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  ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE

  Brian Trenchard-Smith

  ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE

  Copyright (C) 2017 by Brian Trenchard-Smith

  Cover art & interior formatting

  by Kevin G. Summers

  Alice through the Multiverse is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is dedicated to the love of my life for the past forty-two years, Margaret, whose inspiration, patience, and counsel helped me to the finish line.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1: The Family Business

  CHAPTER 2: Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory?

  CHAPTER 3: Ghastly Yuletide Ornaments

  CHAPTER 4: The Devil’s Teat

  CHAPTER 5: Ghost Detainee

  CHAPTER 6: Trial by Water

  CHAPTER 7: Nelson and Brandt

  CHAPTER 8: Strike Three

  CHAPTER 9: Compromised

  CHAPTER 10: The Coracle, the Longboat and the Sloop

  CHAPTER 11: Boys’ Clothes

  CHAPTER 12: Two Hand Cannons

  CHAPTER 13: To London Town

  CHAPTER 14: Safe House

  CHAPTER 15: “It’s Jane.”

  CHAPTER 16: Crazy Jane

  CHAPTER 17: A Bucket of Murphy’s Law

  CHAPTER 18: Wicked Knots

  CHAPTER 19: Something Dreadful

  CHAPTER 20: Thieves’ Market

  CHAPTER 21: The Metal Serpent

  CHAPTER 22: The Rapture

  CHAPTER 23: “For oats, you need a ladle”

  CHAPTER 24: The Girl with Red-gold Hair

  CHAPTER 25: Within the Weightless Cocoon

  CHAPTER 26: Plan B

  CHAPTER 27: The Global Players Club

  CHAPTER 28: Mr. Broken Teeth

  CHAPTER 29: “Much suspected...”

  CHAPTER 30: Crossing the Line

  CHAPTER 31: “ ‘I am but mad north-north-west.’ ”

  CHAPTER 32: A Small Island of Trust

  CHAPTER 33: Quite Contrary

  CHAPTER 34: Sword and Buckler

  CHAPTER 35: It Was the American

  CHAPTER 36: Locked Out

  CHAPTER 37: A Village Gull

  CHAPTER 38: Revolving Doors

  CHAPTER 39: At the Dorchester

  CHAPTER 40: The Millstone of Justice

  CHAPTER 41: Tempus fugit

  CHAPTER 42: Riding in a Car with Boys

  CHAPTER 43: “Thanks, Winnie!”

  CHAPTER 44: Time for a Different Sort of Life

  CHAPTER 45: Descant of Agony

  CHAPTER 46: A Conspiracy of Ravens

  CHAPTER 47: The Plum-Colored Coat

  CHAPTER 48: In the Hall of Kings

  CHAPTER 49: A Drilled Tooth

  CHAPTER 50: Vengeance Is Mine

  CHAPTER 51: Alice and Jane

  CHAPTER 52: The WTF Moment

  CHAPTER 53: At Sword Point

  CHAPTER 54: Jane through the Multiverse

  About The Author

  Author’s Note

  Alice Through The Multiverse was originally published as The Headsman’s Daughter. This is the revised edition, retitled to better reflect its genre, with the addition of three new chapters, picking up from where the book ended, offering a new perspective on the story.

  Time travel as a concept in fiction and movies has always intrigued me. I wrote Alice Through The Multiverse as a wacky, time paradox roller coaster ride, blending thriller genres in a sardonic take on the twists and turns of history, destiny, and timeless love. There’s a bit of metaphysics and political subtext thrown in for good measure. I’ve tried to embed some serious issues in a ripping yarn. If readers respond, our plucky heroine will have more adventures in the Multiverse…

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank friends and family members who made essential contributions to this enterprise. Thanks also to Kevin G. Summers for his evocative cover design; to Rob McClellan of Third Scribe.com for his helpful marketing advice. Deepest thanks to my wife, Dr. Margaret Trenchard-Smith, for her advice on the novel as it was nearing completion.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Family Business

  March 1554

  A young girl ran barefoot through the forest, her face wracked with anguish and dread. This was worse than the worst of the visions that plagued her. This was happening. There was nothing she could do to stop it.

