by Tony Abbott
I wanted Wade and everyone to see this with me.
“Father is waiting for you,” Meg said, waving in Bern and the man with the green cloak, whom I now saw carried a leather pack over his shoulder. Just before Meg closed the door, I slipped inside and followed them into a warm, dry room.
The room had a low ceiling, and the air smelled of burning wood and too many people and the warm aroma of baking bread. All the scents combined into a strange kind of potion, and I felt my tensed-up muscles begin to relax.
A man in a simple long robe and soft shoes swept into the room. “Nam blandit quam ut domus!” he said, his arms open wide. It was something like “Welcome to our house.” “I am Thomas. At your service.”
“I am Nicolaus,” said the man in green, embracing Thomas. “This fellow is a stranger, and I fear he is quite ill.”
I stopped breathing. Nicolaus. He pulled off his hat, and I caught his face for the first time as he turned to the hearth fire. Nicolaus. It couldn’t really be.
Except that it was.
I knew him from his famous self-portrait. He was dressed in many layers, with tights beneath his robes that were like thick leggings. Cold had rosied his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He placed his bag down and threw off his cloak.
The man standing in front of me, as real as life, was Nicolaus Copernicus.
CHAPTER THREE
“Meg, dear, call your stepmother, please,” said the man named Thomas. “Nicolaus and I will help our poor friend into the next room.”
Shivering, I moved aside and watched, amazed, as Copernicus and Thomas helped Helmut Bern toward a long daybed. The whole time, Bern bled from his nose and stared wildly about like he was crazy.
No one in the room saw me. I felt like a spy, lurking in that house. I knew I wasn’t physically there back then, but Bern obviously was, and he was in bad shape, convulsing, twitching, barely able to stand.
Sara would have been the same if we hadn’t rescued her in time.
Together Nicolaus and Thomas laid Helmut Bern down and covered him with a rough-knitted blanket. Then several women in plain long dresses and bonnets appeared from a back room. One of them balanced a basin that brimmed with steaming water, another an armful of cloths. Meg trailed them, holding a brown ceramic mug of something hot.
I stood in the corner, barely breathing, while Thomas led Copernicus to a smaller room. I followed them, knowing I was invisible, but tiptoeing for fear of making a sound. They sat together at a small candlelit table. Thomas brushed his hand across the table as if sweeping away invisible crumbs.
“In the morning,” he said, “we will take your friend to Charterhouse. A hospital. I will support his care until he recovers. They will know best how to treat his ailment.”
“He is less a friend than a stowaway,” Nicolaus said in thickly accented English, but softly, as if not wanting Bern to hear. “He came aboard in the Netherlands in a monk’s robe, but says he is not a monk. Sadly, I fear the man is doomed. This may be leprosy that he suffers. My brother, Andreas, has it.”
“Ah . . .” Thomas trailed off. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, too. “I received your letter, Magister. I will do as much as I can and tell no one. Except perhaps Margaret, who is very close to me. Look, here she is. Meg, come meet our guest properly. Nicolaus Copernicus is an astronomer of great renown.”
“Like Herr Kratzer?” said Meg, with a curtsy. She smiled, and her cheeks dimpled. I liked her right away. Meg was Margaret. Just like my sister, Maggie.
Copernicus turned to Thomas. “Are you saying Kratzer is here?”
“He teaches my daughters. The German community is large in London. Meg, our guest is far more famous than Herr Kratzer. Believe me.”
“Oh, I do!” She curtsied again. “I always do, Father!”
I felt stupid, not knowing who these people were. Thomas. Meg. Herr Kratzer. I had to remember everything and decrypt it later. Lily would help me by searching online for answers. I hoped Lily would help me. If I ever got back to the present. And if anyone believed that my fevered brain hadn’t made all this up.
Meg tugged a sheet of paper from a pocket in her dress and set it on the table. “Father, did I do it properly?”
Thomas held the sheet to the candle. I leaned over to see. In a small, neat script was a series of strange letters.
