by Adrian Speed
“I can’t believe that sums up his entire life,” I pressed on.
“Well of course it hardly sums up a lifetime.” Sir Reginald put the coffee down. “It doesn’t talk about instructing his son to read with the family Bible. It doesn’t talk about his vainglorious attempt to learn the pianoforte. It doesn’t talk about the summer days he spent lying on the grass with his wife. Or anything else that he may have done. However, they are his essential details and I am afraid that appears to be all anyone wrote of him. He was born, he married, he raised children, and he died. I can find no reference to him visiting Europe, nor of entertaining continental companions. The company he ran was successful but not groundbreaking. Its most singular achievement was correctly timing their move towards producing mechanisms for steam driven ships, and that was hardly worthy of celebration. Most of us do not live lives of note, nor is note capable of expressing how meaningful they are to us. Ebenezer Arnold is just such a life. He lived, he loved, and he may have laughed, and it was entirely lacking of note.”
“But his signature is on the Treaty of Fontainebleau,” I pressed on.
“Indeed, it is quite the quandary.” Sir Reginald smiled and I realised that not for the first time he had been trying to lead my thinking towards a realisation he had already come to.
“Which means...” I spoke slowly as the pieces dropped into place in my mind. “Either we have to figure out how such a boring person ended up on the treaty, or, or–” I held up a finger to stop Sir Reginald from interjecting. “Or, the records of the twenty-third century have been scrubbed to make Ebenezer look boring.”
“A great deal can happen in five centuries.” Sir Reginald idly put another sugar cube into his coffee and stirred it in. The coffee cup had not been large to start with. “A dedicated individual can destroy a great deal of evidence over a lifetime, and if he passes that quest onto his son, and his son’s son...”
“Professor Sotheby made a promise to his grandfather...” I nodded. “To destroy the treaty?”
“I cannot be certain as Professor Sotheby's testimony was extremely guarded but I believe he intended to doctor Ebenezer Arnold’s name off the treaty. The professor’s skill with historical documents is such he could have hidden the change from the microfilm. Techniques of the twenty-first century and beyond might have uncovered his duplicity, but it would require an individual to take sufficient interest to study the treaty.”
“And the treaty is such a minor part of history, no-one would take that level of interest for centuries.” It was an unnerving prospect. A dedicated history professor with the trust of academia and access to the world’s archives could change history to suit his whim, and provided he kept his changes small and out of scrutiny, only the all-piercing eye of technology would reveal the truth. “So if the professor won’t talk, let’s go after the grandfather.”
“I am afraid I have already explored that avenue,” Sir Reginald held up a hand and sipped his near-syrup coffee. “Heinrich Sotheby is not in a fit state to talk to us. For a start, he’s dead.”
“Heinrich?”
“Formerly of Austria and formerly Versteckt,” Sir Reginald explained. “Took Sotheby at immigration on Ellis Island, from the auction house, on account of North American prejudices.”
“Well, so what if he’s dead? We’re time detectives.”
“I meant what I said my dear, Heinrich Sotheby is not in a fit state to talk to us,” Sir Reginald shook his head. “Ever. He was born in 1880, the poor man, and shared the fate of every man born after 1860 and before 1900. He fought in the Great War and it shattered him. When it came time to put the pieces back together he used whisky instead of glue. Apparently there were a few short years when this held. He could hold a job, took his children to America, built a nice home in New England and then the whisky demanded its payment. He spent almost all of his life suffering from alcoholic delusions and paranoia.” Sir Reginald rotated the tablet and pushed it towards me. A police transcript filled the screen. “Those are Professor Sotheby’s own words to describe his grandfather.”
“Then how on earth could the professor make a promise to him?”
“Even amongst the most mentally broken there are moments of lucidity,” Sir Reginald said with a sad smile and pulled the tablet back towards himself. “Who else but a child would have the time to sit with grandfather and wait for these moments to arise?”
