“Alright James, you do not have to blindfold yourself but I don’t want to catch you turning around,” I said with a smile. “Though I am sure you will try.”
I managed to get into bed without too much difficulty though I could not help but smile at him, who was doing his utmost to face the wall without looking around. However, just as I was pulling up the sheet to make myself look as ‘respectable’ as possible in our situation I noticed the mirror and realised he had cleverly or should I say deviously stationed himself against part of the wall which afforded a perfect view of me crossing the room and getting into bed!
I must confess I could not blame a man who has affection for a lady wanting to view her dressed in her private garments – less especially as this particular lady had willingly allowed herself to be alone with a man of her affections in a bed chamber! I was now, how can I say, in a delicate position which depended a lot on his response. I decided to play him at his own game, hoping his humour would suffice for I did not want to lose this match. I played my first card.
“James.” I said with the most seductive voice I could muster.
“Yes, Elizabeth?”
“You can turn around now.”
He turned and looked straight into my eyes. I could feel him pushing open a door. I played on.
“By the way James, that sofa does not look very comfortable. Are you sure you will be able to sleep there? I would not like you to catch a chill,” I tried to look as demure as possible.
“I’m sure I’ll be alright.”
He played his card well.
“Perhaps I could help.” I said.
He looked as expectantly as I hoped and then I played what I hoped was my trump card, or as it recently had become fashionable to call it, rather aptly, the Joker.
“Could you turn that mirror to the wall for I feel it is reflecting too much light in your direction?”
It was at this point I wished I had his ‘phone for it would have made a perfect picture to treasure.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I just couldn’t resist it once I noticed it was there. Please forgive me. I'm having great difficulty with, how do you say, courting a Victorian lady who I love. I get so confused with protocols and manners and what will not offend her.”
I held my last card for only a moment then put it before him.
“I know, James. Now come to bed.”
---~---
Chapter Ten
J.
We woke rather late and had a nice leisurely breakfast in the inn. For some reason I was in no hurry to leave. In fact, all I wanted to do was just drive off to some quiet little cottage and live with her forever.
Elizabeth seemed equally content.
---~---
E.
There is something about a shared intimacy which dissolves the gap between time and space. That morning at breakfast I noticed he had for the first time relaxed considerably in my presence and was fussing over me, making sure I had everything I wanted. I let him and found myself thanking him profusely on each suggestion. I was surprised how easily I surrendered to him. It was so nice to be ‘looked after’, if I may permit myself to try to imitate one of James’s innuendos. I had not realised, and this is difficult to write, how much of my intimate self could respond to such physical pleasure.
We left the inn about 10 o’clock and travelled back to Hamgreen again. Mr Maxwell was still there. He took a little persuading to allow us entrance.
“So you agree with me that your world is being manipulated, or are you just worried about your own safety?”
James said, “Both, Mr Maxwell. But I do not think the solution is to remove your equations. Up until thirty years ago society was not wired in, and I feel that is the point where we must cause a deviation to prevent social media expanding. Before that it was just the role of journalists, advertising and politicians to manipulate us. But then we let everyone join in.”
“In that case we must find out where their operational base is, for knowledge of that will give us an indication of where to start.”
“I’m not convinced they have one. They could easily be individuals working together in the dark net - unaware of each other but sharing a common purpose.”
Just then I remembered the letter Mr Wells had showed us.
“James! Did not Mr Wells’ letter refer to a Professor Rolleston? Perhaps he is the key.”
He immediately took out his phone and entered instructions to locate him.
“No one obvious.”
Then I remembered the date on the letter.
“James, what year are we in?”
“2015, I hope. Why?”
“Because there was a number on the letter at the bottom, 2021. I did not think more about it until now. The number must refer to the year the letter was written. When Mr Batalia met Mr Wells he must have come back from the future! Which means if we want to contact Professor Rolleston we must travel to the future as well.”
“Elizabeth, just in case I forget for some reason, will you remind me to marry you at the earliest possible opportunity?”
With the same humour I said I would do my best to remember.
“OK then," James said, "If we contact Rolleston we had better return to Midhurst and set the time to 2021. Coming, Maxwell?”
“Undoubtedly, Sir. And if there is opportunity to get out of this time it would be most welcome”.
We returned all three of us to the Cavern and adjusted the time controls to 2021 and James tried his phone again
“I’m in luck – I’m still with same service provider. Ah! Here he is. He’s working in the Department of Social and Cultural Engineering for the Weber Institute. Now where do they hang out?”
James searched again. This amazing device for instant knowledge was a marvel. I could see why it would become quickly indispensable. I made a mental note to ask James how I could acquire one.
“That’s strange. All it’s got is a phone number, 6779-2279. No zero in front. Nothing else. No area code wit that number either. Let’s give them a bell and ask for him. I’ll put it on speaker phone so we can all hear.”
He telephoned.
“All I can here is static. Wait. I’ve heard that noise before. It sounds like one of those old modems connecting to the internet.”
