Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  “Come on,” said Rachel. “You can’t help her now!”

  The pony trap rattled away.

  Amy Parker was safe, a crowd of people gathering round her. Her face disappeared in the crowd.

  Someone was laughing hysterically, laughing till they cried, and it wasn’t until the carriage was pulling up at the village green that he realized it was him.

  — 54 —

  THEY ARRIVED AT THE scene and Beadle pushed through the crowd, shouting, “Police! Make way!”

  He thought he only had to clamp his hand on Daniel Pearce, but found the girl, Amy Parker, moaning and crying, hysterical, being held by a woman.

  Her father, Mr Parker, was spitting hate, held down by three men. A constable ran up. Women gasped outrage at Parker’s stream of obscenities.

  He looked around for Pearce, but he was nowhere.

  “There!” cried Arabella, pointing up the road.

  A hansom cab – the same cab that had almost run him over – darting away up the rise back to Moseley. Daniel Pearce looking back at the scene.

  “Constable. You take charge here.”

  Another cab coming from Balsall Heath, empty, the driver wary of the crowd in the street.

  “Make way!” Beadle screamed.

  He flagged the driver through the parting crowd. The men dragged Richard Parker to the opposite side of the street to his daughter. Beadle leapt into the cab. Arabella jumped up beside him.

  “Police!” he called. “Follow that cab up ahead! Catch him if you can!”

  The driver cracked his whip and they cantered from the scene.

  “We have to catch him,” he cried. “It’s him. I know it!”

  Arabella stroked his fists with her cool, soft hands, and he relented a little, breathing deep.

  Joe was somewhere behind, at the scene, no doubt telling the constable he was a police deputy.

  They clattered up the rise and crested the hill around the bend and as Moseley village came into view below, he saw Pearce’s cab pull up alongside the green.

  “Faster, man!”

  The cabbie whipped his horse on and they thundered down the hill. Pearce and the girl jumped from their cab and ran into the alley by the giant Oxo hoarding.

  They pulled alongside the empty cab and Arabella leapt out, Beadle jumped down beside her, a jolt of searing pain through his knees, and they were running up the dark alley to the wrought-iron gates.

  He could see them, at his wife’s grave. The girl looked back in panic. A flash of blue light as from a photographer’s flashbulb. It seared his eyeball and floated in his sight as they pushed through the gate.

  He ran to his wife’s grave, panting like a dying dog. They were gone.

  He fell to his knees, one hand slamming against the gravestone. His wife’s name there, accusing. And his name too. Loving wife of Wm. Beadle.

  Arabella crouched beside him and seemed more concerned with him than the disappearance of Pearce.

  “No one can disappear into thin air like that.”

  Someone was moaning in pain. Arabella stroked his face, her eyes livid with fear. She seemed to be saying with her eyes that they both knew that wasn’t true. He remembered the drawing she had shown him from Pearce’s sketchbook. Daniel Pearce pointing a gun on a station platform, under a clock, fading from view. He remembered the eagle feather he kept in the journal in the drawer at work.

  Pearce was gone again. The great white whale had escaped into the ocean’s depths.

  Someone was moaning, and Arabella was stroking his face.

  He felt himself fading, just like the man in the drawing.

  Such a colossal pain in his arm, and across his chest. And he knew, in that final moment before his heart gave out, that this was the end. The future he had mapped out with Arabella was not to be.

  He read his wife’s name again on the stone, and below it his own.

  Loving wife of Wm. Beadle.

  He sought Arabella’s beautiful blue eyes weeping for him, and he sank into darkness.

  — 55 —

  WHEN SHE CAME THROUGH and felt the rush of now hit her, Danny was lying on the grass, shouting up at the sky. “I did it! I did it! Get in!”

  He jumped to his feet and wheeled around, punching the air, the adrenalin that had erupted inside him with the fight still sizzling in his veins, blood smeared down his cheek.

