TIME QUAKE (14 page)

It therefore came as no surprise when, one fine summer night, while they were watching London’s skyline blaze up into a violet sky, and Tom had regained his strength, he said: ‘I do not belong here, Miss Anjali. I wish with all my heart that I could return to my own time.’

Anjali set fire to the corner of another ten-pound note and, leaning over the balcony so far that Tom got ready to grab her, she dropped it and watched the glowing fragments float down towards the dark river, leaving a brilliant, swirling trail until each tiny spark was extinguished.

Anjali closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Her nostrils caught the acrid scent of burning. Then her eyelids flicked open and she turned to face Tom and asked: ‘The girl you always go on about – the one with the machine who was good to you when she landed up in 1763. What was she called again?’

‘Mistress Kate?’

‘Yes. What was her surname?’

‘Dyer.’

‘I thought so. The helicopter pilot told me where he took Vega the day that he disappeared.
I
can’t get you home, Tom, but I reckon I can take you to some people who might . . .’

Anjali spat out her chewing gum and threw it over the balcony.

‘Ever been to Derbyshire?’

A kestrel hovered high above the stone farmhouse. Suddenly it made a vertiginous dive towards the lower pasture that bordered the stream where the Friesian cows were grazing. The valley was still green despite the dry summer. Sam, the second eldest of the six
Dyer children, sat at the kitchen table struggling over a maths worksheet. Through the open window his gaze followed the kestrel’s trajectory. Its prey would be a field mouse, he guessed, or even a water vole. He wished he were with the others, gathering wood for the birthday bonfire. He wouldn’t even have minded going to the airport with his dad to pick up Dr Pirretti. Sam hated being stuck inside. The distant baaing of lambs as they roamed the higher slopes beckoned him, as did the late-afternoon sunshine and the strong breeze gusting through the giant copper beech, a sound that always reminded him of breakers pounding the shore.

It was getting hotter. He hung over the windowsill above his mother’s flower border, balancing on his belly, his feet leaving the floor and his arms stretched out in front of him. Bumblebees slipped drunkenly into snapdragons and emerged buzzing and sprinkled with yellow pollen. Presently his stomach began to hurt and he jumped back inside. Reluctantly he sat back down again at the table.

Sam was supposed to have loaded up the dishwasher but instead he had shoved everything up to one end of the long table. He helped himself to some cold chips and some more of the lemonade his mum had made for the barbecue. He took a gulp. It was so tart it made his mouth pucker and his eyes water. His brows knotted together as he tried and failed to remember how to do long division, and for the hundredth time his gaze left the worksheet and roved around the room instead. He looked at, without really seeing, the bright pictures stuck to the fridge with magnets and the jumble of birthday cards on the mantelpiece. There were so many Dyer children it always seemed to be someone’s birthday. Even though Sam sometimes thought otherwise, birthdays weren’t cancelled because something bad had happened to the family. And today happened to be Kate’s birthday. Her thirteenth birthday.

Sam had been having extra lessons during the summer holidays
because his grades had nosedived since his big sister’s last disappearance. At first he had refused to go to school and then, when he did start classes again, he found that his concentration had been shot to pieces. If only Kate were here she would just give him the answers, he thought. She’d feel obliged to tell him he was stupid, too, of course, but that was okay.

A shard of sorrow stabbed at him. Despite everything his dad and Dr Pirretti and were doing to get the components to build another anti-gravity machine, Sam sometimes doubted that he would ever see his favourite sister again – although he would never give voice to his fears. It was an unspoken rule at the farm that you did not. But there were long, silent nights when his grief was so raw he would bury his head in his pillow, when the part of him that did not want to give up hope was overwhelmed by the part of him that needed to prepare for the worst. He was not sure whether that was somehow disloyal or cowardly or not the right way to think. But there it was – he could not help it. Who knew what the Tar Man had done to Kate and Peter once he had got them back to his lair in 1763 – and there was nothing anyone here could do about it.

