Chapter 4

Titus forgot all about the Ambassador’s parcel, but Dr. Lash dropped it off at his room. The following morning Titus untied the string and upended the envelope. Papers and pictures slithered out onto the counterpane. He picked up a glossy Royal Inniskillings pamphlet. On the cover was a photograph — in color! — of a drab-clad man steering a huge dark metal machine, a land-boat, across a field. He puzzled over the text for some time before he realized the word for the thing was ‘tank.’ He frowned at the picture in disgust. How could any soldier prefer this ungainly hulk, this tank, to a horse? Chilled, he realized that the art of war too had marched on, keeping pace with aviation and medicine and science. The fresh-faced soldier in the tank would look at Titus the way he would look at a coronel of the Napoleonic wars. He was a soldier of the previous century now, an antique. There was no useful future for him with the Inniskillings and their tanks.

He turned over the loose photographs with the same chill round the heart. How could he go back and meet these people, his kin? They would have no memory of Lilian or Violet or Bryan, their great-grandparents. He peered at the faces, foolishly grinning or caught in poses of awkward unawareness, cramming a biscuit into an open mouth or sipping from cups. None of them resembled the sisters or brother he remembered. He would be a ghost, creaking round the estate carping about innovations. Worse yet, he might have the appearance of hanging out for his inheritance. If he returned, to Gestingthorpe Hall or to the regiment, he’d be a curiosity, an odd old animal on display in a zoo. Unbearable!

And why was this here, this leaflet with a photo of a church memorial? It was a large gleaming brass plaque. He flipped past at least once, not being much interested in monuments and art. But then he looked at the picture more closely. It was a memorial to himself! Fixed to the north wall of St. Mary the Virgin no less, his own village church! He felt unreasonably put out. Not only was he not dead yet, but how dare they add such a vulgar, garish fixture to the old building? Portions of the structure dated back to the 13^th century! That he couldn’t remember the original decoration of the wall was irrelevant. The change in itself was ill-judged and displeasing. And to be commemorated so publicly was the most fearful rot.

And here was the insignia of the Inniskilling Dragoons. The plaque had been erected by the officers of his own regiment! And according to the text Mother had made a ritual of coming down every week of her life to polish the thing. And keeping fresh flowers under his portrait, carrying one of his epaulettes about? Where had she acquired such, such Victorian notions? The idea, of poor Mother wasting her time on such pointless sentimentalities — if he had been there he would have jollied her out of them in twenty minutes.

“By God, I’ll have the thing removed,” he muttered. “Pried off the wall.” After all here he was, not dead at all. Surely one could not commemorate a visible and patent untruth, and in a church, too! But, reading to the very end, he saw the leaflet had been printed by some Historical Commission. This plaque was a monument, an historical artifact kept up by the government. A slathering waste of rates and taxes! But after a hundred and thirty years, it was probably no more possible to shift it than to uproot Nelson’s Column from Trafalgar Square. Though the past had changed with his travel to the future, he could not revise the world to fit it.

But most disagreeable of all was the large glossy brochure about Gestingthorpe Hall. He admired the colourful photograph of the manor house on the front. How tall the oaks had grown! And the ivy grew thick as ever on the brick walls, contrasting well with the woodwork which someone had recently repainted a crisp white. But he read the text with growing horror. His sister Violet had sold the place in 1946. The estate had passed through many hands, and was now a conference and meditation center, run by some Buddhist sect. There were interior photographs of the library now converted into a reception room, the billiard room an office presided over by a smiling black.

“No, by God! Not my home!” The hours he had spent, using dreams of the old place to turn his mind from starvation and pain! He jumped to his feet, crushing the brochure in his hands. He would return like vengeful Odysseus, reclaim his own, and throw the bastards out!

His noise brought Dr. Lash in at a run, and Shell too. “Titus, is something wrong?” Lash asked.

For answer Titus flung the crumpled paper at his feet. “And Violet! My own younger sister — how could she sell the old place like that? She should be bloody well ashamed of herself! Some man in the family should have been there, to restrain and guide her!”

Shell took up the brochure and smoothed it, reading. “Titus, did you notice she was ‘Miss Oates’? In 1946 she must have been getting on for sixty, and still unmarried. Maybe a big expensive manor house was the last thing a little old lady needed to live in all alone. You don’t know her circumstances. She could have been sick, and needed the money.”

“After the war it was hard times in Britain,” Lash added. “And don’t forget the death duties.”

Titus sat on the bed and covered his eyes with one hand. The image of his lively sister, only a year younger than himself, rose before him. He could almost hear her laughing as she chased her terrier through the sunny shrubbery, her long skirts fluttering around her ankles as she ran pell-mell down the smoothly-raked graveled paths. That delightful laughing young beauty, to grow elderly and ill alone, selling off the only home she had ever known to survive! He should have been there. He should have come back, to help her. He swallowed and swallowed again, choking down the tears.