  ***

  Dark clouds streamed in from the east, mottling the walls of Farnham Castle with an eerie light. A storm was chasing the lowering sun. The gate creaked open, and a cart left the castle under cavalry escort, carrying three young men, their hands bound, sentenced to death. One prisoner remained standing, braced against the rear wall of the cart. James De Fries, in his twenty-sixth year, seemed calm, resigned. The two fifteen-year-old sheep stealers lying at his feet were utterly terrified.

  Knowing with certainty when the hour of death will come tends to direct our minds to the question of who is accountable. Not ourselves, of course. Fate is malevolent, others are to blame, the words “if only” echo, impotent rage curdles into self-pity. Not so with James De Fries, born to privilege, now to die a common criminal. So had read the charge, trumped up by his uncle to steal his inheritance and serve as a warning to anyone who might dare to champion the poor. But James was not preoccupied with futile fantasies of revenge. What was done was done. He would meet his Maker pure of heart and soul. God would grant him eternal life. Of that he had no doubt. But would God help him find the courage to endure the coming ordeal with dignity? Could his example ease the wretchedness of these two poor lads? But mostly his thoughts were on Alice, who had loved him at first sight, but must not see him now.

  Near the town, half-ringed by forest, the executioner’s scaffold stood, six feet high, thirty feet square, with a crawlspace underneath shielded by lattice fencing. Three nooses dangled above a headsman’s block, posts and pillories, created for various forms of torment. Soldiers, armed with the spiked axes known as halberds, surrounded the structure. Crossbowmen were positioned at each corner as a warning to the sullen townsfolk. Clearly, the sentence was not popular.

  The hostility of the crowd was not lost on Rufus Craddock, the executioner, nor on his wife Harriet or their two sons, Will and Ben, gathered in the crawlspace under the scaffold making final preparations to blades, hooks, leather bonds, the awful accoutrements of their trade.

  “Watch your backs in the crowd, lads,” Rufus muttered to his sons.

  To hang a man to a point shy of unconsciousness, then to rip out his innards and fry them on a griddle before his dying eyes takes the kind of mental discipline Rufus Craddock had always managed to summon on these occasions for twenty-five of his forty years. He was old for a headsman, who often went mad young or drank themselves to death. Rufus had learned from his father how to blot out pity and turn the process into carpentry; chopping, pruning, beveling. All swiftly done, the sooner to return to the cottage with his loved ones, where the family business was rarely mentioned. But today’s task would try his professional detachment as never before. The sheep stealers he would quickly dispatch, but Ruf
us was under orders to ensure that the outlaw James De Fries took a prolonged passage across the river Styx, and the lord of half the county was there to see it happen. Of all people, why this young man? God sets such tests.

  Then the lattice gate to the crawlspace swung open, and a barefooted young girl ran inside, wearing a woolen shift tied at the waist with a cord. She was Alice, eighteen summers old, the headsman’s favorite child. She stood before her father breathless, trembling, fighting back tears. Rufus looked stricken: “I ordered you to stay away, child.”

  “I cannot.”

  Rufus patted a small pigskin pouch hanging round his neck. “He will not suffer, I vow.”

  “Do you swear?”

  “By the Rood.”

  Her older brother Ben put down the axe he was sharpening. “This is no place for you.” Will, the eldest, approached to guide her out before the arrival of the condemned. “I beg you, Alice, go now.”

  Too late. An angry moan from outside drew Alice to a gap in the lattice. The cart carrying the condemned men pushed through the crowd. Her eyes fixed on James De Fries. Harriet dragged her daughter away. “Don’t let him see you! Don’t do that to him.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be, girl,” Rufus added. “I’m sorry.” He made the Sign of the Cross. The rest of the family followed suit. Except Alice, who shook her head, scattering tears.

