James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

It was dark when he bent through the French window again and lay down on the divan, telling himself that he ought not to risk waiting, that he ought to be off at once and finish what he had meant to finish. But he was dog-tired, and what he meant to do wouldn’t allow for that. Surely an hour’s sleep…

The street in the Seven Dials came unbidden into his mind — the rain, the mud, the darkness, the shadowy rooftops and entryways and alleys — but this time he let himself go, and he wandered into his dream with a growing sense of purpose rather than horror.

Hasbro shook him awake in the morning. The sun was high and the wind blowing, animating the ponderous branches of the oaks out on the meadow. “Kippers, sir?” Hasbro asked.

“Yes,” said St. Ives, sitting up and rubbing his face blearily.

“Secretary Parsons called again, sir, early this morning. And Dr. Frost, too, some little time later.”

“Yes,” said St. Ives. “Did you tell them to return?”

“At noon, sir. An hour from now.”

“Right. I’ll…” He stood up slowly, wondering what it was he would do. Eat first. Mrs. Langley came in just then, carrying the plate of kippers and toast and a pot of tea. She handed him a newspaper along with it, just come up from London. The front page was full of Dr. Frost, lately risen from his long and icy sleep. He had got the ear of the Archbishop of Canterbury, it said, who had taken a fancy to Frost’s ideas regarding the rumored time-travel device sought after by the Royal Academy.

The journalist went on to describe the fanciful device in sarcastic terms, implying that the whole thing was quite likely a hoax perpetrated for the sake of publicity by Mr. H. G. Wells, the fabulist. Frost already had a large following, though, and considered himself a sort of lay clergyman. He had taken to wearing white robes, and his followers had no difficulty believing that his rising from an icy sleep held some great mystical import. Accordingly, there was widespread popular support for Frost’s own claim to the alleged time-travel device. What Frost had proposed that had won the heart of the Archbishop yesterday afternoon was that a journey be undertaken to the very dawn of human time, to the Garden itself, where Frost would pluck that treacherous apple out of Eve’s hand by main force and beat the serpent with a stick…

The article carried on in suchlike terms, the journalist sneering openly at the whole notion and lecturing his readers on the perils of gullibility. St. Ives didn’t sneer, though. Frost’s, or Narbondo’s, capacity for generating mayhem and human misery didn’t allow for sneering. The journalist was right, but really he knew nothing at all. Frost would take the machine if he could; but he jolly well wouldn’t travel back to eat lunch with Adam and Eve.

St. Ives scraped up the last of the kippers and watched the meadow grasses blow in the wind. Parsons, too. He intended to make careful scientific journeys, he and his cronies. They knew St. Ives had the machine. The evidence was all circumstantial, but it was sufficient. Two days ago they had finished their search of the sea bottom off Dover. There was no trace of the machine, no wreckage beyond that of the sunken ships. And Parsons had made it very clear to St. Ives that Lord Kelvin, just yesterday afternoon, had recorded strange electromagnetic activity in the immediate area of Harrogate.

Parsons had been diplomatic. St. Ives, he had said, was always the most formidable scientist of them all — far deeper than they had supposed. His interest in the machine, his pursuit of it, could not have culminated in his destroying it. Parsons admired this, and because he admired it, he had come to appeal to St. Ives to give the thing up peaceably. There was no profit in coming to blows over it. The law was all on the side of the Academy.

Well, today it would come to blows. His future-time self knew that, and had returned to warn him with the chalk markings in the silo. And Parsons was right. The device did belong to the Academy, or at least to Lord Kelvin. When had Kelvin deduced that St. Ives had it? It was conceivable that he suspected it all along, and that he had let St. Ives fiddle away on it, thinking to confiscate it later, after the dog’s work was done.

Hasbro appeared just then. “Secretary Parsons,” he announced.

“Tell him to give me five minutes. Pour him a cup of tea.”

“Very good, sir.”

St. Ives stood up, straightened his clothes, ran his hands through his hair, and went out again at the window, heading at a dead run for the little stable behind the carriage house. Sitting in the parlor, Parsons wouldn’t see him, and given a five-minute head start, St. Ives didn’t care a damn what Parsons saw. Across the meadow the silo stood as ever, but now with the door ajar. They had broken into it, thinking simply to take the machine, but finding it gone. So much for being peaceable. He laughed out loud.

Hurriedly, he threw a saddle onto the back of old Ben, the coach horse, and old Ben immediately inflated his chest so that St. Ives couldn’t cinch the girth tight. “None of your tricks, Ben,” St. Ives warned, but the horse just looked at him, pretending not to understand. There was no time to argue. St. Ives had to get across the river before he was seen. He swung himself into the saddle and walked the horse out through the open stall gate, heading for the river. The saddle was sloppy, and immediately slid to the side, and St. Ives wasted a few precious moments by swinging down and tugging on the girth, trying to cinch it tighter. Old Ben reinflated, though, and St. Ives gave up. There was no time to match wits with a horse, and so he remounted, hunkering over to the left and trotting out toward the willows along the river.

They crossed the bridge and cantered along the river path, emerging through the shrubbery on the opposite bank. Now the manor was completely hidden from view, and so St. Ives kicked old Ben into the semblance of a run. They skirted the back of Lord Kelvin’s garden and angled toward the highroad, St. Ives yanking at the saddle to keep it on top of the horse. On the road he headed east at a gallop, leaning hard to the left to compensate and keeping his head down along Ben’s neck, like a jockey. Old Ben seemed to recall younger and more romantic days, and he galloped away without any encouragement at all, his mane blowing back in St. Ives’s face.

St. Ives smiled suddenly with the exhilaration of it, thinking of Parsons unwittingly drinking tea back at the manor, wondering aloud of Hasbro whether St. Ives wasn’t ready to see him yet. Suspicions would be blooming like flowers. The man was a simpleton, a bumpkin.

The saddle inched downward again, and St. Ives stood up in the stirrups and yanked it hard, but, all the yanking in the world seemed to be useless. Gravity was against him. The right stirrup was nearly dragging on the ground now. There was nothing for it but to rein up and cinch the saddle tight. He pulled back on the reins, shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” but it wasn’t until old Ben had stopped and begun munching grasses along the road, that St. Ives, still sitting awkwardly in the saddle, heard the commotion behind him. He turned to look, and there was a coach and four, kicking up God’s own dust cloud, rounding a bend two hundred yards back.

“Go!” he shouted, whipping at the reins now. “Get!”

The horse looked up at him as if determined to go on with its meal of roadside grass, but St. Ives booted it in the flanks, throwing himself forward in the teetering saddle, and old Ben leaped ahead like a charger, nearly catapulting St. Ives to the road. They were off again, pursued now by the approaching coach. The saddle slipped farther, and St. Ives held on to the pommel, pulling himself farther up onto the horse’s neck. His hat flew off, and his coat billowed out around him like a sail.