  Rachel steadied herself, feeling a rush of dizziness. “Promise me we never go back again,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “What are you worried about?” Danny cried. “It all turned out fine, didn’t it?”

  She dug out his bag from under the bush and threw it at him. He caught it, still grinning infuriatingly. She reached out to him and brushed his cheek, blood on her fingertips. He winced away from her.

  “You should get that seen to. It looks nasty. He could have killed you.”

  “He could have killed her. I stopped it. She’s going to live. I wonder how long for?”

  “We’ll see in the library,” she said. “Maybe she died the next day.”

  “You’re a real glass half full girl, aren’t you? We changed history!”

  They staggered up the path, both breathing heavily, taking unsteady steps, and walked out onto St Mary’s Row through the lychgate: busy, overcast, Saturday afternoon St Mary’s Row in the year 2011, all normal, just as they’d left it this morning. She turned to him.

  “You’ll get that seen to, won’t you?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  He was already marching down the slope to the village, an absurd spring in his step. He was so full of himself.

  He wheeled around and called to her, laughing. “Rachel! Thank you! Thank you for helping me!”

  She turned and trudged up Wake Green Road, walking the half a mile to home, piecing it together, wondering what might have happened to them all. Had Mr Parker died in the asylum just as he had before or was it murdering his own daughter that had done that to him? No, it was the syphilis that had killed him. His date with the asylum was assured and they were probably carting him off there right now. Had Amy survived and grown to be a woman, and if so, when had she finally died? And if they’d changed that, made her live longer, maybe have children herself, what effect would her life, branching out, have on other lives around her?

  She clumped up her garden path, so exhausted that she didn’t notice the new car in the drive. She put her key in the door and turned it. It stuck. Something was wrong. She rattled it a few times but it wouldn’t click the Yale lock open. She sighed and pressed the doorbell and listened as someone approached inside. Olive opened the door.

  “My key’s not working,” she said, stepping inside. “We’ll have to get—”

  Olive shoved her back. “Hey! What’s going on?”

  Rachel stumbled back onto the drive. “What’s wrong? It’s me, Nan. Rachel.”

  Olive looked scared. “Martyn! Someone’s trying to come in!”

  “Nan! Are you all right? Don’t you recognize me?”

  Martyn rushed to Olive’s side and stepped in front of her. He’d dressed up for something; he looked all smart and clean but there was anger in his eyes. What was happening?

  “What’s wrong with Nan, Dad?”

  “Hey, bugger off!” he shouted. “I don’t know what funny game you think it is but take it somewhere else!”

  “Dad!” she cried.

  “I’m not your bloody Dad. Go on! Sling it, you bloody druggie!”

  She saw this was no joke, she saw it in the menace in his eyes, and yes, the fear too. She backed away and felt herself crumpling up like a sheet of paper burning, everything she knew melting from under her, the horror dawning on her.

  “No,” she moaned. “This isn’t happening. No. No. No.”

  “Go on!” Martyn shouted. “Now! I’m calling the police!”

  Tears were already falling down her face as she silently screamed and broke into a run.

  She ran cryin
g down Wake Green Road and through the village and down Chantry Road and was hammering at Danny’s front door with her fists, shouting his name.

  The door flung open and he lurched back as her fists hit him.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” he shouted.

  She grabbed hold of him. “Danny. Does anyone recognize you?”

  “What?”

  “My Dad and my Nan. They don’t know me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something’s happened!” she screamed. “They don’t know who I am! I don’t exist!”

  Jessica pushed her way to the front door, shouting ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?” She looked Rachel up and down with disgust. “Oh my god, it’s not some gypo woman selling pegs is it? Tell her to bugger off, whoever she is!”

  She flounced back inside. Danny stared in shock.

  “What’s happened?” whimpered Rachel.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She slapped him right on his bleeding cheek. “What have you done! What have you done!”

  “I don’t know!”

  “It’s her. She’s changed it all. You stopped her dying, and now I don’t exist. It’s her!”