“Maybe this isn’t the best time for a walk,” Shell was saying uncertainly to Lash. “How do you feel, Titus?”

“We’ll put it off for another time, old man, shall we?”

“No!” That brought him to his feet. “It’s nothing. Just the surprise, that’s all.” Fighting to control himself, he shoveled all the papers and photos back into the envelope. He didn’t have to look at them again until he was ready. There was nothing to be done about Gestingthorpe, or Violet, or the regiment, so the moment could be a long time from now.

“There’s no rush, Titus,” Lash said.

“Yes, there is.” He had lost his home, his job, his family, even his country — a nation that would tolerate a Buddhist meditation center in rural Essex was no longer the England he loved. He had thought he was desolate that first evening, looking out the window at the strange new world outside. He hadn’t known the half of it. His heart had been stripped as naked as his body. But he could not show a morsel of his pain. It simply wasn’t done. The two doctors were watching him with a curious intentness — for signs of weakness perhaps. He schooled his voice to a light brisk tone. “Well, let’s be off.”

Again they walked down flight after flight of empty echoing stairs. “Why not the elevator?” Titus demanded.

Shell laughed. “You’re progressing, Titus! But we’re supposed to exercise, remember?”

There was no denying the crowded surging street outside was nerve-racking. Dr. Lash wanted him to stand inside the big glass doors and watch the traffic for a while. But the park beyond beckoned Titus with its tall trees overtopping the fence, and he pressed on.

Both doctors insisted on tucking his arm through theirs to cross the avenue, and nattered on in a steady distracting dialogue that he was actually able to attend to this time. “Did they have traffic lights in his day, Kev?”

“Can’t recall. Red for stop, green for go, Titus. As long as you cross with the crowd in New York you can’t go wrong — even if they’re jaywalking.”

“Yeah, the cars won’t ram a crowd.”

“No! always let the scooters go by. If you try and beat them, they’ll crash into you, isn’t that right, Shell?”

“Yes, they go much too fast.”

“Whew! Here we are, safe and sound!”

Again he felt that clearing, the sense of relaxation and perils past. “How can you worry so?” Titus asked, ungratefully. “I’m not some fragile petal, confound it.”

“You’re solid as oak, physically,” Shell assured him.

“It’s the cultural and social transition we’re trying to ease for you, old chap.” Dr. Lash folded his arms, and with an unpleasant shock Titus recognized pity in his tone. “Do you even realize what you’re trying to accomplish, Titus? Don’t you see? You’re moving from the age of steam to the interstellar age in one gigantic leap. It’s a stupendous feat. You’re doing what no man has done before, and probably no one will ever attempt again. You must let us try and help you.”

“He doesn’t see,” Shell said. “What are mountains to us are just molehills to him. Too courageous.”

“No, Shell, that’s just what’s so dangerous,” Dr. Lash said earnestly. “It’s not courage. It’s his underpinnings, the cultural ground he’s standing on. We have here an Edwardian Tory who comes from a world that has never known doubt — never seen the Somme, or Buchenwald, or Hiroshima, or Pyongyang. He’s standing on what doesn’t exist any more.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Titus growled, bewildered. “If there’s anything despicable about the modern day, it’s your habit of turning everything into a palaver. Let’s walk, shall we? We’ll catch you up later, doctor.” Remembering Lash’s comment about his reaction to modern clothing, he added, “I like that headband, Shell. Is it the latest mode?”

“It’s a sweatband — stretchy, see?”

“Sweatband,” Titus muttered, fixing the term into memory. He called to Dr. Lash’s retreating back, “If you can find me a notebook of some kind, Lash, I’d be grateful. Too many new words.” The doctor waved in reply.

“I suppose Kev is right,” Shell said. ”It’s his area of expertise. But it sure looks like courage to me.”

Titus was sure that when a man had no choice it did not count as courage. But he didn’t want to waste time in blather. He ducked his head and strode out, instinctively selecting a new turn of the path. Shell fell in beside him, trotting along and waving her hand weights in her exercise routine. The trees opened out into a wide green lawn, scruffy and marred by several paths. The late-June sunshine lay like a fevered hand across them, as humid as India. Titus reveled in the warmth. After the Pole he was never going to growl about heat ever again. “Show me the trick with these pillar boxes,” he suggested.

“Pillar box? Oh, you mean the drinking fountains.”

“Bosh. These aren’t fountains.”

“They replaced the things that you called drinking fountains — the name carried over. I guess it does sound funny. Like this.”

