Ch 1 Scene 2

Well having at least partially fixed and posted Ch 1 Scene 1, I can now post Scene 2


Inside time it is the Northern Spring of Nineteen Hundred and Four of the Christian era.
Such was the certainty of their coils and springs that the eight great clocks ticked in unison. In the quiet of the late evening the sound grew to become like an unseen spanner tapping a pipe. Gliding, scarcely a rattle, in his wheelchair along and around the network of tracks in the Conning Hall, the Master of Dover Castle glanced at his clocks approvingly. You knew where you were with time. The clocks measured the motion of the sun and chimed its progress as it travelled, without setting, the Empire.

Moonlight pierced through a window set high in the eight foot deep wall. Dover, as he was known to his colleagues, had turned off the electric light; he knew this room well enough. His wheelchair tracks gave him access to every device and control. He knew each clock without looking. Each had its own polished wood, mahogany, teak, oak, its highly polished metal plating in set square geometry. The hands moved over pale faces, tick-tocking the telling of time. He saw each pair of hands in his mind, a chess master playing blindfold.

Caught by the moon in that moment, he seemed a wasted spirit of a man. Once he had been corpulent perhaps but now yellowing flesh hung folding from his near enough cadaver. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot. A dressing gown, once red at a guess, shrouded his frame, yellow smudges on the collar suggested a rapidly eaten egg or nicotine perhaps.
The Master pulled a lever on the wheelchair and it sped down to a turntable, another lever and it faced a new direction and powered by magnetics, travelled up a short incline. There on a table a glass orb rested on a tripod. Under it there was a Bunsen burner and this the Master lit, his arthritic fingers bent claw like fumbling the lucifers. The match flamed: the burner ignited. In a short while a pool of blue liquid in the bottom of the orb simmered. Gasses were released, tiny fitful billows in the glass. Lighting a cigarette in the Bunsen flame, Dover watched intently as if seeking some salvation amidst the vapours. ‘What would she have done?’ he muttered.
‘Bah’ he said, quietly and seemingly without rancour as if resigned.

‘Rassendyll’, he shouted. He wrenched the chair, turning it without using the lever, by will alone and it sped downwards on a new track leading to the door. He pulled urgently at a cord. ‘Rassendyll’, he called again.

Richard Rassendyll opened the door framed in the light from the room behind. Such a sharp contrast he was to the dishevelled figure in the wheelchair. Tall, elegant, his fair hair guardee smart, He was in evening wear, all starch and servant pressed.

‘Oh! You are dining this evening, Richard?’ said Dover.

‘I missed my train a couple of hours ago,’ Rassendyll grinned. I had thought to catch Mrs Eynsford-Hill, in London, after her performance tonight.’

‘Ah, Richard, yes, I’m sorry,’ murmured Dover, almost to himself. ‘I have kept you, haven’t I?’ I have been distracted. I am sorry.’

Dover’s face sank a little as if exhausted by the uttering of a sentence. Rassendyll smiled and shrugged. In this place long hours and tedious ones were much the usual state of affairs. He had grown used to it and there was a closeness to the centre of authority that is narcotic to an ambitious diplomat.

‘I wonder, Rassendyll, would you be so kind as to tell the Laird of Boleskine that I wish to speak with him at his earliest convenience? If not that then at my earliest convenience, please. Here, mind, in this place, the telephone won’t do. Where is he at this moment?’

‘Paris, I believe. God knows what mischief he is up to there.’
‘Get him here on the first train, then’. Perhaps you would go and fetch him. Please do.’ He might conjure up something or another that scares him more than I do.’
‘Can I tell him what it is concerning, Dover?’

‘It is concerning me. I am very concerned, Richard. There is something afoot. I am unsure...... I suspect that an ugly little claw is pulling at the loose threads of the fabric of Empire. I want to know whose it is... or what. And then I think I shall want it stopped. See to the Laird immediately, would you?’

The wheelchair turned. Dover re-entered his world of tracks and pulleys, the constant ticking of the reality of time and was lost to the darkness.

He turned his face a little. ‘I am sorry to have kept you, Richard,’ he murmured unheard.