The Time Tutor: A Penguin Special from Plume Read online

  “Greetings,” he said, stepping out from behind the counter and bowing very low over her hand. “Greetings, young creature, beautiful seeker of knowledge! Come in, come in. Come, sit in this chair. Yes, yes . . . make yourself comfortable, my dear. My name is Ignatz Vogelstein, Time Tutor. I am versed in the secrets passed down through the ages by Chronos himself, and I am ready to lay them all at your exquisite feet.” And then he bowed again, came up, and bowed once more. There was no overdoing it with young women. They encountered the world as if it were a play, the more overblown the better.

  But when he came up from the last bow, he found himself confronted with a gaze both penetrating and contemptuous, and a mouth firmed in disapproval. His wig suddenly itched. “Er,” he said, awkwardly dropping into the chair that faced hers. “May I offer you . . .” His sentence fizzled. He had nothing to offer but the dregs of some barely passable brandy.

  The young woman smoothed her hands over the material of her cloak, and he realized that, like an ass, he hadn’t offered to take it from her. Now she was sitting and it was too late for courtesies.

  “No thank you,” she said, in answer to the question he’d never asked. “Mr. Vogelstein, I assume you summoned me here for a purpose. I am in full possession of all knowledge that I might need and I have no interest in learning anything from you. But I am interested in finding out more about you. I represent an organization that oversees what we know about time, and you are not on any of our official rosters.”

  “You are in full possession, are you, my pretty one?” Dar got his gumption up and waded in once more, attempting to save the situation. He waggled his eyebrows, exactly as his own, loathsome tutor had done. “Full possession, you say? I very much doubt it. But you are lucky! I”—and here he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“I am the greatest time traveler of them all, able to bend the hours to my smallest whim. And you, you are chosen by the stars to learn my secrets.”

  The girl got to her feet. “Mr. Vogelstein,” she said, “you are clearly either a fraudster or delusional, or both. I take my leave of you. Expect further investigation by my organization.” She turned and headed to the door.

  “Confound it!” Dar scrambled to his feet, grabbed the wig from his head, and threw it on the ground. Then he ripped off his spectacles, threw them down, too, and ground them under his heel. “Beelzebub and all his demons in hell! Come back here!”

  The girl turned slowly and stared at him. “Pardon me?”

  Dar crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her, his temper flown away with the smoke up the chimney. “Goddammit, you blasted chit, sit down. If you won’t take your medicine with sugar, I’ll give it to you neat.”

  • • •

  Alva turned to find the time tutor transformed in a moment from a hunched-over charlatan in a moth-eaten wig and spectacles that gave back the light of the candles into a tall, broad-shouldered man with wiry black hair and angry dark eyes. The schoolmaster’s outfit looked ridiculous on him, now that he was standing at his full height and radiating outrage. She blinked, and then, although she was still pulsing with rage, she found herself fighting back a smile. He was a rogue. And, for her sins, Alva liked rogues. She admired the way they tweaked the world by the nose; she admired their gambler’s spirit. And she liked sparring with them. “My medicine?” She took not one step back toward the chairs. “Do you think I am ill, sir? I assure you I am very well. You are the one in need of a physic.”

  The man achieved his goal by taking two steps toward her. He was tall, and he loomed over her. He was angry, but the threatening stance was bluster. She could tell by the way he moved; he wouldn’t hurt a flea, at least not physically. He would choose, instead, to blister a flea with verbiage, or confound a flea with a smoke-and-mirrors story, or failing all that, hail a flea as a friend and offer it a drink.

  She liked him. She looked up at him: A frowning mouth set beneath a hawk nose. His eyes were tea brown, and his black eyebrows were all saturnine angles. She liked him very much. He was handsome, not because his features were beautiful, but because they were harsh, and vital, and entirely expressive of his volcanic mood. He was both thrilling and just a little absurd. It was a combination that was true, in her experience, of most temptingly dangerous things, like too-wild horses, and thunderstorms, and dark stairways leading who knows where.