He watched her carefully. The gesture looked strange because she passed the back of her hand along the surface, not the palm as one might expect. Immediately the hatch popped open, accompanied by a solid internal thump, and she pulled out the usual small water bottle. “More sanitary for drinking than running water,” she explained. He tried it himself and nothing happened. “No, your left wrist.”

And indeed when he tried it with the left, the hatch opened and the bottle appeared. “How is it done?” he asked, impressed. “Did it recognize my hand?”

“Feel, here.” They sat down on a nearby bench to drink, and Shell put a forefinger on her own left wrist, just at the joint. “Yes, that’s right, your own wrist.”

Titus felt nothing. “What am I supposed to be finding?”

She probed Titus’s wrist with a doctor’s expert touch. “There. You can feel it, like a tiny bead or pellet just under the skin.”

This time Titus found it, a firm pinhead too small to be seen and only just palpable. “What is it?”

“An ID chip. Think of them as dog-tags, or identity discs — those things that soldiers wear.”

“My regiment never had any.”

“Were they after your time?” She frowned with thought. “A sig. An e-ddress. A, a calling card — is that the right term? No one can impersonate you, and you can prove your identity wherever you go. It’s also your wallet, your medical record, and a dozen other functions. They’re powered by a bio-battery that draws on your body heat. And you can program it as a pinger, or use it to open doors at the TTD building — remind me to show you how to work the main door sometime.”

He stared at his wrist, impressed. “Does everyone have one?”

“Mostly — you find a couple people here and there who are philosophically opposed to the idea. There are people around who’re philosophically opposed to everything. But anyone with a medical condition is supposed to have one, so that their records will be available.”

Ruffled, he said, “I don’t have a medical condition.”

“You had your limbs cloned and replaced.”

This was veering off into the terra incognita that Titus never intended to explore — he still didn’t know what cloning was, and was ruddy sure he didn’t want to find out. But at that moment, trotting towards them from a side trail, came something that drove the wonders of the future completely out of his head — a tall chestnut horse carrying a man in uniform. Titus assessed horse and rider with a cavalryman’s eye. Drags a little with the rear hoof, possibly re-shoeing would help. Handsome beast, sixteen hands if an inch, well-used but well-cared for, with a wise calm eye — a good city mount. The rider had spent years in the saddle, getting a little past it but still in fine form, back straight, hands relaxed on the reins, no daylight at the seat — the first man he’d seen here who might be a good one to hounds. And ought that saddle be set so far forward on the withers?

The heavenly vision swept past, the rider’s stern eye evaluating and dismissing Titus as harmless. Titus stood to watch them post by. He had to gulp to get the lump out of his throat. “Shell,” he croaked.

She had been stowing her weights in the rucksack. “What is it, Titus?”

“My God, you still have horses! Cavalry!”

“Who, the cop, you mean?”

“Yes! I, I...“ He could hardly form his desire into words. “Is there a stable? Could I just, just go and smell the horses? Touch them?”

She stared. “Why? What for?”

“I’m — I mean, I was a cavalry officer. I’ve worked with horses all my life.”

“Oh, I get it! Well, I’m sure the mounted police don’t allow tourists. But there’s a riding stable on West 89th — Miranda takes lessons there.”

Titus was unable to take any interest in Miranda, whoever she might be. He began to walk fast, as if mere speed would bring him nearer. “Is it close? Could we go there?”

“God knows what Kev would say. But if we get his okay, and the approval of the Board, we might get you into the saddle again, Titus. You’re going to need some physical activity, tennis or something, for your health. So why not something you’re into, like riding?”

“You mean that?” He could have shouted for joy.

“Sure.” She frowned, thinking as she strode along. “Somebody’ll have to keep you company, me or Miranda, I guess. Not Kev — animal hair is deadly to him. Now that I think about it, you’d fit in great with the handicapped riding group. I bet anything you like, that Sabrina’s going to insist on another physical for you. And we’ll have to get you boots, a helmet — there has to be a couple bucks left in the miscellaneous part of the budget...“

“You are an angel. I knew it!”

“Nah.” She grinned. “It’s good to see you hot about something, Titus. Americans are always hot about stuff. That stiff-upper-lip thing of yours, that British reserve — when you don’t respond and don’t react, it seems so strange to us.”

He felt this was obscurely insulting. “We get hot, as you call it, if there’s something to become excited about.”

“Sometimes you’re so cool, it’s downright creepy. Alien, even.”

He stared at her, this bizarre woman in her immodest clothing and sweat-banded frizz of hair, maneuvering through her gaudy futuristic world with the effortless grace of a fish in water. “Alien? I?” He wavered between rage and laughter. But if she could get him on horseback again he could forgive her anything.

Copyright © 2008 Brenda W. Clough