“Who would leave their child with a chronic alcoholic constantly reliving the First World War?”
“A family in which both parents must work and yet cannot provide an income sufficient to keep a nanny,” Sir Reginald said. “I believe there was an economic downturn not long after Professor Sotheby was born in 1928.”
“So we could try those few years before he became a nervous wreck,” I said. “Go back to when, the twenties? Try to find out what he knew.”
“It is a possibility,” Sir Reginald said. “Although I think we would be better served trying before the war. He might have been a stable alcoholic for a few years, but he was still an alcoholic, and alcoholism blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction.” Sir Reginald frowned. “Which in retrospect might be precisely the reason the professor was asked to make his promise.”
Sir Reginald let his head fall forward into his hands and began massaging the scalp.
“And there is the paradox consideration,” he continued.
“Professor Sotheby did look a lot like our killer in Lucon.”
Sir Reginald didn’t speak. Instead he just sat with his head in his hands and, I hoped, deep in thought. Thankfully nobody at any of the other tables was paying us any mind and, because we were speaking in English, were simply ignoring us as tourists.
“All human beings die,” Sir Reginald said eventually, pulling his head up. “Whether they flourish or wilt, whether they abstain or indulge, all of mankind will die. But there are three things which will live on eternal in this mortal coil if nurtured properly. They are the company, the society and the family. When dealing with these we risk greater paradoxes than in any other scenario because they will live for centuries, if not millennia. We may send a family down a path to recognise us throughout the centuries by a simple how-do-you-do if we do not exercise reasonable caution. We were recognised in Lucon and I pray it is not because of Professor Sotheby passing our description through the ages. The more we interfere with this family the more we risk, and we are already dancing on a knife edge.” Sir Reginald turned to the tablet. “I believe it is all linked, somehow, and I think the answers are here in Arnold’s notes. If the research has been doctored throughout time perhaps I can gain a picture from its absence instead of presence.”
“Well if you follow that logic of paradoxes, why do we risk time travel at all? Couldn’t anyone recognise us and pass that information down? Aren’t we risking paradoxes just by existing outside our own time?”
Sir Reginald glowered and his hands began to fidget against each other. His eyes fluttered from me to the sky as he tried to make up his mind about something. In the end he drained his mug of coffee, leant back in his chair and adjusted his suit.
“When you first learned I had a time machine, what was your first instinct to do with it?” Sir Reginald asked.
“Well,” I was taken aback. Not least by his question, but the sudden harshness in Sir Reginald’s voice, as if I had flipped a lever of temper in his mind. “I wanted... well, at first I wanted the answers to some questions. What dinosaurs really looked like, what really killed them, how Latin was really spoken, where the human race was you know... going...” the Genesis computer had been a sad answer to that question.
“And once those answers were provided?”
“Well, I wanted to go and learn more about certain cultures. Get an in depth view of, well, the Victorians for a start...”
“And then? Once you had satiated all curiosity as to the past and future, what then was left?”
“I... I don’t know, I never really thought about it,” I
confessed. “Working with you... always felt right.”
“Answer me this then,” Sir Reginald held up a hand to stop me going further. “In your life before you met me, in Canada, did you ever have something stolen from you?”
“Er...” I had to think for a moment. “My bike, when I was fourteen. Someone snapped its chain and went off with it.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Of course.”
“And was it investigated?”
“I think so, but they were a bit busy for a bike thief. Eventually I got it–”
“What was the name of the policeman you spoke to?”
“I don’t know–”
“What did he look like?”
“Er... he was tall, I guess? Brownish... brownish hair?” I couldn’t help it, I had to laugh. Sir Reginald did not share the amusement.
“Well now my dear, you have all the pieces,” Sir Reginald put his hands together and glared. “Why do we risk the paradox?”
This was all the pieces? My mind raced. What on earth was Sir Reginald trying to show me? What did me losing my bike almost ten years ago have to do with anything? What did the investigating policeman have to do with anything? I suppose solving mysteries was as good a way as any to use the time machine for good, once all curiosity was slaked but...
