6

Moll’s diary.

JHS has tort me to read. I catch on fast, he says. He don’t no the harf. So I’m starting a diary too, Jake, all for you, and locking it in my room so that snivelfacd creep Hassan can’t read it and split on me.

Been a year now in this posh crib. Good dresses, a coat, boots withaht holes. No rozzers after me, no punks pinching my stuff. Warm bed, food, plenty of it. JHS likes his grub.

Working every day with the mirror. But you no what? No braslet, so nothing works . . .

Jake said he’d cum back for me. Swore he wood.

Cum on, Jake. Hurry up and get me.

I’m waiting, Jake.

Moll’s diary. 6 months later.

Today JHS nearly exploded with excitement. He’s been writing to some scolar who says he knows where there’s a bracelet just like the one we need. The letter came at breakfast; JHS came bursting into the kitchen (because I have to eat there with Hassan and Mrs. C since he met the LOVE OF HIS BLOODY LIFE).

“My coat, Moll!” he says. “Quick!” His face was as red as a turkey-cock’s comb.

Mrs. C rolled her eyes. She thinks JHS is for the Bedlam over the mirror. She hates it, won’t even dust it. Says it’s a black eye watching her and she might fall into it and go down and down and down, skirts over her head, still holding the feather duster.

Anyway, I grab his coat and we (me and JHS) jump in a cab.

“Where are we going?”

“The Ash Moleyan,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“What’s that, sir. Why do I keep having to remind you of your manners, Moll!” He gets tetchy over that. Remember your place, girl, I thought. I kept shtum.

Till he says, “That’s a museum, in Oxford. I’ve been corresponding with them, about the bracelet, and they’ve got one, Moll! They’ve got one!”

“Just like Jake’s?” I say, all quiet.

“From the description here it sounds absolutely identical! Silver snake swallowing its tail, the amber stone in the center . . .” He couldn’t sit still he was so took up. “Just think, Moll, if it’s what I’ve been searching for for years! As things stand, I dare not use the mirror myself until I’m sure I can return. But both Venn and David Wilde had such a bracelet; they were a pair, and a pair must exist in our time too, somewhere. They simply must!”

He went off into a mumble and then a dream and I let him, Jake, because I like looking out at the streets, all them crossing-sweepers and peelers I used to know. We drove past Hayes, the butchers what set his dog on me once and he saw me and stared and I waved like the Queen. Then stuck my tongue at him.

It’s hard to get used to, being upper clars.

And why did the bracelets have to exist in our time? What if there was only one pair and they were the same ones all through . . . but then it all got too complicated and my brain went giddy.

You’d know, Jake, I’ll bet . . .

At the station we got the 9:30 train for Oxford. I sat opposite JHS in First. A woman got into our compartment and looked at me through her specs like I was an ant with measles.

JHS read the letter over and over and then fell asleep with it on his lap. It fell off and I picked it up and read it. Lots of guff, lots of long words. But the bracelet sounds the same.

Won’t let myself get all excited, though.

Won’t let myself think about you, Jake.

At Oxford we got out. Gave the old biddy the finger. Doubt she even knew what it meant.

The Ashmolean is a big museum full of all sorts of junk, and Bill the Brick (they called him that because he could smash one with his fist), who used to fence my stuff, would pop his eyeballs at some of it. JHS made a fuss in the entrance hall and they got a little foreign-looking cully with glasses that made his eyes wide as an owl’s, to come down.

“Mr. Harcourt Symmes? Good morning, sir. I have to say we weren’t expecting you quite so soon.”

Symmes shoved the letter in his face. “I came at once. This bracelet. It’s exactly as you describe it?”

“I assure you—”

“Then let me see it, man, immediately. I can’t tell you how much this could mean to the scientific research I am in the process of . . .” Blah, blah, blather, blather.

The long and short of it is I’m dragged after them through endless rooms of rust and dust and broken pots. Once I got a big shock and screeched and they both stopped and stared at me.

“What?” Symmes asked.

Couldn’t they see? I pointed at the dead geezer in the painted coffin. Talk about a stiff.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Moll.” JHS caught my arm and whisked me on. “It’s ancient Egyptian. It’s not going to hurt you.”

He smiled a sort of ghastly grin at the other man. “My niece. I’m bringing her up, having rescued her from . . . a very difficult childhood.”

Owl-Eyes stared at me, his lips as tight as a mouse’s arse.

We got into a big gallery. Owl-Eyes switched the gas on and I saw long glass cases packed full of serious tin—silver, gold, diamonds.

