A Different Day, A Different Destiny (The Snipesville Chronicles)

by Laing, Annette

  In the morning, forty hours after they had left Dundee, Hannah awoke to find bright light streaming through the cabin porthole. The ship’s engines had shut down, and the vessel was barely moving. It was then she realized that the steamer had docked in London. But when she knocked on the Professor’s door, there was no answer. Hannah hunted down the cabin steward, who told her that the Professor had already disembarked. “She must be in quite a hurry to see the Exhibition, Miss, if she left without you! Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be back on board this evening, if not sooner.”

  Hannah hoped he was right, and rummaged in her purse for the money that the Professor had originally given her in Dundee: She had forgotten to ask for it back.

  Smiling smugly to herself, she unwrapped the pound notes, thinking what fun she could have in London. Her ticket included five days of accommodations and meals on board, and so, if the Professor had gone off to sulk, it was no big deal. Unless, of course, she never came back… Hannah dismissed that thought with a shudder.

  She decided to change into her blue dress before she went out. Unclasping the latches of her travel trunk, she flung open the hinged lid. On top of the clothes lay a sack, and she pulled it aside. That was when she realized that it wasn’t a sack: It was a tatty old skirt. Puzzled, Hannah peered into the trunk, and drew out a rough woolen shawl. She began to have a very bad feeling about this. Next, out came a grey, shapeless blouse. Perhaps she had the wrong trunk? No. There was her name, carefully written in black ink on the inside of the trunk lid. She threw aside the blouse and rummaged deeper, but all she found was the bottom of the trunk. In panic, Hannah searched the room. Nothing.

  “That witch!” she wailed. “She stole my dresses!” ****

  The ship sailed up the estuary where the River Thames meets the sea, and Alex and Jupe watched the riverbank go by, dashing from one side of the deck to the other and back again so that they wouldn’t miss anything.

  As Alex watched the south bank, Mr. Thornhill joined him. “Behold the mighty River Thames,” he said, smiling. “We’re almost there.”

  Alex suddenly had an awful thought, and he blurted out, “Mr. Thornhill, I don’t have a passport!”

  Mr. Thornhill leaned down to hear him better, and said, “A what?”

  Alex frantically gestured with his fingers. “You know, a passport? To get into England?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mr. Thornhill, returning his gaze to the river.

  So, Alex thought, passports haven’t been invented yet. Phew.

  At that moment, a great cheer went up from the passengers on deck. Alex struggled to see what the fuss was about, and finally asked Mr. Thornhill. “There’s Gravesend,” said Mr. Thornhill, smiling and nodding ahead of them to a crowded town with steamships and sailing ships clustered in its harbor. The steamer passed a rowing boat, and the passengers waved enthusiastically with hats and handkerchiefs.

  Mr. Thornhill removed his hat and leaned on the guardrail. “Here is our point of arrival for London. Do you know, I have learned that we may now take a railway train from here to London Bridge? What a remarkable age we live in!”

  Alex smiled. It was hard for him to be as impressed with trains as Mr. Thornhill was, but he tried to understand: To Mr. Thornhill, trains were state-of-the-art technology. His enthusiasm reminded Alex of his Grandpa’s fascination with computers.

  Mr. Thornhill pulled out a cigar, and then dug around in his pockets for something, muttering, “Confound it! Where are my Lucifers? Oh… wait… here they are.”

  He held up a box of matches. Striking one on the guard rail, he lit his cigar, protecting the match from the wind with a cupped hand. He blew out a puff of acrid smoke and said, “I have arranged rooms for us at Carhart’s Hotel, although I was fortunate to find them. Accommodations are in high demand because of the Exhibition, and Carhart’s is the finest in all of London. I don’t know whether that speaks well of it or not, but I would hazard that it’s no worse than Marshburn’s Inn in Snipesville.”

  Alex laughed, and Mr. Thornhill allowed himself a smile at his own joke.

  Alex, Jupe, and Mr. Thornhill stood unsteadily on the quayside, trying to get used to solid land again, as they waited for porters to finish loading their trunks. “Once I have seen to the luggage, we will take a train into town,” said Mr. Thornhill, tossing his cigar butt onto the quayside. “Hopefully, our trunks will arrive at the hotel in good time.”

