The Aunt Paradox (Reeves & Worcester Steampunk Mysteries) Read online

  The Aunt Paradox

  Chris Dolley

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Copyright © 2014 by Chris Dolley

  Published by Book View Café

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  ISBN 13: 978-1-61138-391-1

  Cover art © sahua d - Fotolia.com and © Hanna Hrakovich - Fotolia.com

  Steampunk Font © Illustrator Georgie - Fotolia.com

  Cover design by Chris Dolley

  One

  was concerned about Reeves. As the poet says, ‘In the spring a young automaton’s fancy turns to thoughts of electrical appliances with shapely legs.’

  And this was the third time this week that I’d seen Reeves huddled tête à chromium tête with the maid next door. Had his giant brain succumbed to her sleek and silvery legs?

  I watched them from an upstairs window, my face pressed against the cold glass for a better view. What if they ran away together? Should I pre-empt matters and offer to take her on as housekeeper?

  Maybe I was overreacting. I was, after all, at somewhat of a low ebb. My fiancée, Emmeline Dreadnought, was away on her family’s annual pilgrimage to Scapa Flow to sketch battleships. And I was counting the days to her return.

  As soon as Reeves came back, I fortified myself with a bracing cocktail, and gave the subject a tentative broaching.

  “What ho, Reeves, old chap. Pleasant weather outside? Plenty of sun and the joys of spring, what?”

  “Indeed, sir. The weather is most clement.”

  “Good. Good... Was that um ... was that next door’s maid you were talking to just now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought so. Are her ears bronze?”

  “Beaten copper, sir. They were manufactured by John Pearson of Newlyn.”

  “Really? You must know her pretty well to be exchanging names of ear manufacturers.”

  “I would not say that, sir.”

  “No? I thought I saw you talking to her the other day.”

  “I was consulting with her upon a personal matter, sir.”

  I tutted and gave the noggin a fatherly shake. “That’s how it always starts, Reeves. One minute one is merely consulting, the next, one’s name is headlining in the local parish banns.”

  “I shall endeavour to remember that, sir.”

  A knock at the door brought our conversation to an end. Reeves shimmered off to open the door and an agitated gentleman burst inside.

  “Thank God, you’re here,” said the stranger hurrying towards me in a blur of tweed. “I don’t know who else to turn to. You are Reginald Worcester, aren’t you? The gentleman’s consulting detective?”

  “I am. And you are...?”

  “HG Wells. But please call me Bertie. Everyone does. You may have heard of my time machine.”

  “Some sort of clock is it?” I said, fearing I was about to be bearded by a door-to-door grandfather clock salesman.

  Reeves coughed from the doorway. “Mr Wells is an author, sir. He wrote a book about a machine that travels back and forth through time.”

  “That’s right,” said HG. “But the thing is, it wasn’t fiction. There really was a time machine, and now it’s gone! My aunts have stolen it!”

  “Good lord. How many aunts are we talking about?”

  “Twenty-five at the last count.”

  My heart went out to the poor chap. “You have twenty-five aunts!”

  “Technically I only have the one, but she keeps going back in time and bringing back other versions of herself!”

  This had the makings of a six cocktail problem.

  “How...?” That was as far as I got. “Reeves? Do you have an opinion?”

  “Most disturbing, sir. Have any of your aunts touched themselves?”

  I nearly dropped an olive. “Reeves?”

  “It is a theory widely held, sir, that if two versions of the same person come into physical contact with each other they will explode.”

  It is sad to observe the decline of a once-great intellect. And a lesson to us all of the consequences of infatuation.

  “Reeves, I have never heard such tosh in all my life. Aunts do not explode.”

  “Mr Reeves is quite correct,” said HG. “I’ve heard that too.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh ... Have any exploded?”

  “No. They’re all as right as rain, chatting away to each other nineteen to the dozen. I can’t get a word in to reason with them! You’re my last hope. I can’t call the police. All they would do is arrest them — which is the last thing I want. My aunts have to be returned to the times they came from, not locked up!”

  “Has your aunt given any intimation as to why she has collected so many versions of herself, sir?” asked Reeves.

  “She said she was planning a dinner party to celebrate her sixtieth birthday and wanted to be sure of intelligent conversation. Though now she’s talking about turning it into a ball and inviting half of London to meet her younger selves. I think she may be planning to have one version of herself for each year of her life.”

  The mind boggled, though I could see the appeal. A ball with sixty Reginald Worcesters of assorted ages would be just the ticket to liven up a cold March evening.

  “Has she any plans for after this ball?” I asked. “She’s not intending to collect even more versions of herself, is she?”

  “God knows. But I fear by then it will be too late. She’s changing the past and, if we can’t locate the time machine soon, there’s a chance we may never find it! She could break it, or have it stolen from her somewhere in the past. And, without the time machine to put things back the way they should be, the entire timeline is in danger. You and I, Mr Worcester, may not even exist tomorrow.”

