by Glenn Cooper
“Don’t look at me, pal. She’s the scientist.”
“How remarkable,” Joyce said. “Well then, Miss …”
“Doctor. Loughty.”
“Explain to me, doctor, if you would be so kind, how you got here.”
He listened attentively, running a long digit over his scar and then pulling it away whenever he seemed to realize what he was doing. When Emily was done with her well-worn explanation he mumbled how extraordinary all this was then took a large breath and let the air out through pursed lips, making a sound like a horse.
He chided himself. “Mustn’t do that,” he said. “Reinforces stereotypes.”
“What stereotypes are those?” John asked.
“You probably have no idea who I am. You’re too young and I’m quite sure I’m a forgotten figure, but during the war, World War II, that is, the British called me Lord Haw-Haw, which always brought to mind a donkey. You know Hee-Haw.”
“Why did they call you that?” Emily asked.
“It was supposed to be a term of derision, I suppose. I worked in propaganda and had a radio program that was broadcast into England from Hamburg. I was none too popular on this side of the channel.”
“You worked for the Nazis,” Emily said icily.
“I did indeed. And for speaking the truth about the Jews and the communists, I was executed at Wandsworth Prison in 1946.”
“You were executed for being a traitor?” John asked.
“For that alone.”
“Usually takes more than that to buy a ticket to Hell.”
“Well, there was the small matter of taking revenge against the Jew bastard who took a razor to my face in 1924 following a political meeting. It wasn’t even a meeting of fascists. It was a Conservative meeting! I joined Mosley’s British Union of Fascists later on. Anyway, my friends and I found a couple of communist kikes and I took my revenge. Left more than a scar on their faces, I’ll tell you that much.”
“You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?” Emily said.
Suddenly turning darker he said, “What I am is no concern to you.”
“Surprised you’re not still with the Germans,” she said. “Until recently Himmler was a big wheel over there.”
“What do you mean until recently?”
“I snapped his neck a couple of weeks ago,” John said.
“Did you now? That will weaken Barbarossa, won’t it? In any event, I entered Hell in London. Solomon Wisdom spotted my talents and peddled me to the crown.”
Joyce asked why John was smiling.
“Solomon’s out of business for a while.”
“Did you snap his neck too?”
“I restrained myself. But he’s got some rebuilding to do.”
“You’re quite the rabble rouser, aren’t you? If you try to do me harm, my guards will cut you down. To return to my story, though not a warrior, King Henry has appreciated my organizational skills and with Cromwell and other privy council members off to war, I am in command here. And now I have you and the others to deal with.”
“What others?” Emily asked urgently.
“We’ve had a flood of you lot the past few days.”
“Are the children here?” she demanded.
“Here’s what I’ve observed with this bewildering influx of live souls,” Joyce said, ignoring her question and leaning back in his chair. “You don’t know your place. If you’d had the usual rite of passage, you would have just been through the rather unpleasant experience of dying. When that happens it doesn’t take long to appreciate that this is your comeuppance for whatever moral turpitude you were guilty of. You quickly learn that there is no appeals process, no way of jawboning your way out of your eternal predicament. In short, you are beaten. You lot don’t seem to know you’re beaten and you don’t know your place. Let me put it simply. I’m in charge. You’re not. You have to answer my questions, I don’t have to answer yours.”
Emily was not going to be bullied. She gave him a withering look and said, “I’ll ask you again: are the children here?”
Joyce stood in a fury and ordered the guards to seize them and take them to the jail.
“This isn’t going to end well for you,” John warned but the angry man was not going to back down.
At first John liked his chances—four to one with the weakling Joyce a non-factor, and he cracked his knuckles for action, but in seconds, another contingent of armed men swarmed the room and for the sake of Emily and their mission he allowed Joyce to take them prisoner.
High in the queen’s wing of the palace, stiff afternoon breezes blew through the open windows of her chamber, billowing the curtains. A strong gust caught a bunch of flowers and toppled the vase off a table, sending it crashing onto the floor. Ordinarily, Queen Matilda would have had a fit over something like this but today nothing seemed to upset her. Her servants rushed to clean up the mess, casting sidelong glances, waiting for her to drop the hammer, but she remained unperturbed. Her full attention was elsewhere.
The children.
As she watched Belle and Sam play with a set of cups and saucers on the carpet, her face, which was usually hard and immobile, became soft as bread dough. While she watched the children, Delia watched her, protective as a hen but woefully lacking in any real ability to safeguard them.
“How old did you say they were?” Matilda asked.
“The boy is three, the girl is two,” Delia said curtly.
“One forgets …” the queen said, her voice drifting off.
Delia pretended she didn’t know what she meant. “Forgets what?”
“How they look. How they act. It has been, well, a very, very long time.”
“They need to be with their mother.”
“Do they?”
“Yes they do.”
“And where did you say she was?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps you could ask Solomon Wisdom.”
“If my memory serves, I did not need a mother for any reason other than birth. I was raised by nannies and retainers.”
“How long ago was that?”
“My head was not made for the mathematical sciences and I have no interest in the meaningless passage of time. I cannot tell you this. Suffice it to say, it was the twelfth century.”
