33
‘What should we do?’ I ask Adam when I’ve finished telling him about Barney.
‘Nothing,’ Adam says. ‘What he’s never known he can’t miss.’
‘But he has the right to know he’s one of the … time travellers ?’ I say, for want of a better phrase.
‘Why? Maybe he’s better off not knowing. Then he won’t have the dilemma of whether he should go back or not. If we really have found a way of controlling this portal, then it will open up all sorts of opportunities.’
‘Then Barney deserves to have that opportunity too.’
‘All right,’ Adam says reluctantly. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.’
‘Can you guys hear me?’ We hear Barney from upstairs. ‘I don’t know if you can, but I’ve seen Rocky off and I’m wondering what’s happening down there?’
I look at Adam. ‘Not a word,’ I whisper. ‘To Barney. Not until I decide what’s for the best.’
Adam nods. We close the cupboard doors and climb the stairs together.
After I’ve repeated my story – up to the WHSmith part – for Barney, we sit down in the shop together to decide what to do next.
‘I still can’t believe that actually worked,’ Barney says, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Imagine actually being able to travel back in time … It’s unbelievable.’
‘It is quite exciting,’ I say carefully.
‘It’s mega! When are you going to tell the others?’ Barney asks excitedly.
‘Today. There’s no point in waiting, is there? Then they can decide what they want to do.’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t want to go in time – not permanently, anyway – though a quick trip to see a few things might be fun. But in this thing’ – he points to his wheelchair – ‘no siree Bob! As I’ve said before, going back in time with a disability is never going to be a good thing.’
Adam and I exchange glances.
‘Which of our time travellers should we tell first?’ Adam asks quickly.
‘Is that what we’re actually calling them now?’ Barney asks gleefully. ‘ Time travellers. So what are we, then?’ He thinks for a moment. ‘What about the guardians of time ? Or the protectors of the portal ?’
‘I’m not sure we need an actual title, do we?’ I say, feeling uncomfortable. I’m not exactly lying to Barney, but I feel like I’m not telling him the truth either.
‘We have uncovered a pretty major thing today,’ Barney says, clearly still elated by our discovery. ‘Personally I think it’s the least we deserve. Ooh, maybe we’re the timekeepers now, like Ernie said?’
‘I’m going to see Ben,’ I say, standing up. ‘To tell him what’s happened. He was in his shop earlier.’
‘Shall we come?’ Barney asks, still full of excitement.
‘No!’ I snap at him. ‘No,’ I repeat a little more gently. ‘I’ll tell him. There’s a few things I want to ask him while I’m there.’
Barney opens his mouth, but Adam speaks first. ‘I don’t know about you, Barney, but I could do with something to eat. Shall we nip out and get some lunch while Eve speaks to Ben?’
I smile gratefully at Adam as I leave the shop, stopping immediately outside to take a few deep breaths. Everything is moving too fast right now – I just need some time to think. Both about what we’ve discovered and what’s the right thing for Barney.
But time, ironically, is something I don’t have enough of right now. Because Ben spots me from his shop window and waves me over.
‘Eve, my dear!’ he says as I enter the shop. ‘Are you all right? You looked a little stressed outside your shop just now.’
‘A little shellshocked might be a better description, Ben, and not only about what you told us yesterday.’
I tell Ben everything that happened this afternoon. From our ideas about the tree and the brass calendar, to me actually travelling back in time, and our meeting. But I leave out the conversation I overheard between Harriet and Luca.
‘Oh, my,’ Ben says, looking shocked. ‘You actually did it?’
‘But you worked that out already when I bumped into you in February?’
Ben smiles knowingly. ‘It depends what timeline of events we’re following. Remember, that meeting between us didn’t happen originally.’
‘It’s very confusing.’
‘The ability to time travel is, that’s why it’s only granted to those who can handle both the knowledge and the pressure.
But you’ve learnt how to control the portal, Eve.
The first person in … well, it could be centuries, for all we know.
You are truly worthy of this honour that’s been bestowed upon you. ’
‘It’s very early days, but I think we might have a loose grip on it.’
