‘Back to the point, if you please,’ said Liam. ‘The Fire of London?’
‘Yeah, why not?’
‘Why not?’ Liam looked round at the others. ‘Um … let me see now. Oh yes … burning to death.’
‘Oh, please. Liam, you can be such a dork.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not suggesting we stand in the middle of the fire. Clearly.’
‘But this whole city burned down, didn’t it?’
‘No. Some of it did. And obviously we watch the fire from a part that didn’t burn down. It’s not complicated.’
‘I think it would be interesting to see that,’ said Sal.
Maddy nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you, Sal. I think so too.’
‘But why? Why go? Why take the risk?’ Liam was flicking his spilled ale off the side of the table.
‘We’re not going to burn, Liam. Sheesh!’
‘Well, all right, not the burning, I’m talking about the risk we take when we open a portal.’
Rashim nodded. ‘He’s right. It’s not a necessary journey. Every time we open a window we broadcast a tachyon signature.’
‘Yes and … sure, there’s a small chance – a small chance – that someone might be looking our way at this time and spot it. But come on, guys, what is actually the chance of that?’
‘There is no precise figure that can be calculated.’ Stew dribbled from the side of Bob’s mouth on to his chin as he spoke.
‘Best not talk with your mouth full,’ replied Maddy – with her mouth full. ‘It’s not a good look for you.’ She turned back to Liam. ‘We’ve been waiting here for what? Nine, ten weeks? If the agency had an actual fix on where we were, we’d have been visited again by now.’
‘But one of their units did come through,’ said Rashim, casting a glance at Becks. She was sitting beside Bob and spooning stew silently into her mouth, managing to make less mess than him.
‘Well, OK, obviously back in 2001 it was a close thing.’ Maddy winced. ‘We must have left a trail behind us that they managed to follow. I mean, a stolen vehicle … I guess those support units must have tapped into police radio traffic or something and they somehow zeroed in on that school. But remember? Computer-Bob was instructed to wipe himself after the last window opened. So, there’s nothing we left behind that anyone could use to find us.’
‘Aye, but what if one of them got to him before he managed to wipe himself?’
Maddy shrugged. Her point was self-evident. ‘Then we’d have had a visit already. Fact is we haven’t. Which means, obviously, we lost them.’
‘And we could be anywhere. Any-when,’ added Sal. ‘They don’t know.’
‘Right. The only thing that might help them close in on us is if we go and do something really moronic that totally changes history and they track the origin of it back to this time.’ She pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘And I’m sure it doesn’t need to be said, but that’s something we, of course, are not going to do.’
‘Still a risk, though,’ said Liam.
‘Ye-e-sss, but come on, a really tiny one. Crossing the street here is a risk. Using a public frikkin’ toilet here is a risk.’
‘More for us than you boys,’ added Sal.
‘Look, the way I see it,’ Maddy continued, ‘we’re home and dry. We actually made it. We escaped whatever messed-up doomsday-loving Waldstein-cult-agency we were involved with and now we’re free. And,’ she said with a smile, ‘as a bonus, we have a frikkin’ time machine.’
‘Which you want to now play around with?’
Maddy frowned. ‘No, come on, Liam, that’s not fair. You’re making me sound childish. I just think we could take a peek, you know? Explore a little. Not too far back in time. And not too far away in distance. I mean, just think of all the things we could get a look at without pushing the displacement machine to its limits: the coronation of Queen Victoria, the execution of Charles I, the first stone of Westminster Abbey being laid. Shakespeare? How cool would that be? Meeting Will the Quill, giving him some story ideas?’
‘Good God, yes,’ muttered Rashim.
‘Charles Dickens?’
Liam’s face flickered with an idea. ‘Charles Darwin?’
‘There ya go, the monkey guy. We can see all these people and some of the great events and stuff that happened in London. Sure, I mean, we couldn’t talk to them or, if we did, it would have to be in a very limited way and –’
‘It would be inadvisable to talk directly with significant historical figures,’ said Bob.
