First of all, when we enter the tavern, ’tis no longer Sir Edward sitting alone we see, looking across the table at the remains of some other diner’s food. In these other Strands, his dinner companion has lingered over his meal, drawing out the conversation. Finely dressed this fella is, in clothes that are dark and even a touch old-fashioned, but ever so well made. He’s wearing a tall hat with a broad brim pulled rakishly down over one eye, sporting a scarlet plume, and when he turns his head to take note of Tristan, it’s a yellow beard that comes into view, trimmed and groomed to a long sharp point. It is, in other words, the German with the white kid gloves who came out of nowhere in the first Strand and prevented Tristan from being murdered in the duel. He sits there quietly, listening to what Tristan has to say. From time to time he and Sir Edward glance across the table at each other in a manner that is full of significance. Anon he excuses himself and leaves the tavern.
Secondly: on these other Strands, we are chanced upon by the same tosser and the same weedy curmudgeon—Herbert and George—I wrote about before. As before they follow us, and Herbert has a go at Tristan on the Whitehall steps. As before the German’s there, stepping up to act as Tristan’s second. And you might think that Tristan would properly apologize and humble himself to avoid a repetition of the duel. But didn’t he amaze me the first time he came back, accepting George’s backsword straightaway, and disarming Herbert in a trice! His abilities, his skill, his confidence—all these more than trebled from one Strand to the next! I cannot account for the marvel of it, but it does make him even more lovely a fellow to watch now. The German watches all, but does less, as his services are no longer needed, and doesn’t he disappear into the crowd before he can be thanked.
For Tristan’s fifth appearance, things were different. This time, he reported to me that his acolyte, a woman named Melisande (not a witch), has been to the nearer future to check the outcome of his labors, but those efforts have been futile. So he asked if rather than repeating our circuit of Whitehall and the Bell Tavern, we might discourse of other ways to effect the necessary change.
This I knew to be my opportunity to start to work him round my finger. “I might be able to help you,” says I, “if you give me more information than you have been.”
“Fair enough,” he says—as if being fair were what mattered. “What do you want to know?”
“Why are you needing this Boston Council scheme to fail? What gain you by that?”
“In my reality as it now stands, the Council builds something in the New World that we don’t want there. A factory. But it’s in the way of where a house should be, a house that had been there when we began our efforts. We need the house to still be there, meaning we need the factory to never have been built.”
“Righto, but why were you meddling there to start with? Surely in your future world full of handsome creatures such as yourself, there is little enough you could gain by going to visit some house in the wilderness? What was there for you?”
He grimaced, for he wasn’t in the humour to go into it, but eventually didn’t I coax from him his story, that being: he and brethren were attempting to make a small fortune for themselves by secreting away an item—a printed book—that was easy enough to get in 1640 but near impossible to get in Tristan’s age, making it of great worth.
“So you’re thieves and chancers,” said I approvingly.
“No,” he objected. “It is a strategy. The money is not to save us from having to labor for a living, it is what we need to be able to labor for a living.”
“Seems peculiar,” I said. “You’re saying once you’ve the money in hand—enough to live on for the rest of your days, in leisure and doing whatever you like—instead of doing that, you’d be using the money for something that requires you to toil more than you’d have to without the money. Be you daft?”
“The labor we want to do is important work. It means far more to us to do that work than to simply live a life of leisure.”
I laughed at him. “So it’s Protestant you be!” I said. “Or farmers. Sure none else would make that choice.”
“Would you not?” he asked. “Is there nothing in the world that means so much to you that if you were given treasure, you would use it not for yourself but to support and protect the thing you love?”
And then didn’t I shut my mouth and nod, for I understood him.
“That is why we need the money,” he said. “That we can do our work.”
“And what be your work?” I asked of course, and of course he answered, “Classified.”
I shrugged then. “I can’t help you figure out how to accomplish something if you won’t be telling me what you’re trying to accomplish,” I said.
“All that matters is for the factory to disappear so that we still have a place to hide the book.”
“So you say. But I need to know the nature of your work, so I know if it’s something I want to be abetting. What if it’s against the interests of Ireland, for all you say we prosper over there in your New World?”
“It’s got nothing at all to do with Ireland,” he insisted.
“Then tell me what it’s got to do with. From where I sit, the only thing you’ve got to offer me—besides telling Sir Edward to spend his whoring largesse with me and my sisters—is that you’ve knowledge I have not. That’s the cost of my assisting you: knowledge. Start with something simple. Such as what it is you’re doing. In the bigger sense, I mean.”
He grimaced. Sat for a bit, he did, as if chewing over the diet of truth in his mind. Then he finally presented this bit of business to me: “In the future—long after you are dead, but long before I am born—magic is completely done away with.”
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“I gain nothing by dishonesty,” he said. “I have nothing to offer you but truth.”
“What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone who is caught and tortured, and doesn’t free themselves by magic, has no magic powers. It’s simple reason. Is it the Inquisition? How do they ever manage it, thick as they are?”
He shook his head. “How magic disappears is a separate conversation for another time. What matters is that my fellows and I are trying to bring it back. But to bring it back requires many things, ingredients and props and general expenses that I cannot easily explain. There is only one witch left in my time.”
“What, in the whole world?” I exclaimed in amazement.
“To the best of our knowledge. She is very old, and when she was young and learning magic, magic was almost gone. So we are at a disadvantage in my time. We are trying to learn more, that we may bring that knowledge into the future and make sure magic is restored.”
Now it was my turn to sit a moment grimacing. “As hard as it is to believe this story,” I said, “I believe you are sincere in telling it. Speaking on behalf of my sisters I thank you for the work you’re doing.”
“Will you aid me to do that work?”
“As much as I can,” I said, “although many’s the questions I still have about this, more now than before you told me anything at all.”
“I realize it’s a lot to hear all at once,” said Tristan Lyons. “I hope that you will help me. In this endeavor, and perhaps others.”
“For the sake of my sisters though I never meet them, I give you my hand and my heart. But we begin with this one task, aye?”
“Aye,” he said. “Once we have accomplished this, I will know better how to proceed in general. And I’ll have more to tell you.”
“Is right you will. Well then. We must consider other means through which Sir Edward would not fund this Boston Council.”