And it was cosmically strange.
The chain of events that Isaac Newton had set in motion two (and three) centuries earlier had resulted in this incredible junction of beings from two separate worlds meeting in a third. In a hotel room.
As he sat watching her in the long hours of the night, measuring her pulse and listening to her breathing, Stanton had a constant sensation of being out of body. As if all the various versions of himself he now knew to have existed were somehow separate to him. His first life, which had ended with the spearmint kiss of a stranger in a cellar in Istanbul. His second, which was a mystery to him except for the knowledge that he had lived it in the century into which the woman sleeping near him had been born. And born long after he must have died. And now this third life, which began when his scarred and tattooed patient had first made her imprint in the dust on the cellar floor in Constantinople, and so rebooted the loop, thus sending Stanton and the whole world back around it once again.
And who was she? What terrible things had been done to her? And why? What world had these other Chronations been seeking to fix?
Having washed and cleaned her each day, he knew her scars by now as well as she must have known them herself. Better, in fact, particularly the crazed white spaghetti of healed lacerations that covered her back and buttocks and the backs of her legs.
These were marks of a cruel and terrifying abuse. She had suffered under a thick lash. A cat o’ nine tails. Thin canes and heavy batons. She’d been stabbed with a stiletto dagger, slashed with knives and bitten by men and animals. She’d been shot and she had been burned. Stanton felt naked fury welling up inside him to see evidence of such abuse.
How had she even survived it?
The same way that she was currently surviving her near fatal encounter with septicaemia. Because she was clearly the toughest individual he had ever encountered, male or female. Not as strong as him, certainly, but immeasurably tougher.
Nonetheless, even a superwoman should have been dead with the kind of punishment and cruelty this woman had sustained. Clearly whoever had tormented her had also prevented her from dying. It seemed to Stanton that they had been trying to break her, and had refused to allow her release until they had done so. They had tortured her and beaten her but each time they had stitched her wounds and set her broken bones, the obvious conclusion being that they had done this in order that she would get well enough for them to attack her again.
Who did that? Who cared so much about controlling another person, bending them to their will? Subduing the spirit of a single individual?
He stared at the sleeping woman.
She didn’t look so tough now.
Asleep on her pillow, her face framed by the white nightcap, the snowy sheets against her chin, her breath gentle and even. What dreams were diverting her subconscious, he wondered.
She had a fine face. Sharp and angular but noble. The nose had been broken and was bent, but not disfiguringly so. Stanton found himself wondering if she might even be beautiful.
He would know when he could see her eyes. He’d seen them once but only for a moment and then wild with fire and from a faraway place. He didn’t know what colour they were.
Speculating on the colour of her eyes brought his thoughts almost inevitably to Bernadette. Those green and sparkling Irish eyes. Smiling eyes as the old song had it. Not smiling, though, the last time they’d met his. Then they’d been wet with anger and pain. Would he ever see them smile again?
He felt his own eyes closing. He was tired; he had tended the woman for days, getting very little sleep. His head nodded in his chair.
Almost asleep now. His breathing falling into a rhythm with that of his strange and mysterious charge. His comrade. In many ways a sort of sister.
But as he drifted he sensed the movement.
Of course he’d known he should have manacled her, secured her to the bed. But somehow he hadn’t been able to bring himself to. Her wrists and ankles showed the marks of having been bound so many times, sore, permanently bruised and scarred. He just couldn’t add to that. And she’d seemed so peaceful.
She wasn’t peaceful any more.
His eyes snapped open to be confronted by a vision of death. An avenging angel, clad in voluminous white, descending on him like a snow eagle swooping down on a rabbit.
He saw her eyes now as she fell towards him, burning embers in a face of ice.
There had been a fountain pen and paper by her bed, with which Stanton had been keeping a diary of her symptoms. The pen was in her fist now. An inky dagger. She must have been aware of it for a while. Lying in bed, feigning unconsciousness, awaiting her chance.
There is always a weapon available if you care to find it.
That’s what his SAS fight instructor had told him. Clearly she’d been taught the same lesson.
The pen was descending fast, its nib closing on his right eye, the ball of which it would pop before travelling on into his brain.
Stanton turned his head in time. The nib tore into the top of his earlobe and crumpled against his skull. The trajectory of her dive completed, the woman crashed down on top of him, her whole body against his, toe to toe, head to head, together in the easy chair.
This was Stanton’s chance, an opportunity to use his greater weight. He rolled her, and even in this moment of extremis he was clear-headed enough to try not to land her on her injured arm. He wanted her well enough so that he could persuade her to stop trying to kill him.
The two of them rolled out of the chair, tipping it over on top of them as they hit the carpet. This time Stanton was on top, an advantage which he put to immediate use by pinning her.
‘Stop this!’ he spat in English, the language she had used to him. ‘I’m your friend. I saved you.’
‘You shot me!’ she snarled. It was the first time he’d heard her speak since the moment in the hospital when she’d imagined in her delirium that he was trying to rape her. Did she sound Scottish?
‘You shot me!’ Stanton heard himself protesting.
‘Because you were about to kill the fucking Kaiser, you fuck!’
‘Because of Chronos,’ he grunted, struggling to keep her pinned. ‘I’m a Companion of Chronos. I know what you are. I know about Chronos. I’m from Chronos too.’
To Stanton’s astonishment she actually smiled, stopped struggling and smiled.
Except it wasn’t a smile of pleasure or fun, it was bitter and cold, really more of a sneer.
‘I know. Asshole,’ she said. ‘I know you’re from Chronos.’
‘You know?’
Stanton was so astonished he momentarily relaxed his grip. Fortunately she didn’t detect the half second of weakness, or if she did she decided not to exploit it.
‘How do you know?’ he asked.
‘We read your letter.’
It was the last thing he’d expected. In fact, with all the distraction of discovering that he was not the only visitor from the future and of then establishing contact with his counterpart, he’d forgotten all about his letter. It had only ever been the longest of long shots that it would survive. A desperate throw of the dice, a nod towards history.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘It was still there?’
‘Yes, it was there. We found it on the night we entered the cellar. On the night I journeyed back in time.’
Now it was her body that relaxed. She no longer seemed predisposed to fight.
‘So … can we talk?’ Stanton asked. ‘If I release you from this pin-down will you go back to bed, let me check you haven’t done yourself any harm trying to kill me and let me order some tea so we can talk?’
She thought for a moment, then nodded.
Warily he released her and got to his feet. Reaching down he offered her a hand. He could see the thought process in her mind. This was a woman who clearly viewed every moment and every gesture with maximum suspicion. But she was still weak and her violent strike at him had tired her.