Maddy nodded. ‘Fair point. But we could see them, couldn’t we? Witness them and all their many great moments.’ She pushed her bowl away. ‘I never realized how much cool stuff has happened over the centuries here in London until I started trawling through our database. And it’s all, like, on our doorstep!’
‘Limiting the geo-displacement to just London will significantly reduce the energy burn,’ conceded Rashim, ‘and, of course, produce less of a trace tachyon signal.’
‘That’s my point. It’s not like I’m suggesting we go swanning off to Ancient Egypt to watch the pyramids being built. Or go witness Neanderthal cavemen hunting woolly mammoths in Nepal. There’s so much closer to home that we could see.’ She shrugged. ‘Why not? We owe nothing to anyone. We don’t have the families we thought we had, leverage that might have been used against us. It’s just us … and, provided we’re not stupid, provided we’re not hurting anyone, provided we’re not changing anything, why can’t we live a little?’
She directed her gaze at Liam. ‘Hmmm, Liam? It’s not like you to be the worrywart.’
He stroked his chin for a moment, weighing that up, then shrugged. ‘Aye, living a little does sound good.’ He grinned. ‘Ah well, the Fire of London it is, then.’
Chapter 5
1889, London
‘Everyone ready?’
The others nodded. Again forced to improvise, they wore clothes that could pass for the period – on this occasion the mid-seventeenth century – just as long as no one studied them too closely. Liam wore a loose linen shirt that spilled over dark trousers. Maddy and Sal wore long, coarse linen shifts and plain bodices that tightly hugged their waists. Only Rashim stood out, insisting that his silk-lined waistcoat would easily pass as a gentleman’s doublet beneath his cape, especially if everyone around them was going to be distracted by the wholesale incineration of the City of London.
Since this wasn’t a mission so much as self-indulgent sightseeing, Bob and Becks were remaining behind to watch the dungeon and operate the displacement machine.
‘You all have your transponders safely secured?’ said Rashim. The transponders were something Rashim had cobbled together from the various components they’d brought with them from the archway. Crude, simple and small devices the size of walnuts. Sal had hers inside a pendant that hung from a loop of chain tucked inside her dress. She absently felt for the bump beneath the cotton, resting lightly just below her collarbone.
‘They’re just a back-up,’ said Maddy, ‘in case we get separated. And, of course, if that does happen, you all know the drill. Right?’
‘We make our own way back to the rendezvous point and wait,’ said Sal with a weary we’ve-been-over-this-already tone. ‘Which is basically just outside on Farringdon Street … only two hundred and twenty-three years earlier than now.’
Maddy sighed. ‘All right, then. Sal and Liam, you’re up first.’
They took their places, side by side, within the squares marked on the floor. Both of them were standing on a small mound of dirt. To one side was a metal pail filled with a peaty composite of river silt and horse manure that Bob had scooped up earlier. Each opened window was going to result in a deeper and deeper trough being excavated out of the stone floor, so this worked as an alternative: standing on a mat of dirt, their feet were safely elevated from the floor so as not to bisect the bottom of the cubic volume being propelled through chaos space.
As always happened just before a displacement, Sal felt b
utterflies stirring in her belly.
It’s only a second, she told herself. Less than that even. An instant. And yet it felt to her like several protracted minutes. She hated the total milky nothingness of it, nothing but a shifting, marbly, wispy snow-white.
Not exactly nothing, is it?
She shot a glance at Liam. He winked back at her. ‘All right there, Sal?’
‘I’m fine.’
He knew exactly what unsettled her. He’d told her he thought he’d seen them too: something, moving around faintly out there in that void. Nothing quite definable, nothing truly solid enough to offer the description of a shape of any kind. A thing – things, in fact, plural – that seemed to circle with malevolent curiosity, spiralling closely, but never quite getting near enough to be seen more clearly before they emerged on the other side.
But they were getting closer. Sal was sure of that. As if they – or it might be an IT, one thing stretched out into long tendrils that could be mistaken for multiple entities – seemed to be getting quicker at knowing she was sharing chaos space, spiralling towards her ever more quickly, ever more curious.