  “Massa Thornhill?” Jupe said, “Where we going?”

  “We are going into London, Jupe. And don’t call me Master,” said Mr. Thornhill abruptly. “You are free. You may call me Mr. Thornhill or sir, as you please.”

  As Mr. Thornhill went to give instructions to the carters who were loading the trunks into a wagon, Jupe looked ready to cry. Alex, alarmed, asked if he was okay.

  “I don’t know,” said Jupe, his lip trembling. “I don’t know. I’ll tell you later, Massa Alex. But I got to think a spell. I don’t even know where I am!”

  Alex whispered, “Jupe, it’s okay! It’s gonna be okay! Remember what I told you? You, your family, every slave in Georgia, you’re all gonna be free in just a few years!”

  Jupe stepped away, looking skeptically at him, and said politely, “Thanks, Massa Alex…”

  Alex knew then that Jupe thought he was crazy, but he tried to bridge the gap between them even still. “Please, call me Alex. Just Alex.”

  “Well, thank you, sir, all the same,” Jupe said. Then he looked downriver, as though he could somehow retrace the ship’s voyage, back along the English Channel, across the Atlantic Ocean, and all the way home to Snipes County, far from this strange place and Alex the madman.

  To Alex, Carhart’s Hotel looked less like a grand resort, and more like five houses that had been knocked together, which was exactly what it was. Mr. Thornhill had rented a suite of four small rooms, three bedrooms and a sitting room. All the rooms were much smaller than in the hotels where Alex had stayed with his parents. He said so to Mr. Thornhill, who was very surprised to hear it. In Alex’s room, he found what passed for a bathroom: A wooden washstand with a jug of cold water and a basin, soap, sponge, and a water glass. On the lower shelf was another bowl for waste water.

  While Alex found the accommodations a bit primitive, Jupe seemed overwhelmed by the luxury of it all. He had spent the entire journey to the hotel by train and horse-drawn cab with his mouth open, gaping at the sheer size of London. Now he was sitting on his bed, taking it all in.

  Alex returned to the sitting room, where Mr. Thornhill was reclining in an armchair, smoking yet another cigar, and pouring himself a glass of whisky. “I must confess to you, Alex, that returning to London has made me feel as though I have traveled through time,” chuckled Mr. Thornhill. “So much has changed here that I feel quite dizzy. But I don’t suppose you have the first idea of what I’m talking about.”

  Alex thought, man, you don’t know the half of it.

  Suddenly, Mr. Thornhill sat up. “I expect you would like to see the sights? There is so much to see in London. Now, I propose that we pay a visit to…” As soon as he began to speak, Alex found himself mentally flipping through a slideshow of London attractions: Buckingham Palace! Westminster Abbey! The Houses of Parliament!

  “…the Thames Tunnel!” exclaimed Mr. Thornhill. “Let us cast our eyes upon Marc Brunel’s astonishing feat of engineering.”

  Alex looked crestfallen. Mr. Thornhill added hurriedly, “Well, perhaps Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks would be best.”

  “It already exists?” Alex blurted out. Mr. Thornhill gave him an odd look, and so Alex added, “Can Jupe come?”

  “If you wish,” Mr. Thornhill said unenthusiastically. But Alex did wish to bring him, and Jupe was both surprised and delighted to be invited along.

  Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, 1851 version, was much smaller than it would be in the twenty-first century. It sat on the second floor of its building, above a salesroom for horse-drawn carriages.
Alex, Jupe and Mr. Thornhill entered through a narrow doorway on the ground floor, and climbed a grand staircase, to be met by a young man guarding a black metal cash box on a table. He brightened up when he saw them approach, and greeted Mr. Thornhill warmly. “Good morning, sir! That will be a shilling each for you, the young gentleman, and your servant, and an extra sixpence for the catalog of the exhibition. Will you be seeing the Napoleon Rooms and the Separate Room on this occasion, sir?”

  “I suppose so,” said Mr. Thornhill uncertainly, but Alex was already nodding excitedly.

