TIME QUAKE (36 page)

He patted the man’s back. ‘I am truly sorry to hear about your child. No. I have no family. My life is my own to lose . . .’

‘A man should have children,’ said the other. ‘I have eight. Five
boys and three girls. When I first came to Virginia, twenty years ago and more, I vowed I should give my family a better life than my parents had been able to give me. It has not always been easy but I’ve reaped the rewards of my labours. This country has been good to us. I fear what will happen if we lose this war.’

The blacksmith put Sergeant Thomas in mind of the Irishman, Michael, in his air-conditioned SoHo bar, who was forever showing him photos of his family and urging him to settle in America where if you worked hard anything was possible. Two and half centuries later it would be a different world but in that way, at least, things had not changed.

‘Why do you smile?’

‘’Tis nothing,’ replied Sergeant Thomas. ‘A memory, that is all . . .’

Sergeant Thomas fell silent and the blacksmith did not interrupt his thoughts. Presently the columns of men started to move off again and Sergeant Thomas looked up at the sky and the mass of ominous black clouds moving towards them from the north-east.

By eleven o’clock the wind was whipping into a hurricane and driving sleet stung the cheeks of Lord Luxon and William. The two men were disguised as farmers, with scarves tied around their heads to prevent their hats blowing away. It was an attire that appealed little to Lord Luxon. But even he was too preoccupied to think much about appearances that night. The wind roared through the branches overhead, and blew so hard they struggled at times to keep upright.

They had not intended to bring with them Sally, Sergeant Thomas’s faithful, if hideous, hound. As they embarked on their fateful journey to the past, she had leaped onto her master at the very moment the anti-gravity machine left one century for another. As
there was no way to send her back without disrupting their plans, Sergeant Thomas had entrusted her to William while he did his duty for King and country. Powerful scents met the dog’s sensitive nostrils: of horses and gunpowder, and wounded, unwashed men. And she sniffed the air, alert and fearful. There were unfamiliar sounds, too, that sent her off kilter: the incessant trudge of thousands of feet through snow, the murmur of a great crowd echoing over the empty distances, the whinnying and snorting of horses, reluctant to step onto icy ferries, the crunch of cannon wheels over frozen ground . . . For a city dog, more used to the honking of horns and the smell of pizzas and gutters, this overload of her senses was too much to bear. She lifted her large head and barked repeatedly. The wind carried her cries away from the river and into the starless night. Lord Luxon kicked the animal mercilessly in the ribs, pushing her onto her side. She struggled to get back up again, whimpering pitifully, her coat covered in snow. When William approached her she snarled at him.

‘Shhh!’ whispered William into her ear. ‘We are within a hundred yards of the enemy. Would you have us all killed?!’

William crouched down in the snow and tied his handkerchief around the animal’s muzzle to muffle her cries before Lord Luxon carried out his repeated threat to silence her himself. When he had finished, William grabbed her by the collar, pushed down her rear so that she sat, whining through her gag, on the frozen earth. He stroked her head and caressed her floppy ears to comfort her.

Lord Luxon, meanwhile, peered out at the army massing on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. The night was very dark but long tongues of flames from the bonfires, dancing and spluttering in the gusts of air, cast enough light over the scene for Lord Luxon’s purposes.

He watched ranks of men stamping their feet and blowing on
their fingers and rotating close to the fires. Behind them, a ghostly flotilla of ferries and boats waited on the black river.

‘One would think we were gathered on the banks of the River Styx!’ exclaimed Lord Luxon. ‘But where is the ferryman to transport these wretched sinners to hell?’

William said nothing, assuming, rightly, that no response was required. But, he thought to himself, they had their own Cerberus, watchdog of Hades, in Sally. She might not have three heads but she was, without doubt, the ugliest dog he had ever clapped eyes on . . .

Presently, above the howling wind, they heard the deep bass voice of Colonel Henry Knox ordering parties of men to shift the great slabs of ice that were gathering at the river’s edge making embarkation impossible. Lord Luxon caught a flash of steel as the big man waved his sabre in the air, directing the men.