‘Hands and feet inside, kiddies,’ said Maddy. ‘Hold perfectly still.’ She looked at them both and grinned. ‘And say cheese.’
Liam guffawed sarcastically. Sal cocked an eyebrow.
‘Ten … nine … ’
‘You know what I think them things are, Sal?’ said Liam quietly.
‘What?’
‘Lost souls. Ghosts maybe.’
Sal looked at him. ‘Is that you reassuring me?’
‘Well, my point is a ghost can’t exactly hurt you now, can it?’
‘That’s not really helping.’
‘ … four … very still, both of you … three … ’
Ghosts? In other words, things that were once people. Sal felt her stomach flop queasily. People. Perhaps the ‘ghosts’ of other people foolish enough to be doing this stupid thing. As Maddy counted down the last few seconds, her voice lost behind the hum of discharging energy, Sal wondered why the hell they were doing this.
Oh yeah, for fun.
And then she was experiencing that horrendous, vomit-inducing drop.
She kept her eyes clasped shut. Falling. Only it wasn’t quite like falling; there was no sensation of wind rushing past her, no whistling roar in her ears. It was actually just weightlessness. And complete silence except for the thud of her own heart.
She counted in her head. Counted enough seconds to call it a minute.
Come on, come on. End! Please!
1666, LONDON
Sal felt something tickling her nose and warily cracked open an eye. Hovering in front of her was a nugget of manure sprouting a twist of hay; equally weightless, it had risen up from beneath her feet and spun lazily in front of her. She welcomed having something else to look at. A universe with nothing in it but herself and a lump of rotating horse poo.
Then thud. Her feet made heavy contact and the turd splatted on to the hard-packed dirt between her feet. But still the milky, featureless dimension. Only it wasn’t. Sal could smell burning. She could hear the clatter of a cartwheel, the snort of unsettled horses, voices raised in panic.
Liam emerged out of the swirling mist and grabbed her arm roughly. ‘Watch out!’
He pulled her back up against a wooden-slat wall, and a second later a heavily laden cart, precariously top-heavy with furniture and worldly possessions, clattered noisily past them both. The driver was slapping the hindquarters of his horse with a cane.
‘Move out of the way up there!’ he called to another pair of figures staggering towards them through the fog of smoke. Sal quickly recognized them as Maddy and Rashim.
The four of them were reunited amid curls of acrid smoke.
‘Jesus, I can’t frikkin’ breathe here,’ rasped Maddy, holding her arm over her nose and mouth.
A strong gust of wind flushed the smoke aside and they found themselves in a narrow street. On both sides, towering wooden-slat buildings tilted towards each other across the street; their increasingly overhanging layers, topped with roofs of thatch and wooden tiles that almost met, cast the narrow cobblestone and packed-dirt street in perpetual gloom.
‘That way … I think,’ said Maddy, pointing. ‘It should take us down to the river.’
They hurried after the cart as it rumbled and bounced down the narrow street. Above them, lead-lined windows hung open and anxious faces peered out at the thick pall of smoke above the rooftops. Banks of it, like cloud banks, filled the afternoon sky.
Others began to fill the narrow street, spilling in from side alleys and even narrower rat runs between tall, leaning shanty-buildings made of wood with thatched reed roofs. Everyone was hastily heading in the same direction, south, instinctively drawn towards the river’s edge. They were all laden with possessions, bundles of family heirlooms, and carrying their children, taking their babies away from the ominous, advancing smoke.
Jostled, bumped, compressed into an increasingly dense, surging river of people, they were finally ejected on to a broad wharf that stepped down towards the river, platform by platform, rickety stairwell by rickety stairwell, to a confusion of jetties on high-tide stilts that emerged from the river’s edge into the Thames like the teeth of a comb. Each jetty was flanked by all manner of lighters, dinghies and fishing boats that bobbed heavily on choppy waters beneath the unsafe overloading of people and their possessions.
Maddy studied their surroundings. Ahead of them, the river; beyond it the distant, chaotic shanty town of wooden buildings on the south bank. To their right, a crumbling, low stone wall followed the line that would one day be Farringdon Street – the remains of a Roman wall that once marked the pre-medieval boundary of Londinium. It ran down to the river.