  The man extended his hand. “In that case, sir, that will be an extra sixpence per person, for a total of five shillings.”

  Mr. Thornhill dropped the coins into his outstretched palm and asked, “Is Madame unwell today? Her absence is to be lamented.”

  The attendant’s expression instantly changed to one of great solemnity. “Madame? No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but sad to say, Madame Tussaud is no longer with us. She died last year at the venerable age of 90.”

  “I had no idea,” said Mr. Thornhill politely. “I have been abroad. Come along, Alex.”

  The three of them entered what appeared to be an enormous formal living room: Mirrors and drapes lined the walls, and the room was lit with hissing gas lamps. Alex, remembering the teeming crowds at Tussaud’s in the twenty-first century, was surprised by how quiet the place was. The wax models outnumbered the real people. And unlike the casually-attired tourist crowd at the modern Tussauds, the few other customers in 1851 were formally dressed and looked wealthy.

  The two boys followed Mr. Thornhill through to the Hall of Kings to admire the Royal Family of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their seven children. Alex decided to step onto the platform and see how tall he was compared with the tiny Queen. But as he did so, Mr. Thornhill grabbed his arm and yanked him back to the ground. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

  “I’m sorry. I thought we were allowed to do that,” Alex said sheepishly. He and Brandon had taken each others’ photos with the waxworks in the twenty-first century, and he had no idea that this was a new privilege. Now, in 1851, he looked about him doubtfully, and said, “So what can we do here?”

  “We shall admire the many celebrated people modeled in wax,” said Mr. Thornhill, adding testily under his breath, “I should have thought that was obvious.”

  As Mr. Thornhill turned away, Alex circled his index finger in the air, and muttered, “Woo-hoo.” But then he had an idea. He said to Jupe, “Let’s check out the Chamber of Horrors!”

  Mr. Thornhill had overheard him, but was confused. He turned to an attendant standing nearby. “Where is the, er, Chamber of Horrors?”

  “We don’t actually like calling it that, sir,” the attendant replied in a hushed voice. “That name was a joke in poor taste that appeared in Punch magazine. We call it the Separate Room. We do advise that it’s not suitable for ladies, sir.”

  Mr. Thornhill raised an eyebrow at him. “As you can plainly see, there are no ladies in our company. Lead us to the Separate Room.”

  The Separate Room (otherwise known as the Chamber of Horrors) was a major disappointment, at least to Alex. Gone was all the really scary stuff, like the torture and execution scenes. Instead the highlight was a display of lifesize wax models of “Celebrated Murderers,” who queued up like ordinary men waiting for a bus. The only exhibit that impressed Alex was that of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, the man who was stabbed in his bath. Even then, he was mainly impressed because he had seen the same waxwork two centuries into the future.

  Jupe, meanwhile, was dumbstruck by the wax models of the guillotined heads of French Revolutionaries. “What are those?” he whispered, pointing with a trembling finger.

  Mr. Thornhill overheard him, and came to join the boys. He pointed to the wax heads and said, “These men advocated liberty and equality for all in France, even for the most ignorant peasants. But their so-called revolution led only to lawlessness, and then to tyranny, as the Napoleon Rooms will show us. The rebels paid for their sins by becoming victims of the rabble. They are evidence of the ill-effects of too much freedom.”

  Alex followed this wordy lecture, but it bothered him. He spoke up. “Mr. Thornhill, how can there be too much freedom? I mean, Jupe is free now, and that’s only a good thing. And you made that happen.”

  Mr. Thornhill looked coldly at him. “I can only repeat, Alexander, that too much freedom leads to a collapse of the proper order of things. I don’t expect a mere child to understand this, or indeed to understand that true freedom is possible only with capital, by which I mean property and money, something that neither you nor Jupe has.”

  An uneasy feeling spread through Alex’s stomach. There was something very chilling about Mr. Thornhill’s words, and also about how he had said them, as though he knew something that he was not prepared to reveal to the boys. Uncomfortably, Alex thought, not for the first time, that he knew very little about Mr. Thornhill and his plans.

