“Should I equip myself with outdoor clothing?” Fairfax wanted to know.
“You probably won’t need it,” Xanthe told him, not meeting his lopsided gaze as the true meaning of this observation struck home. If she did her job well and they arrived where and when they needed to be, Fairfax might well be a convicted criminal on his way to meet his executioner. As she came to stand close to him he took hold of her arm, his grip tighter than was comfortable even through the thick wool of her coat.
“Do not think to trick me, little Spinner,” he warned. “I am not the helpless passenger in this journey you prefer to imagine.”
Xanthe shrugged off his hand. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
She made him take hold of the chocolate pot too. “Are you sure your pockets are empty?” she asked.
“Yes. What is the importance of this?”
“Personal items have strong vibrations and the associations can interfere with what we are asking of this object,” she said, gazing at the copper pot. “This is your anchor to me and mine to this point in time. Now, close your eyes.” As he did so she moved closer, not enjoying the proximity to him but knowing it to be necessary for more than one reason. She quickly slipped the single, special coin into the pocket of his shirt; the one she had so carefully selected from the collection in the shop and brought with her. Such a small, worn little coin seemed a flimsy thing on which to place so much of her hope. As she dropped it into his pocket she offered a silent prayer to whomever or whatever it was that watched over Spinners, asking for her small refinement to the journey home Fairfax would make to be successful. If he noticed her standing near enough to press against him he did not comment on it. “Now,” she said more calmly than she felt, “you have to think of the cell you were held in on the night of your execution.”
“But surely to imagine the astrolabe would be more appropriate?”
“And how many times have you done that and gone nowhere? No, it is the heightened state that the dangerous moment in your life brought about that will call strongest. That and me being here.”
When he opened his remaining good eye to look at her again, questioning the wisdom of her instructions, Xanthe had to damp down her temper. The last thing she needed was him sowing seeds of doubt in her mind. Not now.
“If you want this, you have to do what I tell you to do, and do it without question.”
He set his mouth but did as she bid him.
Xanthe steeled herself. She shut out thoughts of Samuel, thoughts of her mother, thoughts of anything other than the chocolate pot and what Fairfax had told her about his execution. She tried to bring to mind the voice that she had heard from the book. The voice that had made her know that she had been chosen because of her own special gift. The voice that made her feel that she belonged. That she was not, in fact, doing any of her traveling alone. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened and was comforted to hear her name being whispered softly but clearly. Opening her eyes again she took the piece of paper from where she had concealed it close to her heart and unfolded it. The few lines she had written looked insignificant for such a huge task. Trying to summon the confidence they had inspired only a few hours earlier, Xanthe muttered them now, under her breath, trying to obey the instruction from the Spinner that they were for her alone. She would not impart them to Fairfax.
Let the door through the fabric of time swing wide,
May I travel through time’s secret rift.
Let the centuries spin at my bidding,
May my return be sure and be swift.
The metal of the copper pot in her hands quickly changed from cool to almost intolerably hot. She heard Fairfax gasp. She closed her eyes, shutting out that other darkness that she knew must descend. She was aware of the ground beneath her feet lurching, upsetting her balance. Fairfax stumbled, but he too held tight to the chocolate pot. Then came the voices; the cries of the desperate and the lost, some calling Xanthe by name, others crying out to a Spinner to listen to them, to hear their story. She noticed that none called for Fairfax specifically. The sensation of both falling and moving fast through the blackness caused her stomach to tighten, but this time she did not feel afraid. This time, more than any other, even though she was doing something new, she felt in control. This was her choice. Her idea. Her way of doing what she needed to do. She had the found thing that sang to her even as they traveled. She had the snippets of wisdom gleaned from Mistress Flyte. She had the words from the book of Spinners, laid directly onto her ear. She had her mission to help Samuel to spur her on, and her need to return home safely to Flora to lend care and guile to her actions. She would not fail.
As quickly as the movements and supernatural sensations had begun, they ceased. She and Fairfax fell heavily onto the ground. She heard him groan as he landed. For a few seconds she remained where she fell, winded by the brutal connection with what transpired to be a stone floor. She knew better than to hurry to her feet. She let her mind and her body readjust, settle, recover, just for a moment. Beside her Fairfax cursed and struggled, dragging himself up, doing so too soon and too quickly so that he fell again. He lay moaning as Xanthe got carefully to her feet. She blinked, regaining focus. They were in a cell. A single candle stub sat on a small table against one wall beside a cot of pallets and straw. The air smelled of damp and of urine and of fear. She could hear the cries of prisoners close by railing against their lot. She helped Fairfax to his feet.
“Look about you,” she told him. “Do you recognize this place?”
