Down: Pinhole (14 page)

She took a deep anticipatory breath before entering the duke’s tower. Inside the great hall, one would not have known it was daytime. Without windows the hall relied on candles and oil lamps and their choking, smoky haze made her cough. There was a massive unlit hearth and standing before it a long banqueting table. At its middle, seated alone with a spread of food, was the Duke of Guise pretending not to notice her.

“My lord,” Marie said, “I have the special girl.”

The duke speared a hard-boiled egg with his knife and ate it without looking up. When he was finished chewing he raised his gaze and then his eyebrows.

“Bring her here.”

Marie pushed Emily forward until she was standing at the table opposite him. Her reaction to him was primal, akin to a small rodent happening upon a sunning lizard. His long, dry face and moist lips had a distinct reptilian quality and when he fiddled his tongue to dislodge a strand of meat from his yellow teeth she felt a spasm of nausea.

“Has she eaten?”

Marie replied that she had not. He then asked whether she spoke French.

Emily was determined she wouldn’t be cowed by him. She replied in French with all the defiance she could muster, “I’m standing right here. Why don’t you ask me yourself?”

“Leave us, and wait outside,” he told Marie. With rather delicate fingers he plucked a pickled onion from a plate and slowly chewed on it, making a show of ignoring her. Finally he said, “One does not speak to one unless invited to do so.”

“Your rules, not mine,” Emily said.

He cackled, sending a plume of onion breath her way. “You are unique in more ways than one. Sit down.”

She had to smooth out the puffed-up fabric of her clothes to sit. As she squared off against him she defiantly crossed her arms over her chest.

“Take food if you are hungry,” he said.

“I don’t suppose you have tea.”

“Tea is rare. We have none.”

“Coffee?”

“I do not know what this is.”

“Two more reasons to hate this bloody place,” she muttered in English.

“Do not use foreign tongues in my presence!” he fumed. “Tell me, what is the present year on Earth?”

“2015.”

“Time does pass. How old are you?”

“Thirty-two. How old are you?”

“Again, impertinence. I have not invited a question.”

“Again, your rules,” she countered.

“How is it that you have come to Hell without dying?”

“You wouldn’t understand it because I don’t understand it. Suffice it to say that it happened and I’m not best pleased about it.”

“No one is happy to come here. But the strong and the clever find a way to survive. The weak and the dim-witted fare less well. Which are you?”

“Guess.”

“You
are
a rare little birdie. What is your name?”

“Dr. Emily Loughty.”

“A woman who is a doctor? I am glad I did not live in your time. But perhaps you can lance a boil for me.”

“I’m not that kind of a doctor.”

He squinted his confusion. “I hear you were attacked by Clovis. Did you see the filthy bastard with your own eyes?”

“I saw a number of men who fit the general description of filthy bastards.”

“Clovis has but one eye.”

“Not ringing a bell. Who is he?”

“Clovis, son of Merovech, ruler of the Frankish kingdom a thousand years before my time on Earth. To last this long in Hell one has to be crafty. Today he rules little more than a few patches of forest but he survives by roaming the countryside, stealing from me and my allies, and selling his services to the lords of Germania.”

“Well he killed Phillipe Marot who was quite decent to me, so this Clovis is no friend of mine.”

“Marot is not dead. I am sure he wishes he were so but he certainly survives in some piteous state of perpetual agony.”

Despite the tough façade she wanted to show, her lip trembled. She wanted to scream. She wanted out. She wanted to go home.

The duke seemed to pounce on her fear. “I believe that a rare birdie such as yourself would certainly suffer and perhaps perish in this harsh world of ours without the protection of a powerful prince. You are fortunate that my man, D’Aret, secured your position at Castle Guise.”

“And what position is that?”

He called out for Marie to come and fetch her and said, “Why, on your hands and knees in my bed, of course. I will show you when I return after a day or two of hunting.”

Emily lapsed into English again. “We’ll bloody well see about that you filthy cockroach.”

