The Derring-Do Club and the Year of the Chrononauts (38 page)

“Ness!”

Georgina held her hand out beckoning.

Chapter XXIV

Mrs Frasier

Earnestine was hesitating: she was in the way!

Mrs Frasier started to chase them, pushing past Earnestine to do so, but then she realised the foolishness of that.

“Guards! Guards!” she shouted.

The squad of Temporal Peelers, panicked by the explosion, were hurriedly fastening on their sword belts as they stumbled into the corridor.

“Where were you?” Mrs Frasier demanded.

“Ma’am, we–”

“Never mind, get after them!”

“Who?”

“The Derring–Do Club.”

Scrutiniser Jones glanced at Earnestine.

“Not her, the other two.”

“Other two? But one’s been erased.”

“She unerased herself – now move!”

Scrutiniser Jones led the pursuit, rushing into the mist of plaster dust that still hovered over the remains of the door. The others stumbled after him becoming organised as they went.

When they’d left, the Chronological Conveyor became quiet, peaceful. Mrs Frasier saw that Earnestine was standing with her arm half extended.

“I want to understand,” Earnestine said.

“You are coming around to my side,” Mrs Frasier replied.

“But I’m not on your side.”

“You’re not on my side
yet.”

Chief Examiner Lombard appeared: “What happened?”

“The Derring–Do Club escaped.”

“No!”

“Jones is after them, but… best if we prepare the Ultimate Sanction.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, without evidence who’s going to believe two children?” said Mrs Frasier. She pointed to Earnestine. “Bring her to my office.”

Chief Examiner Lombard was tall and forceful, his gaunt face brooked no argument, and Earnestine had no choice but to follow Mrs Frasier.

“Mrs Frasier!” Earnestine shouted.

Mrs Frasier didn’t look round. Her mind was awhirl. From working along one plan, she was now forced to consider one of the other contingencies.

“That will be all,” she said, when they reached her office, but the tall Temporal Peeler stayed at attention.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Lombard, I’ve beaten this girl once, I can do it again.”

“Ma’am,” he nodded and left. “I’ll see to the Sanction.”

“Good man.”

Mrs Frasier collected a few papers from her desk and put them in a case. Earnestine tried to stand up straight to regain some dignity. An awful, gory picture of a mad woman in a chariot going into battle stared down at her. There was a dreadful whine in her voice when she finally spoke.

“This isn’t the future.”

“No.”

“This isn’t real.”

“No.”

“And you aren’t me.”

“No.”

Earnestine let out a breath, a single exhalation: the audacity must have struck home, Mrs Frasier realised: all those people gulled by this fantastic fairy tale.

“You may applaud,” said Mrs Frasier.

“Who are you?”

She twirled her hand theatrically and bowed: “Miss Charity Mulligan at your service.”

“Never heard of you.”

“Oh! That cuts to the quick.”

“Why did you do all this?”

“To make a better world for all.”

“How?”

“Are we going to get all six of Rudyard Kipling’s questions?”

“Yes.”

“It is a simple idea,” said Mrs Frasier. “We present our credentials with a trick, a vanishing act. Audiences love it when things appear and disappear. That’s what stage magicians do: pledge, turn and prestige. And people lap it up.”

“But it’s a trick.”

“People want to believe the trick, just as people want to believe in a better future, a war to end all wars between good and evil. Revelations, séances, fortune telling… it’s all the same promise. We appeared as if by magic and so, with no evidence to the contrary, they had to believe our scientific explanation. Queen Victoria’s reign has marked an age of wonders, so why not temporal engines. And once they’d swallowed the big lie, then others, the forged books for example, followed easily. This Imperial world with its factories and fogs and endless drudgery isn’t the world people want, they want hope and betterment.”

“But someone must have suspected.”

“Many,” Mrs Frasier admitted with a shrug. “We presented proofs as we did with you. Some were convinced, some came over to our side and some we arrested and locked downstairs. But most doubters just sat still. It was too big, you see, too gigantic – easier to accept it all than point out the Emperor’s new clothes. It’s truly amazing how the masses will go along with the herd.”