He pushed his lank hair from his face, hastening to regain his composure, doing what she asked of him. “I … can’t be sure. Wait. It could be … I recall the flea-ridden bed, and the stink.…”
“Those could be found in any seventeenth-century cell, I should imagine. Is this one yours?”
He staggered about the small space, running his hands over the rough wood of the table, glancing toward the heavy door with its high iron-grilled opening. At last he spied an alcove in the far wall. It was nothing more than a natural gap in the stones, but it formed a cleft. He hurried to it, put in his hand, and drew out a cloth-wrapped loaf. He held it up for her to see as if offering a sacred relic.
“This! My manservant, still loyal, brought me food the day before my date of execution. This is that bread.” He nodded at her. “This is my condemned cell. How came we here? Surely I have changed my fate to something better?”
“I’m sure you will have. You must have. You were the king’s man.…”
“Yet here we stand!”
“I told you this was a possible point of arrival for our journey. This is how it has to be, clearly. Don’t lose your nerve now. And anyway, the circumstance cannot be exactly the same. If you are where you were before, as you were before, you will have the astrolabe, surely?”
Fairfax dropped the loaf and shook out the cloth, holding it up to the light of the candle before abandoning it to search the little alcove again, groping in the darkness with increasing desperation. At last he turned to her, shaking. “It is not there!” he said hoarsely.
“You had it hidden the first time you were here?”
Even in the inadequate light Xanthe could see how shattered the man was, and when he spoke she understood the reason for his stricken expression. “I was permitted to bring nothing with me into this godforsaken prison. When my servant brought me bread he risked his own life to bring me what I needed hidden within. It should be here and it is not. I tell you, the astrolabe is gone!”
17
The enormity of this discovery overwhelmed Fairfax.
“You told me you would take me to it! You told me it would be here! I risked all!”
“Calm down. We don’t know the situation yet. You might not be awaiting execution. There might be a lesser charge, you might be going to return home.…”
“I tell you I know what this place is! Oh, I was a fool to believe you capable of doing what you promised.”
“I said there woul
d be risks. We did know you might end up having to go through the execution again. We discussed this. We wanted to come to the time and place, but you went back and changed things. After you escaped your execution you went back and changed the course of your life, you said so yourself. It was more likely we would come to this moment and find you a spectator in the crowd. That’s what we planned for. I could make no guarantees. You knew that. But don’t give up hope. You changed your own future by your shifting allegiances after the first time you escaped the scaffold. When you went back to your own time you swore your loyalty to the king.”
“And yet here I stand once more! How is my fate improved?”
“I don’t know, not yet … but the first time … the astrolabe did not return to your own time with you. It’s possible you dropped it and it lies in the mud somewhere under the scaffold.…”
“I should not have agreed to such a course of action! To find myself incarcerated again, and this time without my astrolabe … If it sits out there beneath the boards now it may as well be at the bottom of an ocean, for I will not reach it before I am dispatched!” He stormed across the floor of the cell and took hold of Xanthe’s arms. “We must go back. Now. Use your damned talisman and take us back!”
At that moment they heard the sound of footsteps heralding an approaching jailer. Light guttered through the grille in the door. Neither Xanthe nor Fairfax had time to move or speak before keys jangled and the lock was turned. A heavy bolt was drawn back and the door shoved open. The jailer was silhouetted against the torch he had placed in the wall sconce before stepping forward. The fractured light faded back along the stretch of narrow passageway that led from the cell.
The guard squinted in at Xanthe.
“How came you here?” he demanded. As Xanthe searched her mind for a plausible response he added, “A fine start to my watch. I should have been told if any of the prisoners had been permitted company. How am I to perform my duties acceptably when I am not appraised of the facts?” he asked of no one in particular, evidently expecting no reply. He stepped aside. “Out with you, wench. Time you were gone.”
“And I?” There was a wavering note in Fairfax’s voice that betrayed his fear. “When am I to leave this place?”
“Huh!” The jailer allowed himself a little laugh at his prisoner’s expense. “Were I in your shoes, my noble Lord, I should not be so eager to make that short journey! Come, slattern, leave the man to his conscience now.” So saying, he shoved a jar of beer into Fairfax’s hand. “You have a friend left who sent this. And I am instructed your keepsakes be returned to you, though what use you may have for them now…” He left the thought unfinished as he tossed a small leather bundle onto the table. As it unraveled, both Fairfax and Xanthe glimpsed the glinting bronze and silver of the small, beautifully crafted astrolabe that lay inside.
Xanthe was pushed into the corridor and the door was slammed shut, locked, and bolted. She craned her neck for a final look through the door and saw Fairfax snatch up the precious device and hold it eagerly up to the light.