“Yes, very good, Meg,” her father said. “Nicely formed.”
“What is this?” Copernicus asked. “A secret language between you two?”
“A playful code I invented for my latest little book,” Thomas said, tugging a slim volume from a shelf behind him. He handed it to the astronomer, who opened it to the beginning and ran his finger along a page I couldn’t see.
Copernicus studied the characters on Meg’s paper, then the book, and smiled. “I see, yes. If I may . . . here are more words to decipher.” Glancing back and forth from the book to Meg’s paper, he picked up a quill that lay on the table, dipped it into a brass ink bottle, and wrote four words in the odd characters.
I stared at the “letters” to memorize them. Three circles with lines in various places, three boxes with lines, a small c, three letters that looked like LOL, something like the French cookie called a macaron, another l, a backward c, a dome, a box with a dot, a triangle.
“I’ll decode them right now!” she said, taking the paper from him.
“But listen, Meg,” said Nicolaus. “The first two words are for your sister Elizabeth to decipher. The other two are for you, yes? Remember these words. They will be important to you in, oh, about ten years.”
“Ten years? What do you mean, sir?” she asked.
Nicolaus smiled. “In ten years a good man will come to paint your picture. And, oh, yes, tell Elizabeth not to kick the sleeping dog!”
What that meant, I had no idea. But Meg laughed and scooted away to another room, leaving the two men alone—with me.
“She is my dearest,” Thomas said softly.
“I know. I can see the way you two trade glances. And now . . .”
Copernicus removed a wooden box from his sack. He unclasped the leather strap binding it and opened the lid away from himself. A rich yellow light flashed from the box onto both of their faces. Thomas shielded his eyes. “My goodness!”
“It is amber, already a thousand years old. Older,” Nicolaus said. “When my friend the artist does come to you, have him build a better box to hide it in. This is soaked by seawater. Seal this item’s two equal arms separately, or, believe me, they will overwhelm you. Thomas, I tell you, this object, like so many of its brothers, is terribly dangerous.”
I was confused by “two equal arms,” but I knew I was seeing an incredible thing—Copernicus in the very act of transferring a relic to a Guardian. To Thomas. But to Thomas who?
I tried to edge around, but I feared I might make a sound, so I never saw what was inside the box, only the bright golden light that shone out of it. Thomas took the box and closed the lid. The room darkened as before to dull candlelight.
“Voteo facio quod possum,” he whispered. “Cujuscumque periculum.”
I promised myself to remember the Latin, even though I know only some of the words. But I already guessed their meaning: “Upon my life I will.” The vow that every Guardian makes. The promise to protect the relic to the end.
Just then a tiny black-haired girl in a blue tunic peeked around the corner at the two men. She was very young. Two years old, maybe, or even less. But she was beautiful, with the sweetest pink face and rosy lips, and deep, dark eyes that seemed to glow like coals. She made a noise in her throat as she toddled into the room, clutched the hem of Thomas’s robe, and tugged it, grumbling happily.
“But who is this little angel?” Copernicus held his arms open. She ran to him.
“Alas, a foundling,” Thomas said. “The poor child suffers from an unnamed wound and cannot speak a word. But her eyes are language enough, yes? We call her Joan Aleyn. She is as dear to me as are my own daughters.”
A bell rang twice in a distant room.
“Ah, a courier from the king. Business calls me,” Thomas said, standing. He smiled, then grew serious. The light in the room seemed to focus on his face, and the lines around his eyes gave him a look of pain. “I promise, my friend, until my dying breath, to do as you ask. Stay here for now. Come, Joan. Let us see what your sisters are up to, yes?”
Thomas took up the wooden box, snatched the tiny girl into his arms, and drifted into another room, leaving the great astronomer alone.
Copernicus followed Thomas with his eyes. I didn’t breathe. He leaned back at the table; then he let out a deep sigh. He dipped into his satchel once more and took out what I knew instantly was his secret diary—the diary that at that very moment was in my own bag!
