‘Sal,’ she replied and smiled. ‘You can call me Sal.’ She grasped his proffered hand. ‘And it’s been a pleasure for me too.’
Maddy acknowledged Herbert with a quick wave, ushered Sal back inside, then closed and bolted the door behind them. ‘Computer-Bob picked up a signal,’ she said, leading Sal over to the table and monitors.
‘So, where are they?’
Maddy sat down in the rocking-chair. ‘Computer-Bob?’
> Yes, Maddy?
‘Put the location data up on the screen again.’
A monitor to their right flickered as a display appeared showing a string of numbers that both girls recognized as a time and location stamp. Sal squinted at the numbers. ‘Isn’t that a week after the fire? Am I reading those numbers right?’
Maddy nodded, frowning. ‘Yeah, it’s about that.’
‘And the location? I’m not too good at making any sense of those numbers. That’s not London, is it?’
‘It’s not here, that’s for sure. Computer-Bob, can you put those geo-coordinates on to a map, please?’
> Affirmative.
On another screen a map of the world appeared, and then a moment later a red dot glowed on it. Maddy’s response was to snort. Not a laugh so much as a nasal retort. ‘What the …?’
Sal muttered a curse under her breath. Not a Hindi one but one she’d already picked up from the milling crowds of dockmen and traders of London. ‘Beggar me.’
She looked at Maddy. ‘What are they doing in the middle of the English Channel?’
Maddy cocked an eyebrow. ‘Beats me.’
Chapter 13
1666, somewhere off the English coast
‘Come on, you pasty-faced lot, the captain wants to get a look a’ ya.’
Liam looked up at the sailor leering down at them. He had a face that seemed to be all beard with a ruddy-coloured, bulbous nose poking out of it, like an egg sitting at the bottom of a nest. A man anywhere between thirty and fifty, if Liam was trying to pin an age on him, but then it seemed to be that everyone in this time looked a decade or more older than they were.
‘Get a leg up, then!’ he growled, nudging Liam with his boot.
The boy got to his feet first and offered Liam a small hand to help him up. Liam smiled at him. That gesture – the extended hand – was the first time the boy had even acknowledged him since their escape from the fire. He grabbed the hand and groaned as he got to his feet. His head still throbbed every time he dared to move. Rashim followed them and they clambered up a ladder after the sailor, emerging into broad daylight.
‘Good God,’ uttered Rashim at the spectacle.
Liam’s eyes wandered up the spider’s web lines of the shrouds as they converged fifty feet above beneath the crow’s-nest. The mainsails ballooned and rippled slightly, more than amply filled with a stiff westerly wind. All around them, the main deck was busy with men at work. For a moment, though, the bustling activity ceased as every last one of them, perhaps a hundred men in total, stopped what they were doing in synchronicity to get a look at them.
‘Come on, ladies!’ barked their escort. ‘Yer not being paid to gawp like old women!’
‘Ain’t been paid nothin’ yet anyways!’ shouted someone from above.
‘You’ll be paid with my boot up your arse, Thomas, if you don’t get them loose lines squared away!’ Their escort muttered a stream of profanities under his breath and then beckoned Liam and the others to follow him. ‘Come on! This way!’
They picked their way through a circle of men sitting cross-legged on the deck, splicing rope ends, all beards and sunburned foreheads. Liam offered a polite smile and ‘excuse-me’s as they stepped through. They were headed towards the aft of the ship, up some steps and on to a smaller raised deck. A crewman with a weather-tanned face and a dark blue cloth cap stood at the helm and grinned at them.
‘New blood, is it?’
‘Aye,’ grunted their escort as they passed him. He led them up to a small oak door and rapped his knuckles on it. ‘Captain Teale! I have yer stowers ’ere!’
Liam heard a muffled voice from within. Their escort quickly opened the door, ducking his head as he led them through. Liam’s eyes adjusted to an interior gloom again. They were in a cabin twenty feet long and about fifteen wide, tapering at the far end. A row of small lead-lined windows wrapped their way round the end of the cabin, letting in a modest amount of light. Sitting in a chair, and slumped over a navigation chart spread out across a table, was the ship’s captain, his face hidden beneath the dipped brim of a tricorn hat.
