Paullina Simons - A Beggar’s Kingdom

For interminable minutes, Julian stared at Ashton. “Short or long?”

“Short. Elevator pitch. Two sentences.”

“Devi showed me a way to go back in time to find Josephine. And I’ve gone twice.”

“Go back, like astral projection?”

“Go back, like body and soul.”

At first, Ashton was without words. “It’s a terrible pitch,” he said finally. “Based on that, I won’t be able to produce your script, I’m afraid. It’s not even remotely believable and you’ve left too many hanging questions. Have you got anything else? I’m serious now. Anything else.”

“The first time I went, she died,” Julian said. “And I was blasted back into my present life. It was just before you moved here. I went again a month ago. I thought I was leaving London for good. If she hadn’t died, I’d still be there with her. But … here I am, so.” He took a breath. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what, Julian,” Ashton said slowly. “How am I looking at you?”

“Like I’m nuts.”

“No.”

“I leap into a wormhole,” Julian said, “and float for a long time down an underground river, and when I come out on the other side, she lives.”

Ashton draped himself over the couch. “Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s time for the long version.” He shot up. “Wait!” From the kitchen he brought a bottle of Grey Goose, two glasses, some ice, and some soda water. He made the drinks, gave one to Julian, didn’t clink, and gulped down half of his. “Go.”

Julian spoke for a long time. Meridian, crystal, the Transit Circle, tear in the fabric of the universe, future tense, moongate, river, dead queen, Wales, Mary, Lord Falk, the Silver Cross, Mallory, Fabian, Margrave, murder, gold, the Fire. Body immolating and reforming at the speed of light. Correction: at the speed of light, squared .

Ashton reached over and swallowed Julian’s untouched vodka.

“I know how it sounds,” Julian said.

“Oh no, my friend. I don’t think you do.”

“Do you remember the dream I used to have of her? Where she is walking toward me, happy and smiling? Devi says it could be a vision of her and me in the future.”

“Well, if Devi says … You mean in the future that Devi just finished telling you doesn’t exist, or some other future?”

“Everything you’re thinking of, Ash, I’ve thought of,” said Julian. “Yet here it is. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m not lying. There is a difference.”

“Oh, a huge one. If you were lying, it would mean you were sane.”

In silence the two men sat in their open sunny flat. Julian was oddly comforted by the shellshocked look on Ashton’s normally placid face, as if his friend didn’t know how to begin to begin to figure out how to help him. You can’t help me, Ash, Julian wanted to say. You can’t help a husk whose fruits have fallen and rotted on the ground.

“Explain my injuries,” Julian said.

“I can’t explain them,” Ashton said, “but you entered a triathlon event without my knowledge. You spent a year growing a sick beard without explanation and shaved it off without explanation.”

“I shaved it off because in 1666 men didn’t have beards.”

“Oh, that’s why. You’re boxing, caving, fencing. I can’t explain any of those things. 1666. Is that when you became a landlord in a brothel ?”

“Yes.”

“You, Julian Cruz, son of a professor and a principal, were a caretaker in a house of women who got naked and had sex for money?”

“Yes.”

“I’m supposed to believe this?”

“ That’s the part you find unbelievable? Not wormholes and—”

“Frankly, yes. Okay, from the top. You fell in love with a girl, but then she died.”

“Yes.”

“And you found a charlatan who showed you how to travel back in time to find her.”

“A shaman, but yes.”

“Potato, potahtoe. You traveled into this past.”

“Yes.”

“Not once but twice .”

“Yes.”

“And you found her, and fell in love with her again, and she with you, and both times, she died.”

“Yes.”

“And you were a landlord in a brothel ?”

Persuasion #1: Julian showed Ashton the list of casualties from Mallory’s yellowing but intact Bill of Mortality. “Look at the paper. It’s from 1665. Why is it still in such good condition?”

“That’s your proof? How the hell should I know?”

“Because,” Julian said, “the paper is only a year old, not four hundred years old.”

Apoplexie 1

Burned in his bed by a candle 1

Canker 1

Cough 2

Fright 3

Grief 3

Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1

Lethargy 1

Suddenly 1

Timpany 1

Plague 7165

“What’s timpany?” Ashton said.

“ That’s your question?”

“How does one die suddenly?”

“That’s your question?”

“How does one die of grief, I wonder.”

“To paraphrase John Green,” Julian said, uncle of nieces besotted with Hazel and Augustus, “slowly, and all at once.”

Persuasion #2: Julian took Ashton to the Silver Cross, off Craig’s Court on lit-up Whitehall. It was a Friday night. They ate. They drank. They read the plaque on the wall. “THE SILVER CROSS HAS BEEN THE SITE OF A PUBLIC HOUSE SINCE THE 17 THCENTURY AND WAS EVEN THE SITE OF A LICENSED BROTHEL.”

Persuasion #3: Julian tried to hand Ashton his breeches and tunic.

“You got them in a costume store,” Ashton said, pulling his arms behind his back.

Persuasion #4: The Elizabethan gold coin.

“It’s fake,” Ashton said.

“Do you want to know how much one of these fake coins is worth today?”

“Fine, but it’ll prove nothing.”

Julian showed him the online collector’s currency markets. An Elizabeth I gold sovereign in fairly good condition, not mint condition, was selling for £50,000. “And there were 48 more.”

“So you say.” Ashton fake-shrugged. “Yours isn’t real. And even if it is real, so what? You found it on the street.”

“I found fifty thousand quid on the street. That sounds normal to you.”

“Jules, we left normal back at Tequila Cantina’s when you showed me a ring for a chick whose mother you’d never met.”

Persuasion #5: The pièce de résistance. Julian took Ashton to St. Giles at Cripplegate. He would unveil for his friend the ultimate proof—the gold in the wall. They went to a hardware store, purchased a hammer, a chisel, a bucket, a trowel, and some mortar.

“You know,” Ashton said, pointing to the supplies in Julian’s hands, “when someone is sick and you entertain him in his sickness, you become an accomplice in his disorder.”

“Let’s see what you say after I show you a leather purse full of ancient gold coins hidden in the London Wall.”

“ After, I’ll be visiting you in jail,” said Ashton, “because it’s against the law to deface a historical monument. Douchebaggery most foul. Vandalism in the first degree. In Singapore you’d get fifty lashes.”

Ashton kept watch on a bench by the church, while across the narrow canal, over a hanging bridge, Julian spent the afternoon walking up and down the same fifty feet, feeling the remains of the crumbling Roman wall with his hands. When he reached the end near the circular turret, he’d turn around and creep back, inch by inch searching for the Kentish ragstone spackled by an amateur mason. Sometimes Ashton was on his phone, but mostly, he sat and watched Julian.