“Well, these children are from the twenty-first century. And in our time, children are cared for by their mothers.”
The queen scowled at Delia and seeing Matilda’s growing irritation, one of her ladies, Phoebe, a raven-haired beauty who hailed from the eighteenth century said, “You would do well, Miss Delia, to be more respectful to her majesty.”
Delia, never one to be told how to behave, not in her own world or this one, was about to dig herself a deeper hole when Belle looked up and said, “Where’s mummy? I want her.”
The queen was quick to respond. “Never mind her. You may call me mummy if you wish, child.”
“You’re not our mummy,” Sam said.
“Perhaps not, but I am your queen, young man, and you would do well to remember that.”
“For God’s sake,” Delia cried. “It’s daft to speak to a child that way.”
Matilda raised her hand imperiously. “Enough! Lock her away,” she ordered her guards. “I wish to see them play with my crockery in peace.”
This was an area of the palace John hadn’t seen during his last visit to Hampton Court. Surrounded by guards they passed through long, drab corridors until they stood before a small oak door, black with antiquity. One soldier lit a torch with a lamp and another unlocked the door with a large iron key. By torchlight the party descended a steep run of stone stairs into a cool, damp cellar.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Emily said.
“As soon as someone with a higher pay grade than that Nazi fuck finds out we’re here, he’s going to be walking around with his head under his arm,” John said.
“I hope you’re right. Every day down here will be a day utterly wasted.”
They walked along a
dark, narrow passageway until it opened into a larger torchlight space, a central guardroom surrounded by jail cells. Dirty, gaunt faces appeared at the barred windows and men called out at them pitifully in English, French, Spanish, Dutch. The soldier with the torch pointed at one of the cells and asked a gawking guard whether there was room for two more.
“I’ve got five in there already. It’ll be a bit tight but when they get good and skinny after a month there’ll be plenty of room.”
The door was unlocked. It creaked open on ungreased hinges. John was expecting something like the rank odor of a rotting room but the smell wasn’t bad at all. By the light of a feeble oil lamp he saw five shocked people, three men and two women, sitting on piles of straw. Though scared, they looked healthy and well nourished and John astonished them with his question.
“You guys wouldn’t be from South Ockendon, would you?”
“How did you know that?” Martin asked.
“Educated guess,” was his reply. “I’m John Camp, this is Emily Loughty.”
“I’m so glad we found you,” Emily said.
“Found us?” Alice asked. “You were looking for us?”
“We were,” John said, getting down on his haunches. “There were eight of you, right?”
Charlie became unhinged. “I lost my dad, my granddad and my brother,” he blubbered. “I’m the only one left. I’m all alone. I should have done more. It should have been me instead.”
“I’m so sorry,” Emily said. “How awful.”
But Tony was in no mood for commiseration. “Look here. Who the hell are you? Where have you come from? How do you know about us? How did we get here? We want answers, goddamn it!”
“I just want to go home, can we go home now?” Tracy said numbly in an interruption that irritated Tony.
“Please be quiet,” he snapped. “Let the man talk.”
“Don’t bully her,” Alice said. “The poor woman’s lost her children.”
Emily dropped down beside Tracy. “Where were they?”
“At school. I was home and they were at school.”
“Thank God they weren’t caught up in this,” Emily said, soothingly.
“Caught up in what?” Tony shouted. “Will you answer my fucking questions?”
“Okay, just relax, pal,” John said.
Martin reached his hand out to steady Tony but the florid man pushed it away. “Tony, you’re just going to make yourself ill,” Martin implored.
“Before we answer your questions, please, can I ask you one?” Emily said. “Did you see any children here?”
“No,” Alice said. “We were told there aren’t any.”
“My little niece and nephew are here. Did anyone speak of them?”
Alice shook her head.
“All right,” John said. “Let’s tell you what we know. This all started about six weeks ago.”
John and Emily tag-teamed the narrative, beginning with the first MAAC startup that launched Emily into Hell and ending with the audience with William Joyce that landed them in the jail cell. Whenever Tony seemed inclined to ask a question, Martin prevented him from doing so with a gentle remark or a gesture. When John and Emily were finished Tony became angry and rose to make a statement directed at Emily.
“The arrogance,” he said. “The sheer arrogance of you scientists. Mucking about with nature. What do you expect? And we’re the ones to suffer. I have nothing but contempt.”
“That’s not fair, Tony,” Martin said. “They’ve come to rescue us and bring us home.”
“Don’t be blind,” Martin said. “They came to rescue her family. They just happened to stumble upon us.”
“Our mission is to bring everyone home,” John said. “Finding you by accident is still finding you. I’ll take a lucky break whenever I can get one.”
“But you’re prisoners just like us,” Charlie said. “How are you going to get us out?”
John had a ready reply. “This fellow who threw us all in jail, this asshole William Joyce—my guess is that as soon as someone higher up finds out what he did, we’ll be upstairs and he’ll be in this cell.”
“All right, fair enough,” Martin said. “Now what?”
