contemplating the grave of Thaddeus Quinn.
In fact, the grave marker was exactly the same, but for the name.
How could this be, if she had never existed?
Shaun stared at the ground, trying to work out the logic.
“I’m going to tell you something my mum told me a very long time ago,” Wendy said, joining him on the bench. “She didn’t like to speak of it, I think… perhaps because it brought back too many bad memories from the war. But I could always coax things out of her with a little neat Scotch.”
She smiled, remembering.
“Before I was born… before she was married to my dad, my mum was seeing someone named Thaddeus Quinn. And she fell pregnant. But something happened to him… and to her… and she wouldn’t tell me what. And there was a young woman who was visiting her when she was six months along. A friend she’d grown very fond of. And this young woman died. And something caused Mum to miscarry the baby. They didn’t have the medical knowledge back then to save very premature infants. So the baby was lost. She would have been my older sister.”
“Jackie,” Mr. Deeley said, staring at the little gravestone.
“Perhaps. Yes. If we’re to believe the note on the cooking pamphlet. And the young woman who died… she never told me her name. But it must have been Charlotte Duran. It all makes sense now.”
Shaun digested this. “It does,” he agreed.
“A few years ago I decided to do some research on the fellow my mum had been seeing. I had a subscription to one of those family tree sites. I think it’s lapsed now. It turned out to be far more work than I thought. I asked Mum for his full name, and she said it was Thaddeus Oliver Quinn. I tried to find Thaddeus Oliver Quinn, and I couldn’t. So, just on a whim, I put in a general search, for any year. And then I found the record of his christening. June, 1816. Thaddeus Oliver Quinn. St. Eligius Church, Stoneford. And I found him again in the first English census, in 1841. There he was, living in Middlehurst. And then, by the time of the second census, in 1851, he was gone. The only Thaddeus Oliver Quinn in existence. Ever. The thing is, I mentioned that to my mum. About how strange it was. And she refused to believe it. She said he was certainly born in Stoneford, and had certainly grown up in Middlehurst. But he was thirty-three years old when she’d met him in 1939. And he’d had his thirty-fourth birthday in June 1940. I suggested that perhaps he wasn’t who he’d claimed to be, and that he’d borrowed Thaddeus Quinn’s name because he had something to hide. Perhaps he was a criminal, on the run from the law. But she refused to discuss it further.”
She paused.
“Do you know anything about Thaddeus Oliver Quinn, Mr. Deeley?”
Shaun thought very carefully before he replied.
“I do,” he said. “But first, I will tell you the date of my own birth. It’s the 12th of November, 1791. Is this possible for you to understand and accept?”
“The 12th of November,” Wendy repeated. “1791. But that would make you more than 200 years old.”
“It would,” Shaun admitted, “if I had inhabited all of the intervening years, and my life had followed its natural progression. And if I had also somehow managed to circumvent the law of nature, which dictates that we rarely survive beyond our hundredth year. In truth, I will celebrate my own thirty-fourth birthday next month.”
Wendy looked at him. And then she stood up. “You’re having me on, aren’t you? All this business about knowing Charlotte Duran and what my mum wrote on the back of a pamphlet and the sister I never had… who’s put you up to this? Nick?”
Shaun shook his head. “I have told you only what I know to be the truth.”
“I’m going to strangle him. And so soon after Mum’s death. I don’t suppose he thought his practical joke would be in such poo
r taste. You can tell him that, for me.”
“Your son has had nothing to do with this,” Shaun said, also getting to his feet. “Please believe me.”
“How? How can you be more than 200 years old? And how did you end up here, now?”
“A consequence of an oddity in logic and time,” Shaun said. “An accidental incident.”
“You’ll have to do better than that. I know all about Time Lords and TARDISs, in spite of what Nick thinks about my television viewing habits. And how could you know Charlotte Duran?”
