Even though Jake felt a tingle go down his spine and the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, he continued to protest, ‘Rose, really, as much I would like to travel to history, as you put it—’
‘It all sounds ludicrous, I know. And don’t ask me to explain the science of it, I’m useless at it. Jupitus could do a much better job. Or ask Charlie Chieverley – he’s the real scientist. It is all to do with our atoms. They possess this memory of history – every single moment of it.’
Jake suddenly remembered the curious phrase he’d heard on deck. ‘When Jupitus said 1506, what exactly did he mean?’ he asked nervously.
‘What’s that, darling?’ Rose said vaguely, fiddling with her bangles and avoiding his eye.
‘1506,’ repeated Jake. ‘Don’t say he meant the year 1506?’
Rose gave a short laugh. ‘I think that’s what he did mean, but let’s not worry about it now. Alan and Miriam were always disappearing. That was their style – instinctive.’
‘1506?’ Jake shook his head. ‘You’re trying to tell me that’s where they are?’
Rose grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. ‘We’re going to find them, Jake,’ she vowed. ‘We’ll find them – I have no doubt about that!’
Jake knew, in that instant, that Rose was not lying. He understood nothing of why or how or who could travel to history, but he knew – he could feel it in the pit of his stomach – that it might all be true. In that moment, he also finally understood – and it was a startling revelation – that his parents were indeed missing.
One of the cabin doors opened and the lady in the fur coat swept into the room. She stopped when she saw Jake and Rose.
‘Oh … isn’t it dinner?’ she asked, sounding irritated.
‘Any moment, I think,’ Rose told her. ‘How are you, Oceane? You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘And you look … essentially the same,’ was the best Oceane could come up with. ‘Perhaps a little saggier under the eyes.’
‘And you haven’t lost your talent to flatter,’ Rose giggled in reply. ‘This is Jake, my nephew.’
‘Oceane Noire,’ the lady said dismissively. ‘You don’t mind if I linger. My cabin is like an icebox, as usual.’ She installed herself on a chaise longue, then lit a cheroot and gazed with mournful theatricality through the porthole.
Presently two crewmen arrived and quickly laid the table in the centre of the room. Then the rest of the passengers assembled: Charlie Chieverley and his parrot, Mr Drake, the radiant Topaz St Honoré, and Jupitus Cole. Jake couldn’t help noticing Oceane Noire perk up as Jupitus strode into the cabin. She stubbed out her cheroot, quickly checked her hair and crossed the room, throwing Jupitus an alluring smile before sitting down in front of him to show off her elegant back. Sadly the whole operation was wasted on Jupitus, who was lost in his own private world, examining charts.
Jake’s attention was caught by a curious nautical instrument that was suspended from the ceiling above the table. It was composed of a sphere, encircled by three golden rings of different sizes that fitted perfectly within one another. On each ring was a different set of markings, some in numbers and some in indecipherable symbols.
‘That’s the Constantor,’ whispered Rose. ‘It guides us to the horizon point. Very important piece of apparatus. There’s another one on deck. You can see it moving.’
Jake examined it more closely. Rose was right: he could just make out the golden rings turning, almost imperceptibly, on their axes.
‘When all three rings are in alignment, we’ve hit the horizon point, and that’s where the fun really begins. Your first time is unforgettable. It’s like the best roller-coaster ride ever.’
Looking at his watch again, Jupitus flushed with irritation. ‘Norland!’ he shouted down the stairs. ‘Is dinner being served or not?’ The room fell silent as he muttered, ‘Useless individual. What is the point of a butler who cannot keep time?’
Norland appeared from the galley below. He seemed quite unflustered. (He had learned from experience that the best way of dealing with Jupitus’s temper was to pretend that no crime had been committed). He pulled on the ropes of the dumb waiter, opened the hatch and distributed plates of succulent roast chicken. Everyone sat down to eat, Jake with Rose on one side, Oceane on the other, and Topaz and Charlie directly opposite.
Oceane took one look at the platters of vegetables and sighed wearily. ‘Dreadful English food.’ No one paid her the slightest bit of attention.
