‘You risked your life to bring me my parasol,’ she said slowly, as though she had suddenly understood the real dangers Tom had braved.
‘Well, the parasol was only an excuse,’ he replied, gazing passionately into her eyes. The moment had come. It was now or never. ‘I risked my life to see you again because I love you, Claire,’ he lied, in the softest voice he could muster.
He had said it. Now she must say the same thing to him. Now she must confess she loved him, too – that she loved the brave Captain Shackleton.
‘How can you love me? You don’t even know me,’ she teased, smiling sweetly.
That was not the response Tom had been hoping for. He disguised his dismay with another gulp of tea. Did she not realise they had no time for anything except giving themselves to one another? He only had three hours! Had he not been clear enough? He replaced the cup in its saucer and glanced out of the window at the boarding-house opposite, its beds waiting with their clean sheets, ever further out of reach. The girl was right: he did not know her, and she did not know him. And as long as they remained strangers there was no possibility of them ever becoming lovers. He was fighting a losing battle . . .
But what if they did know each other? Did he not come from the future? What was there to stop him claiming that, from his point of view, they already knew each other? Between this meeting and their encounter in the year 2000, he could make up any number of events it would be impossible for her to refute, he told himself. He had discovered the perfect strategy for leading her to the boarding-house, meek as a lamb.
‘This time you’re wrong, Claire. I know you far better than you think,’ he confessed, clasping her hand in both of his. ‘I know who you are, your dreams, your desires, the way you see the world. I know everything about you and you know everything about me. And I love you, Claire. I fell in love with you in a time that doesn’t exist yet.’
She was astonished. ‘But if we’re never to meet again,’ she mused, ‘how will we get to know each other? How will you fall in love with me?’
Tom realised he had fallen into his own trap. He stifled a curse and, playing for time, gazed at the street outside. What could he say now? He watched the carriages go by, indifferent to his distress, making their way among the vendors’ barrows. Then his eye fell on the red pillar box on the corner, solid and steadfast, sporting the insignia VR on the front.
‘I fell in love with you through your letters,’ he blurted out.
‘What letters? What are you talking about?’ exclaimed Claire, startled.
‘The love letters we’ve been sending one another all these years.’
She stared at him, aghast. And Tom understood that what he said next had to be credible, for it would determine whether she surrendered to him or slapped his face. He closed his eyes and smiled faintly, pretending he was evoking some memory, while he tried desperately to think.
‘It happened during my first exploratory journey to your time,’ he said. ‘I came out on the hill I told you about. From there I walked to London, where I was able to verify that the machine was reliable when it came to opening the hole at the specified date: I had travelled from the year 2000 to the eighth of November 1896.’
‘The eighth of November?’
‘Yes – that is to say, the day after tomorrow,’ Tom confirmed. ‘That was my first trip into your century. But I scarcely had time to do anything else, because I had to get back to the hill before the hole closed. I hurried as fast as I could, and I was about to enter the tunnel when I saw something I hadn’t noticed before.’
‘What?’ she asked, burning with curiosity.
‘Under a stone next to the grave marked John Peachey I found a letter. I picked it up and discovered to my amazement that it was addressed to me. I stuffed it into the pocket of my disguise, and opened it in the year 2000. It was a letter from a woman I’d never met, living in the nineteenth century.’ Tom paused for dramatic effect. ‘Her name was Claire Haggerty and she said she loved me.’
Claire gasped. Tom watched, a tender smile on his face, as she attempted to digest what she had heard, struggling to understand that she was responsible for their situation, or would be responsible for it in the future. For if he loved her now it was because she had loved him in the past. She stared into her cup, as though she were able to see him in the tea leaves in the year 2000, reading with bewilderment the letter in which a strange woman from another century, a woman who was already dead, declared her undying love for him. A letter she had written.
Tom persisted, like a lumberjack who sees the tree he has been hacking begin to teeter and swings his axe harder: ‘In your letter, you told me we would meet in the future – or, more precisely, I would meet you because you had already met me,’ he said. ‘You implored me to write back, insisting you needed to hear from me. Although it seemed very strange to me, I replied to your letter, and on my next visit to the nineteenth century, two days later, I left it beside the same tombstone. On my third visit I found your reply, and that was how our correspondence through time began.’
‘Good God,’ the girl gasped.
‘I had no idea who you were,’ Tom continued, not wanting to give her any respite, ‘but I fell in love with you all the same, with the woman who wrote those letters. I imagined your face when I closed my eyes. I whispered your name in my sleep, amid the ruins of my devastated world.’
Claire fidgeted in her seat. ‘How many letters did we write to each other?’ she managed to ask.
‘Seven, in all,’ Tom replied randomly, because it sounded a good number: not too many and not too few. ‘We hadn’t time to write more before they prohibited the use of the machine, but it was enough, my love.’
Upon hearing the captain utter those words, Claire heaved a sigh.
‘In your last letter, you named the day we would finally meet. The twentieth of May in the year 2000, the day I defeated Solomon and ended the war. That day I did as you instructed in your letter, and after the duel I looked for a secluded spot among the ruins. Then I saw you and, as you had described, you dropped the parasol, which I was to return to you using the time machine. Once I reached your era I was to go to Covent Garden market, where we would meet, and then I was supposed to invite you to tea and tell you everything,’ Tom added wistfully: ‘And now I understand why. It was so these events would take place in the future. Do you see, Claire? You will write those letters to me in the future because I am telling you now that you will.’
‘Good God,’ she repeated, almost out of breath.
