TITLE: Nota Bene (2/7) Nil Desperandum (Do Not Despair)
AUTHOR: Blue Fenix
AUTHOR'S EMAIL: the_blue_fenix@yahoo.com
PERMISSION TO ARCHIVE: AuroraVernealis, Aurora Journals, and Fanfiction.net only
CATEGORY: Het; adventure
SPOILERS: Cardinal's Design, Cardinal's Revenge, Let There Be Light
RATINGS/WARNINGS: G to PG, for parts one and two. Later chapters up to R for consensual heterosexual activity.
MAIN CHARACTER(S): Phileas Fogg, Passepartout, Rebecca Fogg, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas pere.
SUMMARY: The return of the Phoenix time machine draws Fogg and company through time to save the life of an old friend.
DISCLAIMERS: the usual. Borrowed characters, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I've got no money to sue for.
Rebecca had settled herself in an armchair in the front hallway to wait on events. Fogg thought there might be time to pinpoint their destination by its longitude and latitude. He was back in the library, just in the act of reaching down a full-folio atlas from a top shelf, when he heard the doorbell. He went to the hallway. Rebecca was answering the door herself. "Come in, Jules."
The young Frenchman shambled into the house. He didn't show any surprise at finding both Foggs and Passepartout waiting for him. His hair and clothes glittered with water from the misty evening outside; only the leather fisherman's coat he always wore showed any signs of keeping him dry. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I should have sent a wire I was coming. I really should have gone to Paris, but I couldn't do anything ... not even the funeral ... there wasn't any point. And you're the only other people in the world who knew ... I'm sorry. I'm bothering you." His eyes were overflowing with tears.
"Passepartout," Fogg said quietly, "Hot tea and blankets in the library. We'll build up the fire ourselves." The valet nodded fervently -- no less than his employers, he regarded Jules Verne as a personal friend -- and disappeared.
Rebecca took hold of the young man's hands. "You're ice cold. Come in here and get warm. It's no use your making yourself ill. Tell us what happened and we'll help you."
Jules shook his head in violent denial, but he let himself be led into the warmer room and the armchair nearest the fire. Fogg took over the task of easing him out of his leather coat. When it was removed, Jules began to shiver violently. "It's a survival reflex," Fogg reassured him. "Now that there's warmth around you, your body's trying to get some inside." He must have walked a long distance through the chill December evening to put himself in this state. Little by little, the uncontrollable shivers began to ease. "That's better." Phileas glanced at Rebecca, who met his eyes with her earlier anger set aside. Questioning the boy in this condition would be useless cruelty.
Passepartout appeared in the doorway with a full tea set on a tray and a blanket folded over one arm. "First thing is learned serving in an English house; the tea shall answer for any problem," he remarked. "The arm is falling off; put the kettle on." He poured a steaming cup while Rebecca tucked the blanket around their friend's legs.
Jules took the cup in both hands and gulped it gratefully. "Sorry," he said in a stronger voice. "I guess I didn't eat anything on the channel boat. I saw the newspaper, and I already knew there was a ship for London ... coming here was the only thing I could think of to do. I doubt if there's anything in the English papers. There barely was in the French ones. I just happened to see a Paris paper, four days old, while I was in Calais visiting friends." He reached into the pocket of his shirt and brought out a damp, much-folded scrap of newsprint. "It's Alexandre. He's dead, dead and buried."
The blunt words, even from himself, wrecked Jules' composure. He threw his head back against the chair, the muscles in his jaw clenching to hold back outright sobs. Rebecca slid one arm around the young man's shoulders to comfort him, and threw a meaningful look at Fogg. He retrieved the piece of newspaper. Alexandre Dumas, noted author of Les Trois Mousquetaires, dead in a tavern brawl and in debt on the last day of November 1861. Fogg suspected the reporter, from his tone, of being a failed and bitter novelist. A little too much smugness in the description of Dumas' poverty and debauchery twenty years after the creation of his masterwork, and a distinct implication that his fate was deserved. The offhand description of the pauper's funeral the next day was particularly heartless.
