Enthusiastic applause concluded the speech, and the man on stage bowed low and received the accolades of his colleagues. Another man joined the first on stage and made a brief announcement of which Kit failed to understand a single word, and then the audience was on its feet, crowding the aisles, and moving toward the doors. “This way!” said Cosimo, pushing into the aisle. He proceeded to fight his way upstream toward the front of the auditorium, dragging Kit behind him.
“Sir Henry!” called Cosimo, waving his arm. “Sir Henry!”
“Mr. Livingstone!” came the reply. The tall, lanky man surged toward them using his long black walking stick to ease his passage through the throng. “Welcome, dear friend,” he cried, gripping Cosimo’s hand. “I trust this meeting finds you as well as you appear.”
“Never better. It is good to see you, Sir Henry. I must say, it has been far too long.”
“I was beginning to fear you had forgotten our rendezvous,” said the lecturer. “I am delighted to discover my trepidations were completely unfounded.”
“Wild horses could not keep me away,” replied Cosimo. Turning to the young man beside him, he said, “Sir Henry, I am delighted to present my great-grandson, Christopher.”
The nobleman turned his attention to Kit, who was in no way prepared to be the object of an almost blistering intensity of interest. One glance into those razor-keen eyes and Kit felt he had been peeled to the pith. “A pleasure, sir!” cried the lecturer, seizing the young man’s hand in a ferocious grip. “An unalloyed pleasure.”
“Likewise,” mumbled Kit.
“Kit,” said Cosimo, “I present to you my dear friend and colleague Sir Henry Fayth, Lord Castlemain, a man of extraordinary accomplishments in many fields-astronomy, chemistry, geology, and engineering to name a few. In short, a polymath and scholar of the first order.”
Lord Castlemain gave a tap of his walking stick and bowed low. “As always, dear friend, your flattery overreaches its humble mark.”
“Nonsense! It is the simple truth, nothing more,” replied Cosimo grandly. “Now then, I believe I requested the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight. Will you honour me with your presence at my table, Sir Henry?”
“Nothing would delight me more, dear fellow. Indeed, I have held myself in the utmost anticipation all day. But-and I really must insist on this-it shall be my pleasure and mine alone to treat you to table.” Cosimo opened his mouth to object, but Sir Henry held up his hand. “No, sir! I will not hear nay. Come, let us not fall out over trifles.”
“What can I say?” Cosimo bowed in deference to his friend’s wishes. “We accept your hospitality.”
“Splendid! I do hope you are hungry, good sirs.”
“Ravenous!” roared Cosimo-so loudly that Kit gave a start. But no one else seemed to pay the least attention. “But, might we first pass by Pudding Lane? I have that errand we discussed.”
“Certainly, sir. Let us not suffer a moment’s delay,” said Sir Henry and, stick held high, charged off through the crowd. “Please, this way my friends, if you will. My chariot awaits.”
Kit fell into step behind the two men and, although labouring under the strong impression that he had wandered onto a movie set during filming, he had to admit that he was taken in by the very formal, and wholly archaic, manner of the man. And in all his wildest dreams, he had never once imagined he would ever hear anyone actually say the words “my chariot awaits” and mean it literally.
The vehicle in question turned out to be a large and well-appointed coach with an enclosed passenger box and generous windows. As the night was good, the windows were open, and taking the seat facing rearward opposite the two older men, Kit settled into the sumptuous upholstered leather. The door closed, the driver flicked his whip, and they were soon bumping along the darkened streets of Olde London Towne to the fine clip-clop of a matched pair of enormous chestnut mares. This, thought Kit, feeling more and more like minor royalty, was the only civilised way to travel.
Hard on the heels of this thought came another: none of this is real.
This thought led inevitably to a third: you’ve fallen and struck your head on a rock, and when you wake up in hospital three weeks will have passed and you will be on a ventilator with tubes up your nose and wires attached to your broken cranium.
That was surely a safer explanation than the one where he was forced to admit that what was happening to him was in some way really happening.
Still, weren’t those horses a lovely sight?
CHAPTER 6
In Which Kit Acquires an Apostle Spoon
The carriage clattered along the darkened streets of an alien London, the iron-rimmed wheels bouncing over uneven cobbles, until at last it rolled to a stop outside a tumbledown thatched house in a cramped street of low clapboard dwellings. “Please remain seated, gentlemen,” said Cosimo. “It is but the work of a moment.” He disembarked and hurried to the rough plank door that supported a crudely hand-lettered placard: THOS. FARRYNER, BAKER.
Glancing up and down the narrow street, Cosimo banged on the door with the flat of his hand. When that failed to produce a result, he picked up a loose cobble and began beating on the planks, rattling the door on its hinges. In a moment, there came a cry from inside and the door flung open. “Here! Here now! Wot’r ye about then?”
“Sorry to bother you at this late hour, my good man,” said Cosimo. “I wonder if I might trouble you for a loaf of bread?”
“I be closed!” cried the somewhat woozy man. “You’ve woke me up, you have!”
“I do most heartily apologise and beg your pardon,” replied Cosimo. “But, seeing as you are awake now, might I purchase the bread? Any old loaf will do.”
“Hold yer water, then,” grumbled Thomas the baker. He shuffled back inside, reappearing a few moments later with a round lump of bread. “That’s a ha’penny to you.”
“Here’s tuppence for your trouble,” said Cosimo, passing over the coins. “You can thank me later.”
“Tch!” replied the baker, and slammed the door.
Cosimo returned to the coach with the bread under his arm. “That should do it very nicely,” he chortled, climbing back into the coach. “Drive on!”
As the coach jolted to a start once more, Kit puzzled over the meaning of the charade he had just witnessed. Finally, when he could no longer help himself, he asked, “What was all that about? What do you want with stale bread?”
“Oh, this?” His great-grandfather glanced at the loaf beside him on the seat. “But I don’t want it at all.”
With that, he took the loaf and, calling, “Free bread!” tossed it from the carriage to a clutch of poorly dressed women who had gathered around a lantern that cast a pale circle of light onto their bare heads and shoulders. One of them caught the loaf and at once began dividing it up among the others. “Thank-ee!” she called with a gap-toothed smile.
“Don’t you remember anything you learned in school?” asked Cosimo.
“Not much,” confessed Kit.
“Second of September… year 1666… Pudding Lane? No?”
“Sorry, not with you.” Neither the date nor the place rang any bells.
“Why, it’s the Great Fire, dear boy. Never heard of it? What do they teach in school these days?”
“That I’ve heard of.” Kit thought for a moment. “So, by waking the baker you’ve prevented the fire-is that it?”
“Well done! There might be hope for you yet.”
“But isn’t that hazardous-messing with events?”
“Well, why not?”
“You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden.”