Jake ate his meal, which was one of the tastiest he’d ever had, and listened in uncertain bemusement to the snippets of conversation around him. Topaz asked Jupitus about his experience in Byzantium defending the silk route from China. Jupitus played down the event in his usual deadpan style, but obviously relished the name he’d been given at the time: Hero of the Turks.
Oceane loved this story and offered one in return about her ‘intolerable experiences’ in Paris, where she’d found herself facing a horde of French revolutionaries ‘without so much as a nailfile to defend herself’. Inexplicably this led to Norland, who sat down after he had finished serving (keeping the largest portion for himself), telling a long-winded anecdote about hearing Mozart playing the piano when he’d been sent to the Austrian court of Joseph II.
All these anecdotes were told as casually as if they had taken place on an ordinary holiday in the Costa del Sol. To Jake, it felt like a dream or an elaborate piece of theatre. And yet, what an entrancing, compelling idea it was – to actually travel back into history! Rose had told him that he would ‘see for himself’. Jake was breathlessly waiting for this proof to materialize.
Every now and then he glanced over at the radiant, confident girl sitting opposite him. She was not like any girl he had ever set eyes on. On Jake’s bedroom wall he had pinned up pictures of people he found interesting. One in particular, which he had cut out of a Sunday magazine, fascinated him: a portrait of a girl, a warrior princess – or so he imagined. Her face was pale and beautiful, her gaze both regal and uncertain. There were jewels in her long hair and she wore gleaming battle armour. Behind her lay a mysterious landscape of mountains and castles over which ominous storm clouds were gathering. Topaz reminded Jake of this figure: mysterious, beautiful, brave.
Brave? Jake wondered; he had never given a thought to whether someone looked brave before. As he watched Topaz chatting to Charlie, he lost himself in her blue eyes. They seemed to sparkle and shimmer with a thousand emotions at once: excitement, happiness, impatience and wonder. At one point, her concentration drifted and her eyes seemed to darken from indigo to deep ultramarine, filled with the deepest sorrow. A second later, she was roaring with laughter at Charlie’s impersonation of a one-eyed parrot-whisperer he’d once met in Tangier.
During the conversation, expectant eyes would occasionally look up at the glistening Constantor that hung over the table. The golden rings were moving ever closer to their point of alignment.
At the end of the meal, Jupitus stood up and headed over to the sideboard. Everyone went quiet as he opened the veneered box that Jake had seen him remove with such care from his safe in London. He extracted first the gleaming silver device of gauges and dials; then the plain bottle of grey liquid; and finally, carefully, the fine crystal vial of golden fluid.
‘What’s going on now?’ Jake whispered to Rose, wondering why everyone had fallen quiet.
‘The little machine there is called the Horizon Cup’, his aunt replied.’
Jake watched as Jupitus carefully moved the device’s gauges and dials to precise settings.
‘He’s entering the exact date we are travelling to,’ Charlie explained. ‘In a moment he will deposit a drop of each liquid into the cup. The cup then fuses the liquids at a certain ratio – an incredibly specific ratio. Then we drink it and it’s hello, history.’
‘It fuses the liquids?’ Jake was struggling to understand.
‘On a molecular level, naturally,’ Charlie went on, push
ing his spectacles up his nose. ‘A certain percentage of the gold liquid will take you to 1750; quite a bit more, and you could be having breakfast in ancient Rome. That is, of course, providing you have the valour in the first place – that’s the ability – the strength – to travel to history. Don’t think just anyone can drink it and go tearing off into the past. Just a very select few of us, those of us with shapes in our eyes, diamonds or rectangles. An even smaller number can voyage any significant distance, to BC and beyond.’
‘And what are those liquids?’ Jake asked as Jupitus unscrewed both bottles and deposited a single drop of each into a funnel at the top of the device.
‘The grey one is just some common tincture, but the golden one—’
Rose finished Charlie’s sentence, speaking with profound reverence: ‘– is atomium.’
