THE TIME THIEF Read online

  Stomach lurching, Peter stared into Kate’s face, trying to divine what was wrong. She was in agony, that much was plain. She was turning round and round as if caught in a glass cubicle, her hands pressing feverishly against its walls. He could neither hear her nor tell if she was aware of him, but she was shouting noiselessly and the words her lips formed were unmistakable: “Help me!”

  It was over as suddenly as it had begun. Kate’s form had returned to normal: opaque and solid. She slumped forward onto the cobblestones of the street, insensible and deathly pale. Mr. Schock looked on as Peter brushed the excitable beggar to one side and scooped up Kate in his arms. The bewildered Mr. Schock needed to jog to keep up with him.

  “What ails the child?” asked a lady with two young children in tow. “May I be of assistance, Sir?”

  “She has fainted, that is all,” snapped Peter. “I must needs take her home.”

  A few minutes later, safely inside a hackney coach, both men had to struggle to control a sense of rising panic. They peered anxiously at Kate. Her closed eyelids fluttered and her limbs twitched. The skin on her face appeared waxy, almost bloodless, and her breathing was shallow and rapid. Peter held her hand. Very gradually, a little color returned to her cheeks and her breathing eased. Kate was beginning to stir but was still unconscious.

  “Joshua, do you have any idea what is going on? Is this the ‘blurring’ phenomenon which Kate told me about? If it is, I hope she doesn’t make a habit of it….”

  “When he was still a boy, I witnessed Peter blurring on more than one occasion,” said Peter. “It is as if the body is connected in some fundamental way to its own time and tries to return to it. But it can only do so fleetingly and appears as a ghostly apparition. It is possible that only children are susceptible to the phenomenon for, although both Kate and Peter blurred, Dr. Dyer never did. Although, many years ago now, I recall we heard reports of a footman seeing the ‘ghost’ of the Tar Man. I wondered at the time if he had, indeed, reached the twenty-first century and had learned to blur…. I take it that you have experienced nothing?”

  His father shook his head. “No, I’m relieved to say. It doesn’t look much fun….”

  “I cannot be certain, but it seemed to me that Kate was trapped between this time and her own…. The process was not complete. I am fearful for her well-being. We should not delay—the antigravity machine must be repaired as quickly as possible. Kate needs to return to her own time. Of that I am certain.”

  “It sounds like a trip to France might be in order….”

  Peter nodded. “Alas, despite the Revolution, I think we have no option.”

  When Kate finally regained consciousness, as they approached Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she opened her eyes to see Joshua and Mr. Schock bending over her. She burst into tears.

  “What is happening to me?”

  “It’s all right,” said Mr. Schock gently. “We’re here, we’re taking you back to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Don’t be scared….”

  “But I am scared!” she sobbed. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me…. No one could help me where I went. I thought I was blurring back home but I couldn’t get there. Something was stopping me. I thought I’d be stuck there forever….”

  ELEVEN

  CUPID’S ARROW

  In which a chance encounter delights the Tar Man and Anjali sees more than she bargained for

  Life cannot have been kind to him. He had an old face for one so young, at least what you could see of it, for his features were mostly hidden under the hood of a gray sweatshirt. The boy was about fifteen years old, although he would have been hard pressed to tell you his exact age. He was too thin for someone with so much more growing to do and his pale skin was stretched, taut and translucent, over his cheekbones. He slipped through the exuberant weekend crowds of Covent Garden alone and unnoticed, head down and hands thrust into the pockets of his baggy jeans, but every so often he would look up and scan the sea of faces that surged around him on all sides. He had already walked up and down Drury Lane three times and was becoming weary of searching. Now, like thousands of other Londoners, he felt the pull of the bustling Piazza and the market with its lively stalls, galleries of shops, and tempting cafés.

