Anen spoke again, his voice gentle with sorrow. “We tried to heal him, but it was not to be. His soul has entered the House of the Dead and has begun the journey into the afterlife.” He pointed to the body in the bed and seemed to expect a response.
Benedict gazed upon that inert form. The transformation had begun; the animated presence he had known all his life was no longer there. All that was left was a shell, a rather sad and damaged husk. The man he knew and loved was gone.
CHAPTER 15
Wilhelmina enjoyed her visits to the abbey at Montserrat and looked forward to them with an anticipation that far exceeded any expectation she held for the journey or destination itself. In some ways it was reminiscent of the feeling she had had as a schoolgirl the night before the annual field trip to the British Museum, a place she loved; or maybe it was the way a pilgrim felt when, after weeks or months of preparation, the day came to set foot on the peregrine path leading to a sacred destination. Perhaps, by a little stretch, that was what she was-a pilgrim.
Just thinking about working with Brother Lazarus at his kitchen table in the observatory high on the mountaintop, sipping his sour wine and talking astronomy, cosmology, and physics in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of ley travel, made Wilhelmina’s heart beat that little bit faster. She had found him-or had been guided to him, as he insisted-to further her education for the work ordained for her to do. She was stretched and challenged, always, but also comfortable in his presence; he was the wise uncle she had never had.
And so it was that on one of those early visits it was decided that as a test of Brother Lazarus’ theory of time calibration between alternate dimensions, Wilhelmina should return to London to find Kit and, as she put it, settle her affairs. Aside from explaining what had happened to her during that first ill-considered jump, she wanted to tell him not to worry about her, that she had found her bliss running a coffee shop in Prague and was making a better life for herself in the seventeenth century than she had ever known in the twenty-first and, incidentally, that whatever romantic attachment they might once have shared was now irrevocably severed. Time had passed, events had transpired, and as a consequence they were no longer what they had once been. Selflessly, magnanimously, with every blessing for his future happiness, she graciously freed him from any entanglements, real or imagined, he might feel. For this last part she rehearsed various scenarios, all of them ending with a tearful, regret-filled Kit bidding her farewell as she strode-shoulders back, head held high-out of his life forever.
The inevitable breakup was not owing to any vindictiveness or hard feelings towards Kit; she bore him no ill will whatsoever-just the opposite, in fact. She was extremely grateful to him for introducing her to the wonders of ley travel, if accidentally, and any resentment or bitterness she initially felt-and there was plenty of that in those first traumatic days-had long since evaporated in the sunny prospect of a far brighter future than she could have imagined, much less engineered, on her own. That it was a future taking place in a post-medieval version of Prague gave her no end of pleasure; the paradox was delicious. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned girl at heart, she mused happily.
Now that she was familiar with ley travel in its broadest, most general sense, and growing in confidence by leaps and bounds, as it were, Wilhelmina was keen to master the finer points and intricacies and so had become a willing guinea pig for Brother Lazarus’ experiments.
“Getting the time period right,” he said during one of their sessions. “That is most crucial if we’re ever to effect a reunion between you and your friend.”
“Or any other useful purpose, for that matter,” suggested Mina.
“To be sure.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “Are you certain you wish to try?”
“Why not?” She shrugged. “What have we got to lose? I know how to get back here. If anything goes wrong, I can always return. And who knows? Whatever happens might prove useful.”
“There is rarely advance without experiment,” he observed, then leaned forward, elbows on the table in the posture of a lecturer instructing a pupil. “If this experiment is successful, we will add a great deal to our store of knowledge. See here, now. Listen carefully. Thomas Young was active in London between 1799 and 1829. He was a president and member of the Royal Society, so you should be able to make contact with him through the society secretary-providing you can get back to London in the first place. The ley that took you to Prague should lead you back to London-although this is far from certain.”
Mina agreed that it was worth a try. “I just wish there was a way to calibrate the time frame more precisely.”
“That, my dear, is what the experiment is designed to explore,” he said with a smile. “If my theory is correct, each physical point along any particular line corresponds to a specific time reference. That being so… ” He smiled and shook his head. “Well, you’ll just have to try making a jump and see where that gets you. A leap or two along the same ley should give you the means of comparison. Again, this is assuming you end up in London.”
“I have my ley lamp to help me,” she pointed out.
“An extraordinary instrument,” Brother Lazarus enthused. “I would give my right arm to know how it works.” He regarded her across the table. “Are you certain you wish to try this? Going home again could be distressing.”
“I was born and raised in London. I’ll be all right.”
“When will you go?”
“I’m ready now,” Mina told him. “There’s no time like the present.”
As the sun began to sink beyond the crags to the west, Brother Lazarus walked with her to the high mountain ley to see her away. “Vaya con Dios!” he called as Wilhelmina embarked on her long-delayed return to London.
Her attempt employed the line she now called the Bohemian Ley; the landscape was as she remembered it from that first traumatic leap, and visiting the place again brought a curiously nostalgic feeling. The little blue lights on the lamp confirmed the presence of an active ley, and her first jump proved marginally successful in that she reached the outskirts of a sizeable town set in a place that in most ways resembled the English countryside. At first glance the landscape looked familiar; but as she stood on a bluff overlooking a wide, generous valley with a small village of thatched-roof cottages, the absence of paved roads and motorways gave her to know that if it was anywhere near London, the day of the combustion engine had yet to dawn. Immediately turning around, she doubled back before the ley closed-and tried again.
In all, it took her two days and no fewer than seven leaps before she happened to strike the winning formula: roughly a metre every four hundred years, or thereabouts. She worked out that if one paced off the stride and matched stride to leap, so to speak, one could home in on England’s capital city in a particular epoch. Her seventh attempt brought her to a suitably modern period.
The sound of the gusting wind receded, blending into the whine of an ambulance siren echoing down the brick canyon of Stane Way. The alleyway looked familiar, and she was mightily encouraged. It remained to be seen precisely when she had arrived, but that mystery was cleared up the moment she emerged onto Grafton Street. A bus bearing an advertisement for Virgin Mobile phones was the first vehicle to pass, and it was quickly followed by a British Telecom van advertising their speedy 30 MB service for?I6 a month.
“I made it!” trilled Wilhelmina. “I actually made it!” She shivered with equal parts excitement and dread at the prospect of a return to her old haunts, then started down Grafton Street. Her progress soon had her reeling with the brute force assault on her senses. The ordinary sights of the city were garish and gaudy, the sounds strident and confusing-everything blared and screamed and contested for her attention. After the relative peace of a less- mechanised time, the modern pace of the world seemed an ordeal-too loud, too fast, too rough. She had the feeling of running an obstacle course full of unnecessary shock and alarms.
Everywhere she looked, the view appeared designed to deliver a blow. A low-slung black car with black-tinted windows cruised by, booming out a bass beat designed to disturb; a motorbike zipped past in the opposite direction buzzing like an oversized hornet; the pavement teemed with French language students lugging matching orange backpacks and drifting along in amorphous crowds like multi-headed amoebas; a tower block undergoing renovation was a gutted noise box echoing with the clatter of jackhammers and diesel generators filling the air above with a