After the jailer had shooed her from the premises Xanthe found herself on the grounds of the Tower of London, lost and unnoticed among the rowdy crowd that surged and seethed around the scaffold, waiting for the next condemned man to be led to his doom. In such a throng it was easy to remain hidden in plain sight, and her faux seventeenth-century clothes were a passable disguise. What was less easy to explain should anyone have cared to ask was why she was wearing a heavy coat, warm clothes, and a weatherproof hat when it was clearly a bright summer’s day. She quickly removed the incongruous outer garments, rolling them up and tying them to the strap of her shoulder bag. Judging by how high in the sky the sun sat, it was mid morning. The trees were in full leaf and people in the crowd were tanned from a full summer. The warmth of the day and the close press of bodies made the air heavy with smells of salty skin and unwashed clothes, over which Xanthe could detect the unmistakable stink of raw sewage. She looked about her, taking in the variety of people, apparently from all levels of society, who were drawn to witness the execution of traitors and murderers and who knew who else besides. Children ran and played amid the throng. Here and there hawkers offered pies or beer for sale. There was an unsettling atmosphere of a fair day or carnival, with human suffering and violence at its center. Xanthe moved cautiously between the spectators until she found a spot beside a wall in the shade, a little way to the side of the main area. From there she could watch without being jostled and could keep reasonably well out of sight herself.
She tried to take stock of the situation. Fairfax was in the condemned cell, that much was plain. The fact that the astrolabe had not been in its hiding place told her that this was not the moment before his original execution. Something had changed, therefore it could not be. So, this was a version of the date after he had been through it once before. Two things about this fact confused her. First, if this was the case, why wasn’t the astrolabe somewhere on the ground beneath the raised platform on which the executions were performed? If Fairfax had dropped it the first time, seeing it slip down between the boards, the most likely place for it to be was still there in the mud somewhere. It was possible it could have been found by someone, of course. But someone had sent the astrolabe to him in his cell. Someone had had it and known of its importance to him. How did Fairfax come to have such a powerful ally in this second version of his experience of this date? And how had he come to fall so low as to be condemned when in Samuel’s time he had been a successful, wealthy man of the king? Xanthe could not find answers for such complex questions. She pushed them aside, forcing herself to simply deal with the situation that she faced, rather than trying to make sense of such bewildering details. She wondered if Fairfax would try to use the astrolabe to travel back to his own time while he was in the cell. They had touched on this possibility, as he had been not unreasonably anxious to avoid being hanged for a second time. They had agreed that if the opportunity presented itself they would definitely attempt to return the moment they had the device. But he was on his own now. It was unlikely he would be able to spin time without Xanthe and the chocolate pot there to help him. She realized that he was, in all probability, doing just that at that very moment. She imagined his desperation and fear as he realized he couldn’t make it work. It must have been an unfamiliar experience for him to feel so utterly powerless.
A shout went up. A drum began to beat. The crowd set up a babble of jeers and taunting, surging forward, all eager for a better view. Xanthe had the advantage of being tall but still she had difficulty seeing who was being brought out from the tower. She could see a small group of guards moving through the melee, a prisoner between them, held tight, prevented from bolting but also protected from the agitated crowd. Xanthe wondered what the man had done to warrant such loathing from people who didn’t even know him. It was not until he mounted the steps to the scaffold that she could see clearly that it was indeed Fairfax. She felt a surprising surge of pity for the man. He had been stripped of his velvet doublet, his fine shirt slightly ripped, his hose scuffed presumably from him having fallen somewhere on the short journey from his cell and been roughly handled by the guards. Xanthe could only hope that he still had the gold coin in his pocket. She noticed that his left hand was closed into a fist and felt certain it would contain the astrolabe. Fairfax’s eye patch had become dislodged so that his horribly swollen and wounded eye was plainly visible. She reminded herself that it was he who had brought himself to this point. He who wanted to wield the power of a Spinner, not her. It was his choice to put himself at such risk to get what he wanted. She was doing what he wanted in order to save Samuel. That was, after all, what the chocolate pot had summoned her to do. The noise of the crowd grew ever louder as the court official read out the charges and sentence so that Xanthe was unable to hear, unable to discover his crime. She saw him searching the crowd for her but did not dare signal to him. There were two possible ways their perilous plan could now progress. Eithe
r Fairfax successfully spun time at the point of his imminent death and this time managed to take the astrolabe with him, or he would trigger the journey but, as before, drop the device. If this second version of events happened, Xanthe would seize the moment of confusion when everyone was shocked and astonished to see a man disappear in front of them. She would hurry forward, dashing between the upright supports beneath the wooden platform, retrieve the astrolabe, and use the chocolate pot to return to Samuel’s time. If he took the thing with him she would simply find a quiet corner from which to travel.
Secrets of the Chocolate House Page 28