“I think we’ll just have to wait,” Emily said. “Now we’ve told you who we are. To see this through, we’re going to need to cooperate and draw on all our skills. I’m keen to learn more about each one of you.”
Martin volunteered to go first. “I’m a medical doctor,” he said. “A consultant. Ordinarily I would have been at the hospital at ten in the morning but I had a canceled meeting and Tony and I had a bit of a spontaneous lie-in. It was a good morning. We were having coffee and reading the paper when, well …”
“Yeah, it was a good morning until it became a shit morning,” Tony said bitterly. “The thing is, Martin led me into indolence.”
“Not for the first time,” Martin said.
“Yes, not the first time for sure,” Tony said. “I actually had a client meeting that morning. I called in sick at his urging. I’m an architect. My firm does a mixture of commercial and residential commissions. The client I postponed wants a truly garish trophy home in Hampshire to replace a country house he bought with lovely bones. I had been trying without success to get him to tastefully renovate but his intention is to level it and put up something very large and very nouveau. It actually wasn’t a huge stretch to feign illness because the prospect of the meeting was making me nauseous.”
“How long have the two of you been together?” Emily asked.
“Ten years,” Martin said. “If we manage to get out of this alive we’re going to get married.”
“If I don’t change my mind,” Tony said.
“Everyone’s invited,” Martin said.
“I’m in,” John said. “Shit, maybe we’ll make it a double wedding.”
“Are you asking?” Emily said.
John reached for her hand. “Maybe.”
“Thank you, Martin and Tony, for setting a fine example,” she said with a broad smile. “If the maybe turns into a yes, a double wedding it shall be.”
“I’d like to come if we can get a babysitter,” Tracy said softly.
“Bring the children,” Martin said. “Tony’s got what is it—six nieces and nephews? The more the merrier. I’m sorry, but I don’t know the names of your children or even your husband’s name. We've lived on the same street for years. It’s our fault for not having you over.”
“My husband is Dan. He’s in IT for a city firm. You asked about skills. I don’t have any beyond being a mum so I don’t know how I can help.”
“You’ve got lots of practical skills, luv,” Alice said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Thanks but beyond keeping a house, I’m useless really. Anyway, Martin, our son is Jeremy. He’s eight. Our daughter is Eva. She’s ten. I wonder where they are and what they’re thinking. Do you think they’ve been told what happened to me? To us?”
“I’m not sure,” Emily said, “but I doubt it. The authorities were …” She was going to say “hell-bent” but she caught herself. “They were determined to keep a lid on the situation. They were putting out a story about a bioterrorism threat on the estate so my guess is that your husband has been told you are in quarantine and can’t communicate.”
“That’s good,” Tracy said. “Dan’s a trusting soul. He’ll believe what he’s told by the authorities. He’ll be worried sick though.”
“I’m sure he is,” Emily said.
“Will I be able to tell him the truth when I get home?” Tracy asked.
“They’ll probably try to keep all of you quiet,” John said. “If you want my advice, make them pay through the nose for your silence.”
“How much are my dad, my brother and my granddad worth?” Charlie asked. “How do you put a price on them?”
John nodded. “All I’m saying is that you guys are victims and victims are entitled to compensation. Mega-compensation. What’s your story, son?”<
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“Me?” Charlie said. “I’m a builder. We were doing a renovation on the estate. It was just another working day. We were just cracking a thermos of tea when everything shifted. Forever.”
“Okay,” John said. “We’ve got a builder, a doctor, an architect, and most importantly with Tracy, a domestic goddess.” He turned to Alice. “How about you?”
Alice sighed. “I’m a building inspector for the council. I was an electrician by trade but my company went bust. I don’t think I’ve got any skills of use here. I haven’t seen any lights or electrical fixtures. I’m divorced, no children any longer and I miss my cats. I hope my neighbor is looking after them.”
“I think you’re wrong about your skills, Alice,” Emily said. “Some of them desperately want to build an electric grid but they’ve got large technology gaps to fill. They do have a limited battery capability which powers telegraph lines in Brittania and some of the continental areas.”
“I’m not an engineer, dear, I’m only an electrician, but I’ll do what I can to help everyone else.”
As the day dragged on, John inspected every inch of the cell looking for escape possibilities but the walls were solid blocks of stone. The floors were hard-packed dirt that might have been amenable to tunneling. But even if they had digging implements it would be a multi-week project, ripe for discovery at any stage. The door to the cell was sturdy but wood was always vulnerable. The problem was the guards stationed on the other side.
The prisoners sat and chatted the hours away, sharing the remaining scraps of food from the morning rations and eyeing the dwindling lamp flame, the only thing keeping them from near-total darkness.
A face appeared in the barred window and the lock mechanism clunked open. In short order, several guards crammed into the cell and one of them pointed a flintlock pistol at John. It was clear they had identified him as the greatest potential threat. John and everyone else stood up.
“You! Move to the corner.”
“Me?” John asked in a way that returned the menace in spades.
“Yes, you.”
“Why?”
A guard with a fancy set of buttons on his tunic said, “Just do it or you’ll get a lead ball in your head. And once we start shooting the rest of you will get it too.”