‘There is our man, at last!’ exclaimed Lord Luxon, steam coming from his mouth with every breath. ‘But where the devil are Sergeant Thomas and Corporal Starling?’

He took out his night-vision binoculars and scanned the faces of the soldiers. After several minutes he gave up looking for his own men and concentrated on looking for the whereabouts of the commander-in-chief of the American army. The sound of men hacking at the ice and levering it away from the bank with poles punctuated Lord Luxon’s feverish thoughts. Adrenaline raced through his veins and made him forget the cold and the wind. He thought of glory, and of his father’s disapproval of him, and of his dead uncles, and of sweeping aside once and for all the mistakes of his youth. This, he thought, would be his legacy to England, and England would forever be in his debt.

Suddenly, Lord Luxon saw what he had been waiting for and his heart missed a beat. The time had come! General Washington was climbing into a boat manned by perhaps a dozen men.
Through sheets of snowflakes Lord Luxon could distinguish his hat and cape and sabre, and saw the mariners holding up their oars and poles to attention whilst blocks of ice smacked against the side of the boat. The rim of the boat had been painted yellow and Lord Luxon watched this thin stripe bob up and down in the water as General Washington climbed in, causing the vessel to list from side to side. General Washington seemed to be about to sit down but then changed his mind on account of the freezing water sloshing about at the bottom of the boat. He remained standing, legs wide apart for balance.

‘William, do you see Sergeant Thomas?’

‘I do not, sir.’

‘Damn his eyes! Where
is
the fellow?’

Lord Luxon was becoming agitated. He reached up and tore off a bare branch from the tree that swayed above them. Sally, who had not taken her eyes off Lord Luxon, flinched, fearing another beating. She whimpered despite William’s handkerchief. Lord Luxon glared at her.

‘And confound his wretched hound!’

He took a swipe at her and William cried out as the animal yanked her head from his grasp and bounded away from her tormentor and towards her beloved master. Sally knew he was near. She could detect his scent even amidst thousands of others. Lord Luxon and William both ran after her but even with her clumsy, lolloping gait, she could outrun them with ease. They stopped under cover of trees some fifty yards from the bank. Lord Luxon stood white-faced and grim-jawed. He surveyed General Washington standing proud in his boat and Colonel Knox cupping his hands to his mouth and bellowing orders to the watermen from high on the bank. He could see the ripple of movement as men moved out of the way of the rampaging canine.

‘Shoot, damn you, shoot!’ hissed Lord Luxon. ‘Before all is lost . . .’

Astride in the boat amidst the seated mariners, General Washington made an easy target. Sergeant Thomas stood in the dark willing him to turn around for he had no desire to shoot the man in the back. The wind was very strong now. His ears were full of the howling wind and Colonel Knox’s incessant commands bellowing out across the river. Flurries of snow swirled in front of his eyes, sometimes making his victim disappear completely. Twenty yards and two bonfires separated Sergeant Thomas from Corporal Starling and each had managed to catch the other’s eye. Now that the General’s boat was ten or fifteen yards from the bank, the moment had come. This was it. They had arrived at the tipping point of history. Sergeant Thomas’s stomach lurched. His mouth had gone dry. He gave the prearranged signal, a double nod of the head, which Corporal Starling repeated back to him. Sergeant Thomas started to count to thirty which he knew his accomplice would be doing at the same time. Then Sergeant Thomas knelt down, placed his musket on the ground and took out the small twenty-first-century revolver from his pocket. He screwed on the silencer as they had practised a hundred times. Under cover of the snow and the wind and the dark, and in the midst of all this frantic activity, not a soul noticed him taking aim.