  As the boy made his way toward the market, he was surrounded by the incessant hum of a thousand conversations; he moved through shifting pockets of sound, each one gradually merging into the next. There were sudden waves of laughter and applause as a couple of street entertainers worked the large crowds, then he became aware of the electric chords of a blues guitarist which gradually transformed into a soprano’s trilling notes, and presently her song too was drowned out by a hurdy-gurdy that invited customers to step onto an old-fashioned merry-go-round. The boy stopped in his tracks. He had never seen such an amazing contraption before and stood before it, captivated. He watched the troop of painted horses bobbing up and down as children beamed, holding on tight to the striped posts, flying around and around, a blur of red and gold. Yet it never occurred to him that he could have a ride himself. Such things were not for the likes of him. The boy soon turned away, for he was tired and hungry and, unlike the smiling faces that surrounded him, did not crave entertainment; he had a different motive for being here. So he continued on his way, walking relentlessly on as if it were the only thing he could do.

  As he made his way forward, pushing against a crowd of people leaving the market, it struck him that everyone else appeared to belong in this world in a way that he felt he never had. In this century as much as in his own, his lot was to scrape the barrel of life’s bounty, a scavenger roving around the edges of other people’s good fortune. He mostly wished that his curiosity about the magic machine had not got the better of him and that he had never gone near the crypt at Tempest House on the day that Blueskin and Gideon Seymour raced against each other. He remembered the shaft of light that had pierced the darkness as someone removed a couple of roof slates and dropped into the crypt next to him. The next thing he remembered was waking up, who knows how many hours later, with a poacher lying on top of him and three fine carp on his chest. The fish slime had ruined his footman’s uniform and the fishy stink had lingered about him for days. But when he had thrown wide the crypt door, it had opened onto a new world… this one. For a long time afterward he kept expecting to wake up from his dream. But he never did. He lay low for several days and nights, observing this foreign place and trying to make some sense out of what he saw, creeping out after dark and darting back under cover as soon as anyone noticed him. In 1763 it was commonplace to be poor and hungry but in this unknown future, Tom knew himself to be part of that small ignored army that sleeps in shop doorways and on filthy mattresses in subways, whom people step over and pretend not to see. Tom felt so down and helpless, he thought he might even have been pleased to see the Carrick Gang—though not Joe Carrick. Not him. He had had enough beatings from Joe Carrick to last him a lifetime.

  The smell of chargrilled steak made his grumbling stomach clench. He walked up to a waffle stall and pressed his nose against the glass display case. The sight of mountains of custard doughnuts and pastries and waffles dusted with vanilla sugar drove him half-wild. He reached into his pocket to pull out his white mouse and rested her for a second on the counter while he dug deep looking for coins.

  “Get that vermin out of here, sonny,” warned the stallholder, not unkindly, looking at the mouse’s twitching whiskers and delicate pink ears. “You want to get me closed down?”

  Tom grabbed his mouse protectively and backed silently away. A few seconds later and he had disappeared into the mass of people heading for Covent Garden’s South Gallery. He needed to get some rhino. Five pounds would do. He made his way toward the big semicircle of folk who were watching a tightrope walker inch his way across a rope swung between two stone pillars of the portico of St. Paul’s Church, arms outstretched and a cutlass clenched between his teeth. Tom hardly noticed him. He dreaded the act of stealing. He was not a natural cut
purse, for his movements were too jerky and he lacked confidence. His heart would thump and his hands would sweat as he stood behind his intended victim. Often he would lose courage and edge slowly away, not ready to risk all for an uncertain gain.

