The Time Tutor (11 page)

“Yes,” Bertrand said, and Dar was shocked to see a glimmer of satisfaction in those strange green eyes. “But only when Alva is proven to be dead.”

“Are you suggesting we should
kill
Alva? Because you realize I can and will kill
you
—”

“Be silent.” Bertrand pointed a finger at Dar. “You are an upstart lordling, Dar. And you have overstepped your bounds by a good, long way.”

Dar raised his eyebrows. “Impressive, Arthur,” he murmured. “Very impressive. But you do not frighten me. You are the upstart, and you know it. And you know what comes of your pretensions, too. So simmer down. You cannot be planning to kill a woman you loved yesterday, and whom I love today. What is your game?”

Bertrand narrowed his eyes. “We stage a grand betrayal,” he said. “It is what Hannelore fears the most. All her energies are bent on securing the loyalty of her Favorites.”

“A betrayal?”

“Yes. A spectacular betrayal.”

“Who is going to betray whom?”

Bertrand smiled for the first time since Dar had seen him today. “Alva is going to betray Hannelore. She is going to do it so thoroughly, so definitively, that Hannelore will hate her forever.”

“And make you her successor.”

“Yes.” Bertrand twisted the ring on his finger. “Exactly. Alva will take the fall and be forever shunned. And I will be perfectly placed to inherit the Guild itself.”

“Alva wishes to found an Ofan school,” Dar said. “She intends to take my education of the Ofan further. Organize it. Organize them. She thinks—and I think she's right—that we need to study group control of time. Keep abreast of the Guild. But do it in a way that doesn't drain and destroy lives.”

Bertrand raised his eyebrows. “She is ambitious.”

“She is perfect,” Dar murmured.

Bertrand's eyes didn't waver. “She is a whore.”

“Careful, Arthur.” Dar's sword hand twitched, an ancient memory.

Those green eyes blazed, with what Dar could only see as hatred. “You will
never
call me by that name again,” Bertrand said. “Never. You will die without ever saying it again.”

Dar stared for a moment more into Bertrand's face. “I never shall say your name again,” he said. “But you, in turn, will not speak ill of Alva. Never once. That is the deal.”

Dar watched Bertrand struggle—just a ripple on the implacable surface. Then Bertrand nodded, once. “It was wrong of me,” he said. “And it is an easy promise to make; I have enormous respect for Alva. Now. How shall we stage this betrayal? Hannelore must discover Alva in a compromising situation.”

Dar sipped his lager. And grimaced. It was like drinking horse piss. The 1970s were the worst. He pushed the glass away. “It will be at the Savoy,” he said. “Hannelore will discover Alva at the Savoy, in the 1920s. She will find Alva having time-traveled without permission. Dancing and carrying on with her Ofan teacher.”

 • • • 

“Betray Hannelore.” Alva tested the idea, weighed it in her mind as she used to weigh beets in her hands, sorting the good, dense roots from the wormy. “It is a good idea,” she said, at last. “And Bertrand is right. I must be shunned by Hannelore and the rest of them. But I do not want Hannelore to know that I am Ofan.”

They were walking down to the river in the early evening, dressed in rich medieval garb. Dar had returned to her in the company of an exquisite and fastidious butler named Neville. Neville had dressed them both in the height of twelfth-century fashion, paid the landlady, and was now going before them through the crowded, twisty little streets lined with half-timbered houses, clearing the way for “M'Lord Dar and his lady.”

“Why not? If we reveal you to be gallivanting about with an Ofan bigwig, that will confirm the betrayal. You hate the Guild, she hates you.”

“Because then she will watch me, Ignatz. Watch us. And I wish my school to be secret from the Guild, for as long as possible. You must leave me to betray her, alone, on my own terms.”

“Fine. But if you aren't Ofan, then what are you?”

“I shall set myself up as an independent woman,” Alva said. “A woman with a reason to be in London, and a reason to have a house with a great deal of traffic in and out of it. A woman whose wealth makes sense, whose social influence makes sense.”

Dar shrugged. “Not so easy to arrange in the eighteenth century. Not unless you are a very grand lady. An aristocrat. And you are not. You could marry me, but—”

“I shall not be marrying you.”