  “Steady on,” I said, feeling for the poor chap. “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

  Reeves coughed. “I fear, sir, that the timeline has already begun to change. I have been experiencing some odd feelings of late. You may recall my meetings with the maid next door...”

  My heart sank. “I hardly think this is the time, Reeves. A cold oil bath and a bracing walk will soon sort you out. We have a case to solve.”

  “If I may explain, sir, the feelings I am referring to are ones of foreboding caused by a distrust of my memory.”

  “Your memory?”

  “Indeed, sir. I appear to have conflicting memories of certain people and events. At first, I suspected a malfunctioning subroutine, but a full system check failed to locate the problem. Which is why I have been in conversation with the maid next-door — to see if her memory has been similarly affected.”

  “Has it?” I asked.

  “No, sir. Her memory appears to accord with the history books. From what Mr Wells has said, I think it probable that my circuits contain both extant memories from the original timeline mixed with those of the new. It is most confusing, sir.”

  “What conflicting memories do you have?” asked HG.

  “One that springs to mind, sir, is the name of Henry VIII’s sixth wife. I have a strong memory that the lady’s name was Catherine Parr.”

  “No,” said HG. “It was Charlotte Neal. There’s a mnemonic: Divorced, beheaded, died ... divorced, beheaded, sued him blind. Rather a spirited queen if I remember. She took half of Wales in the divorce se
ttlement.”

  Reeves coughed. “Indeed, sir. Would your aunt’s name happen to be Charlotte?”

  HG gasped. “You don’t think... My God! Aunt Charlotte’s maiden name was Neal!”

  “Are you saying, Reeves, that this Aunt Charlotte popped back in time and married Henry VIII?”

  “I fear so, sir.”

  “But... how long has she had this machine? Surely she hasn’t had time to get married and divorced.”

  “She has a time machine,” said HG. “She can spend years wherever she wants.” He paused, deep in thought. “But, wait. Wasn’t Queen Charlotte in her early twenties?”

  “Perhaps the Charlotte in question, sir, was one of her younger selves.”

  HG put his head in hands. “This is far worse than I thought. If she’s letting her younger selves play with the machine... My mother always said Aunt Charlotte had been a handful in her twenties.”

  Reeves coughed again, one of his muted coughs which usually preceded an observation of impending doom.

  “What is it, Reeves?” I asked, bracing myself.

  “I have another conflicting memory concerning a Charlotte, sir.”

  “Not another queen?”

  “No, sir. It concerns Pope Charlotte.”

  ~

  If ever a man needed a restorative bracer, the name Herbert George Wells topped the list.

  “What have I done?” he said, for possibly the fifth time.

  “The question, Bertie,” I said, deciding it time to take charge now that we were dangerously low on gin, “is not what you did, but what are we going to do? It seems to me that our first task is to retrieve this time machine of yours before any further damage is done. Now, what does it look like?”

  “What?” he said distractedly. “Oh, the time machine. It’s about the size of a small automobile, but without the wheels. There’s seating for two and it has a large temporal deflector at the rear.”

  “What’s a temporal deflector?” I asked.

  “That’s what The Traveller called it. It looks like a very large parasol.”

  “Traveller?”

  HG recounted the tale of how he met The Traveller — a man from the future whose name, apparently, he never thought to ask — in 1894 when the man suddenly appeared at his door asking for assistance.

  “He didn’t leave a visiting card?” I asked.

  “No. He said he recognised my name from the future and begged my assistance. He had a list of materials he needed and, with the help of some of my associates from the Royal Society, we helped him repair his machine. Then he vanished.”

  “Back to the future?” I asked

  “We assumed so, but he left his time machine behind. Dawson — he’s one of my associates from the Royal Society — was of the opinion that another time traveller must have found him and taken him back.”

  “Why ever did he think that?”

  “It was the only explanation we could think of to account for the time machine being left behind. We enquired at all the hospitals and morgues throughout London. No one resembling The Traveller was admitted to any of them. Dawson wondered if perhaps The Traveller had journeyed here without authorisation. The second traveller could then have been sent here to fetch him.”

  “Wouldn’t the second traveller have sought to locate the other time machine, sir?” asked Reeves.

  “We wondered if the first traveller might have refused to divulge its location. Who knows what factions and disputes might exist in the future?”

  Who indeed, but we were straying from the point — and how many kings of England were left who hadn’t married a Charlotte!

  “If this time machine is as big as you say it is, it can’t be that easy to hide,” I said. “Have you had a good look around your aunt’s grounds? It could be stowed away in a barn.”

  “My aunt has a town house. There are no grounds to speak of. I’m sure she has the machine somewhere indoors. I suspect it may be in the attic, but her servants watch me like hawks. Do you break into houses, Mr Worcester?”

  “We consulting detectives like nothing better. Give us a tall tree and a second storey window slightly ajar and we’ll choose that over an open door any day, won’t we, Reeves?”

  “If you say so, sir. One question I’d like to put to Mr Wells is ‘given the size of this machine, how did your aunt relocate it to her attic?’”

  “She must have flown it there,” said HG.