“Charlotte is… was… a traveller in time, like myself. She was accidentally sent back to 1825, where she met me. We fell in love. And then she became desperately ill, and it was imperative that she returned, or she would die. It was your son who engineered this, harnessing his computer to the forces of nature. I could not bear the thought of Charlotte leaving me, and so I made the decision to go with her. And then, together, we travelled in time again… to 1940. Which is where she apparently died. And then I travelled again, to the time we are in now. That is why I am here. You may choose to believe me, or to discard my story as fantastical nonsense. But I have no other explanation to offer.”
“So if I were to ask Nick about this, he’d say the same thing? He’d know who you were, and he’d confirm what you’ve just told me about his computer and 1825 and this woman named Charlotte?”
“Yes,” Shaun said. “Of course.”
He paused, reminding himself that this was not the present that he was accustomed to.
“Perhaps not,” he decided, after a moment.
“Yes,” said Wendy. “Perhaps not. Thought you might say that. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You certainly spin a good tale.”
“Can you not accept that what I have told you is the truth?” Shaun asked, unhappily, looking again at the little stone marker, his heart filling with despair. “In the time and place that I have come from, Charlotte’s year of birth is 1979. She is your niece. And her mother is your sister, Jackie, who was never born. ”
“The same Jackie that Mum wrote about on the back of the cooking pamphlet.”
“The very same. And the very same Charlotte.”
“I don’t know who you really are,” Wendy said, “and I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish by showing up like this, out of the blue, with your unbelievable story. If you’re thinking you might try to extort some money by claiming to be a long lost relative, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m going to leave you here, Mr. Deeley. And I don’t expect to see you again. Goodbye.”
And she walked away, leaving Shaun standing alone beside Mrs. Collins’s grave, unable to bring himself to run after her, to remonstrate his innocence.
Nothing he might say or do was likely to cause her to change her mind.
He shook his head, as if doing so would cause him to wake up from this horrible, horrible dream.
But nothing changed.
And if he was asleep, then the nightmare was unceasing.
Chapter Sixteen
It was morning. And it was very cold. Charlie shivered under the blanket and the eiderdown and her winter coat, which she’d dragged over her shoulders in the middle of the night. At home, in Stoneford, her eighteenth-century cottage had been modernized with hot-water heating throughout. On freezing winter mornings, she woke up to warm rooms and warm floors and warm feet.
There was no hot-water heater in Betty Singleton’s little house on Harris Road. There were fireplaces, but the only two that appeared to be in regular use were downstairs, in the sitting room and the dining room. And in Betty Singleton’s big front bedroom, there was no glass in the windows. The boards that had been nailed over the empty frames were excellent for keeping out the morning light, and even better at letting in the chilly morning damp.
Charlie lay in bed, dreading getting up and making herself even colder. Her feet were freezing, in spite of the two pairs of socks she’d put on, foraged from Bert Singleton’s collection in the bottom drawer of the dressing table.
And then the realization that Mr. Deeley was no longer alive came back to her like a thick, suffocating fog. For a brief moment, just now, upon waking, that knowledge had been absent; her mind had been clear and her memories unencumbered. And then, the horrible truth had descended. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.
Outside the boarded-up windows, she could hear morning sounds. London waking up and carrying on. Motor cars. Gates clicking shut. People chatting with one another on the pavement.
There ought to be church bells, she thought. It was Sunday morning, and the church at the end of the road ought to have been calling people to come in and pray.
And then she remembered that during the war, all of the country’s church bells were silenced, to be rung only in the event of an invasion by German forces.
She crawled out of bed at last and looked outside through a gap in the boards. It was a grey, misty day. The kind of day she’d have loved, if she’d been at home in Stoneford. And if….
And if….
If only.
She’d travelled in time twice before, and each of those journeys, like now, had been accidental. Or, at least, beyond her ability to influence and control. And at the end of each journey, she’d been returned to her own time and place as if nothing at all had happened.
Perhaps there was a mechanism, something she had yet to learn about.
Perhaps there was a way to get back home.
On the night she and Mr. Deeley had arrived, Betty had said her next-door neighbour, Ruby, had been expecting them. Ruby was the name of the woman who had visited the museum’s Blitz Display, and given her the piece of shrapnel on the station platform at Middlehurst.