At the first light of day, after a small breakfast, Solomon Wisdom escorted John down the hill to the river. John’s head hurt from his drubbing and the wine, his shoulder was stiff, but his toothache was the biggest problem. He thought about trying to pull what was left of his troublesome tooth but decided to leave it alone for now. He’d just deal with the discomfort.

Wisdom showed off his wealth and power by revealing his private sailing vessel moored at a floating dock. At the water’s edge John bid farewell to Dirk and told him to return to Dartford and wait for him there, after which the young man extracted one more promise to help him reunite with Duck. A crew of a dozen men raised the canvas sails and the ship began to make its way against the current.

The vessel, a forty-footer, was a shallow-draughted wherry with a squarish single gaff sail. The scooped-out deck was open and uncovered. There was a bench near the bow which John and Wisdom occupied while the crew piloted the vessel and scanned the banks of the Thames for trouble. John kept his sword on his belt and his loaded flintlock in the bag by his feet.

The river was still tidal this far east and the water smelled brackish. A few small boats were about, casting nets, but otherwise the river and its banks were deserted. Wisdom pointed up the hill toward his house seeking a compliment and he was pleased when John told him it was indeed a fine building. As they progressed westward, signs of settlement increased. On both north and south banks of the river John saw a number of small villages on the scale of Dartford, and as they approached what he knew to be the approximate geographic location of London, he saw the beginning of barge traffic and a bona fide city in the distance.

It was not a city in the modern sense. This version of London was a low and sprawling expanse of mostly small wooden buildings with a scattering of larger brick ones and one palatially sized complex of stone at the approximate location of the earthly Tower of London, and another where the modern Parliament stood. There was a single bridge spanning the river near that point, a bulky wooden structure upon which a single horse cart was making the traverse. It was a monochromatic city shrouded in the smoke of thousands of wood fires. What it lacked was church spires and to John it looked odd without these iconic fingers pointing to the heavens.

John watched men on the shores going about their business. What he saw was labor from another era. They loaded and unloaded barges with manual winches, hauled goods by horse cart, shaped logs with two-man saws and adzes, dumped waste into the river. But then, as they sailed closer to the northern shore, he noticed that the rows of poles which he had persistently seen all the way up-river from Dartford were connected with ropes or wires.

“What are those?” he asked Wisdom.

“The poles, you mean?”

“Yeah. They look like telephone poles.”

“I do not know what a telephone is,” Wisdom said. “Those are telegraph poles.”

John almost slipped off the bench. “You’ve got the telegraph?”

“I do not possess it. The king does.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Why not? It has existed in this realm for some time. I am led to understand that the king of Francia possesses it too and perhaps other rulers. It was Mr. Cosgrove, the gentleman who initiated me into the brokerage business—it was he who recognized the special skills of a telegraph man who arrived here, oh, perhaps twenty years before I did. I believe this man had butchered and eaten his landlady or something equally unsavory but Cosgrove saw his potential and for a hefty bounty delivered him to the crown. The king recognized the potential of this enterprise and saw fit to have the fellow teach various smithies and craftsmen to fashion the batteries, the coils, the wires, and what-not to make the telegraph work.”

“Is this guy still around?”

“Oh no. I remember him fairly well as he prospered for a time and was rewarded by the king with a house in London. A good many years ago he got into a fight with some men even more unsavory than himself and wound up chopped to bits. There the irony ends as I do not believe he was eaten.”

They sailed on for another four hours or so, the pilot skillfully taking the best line to fill the sail and battle the currents and tides.

John finally stood and balanced himself against the mast.

“How much longer?”

He hadn’t noticed that Wisdom had been napping. He snapped awake and looked around, saying, “That settlement on the hill over there, that is Richmond. Do you see the smoke? There is a forge there. We are almost arrived at Kingston.”

Around a bend in the river, just beyond another wooden bridge, John saw a disturbing sight on the south bank. A gallows had been erected on a grassy verge, five poles in a row, each with a man hanging by the neck. But the men, whose hands were tied behind their backs, weren’t swaying in the wind; they were moving their legs in a macabre dance. The crew noticed too and began pointing and laughing.

“Jesus,” John said softly. “We’ve got to help them.”