  His scowl deepened. Her smile was enraging him, so she widened it just a thread. “Women!” He said it like a curse.

  “Women?” She looked him up and down, her gaze lingering on the place where his collar was badly frayed. She reached up and touched it, and—to her delight—he flinched. “I’m surprised, dressed as you are, that you have any experience whatsoever of my sex.”

  He took a step backward, as if she might burn him. “I have experience; never you doubt it.” He held up a hand, warning her off. “But I’ve never understood you . . . you females. Slippery, insinuating—the lot of you.”

  “Ah.” Alva nodded benignly. “I see. Poor man. It is that you are a misogynist. How dreary for you.”

  “A misogynist? Sweet song of the spheres, I give up.” Alva watched with glee as he slumped, defeated, into a chair. “Fine.” He waved a hand, and she noticed that it sported a very fine gold signet ring. So the schoolmaster’s clothes were a costume; that was most certainly a gentleman’s ring. “Go. You are a witch, and I’ve botched it anyway, made a damned fool of myself. Get out of here. Go back to the Guild, back to Bertrand, see if I care.”

  All of Alva’s senses sharpened. “What did you say?”

  “Go back. Go back to Bert—” The time tutor froze, clearly realizing he had made a terrible mistake. “Never mind,” he muttered. “Forget I said anything. Blast!”

  Alva took a step forward. Slumped as he was in his chair, it was her turn to loom over him. “Did you just say Bertrand?”

  He flung his arms out wide. “Forget it. Leave. You wanted to a moment ago—why won’t you now? Confounded woman, you’re like a cat; you can’t make up your blasted mind.”

  “But . . .” Alva turned in a slow circle, looking closely now at the time tutor’s dingy shop. There was nothing to mark it as in any way dedicated to the study of time. Indeed, it seemed to be an old draper’s shop, long given over to dust and cobwebs. “What is this place?” She came round again full circle. “Is this an Ofan retreat? Are you . . . Ofan?” She felt a rushing in her head and a tingling in her hands. This was confirmation: The Ofan were real. “And if so, how do you know Bertrand Penture?”

  He must have sensed that rush of excitement in her. His eyebrows went up, and his gaze sharpened; she felt herself pinned by his attention, like a specimen to a card. This was him, now, looking at her, seeing her for the first time.

  He reached up for her hand, and she found herself giving it to him. She could feel the tension in his hold, the strength. He tugged, and she followed—he pulled her so close that her skirts overswept his feet. “Yes, I am Ofan.”

  “And what can you, Ofan by your own admission, know of Hannelore von Trockenberg’s Favorite, Bertrand Penture?”

  He considered her for a long moment, his eyes traveling over her face and down her body. She held herself very still under his wandering eyes, her chin high. If it were not for the strangely gentle warmth of his hand, keeping her close, she might have stepped back, might have left. These were deep waters.

  “What do you know of Bertrand?” he finally asked.

  Alva felt her eyebrows twitch, and cursed herself for showing even the smallest reaction. If Bertrand was a spy, then this man knew it. Should she tell him that she suspected Bertrand? But if Bertrand wasn’t a spy . . .

  “Do you love him?”

  Alva laughed. She couldn’t help it. All her worry about spies, and he was thinking about romance. “We are talking of love?”

  “Aren’t we? A beautiful woman. A handsome man. Living together in tha
t glittering Guild mansion.”

  “You have a rather plodding understanding of how love works,” she said, smiling down at him. “I am to love Bertrand simply because he is handsome and I am beautiful? I thought we were talking of the Ofan, Mr. Vogelstein, and the Guild. I thought we were going to talk of great and important things, and of that highest human goal, knowledge.”

  “Cabbages and kings,” he said nonsensically. It was the first time she’d seen him smile, and it spread quite deliciously across his face. It made him look somewhat older, for it brought out the laugh lines in his cheeks and at the corners of his eyes. “Why did I bring you here?” He jerked hard on her hand, tumbling her down into his lap. “You are exactly right. I brought you here to talk of knowledge. I brought you here to undo you with it. I brought you here to seduce you.”