To the rest of the world Kate was just another missing person – and since her disappearance the Dyer family had got to know just how many people do suddenly vanish, for all sorts of reasons, leaving their families in a state of perpetual limbo. All of which did not make this particular family’s loss any easier to deal with. Perhaps in an effort to keep hold of her, Sam increasingly felt the urge to identify, as precisely as he could, that unique blend of qualities that made Kate Dyer who she was. Sam chose adjectives to describe her: brave, loyal, emotional, bright – in both senses of the word – impatient, determined . . . Absent she may have been, yet Kate’s presence nevertheless roamed the corridors of his mind and would dart out unexpectedly: a swish of red hair, a shrill hoot of laughter,
a wry look, her habit of pulling hats over faces, her undisputed ownership of the last spoonful of her favourite risotto. One bleak dawn Sam and Dr Dyer had emerged simultaneously, red-eyed, from their bedrooms, and in the instant that their gazes had crossed, each recognised what the other was feeling. Brother and father clung to each other briefly and had then returned to their respective rooms without exchanging a single word, for neither felt inclined to indulge in empty words of sympathy.

Sam jumped as someone rang the doorbell. As the only other person in the house was the Marquis de Montfaron – who was intent on catching up with two centuries of world knowledge in his father’s study – Sam scraped his chair back over the red quarry tiles and got up to see who it was. But the Marquis had got to the entrance hall before him and, as he pulled open the door, Sam saw a girl’s head appear, her blonde hair a luminous halo in the sunshine.

Kate’s best friend Megan grinned at him. ‘Hiya, Sam!’ she called.

‘Is it time for the bonfire already?’ asked Sam. ‘I’ve still got tons of maths to do! Mum’ll kill me if I don’t finish it.’

‘No – the bonfire’s not ’til six thirty. I wanted to come early. I’ll give you a hand if you like . . .’

Sam’s face lit up. ‘Do you mean it?’

‘I wouldn’t have said if I didn’t.’ She looked up at Montfaron who towered above her, his hair scraping against the top of the door frame. ‘Good afternoon, Monsieur le Mar-r-rquis de Montfar-r-ron!’

Megan rolled her r’s just as Montfaron had taught her to do. Parisians, he said, would frown at such a pronunciation but his ancestors came from the sunny south and he was proud of his origins.

‘
Tr-r-r-rès
,
tr-r-r-rès bien
, mademoiselle. Your pronunciation improves by the day. Br-r-ravo!’ said Montfaron, taking hold of Megan’s hand and kissing it because it amused him when she blushed. He bowed ostentatiously, knocking his head on the wall of the narrow hallway as he did so.

‘This charming dwelling,’ he said, rubbing the top of his head, ‘would be greatly improved by a little judicious expansion . . .’

The Marquis made a show of placing the flat of his hands on each wall and pushing with all of his might until his face went red. When he heard a sound suspiciously like cracking plaster from beneath the old wallpaper, he stopped suddenly, and a guilty smile grew on his face.

‘
Quelle horreur!
Demolishing the
salle d’entrée
of my most generous hosts is an unfortunate way to show my gratitude . . .’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll tell Mum that Dad did it – she won’t say anything then.’

The Marquis ruffled Sam’s hair. ‘An excellent stratagem,
mon cher ami
! Although,
hélas
, one untruth inevitably leads to another . . .’

Sam blinked as the hall light flashed on and off, on and off, on and off. Montfaron forced himself to remove his hand from the switch and sighed appreciatively. ‘You, who take it for granted, like rain falling from the skies, cannot imagine how I
adore
electricity . . .’

‘No need to panic,’ laughed Megan, examining the wall. ‘You can’t see anything. The plaster’s all lumpy anyway.’

When he had first appeared at the farmhouse with Kate and Peter’s father, Megan had taken an instant liking to the charming Marquis de Montfaron. He had looked around him at the twenty-first-century kitchen with eyes that sparkled with wonder and excitement. Such vivid, intelligent eyes – large, and the precise shade
that conkers have when they are freshly burst from their prickly shell and are still a waxy, mahogany brown. Not to mention his exquisite clothes! Even little Milly had been so fascinated by his embroidered waistcoat, buckled shoes and lace cuffs that she had clung to him like a limpet, refusing to climb off his knee and jealously fending off all rivals for his attention. But even now, in Dr Dyer’s jumpers and some jeans loaned to him by Sergeant Chadwick, and with his black and silver hair tied back in a rubber band dropped by the postman, the six-foot-six Marquis still cut a striking figure. Sam and Megan both agreed that for a scientist-philosopher escaped from the French Revolution, the Marquis de Montfaron was the least boring grownup they had ever come across.