He took out a small key and unlocked a case and lifted out a bracelet.

Me and JHS stared at it.

The silver creature crawled round and swallowed its own tail. An amber crystal glowed in its heart.

I would have recognized it anywhere, even though I really only saw it for a few minutes, when you showed me after we got it back from the thieves at Skimble’s.

Those were the days, eh Jake?

JHS cleared his throat and shook his big shiny head and made a big effort. “Ah. How unfortunate. It is not at all the same. Quite unlike. The whole design is . . . er totally different. Isn’t that so, Moll?”

I nodded, deadpan. “Nothink like it, Uncle John, Your Honor, sir. Nothink like it at all.”

Oberon Venn stood before the obsidian mirror.

In it he could see his own reflection, his face all angles, a pale glimmer in the depths of the dark glass.

For a moment he could not recognize himself. The mirror showed him something insubstantial, wavering, a being caught halfway between existing and not existing. He wondered if it could see into his soul, into the fluttering indecisive thing he had become. That Summer had made of him.

Maskelyne and Gideon watched, the changeling standing, arms folded, in the heart of the malachite web, the scarred man seated at the control panel. The baby, Lorenzo, crawled unnoticed on the dirty floor.

Venn said, “And you’re sure Sarah went after them unseen?”

“Piers says the cat says so.”

Venn nodded, reluctant. “That girl . . . She really is a true Venn.”

He came forward and gripped the silver frame, its unknown letters. As he closed his fingers around it, the mirror gave the smallest shiver; only Maskelyne sensed it, and he looked up and saw that Venn, as always now, was wearing the remaining bracelet locked tight around his wrist.

“Step back,” he said quietly. “The mirror knows you’re there.”

“Does it?” Venn stared into his own cold eyes. “Does it know what I want? Does it know where they all are, the lost ones, Leah, David, Jake?”

Piers came running in, breathless. The little man wore his white lab coat, the pockets stuffed with papers and wires. In his arms he carried a tall pile of books with the marmoset balanced precariously on top of it. Seeing Venn, his gaze widened with alarm.

“Be careful, Excellency.”

Venn was still, as if by his own despair he could conjure something, anything, from those black, heartless depths. When at last he did step back, his face was gaunt.

He turned to Gideon.

“Summer is holding Wharton. As a hostage for you.”

Gideon folded his arms over his patchwork coat. The news was a shock, but he managed to keep his voice steady. “Then I truly feel sorry for him.”

“The fool thought he had some sort of choice, thought he was being heroic, giving himself up.” Venn’s ice-blue gaze held the changeling in contempt. “I won’t force you to go back. But don’t you think you should . . .”

Gideon shrugged, calm. “No, I don’t. Summer doesn’t keep bargains. The Shee don’t understand fair or unfair. If I went back, she’d still torment him and probably imprison both of us in some dungeon in the Summerland. It’s a pity about him. But I’m more use to you here.”

Venn nodded. “A cool judgment. You’ve grown very like them.”

Annoyed, Gideon paled. “I don’t think so.”

“No? If Jake was in your place, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d be furious, reckless. He’d be storming into the Wood to save Wharton right now.”

That was true; Gideon knew it. He felt the familiar stirring of self-hatred, of shame, but Venn turned away abruptly, and said nothing more.

Gideon breathed out. Then, seeing Piers’s bright eye on him, he growled, “Keep your opinions to yourself, little man. You wouldn’t go.”

“Well no,” Piers said, “I don’t suppose I would. But then I’m not a mortal. I don’t have to be brave and stupid.”

He turned to Venn. “Excellency, this is what you asked for. Like I told you, I found it under a floorboard in Sarah’s room—she had a stash of stuff there. She must have had the hiding place in the future time, when the house is ruined. If that makes sense.” He fished a small gray notebook out of the pile and laid it on the workbench. “And this.”

A black pen, with a capital Z on its cap.

Venn picked the notebook up and opened it.

He flicked through the messages she had written, and Janus’s mocking answers. One of them caught his eye.

DO I HAVE TO SEND MORE OF MY TIME WOLVES AFTER YOU, DEAR SARAH? DO I HAVE TO HUNT YOU DOWN TO STOP YOU DESTROYING THE MIRROR?

NO, I DON’T. I CAN SIT BACK AND SMILE. VENN WILL DO MY JOB FOR ME. VENN WILL PROTECT THE CHRONOPTIKA BECAUSE VENN IS THE MOST SELFISH OF BEINGS. HE WOULD SACRIFICE THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD FOR HIS OWN HAPPINESS. AND SO HE WILL ENABLE MY TYRANNY TO BEGIN.

