by Adrian Speed
“Well,” I turned over the ridiculous hat in my hand. “Well thank you, I suppose. But unless I want to” – I lowered my voice as far as it would go – “Turk lurk thurs” – I brought it back up to normal – “and introduce myself as Andrew, I think I’ll dress as a woman and stay as Hannah.”
“As suits you, corn rose.” Sir Reginald set himself back down in a chair and pulled my half-pint mug towards him. “Is this still the same claret? Marvellous, it’s been some hours since I left.” He took a deep swig and then jolted in surprise. “And of course, that was why! I will return!” with a burst of energy he swept from the room and down the stairs. There was a clatter and within minutes he returned carrying an umbrella along with his cane. “Here you are, my dear,” he offered the umbrella towards me. “This is for you.”
“Er, thank you?” I took the umbrella from him. It had an unusual design, and much more old fashioned than I’d seen in the twenty-first century. Its central staff was entirely bamboo and entirely straight, without the crook I was used to, and it’s handle was a flat oval instead of a pure circle. It had a solid brass bulb at its end and there was a round guard the opening mechanism rested against. “Do they use umbrellas much in the 1660s?”
“Not in England, but parasols are the vogue for ladies in Paris and Rome,” Sir Reginald said. “Claim to be a Huguenot, fleeing catholic wrath, and none shall suspect you.”
“And it always pays to have an excuse for being out of touch,” I nodded, remembering how Sir Reginald would always excuse me as being a German, or a Canadian, or whatever foreigner would suit the time. Pretending to be French would be no hardship.
“I had meant to give it to you when you returned to me in Edgware Road, but it passed out of my mind until you insisted on female costume for your endeavour,” Sir Reginald said.
“You wanted to give it to me earlier? Why would...” My words trailed away as realisation dawned.
I twisted the handle until I heard a click like a fountain pen and then pulled on the end. Brilliant steel shone as I pulled the mechanism away. Two and a half feet of steel slid out of the umbrella, ending with a needle sharp point. It had a very slight curve, sharp only on one edge like a katana, or a European cutlass, and had been sharpened so recently it shone like silver.
“We are both accomplished swordsmen,” Sir Reginald said, resting his hands on his cane. “It seemed unfair that only I should carry a blade.”
Very carefully I gave the blade a few twirls after making sure Sir Reginald was well out of reach. The bronze pommel kept it perfectly balanced, the guard for the mechanism also served as a cross guard for my hands, and the hilt was smooth and comfortable to hold. I swept the air as my kendo master would have instructed, and in my mind’s eye I could see knights coming apart against it.
I slid it back into its sheath and stared at it. I hoped I could be trusted with it. In any era before the revolver, carrying this sword with the knowledge and strength to use it made me one of the deadliest people alive. I’d have to follow Sir Reginald’s example, a weapon of last resort, and nothing more.
“Thank you, Sir Reginald,” I said, trying to give him a warm smile.
“You are more than welcome, my dear.” Sir Reginald inclined his head and reached up to remove his hat in respect, remembered it wasn’t there, and tried to pretend he had been going to hold his lapels all along. “I know I can entrust you with it.”
“I hope so,” I whispered. Somewhat louder I said, “So, do I have a bedroom where I can change? Because time’s a-wasting!”
Chapter XIII
The newspaper had said the skeleton had been found near the Monument in the twenty-first century, but on close inspection of the included map it was really closer to the Stock Exchange. To that end, I made my way to the area as it stood in 1665, the stately Royal Exchange.
I followed the road across High Holborn and down to Cheapside past St Paul’s. Despite myself I had stood on the side of the road and stared at the great gothic cathedral for some time. It was so.... wrong to see in London. It had a great square tower that reminded me of the twin towers of the Notre Dame and it seemed far higher than the new St Paul’s. The gothic fluted arches seemed to crawl all the way to heaven. Its attempt at serenity was ruined by the scaffolding that ran around it, full of workmen yelling at each other over the stonework or the guttering.
Eventually the crush of traffic spurred me on towards my destination. It was hard to believe that plague had so recently been so catastrophic. London certainly didn’t feel any emptier than the London of my time. But here and there were shadowy alleyways off the broader paved streets and down there you could still see houses shut up and barred, and dark-cloaked ‘doctors’ flitting between them. Everyone seemed to have laden themselves down with talismans, some of them religious, many of them foreign herbs and mercury and antimony.
But still the city was full of bustling people, trying to keep their livelihoods going. The engine of the city didn’t care about the plague; it demanded coal and iron to be brought to its foundries, men and beasts to shape the steel and ships loaded to carry it away again.
Nothing looked like I was used to, and I was expecting that to an extent, but what surprised me was how, despite the wooden houses and gothic churches, I could almost still navigate along the same roads. They were narrower to be sure, twistier in places, with more side alleys in others, but they were still broadly the same.
Of course, that didn’t stop me walking past the Royal Exchange twice without recognising it. The Stock Exchange I knew was a great edifice of classical stone, a modern day forum. This looked more like a Dutch palace. The bottom floor was stone but the upper galleries were wood, and a tower stood over its entrance way, about wide enough for two carts to pass through. Sir Reginald would probably recognise it first time, but he had abandoned me for the day.