He stared at the book’s leather cover and brass corner ornaments. They were far less worn than they would be five centuries later. He turned to a clean page. He picked up Thomas’s pen and dipped it again in the inkwell.
I felt alone, so alone, among all these dead people. I wanted to get back to the others, to today, to wake up from this dream, or whatever it was, and forget it.
But a voice in my head said, Not yet.
I had to admit that since our relic hunt began, I’d come to know Nicolaus Copernicus as I knew my own friends. I wanted to talk to him, to open my bag and show him what I had. I wanted to scream to him:
Do you know what my friends and I are doing? We’re Guardians just like your friend Thomas!
I burned to see what page he was writing on, so that I might read it later—the page he wrote while I stood near him. I moved closer, an inch maybe, no more. The candle’s flame quavered, as if the air was disturbed. Surely not by me. I was a ghost. Copernicus lifted his eyes from the page and observed the flame wobbling. I breathed as silently as I could. Still, the flame’s tongue reacted, as if the air around me had rippled.
Copernicus set down his pen.
He turned his face to me.
“Rebecca Moore,” he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
My vision went black around the edges. My heart pounded as if it would explode. But I held on to myself. I bit my lip, felt my feet on the floor, and focused. I was still afraid to take a step out of the shadows.
“You’re Copernicus? You’re really him? How can I . . . how . . . ?”
“Let us not waste time on these things, Rebecca Moore.” His voice deepened suddenly. “We have a few moments only. Yes, this is London. Yes, it is November of the year 1517. By some trick—or gift—that I do not understand, travelers such as we can see each other. I am here, but these others cannot see you.”
“So what am I, a ghost?” I said.
He waved that away. “I know, of course, what will happen to my friend Thomas, though I must not tell him. The horror of knowing and not being able to warn, the horror of knowing it will happen anyway. This is why, you see, we use codes. To hide the truth—not only from the Teutonic Order. But from ourselves.”
The candlelight warmed his face, as the fire in the hearth must have warmed him, though I saw him shiver. I tried to shape my thoughts. I couldn’t.
“For Thomas,” he said, “it will happen in eighteen short years.”
“What will happen to him?”
“A rise in fortunes, then a fall. Friendships with King Henry seldom end well. Thomas will be executed on the sixth of July in 1535. Everyone knows this in your time.”
I felt my head emptying out, like water going down a drain. I was faint, ready to fall to the ground, to fall somewhere, but Copernicus rose quickly, took hold of me by my arms, and settled me in a chair. I didn’t think it was possible to have form and weight in a dream. Maybe I imagined that, too.
He stood, his forehead deeply furrowed. “Rebecca Moore, I bear much guilt. Perhaps I am guilty even of this.” He glanced to the other room. “A time traveler is like a blind man with a torch, setting fire to everything he stumbles into.”
My mouth was as dry as sand. “What do you mean? How can traveling in time do that?” I wished Wade could have heard this, to understand the time thing.
“Time travelers are sleepwalkers,” he said. “We trail destruction behind us. Accidental murderers. This is why I took the astrolabe apart. I saw what I had done. What more horrors could be done by the Order. Do you see now?”
“I don’t see. I don’t understand—”
He seemed upset. “Horrible things happen when you travel this way!” He waved his hand up and down to signify—what?—a passage through time? “I didn’t know this until my second journey. The holes we created, the holes we left behind. The first journey was joy I’d never known! Rebecca, there was beauty and wonder everywhere, and yes, the blessed power of good!” His eyes sparkled, then faded. “The second time, no. I saw what horrors I had begun.”
I was getting so little of what he told me. “What horrors you had begun? But you wouldn’t have. You’re good. How? And how many journeys did you make?”
“Whenever one travels this way, a hole is created,” he said. “In your time you will know it as a nuclear event.”
It was strange to hear a man in an old house in London in the sixteenth century use the word nuclear.
“In this time”—he spread his hands wide—“it is seen as a hole in the sky, a hole as narrow as a dagger’s point.” I remembered reading those words in the diary. “Things drift that should not,” he said. “People drift, sometimes.”