  ****

  Brandon finished polishing the last shoe in Balesworth Hall just in time for the beginning of his half-day off. Every Saturday between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m., plus every other Sunday afternoon, his time was his own to do as he pleased. Brandon was dying to do something, anything, that wasn’t mind-numbing work, just to use his brain a bit. But there was not much to do in rural Hertfordshire in 1851, especially not by himself. If nothing else, he thought, he could take a walk in the country, and get the smells of shoe polish and silver polish out of his nostrils. The weather was gloomy and overcast, as it so often was in England, but he didn’t think it was likely he would get soaked through. When the rain came, it rarely rained as heavily here as it did in Georgia. Anyway, he would chance it, because he was keen to see what the town of Balesworth looked like in 1851.

  He planned to walk along the Great North Road until Mr. Veeriswamy suggested that he take a footpath through the fields and woods instead. Brandon had forgotten that what the English meant by “footpath” in the countryside was an unmarked dirt trail. Several times, he stopped in the fields and woodlands thinking he was lost, but each time he decided to carry on. Finally, he emerged from the woods just in time to see a steam train draw up at Balesworth Station. He had arrived.

  When Brandon finally reached the High Street, he was excited to find the weekly open-air market in progress. In 1915, he had often shopped at a booth selling used books, and he hoped it was in business in 1851. But his hope was immediately dashed, for the market was not much as he remembered it. Although a few stalls here and there sold fruit and vegetables, most of the activity involved serious-looking men smoking pipes and muttering to each other as they clustered around penned-in herds of cattle.

  Hesitantly, Brandon approached an elderly farmer with long puffy white sideburns who was hovering at the edge of a conversation. “Excuse me, sir, but can you tell me if anyone ever sells books at this market?”

  “You’re not from here, are you?” the old man said with a smile, leaning forward on his cane. “Well, lad, you won’t find no books here. You’re all mizzle-mozzled, you see! This here is Balesworth’s cattle market. You want a fair with hawkers and peddlers and that? You best be coming back for the Fair in September, I reckon. Mind you, I don’t say you’ll find what you’re looking for, because nothing in town has been the same since that Great Northern Railway opened here last year. It’s like to put an end to the Balesworth cattle market, because now the Smithfield butchers can get their cattle from anywhere, can’t they? They don’t have to come here. I tell you, lad, this here railway will be the ruination of Balesworth. The inns ain’t doing half the business they was, and that’s a fact. We hardly seen any coaches these days, and they get fewer all the time. And dangerous the railway is, too. They had a collision not twelvemonth ago, right outside Balesworth Station. I wouldn’t travel on it, not me.” He rubbed his foot in the dust of the road and shook his head.

  “Well, er, thanks,” said Brandon, thinking to himself that this old
man really liked talking. “That’s, er, interesting.”

  Suddenly, the old man looked up, and spoke again. “Now, if it’s books you’re after, well, you’ll have to go to James Cotter’s shop.”

  “You have a bookshop?” Brandon exclaimed. He didn’t remember a bookstore in twentieth-century Balesworth.

  The old farmer looked mock-offended. “Arr, we do that. We ain’t all joskins in Balesworth, you know. Some of us is book-learned.”

  “Joskins?” Brandon said blankly.

  “Joskins!” laughed the farmer. “That’s what we call country bumpkins. Now skedaddle, and get you down to Mr. Cotter’s. You’ll find he’s by the Balesworth Arms. He’ll welcome a customer, what with business being so slow and that, and he’d be happy to help a young man of letters such as yourself.”

  The tiny bookshop was in the front room of Mr. Cotter’s house. A bell rang when Brandon entered, and soon Mrs. Cotter appeared. She was taken aback to see that her customer was a black boy, but she quickly recovered herself, apologized for Mr. Cotter’s being indisposed, and asked if she might assist him? Brandon didn’t know what he wanted, which seemed a great relief to Mrs. Cotter, who sat down behind a small counter and resumed work on a sewing project.

  Brandon spent a long time browsing, but none of the books appealed much to him. All were hardbacks, and far too expensive for the shilling in his pocket. But when he returned to the counter to ask Mrs. Cotter for suggestions, he spotted a magazine, The London Illustrated News, right next to the cashbox. It looked interesting, and better yet, he could afford it.