“I must continue my reading of the Arnold case,” he had insisted. “My head being somewhat full of wine, I must retreat to a coffee shop if I am ever to make headway with it.”
“Don’t forget to hog an entire table with your MacBook.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing,” I muttered. “Alright, I’ll carry on alone.”
As such, I alone stepped through the entrance and into a courtyard filled with tradesmen advertising their services. The merchantmen all wore similar quality clothes to my own, which I supposed told me my disguise’s station. Not nobility, not the common folk, somewhere in the middle. Around the courtyard sat two galleries, one on top of the other, filled with shops. I tried to walk as if I knew exactly where I was going and what I was doing, and had done it a hundred times.
“Finest silks of the orient,” one trader announced as I passed. “Nipponese, Turkish and Mandarin, match your oriental parasol?”
“Spices and herbs from the Indies, East and West,” another suggested. “Nutmeg, jakolate, and pepper, black or white.”
“Can you not tell at sight a lady of finest refinement?” the trader scolded the others. “For this great lady there can be no other desire than the prettiest Egyptian cotton.”
I passed by them all. If this was where my unfortunate skeleton died then I had a hideously broad variety of options. People were flooding in and out of the Royal Exchange and businessmen thronged to barter over the price of shares in companies or futures of ships yet to arrive in harbour. There had to be nearly a thousand people in the Exchange at this moment alone, and more besides delivering to the shops that lined its galleries or trading warehouse stock in the courtyard.
I tried to find a secluded spot in the shadows and hid myself away into it while trying to think, folding up my umbrella to try and hide from all notice. There had to be an easier way to narrow them down, or at least gain an insight into what kind of person I was looking for. There were just so many voices coming through the throng it was hard to drain them out.
“Half a hundredweight of tobacco is what I need and nothing less!”
“It simply
stands off shore in quarantine.”
“Be it in quarantine or still in Virginia, it is the same to me lest it be delivered ere the end of day,” was one conversation, between a man who sounded like an elephant seal that had sprouted legs and an unfortunate tobacco tradesman.
“A word from my wife’s cousin to Lord Montagu and we can be the sole suppliers of powder to His Majesty’s navy.”
“We, say you, as if you have a single ship to your name. It will be my fleet you want to use, and you claim it as a joint venture.”
“Without me there is no word to Lord Montagu and no monopoly with His Majesty.”
“Without me there is no fleet to carry the powder, it is you who needs me and not t’other way around. When powder brings men as much pleasure as wine or oranges, then you may sway me, brother,” was another snappish argument between two traders in the courtyard trying to raise funds for their next venture.
“Captured by the Dutch. I had almost lost it all but the sailors have returned. A strong crew who knows what it means to beat around the Cape and cross the straits at Malacca. Go in with me this day and they can return before the year is out.”
“A crew that let their ship and their cargo fall into foreign hands is a weak crew.”
“I am only asking for a tenth-share, you would earn a fortune upon this venture.”
“Perhaps after the war with Holland closes, and I need not fear your crew’s cowardice.”
“’Tis no cowardice to surrender to thirty guns when you stand with four. The crew cannot live on charity until the war ends. They will join other crews, or turn to the Navy.”
“So it stands as your problem, cousin, not mine.”
They were so loud and so numerous they were hard to ignore. Snippets of their lives emerged from the roar and slid into my mind while I was trying to think. Unless I closed my eyes I’d follow their lips, matching their movements to part of the rabble.
I needed to find out exactly where the body was found and then find the place in the seventeenth century. At least to within a dozen metres. It was no good simply knowing it was near the Exchange, there were thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people.
I could go forwards in time to the twenty-first century and request GPS co-ordinates of where the remains were found. But what good would that do me? There were no GPS satellites back in the 1660s. Was I going to stand out in the road with sextant and chronometer to determine my latitude and longitude to the sixth decimal point a dozen times over while I searched for its matching point in the twenty-first century? I’d be burnt as a witch before the day was out.
Were there any fixed points I could use? London Bridge had been replaced twice over by the twenty-first century. Could I use the river itself?
A walk down from the Exchange to London Bridge put an end to that idea. There was no stout stone embankment constraining the river like there was in the twenty-first century. Instead there was a chaos of quays lined with boats and ships of all sizes. Based on the waterline the Thames was allowed to be almost half as wide again compared to my time, to bring sea going ships up the banks at high tide.
Yet, as I stood next to London Bridge and glared at the quays I stood in the shadow of a building more unyielding to time than anything else in London. The Tower of London. The white walls of the tower were grey with soot and crumbled in places, its four turrets looking more like molten marshmallows. Minor renovations might have graced its walls, but its outer fortifications hadn’t changed. I walked up to the gatehouse. The beefeaters didn’t notice or care at first but as I approached their pikes came glittering into view.
“Stand fast there, madam,” a guard warned. “Unless you have business for the Tower.”
“I just want to touch the gatehouse wall with my outstretched parasol,” I said. The guard’s expression contorted into confusion.
“Why?”
“Because I want to make sure I know exactly where I am.”