“Then what will you do? The only other option is to become . . .” Dar's sentence petered out. He stopped dead in the street. Neville glanced back over his shoulder, then stopped as well, holding his arms out theatrically to keep passersby away.

Alva smiled at him, enjoying his discomfort. “I can see that you have thought of it. Why will you not say it?”

He set out walking again. “I won't have it.”

She laughed. “But it is none of your affair, Ignatz. The only way to set myself up against Hannelore is to reign supreme over a group of admirers and hangers-on, much in her own mode.”

He rounded on her, frowning fiercely. “So you will be a courtesan.”

“The greatest courtesan! I shall set up my house in Soho Square, above the Ofan catacombs. From there I shall drive Hannelore to distraction by seeming to become the most powerful whore that London has ever seen; I shall have men of state and wealth at my fingertips.”

“Yes. Just as you had me at your fingertips in that damned draper's shop.”

“Ah, but that draper's shop was a sham, was it not? While Hannelore rants and raves about my dramatic desertion into the ranks of the demimonde, what will be transpiring behind the drawn curtains of my house of ill repute, and down below in the Ofan rabbit warren? There, you and I shall begin the work of founding our little university.”

It was grand talk, but as they neared the river, Alva found herself growing uneasy. She, who had been poised to become the next alderwoman, was tossing it away for a thin dream of justice.

But still, it was happening. They were standing, alone, in the shadow of a ramshackle hut built to the edge of the riverbank, and Dar was about to lead her through the jump that would take them to the twentieth century. And then she, Alva, would crush Hannelore's heart.

The thought of it made her want to throw herself into the river—either the Thames or the River of Time—throw herself in and float away to a place where she wouldn't have to see Hannelore's face, ever again.

The Thames flowed past, fast and clear at high tide, and dotted with fishing boats. Insects must have been drawing the fish to the surface, for Alva saw a big silver one leap into the air.

“I am going to lead you,” Ignatz said. “We shall go slowly, and I shall guide you through every stage. Are you ready?”

She took his hand. “Yes,” she said.

“Close your eyes. Listen to the water slipping past. We are standing now on the land where the Savoy will be built, almost seven hundred and fifty years from now. You are listening to the Thames. But can you feel the River of Time? Can you feel it pushing us both?”

Alva allowed the rushing feeling to begin in the back of her head. She gripped Ignatz's hand, hard.

“Sense it,” he murmured. “Now reach forward from this moment. The River of Time is made up of human feeling. Thousands of years of human emotion, pushing forward with hope and ambition, yearning backward with grief and longing. We are going to jump forward. You must use your hope. Do not use your backward-looking feelings. Put aside your nostalgia and grief and let yourself feel what you might have felt as a child on a special morning, on a feast day.”

Alva summoned up the courage, and then she opened her heart. The River rushed in. She could feel the future, feel it pulling at her. It was thrilling, like riding a horse fast in the dusk, when you cannot quite see the ground.

“That's it,” Ignatz said. “But softly. Do not let it overwhelm you. You will find that you can control it, as you might control tears. You feel the River, but you do not let it flood you, not just yet.”

“Yes,” she whispered. She could control it, and the sudden knowledge of that power thrilled her. She heard him laugh, delighted with her.

“Now. You feel the River. Focus as well on this place, where your feet are planted. What are you sensing?”

Alva trained her attention down, down to the place right around them. “With my hope I feel . . .” She gasped.

“Too much,” he said. “I should have been more specific. Do not let yourself feel everything at once, all things that this place can tell you. Start from now and feel forward, one era at a time.”

Alva took a deep breath. “Soon,” she said. “A great deal of pride. The pride of craftsmen, the pride of a family.”

“Yes,” Ignatz said. “You are feeling the Savoy Palace. The grandest nobleman's house in England. It will be built here in one hundred years, by a Savoy nobleman who became the Earl of Richmond. So powerful is Richmond that he and his descendants will have special powers here, in this place, powers beyond the laws of England itself. These powers are called the Liberty of the Savoy. Geoffrey Chaucer will begin writing
The Canterbury Tales
while employed here. Here, collected, are the master works of thousands of artists, jewelers, tapestry weavers, wood-carvers.”