Phileas himself wouldn't have trusted the magnificent old scoundrel with a five-pound loan or a bottle of brandy. But he'd been a friend to Jules Verne when the young man badly needed one, backing his first play and guiding his early ventures into writing. He'd helped Fogg and Rebecca as well, joining them with the courage of a lion in a scuffle against Prussian agents that was no duty of his. And one of the things that had drained his fortune, along with the debts and carousing he was justly famous for, was the near-obsessive construction of the Phoenix time ship based on an ancient set of plans that Dumas had discovered by chance in a seventeenth-century document.
Fogg's chin came up. "The Phoenix."
Rebecca took his meaning instantly. "Of course. You all but spelled it out for us. But why poor Dumas in particular? People, even famous people, die every day."
Jules, confused, looked from one face to the other. "What are you talking about?"
"Damned if I know." Fogg retrieved the atlas, and flipped through it to the largest scale map of France. "Yes. The coordinates set on the Phoenix are in Paris -- Montmartre, if I'm not mistaken."
"We haven't got the Phoenix any more," Jules said with a dogged determination to keep the facts straight. "It's gone. Passepartout and I fixed the controls so it would go away."
"It's come back. It was delivered to the back garden about thirty minutes ago." Phileas passed the French newspaper clipping to Rebecca. "See if you can glean any additional facts from that, will you? Passepartout, I'll want you to get all the London and Paris papers you can, from the date of Dumas' death to the present, in case there are any other stories. The more we know about what we're up against, the better our chances. What else?" He stared into space for a moment, completely focused on tactics. "Money. We may have to wait for tomorrow morning when the banks open -- there's no telling what we'll need cash for, especially with the Aurora out of reach. The cabin alone's three times the size of the Phoenix; we could never take it with us."
Rebecca reached across to the desk and upset what looked like a crystal inkwell on the edge of the blotter. No ink spilled out; instead a tiny brass lever set into the surface of the desk shifted into a new position. On the other side of the room, a painting of a Fogg great-uncle hinged out from the wall. "Thank you," said Phileas, and opened the wall safe behind it. The stacks of bank notes were thicker than he remembered. "Actually, I suspect this will be adequate. Likely all we have to do is keep Dumas out of harm's way on that day to put things right."
Jules sat up. "You don't understand. He's dead."
Rebecca gently smoothed the younger man's hair. "Five days ago he wasn't. You're forgetting the Phoenix."
"We can make it never have happened?" Jules paused, opened his mouth to start over, then gave up the effort. "You know what I mean. Is something like that even possible?"
"We've had intimations that it is." Fogg closed safe and portrait alike. "We should wait for morning in any case, I think. You'd be much the better for a night's sleep."
He meant it kindly, but the muscles in Verne's jaw tensed again. "I'm fine. Do you think I'd mess up something this important?" Between grief and exhaustion, the young Frenchman was temporarily as combative as Fogg himself.
I'm a bad influence. Fogg held up a placating hand. "You'll unquestionably be vital in this. You know him better than any of us. All the more reason you should be at your best. It's time travel; it makes no difference if we leave this instant or in ten hours."
Jules nodded slowly, trying to take it in. But his hands clenched the arms of the chair with undirected energy. Another moment, and he was on his feet pacing in front of the fire. "That's why I came here, so it would be safe to let go. I wanted to mourn with people who would understand." He hadn't quite used the word home, but he didn't need to. Fogg felt warmed to the heart by his friend's trust; he saw by Rebecca's softened expression that she was moved too.
Jules was still pacing. "That was when the worst had already happened. There was nothing anybody could do. If it's not ... if there's still a chance ... I can't, don't you see? I can't just set it aside and sleep, not until I know."
"Sometimes it's necessary," Rebecca told him. "Patience is a vital survival skill for a agent."
"I'm not an agent," Jules fired back. He looked like he regretted the sharp tone; his voice softened into a plea. "I know I'm not as old or as tough or as skilled as you are." His look took in both Foggs. "I understand why sometimes you treat me like a child. But please, not this time. I can't take it. Alexandre is too important to me."
Passepartout, standing by the tea tray, looked an eloquent plea on behalf of his countryman. Fogg glanced back at Rebecca; her eyes held fond, amused resignation. Go on -- you will anyway. "Passepartout," Fogg said, "How quickly can you produce a hot meal and a dry change of clothes that will fit Verne?"