  • • •

  Dar allowed satisfaction to wash over him like an ocean breeze. The girl was in his lap, her hands on his chest, and she was staring at him with those huge, violet eyes. She had surprised him, at first, by seeing through his charade. Perhaps he had slightly overdone it. And she’d disarmed him for a second there. Bertrand would thank him someday for getting him out of a trap. The girl was far too strong a flavor for Bertrand. She’d almost been too much for Dar, and he had yet to meet the woman who could best him. Almost too much, but not quite. He was back on track now.

  “I’m not going to seduce you like a lover,” he murmured, controlling his free hand’s wild desire to be tangled in her hair. “I’m going to seduce you with the secrets of time, with the incredible power you hold in your very being—a power that the Guild wants to keep from you.”

  She was still and silent for a moment, and very lovely; he was going to enjoy teaching her.

  But then she spoke. “That’s your plan?” She wasn’t getting up from his lap, but the sarcasm was unmistakable.

  Well, nothing for it but to soldier on. Flattery. Flattery was always a good weapon. He rolled it out. “Yes,” he said. “You are too brilliant, too great a talent, to be wasted on the Guild. They have taught you nothing, and they never will. It is always a promise that she dangles like candy, but Hannelore hasn’t taught anyone to jump in decades. They will suffocate you with their rules, waste your youth and your beauty with their nipcheese regulations. Join us. Experience the power, unfettered.”

  He smiled at her for a moment more, concentrating on ignoring how comfortable she felt, balanced on him, how lovely she smelled.

  Then he gasped.

  She was insinuating one hand between them, and quick as a darting minnow, she found the fall of his breeches.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hm,” she said, her fingers working at the buttons as her gaze melted into his. “I don’t know. What am I doing?” She opened one side of the fall, and her hand found its way inside. He leapt to meet her, and was in her hand. “So,” she said, holding him firmly. “You weren’t going to seduce me like a lover?” She squeezed. “How about now?”

  Dar blinked. “No, no . . . I only wanted to offer my services . . .”

  “As a time tutor?” She smiled pityingly into his face. “Don’t you know the Guild thoroughly educates those of us it raises into its upper ranks?”

  “I know that they don’t. You haven’t been taught anything . . . ah!”

  She stroked her fingers up, and pressed against the sweetest spot with calm deliberation. “I am quite well educated enough, Mr. Vogelstein.” She withdrew her hand, leaving him in full Tower of Pisa glory, then nimbly buttoned his fall. “I believe we are finished here.” She got off his lap. “It is my belief that you are mad. But perhaps you are merely so blind as to think that you can delude a fully grown woman, a woman near the pinnacle of Guild power, with costumes and stories that would not fool a child of seven. Whatever you hoped to teach me here today, I have learned the only lesson I need. And it is this. You called me here because of Bertrand Penture.”

  “No, no, not at all—”

  “What this leads me to deduce is that you are, indeed, Ofan, as you claim, and that Bertrand is an Ofan spy. Bertrand’s infatuation with me has you worried. You hoped to lure me away from the Guild with nursery tales, in order to leave the path clear for him to continue his work at the very heart of the Guild’s eighteenth-century operations.”

  It was as if he could actually feel the scales falling from his eyes. How could he possibly have underestimated this glorious creature? With each passing second she grew more more magnificent.

  “Your efforts, if we may call them that, have been in vain,” she continued. “I know Bertrand is a spy.” She looked down and seemed to notice that her skirts were still in contact with his feet. She swept them aside as if he were something filthy. “Hannelore told me of Bertrand’s treachery a few days ago, and asked me to find the evidence. Your behavior this evening may well be the proof that Hannelore is waiting for.”

  She paused as if she expected him to say something, but what was there to say? She had thoroughly trounced him, not that it was much of a contest, since she was right: He, Lord Dar, was a pillock. If his ignominy weren’t so complete, and if her revelation about Bertrand weren’t such desperately bad news, he would be on his feet, applauding and cheering. And then on his knees, begging her hand . . . in his trousers and perhaps even in marriage.