  She backed away down the path, a sudden gleam of venom in her eyes.

  “What do you mean?” said Danny.

  “She was supposed to die, Danny!”

  She ran off up the street. There was only one place to go.

  The touchstone.

  — Epilogue —

  SHE REACHED THE GRAVESTONE, heart pounding, doubled over, wheezing for breath. She looked all around to check she was alone and reached out to touch the spot.

  Her fingers burned and the lights went out. There was a roaring in her ears. She stumbled around, blind, tripping over a mound in the grass, falling to her knees. The roaring sound became an eerie drone and an insane wailing. She blinked at the darkness and peered up at the sky. A sudden beam of light flashed across the blackness and she saw that she was still in the churchyard but it was night. She stumbled to her feet and gazed up in awe.

  The droning sound that split her ears came from the dark, brooding sky, across which evil shapes flew – so many – lit by searchlights. The wailing sound was an air raid siren. There was a continual crump-crump-crump of Ack-Ack guns, and somewhere beyond the village the ding-ling-ling of fire engines in the distance. The searchlights knifed the blackness and the red glow of a hundred fires lit up the great barrage balloons floating above the city.

  Rachel reeled with shock, dizzy, unable to take it all in. The noise of explosions nearby was deafening, bombs falling dangerously close and closer.

  “Rachel!”

  She wheeled round, trying to locate the voice. A man was standing at the wrought-iron gate. He was wearing a military cap with a trench coat.

  She stared, dumbfounded.

  He seemed surprised that she didn’t recognize him. He must have thought it was the uniform because he swiped his hat off.

  But she knew she’d never seen him before.

  “Rachel! It’s me, Charlie!” he shouted. “You told me to meet you here, remember?”

  She wanted to respond but her lips wouldn’t move. She could only gawk, paralysed.

  There was a sudden ear-splitting whistle of a bomb falling overhead. The soldier looked up in panic. She remembered he seemed to have a kind face and wondered if he was an angel. It screamed down on them and there was a moment of peace when she knew she was going to die, before the whistle erupted in an almighty explosion and the world turned black.

  2. FAMILY AT WAR

  Dedication

  To Kim

  Note on the Second Edition

  AS WITH THE FIRST BOOK, this is a complete rewrite of Touchstone (2. Family at War), which increases the original story by some 150%.

  Rachel and Danny’s brief Blitz adventure is now much more involved and has allowed me to create a more detailed picture of civilian life during those uneasy months following the Dunkirk catastrophe, when the fall of Britain to Nazi Germany seemed inevitable.

  — 1 —

  HANDS LIFTED HER, BOUNCED her to her feet. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably and the skin all over her body rippled as if it were the skin of a drum being beaten. The soldier held her at arms’ length and shouted, “Come on, Rachel! We need to take cover!”

  She could only stare, frozen with shock.

  He grabbed her hand and yanked her away, heading for the rear gate of the churchyard.

  From the darkness beyond the wrought-iron gate came a bark that made her yelp.

  “Oy! Where the bloody hell d’you think you’re—”

  An old man in a fire warden’s uniform. His outrage snapped into a swift salute. “Oh, sorry sir.”

  “I’m afraid we’ve been caught out in it, Reg,” Charlie shouted over the barrage.

  His name was Charlie. That’s what he’d said. He knew her. She’d told him to meet her here, on some night in the Blitz; some night she had no idea she was coming to.

  An explosion boomed out a few streets away. Rachel screamed and buried her face against Charlie’s trench coat. It was too close. They were all going to die any moment.

  “Quick! In here!” Reg shouted.

  They scooted down the alley. It wasn’t the wide yard space of 1912. The Barclays building had made it the narrow alley she knew. It was too dark to see anything, but she felt Charlie turn sharply to the left into a rear courtyard, their feet scraping on cinders. Then for a second a sudden flash of bright blue light illuminated everything. They were in a back yard. Reg reached down and pulled at a cellar flap. It revealed the first few steps of a barrel skid: a steep concrete slope with a narrow staircase down the middle, disappearing into blackness.