He looked up at them and now Liam could see his face. Unlike the rest of the sailors he’d seen so far, the captain’s face looked a little softer, a little plumper, a little less weather-worn. He sported a beard and moustache trimmed neatly round his pursed lips, the beard long enough beneath his chin for the bristles to be twisted into a tidy braid, tied off with a yellow ribbon.
‘My name is Captain Jack Teale. Captain of this vessel, the Clara Jane.’ He studied them silently for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘you’re clearly not the usual kind we pick up: wayward dregs and scoundrels.’ He took in Rashim. ‘First mate here said something about you, sir, supposedly a gentleman of means.’
‘I … well, I … think there was a misunderstanding the other night.’ He looked to Liam for help. ‘When we were rescued.’
‘Aye, that’s the thing,’ cut in Liam. ‘We were in a tight spot, so we were. That fire in London was completely out of –’
‘Oh, indeed. I saw it. Quite something to behold. Tragic actually,’ Teale conceded. He shrugged. ‘But also something of an opportunity. We made some decent coin ferrying and “rescuing” that night.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘But it seems not with the three of you. Your negotiation, so I’ve been told, was somewhat less than honest.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Liam shrugged. ‘I had to do something. It was that or burn to death.’
Captain Teale smiled. ‘Can’t say I blame you that much. I’d have done very much the same in such a desperate quarter.’ He sat back in his chair, removed his tricorn hat and scratched at his scalp beneath long dark hair which, like the beard, was twisted into thick braids. ‘The fact of the matter is I’m not a philanthropist, I’m a businessman, and this ship is a private enterprise. So, you’ll be obliged to earn the fare you promised, before I think about letting the three of you go on your way.’
‘Earn our fare?’ Liam looked at Rashim, then back at Teale. ‘What, as part of your crew?’
‘Aye.’
‘Uh, can I ask … for how long?’
Captain Teale ignored that. Instead, he was now studying Rashim. ‘Now, sir. A gentleman, is it?’
Rashim offered a tentative nod.
‘A gentleman without a single coin on him, so it seems.’ Teale drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Unfortunately for you. But I shall assume you to be educated? Well versed in current affairs? In words and numbers? Languages? Sciences?’
‘Yes. Yes … of course.’
‘Good,’ replied Teale. ‘Perhaps you might offer me a little decent conversation. The animals out there on deck are little more than shaved monkeys. Good men to be sure, but not gentlemen.’ His eyes settled on Rashim’s waistcoat. ‘If I may, sir, that is a very nice doublet. I’ve not seen one cut quite like that before.’
‘It’s … uh … it’s the latest fashion in Italy, I believe.’
Teale raised his eyebrows in appreciation. ‘That so?’ He got up, came round the chart table, bumping his hip clumsily on the corner. ‘Ah, beggar me! Damned ships are all hard edges and rough corners.’
He stood in front of Rashim, rubbing his thigh. He reached out and ran his fingers over the fine silk. ‘Very nice. Take it off, there’s a good chap.’
Rashim glanced anxiously at Liam. The waistcoat contained his transponder, tucked away at the bottom of an inside pocket.
‘I’d like to hang on to it, if that’s OK with you?’
Teale rais
ed an eyebrow. ‘Oh-kay.’ The word was new to him. ‘Ohh-kayyy? What is that? Italian?’
‘No, not really.’
Teale cocked his head. ‘I’ll have the garment, if you please.’
‘I’d really rather hold on to it.’
‘You’ll remove it or I’ll have Mr Reynolds here remove it for you.’ Teale shrugged. ‘And, to be honest, he’s not exactly light of hand. ’Twould be a shame to rip such a nice thing, don’t you think?’
Rashim looked at the sailor who’d escorted them. The man scowled at him and growled.
Actually growled.
‘All right, all right.’ He unbuttoned the waistcoat and then hesitated a moment before handing it over. For a moment, Liam wondered whether Rashim was going to ask to retrieve the transponder first. But that would be foolish. This captain would probably mistake it for a piece of jewellery and insist on keeping it too.