“But it’s a lie!”

“Don’t you occasionally lie to make things better?”

“No.”

“Ah well, that’s why I’m grown up and you’re not.”

“The world is good as it is.”

“Oh really, that is too much. Please, don’t even bother to defend it. Most women in this fine city are prostitutes, forced into it by financial necessity and the lack of opportunity. These stalwart gentlemen may have banned slavery in the Empire, but they revel in it here in the capital. They keep their wives, their Angels of the Home, locked away in their airless houses and go off to fornicate every night with gin–riddled opium addicts desperate for a few pennies. And ever so grateful for the attention. I wanted more. I wanted a better world. Not just for me, and not just for men, but for everyone. Is that wrong? Is that not the ultimate act of doing good?”

Mrs Frasier waved her hand as if she were trying to conjure this new world from the air. She could see in Earnestine’s eyes that the girl was wavering, entranced by the spell.

“We will do it, why not – you and me, side by side, making a better tomorrow,” Mrs Frasier said. “The plan can still work.”

“You’re a strumpet.”

“I am not! I’m an actress.”

“They’ll stop you.”

“Who?”

“Men like Major Dan and Captain Caruthers.”

“Men!” Mrs Frasier laughed. “With all their brass buttons and smart uniforms, their wars and death and destruction. This is a modern age, an age of reason and law. If you want to conquer, there are armies and battles, but better yet to come up with a good, solid legitimate reason and fight it–”

“What sort of–”

“And then you fight it through the courts. That’s where laws are made, not over in the Houses of Parliament, not by Kings and Queens, but by the judges and the lawyers. They interpret the law, they create precedent. In a civilised country, that’s what establishes the laws. And he who makes the rules, wins the game.”

“What sort of legitimate reason?”

“One was descended from King Harold or one took a sword from a stone or a burning bush talked to one. It doesn’t matter, and if one doesn’t have a legitimate reason, then one makes one up. Then one fights it through the courts and we have the best lawyers.”

“You have the best lawyers?”

“Of course, we locked all the others up.”

Earnestine screamed in frustration: “But it’s a lie!”

“Not a lie, a story. One of Jerry’s finest.”

“Jerry?”

“Uncle Jere–”

“I’d never call him ‘Jerry’.”

“Why not?”

“Uncle’s stories are make–believe,” Earnestine protested. “This I thought was real… and I wanted to believe it all, suffrage and a fair deal for everyone, a Utopia, but you’ve let everyone down because it’s not true.”

“Why not still believe and then make it happen,” said Mrs Frasier, leaning forward and down. “Stories can change the world. It’s not true
yet
.”

“But you are blackened by your actions,” Earnestine said. “You’re tainted. How can you rule fairly if you’ve done these unspeakable acts?”

“By handing the reins to someone who is good enough to rule.”

“Who?”

“You, of course.”

“Me!?”

“Yes. The ends never justify the means, I know that, but I am the means that can be discarded and you can make the ends work.”

Earnestine tightened her lips and shook her head.

Mrs Frasier’s expression softened: “If you don’t wish to be part of this, then go. I won’t stop you.”

Mrs Frasier stepped back, one foot neatly tucked behind the other and her hand unfurled in a theatrical gesture to present a side door.

Miss Deering-Dolittle

Earnestine hesitated.

She knew when she was going to be gulled.

“It’s a trick.”

Mrs Frasier smiled: “Of course.”

What choice did she have? She didn’t want to be included in this insane plan. Instead, she wanted to sit in her room, look at her maps and read her adventure books, so she went to the door, slowly, carefully and–

It was locked.

Mrs Frasier had a clutch of keys.

“There’s always an answer,” she said as she picked out a particular fob.

Earnestine took it, placed the big, black key in the lock and turned. She offered it back to Mrs Frasier. A fob dangled and Earnestine saw the legend ‘
The Future
’.

“I have mine here,” Mrs Frasier said, holding up a copy. “Keep yours, in case you change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

“Indulge me.”