  She looked him up and down. “No wonder the Ofan are nothing more than an annoyance to the Guild, no more real than a ghost story.” She turned in a swirl of fabric, and exited the shop on a lightning-studded cloud of righteousness, like a Valkyrie.

  Dar stared after her for a long time before he even noticed the exquisite aching sensation somewhat to the north of his knees and south of his navel. He was still as hard as a rock, and he doubted he would ever return to a state of decency. By all the wounds of Saint Sebastian, she was a complete and utter goddess.

  • • •

  Alva allowed herself a few moments to savor her victory over that dark-eyed rogue back in the shop, but then, when her mind turned to the matter of Bertrand and what she had learned, she shut the thinking down. She managed to make it home in the litter without reflecting on much of anything. Instead she stared at the city outside the window, so much larger and louder and dirtier than anything she could have imagined before her jump. It was drizzling, and it was that hour of transition between day and nighttime. She was being carried down to the Guild’s mansion near the river. On rainy evenings like this it seemed to her that the rising tide of the Thames had secretly washed over the city, and no one had noticed that suddenly they were all mermaids and mermen, living their lives in a dark and wavering underwater metropolis. The eyes of people and horses glimmered in the light of flambeaux, and as they passed through the finer neighborhoods, the gaudy silks of both men and women sparkled dimly, like scales.

  Alva closed her eyes, trying to feel the movement of time in this ancient city. She knew that when she learned to jump in time, it would be because Hannelore would teach her to feel the River of Time all around her. Swinging and bumping along in the litter through the light rain, she felt a slight sensation at the back of her skull. She thought she could almost, just almost, sense the River’s currents all around her. It was as if she were groping, blindly, for her own high purpose in life, and that purpose was being held just past the ends of her desperate fingertips. Hannelore could teach her . . . but would she? Only when—if—Alva delivered up the spy.

  And the spy was Bertrand. Hannelore suspected it, and Alva now had proof, or close enough.

  She shook her head sharply. She could not bear to think about that yet.

  When she got back to her suite in the Guild mansion, Alva distracted herself further by calling for her maid to undress her. Once her gown was off, she stood in her shift and watched the girl bend, neat in blue and white, to build up the fire. Susan, who had tended her for more than a year now. “Where are you from?” she asked.
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  Susan stood, and turned slowly. “Why do you ask, miss?” There was something in her dark eyes that Alva didn’t understand. Something wary. Then that gaze dropped.

  “I would like to know,” Alva said, wondering why she had never asked before. “I am from Sweden.”

  “Yes, miss.” Susan curtsied.

  “You hardly have an accent. Much less than I do. From which year did you jump?”

  The eyes darted up again, and down.

  “I jumped from 1348,” Alva said.

  “Yes, miss.” It was clear that Susan already knew these facts about Alva; everyone did, for Alva was not only a Favorite, but a favorite Favorite. Why couldn’t Alva know the same things about Susan?

  Alva opened her mouth, and shut it again. The maid was standing with her hands clenched before her, looking as if she was waiting to be struck.

  “I’d like my hair dressed simply this evening,” Alva said, defeated.

  “Yes, miss.”

  She caught sight now and then of Susan’s face in the mirror as the girl worked on her. She was pretty, but not as young as Alva had always assumed. In fact, she might be as much as ten years older than Alva. And there was something in the way that she held her mouth. It would be a prettier mouth if she would relax, but Alva realized now that Susan never relaxed.

  All the servants in the house were Guild members; they had all jumped from some other time. But none of them were Favorites. They looked and behaved and were treated just like all other eighteenth-century servants. What must that be like, Alva wondered, even as she reveled in the delicious feeling of having her hair brushed and styled. What was the difference between Susan from nowhere, in the year nothing, and Swedish Alva from 1348? Why had Hannelore lifted Alva up so high, and assigned Susan to servitude?