“Are you aware that when one of your son’s little playmates bloodied Joe’s nose in a childish scuffle, Krystal tried to have one of your Irish knights behead him on the spot? When he quite properly refused to carry out the execution of the child, she threw a screaming tantrum that brought half the folk in the palace to that spot, then ordered the knight from out her sight, gathered her son and her ladies, and stayed in the wing she and they inhabit for the rest of the day, having the servants bring in food and drink.
“When Buddy Webster was informed of the incident, he forthwith moved the child and his entire family to my more distant estate, in the West Riding.”
“Good!” said Bass vehemently, his face dark with rage. “Have you tried talking any sense back into her swollen head, Hal?”
The old man shook his head slowly. “Alas, my friend, I seldom even can squeeze out the time to get out to the country palace for so much as a single day. I’ve spoken to her but the once since you left here for Norwich. That was when she made to rail at me for not affording her the deference she thinks herself due. We had . . . ahhh, words.
“I did send Mr. Rupen Ademian, whom you met, out to talk with her: that was after she had Jenny Bostwick flogged. She refused even to receive him, noting that, emissary of mine or not, he was not a nobleman, not even a gentleman, and that her ladies all agreed with her that to receive him in audience would demean her.”
“I was right all along, Hal,” Bass growled. “The woman’s flipped out, she’s become nutty as a fucking fruitcake! No. Hal, I’ll not go out to see her, not now. I’d probably beat her to death or close to it. I’ve arranged for little Joe to enter fosterage, you know, and I want you to have him taken away after I’ve had time to get out of England. Yes, I’m a coward, so there! Isn’t there some convent, maybe of a nursing order, that you can have her locked away in until I can get this Irish business done and get back?”
CHAPTER
THE FIFTH
Even as Bass sat talking with Harold of York, two other men met and talked in an out-of-the-way, benighted place in the countryside beyond the walls of York. Except for a clear difference in age, both the elder and the younger were so alike in appearance as to seem two peas from the same pod. They had met before in similar locations, and this latest meeting concerned some of the same topics earlier discussed. The mounts upon which they had ridden to this spot grazed placidly a few rods distant.
Speaking in a tongue that would have been imcompre-hensible to even Bass or Harold, the younger remarked, “That is not much of a horse. Elder One. That beast you rode before was far better.”
The man addressed shrugged. “This horse and those of the others of the party of Foster Bass were borrowed from the garrison at Hull. Yes, this one is rough-gaited, but still does it serve the purpose.
“Now, anent other matters. Younger One: Since last we met, I have journeyed long and far, both in distance and in time, both upon the nearer continent and the farther. No, I have yet to find just to where and to when the twentieth-century musicians were projected or exactly how the mistake could have occurred.
“But I journeyed also to Our Place, in the east, and conferred with experts on the projectors themselves, as well as with those whose task it is to monitor units assigned to field personnel. We now concur in the belief that the ill-guided journeying was possibly not your fault, for the devices revealed that your unit was subjected to a substantial amount of abuse at critical moments of the activation; such degrees of abuse might very well, I am told, have caused slight slippages in the settings, and even minute deviations can, as we both know well, create extreme variations.
“Therefore, you should expect the imminent arrival of a ‘merchant from the east.’ You will know him, of course, and he will attune a replacement projector to you, as well as issue you replacements for all the items lost with your original projector. He will also explain and demonstrate some improvements recently developed in the projectors. With these improvements, you need no longer physically conceal any of your equipment, for now you may summon your storage casket at will.
“As for the matter of the now-lost projectees. copies of the records from the monitoring devices will be journeyed back to our world and time with the next shipment of metals and chemicals. With the more sophisticated equipment and interpreters there available, it is to be presumed that the exact error will be quickly found and corrected. Perhaps it has already been corrected and this is why my own hurried searches have been fruitless.
“At one point, in this last series of searches, I was momentarily certain that 1 had located the missing party of projectees, but then I realized that there was one too many of the projector auras in the group my device had detected.” “Who could that group have been. Elder One?” the Younger One asked with deference. “More accidental displacements wrought by one of those primitive projectors such as brought him once known as Kenmore Harold to this place?”
“No,” replied the Elder One. “These auras were not the greenish auras of those unsophisticated contraptions, rather were they as pale as any of ours, invisible to the
unaided vision. Until I journeyed to Our Place, indeed, I had thought that they might represent some special mission of ours, but no such mission exists, I found in the east. Now I and the directors are of the opinion that those invisible-auraed ones must have been of Them.”
The Younger One exhibited shock. “Them, Elder One? Why must They haunt us in whatever time or world we visit? Do we not hide our true selves and activities from the indigenes diligently, never take enough of any one mineral to make our visits obvious, eradicate all traces of our visits when we are done at the sites and also do all within our powers to undo damages wrought by those fools who came from earlier times, such as that from which this current problem resulted?”
“How can we intelligently question Their motives. Younger One?” was the reply. “They are as far and even farther beyond us in all ways as are we beyond the indigenes of this world and time. We may only be certain of one thing concerning Them, and that is that They do indeed have reasons for being wherever or whenever They appear to us or on our sensors. All that we can do is follow meticulously the dictates They promulgated, for resistance would be unthinkable. We are as but lowly worms to Them, and They could crush us. even our world, effortlessly, were we in the slightest disobedient to Their directives.
“But such matters aside, for now. Upon the return of the party of Foster Bass to Norfolk, we all are bound for the next big island west, the one the indigenes call Ireland. When and as I can, I will make use of my own newer-model projector to contact you, projecting message holders to the receiver within your equipment casket, so you should be certain to check the receptacle daily, at least, for I will be projecting them in normal time. Should matters alter drastically in any way, here, you must message me immediately, setting the message holder for alarm. I only say this last because I somehow do not think that we have experienced all that we eventually will of the primitive projectors and the savage humans who operate them.”
“London is fallen, Your Grace.” These were the words Bass was given when, the day after his return from York, Captain Sir Egbert d’Arcy one of Richard Cromwell’s officers, was granted audience.
“Angela actually surrendered the city, Sir Egbert?” asked Bass wonderingly. “Surely she knows that she can expect no parole or even quarter from His Majesty, not after all she has seen done to him and his?”
“No, your Grace, the city was surrendered by a deputation of the soldiers and the citizens. The Regent and her bastard both are dead. It is bruited about that she rendered the bastard senseless with a draught and had a Ghanian mercenary, her sometime lover, run the lad through with his sword, then do the same for her, after sharing with her a goblet of wine, which meant that he too was shortly dead, as the wine was laced with a quick-acting poison. His cries and gasps and thrashings about it was that caused the outer guards to force the doors and find them all three either dead or in the final throes.”