After about minute a curt voice spoke.
“Rolleston here.”
“Hello, Professor Rolleston. James Urquhart here. I believe someone is looking for me.”
There was an audible sharp intake of breath. James tried again.
“We're looking for Mr Batalia.”
“Mr Urquhart, I do not know where he is.”
“Good, but we do. He’s trapped in the past around 1895 and we have his time machine.”
“You have the time machine? What do you want?”
He sounded very worried.
---~---
J.
I seemed to have Mr Rolleston in a corner, though after my brass handle and broken window affairs I did not hold much hope.
“The first thing we want to know is what you want of us.”
“I’m not at liberty to divulge that.”
“OK, that’s up to you. While you're thinking about your liberty we will go back to the 1870s, destroy Maxwell’s papers and then destroy the time machine. Oh, and also your control centre. Any problem with that?”
“But you can’t! Society would collapse. We are close to bringing together a system that will save the world from destruction.”
“I think the only thing you’re close to is your plan for world control.”
“We have discovered the means to socially engineer populations. We can remove much of the randomness that causes waste and war.”
Maxwell interjected. “And in doing so, Mr Rolleston, you will remove the human will and its inventiveness, sir. Do you think I and my colleagues would have been allowed to make our discoveries on the nature of electromagnetic radiation? I think not. You will put boundaries on our quest for k
nowledge and then you will slowly constrict it until we are all in stasis. How will you deal with new natural catastrophes or diseases?”
There was silence. I continued.
“So, Mr Rolleston, I’m beginning to understand how all this time travel came about at last. You discovered Maxwell’s diaries, which showed how to make a time machine.”
“Actually, we found your diaries first, Mr Urquhart.”
“What?”
“Yes, yours and Miss Bicester’s. Found in a box in Hamgreen Lodge. I wrote a thesis on it trying to prove that they recorded real events and therefore time travel existed. I’m glad to say I’ve been proved right.”
I looked at Elizabeth and she looked at me. “You’ve kept a diary too, James?”
“I've kept notes of everything that has happened in the hope of it all making sense, and I still have them. What about you?”
“Why, I still have mine. So why are these diaries at my home?”
I began to understand what was going on. Marco mentioned it when he said he was in a time loop at Loch Ness. Time travel had not only caused a corporeal shift but also affected the mind.
“I think this all starts with us. At some point in the future we will return to Hamgreen and put our diaries of our adventures together.”
I decided to test Rolleston.
“Where were they found, Mr Rolleston, and what did they look like?”
“In the attic, clasped together in a metal box. Miss Bicester had a leather-bound book and yours was a thick black note book.”
Elizabeth and I looked at each other in surprise. They were our books. But I also now knew where we should put them if, if what? ... I decided to press on.
“So Professor, let’s get back to Maxwell’s diaries. I bet they contain a conversation between Marco and Maxwell. So you knew you had to build the machine so that Marco could go back to Maxwell and help him formulate the functions to build it. But in doing so Marco revealed to Maxwell the world order you were creating. Maxwell was not happy. His papers were already published so he needed your time machine to go back and destroy his papers and those of the people who contributed to his theory so your world would not exist. Is that not right, Mr Maxwell?”
“That is right, sir. I gave Mr Batalia the wrong papers in the hope that he could not progress and so would return instead, which he did, unobserved by me. While he looked for my papers I boarded and hid in his time machine. He brought me to Hamgreen where I later met you and Miss Bicester. I found out where he was working and the location of the time machine and had it transferred here. I used his computer at Hamgreen to access his bank accounts.”
“But why Hamgreen, Mr Maxwell, and not Manchester or his Control Centre at Midhurst? What was he doing at Hamgreen?”
Rolleston interjected, “To see if he could find more information about your diaries.”
“No, Mr Rolleston. I mean, how did he know they were there?”
“Miss Bicester’s father had advertised an auction at the house. I have an interest in old books. The diaries were for sale, so I bought them. I could not make sense of them. They looked like notes for a novel but their dates were separated by over a hundred years. I sent them to a colleague to date them who confirmed the dates were correct. That was when I began to suspect time travel. When I found that H.G. Wells had published his time machine novel shortly after Miss Bicester’s diary I became almost certain and flagged it up to my directors.”
Why was there an auction? Was the house up for sale? Elizabeth and I looked at each other. Where or when did this all start? What was the initial cause? Was it a time aberration with Marco at Midhurst transferring him to the cricket match in 1870? Or when I walked onto the game at Hamgreen in 1873 and met Elizabeth. If there had been no time aberration then Adcom and ComsMesh would have achieved their goal without any trouble. Did this mean that these time warps we were participating in had been created somehow to stop ComsMesh?