Wisdom looked at the spectacle and said, “Them? They are beyond help. I saw these self-same men the last time I made this journey a fortnight ago.”

“They’re still moving.”

“You still have not come to grips with our realities,” Wisdom said. “They are hung but they are not dead.”

John sighed. “What did they do to deserve this?”

“I have no knowledge of their transgressions but it was enough to incur the ire of the king or one of his lords. Look there, instead. Hampton Palace.”

John had made the obligatory trip to Hampton Court Palace once, with Emily as it happened. It was on a Saturday in the summertime and the lines were long and the grounds were packed with tourists. The palace had been originally built by Cardinal Wolsey, chief minister to Henry VIII, but the king seized it when Wolsey fell out of favor and expanded it to accommodate his full court of one thousand. Of all of Henry’s sixty houses and palaces it was said he had most liked Hampton. Successive monarchs made further, massive additions and renovations and the modern tourist attraction was a hodge-podge of Tudor and Stuart architectural whims. Now John recalled his visit to Hampton in much the way one remembers touring an art museum—grand halls, endless galleries of paintings, tapestries and sculptures, and sore feet.

The palace he saw here was a far cry from the one in his mind’s eye. Though substantial and larger than almost any building he had seen from the river, it paled in comparison to the Hampton Court Palace on Earth. The construction materials were predominately brick but the fascia facing the river had a typical Tudor-style wooden exoskeleton of large, angled beams. There were multiple turrets and chimneys, many belching smoke. Also, he could see no formal gardens. The palace seemed to rise from a wild meadow.

The pilot landed the boat at a dock just downstream from a large three-masted ship, a fine looking craft with several small deck-mounted cannon. A few bored-looking sailors eyed them suspiciously until an older man, their superior officer, spotted Wisdom and called down to him.

“You were recently at Kingston. What brings you back so soon?”

“I need to see the king.”

“What for?”

“Urgent business. A new arrival he will surely want to meet.”

The officer fixed his eyes on John as he asked, “Why’s that?”

“Because he is not dead, that is why.”

The officer’s jaw slackened and as he scampered down the gangplank he shouted at Wisdom to wait at the palace gate.

Before they were allowed to enter John was compelled to relinquish his sword and his pistol. Inside, a squad of po-faced soldiers took them to a rather small room which lacked even one stick of furniture. There they stood for a good while, offered neither food or drink, until a small man with a drawn face and sallow complexion, a flowing black robe, and a flat black cap entered. He greeted Wisdom cordially and pulled him to a corner of the room. As the two men whispered the small man kept glancing at John through his round, ferret-like eyes.

When they were finished talking Wisdom said to John, “The king has requested that I speak to him first. You will be summoned when he pleases.”

John waited, pacing the room like a prison cell. The small-paned, leaded-glass windows offered a view toward the river. A blue heron perched on the bank and took to wing when a man approached with a fishing pole. Here he was, about to meet one of the most famous men in history but all he could think about was Emily. Was she scared? Was she hurt? Had she given up hope of ever making it back home?

I will find you, he thought.

I will find you.

It took an hour for Wisdom to return and when he did he flashed his crooked smile.

“The king is indeed most eager to meet you,” he said.

John noticed a bulge under Wisdom’s jacket that hadn’t been there before.

“You look pleased. Did he pay you well?”

The smile fell from his face, Wisdom said, “I am pleased to help the king and I am pleased to help you.”

“Did you help this Guise guy too?”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“Then how did you know Emily was in France?”

“The kingdom is thick with spies.”

“Whatever you say, Solomon. Let’s go meet Henry. I’m itching to see which one of the movies got his looks right.”

The great hall at this Hampton Court vaguely resembled the one John remembered on Earth. Both were lofty, with vaulted and buttressed chambers, but this one lacked stained glass windows and tapestries. Lining the walls, three to four deep, were men dressed in clothes of different eras, including a few in fairly modern garb. The hall was still. Every eye tracked John as he walked down the long axis of the room to meet the man seated on a carved throne. Beside him stood the small man in black. As they got closer, Wisdom peeled off, leaving John to make the final approach alone.