The Time Traveller, Smith Read online

Part 4

  I awoke after I do-not-know-how-long in a room appointed in such a fashion as would not have seemed out of place in a smart hotel or at the least a well-to-do inn of my own time. If it had not been for the thick layer of dust that bloomed across the furnishings and the way the mottled velveteen wallpaper hung down in crumpled pleats from the high moulded ceiling, I could almost think myself returned to the more civilized past! Once again I found myself questioning the veracity of my recent memory. Had I indeed ever stirred from the rubble of that explosion? Were my strange experiences real, or were they but the fantastical imaginings of a fading self? My head throbbed.

  I stumbled from the musty bed and at first thought the dust to be nothing more than the product of my thick head and bleary eyes, until I ran a finger, creating a half-inch deep ravine, across the ashy surface of the wash-stand mirror. I did not know if I had been drugged or coshed. Certainly it seemed unlikely I had fallen asleep while being so rudely stolen from the Angel. My head throbbed the more.

  I rubbed my palm across the mirror’s surface until I could see my face reflected back in the blotted and time bent silver. I made a sorry sight. Although it had been, for the life of me, no more than a day in my own reckoning since I had been going about my workaday business as a Clerkenwell watchmaker, the figure staring back at me with his bloodshot and black-rimmed eyes was not the same smart young man reflected in my own wash-stand mirror only the morning before.

  I raised a shaking hand to my cheek, felt the bristly growth of beard there, more beard than I could ever think to have grown in a month or even two, speckled, here and there, with thicker curls, wiry and grey. My cheeks felt like gullies, my cheekbones pronounced and angular peaks above the dense forest of my beard; my skin like a desert, dry and dappled, darkly blemished in spots, in others, pink and raw; all smeared with earth and sweat, grease and dust. The hair on my head, speckled now like my beard, was like felt, matted, hanging over my filthy furrowed forehead like the canopy of an overgrown shrub.

  My clothes were rags. The collar of my shirt and my necktie had been lost, the top buttons torn away, so as the placket front hung loose and open. The lapels of my jacket were torn, as was one arm at the shoulder; both cuffs ripped and frayed. My trousers had been torn at each knee, my kneecaps poking through like pale muddy stones, and the hems had come away in tatters. I had lost my shoes and socks at the Angel, it having slipped my mind to request the common decency of sensible footwear, as my captor carried me off.

  Scrabbling in the dust of the wash-stand I uncovered some ancient toilet articles, amongst them a straight razor, its mother-of-pearl handle cracked with age but with which, on finding the tarnished blade still moderately keen, I began to cut at the ugly beard, with a careless determination at first, so as the whiskers came away in thick tufts and my skin smarted from the blunted edge, and then with more care as the mass of hair shortened, in patches, and I slowly scratched away most of that horrible growth.

  Along with the razor, an old tortoiseshell comb, its teeth half snapped, proved of some use in taming my matted hair which, wetted down with spittle, made, finally, a passable approximation of a side parting.

  I do not know if it made feel any better. My head still throbbed; my mind still befuddled. I am not even sure it made me look any better. The skin where my beard had been was raw, lined with grazes from the imperfect razor, and although cleaner, only served to contrast the grime on my upper face all the more; so much so that it almost seemed I wore a mask, like a threadbare and filthy harlequin.

  I was interrupted from further despondency by the appearance of someone who I had feared long dead.

  For, as I unhappily examined my novel but ruined appearance, the door to the room was opened with a creak and who should enter, seated hunched in a wheeled wickerwork armchair and coughing violently through the plume of dust thrown by opening door, than my old master and colleague, the great watchmaker, György Conel!

  “My - My - ” I gasped.

  Behind Conel, a tall, scrawny girl with pale skin and a mass of ginger hair propelled the chair into the room, and, behind them both, a glimpse of an indignant patch-eyed face before the door was pulled to.

  “Neg. Neg,” the old man coughed (“Neg” being the Hungarian for “No”), waving a hand to clear the air. He continued in his pronounced accent, his voice cracked and hoarse, and not only from the dust I feared. “Iz ziss zee vay to greet an ole frient, Mazvell Smit? Well, is it now?”

  I knelt before him and took his frail hands in mine. It seemed that old man Conel had suffered worse than me on being cast to this time.

  “Oh, Master Conel,” I blubbed, “I thought all I knew gone and dead. And yet here you are!”

  “Neg, now Maz. Do not go weeping like an apprentice for his family. We do not have much time alone.”

  He paused for breath.

  “Make no mistake, Maz, that we are anything but prisoners here. Beau Riche has worked me hard since he took me from my previous employ so many years ago.”

  So many years? But I had worked beside him only yesterday. But then it had been 1908. So many years, indeed. I at least now knew the name of my captor - Beau Riche, the loathsome King assumptive of North London!

  Conel wheezed for breath again.

  “And he will work you hard, also. But only for a little time. You were brought here alone?”

  “No, a woman also, to whom I am eternally indebted, was taken with me. My saviouress, Miss… K.”

  His eyes glimmered with brief delight, the kind of desirous twinkle I had seen in him previously only when he had examined a particularly intricate clockworking.

  “Then she is here too. Good. Good.”

  I could not think what could possibly be good about it, if we were indeed prisoners as he said.

  At that moment the door was creaked open again, sending another choking cloud of dust into the air.

  “You must trust me, Maz,” Conel rasped quickly, with difficulty, “though I know the events of our last meeting may have eroded any trust grown between us. And the Lady K, Maz. You must trust her also.”

  And through the doorway marched the burly one-eyed man who had abducted me the previous night. With a flick of his head he indicated that the girl should wheel the old man from the room and then, grasping me roughly by the elbow, dragged me after them.

  “Ye have work t’ dae, laddie,” he growled in a deep Scots burr, “befo’ ya oudience wi’ ‘Is Majesty.”