arabesque of filigreed lines; wave-tumbled rocks did not feature a curved row of tiny holes along one side, nor sport a knurled dial. Moreover, beach stones did not possess a central aperture that resembled a squinting eye from which radiated a gently pulsating indigo light-at least, not in Mina’s experience.
This last she had not seen herself, but had it on Gustavus’ authority that it was so. “The substance inside gives off light when it comes into contact with certain ethers,” the young alchemist had told her. Mina had no idea what these ethers were, but how the device was to be used was another matter.
As she pored over the peculiar instrument, she mustered the scant facts she possessed and tried to imagine how they might be applied to the task at hand. The instrument had been made according to a design supplied by Lord Burleigh to be employed by him for what the alchemists called astral exploration. If her hunch was right, the earl’s explorations were connected in some way to ley travel: the peculiar phenomenon that had plucked her from the twenty-first century and dropped her so rudely into the seventeenth. From what she could recall of the information Kit had imparted-fractured and confused as it was-and her own limited experience, ley travel was a thoroughly unpleasant and wholly unpredictable exercise that nevertheless could yield serendipitous results, and she was determined to repeat the procedure and, if possible, master it.
Although she no longer wished to return home to London-a lack of desire that she could not explain, even to herself-as an unwitting transplant in an alien world she felt it something of a duty to learn more about the means and mechanisms by which she had come to take up residence in another time and place. Burleigh’s device, she supposed, had something to do with facilitating such leaps, or calibrating them in some way, and this was where she would start.
She had decided that her experiments should take place in solitude, reasoning that whatever happened, it would be best if it happened out of sight so as not to alarm any casual passersby. So, after thoughtful deliberation on how to safely embark on the venture at hand, she had told Etzel that she wanted to go breathe some country air and perhaps collect some wildflowers. It was, after all, in the country that she had landed following her first and only ley jump. Leaving the coffee shop, she took the wagon out of the city and up into the surrounding hills. The day was bright and fine; an unseasonably warm spring was swiftly melding into summer-as good a day as any for an experiment in ley travel.
Holding the device in her hand, she puzzled over how to start. As she recalled, her first leap had been made simply by walking with purpose, so Mina began striding along the hilltop, holding the device before her as if it were a flashlight and she was trying to find a darkly hidden path. She stepped off fifty paces, turned, and walked back. When the expected result failed to materialise, she did the same thing in another direction and obtained the same disappointing result. The mechanism remained happily inert and uninvolved in her efforts. Undeterred, she took herself to a new spot farther away and tried again.
This went on for some time, and with no different result. After a while, Mina began to feel discouraged-not that she had expected to conquer the device easily, but she felt her efforts entitled her to some small reward for her determination, if not for the considerable effort she had made to obtain it in the first place.
In the end, she slipped Burleigh’s gismo into the pocket of her smock, collected a large bouquet of wildflowers, and bundled them into the wagon for the drive back to town. Over the next few weeks, she would try her experiments again in various locations around the outskirts of the city. Each time she returned better for the exercise, but no closer to unravelling the mystery of ley jumping.
Then one day it happened. Quite by accident, and on another errand entirely, she was walking along a sunny open stretch of the Moldau, the river dividing the city. She strolled through the lower town and out into the fields and farming hamlets of the countryside and, as always, had thoughts of the coffee house percolating away on the back burner of her mind. She had an eye peeled for a new source of honey for the bakery; her city purveyors all bought theirs in bulk from rural sources and offered it to her at a price that included a tidy profit for themselves. Well and good, but Engelbert’s recipes were using more and more sweetening as their patrons demanded pastries to compliment the natural bitterness of the coffee. Honey was the costliest ingredient, and Mina had begun thinking about contracting directly with country beekeepers to supply the commodity fresh from the source. By cutting out the middleman, both she and the beekeeper would get a better price, and she could guarantee a constant ready market.
She walked along beneath a sky of bird’s-egg blue, past fields of ripening barley, beets, turnips, and beans; small herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, and geese. The river rolled away to her right, its long, slow currents barely ruffling the quiet jade-green surface. Mother ducks surrounded by a flotilla of half-grown ducklings paddled among the weeds growing long at the banks, the little ones dibbling for insects and bits of edible flotsam.
A dairyman walking beside his donkey cart approached on the lane that ran along the bank; he tipped his hat as he passed. The air was momentarily filled with the slightly sour, milky scent of the dairy, and Wilhelmina was instantly plunged back into a time and place she scarcely remembered ever having been: a farm in Kent when she was barely six years old. It was a school trip, and her class had visited a farm that produced the milk she and her classmates drank every day from little bottles. The farmer had shown them into the separating room to see the huge machines at work dividing the raw milk from the cream; the smell of the room-strongly pungent and steeped in the sharp rancid odour of fermenting cheese-had so overwhelmed her young senses that it remained with her ever after.
She greeted the farmer and then paused to watch him on his way, breathing in the scent as he passed. Mina was still thinking about that school trip, so long forgotten but vividly revived, when the lane turned to follow a bend in the river and passed into a beech wood copse. The sunlight through the trees threw dappled shadows on the path, and she was looking at the pattern as she walked. She happened to slip her hand into her pocket and brushed Burleigh’s device. To her surprise, it was warm to the touch.
She looked down and saw a deep blue light burning through the fabric of her smock. The thing was glowing.
She stopped and with trembling fingers drew out the brass-encased device. A strong blue light streamed through the little holes that lined the curve of one side, and through the central half-moon aperture as well. Something had stirred the instrument to life, but what?
Mina gazed around her. She noted the trees, the leaf-shadowed lane, the wide sweep of the river, and even the cloud-spotted sky above and the birds soaring there. She regarded everything, yet saw nothing she supposed might trigger the sudden awakening of the curious little gismo that was even now filling her hand with an appreciable warmth.
Slowly, keeping her eyes on the object, she began walking again. The lane curved as it followed the river, and gradually the light in Burleigh’s object faded. She kept walking until the last little glimmer of blue light died. She turned and retraced her steps. As she half expected, after a few steps the glow rekindled… a few more steps, and the glow grew brighter.
She marched a dozen swift paces along the lane, moving out from the shelter of the copse. The softly glowing blue light slowly faded once more, and the device cooled in her palm.
She stopped and, certain that she stood on the brink of discovery, made a slow about-face and moved once more into the copse. The deep indigo light returned, and this time she imagined she heard a small squeaking sound-almost like the chirp of a baby bird. Still walking slowly, she held the device to her ear and confirmed that yes, indeed, the thing was speaking to her. Instinctively, she put her finger to the tiny knurled nub on the surface of the device and gave it a twist: the peeping sound grew louder.
“’Hello!” she muttered to herself. “It’s a volume knob.”
Still walking slowly, she noted when the blue glow began to fade once more, then instead of waiting until it went out altogether, she spun on her heel and headed back the opposite way, still holding the instrument out in front of her. At the exact place where the light was brightest and the sound the loudest, she stopped.
Burleigh’s mechanism was obviously marking the place, but try as she might she could not see why. She stood perfectly still and gazed at the little woodland glade around her. What was different or special about this place? What was the gismo trying to tell her?
She cast her mind back to the first time she had made a leap. Something that Kit had said about lines etched on the landscape came drifting back into her consciousness, and she looked for anything that might resemble a line. Although it took a few moments, the realisation finally dawned on her that she was, in fact, staring right at it: a perfectly straight course through the beech copse, a thin trail with trees on either side and the merest trace of a path on the ground like that wild animals made-a fox run, perhaps-but straight as an arrow until losing itself in the deep shade of the little wood.