“Beyond my own my dear, you have one of the most piercing powers of observation and strongest of memories,” Sir Reginald pointed his finger at me, almost as an accusation. “And yet of the policeman you remember next to nothing.”
“Oh come on, they do it that way on purpose,” I said. “They have uniforms, and regulation haircuts, and–”
“And yet even when bald and clean-shaven, no two people look truly alike,” Sir Reginald said. “And yet even your powerful mind lets the police slide out of focus. Their appearance is not important, their function is important. We remember what they did for us, we do not remember them. They fade until they are an indistinct police-shaped blur.”
“Or a detective-shaped blur,” I said, cottoning on. “And when all curiosity was satisfied... that was your answer with what to do with the time machine: you wanted to be a detec– no, no, you wanted to help people.” Sir Reginald nodded. “And being a detective was the best way to help the most people without creating a paradox.” Again, Sir Reginald nodded. “That’s why you were so angry to lose your hat!” I said with a clap of my hands. “That was your uniform! Director Michel, the Commissaire, they all remembered your hat!”
“It’s not the only reason I want my hat back,” Sir Reginald muttered. He leant forward and tried to become more animated. “But well done. I would hazard that the Commissaire would struggle to name a single feature of my face, even the colour of my hair correctly, because all he remembers is the top hat who helped him solve his problem. The person beneath has faded from all memory.” Sir Reginald raised a finger to point at the sky. “So now tell me why this potential paradox is so dangerous.”
“Because...” I said, my brain slotting the answers to Sir Reginald’s latest test into place. “Because people remember your function more than they remember your appearance. When they write to you, and ask you for help, you’re their saviour. But now we’d be stumbling into people’s lives unannounced, asking difficult questions and bringing up unpleasant memories. And we’re not investigating a person... we’re investigating a family. A family’s memory lasts a lot longer than a person’s.”
“Usually I find it struggles to last longer than two hundred years,” Sir Reginald acknowledged. “Grandfather to grandson, then he becomes a grandfather and passes it to his grandchildren. Often it crumbles earlier, but it struggles to last longer than that.”
“So... it’s possible Sotheby could have passed it onto his a grandson, who passed it onto a grandson, who became our killer in Lucon?”
“If we hurt him and his family sufficiently,” Sir Reginald nodded. “That is why I want to keep as far away from them as possible.” Sir Reginald tapped the tablet. “The answers are here, I am sure of it. I must simply grit my teeth and push it all into my mind and then assemble the answer from the pieces.”
“I could help,” I suggested. “I’ve got my phone, I can start reading.”
“Having two of us work through it is simply inefficient,” Sir Reginald shook his head. “It will take a complete picture of the research to see the gaps of doctored evidence, or the connection between the Sotheby and Arnold families.”
“Are you trying to keep the evidence from me?” It came out much angrier than I meant it. Cold, and dark, like glacier water streams.
“By no means,” Sir Reginald immediately pushed the tablet towards me. “Read it if you wish.”
I opened it up on my phone. There were hundreds of documents to sift through, if not thousands. Letters, diaries, newspaper articles, archived websites, social media archives, a lifetime’s worth of lifetimes.
“Of course, if you find you want to do something a little more active...” Sir Reginald picked up his own tablet. “I’m in just enough of a self-destructive enough mood... to suggest we see what that poor soul who died just before the Great Fire of London business was all about.”
“I thought you said that there was nothing there but fire and plague,” I glared.
“As it is, but if we avoid the fire itself and ply our bodies with bubonic-targeting phage I am sure we shall be in perfect health.”
“Phage?”
“Oh, I am sorry, I meant the unction of silver.”
“Unction?”
“I... uh... hmm...” Sir Reginald’s hand twitched as he puzzled through this. “Anti-biotic compound?”
“Why do you phrase that as a question?”