  “It’s a flying time machine?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. The machine has to be able to move within space or else it could be badly damaged if it materialised in a wall or tens of feet off the ground. That’s one of the pitfalls of time travel — three hundred years ago my cellar was solid earth, one hundred years in the future it’s packed full of metal cabinets, and a thousand years after that it’s under water. Before the machine fully materialises, you can engage the spatial engine and move the machine to a safe location.”

  “How far can one move it, sir?”

  “I don’t know the exact limits. The Traveller never vouchsafed that information. I’ve never travelled more than a mile. My aunt’s house is a mile and a half from mine, but there’s no other way she could have accomplished it.”

  “I know one should never underestimate an aunt,” I said. “But even so, how did she know how to work the thing? Isn’t it difficult?”

  “Ah,” said HG, looking sheepish. “She was being beastly to me last week — asking me when I was going to get a proper job, and what a disappointment I had been, and ... I snapped. I showed her the time machine. She expressed an interest in understanding how it worked, and I ... showed her. I was only trying to impress her. I didn’t expect she’d come back later and steal it!”

  That is the nature of aunts, and one of the reasons Salic Law forbids the crown ever passing to one.

  “And I kept the cellar door locked at all times.”

  My ears veritably pricked. A locked room mystery! I shuffled to the edge of my seat.

  “Had the door been forced, sir?” asked Reeves.

  “No, she must have taken the key from the hook in the pantry.”

  Perhaps not a classic locked room mystery.

  “What do you suggest we do, Mr Worcester? Wait until dark and break in?”

  I shook the old noggin. “Can we afford to wait that long? Queen Victoria might be replaced by Queen Charlotte XXVII by teatime. What do you think, Reeves?”

  “I think an early intervention is called for, sir. Perhaps if we appealed to the aunts’ better nature, and explained the gravity of the situation—”

  I had to interrupt. “Reeves, these are aunts. Better nature is a but a vague concept to them. We need something distracting, something cunning and subtle.”

  I was reminded of the latest Mallory Queen — The Mystery of the Missing Siamese Triplet — in which Mallory kept the suspect talking while his father crept upstairs and searched the attic for leopards ... or had it been leotards? The lettering on the page had been smudged and I still wasn’t entirely sure.

  “I have a better plan,” I said. “You and I, Bertie, will call upon your aunts and keep them busy while Reeves infiltrates below stairs. He’ll soon learn the location of both the time machine and any key that might unlock the room it’s hidden in.”

  As plans went this had to be one of my best. Even Reeves could not contain his admiration — I saw his left eyebrow rise a full one eighth of an inch.

  But I wasn’t finished.

  “And when Reeves has located it, he’ll pass you the key. I shall then feign a heart attack and, in the confusion, you slip out, find the machine, and fly it home.”

  Two

  was feeling pretty braced as I followed HG in the Stanley. With a modicum of luck we’d have the case wrapped up in time for a spot of lunch at the Sloths.

  Reeves was not so confident.

  “Retrieving the time machine, sir, is but the first step. The more difficult task is to repair the timeline and
return things to the way they were.”

  “Do we have to? Think of all those poor Eton boys swotting for their exams. Wouldn’t it make their life easier if every queen was a Charlotte?”

  “If only that were true, sir, but I fear the changes will be far more pervasive than that. Mr Babbage was of the opinion that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian forest could cause a tornado in East Dulwich.”

  “Large butterfly, was it?”

  “I believe the size of the butterfly to be irrelevant, sir. Mr Babbage was making an observation concerning the interconnectivity of events.”

  I had to disagree.

  “It may be irrelevant to C. Babbage esquire, but one suspects the people of East Dulwich have a different opinion on the matter. Is anyone hunting these giant butterflies, Reeves? What happens if they flap their wings in a different direction and Piccadilly gets flattened?”

  “I believe we have arrived, sir. Mr Wells is preparing to park.”

  ~

  Reeves oiled off in search of the servants’ entrance while Bertie and I prepared to engage the enemy head on. We found them in the drawing room. I felt like that chap — Daniel, I think his name was — standing in the doorway of the lions’ den. The only difference being that aunts, unlike lions, don’t have the habit of becoming bosom chums with the first chap who extracts a thorn from between their toes.

  And there were twenty-eight of them. All looking my way as the lively hum of conversation came to a stuttering halt. It was uncanny how alike they were. Far more so than sisters. Some appeared identical and they ranged in age from deb to dowager.

  The Worcester knees trembled, but I steeled myself. Grasping Bertie’s arm, I leaned toward him and whispered some sage last minute advice. “If any look like exploding, run.”

  “Is that little Bertie?” said one of the aunts. “Hasn’t he grown! When I last saw him he was still in short trousers.”

  “He was a baby when I last saw him.”

  “And who’s that with him? Did Sarah have another child?”

  “This is Reginald Worcester,” said Bertie. “An um ... old school friend. Reggie, this is my aunt, Mrs Dean.”

  “What ho, aunts,” I said, putting on the best Worcester smile.