  “Go on,” Reg yelled. “Watch your step.”

  Charlie stepped in first and led Rachel by the hand. She disappeared into the blackness. Reg followed and closed the flaps after him.

  She stepped down, feet groping in the blackness until Reg turned his torch on and illuminated the perilous slope. Rachel screamed as she slipped. Charlie grabbed her.

  “It’s all right, Rachel. I’ve got you.”

  “Can you see your way?” called Reg. “Just take it slow.”

  They descended to a black curtain at the foot of the skid. Charlie pushed through it into a large, dimly-lit cellar. The dank smell of sweat and naked fear. Faces through the candlelight, fifty or more men, women and children, all in 1940s dress, their blank eyes taking in the new arrivals.

  Charlie guided Rachel to a dark corner.

  “This is my pitch!” someone growled. “We were here last night!”

  “Here we go,” Charlie whispered. “Sit over here.”

  He indicated a corner of the cellar that wasn’t taken up and they squeezed in there. Bombs crashed and reverberated above, each shuddering catastrophe raining dust. Rachel held onto him as if she was in the middle of an ocean and his arm was a lifebelt. Mothers held their children so tight they moaned in pain. An old man in a flat cap smiled and winked, but he jumped at the next explosion like everyone else.

  “Listen to it,” a woman shouted. “There’s gonna be nothing left by the time they’ve finished.”

  “Don’t say that,” another woman wheedled from the far corner, somewhere in the dim haze.

  “We should never have gone to war with the Germans anyway. That’s what I say.”

  An old man piped up. “Oh change the bloody record, Sheila!”

  “It’s true,” she said. “It’s none of our business all that stuff that’s going on in Europe, and now look where we are. They’re gonna bomb us all to buggery.”

  “Now now, Sheila,” said Reg. “The kids.”

  “It’s the kids I’m thinking about! Hitler’s gonna bomb everything we’ve got and we’re gonna lose this war before it’s even started!”

  Sheila’s kindling ignited a bonfire of chatter.

  “What are we getting into a war to protect Poland for?”
/>
  “I don’t give a monkey’s about the Poles.”

  “It’s the Jews Hitler wants. He don’t care about us.”

  “It’s the bloody politicians who’ve led us into this!”

  “Our Chamberlain didn’t want it. He’s a sensible man. Not like that warmonger Churchill!”

  “And bloody Leo Amery. One of our own MPs demanded this!”

  “Shut up!” Charlie shouted, rising, his shadow shooting across the cellar wall. His authority stilled everyone. Even the bombs above seemed to quieten. “Enough of this sedition. Any more of this and I swear I’ll shoot the next person I think is a Nazi agent. That means you too, Sheila Sutton.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that!”

  “We’re at war, you stupid woman. It’s you who can’t talk like that. Now shut up.”

  Rachel tasted salt, licked her lips, her fingers to her face. She was crying, quicksilver tears falling onto her lap.

  Charlie returned to her side and leaned in close so no one could hear. “Hey, don’t cry,” he said. “We’re quite safe here. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get back. Maybe if I go back it’ll all be okay, it’ll all be right again.”

  “We have to stay put till it’s over. Shouldn’t be more than half an hour.”

  “My dad’s waiting for me,” she said. “He’s wondering where I’ve got to. I’ve got to go home.”

  That was right. It was all so simple. All she had to do was go back home and everything would be all right again. She wriggled free, pushed Charlie away and leapt up before he could pull her back. She ran for the black curtain.

  “Rachel! No!”

  She was scooting up the beer skid steps before he could stop her, her ankle length skirt tangling her legs up. Charlie’s boots scraped up the steps behind her. She stumbled up in total blackness, pushed at the cellar flap, and the doors flew open.