  Her mother offered comfort: “God understands...God forgives.”

  “I do not.” Alice let out a sob suffused with anger.

  Harriet clasped her daughter’s hands within her own. “Pray, child, pray.”

  For some time now, Alice had been having difficulty reconciling the goodness of God with the world’s cruelty. And the strict moral code that emanated from the pulpit did not resemble the behavior of the most fortunate in the land. Prayer would be no comfort today.

  The horses hauling the cart halted close to the scaffold. Rufus and his sons pulled the black hoods down over their faces and went out. Alice peered through the gap in the lattice. James was standing, his back to the scaffold, so that her view of him was obscured behind the head of the nearest horse. Her gaze raked the crowd, then fixed on a nobleman, guarded by a cordon of soldiers. Tall, haughty of mien and richly dressed, hair and beard streaked with silver. This was Sir Giles De Fries, one of the most powerful landowners in the southern counties, James’ uncle and the man responsible for his death sentence. “Devil take you, Giles De Fries… I curse you to the end of your line,” Alice whispered from the deepest, darkest corner of her being.

  Alice had loved James from afar at first sight, although for years their social disparity made contact impossible. Still, a girl can dream, particularly at the age of six. As time passed she would glimpse him with other young nobles riding through the village, on their way to the hunt. So it was with astonishment, as she brought water to last year’s harvest workers, that she came upon him scything down corn, shoulder to shoulder with the village lads. Their eyes met. Something coursed through her body so strongly she nearly dropped the pail. She knew that he saw it. Did he feel it too? She wondered this because he asked her name, and addressed her not as a wench, but in the respectful tone in which a man of his station would address a lady. This was his way with all, she learned, which was why he was much loved in the village, and hated by his uncle, Sir Giles De Fries.

  The quarrel between uncle and nephew, a family matter initially, intensified until it became the talk of the county. Sir Giles claimed that his nephew was in league with Protestant rebels, and sent men to arrest him. He was to be killed for resisting. Yet James escaped, fleeing wounded into Farnham Forest, a haven for outlaws, who, his uncle hoped, would delight in finishing him off or would perhaps hand him back for reward and pardon. So they might have, had Alice not found him first.

  Alice had always walked the forest in safety. As the headsman’s daughter, outlaws dare not harm her. They counted on her father’s mercy should they ever meet him on the scaffold. Agony prolonged or curtailed; executioners have their ways. Alice was set apart, too, by odd visions of an unnatural world that came to her at times, but since she seemed otherwise sane and clever, people left her to herself. So for many years the forest had been Alice’s playground, where she picked flowers and delighted in the antics of birds and foxes. But as she walked its secret paths, she was aware that hidden eyes were upon her.

  Then, one day, there he was: James De Fries, bathing his wounds in a stream. It had been a dagger fight. He had left three dead behind him. Her eyes met his again, and Alice knew for sure that he felt as she did. What might he be feeling about her now, Alice wondered, about to receive death at the hands of her father and brothers, a new thought joining others tormenting her mind.

  The executioners moved past the angry crowd, held back by soldiers. Ben remembered the applause of the crowd the previous week, when they slowly flayed and dismembered a child murderer. Ben had felt proud to be an instrument of justice then, enjoying the brief approval of townsfolk who generally avoided his family. He had not yet acquired his father’s dispassion and acceptance of their social isolation. The fickle nature of people when they form large groups like the one that surrounded the scaffold dismayed him. A further shock awaited Ben as he reached the back of the cart: the age of the younger prisoners, five years his junior.

  “So young...it’s not right.”

  His father hustled him on. “They say what’s right, not us. Quickly now.”

  The wind gusted, the storm rumbled closer. Watched by the portly county magistrate, the executioners dragged the condemned up steps onto the scaffold. Avoiding looking him in the eye, Rufus took James. His sons took the two boys. The sight of branding irons on hot coals made the shorter thief lose control of his bladder. Sir Giles noted this. A smile creased his tight mouth.