‘Atomium?’ asked Jake, fascinated.
‘One of the rarest substances in history,’ said Charlie. ‘We couldn’t operate without it. But be warned: it tastes like something you put in a car.’
Jupitus took a step back from the Horizon Cup. Everyone took a step back. Oceane Noire went so far as to shield her head with her porcelain-pale hands. Jake was utterly baffled as Rose guided him away.
‘The Cup gets very hot!’ she explained.
Then Jake noticed that it was changing – glowing red like molten metal; even from the other side of the cabin he could feel the intense heat coming from the tiny egg-sized machine. It rattled and whistled slightly as it returned to its normal state.
Jupitus waited a good three minutes before he returned to the device, using a napkin to pick it up. He unscrewed the top half (inside, the metal dazzled the eyes like sunlight) and deposited its contents, a dash of shimmering solution like a liquidized diamond, into a jug of water. This he stirred with a long spoon, then filled seven small crystal glasses. Norland put them on a tray and started handing them round.
‘To the voyage!’ Jupitus toasted, lifting his glass.
‘To the voyage!’ everyone repeated after him.
Rose looked at her glass. ‘Nothing to lose now, I suppose. To my return to the History Keepers’ Secret Service!’ And she downed it in one.
Charlie left a sip in the bottom of his glass and held it up for Mr Drake. The parrot was clearly loath to drink; he sank his head down onto his chest.
‘You know the routine by now,’ Charlie told him, producing a peanut from his pocket. Mr Drake reluctantly drained the glass and received his reward with a muted squawk.
‘Take the remaining solution to Captain Macintyre and the crew,’ Jupitus instructed Norland, who disappeared with the jug of atomium.
Eyes gradually turned to Jake.
‘Bon voyage, my darling,’ said Rose. ‘We all wish you the best of luck.’
There were calls of ‘Here, here!’ from around the cabin, though Jupitus only murmured his agreement, and Oceane remained silent.
As Jake lifted up his crystal glass, he saw that it was engraved with the emblem of the hourglass and the whizzing planets. He took a deep breath and drank the shimmering liquid. He immediately coughed and had to be patted on the back by Charlie.
‘Mr Chieverley,’ Jupitus called over, ‘when we reach horizon point, make sure you stick with him.’ He flicked his fingers towards Jake. ‘It’s his first time – we don’t want any dramas.’ He looked at the Constantor and then at his watch. ‘One hour to the horizon point,’ he announced, before leaving the cabin and slamming the door.
* * *
‘Can you feel anything yet?’ asked Charlie Chieverley as he came on deck with Jake.
Jake shook his head.
Charlie looked at his watch. ‘It’s nearly an hour since we took the atomium. You’ll feel something soon.’
The Escape was now in the open sea, cutting through the waves towards a patch of moonlight that lay for ever beyond its reach. The rain had stopped, but the fresh wind persisted.
Jake was intrigued by Charlie: he was eccentric, with a dry sense of humour, more like a worldly-wise grown-up than a boy. If Charlie didn’t like something, Jake reflected, he wouldn’t hesitate in saying so. People who were brave enough to speak their minds had always appealed to him.
‘So I just want to make sure I understand all this. There are two liquids, atomium and this tincture—’
‘Atomium’s the important one. Scandalously rare.’
‘And the exact proportion decides the point in history we travel to?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
‘But what I don’t understand is … how does the atomium work?’
‘Ah!’ Charlie exclaimed excitedly, pushing his spectacles up his nose. ‘It reacts with our atoms, to take us into the time flux, that network of in tangible pathways that connects all ages. The atomium wakes up every atom in our body and asks for an inventory of everything it possesses. Our bodies have more atoms in them than you could possibly imagine. In the breadth of a single hair, a hundred billion jostle for space. And these atoms are forever being recycled around the universe. You’ll have a couple of thousand atoms that once belonged to Shakespeare, you’ll have some of Genghis Khan’s and Julius Caesar’s, as well as some that belonged to a hedgehog living in Norway.’
Jake struggled to get his head around the notion.