Teale took the waistcoat, put it on over his own burgundy shirt and buttoned it up. ‘Very nice. Very nice indeed.’ He smiled, not unkindly, at Rashim. ‘Thank you. Let’s consider this a first instalment of money owed, shall we?’
‘Can I ask how long you intend to keep us aboard?’ asked Liam again.
Teale turned to look at him. ‘Well now, sir, that all depends on how quickly this enterprise turns a profit.’
‘So, what, uh … what exactly is this enterprise?’
‘Is your servant here always so damnably precocious with his questions?’ he asked Rashim.
‘I … yes, I suppose he is.’
‘Do you not thrash the impertinent fellow?’
‘No. I don’t thrash him. It’s not that sort of a relation–’
‘If he is indeed in your employ, sir –’ Teale looked bemused – ‘taking your wage, you’re damned well entitled to thrash him.’
‘No.’ Rashim looked at Liam. ‘We’re not so much master and servant. We’re more friends. Travelling companions actually.’
‘And this small boy? Whose property is he?’
‘Just another companion,’ answered Rashim.
‘Companions, eh?’ Teale shook his head at the oddness of it all, then turned to Liam. ‘As you’re now a part of this ship’s crew, you’ll be addressing me as Captain in future, or – if I’m in a more genial mood – Skipper.’
Liam nodded. ‘All right, Captain. May I ask again, what is this enterprise?’
‘Since you ask,’ Teale said with a shrug, ‘our enterprise is relieving overladen Spanish merchant vessels of their burden.’
‘So, this is a pirate ship?’ asked Rashim.
‘Good God, sir, no!’ snapped Teale. ‘Nothing so … so criminal! No, this is a privateering vessel. We have the King’s blessing, of course!’
‘Not yet we ain’t,’ grunted Reynolds.
Teale waved the man’s comment away. ‘Pfft! Mere paperwork. We shall have that trifling matter sorted soon enough.’ He turned to Liam. ‘Meanwhile my first mate, Reynolds here, will find some duties for the three of you to do. I’m not sure precisely what … messing around with grubby yards of rope of some kind, I fancy.’
He stepped back, looked down admiringly at his new waistcoat and straightened it. ‘Now off the three of you go. Go and be useful.’
Reynolds led them out of the captain’s cabin. They stooped through the low door and stood back out on the raised stern deck. Liam looked down the length of the ship, a hive of activity, every sail out now and filled as she ran before the wind, sloughing through choppy water at a fair clip, sheets of salty spray fanning up either side of the ship’s prow.
Reynolds grinned at them with a gap-toothed mouth. ‘Right then, you little beauties, you’re all mine.’
Chapter 14
1889, London
‘This is completely crazy! Where are they going?’
Maddy and Sal studied the monitor in front of them. Computer-Bob had lost the signal as it blipped its way past the end of the crinkly coast of Cornwall. Lost it because there were any number of directions the blip – clearly a ship of some sort – could have gone. North up into the Irish Sea. South down towards the coast of France. West out into the Atlantic or innumerable headings in between those compass points. For the last seventeen hours computer-Bob had systematically been sweeping the sea to the south-west of Britain in a spiral search pattern radiating out from the last point they’d had them on-screen. Searching in ten-square grids, moving forward in day-chunks of time for each grid location. The further Liam and Rashim moved away in time and space from their last contact, the greater the chance they were going to be lost completely.
Seventeen hours of agonized waiting and watching as computer-Bob painstakingly generated a grid pattern that overlaid an image of the Atlantic Ocean. There were squares colour-coded to indicate the grid locations searched, and the dates they’d been searched for. There was some best-guessing involved too: the speed at which a ship at that time might travel, assumptions that it would travel in a straight line and not be randomly zigzagging.
Guesses. And that’s what was disconcerting. Guesses. That’s all they could work with. But now, after so many hours taking turns sleeping and watching and hoping, now they finally had a fix on them again.
Sal looked at the square that was flashing on the screen. It was two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic. The time-stamp indicated that four months had passed for Liam and Rashim.
‘Four months?’ Sal shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t take a sailing ship that long to cross the Atlantic, would it?’