‘Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—’

Sally’s forelegs landed square in the middle of his back, pushing him forward onto the hard ground. His forehead hit something hard and for several moments he saw stars and was unable to move. After hours in the freezing wind he suddenly felt warm. Sally lay on top of him. As he tried to get up, the dog nuzzled his neck and William’s handkerchief, now soaked with slobber, wet his
ear. Sergeant Thomas pushed himself up, aghast, and thrust Sally roughly away from him. A terrible panic came over Sergeant Thomas as he heard shouting and the sound of running feet. He stood up. Hundreds of men were rushing in the direction of Colonel Knox. Confusion reigned. Soldiers raced around the bank as if someone had kicked over an ants’ nest. He glanced at the river. General Washington was shouting at the oarsmen to return to shore. The gun! The gun! Sergeant Thomas dropped to the ground and felt blindly for the weapon. His fingers closed over the barrel of the gun and he leaped to his feet, feeling for the trigger as he took aim. Sally bumped up against him.

‘Heel!’ he cried.

The gagged animal sat down obediently and looked up at her master as he pointed his gun at George Washington’s heart. She whimpered. Sergeant Thomas glanced down at her and the thought scorched through his mind like a fork of lightning that the animal was Washington’s guardian angel. Was she telling him that he was not meant to assassinate the first President of the United States? The faces of the blacksmith and Michael in his bar in SoHo appeared to him. He thought of the people going about their business in Prince Street, and then of all the people who must have come to America from every corner of the globe to start a new life. And then he thought of the corrupt aristocrat who had hired him, whose wish it was that General Washington should die so that Britain should retain its colony. And for what purpose? Who would benefit? Ever so slowly, as if his arm had a mind of its own, Sergeant Thomas lowered the gun . . .

Neither man nor beast saw the slight figure pushing his way through crowds of running men, hurtling towards them through the wind and snow. Sally was as slow to react as her master when Lord Luxon tore the gun from his hand.

‘No!’ shouted Sergeant Thomas into the wind.

The cry reached General Washington who turned instinctively towards it, even in the midst of all the commotion on shore, his keen eyes searching the darkness. By the flickering light of a bonfire, he saw first the shape of a man and then the shape of a great dog collapse to the ground. As he opened his mouth to raise the alarm he glimpsed the glint of metal and a hand wielding a strange weapon that pointed directly at him. Lord Luxon squeezed the trigger. It weighed so little, the bullet that sped across the stormy night to lodge in a human heart, and yet it had gathered enough momentum to topple a nation. Without a sound, the commander-in-chief of the Patriot forces fell into the Delaware River, his blood staining the blocks of ice that knocked against the boat. Four brave mariners jumped into the freezing waters to rescue their leader. By the time General Washington’s lifeless body was heaved onto dry land, Lord Luxon had disappeared into the night and the Patriot cause was already lost.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO

The Veil

In which Peter finally learns of the problems that
have beset his friend, and the consequences
of time travel become impossible to ignore

In the middle of the night, when all was silent and she could not even see her hand in front of her face, Kate would sit up in bed and stare all around her, searching for signs that she had slipped into a world where time flowed faster. She would reach out to Peter, and listen to his even, easy breath and know that for now, at least, she was not alone. Reassured, Kate slept fitfully on.

It was past midday when a pale and bleary-eyed Hannah knocked on Peter’s bedroom door bearing a bowl of steaming hot water. She deposited it on the dressing table by the casement window. The blackbirds sang and the sun shone down on Sir Richard’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as if all were right with the world. She found not only Peter but also Kate. They had dragged the mattress from the bed, turned it sideways and had taken half each, so that their top halves were cushioned whilst their legs lay sprawled out over bare floorboards. Both wore long white nightshirts. Peter slept on
his back, with his mouth open, whilst Kate lay on her stomach. A lace
fichu
, that had decorated the neckline of Kate’s dress, now bound the children’s wrists together. Hannah wondered which of them thought the other was going to get away in the night. She sighed. But in a topsy-turvy world such as this, what did it matter? She knelt down next to them.

‘It grieves me to wake you after such a night, but the Tar Man is waiting on you and Master Gideon in the drawing room. Though it does not seem right to see a rogue like him sitting in Sir Richard’s armchair and sipping tea from a china cup . . .’