  Tom was too short to see anything but a row of backs. Immediately in front of him was a couple in tight jeans, their arms entwined around each other. There was half an inch of wallet peeping out of the man’s back pocket. Tom’s best chance was to ease the wallet out while the audience was caught up in applauding a trick. He hovered uneasily, waiting for precisely the right moment. It should have been easy. He stretched out his trembling hand and, standing as close as he dared, touched the wallet with the tip of his fingers just as a cheer went up. But fear caused him to freeze, so he withdrew his hand, gritted his teeth, and waited for the next cheer…. After three attempts he sloped off, empty-handed and sick at himself, and sat down on the ground close to a pasta and pizza restaurant on the edge of the market. He rested his head on his knees and furtively pulled out the white mouse who was struggling to get out of his dark, cramped pocket full of crumbs. Tom placed her gently inside the hood of his sweatshirt. She immediately scurried around his neck and down his back, tickling him with her scratchy claws. The tiny creature seemed to vibrate against his skin. He laughed despite himself and sat up in order to extricate the animal. As he looked up his heart leaped—a family of four were walking away from their corner table leaving their generously-sized pizzas half-eaten. Tom flew up to snatch the remnants off their plates and ran outside. He crouched down against a wall and discreetly placed the mouse in his lap and offered her a morsel. The two of them sat and ate. Then the mouse washed her face with her paws and Tom wiped the tomato sauce from his lips with the back of his hand. The day had suddenly taken on a rosier hue.

  Not for the first time, he fished out the carefully folded piece of newspaper from his back pocket and looked at the grainy photograph trying to decide whether it was wishful thinking that the character on horseback charging down Oxford Street was indeed the Tar Man. The face was in darkness but the way the fellow held his neck, not to mention the display of horsemanship, suggested that it was…. And if it was Blueskin, he would know just what to do. He wouldn’t be scared of the twenty-first century. Lord Luxon aside, Blueskin was the cleverest man he’d ever come across, and he was bound to have a plan. Sooner or later he was certain to reappear in his old haunts. And when he did, Tom was going to be there, waiting for him.

  Seated in a café on the lower level of Covent Garden market, the Tar Man watched the last of Anjali’s shortlist of candidates leave and climb the stairs to the ground floor.

  “Look how he struts, as if he expects the whole world to take note of him!” remarked the Tar Man with a sneer. “He has too high an opinion of himself to be eager to learn and is too conspicuous to be useful to me.”

  As the lad in the sharp suit reached the top of the stairs, he gave Anjali a wave and a cheeky smile.

  “Ciao, Tony!” she called. Then, turning back to the Tar Man, she said: “He knows how to handle himself. And he’s a good dancer. I like him….”

  “Then you are more of a fool than I give you credit for. Bless me if all of the rogues you have brought to me so far aren’t like you—headstrong and cocksure with an aptitude for doing the opposite of what you are asked! Every last one of them would overreach himself and need pulling out of the hole he had dug for himself.”

  “You think I’m like that! I ain’t given you no trouble! If you’d seen how I was with the teachers at school, you’d think I was an angel now….”

  “I believe you!” said the Tar Man. “I’ll warrant you were whipped more days than you were not.”

  “Whipped! You think teachers are allowed to beat the kids up? There’s laws, you know. Things have moved on since the bad old days.”

  The Tar Man snorted. “Then I pity the teachers. No doubt it is the teachers who get the beating. If they cannot demand obedience how can they teach the children to respect their betters? And the threat of a good whipping does much to focus the mind.”

  “That’s rich coming from someone who breaks the law every day of his life! I can’t see you respecting your ‘betters’ when you was a kid!” exclaimed Anjali.

  People from adjacent tables looked over at them but soon turned away when the Tar Man stared back aggressively, challenging them to look in his direction again. Then he glared at Anjali.

  “You would do well to control that tongue of yours, before you trip up over it,” he snarled.

  The Tar Man had realized by now that the girl would be impossible to tame. But she had proved useful, so he would tolerate her impudence—up to a point. Anjali knew she’d overstepped the mark. Me and my big mouth, she thought.

  “Anyway,” she continued more sweetly, “I don’t see why I can’t be your apprentice. I’ve done all right, haven’t I? I got you a passport and a bank account and your own place. And a smile good enough for Hollywood.”

  The Tar Man stared intently at Anjali in a long moment of dispassionate appraisal. Anjali stared back defiantly, but in reality wanted to hide from his searching gaze. It was a trick, she knew, but a good one. He made her feel as if he were stripping away all the little pretences with which she was in the habit of clothing herself. I’ve got to go careful with this one, she thought, I can’t second-guess him. Finally he spoke.