The guards exchanged a glance with each other.
“Yer in London.”
“Yes, but I still need to touch the gatehouse.”
Very slowly the guard pulled his pike back upright.
“As you like,” He said, resting his pike against his foot. “But anything else funny and that arm’s coming off.”
I raised the parasol and put its tip against a gap in the stonework. Three blocks up, two blocks from the left.
“Thank you very much!” I said, withdrawing my arm and then dashing away back to Covent Garden.
It took an agonisingly long time to get back to the time machine and land again in the twenty-first century, yet it seemed to take even longer in a modern taxi to get from Edgware Road to the Tower than it had to walk the distance in the seventeenth century.
“Nice costume,” a yeoman of the tower laughed as he saw me approach the gatehouse. “Do you want a standard entry or a gift aid–”
“No thanks, I just want to stand in front of the gate house and touch it with the tip of my outstretched parasol.”
“Er, why?”
“To know exactly where I am,” I explained, raising the parasol and loading up my phone. Without the fear of a sudden piking it took only a few seconds find the same mark in the stonework and get GPS co-ordinates. Barring a few millimetres of soil movement I now knew exactly where I was in both the 1600s and the modern age.
Leaving an extremely bemused yeoman at the entrance to the Tower I headed back towards the time machine scrolling through on my phone to try and find exact GPS co-ordinates of where the skeleton was discovered. With those I could plot a straight line between them, the angle against due north, and everything else I’d need to find the location of the skeleton in the 1660s without looking like a crazy mathematics witch.
From there it was another irritatingly long taxi ride to the Edgware Road, a skip through four hundred years of time, and I was back in Covent Garden, up the stairs from the cellar, out the door and along to the Tower.
“Again?” the guards started laughing as I approached.
“I forgot where I was,” I explained. “I need to know exactly where I am again.”
“London! In front of the Tower! What more can you need girl?”
“To know exactly where I am,” I said and reached out with my umbrella, pressed it against the exact correct point in the wall. I shuffled a little bit to the left until I was square against it. I cupped a compass in one hand so the yeoman wouldn’t see it, got the angle and then turned to them. “Thank you!” I said and left again. One of the guards cracked up laughing while the other yelled after me.
“And don’t come back! If you forget again chuck yourself in the Thames! It’s a better reminder than the Tower!”
I followed my plan through the city as best I could, between the roads that had changed and those that had stayed the same. I knew I was going to be a few metres out, but it was as close as it could be unless I wanted to temporarily transport the GPS satellites back in time, and I suspected the American military would be a little bit peeved if I did that.
It led me to Birchin Lane, and a row of houses down from the Exchange. The street had several merchants shops, like the Exchange, but these were a step down from the ones in the great building down the street. Here they were more modest shops, with basement warehouses and shopfronts in their ground floor. But they were still of a higher class than the market traders or street criers. These were businesses that those in the know sought out and did not need to cry their wares in the street.
Evening was quickly falling in this cold January and the tradesmen were closing their doors against the cold and giving up on the day’s trade. But I followed my trail to its end. A fresh-faced young man in a stout black hat was closing his shutters and stamping his feet against the cold. I was stood in the street staring at his shop and so naturally he began to stare back.
“I’m closing up the shop, but business never stops for those who have coin,” he said as he locked the shutters closed. “Did you desire
some Oporto wine? It’s a fine draught warmed against the fire on a cold night. Or perhaps I can interest you in some Spanish oranges? Only the best. Some say they keep away plague. By heaven, they certainly seem to keep away the foul vapours.”
“Er...” I struggled. What do you say to someone who might burn to death before the end of the year? “Port. Yes. I’ll take a bottle of port. Sir Reginald likes port.” I fumbled in my pockets for money. It would at least excuse the staring.
“Sir Reginald?” The seller seemed to almost snap to attention, as if the knight had appeared in front of him. “I did not realise I was serving the nobility. I shall draw up my finest. Hold here a moment please my lady.”
The seller stepped inside his shop and was gone only a few moments before he brought out a small wooden cask in a wicker basket.
“A barrel?” I said, staring.
“’Tis only a gallon cask, my lady,” the seller said, looking askance. “I can send to you a barrel if it proves favourable, but I doubt any lady's constitution is enough to transport a whole barrel alone.”
“I was just expecting a bottle.”
“A bottle? No my lady, the market master would never allow me to sell wine in something as unsafe as a bottle. A clean, untapped cask ensures you need never fear short-selling.” He handed the basket towards me. It was a small cask, but still much heavier than I expected. “And it’s a shilling to you then, my lady,” the seller said. He cast his eyes up and down the street as he spoke as if he was expecting a knight to step out of the alleys and challenge him to a duel.
“Er, here?” I thrust a silver coin out.
“That’s a sixpence my lady.”
“This one?”
“’Tis half a crown.”
“Which of these is a shilling?” I pulled out the small coin purse in desperation and held the coins out in front of me. The seller looked it over and plucked out a wide, flat coin about the same size as a ten pence piece.
“This one is my lady,” the seller said, bowing. “And you may keep the basket as well, as a sign of my favour.”