‘I think you are too modest. It really is truly incredible,’ he continues, looking amazed and at the same time emotional.
He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe that after all these years, not only were the predictions on the tree and the doors correct, but now there’s actually a chance for me to return. ’
‘Why do you want to go back, Ben?’ I ask, knowing the reason, of course. But I want to know more. ‘I know it’s to see your mother, but what else is making you want to take this enormous risk?’
Ben looks at me as if he doesn’t quite understand.
‘You don’t know what will happen to you if you time travel. You might remain as old as you are now, or you could revert back to the ten-year-old boy you were when you came here. Will you have memories of what’s to come in the future? How will it all work?’
‘That’s the beauty of it,’ Ben says, smiling. ‘I don’t know. No one does.’
‘Then why do it? Forgive me for saying this, but you’re old, Ben. You’re fragile. Being old at the turn of the last century isn’t like being old now – it will be tough.’
‘I know it will be,’ Ben says sombrely. ‘But I haven’t got many more years on this earth, whether I decide to spend them here in the present time, or back then. If I don’t go back now, I’ll never do it, and therefore I’ll never feel truly at peace with myself.’
‘But what if you didn’t know where you came from? You didn’t know you’d time travelled here and you had no memory of your original life. Do you think you’d want to know the truth?’
Ben gazes steadily but silently at me. Only breaking eye contact to blink.
‘Barney,’ he says eventually. ‘Who told you?’
‘No one told me. I found out earlier when I travelled back to the twenty-ninth of February. I overheard a conversation between Harriet and Luca that day.’
Ben nods, as though it doesn’t surprise him the two of them would have been gossiping together.
‘Barney doesn’t know he came through the tunnel,’ he says. ‘He doesn’t know he was actually the last person to do so as well. He was just a small child when he came through, barely walking. Actually, that was the problem. He wasn’t walking – he couldn’t.’
‘Barney told me he couldn’t remember his parents because they’d died in a house fire when he was four, and that was when he lost the use of his legs.’
‘That part is true. That is exactly what happened to him. But it didn’t happen in the year 2004 like he thinks it did, it happened in 1908.’
I try to process the dates as well as what Ben is telling me. ‘How did he come through the tunnel if he couldn’t walk?’
‘We think someone put him there. Someone who thought they could help him by sending him into the future.’ Ben waits to see if I understand.
‘Dotty …’ I say immediately. ‘It has to be. Do you think Dotty put him in there?’
‘Who else knew the tunnel was there? And I don’t think it was the only time she did it either.
When George decided he was going to seal up the tunnel permanently, your grandmother and I weren’t too happy about it.
We worried that people might still appear in there on a leap day, and not have a way out.
So every twenty-ninth of February after the tunnel was closed, we’d secretly go down and check on and off throughout the day from the antiques shop so George never became suspicious.
That’s one of the reasons the portal is more accessible from your shop than Adam’s – it was opened more often and more recently than the other side.
The day we found Barney on the twenty-ninth of February 2004 was one of those times.
Whoever had left him had also left a note with him. ’
‘You’ve still got the note, haven’t you?’ I ask, knowing he will have.
‘Of course.’ Ben pulls an envelope from his inside jacket pocket.
‘I took this from my safe when you and Adam were beginning to make some progress with the portal – or was it when I bumped into you at the entrance to Clockmaker Court …’ He raises his eyebrows mischievously.
‘I can’t quite recall.’ He passes me the note and I open it carefully.
It’s handwritten in black ink on yellowing paper.
To whom it may concern.
For whatever reason, I know that you have now closed off the tunnel at your end and I have not been sending anyone to you for some time.
However, this child is different. He deserves a good life and I hope whatever year he arrives in with you, someone can give him a better life than he will have if he stays here in 1908.
The boy was orphaned in a house fire and his injuries mean he will never walk again.
Although things are starting to improve, most handicapped children are still treated badly here and have a very poor quality of life.
I do not know what the future holds for children like him but, even if he only travels as far forward as 1944, I know he will have a better life than he will have in this time.