His eyes bright with excitement, Charlie went on, ‘That is one thing. But a single atom itself is extraordinary, like a mini-universe. Think of this: if the atom were the size of St Paul’s Cathedral, the nucleus alone would be no bigger than a pea. So what about the space in between? What does that contain?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jake, half smiling.
Charlie leaned in close and took off his spectacles in order to make his point more dramatically. ‘It contains history. The history of everything.’
Again, a tingling went down Jake’s spine. More questions came immediately into his head. ‘And the horizon point?’ he asked. ‘What’s that?’
‘There are many horizon points all around the world. Each one is a focus of intense magnetic activity … You know, of course, that the Earth has a magnetic field – the horizon points provide the power for the atomium to do its job. We invariably use horizon points that are far out to sea; the landlocked ones are fraught with complications.’
Again, Jake thought hard about this strange science. ‘Rose said only a “select few” can travel into history. But we all have atoms – why can’t everyone do it?’
Charlie smiled and took a deep breath. ‘That is the unanswerable question,’ he said, relishing the mystery. ‘No one knows where we get our valour from. But the fact is, if you do not have a shape in your eye, you will not be travelling to the past.’
‘And what about the ship? The rigging? The cups and plates? How do they travel to the past?’
‘Not to mention the clothes we’re wearing. None of us would enjoy arriving in nothing but our birthday suits!’ Charlie giggled to himself. ‘As a group, we extend our focus. Telepathically, so to speak’ – he swept his hand grandly around the ship – ‘we carry all this with us: the Escape, everything in it and some of the water too. The most talented keepers, usually the diamonds – I myself am honoured to be one,’ he added proudly, ‘carry the most. Not just the inanimate objects, but the other keepers too, the less qualified ones.’
‘That’s why Jupitus Cole asked you to stick with me?’
Charlie whispered, ‘With you also being a diamond – so I’ve been told – you should be a natural, but it’s best to take precautions on the first voyage.’ He looked round and dropped his voice further. ‘When I said the diamonds “carry” the other agents, I meant more the oblongs and the misshapes. It’s very hard to take any journey of note without at least one diamond on board.’
Although all these ideas were still abstract to Jake, he couldn’t help feeling a certain sense of pride in his status. ‘And if we are able to travel in time,’ he asked, ‘are we able to visit ourselves – you know, at a younger age?’
&nb
sp; Charlie looked at Jake as if he were mad. ‘You’ve been reading too much science fiction. Our lives are like everyone else’s. They start at the beginning and finish at the end. We can only be in one place, in the present … wherever that present happens to be. Look …’ Charlie held up his wrist and showed Jake his watch (which, like his spectacles, was battered and fixed with tape). ‘The number there’ – he pointed to a little window of numerals in the middle of the clock face – ‘is my age. Fourteen years, seven months and two days. Wherever I am in history, it doesn’t matter, this watch adds up the days. On my birthday it plays me a little tune – Beethoven’s Fifth.’
He patted the watch fondly and whistled his birthday tune. He stopped when he saw that Jake’s attention had been caught by something. Topaz St Honoré had appeared on deck. Jake’s eyes flickered and again his throat dried as he watched her glide towards the prow of the ship.
‘Oh dear.’ Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Another heart stolen by le sphinx français.’
Jake blushed with embarrassment.
‘Topaz has that effect on most boys,’ Charlie went on.
‘No, not at all, I …’ Jake floundered. ‘She just seems quite … mysterious …Does she live in Normandy?’ he asked, attempting to deflect attention from himself.
‘Since she was adopted by Nathan’s family, yes. Mostly she lives at Point Zero with them. Of course, she and Nathan fight like lunatics, just like any brother and sister.’
‘Nathan?’ asked Jake.
‘Nathan Wylder. You’ll meet him when we arrive. Actually, you’ll hear him first. He has the loudest voice this side of Constantinople. American. A civil-war child.’ Then Charlie added with more admiration than envy, ‘He’s the undisputed star of the service. A bona fide hero.’
The History Keepers: The Storm Begins Page 4