  Three powerfully built armed men, mercenaries, marked by the scars of foreign wars, watched from the fringe of the forest unnoticed by the crowd. Cedric, Andrew, and Gareth, companions since youth, had been away for five years, serving in the army of Philip of Spain. Now the Prince needed eyes and ears in England, to judge when the rebellions had been crushed, and it was politic for him to marry the English Queen, Mary Tudor. This had been a golden opportunity for the three men to return home and become rich. They had been assigned to the service of a Dominican Inquisitor named Córdoba, proud and haughty as Spaniards were, but perhaps the cleverest leader they had known. It was good to be back in the old country. There were worse tasks than to observe an execution at his behest. Cedric, the tallest, regarded the sky, hoping that proceedings would be underway before the storm broke. Faugh! Certainly, English weather had not changed.

  Rufus and his sons secured the prisoners to posts in readiness for the ritual of torture and dismemberment. James surveyed the crowd, to see whether his uncle was attending. Yes. There he was. Sir Giles De Fries, surrounded by a squad of his personal guard. Uncle and nephew stared at each other coldly.

  Arrogant whelp, thought Sir Giles, how brave will you be, as fingers and toes are snipped from your body? He had sent the headsman a list of the torments he wished to see. He cared nothing about the imminent storm. He would stand in the rain for an hour, if need be, to ensure that each and every punishment was inflicted. Sir Giles was a man who took cruelty seriously.

  Unseen by the crowd, and shielded particularly from Sir Giles’ view, Rufus took the pouch around his neck, and squeezed the contents, a dark sticky mixture little more than a spoonful, into the palm of his hand. He raised it to James. “Open your mouth. It will numb the pain.”

  “Nay; give it to the lads,” replied James, with a toss of his head, as if to shrug off the temptation.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Look at them, man! I will not have it.”

  “I gave Alice my word,” the headsman insisted.

  James was shocked. “Alice? Do you know?” James stared into the executioner’s ey
es. “I did not dishonor her.” Rufus nodded. He knew his daughter.

  “Tell her I died well.”

  “You won’t die well, ’lest you swallow this,” growled Rufus.

  Ben stepped up beside his father: “Da?”

  “Keep ’em busy.”

  Ben distracted the crowd by displaying a favorite instrument of torture, a metal ring for tightening round the skull till the eyeballs popped from their sockets. The crowd roared its disapproval.

  In the crawlspace, Alice flinched at the sound. Her mother tried to comfort her. “Be strong...be strong...”

  “ ’Fore God, I demand justice,” Alice whispered fiercely.

  On the scaffold above, James again refused the opiate. Rufus shook his head. “Alice is here...below.” James was aghast. “Why?” Rufus had no answer. The prospect of Alice hearing him give in to pain was more than James could bear. “Why?” James asked again.

  “She is willful…I forbad it. For her sake…and for yours.”

  “Send her away!” pleaded James.

  “It is too late.” Rufus raised the potion in his hand.

  “Please...” James breathed deeply, summoning his last reserves of courage. He gestured the young thieves. “Give it to them, sir!”

  The pause in the proceedings escaped Sir Giles, who had lapsed into a triumphant reverie. Not before time, he thought, the final impediment to his brother’s estate was about to be removed. He had hated the elder Reynard, their parents’ favorite, who after their deaths was frequently away on the late King’s business, leaving Giles to steward the estate to which he should rightfully have been heir. Instead, Reynard had married late in life and had bequeathed it to his stepson, James. Sir Giles indulged himself in these ruminations, the more to savor the punishment to come: “…that strutting popinjay, befriender of peasants and pamphleteers…soon his head, full of radical poison courtesy of a Parisian education, would be cleaved from his shoulders, thanks be to God...nay, James was not fit to rule lands that bridge three counties…better yet, his death will deter this town from joining the rebellion to the south.” A single drop of rain brought Sir Giles back to the matter in hand.