Earnestine pushed the key up her sleeve, opened the door and then, fearful that she was going to be plucked back inside at any moment, she sprang through.

The outside!

The time: her present.

No–one stopped her.

She walked away, carefully, and when she heard the door close and lock behind her, she scarpered as fast as she could. She was soon down the side street by the factory wall and then out into the safety of the crowds.

A newspaper vendor shouted and waved an example of his wares aloft.

“Brave New World! Law passed today!”

She reached an open space, hardly a park, and there were children using sticks to knock makeshift hoops along, and others poking their fingers into a patch of dirty water. Ladies, dressed in outrageous outfits, staggered about due to the effects of gin, only to be propositioned by the occasional man making lewd gestures. Everything was dilapidated, grey and unpleasant.

The more Earnestine looked, the more she saw the streets for what they really were. These children had no real future, these women were used and beaten, and these men were no gentlemen.

The present was exposed to her in all the waifs and strays, filthy, barefooted and marked with bruises, cuts and smallpox scars.

There!

A man threatened his women, forcing them to be whores; even the Nannies with their prams and charges were slaves to necessity, like the servants running errands for those imprisoned by polite convention in their plush houses. Servants like their own cook and their maids… whose names she could not even recall, and whom she treated like instruments to fetch and carry and cook and clean. They should be free and she should be more caring and responsible.

The flowering Empire had brought prosperity, but not to everyone. The rich industrialists were fat from the proceeds created by those chained by poverty to work in the factories. The rich became richer, investors paid themselves dividends and bankers hoarded the wealth, while those too destitute to pay the ever rising rents had to slave in the workhouses to pay back those who put them there. The poor were blamed as if they had chosen this hard life for themselves and punished for that choice. What little they had was taken from them and this broiling mass of mankind had no say in the world.

And women had no rights at all as such, twenty one or not twenty one.

It could be changed. It should be changed. It would… but the ends did not justify the means. She knew that.

But she was not responsible for the means.

But she could be for the ends.

But… and that was Mrs Frasier’s point.

Earnestine gasped, winded, and needed to stretch out her hand to grasp a lamppost for support. She bent over and–

“Are you well, Miss?”

“Yes, I’m well,” Earnestine replied without looking, “don’t worry yourself, everything is going to be well.”

If… only, but there was time yet.

No more ‘buts’: she would join Mrs Frasier and change the world. She was a member of the Derring–Do Club, after all – best foot forward and all that.

“Perhaps you should step this way, Miss.”

“No, I have to–” but everything went dark. Something was over her head, a coat, a bag… something cloying and there were strong arms around her and her kicking feet came off the ground. Doors clattered and clunked and she was bundled into a carriage.

A deep voice shouted: “Move it.”

The floor jolted under Earnestine as she struggled to extricate herself.

“Be still,” said the voice, “if you know what’s good for you.”

Earnestine heard a revolver being cocked.

She went still, jolly still.

Mrs Arthur Merryweather

Outside, it had been suddenly ordinary and normal, a street like many, many others she knew and a complete shock after the future world.

“What do we do?” Charlotte asked as they ran.

“We go to the Club,” Georgina replied. “The men will know what to do.”

“The men!”

“Otherwise it’s taking them all on single handed… Charlotte, come back at once.”

Charlotte did so, but froze: “Peelers!”

There were a few appearing, searching, gradually spreading out as they assigned each other various routes. Georgina and Charlotte shrank back to the wall, and worked their way down the street.

“Underground station,” said Charlotte pointing. It was the City and South London Railway at Stockwell. “We can change at Bank.”

“Unaccompanied young ladies don’t go on the Underground,” said Georgina.

“I’m accompanying you.”

“That doesn’t… but under the circumstances.”

They made it to the station, handed over their two pence each and descended into the depths. The platform was full of men and accompanied ladies. Eventually, the train arrived, pushing a strong breeze before it, and they entered the ‘padded cells’. It was claustrophobic, the only windows were mere slits at the top of the carriage, but then there was nothing to see in this underground tube. It snaked north–east and then went under the Thames. Georgina felt her stomach lurch as the slope took them down below the waters.