“But . . .” Something was licking at the edges of the feeling, something new. Something . . . hot.

“Yes, Alva. You can feel it. I feel it, too.”

She hung on to him. The great palace was burning. It was burning, and so much was burning with it. She felt the rage, the despair, the grief, but she was also overwhelmed with jubilation. Her questing hope, her forward-pushing emotion found it, that strong, triumphant,
new
feeling, a feeling that fed on the destruction of the old. Jubilation and anger and . . . “What is it?”

“It is another hundred years later,” he said. “Wat Tyler is burning the palace down.”

“Why?”

“‘Till everything be common,'” Ignatz said, his voice strangely gentle. “‘And that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may all be united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we be.'”

She said nothing. The joy was fading, to be replaced, and replaced again . . . with suffering now. “Pain,” she whispered.

“A hospital,” he said.

“But why does it feel bad?”

“The River doesn't judge,” he said. “It is made up merely of feelings. You are finding the strongest current. The patients are afraid; they are in pain. Many of them are dying.”

“It goes on for so long.” Alva reached, and reached, through the agony and the fear, to a sparkle in the distance. . . .

“We are getting there,” he said, and she felt, in his hand that held hers, a shift. He was letting go of teaching her. He was beginning to thrum with excitement, to be with her rather than beside her. Something fun and frivolous, something ridiculous was coming. . . .

And suddenly, like a thunderclap, Alva was laughing . . . standing by the bank of the Thames in the year 1145, but laughing with a theater audience giddy with absurdity, seven centuries in the future.

“That's D'Oyly Carte's theater,” Ignatz said. “We are almost . . . just a moment now. Yes. Hold on. You are about to jump us there. Are you ready?
Now.
”

Hannelore. The old woman laughing, Leonard on her lap, and Alva laughing, too . . .

“I'm sorry,” Alva whispered, but her words were torn away.

She had already leapt into the future, into a dark night spangled with lights, and the happiest music she had ever heard spilling out of an open window behind her and floating out over the dark waters of a bridge-bound river.

 • • • 

Ignatz was suited to the 1920s. The loose-limbed height of him, the tilt of his body, the angles of his face, his sculpted eyebrows, and his black hair were all perfect in this era of black-and-white tuxedos. Poised between elegance and insouciance, with the bowl of a champagne coupe balanced on the knuckles of his third and fourth fingers, he looked at home here at the Savoy. He lounged in the streamlined chairs; he grinned at his ease, bantering with waiters and strangers and women who looked him in the eye; he laughed with his head thrown back, unabashed. It was something to do with the electricity, Alva thought, as she spun through a waltz with him under the chandeliers. He was lit up, energized, alive under the bright lights. And she realized—as they jostled through a rambunctious Charleston among perfect strangers, and one lock of his hair fell down over his eye and he didn't care, and as he kissed her on the mouth in front of the band and a trombone player made a saucy noise with the slide, and everyone around them laughed and cheered—that she was happy, too. She was reaching up on tiptoe to tell him so, in his ear, when midnight struck.

Before she could speak, Alva knew that Hannelore was in the room. “Stand away,” Alva whispered to Dar. “Stand well away.” And she turned to face the onslaught.

Hannelore had come for her in a wig and enormous gown, fresh from the eighteenth century. She stood at the entrance to the ballroom, scanning the crowd, and when she saw Alva she stepped forward, grand and terrifying. The dancing stopped as she passed, and people stared at the old woman dressed up like Marie Antoinette. By the time she had reached Alva, the music had come to a stuttering halt.

“Hannelore,” Alva said.

The Alderwoman stood facing her for a moment, and Alva could feel the rage in her like heat from a furnace. Then her hand shot out and she took Alva by the ear, pinching hard. “You little traitor.”

“I had to be free,” Alva said, refusing to wince at the pain in her ear.

Hannelore spun to face the crowd, dragging Alva about with her. The revelers gawped, monocles and sequins and diamonds sparkling here and there in an otherwise still sea of faces. “Look at them,” Hannelore said. “How could you trade my love for this flat mimicry of life?”