Ruby Firth. Who was due home today from Basingstoke.
Charlie put her winter coat on over her nightgown and went downstairs.
• • •
Breakfast was porridge with a little milk, and tea, and was notable for the absence of Betty’s lodger.
Charlie was relieved. She’d been dreading seeing him again. She found herself wishing, rather uncharitably, that he would stay away permanently. She huddled in her winter coat, focusing on her spoon and her bowl and the porridge, hoping Betty assumed her numbness to be the result of Mr. Deeley’s death.
The numbness was real. She couldn’t think, couldn’t function. Even recalling what she’d seen last night at Strand Station, after opening Silas Ferryman’s suitcase, was an ordeal. She knew she had to tell Betty about it. She knew she had to tell the police. She or Betty could be this man’s next victim. But she was unable to summon the strength.
“It’s not like him not to ring,” Betty said, staring out through the blast-taped windows into the garden. “I didn’t see him at all yesterday, or last night. He said he had some business in London. I just hope…”
She stopped.
“I mustn’t. It would be too dreadful to contemplate. And here’s you, and your poor Mr. Deeley. I’m so sorry, Charlotte.”
Charlie raised her head to acknowledge Betty’s kindness, but said nothing.
“I’m so glad you got back safely. I went out earlier to see if Thad was about and I ran into Mrs. Lane from down the road. Her husband’s a policeman, and she told me another young woman was discovered dead last night. Her throat had been slashed. She was found near the British Museum, on a bomb site. Just like poor Angela Bailey.”
Charlie went cold.
“I’ll fetch the Sunday papers later. Perhaps it’ll be in there.”
Charlie continued to eat her porridge in silence, while Betty took an envelope out of her apron pocket.
“I’ve had a letter,” she said. “From Pete. It came in yesterday’s post. I haven’t seen him since the summer.”
Charlie raised her head again.
“He wants to marry me,” Betty said, hopelessly, looking at Charlie. “What am I to do?”
• • •
Charlie let the knocker drop on the neighbour’
s door and waited.
“Coming! Coming!”
The door opened, and Charlie immediately recognized the full-moon face, the very red cheeks and the bowl haircut of Ruby Firth. And, astoundingly, she looked exactly the same as she had when Charlie had first seen her at the museum, and later, on the Middlehurst station platform.
“It is you,” she whispered.
“It is, it is,” Ruby replied. “And I’m so terribly sorry for not being here on Friday. Called away on an urgent mission. But it’s all worked out for the best, hasn’t it? Do come in.”
She stood aside to let Charlie enter, and then shut the door behind her.
“I’m a bit at sixes and sevens today, I’m afraid. Got home to discover Mrs. Crofton’s been bombed out and all my front windows smashed by the blast. I’ve been trying to arrange for someone to come round and mend them, but of course everyone’s in the same boat. And I’m confounded by this recipe for potato macaroni pudding.”
She held up a slip of paper that looked like it had been printed by the government.
“I might be good at time travelling but I’m a ruddy poor excuse for a cook.”
Charlie followed her into the kitchen, where she lit the gas and placed a kettle on the ring for tea, and then into the dining room, which was laid out exactly the same way as Betty’s, but all in reverse.
“And, actually, that’s not even true. I’m a ruddy poor excuse for a time traveller as well. Still only displaying my L plates, truth be known. Haven’t quite passed my competency test. Jolly nice to see you again, by the way. Everything all right? Aside from bombs dropping in the middle of the night?”
Charlie sank down in an armchair to one side of the fireplace.
“No,” she whispered. “Nothing’s all right at all, Ruby. I’ve lost Mr. Deeley. He was killed yesterday. In an air raid.”
Ruby sat down in an armchair that was the twin of Charlie’s, on the opposite side of the fireplace.
“I’m so terribly sorry,” she said, leaning forward, her eyes bright.
“Why am I here?”
“Because you’re a time traveller, my dear. You have it in your blood. It’s inescapable.”