by Jemima Pett
Chapter 12: The Adventures of Victor
In which Victor gets more than he bargained for but finds that brains often skip a generation
At about the time the Buckmore party was pulling into the courtyard at Castle Vexstein, Victor was serving the last few customers in his bar and mentally counting the number of overnight guests he had. It wasn’t many, as quite a few of those that had been hanging around earlier had departed with the delegates from Castle Vexstein’s summit as they made their ways back to their own Castles. Probably about three quarters of the Baron’s guests would have used the Inn of the Seventh Happiness as their crossroads. So while he had been hugely busy earlier, he wasn’t now. And a plan was forming in his mind.
The one thing that he and George had not managed to work out was the time that the time tunnel sent you to, and whether the principle was the same at each end. What were the rules governing the tunnel? As the bar got quieter, he jotted down a few lines on a paper drawing them between East and Hattan, then scribbled them out, turned the paper over and tried again. Then found another piece of paper. At about the fourth go, and after the last people in the bar had either left or gone to their rooms, but it was still a few minutes early to turn in himself, Victor had a brainwave. It all hinged on George’s understanding of what the person who rushed past him in the tunnel during his journey here from Castle Hattan was doing. What if the ‘when’ of it was wrong? What if he wasn’t rushing back to throw George in a dungeon? If you changed those, a whole load of things fell into place. The two problems that remained were; did the time tunnel ‘mind’ if a person was in the same place at the same time, which was contrary to an awful lot of fictional speculation about the workings of time tunnels; and was Hugo the same person as the guy in Castle Hattan that George knew as Lord Mariusz?
George had assumed that the person who had rushed past him was Hugo or Mariusz on his way back to be cross with George and this Professor person he had called Saku. What if he was in a rush simply to be in a certain place at a certain time? If Hugo left his room to go down the tunnel to Hattan, but knew he would have to be back in time to meet Prince Lupin and set off to Buckmore, he would have at least a fourteen-hour journey but he only had about seven hours to do it in. The only way he could do it was if he could somehow overlap himself in the tunnel. If he knew he was going to do it before he set out, there should be no disorientation about meeting himself on the way back, as that was his intention. It would fit with the strange behaviour of Hugo when he had met the Buckmore party the previous morning. And now, this evening, he had come and said something very strange to Victor when they were changing the horses on the Prince’s carriage for the final leg to Castle Vexstein. It didn’t make any sense at all, but when Baden had come to find him, Victor had understood; he was merely trying to look as if he was talking to Victor, before slipping off down his special tunnel again. Giving the Buckmore party the slip, in fact. Victor wondered what had happened at Buckmore for him to leave them in such a sly way.
He drew another line on his piece of paper. He and George had agreed the tunnel almost certainly originated in Castle Hattan, because that was where all the excess energy was being made. If you left Hattan via the time tunnel, but always got back just a few minutes after you left (like this Mariusz guy returning just after he’d left George and the Professor Saku), then you could spend a lot of time here and no time at all at the other end. If that was right, Hugo was just about to rush back with whatever information he had found out at Buckmore, and turn up a minute after he had last left... which would make him threaten George, and get George to jump down the tunnel. And that meant Hugo and Mariusz were the same person.
But George had arrived here in the afternoon after the earlier arrival of Hugo - the one where he had rushed to meet Buckmore’s departing dawn coach. George had just taken more than twice as long to traverse the tunnel as he was in no hurry at all, so had arrived in the afternoon. He had passed the ‘hurrying back after meeting Fred’ Hugo in the tunnel. And that Hugo had passed himself a few minutes or maybe as much as an hour or more before he passed George, because of the one hurrying and George not.
George had then stayed the night and they’d gone to Vexstein together. It wasn’t until Victor got back for the evening rush that Hugo had dashed down the tunnel because of whatever had happened at Buckmore. So whatever Hugo was just about to do to George had already happened, since George was back, and at Castle Vexstein. Victor frowned. Was this what they called timeline paradox? Would they all wink out of existence if Hugo, or Mariusz, as he should probably call him, managed to prevent George leaving, or was he merely carrying out something he was destined to do and he couldn’t change it? Victor sighed. He couldn’t quite work out when he would arrive on the other side if he went to Castle Hattan himself. It would be well after that event, he thought, as George’s arrival in Hattan seemed to be in no way related to Hugo’s previous visits.
Something itched in the back of his head. George had said something about his meeting with Mariusz. He said he’d been expected, or something like that. A light went on in Victor’s brain. He was expected because Mariusz, or Hugo, had already heard of George from Fred on the way to the Inn. He had guessed that George might have gone the wrong way and ended up in Castle Hattan. He had dashed back down the tunnel, crossing with his returning self, and met George, who had solved his power problem!
Victor drew some more lines on his paper. The time tunnel originated in Hattan, he thought. And that controlled when people would arrive in either destination. If you left Hattan, you arrived back more or less when you left. However long you’d been in the East. What if you started here? Maybe you arrived in Hattan a parallel time after the person returning to Hattan had left East? This is why Mariusz/Hugo had been expecting George. The number of hours that were between his and George’s departure from East were the same number of hours between their arrivals in Hattan. Maybe. Victor frowned as he realised he might be going round in circles.
He looked up as the clock in the parlour behind him struck midnight. Hugo had dashed down the tunnel some hours ago. He would get to this time tunnel long before Victor would if Victor left now. But George had said it had taken him more than half a day to do the journey, even though Hugo could run it in around seven hours, by their calculations. Victor couldn’t be away so long, not with the inn to run. He sighed once more. His assistant called to him and said he was going. Victor nodded. Then he stopped him.
“Gandy,” he said, “I need to go out on a mission. Tonight. Something to do with the Energy Drain. If I’m not back in the morning, could you and Missy hold the fort for me? Just till I do get back?”
Gandy looked worried. “You’re not going to do a disappearing act like your dad did, are you?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so. I think I know what I’m doing. Just in case, I’ll leave a note behind the bar. For Prince Lupin, or Baden. Or those nice young guys, Fred and George. You saw them, didn’t you?” Gandy nodded. “Mustn’t let Hugo see note.” Victor added.
They both agreed and Victor wished Gandy a good night and let him out, saying he’d see him tomorrow night. He turned the key in the door after him and stood leaning against the door. He did know what he was doing, he thought. He was going to rescue his Dad. It had to be why he had disappeared. If he had turned up at Castle Hattan sometime in the future, Hugo couldn’t possibly have let him come back, even though they’d known each other and worked together since Victor was very young. It would have ruined Hugo’s business forever. He wrote a short note to Prince Lupin and the others and placed in it the till. Then he went out of the back door, carefully closing it behind him, and into a little lean-to shed. He took an ancient cover off an equally ancient velocipede, wheeled it from the shed, threw his leg over the bar, and started pedalling down the tunnel towards the time portal.