It stabbed him like a thin blade of fear in his heart, a sliver of ice. It was clever and mocking and it would have hurt her all the more because she would have thought it was true.

Bitter, he looked up. “Why did she communicate with him like this?”

“Know your enemy, they say.” Maskelyne came and picked up the pen. “This is interesting. The notebook is just ordinary paper. The pen, however, is the device that coveys the message. It is some creation of the future. She must have brought it with her.”

Venn took it from him and looked at the letter Z on the cap. Then he said, “It makes me think. What if it was Janus who took Jake? What if Sarah guessed that when she went after them? Who else can send Replicants across time?”

“We won’t know, unless—”

“Unless we ask him.”

Venn took the black pen and strode to the mirror. In huge, angry letters he scrawled a message over the black glass.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH JAKE?

Through the hothouse window Sarah saw a paradise such as she had never believed could really exist. She opened the door and went out and stared.

A great park stretched downhill before her, its green lawns perfectly smooth. Between neat paths, formal gardens were laid out in squares and rectangles, immaculate with parterres of white shell, dark cinders, crushed terracotta gravel. Box trees, cut in precise balls or tidy triangles, stood in containers. Great urns of roses perfumed the summer air, and as she looked up, doves rose in a cloud from the roof of the hothouse.

“My message was for you to wait inside!”

Sarah turned.

The thin Englishman was back; with a shock she realized that he could see her.

Behind him a château, a vast white sugar-icing palace rose against the blue sky, its windows perfect, its symmetrical steps leading up to a pillared colonnade.

He glanced around. Grabbing her arm, he hustled her back into the steamy greenhouse. “Bloody stupid girl!” He hurried to the Conjurer automaton and pulled a parcel from under its seat. “These are your clothes. Your contact in the kitchen is the woman called Madame Lepage. She’s in the plot. Get changed, quickly.”

She said, “But you. You’re—”

“Long Tom. I’m inside too, with the metal puppets. You know all about the plan? You can do what we need?”

Baffled, she said, “Of course . . . But—”

“Good. Then hurry! Get dressed now.”

He shoved the parcel at her; she took it and ducked between the giant leaves.

The Scribe automata watched her with its vacant glass eyes; she wished it could truly answer questions because she had absolutely no idea at all what was going on here. Opening the parcel, she found the dark plain dress of a kitchen maid, a white apron, a frilly cap. As she changed quickly, bundling her own clothes into the bag, she said, “You snatched the boy Jake, didn’t you?”

“How the hell do you know about that?”

“I heard . . . talk.”

“Yes, we got him.” The tall man laughed. “Went straight in and kidnapped him from his bed. Arrogant brat too. Don’t know why she was so keen.”

Sarah paused, half buttoned. “She?”

“Some sort of twisted revenge, maybe? Some joke? You never know with our little contessa. Are you done?”

She hurried out, breathless.

“Why is your hair so short!” He glanced at her, anxious. “Well, maybe the cap hides that . . . Remember, your name is Adelie, you’re madame’s niece, just here tonight to help for the Midsummer Ball.”

She said, “I don’t know a word of French.”

Long Tom swore a lurid oath. “Where in hell’s dregs did they find you? Then just keep your mouth shut. Okay?”

Bewildered, she nodded. “Okay,” she said.

As he turned swiftly toward the château, she said, panicking, “About the ball . . .”

He glanced back. “The vicomte’s invited half of Paris. You know what to do. The door in the moon has to be open by the stroke of midnight. Don’t forget.” He pulled his hat on, wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Too hot here. Too dangerous. We must be mad.”

Then he was gone, a flicker in the brilliant sunlight.

Sarah smoothed her dress with shaky hands. All right. Think. They—whoever they were—had mistaken her for some other girl. They could journey. They had the mirror, and at least one bracelet. And they were planning something for the Midsummer Ball, something that involved Jake.

Which meant, presumably, that they would be bringing him here.

To do what? What was this plot? To steal something? Murder someone?

She looked up. The glorious confection of the château stood serene under its blue sky. But a few miles back there, in Paris, the crowds were screaming around the guillotine. Blood was running in the gutters, and mobs roaming the streets. How long before the heedless aristocrats holed up here felt that wrath?

She had to find out more. About where Jake was, and about the mysterious contessa.

Not to mention, she thought as she set off for the kitchens, about finding a door in the moon.