His name is Barnaby and he is four years old.
Please look after him. I know you will.
‘It’s Dotty’s handwriting,’ I say, looking at Ben. ‘I remember it from the letter we read that was in the Dalmatians book, and she went missing in 1944, didn’t she, so she would know things were better up to that year.’
Ben nods. ‘It seems that Dotty may have been sending us people all along. Obviously I know my story with her, but some of the others remember a mysterious woman guiding them down the alleyway to the doors. Until Barney – or should I say Barnaby – appeared, though, we never really thought about it being Dotty.’
I consider this for a moment.
‘But some of the others came from much later years than Victorian and Edwardian times, didn’t they?’ I say, thinking out loud. ‘Are you suggesting she was doing this for many years – decades, even?’
‘There seems to be no correlation between when they arrived with us and the year they came from,’ Ben says, remembering.
‘All we know is that they came from leap years and arrived in them, too, every four years. I don’t think Dotty, if it is her, knew what year they would appear in once they went through the portal.
But bearing in mind that Harriet came to us from the fifties, one can only assume that Dotty was trying to help people for a long time after she arrived in 1904 – that’s if she really did stay there. We have no way of truly knowing.’
‘So, you’re saying even if she was guiding them to safety in order at her end, the order they appeared here in Clockmaker Court was random?’
Ben nods. ‘I don’t think the tunnel can be completely controlled. It seems to make its own mind up what year people are deposited in the future. It’s as if it knows what’s going to be best for them.’
‘I can just about cope with the fact we’ve discovered an actual time tunnel, Ben. I really can’t deal with the thought it might have its own mind too!’
‘Fair enough. But you agree it might be Dotty at the other end helping people out of difficult situations?’
‘Yes, I do. It sounds like her style.’ I smile. Dotty is becoming more heroic and more wonderful to me by the minute. ‘I wonder why she’s never tried to come back herself, though?’
‘I’ve wondered that too, many times. But as the time grew closer for both you and Adam to take the helm, I thought I would wait and see what happened.’
‘You were all putting a lot of hope on the two of us working out, weren’t you?’
‘It was always going to work out,’ Ben says, smiling.
‘I had faith in the old oak tree. Every time I wavered and worried for the future, I just looked out of my shop window and saw it standing there, bravely weathering every storm, just waiting patiently for the day it would be proved correct. And here you now are.’
‘Yes, here we are. But Barney,’ I say, watching him come back through the court with Adam, carrying paper bags filled with lunchtime goodies. Adam glances across at Ben’s shop and sees me watching him through the window. He mouths silently, ‘You OK?’
I nod at him and then I turn back to Ben. ‘Should I tell Barney he’s from the past now I know?’ I ask. ‘I really don’t like keeping secrets.’
‘I think you’ll know when the time is right,’ Ben says in his usual calm, considered way.
‘You now have a much bigger secret to keep, Eve. A secret that many generations before you have kept hidden. I don’t think you need to be told why it must be kept a secret.
Something like this in the wrong hands … well, it could be disastrous.’
‘I have seen the Back to the Future movies, Ben. I remember what happened when Biff got the Sports Almanac .’ I smile at my joke – somehow making light of all this helps lift the burden a little.
But instead of joining in, Ben looks even more grave.
‘This isn’t a movie, Eve. This is real. You have been given an incredibly important task here, one people have been undertaking for hundreds, possibly thousands of years before you.
You and Adam are the new timekeepers. You must keep the portal safe. ’
‘Of course,’ I agree earnestly. ‘I do understand, Ben, how important this all is.’
‘Good. I’m glad you do.’
I feel bad now for making light of the situation and I want to make it up to him.
‘You know, if you really want to go back to 1904 to see your mother, Ben, then I think I can help you do it. If you’re absolutely sure, that is?’
Ben’s dark brown eyes, that always seem to twinkle, suddenly shine that extra bit brighter. ‘Eve, I’ve never been surer of anything in my whole life – all one hundred and thirty years of it.’