  “Spirit you have in plenty, Anjali, and intelligence, and you’ve proved your worth. But my apprentice must be my cat’s paw when I need to hold back and I must never for one moment doubt that I can trust him, even though it means he must swear false in the highest court of the land. He would declare that a cow was a horse if I asked it of him. He should be dogged and tireless, and while he would nurse an ambition to follow in my footsteps, he would not expect too much too soon. Life will, you can be sure, have dealt him a few hard blows, for no one learns the self-mastery and persistence I would have him possess without a little suffering.”

  “So does that mean you are considering me?”

  “So, in short, Anjali, be glad that I do not care to take you on as my apprentice. It means that life has let you get your own way more often than not, and no doubt will continue to do so.”

  Anjali looked away and sighed heavily. She knew he was right. She’d always been a rebel and she wasn’t suddenly going to start liking taking orders. All the same she felt that she had been criticized in some subtle way and did not like it. She pouted slightly which brought an amused smile to the Tar Man’s face. By way of diverting her from her sulk, he slid the car magazine they had purchased earlier across the table.

  “Here,” he said, “by all means choose whatever pleases you.”

  Anjali’s expression brightened and she started to flick through the magazine, feigning boredom. She stopped at the luxury sports car section. It’d have to be red, she thought, or was black better? As she turned over the pages, she forgot to be indifferent.

  “Wow!” she gasped. “Take a look at that! This has got to be the one! Me turning up at the club in this!”

  The Tar Man glanced at a photograph of a sleek, silver car. “No man is a better judge of a horse, but I do not yet have an eye for cars. I am at pains to tell them apart.”

  “Trust me, this one’s a thoroughbred. This one would have won the Derby. Three times.”

  “Very well, Anjali. Find me a merchant who will offer me a fair price and we will see.”

  “And we’ll need a driver, of course. I bet Tony’s good behind a wheel….”

  The Tar Man ordered himself another coffee, a beverage he had never been partial to in his own century. Whatever they did to it nowadays, it was good. Anjali had to remind the Tar Man that the girl was a “waitress,” not a “wench”—which had not gone down at all well—and that you did not bellow out your order across the room. First you attracted the waitress’s attention and then you waited for her to come to your table to serve you, at which point you politely gave her your order.
And as for the coffee he was so fond of, he wasn’t pronouncing it right. It was “cap-u-cheeen-o.”

  The Tar Man wore the patient expression he had learned to put on in response to Anjali’s criticisms. He pretended to be happy to be corrected and she pretended that she did not enjoy catching his mistakes. Yet the Tar Man was satisfied with Anjali’s twenty-first-century lessons. He had provoked fewer stupefied reactions in his dealings with people since taking her on. Little by little he was learning to blend in. As for Anjali, she still wondered why Vega Riaza, as he now insisted on calling himself, still persisted in pretending he came from 1763. She had been playing along for long enough now to half-believe it was true. But in her heart she knew that this couldn’t be the case. Until she saw the evidence with her own eyes, how could she believe such a thing? She had satisfied herself, at least, that Vega Riaza wasn’t mad, although why he should prolong this crazy game was beyond her. And he was more than generous—either that or he really didn’t have a clue how much money was worth. But, whatever his game was, her little stash of savings was growing by the day… and what else was she going to do with herself? She went back to reading What Car? magazine while the Tar Man examined his gleaming white incisors appreciatively in the back of a coffee spoon.

  Presently, and without turning to look at him, Anjali said to him, “There’s a weedy, weaselly-looking kid, can’t take his eyes off of you. Up there, next to the stairs, leaning over the railings.”

  When the Tar Man saw the stooped, young figure, his dark, anxious eyes staring out from under unkempt hair, he stood up, dropping the spoon on the floor and letting out an involuntary cry of surprise. He climbed the stairs three steps at a time and took hold of the boy’s narrow shoulders. The Tar Man looked incredulously into his face.