‘I don’t think so. Old sailing ships weren’t that slow getting about, were they? Maybe they’ve been somewhere else. Or perhaps they’ve been there and back and set off again? I don’t know.’
‘Well, whatever, so now we have them, why don’t we just open up a window and go get them?’ asked Sal.
Maddy shook her head. ‘We can’t: the signal’s a moving target. Think about it, Sal. We open up a portal and step through and we’re just as likely to find ourselves dropping into the ocean in the ship’s wake than we are stepping on to it.’
‘Maddy is correct,’ added Bob. ‘Even if the portal correctly opens on the ship, if it is still in motion, there is the possibility of a density merge with part of the ship or even one of the ship’s personnel.’
‘Right. And I don’t fancy ending up spliced with a sweaty sailor.’ Maddy was chewing on a matchstick. She so very much missed the plastic biro caps she was used to gnawing to a jagged nub. ‘What we need is for them to get wherever they’re going. They’ve got to stop at a port or bay somewhere, right? I mean, this is some old seventeenth-century sailing boat, so they’ll need to stop for food or water, or shore leave.’
Bob nodded. ‘Waiting for the target to become stationary would be the most advisable course of action.’
‘We’ve got to just sit tight, Sal. Sit tight and make sure we don’t lose track of them again. At least for the moment they’re out at sea, so presumably they’re going to follow a straight line since there’s nothing to dodge round.’
One of the monitors displayed computer-Bob’s dialogue box.
> Correct. I have reversed the search from this current location, regressing by time and location, and now have identified three other locations the signal has travelled through.
On the map, three of the grid squares across the Atlantic turned red. Each of them indicated they were several days apart in time. The three squares were more or less in a straight line. The tangent of the line was a downward slant pointing roughly towards the south-east coast of America to the tip of Florida.
Sal frowned. ‘They’re going to Florida? What’s there?’
‘Disneyland!’ said SpongeBubba. The unit had waddled across the floor, drawn by idle curiosity to the others gathered round the table. ‘Skippa’s going to Disneyland!’
Sal looked at Maddy. ‘Do you know how to turn this stupid thing off?’
‘SpongeBubba? Over-ride command menu. Guest administrator.’
SpongeBubba’s
eyes swivelled to look at Maddy intently. ‘Password?’
‘Obi-Wan Kenobi.’ She looked at Sal. ‘Rashim told me.’
‘What’s that mean?’
Maddy tutted. ‘That Rashim’s a nerd.’ She turned back to SpongeBubba. ‘You good to go?’
‘Menu options available. I am listening.’
‘Standby mode, please.’
The lab unit slumped slightly with a wheeze of servo-motors then was perfectly still.
‘Rashim told me the command list.’ Maddy turned back to the matter at hand, grabbed the mouse and began to scroll down the map on the screen. ‘Florida. Or they could just as easily be heading towards the Bahamas.’ She zoomed out slightly. ‘Or anywhere in the Caribbean in fact.’ She frowned. ‘Jeez, look. That’s a whole bunch of islands right there. They could change course somewhere in there and we could easily lose track of them again.’ She winced. ‘If we knew more about what their situation is, what kind of boat they’re on, maybe we’d get a clue as to where they’re headed.’
‘Information,’ said Becks. ‘They may not even be alive.’
The girls turned round to glare at her. ‘For Christ’s sake, Becks!’
She looked at them impassively. ‘Maddy, it is a distinct possibility to consider. It has been four months in their time.’
Maddy spat a small splinter of wood from her teeth. ‘Well, let’s assume for now that they’re alive, shall we? Liam’s lasted that long before, and in far more hazardous times.’
Becks nodded.
‘Right.’ She turned back to look at the map. ‘I just wish I knew more about this period of history. You know … as opposed to relying on whatever we’ve got on the database. Which probably isn’t going to be much.’
‘We could open a pinhole view,’ said Sal. ‘Maybe we can get a close enough image of what’s there,’ she added, nodding at the blip on the screen. ‘Who knows? We might even catch a glimpse of Liam.’
‘True.’ Maddy nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s got to be worth a try, I guess.’ She leaned forward. ‘Computer-Bob, how accurate is the signal?’