“No reason, yes, well, anti-biotic compound, that will certainly prevent the plague,” Sir Reginald nodded. “What say you then, to the fire?”
I looked down at the documents on my phone. The prospect of such dry reading for weeks on end didn’t thrill me. And Sir Reginald would probably insist I get on a plane to Montreal to see my parents by the time we finished them anyway.
“I say, let’s do it.”
Chapter XII
Sir Reginald landed the time machine in a copse of woodland. A murder of crows greeted us as we arrived, cawing in confusion. Judging by the grey skies and stinging cold he’d taken us to the middle of winter.
“The old road to Edgware,” Sir Reginald declared, pointing his cane beyond the trees and at a scrubby lane amongst the fields. I followed him and looked out at an alien landscape. I felt like he’d dropped us somewhere in rural Surrey. Timber-frame farm houses and barns sat in the middle of patchwork fields. In the cruel cold of an English winter everything stank of manure and the fields were nothing but mud. “Alas it seems we’ve landed before they built the turnpike. Nonetheless, we shall struggle on to the village of Paddington and I think we shall find what we need in Covent Garden.”
I knew Paddington as a vast railway station and streets and streets of ten-story office blocks. Now it was a dozen houses clustered around a fork in the road. I expected the villagers to gawk at us as we passed but they seemed too busy in their own lives. Two strangers could dress however they wanted, clothes still had to be washed, bread baked, fences mended, fields tilled.
The old Edgware Road eventually met a straighter, larger road, big enough for two carts to pass side by side and filled with more steady traffic; however, the city was still nowhere to be seen.
“Hyde Park,” Sir Reginald pointed over the road to the rolling parkland behind. Once he pointed it out, I could see it. The trees stood in the same places, even if they were different trees. The land rolled the same way, and faded into the distance the same way. Even the footpaths were laid out the same. Yet it all looked... wrong. There was no Marble Arch, no wrought iron gates, and the edges weren’t lined with buildings. “Only recently opened to the public by our good King Charles.” Sir Reginald touched his lips with the tip of his cane. “Or was it his father?”
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br /> As we passed Hyde Park’s tree line a gust of wind curled in from the south east and hit us with the stench of the city. It brought a tear to my eye and I longed for the days when animal dung was the worst that the 1660s had to offer. It smelt of sweat, salt, blood and excrement, all mixed in with the heady smog of coal and a blast of the sea for good measure.
“Quite the whiff isn’t it?”
“It’s worse than Vindobona!” I gasped.
“That was a mere frontier town,” Sir Reginald smiled. “This is the city of London! Five hundred thousand souls and scarcely a sewer between them.”
“You’re smiling! Why are you smiling?”
“Why, my dear? For the same reason Hillary smiled at Everest,” Sir Reginald said and started striding towards the city. “Now, onwards, I want us to secure lodgings post-haste.”
As Sir Reginald led us down the road towards the city more and more roofs came into view over the horizon. I was expecting London to be different, but I wasn’t prepared for the city that emerged from the mist and smoke. It looked more medieval than it did like modern London. Tall, timber houses towered over one another topped with tile roofs, looking unsettlingly overbalanced, like a stand of ancient trees. Only a grand, baroque palace under construction on the outskirts looked anything like modern London.
I couldn’t recognise a single building or spire. Not one. Even the familiar dome of St Paul’s had disappeared and in its place stood a tower that would be the envy of Manhattan. Only the sound of its bells sounded remotely familiar.
“Stand close,” Sir Reginald warned as we approached the outskirts of the city. “And walk as if you own half of Berkshire. This is not the London you remember.”
The city streets were not fit to stand in. There were cobble stones but not until I’d sunk through an inch of muddy effluence. Few tradesmen walked the streets and those that did shied away from us, breathing through sweet smelling rags. Although sweet smelling was putting it politely, over the top of the human stench came overwhelming wafts of peppermint, liquorice, camphor and nutmeg.