ward off the river's noxious fumes.
It made her easy to identify.
Edward Oxford pounced on her in Nine Elms Lane and pulled her into a secluded walled courtyard at the side of an empty carriage house.
Sarah knew that things like this happened. Girls were forced to do things they didn't want to do and men got away with it.
Don't fight, she told herself. It will be over more quickly.
Then her assailant turned her and she saw him.
She fought.
Fingernails raked the side of Oxford's helmet, slipped off it and onto his cheek, and gouged into the skin. Teeth bit into his wrist. He lost his grip on her, regained it, was overbalanced, and fell, pulling her down with him. They rolled on the dusty ground, thrashing about, her cries echoing from the walls.
'Get off me! Leave me alone! Help! Police!'
Her elbow rammed into his chin and his head snapped back.
He flew into a wild rage and pressed his whole weight onto her, forcing her down, his crazed eyes inches from hers.
She spat in his face. He banged the front of his helmet into her forehead. She went limp.
Oxford lifted himself from her and stood.
She groaned and sat up, blinked, and looked at him.
'Are you from a carnival?' she asked.
'No. Get up.'
She clambered to her feet.
'Just answer a question and you can go,' he said.
'You won't hurt me?'
'No.'
A bolt of energy suddenly snapped from his control unit and hit her in the chest. She flew backward into a wall and slumped to the ground.
Oxford yelled in pain and stumbled.
'Christ!' he gasped.
Another shock jolted through him. He toppled over and passed out.
He came to his senses moments later.
'Home in time for supper,' he mumbled, not knowing what he was saying.
Sarah Lovitt was either dead or out cold. He giggled manically at the thought that she might be a corpse with a rainbow on her chest.
A minute later he discovered that he was wrong on both counts. She had a pulse but no birthmark.
It was June 20, 1840. Ten days had passed since the brutal assassination of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
'Tallyho, Edward! Bon voyage!' said Henry de La Poet Beresford in the grounds of Darkening Towers. He watched Oxford blink out of existence in midair, then turned and walked toward the veranda doors. Before reaching them, he heard a thud behind him.
He looked back and saw the time traveller lying in a heap on the lawn.
'That was fast!' he cried, running over to his friend. 'Are you all right?'
Oxford turned over and looked up at him. Beresford stepped back in shock. The man from the future seemed to have aged twenty years.
'What the devil happened, Edward? You look terrible!'
'None of them!' rasped the stilt-man. 'No birthmarks! I've spent God knows how many hours exposed to your stinking damned past and all for nothing!'
Beresford dropped to his haunches, unbuckled Oxford's boots, and pulled them off.
'Come on,' he said. 'Let's get you inside.'
Two hours later, despite the removal of his malfunctioning suit, a hearty meal, and a glass of brandy, Oxford had fallen into a virtually catatonic state. His eyes, the whites visible all the way around the irises, stared fixedly at the wall. The muscles to either side of his jaw clenched spasmodically. He had told Beresford very little, just that none of the Battersea Brigade girls bore the crescent-shaped mark.
The marquess was, nevertheless, as sure as he could be that one of them would, in the not too distant future, become mother to a girl with such a mark.
Now the search must switch to that descendant.
THE BATTLE OF OLD FOLD AND ITS AFTERMATH
All NO is false, all NO is true:
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes
His little bit the whole to own.
CORD BYRON
It took him nearly three months to recover his wits,' said Henry de la Poet Beresford. 'Though `recover' may be too optimistic a word, for I assure you that, by this point, the time traveller was quite demented.'
Supporting himself on his knuckles, he lurched around the banqueting table as he continued his tale; and every word he uttered, in that thick, guttural voice of his, was heard by Sir Richard Francis Burton, who lay hidden overhead.
'We arranged to meet again on September 28, 1843. He did his vanishing trick, and, over the course of the next three years, I monitored the Battersea girls, their marriages, and their subsequent children. By this time, of course, my reputation was such as to make it impossible to get close to the families, and I was unable to establish which of the daughters bore the Oxford birthmark.
'I reported this to Oxford three years after he'd departed, and he flew into such a fit of temper that, had he dropped dead from apoplexy, I would not have been surprised. For an entire night, he ranted and raged. Then he demanded that I keep track of the children, and informed me that he'd not be back until eighteen years had passed; that is to say, not until September 28 of this year, when the Battersea children would be of age; old enough for him to sire an ancestor by!'
'Yesterday was the twenty-eighth!' exclaimed Nurse Nightingale.
'Yes,' confirmed Beresford. 'His decision was a blow to me, for by now I was plotting to get rid of the insane fool and claim his suit for my own. I tried to persuade him to visit sooner-damn it, I almost begged!-but he steadfastly refused, maintaining that it would be a pointless waste of his suit's dwindling resources.
'As he left this very room through those veranda doors, I ran to the morning room, took a pistol from the cabinet there, and ran back, intending to shoot him dead in the grounds. I was too late; he was gone.
'Over the ensuing years, I never lost sight of the Battersea families, but I'll admit that after the Libertines split and the newly formed Rake faction grew in influence and demanded more of my attention, the whole Oxford affair became more and more dreamlike. Had I really played host to a man from the future? Might it have been a drunken hallucination?
'Eighteen years is a long time; memory plays tricks; doubt casts the past in a different light. Frankly, I never