‘Have you learned any more amazing facts today, Monsieur le Mar-r-rquis?’ asked Megan.

‘Ha! I am
drowning
in an ocean of knowledge. My jaw
aches
from dropping in astonishment. I cannot sleep for I do not know how much time remains to me to acquire this mountain of wisdom. The one thing I
do
know is that I shall never come to the end of it.’

‘Well, two centuries is a long time,’ agreed Sam. ‘It took me long enough to catch up after I had six weeks off school—’

‘Is it such a long time? I am not far short of fifty years old – it is but four of my lifetimes. And yet, it seems to me that the
accumulation
and
acceleration
of knowledge in that time is
stupendous
!
Miraculous!
Man has stepped on the moon! Surgeons operate on patients without them feeling any pain! Aeroplanes carry people to the other side of the world in less than a day. Until I arrived in your century I fancied myself a scholar and a scientist. Now, I hardly dare open a book, so terrified am I that it will make a nonsense of things I have spent half a lifetime learning.’

‘Why don’t you give yourself a day off, then?’ asked Sam.

Montfaron sucked his breath in and shook his head. ‘Ah,
non
,’
he said, ‘I cannot rest. This effort is as nothing compared to its reward. For is there anything of greater value to mankind than
knowledge
? Even if Time will make fools of us all in the end.’

‘When you return to your own century, will you keep this knowledge to yourself?’ asked Megan. ‘Because . . . well, you could cause a real mess if you didn’t . . .’

‘An excellent question, mademoiselle. If ever I manage to return to the past I shall consider that potential dilemma most carefully. Until then,
Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m’entraîne
– I shall submit myself blindly to whatever fate has in store for me.’

‘So what
did
you find out today, then?’ asked Sam.

‘For pity’s sake,’ exclaimed the Marquis, covering his face with his hands. ‘Do not ask me to repeat it! My addled brain shall explode!’

Sam and Megan laughed.

‘I
shall
tell you one thing, however. Your father, Sam, advised me – and with perfect logic – that I should become familiar with the discoveries of the nineteenth century before I proceed to the twentieth century and, thence, to the new millennium. So I have begun to study the work of a certain Charles Darwin and I confess that the gentleman’s theory of natural selection has profoundly shaken me.’

Sam nudged Megan. ‘Is Darwin the one who invented evolution?’

‘I think so . . .’

‘We’ve got a cow named after his granddad, or uncle, or something – Erasmus Darwin,’ said Sam.

It was Montfaron’s turn to laugh but Sam suddenly looked upset.

‘Erasmus is Kate’s favourite cow . . . She always says she’s jealous of her eyelashes.’

The Marquis gave Sam a gentle pat on his back. ‘I have witnessed
your sister’s strength of character,’ he said. ‘And have I not described to you what courage she showed in rescuing us from the chalk mines of Arras? Now I do not say that this is the best of all possible worlds, my dear Sam, but it is right to live in hope and something tells me that your sister’s role in all of this is far from over.’

Sam nodded his head but still looked fixedly at the floor.

Megan took hold of his hand and squeezed it. ‘You know Kate – she’s a match for that stupid Tar Man. She’ll be all right – don’t you worry, Sam.’

Sam looked up at his two companions and forced a smile.

‘Well,
mes chers enfants
, with your kind permission, I must take my leave of you and return, like Sisyphus, to my never-ending labours.’

Megan frowned. ‘Sisyphus? Isn’t that a disease?’

‘Ah,
non
, mademoiselle! Sisyphus offended Zeus, the father of the gods. His punishment was to push a boulder up a steep hill. Each time the poor fellow was within reach of the top it would roll down and he would have to start all over again, and again, and again – for all eternity . . .’