To her left, looking eastward along the riverbank, she could see a bewildering encrustation of timber warehouses and yet more jetties, the forty-five-degree angles of many dozens of loading cranes, the vertical, swaying lines of hundreds of masts. London along the riverbank resembled a confusing, randomly intersecting, precariously leaning lumber pile. A mess of shacks, warehouses, tall six- and seven-storey timbered tenement houses, half built on land, half built on slime-covered stilts that descended into the river.
Beyond, a mile upriver, Maddy could see London Bridge stretching across the Thames, an ordered procession of sturdy stone and brick archways, topped with the same chaotic timber jungle of towering stacked houses. Once upon a time it was just a bridge; now the bridge itself had grown almost a whole town’s worth of homes on top, like the bottom of a ship’s hull growing a colony of barnacles.
‘Let’s head along the river,’ said Maddy, pointing towards London Bridge. ‘We can get a closer look.’
Chapter 6
1666, London
‘Jay-zus, there goes another one!’
Three hours had passed. Liam and the others watched in silent fascination as a team of the watch, the city’s volunteer firemen, secured half a dozen long-poled fire hooks. The hooks were gaffed over the frames of several top-storey windows. Then the men firmly grasped the bottom of the poles, five or six to each one, and at the blast of a horn they tugged in unison with a chorused grunt of exertion.
The five-storey tenement building – its upper floors projecting out precariously, making it look recklessly top-heavy and ready to tumble over of its own accord – creaked as the structure flexed. Another synchronized grunt rose from the men as they tugged again in unison, and they heard the first snapping of timbers at the very top. Wooden roof tiles began to cascade down on to the street.
‘Hoy! All below!’ shouted the watchman with the horn. ‘She’s coming down!’
The whole building swayed and flexed disconcertingly for a moment, then the entire rear timber wall began to peel away from the top. The roof, suddenly without support, collapsed in on itself with a deafening crash, dust billowed out of the open windows and a shower of shards and splinters rained down. Then the wall being tugged
by the fire hooks groaned and began to fall outwards. The watchmen beat a hasty retreat as it slowly arced out, like peel from an apple, teetered and then fell to the ground, shattering into brittle fragments and shards across the wharf. In several places the wharf was smashed through, structural beams crashing through the planking itself, down through the criss-crossed lattice of wood pylons and struts and splashing into the Thames below.
Liam whooped excitedly at the spectacle of it. All that remained of the tall building was one stubborn far corner, two storeys high, which wavered for a moment then it too creaked, groaned and finally folded in on itself and, with a crash, became part of an untidy, jagged mound of splintered lumber.
Through the cloud of swirling dust where the building had once stood they could see a horizon of huge rolling tongues of orange flame, whipped up by a fresh westerly breeze that was pushing the fire eastward. The flames were leaping greedily from rooftop to rooftop. Showers of sparks and tufts of blazing roof thatch danced in an updraught of hot air, effortlessly leapfrogging the firebreak gaps of the buildings that had already been pulled to the ground.
Maddy glanced to their right. London Bridge, just beside them, a towering wide structure that reached confidently across the river on its stone and brick base, was already on fire. The tall, top-heavy spires of tenement housing on the northern end of the bridge were now burning ferociously. Earlier they’d watched as teams had frantically attempted to pull down enough buildings to create a firebreak that would save the bridge. But the effort had turned out to be too little, too late.
Below the bridge, near the base of the brick archway stanchions, all manner of boats had begun to gather. None of them were directly beneath the bridge for fear that the flaming debris now raining down might land on them and set their tar-painted decks alight. Dinghies criss-crossed between the larger boats across choppy waters as enterprising oarsmen raced each other towards floating valuables that had been tossed from the windows above.
And now Maddy could make out individuals trapped in the tenement buildings already on fire. People were desperately hanging out of wide-open windows that spewed thick columns of white smoke, waving their arms, waving rags, screaming, pleading for help.