I suddenly had a thought. Where were all the servers storing ComsMesh’s data? The amount of power needed ... It had to be in the cavern at Midhurst. Had the immense power concentrated in such a small place caused the initial time shift that rippled through the years, sweeping up me and Marco? I had certainly picked up strong magnetic signals on the castle ruins with my phone. I tried to imagined distortions in time and space appearing around the servers at Midhurst and coalescing into nodes as the time dimensions struggled to find paths of least resistance. Perhaps when we entered and used those nodes they became stronger, forming a new or parallel time direction which we were now in. The problem was, how stable was this timeline? I needed to get back to 2015 quickly, in case the timeline disappeared. I turned the dial and cut off Rolleston. I realised I still had no idea how the time-travel machinery worked.
---~---
E.
I was still shocked that we had sold or would sell my home. Even more concerning was that it was my home in the first place as I was sure that in my time a lady could not own or inherit property. As my father had only daughters I expected the house to be transferred on his death to his nearest male relative, my cousin Henry. This I must admit was of no great concern because my cousin, when I had broached the subject, told me that we would be allowed to live at the lodge.
I pointed this out to James who was really surprised that women did not have these rights and “looked it up” on his phone.
“Ah Elizabeth, it seems you can inherit. A law was passed in 1872 giving women the right.”
“So it seems that I will inherit our home. But I still do not understand why it would be sold.”
I then noticed that Mr Maxwell was studiously looking at the controls, and so did James.
“What are you doing, Maxwell?”
“I am trying to figure out how this works and I am led to the conclusion that it is not a time machine, it is a machine for manipulating a point in time.”
“Do you mean a time node?” said James.
“Yes, that is a good word and I think that Mr Batalia’s time machine is a container in which he has trapped one of these nodes, which he can manipulate from here.”
So,” I said, “if I understand you correctly, if we release this node or knot of time from his box, time travel will no longer be possible?”
“Except,” said James, “at the moment in the future they have Maxwell’s diaries, so they could start all over again. What is really scary though is that everything we're doing now they may know about. In fact they may actually be watching us!”
I hoped that they had not been watching everything that we had been doing. Then I tried to sum up.
“So, we have Mr Rolleston in the future with our diaries, Mr Batalia trapped in the past. Mr Maxwell from the past with us now and Mr Maxwell’s diaries in the future.”
“And Mr Wells wandering in the past looking for Mr Batalia.” James added.
I began to feel we were running around in circles.
“So what are we trying to do? I mean where do we want all this to end? As far as I can see we could just walk out and leave everything to carry on without any harm to us.”
“Except, Elizabeth, in this timeline we become wanted persons and we need to find out why. We need Marco.”
We both looked at James.
“Look, I’m not spending my life wondering when the Time Police or whatever they call themselves come to get us. At the same time we can’t destroy the time machine because Rolleston and ComsMesh will just carry on. Somehow we have to get Marco to do it.”
“But first we need some clothes for the period,” I said, “Otherwise I will be taken for a woman who escaped from a mad house or even worse, one of ill repute.
---~---
Chapter Eleven
E.
James took me into Chichester where he found what he called a novelty shop hiring out period fashions. Actually, it reminded me of one of those occasional shops in Brighton where ladies who had ‘accidently’ exceeded their allowance and were reticent to ask
their fathers or husbands for additional funds could temporarily lodge garments in exchange for a small pittance to avoid embarrassment. We eventually hired some clothes despite my protestations that I would look like they had been borrowed from my mother’s wardrobe. I told him that I hoped I would not meet any of my acquaintances for I was sure I and these garments would become a topic of conversation at my expense for many years to come in certain circles. I was reminded of my grandfather who despite our insistence that he should change his fashion would invariably arrive at engagements in garish hose and breeches.
James in his hacking jacket did not fare better and looked exceedingly like an American card sharp rather than an English gentleman, but at least I had dissuaded him from his first choice of a ‘festive’ and rather ‘sudden’ striped jacket with matching cap.
We returned to the cavern, changed our clothing and turned the time back to 1895. Then, summing up courage for our reception, we returned to the passage and my world. We thought it best to come out in the crypt of the church just in case our room in the inn was occupied. We tried the door latch, which had been locked in James’ time, and were gratified to find it opened. We went through the church quietly past two old parishioners in the pews who tried not to notice us but gave the distinct impression that their topic of conversation would be us for the rest of the day.
We arrived at the coaching inn across the road from the church and went in. James was already a little unnerved as he had seemed to attract more than his fair share of local dogs as he crossed the road, which he cheekily attributed to the fact that they were not used to the odour of someone who washed twice a day. I responded that a lady might prefer a gentleman who washed less but at least had money to pay for meal and lodgings. He immediately produced his wallet and removed some notes so as to show me that he had sufficient funds. However, when I suggested that the coinage of Queen Elizabeth would not be as well respected as Queen Victoria’s in my time he looked a little crestfallen. This was not helped by the attention he continued to receive from a small Irish terrier which had attached its molars to his trouser leg. Poor James was then reduced to asking if it would be alright to borrow some money. I thought it prudent at this point not to remind James that it was impolite to ask money from a lady.
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