Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (39 page)

 
          
 
"They do. They say you come near to
killing yourself over the dog, nearly struck by a wagon.
Chased
off that bloody mastiff, too.
That's what they say."

 
          
 
"Well." St. Ives was at a momentary
loss. "They exaggerate. Old Furry's a good pup. Anyone would have done the
same."

 
          
 
"Anyone didn't do it, lad. You did, and I
thank you for it."

 
          
 
Anyone didn't know to do it, St. Ives thought,
feeling like a fraud. He hadn't so much chosen to save the dog as he had been
destined to save the dog. Well, that wasn't quite true, either. The past few
hours had made a hash of the destiny notion—unless there were infinite
destinies waiting in the wings, all of them in different costumes. One destiny
at a time, he told himself, and with the help of Binger and his sons, St. Ives
hauled the time machine to the barn, in among the cows, and then Mr. Binger
drove him most of the way back to the manor. He walked the last half mile,
thinking that if Parsons was lurking about, it would be better not to reveal that
Binger was an accomplice.

 
          
 
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 blear-

 
          
 
"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 litde 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.

 
          
 
He turned to look, and with a vast relief he
saw that they would outdistance the coach, except that just then the saddle
slewed downward and St. Ives with it, and for a long moment he grappled himself
to the horse's flank, yanking himself back up finally with a handful of mane.
He snatched wildly at the girth, trying to unfasten the buckle as old Ben
galloped up a little rise. St. Ives cursed himself for having bothered with the
saddle in the first place, of all the damned treacherous things. Somehow the
girth was as tight as it could be now, wedged around sideways like it was. And
it was behind his thigh, too, where he couldn't see it, and old Ben didn't seem
to care a damn about any of it, but galloped straight on up the middle of the
road.

 
          
 
They crested the rise, and there before them,
coming along peaceably, was another coach, very elegant and driven by a man in
bright red livery. The driver shouted at St. Ives, drawing hard on the reins
and driving the coach very nearly into the ditch.

 
          
 
A white-haired head appeared through the coach
window just then—Dr. Frost himself, his eyes flying open in surprise when he
saw who it was that galloped past him on a horse that was saddled sideways.
Frost shouted, but what he said was lost on the wind. St. Ives tugged hard on
the girth, feeling it give at last, and then with a sliding rush, the saddle
fell straight down onto the
road,
and old Ben tripped
right over it, stumbling and nearly going down. St. Ives clutched the horse's
neck, his eyes shut. And then the horse was up again, and flying toward
Binger's
like
a thoroughbred.

 
          
 
When St. Ives looked back, Frost's coach had
blocked the road. It was turning around, coming after him. Parsons's coach was
reining up behind it. Good, let them get into each other's way. He could
imagine that Parsons was apoplectic over the delay, and once again he laughed
out loud as he thundered along, hugging old Ben's neck, straight through
Binger's gate and up the drive toward the barn.

 
          
 
"They're after me, Mr. Binger!" St.
Ives yelled, leaping down off the horse.