“But you can do good things because of traveling in time, can’t you?” I asked. “Something good must happen. It must.”
He was quiet for the longest time before he said, “She lives.”
“Who?” I said. “Who lives?”
“But because she lives . . . there is the evil. You cannot escape that. . . .”
He trailed off.
When I pleaded with him to tell me more, he shook his head sharply. “I should not. I cannot. You must return. Go back. Do not come here again, Rebecca Moore. The evil, the loneliness will break you, do you see?”
“Stop saying that! I don’t see! What are you trying to tell me?”
He turned his face to the fire, overcome by something, then said, “To find this relic, remember the words I gave to Meg. Serpens does not lead to it. The words I gave to Thomas’s daughter are for you, too.”
“I don’t know the code—”
“It has to be in code! To tell you outright would be far more dangerous.”
“Why?” I was getting angry, too. “Why?”
“Because you would stop searching! You cannot stop searching! Look here.” He spun the diary around to the page he had written on while I stood in the shadows. What he had inked were four more words with the odd characters.
“Can’t you just tell me what it means?” I pleaded.
“This—this—will happen after nightfall tonight.”
“After nightfall tonight? Whose night? Yours or mine?”
My brain was fizzling out. Too much information. The horror of knowing, his second journey, the bizarre codes, the sleepwalker.
Then as I stared at the page, trying to etch the symbols into my mind, Nicolaus whispered into my ear, “The . . . Temple . . . of . . . Mithras . . .”
I wanted to ask what he meant, but my words were lost in a mist. Whether he began to fade away from me or I from him, it didn’t matter. Without my leaving that close, hot, shivering room, I was dragged away from him, from the old house and the old city, and I couldn’t see him anymore.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Wolff is on the embankment. I see him. Becca, stay here with us.”
The hand was gentle but insistent, tugging me backward. I turned, and there was Wade’s face. The Old Barge was gone. Bucklersbury was gone. The ancient curving street was replaced by the throng at the river. Rain sprinkled my face. It was this morning again. Wade and Lily huddled close on either side of me, while Darrell stood in front, as if blocking us from being seen.
“Becca, p
ay attention!” Lily’s voice in my ear.
“What? Sorry.”
“I told you not to say that.”
The half hour, or longer, that I had been back there with Helmut Bern and Meg and Thomas and Nicolaus had gone by in an instant. I was barely a step or two from where I’d been when everything winked out and I saw Helmut Bern crawling on the sand.
“He’s moving.” Darrell nodded back over his shoulder.
I saw him then, Markus Wolff. A tall man with a craggy face and close-cropped white hair, walking slowly among those gathered on the far side of the excavation. His black overcoat—the one that had gained him Lily’s nickname Leathercoat—glistened in the light rain. Seeing him, remembering how he’d threatened us at gunpoint in San Francisco, shocked me back to the here and now.
As Wolff trained his icy eyes on the workers below and took snapshots with his phone, my time with Nicolaus seemed to snuff out like a candle in the rain.
“He’s sending pictures to Galina,” Wade murmured.
“It’s strange to see Wolff in the daylight, isn’t it?” Lily whispered. “He’s so like a vampire, except that vampires are hilarious compared to him.”
My head was splitting. “Just what I was thinking,” I managed to say. The area behind my eyes ached; so did my jaw, as if I’d been clenching my teeth too long. My nose was running, too. When I wiped it, my finger was smeared with blood.
With blood! Like Helmut Bern! I turned away from everyone, but that was it. A single drop. I wiped my finger on my jeans.
We started back to Roald and Sara, when all at once the crowd lurched and parted. A long black car, just this side of being a limousine, pushed through the spectators, nudging them away. It stopped.
“BMW,” said Darrell. “And it has no license plates. Julian, no plates.”
A tall man in a dark raincoat with a slouchy rain hat pulled low over his face exited the rear of the car. He stepped to the edge of the embankment.