"Instant as pie, master!" Passepartout grinned. "And packing the trunks takes not ten minutes ..."
"No baggage. It would slow us down too much. We'll buy anything we need." Fogg tucked a sheaf of bank notes into his smoking jacket and handed another to Rebecca. "But I do think a change of clothes would be wise for the rest of us as well. I didn't like the lack of suitable equipment when we found ourselves in the seventeenth century. Let's try to do better this time."
----
Fogg took care with his own preparations. The difference between a clean shave or six hours' worth of stubble, or a plain wool suit instead of a Harris tweed, had no tactical significance but the familiar ritual helped him focus. The readiness is all. Insofar as he could, he tried to put the encounter with his older self and especially the upcoming row with Rebecca entirely out of his mind. She was too much the professional to squabble with him in the middle of a mission. He was still appalled that the visitor -- it was hard to think of the man as himself when the fellow was so damnably flippant -- had blurted out such a private matter where Rebecca could hear it and be hurt. Utterly heartless. As if he came here purposely to upset her.
Fogg took still more care with weaponry, far more equipment than he usually carried. It was unlikely that if he lost the stiletto from his left sleeve, for example, he'd have time to reach the secondary blades behind his coat lapels. Nevertheless, arming himself with everything that ingenuity and paranoia could suggest was a distinct comfort. The mission as such should be simple enough. Only the time travel aspect made it at all extraordinary, and no amount of weaponry would help if that end of things went wrong. A trip to Paris then, nothing more, and Paris was almost a second home to him. Fogg brought out a coil of rough-edged wire, with a ring on either end to make a serviceable hacksaw, which fit neatly into the back of his watch case. He considered a second full-sized revolver, but decided it would spoil the line of his coat and settled for the sleeve derringer. He left his room, trying to escape the foreboding that he might never see it again.
Rebecca, a few doors down the hall, was closing her own door. Her posture was stiffly correct. Phileas diagnosed body armor or her leather fighting suit or both under the high-collared blue dress. He approved. Her only visible accessory was a small reticule, but he had no doubt she exceeded his weight of weaponry by something like a three-to-two margin. "It's a wonder you can stand upright," he remarked.
"You had a point about adequate equipment," Rebecca said dryly. "I do listen on the occasions when you make sense."
The mission hadn't started yet, of course. Phileas squared his shoulders as if facing a physical threat. "I am sorry you had to hear that."
Her light blue eyes burned like gas flames. She shifted the small bag from one hand to the other, a tense gesture like a tiger flexing its claws. "Of course you are. Not sorry that you've laid out these detailed rules for when you're allowed to commit suicide. Not even sorry to make me into your excuse. You're sorry you got caught at it. That makes everything all right."
Her eyes were locked on his, demanding. Fogg considered the kind of words she wanted. I promise to go on living, no matter what happens to you. Rebecca at least could never catch him breaking his oath. But it would remain a lie all the same. Too often he'd found life a burden even while she was alive and well. The thought of days and weeks and years without her was a horror beyond contemplation. "Ask me for anything else," he said quietly. "But not that. Your life is your own to risk; I do accept that. Leave mine to me."
She was always fair-skinned, the porcelain complexion that went with her blazing hair. Now Rebecca turned still paler. Fear or anger, he couldn't be sure. Normally Phileas could guess her thoughts well enough but her blank expression was like a wall between them. Her knuckles were white too, gripping the purse. "Jules will be expecting us downstairs." Rebecca swept past him in a swirl of skirts. Phileas followed her, aching.
----
The four of them met out in the back garden, inside the Phoenix. Jules Verne was freshly dressed in an assortment of clothes that looked to have been borrowed from Passepartout and some of the other servants. It gave the young man a slightly Bohemian air that might get him thrown out of a formal dinner but that would perfectly suit the parts of Paris they were likely to visit. He'd been fed, and had recovered his stamina with the irritating ease of extreme youth. His color was better now, his eyes determined but not desperate. The trembling was gone even from the small muscles in his hands. He grasped the meaning of the Phoenix's new controls with scarcely a word of prompting, and had the emotional energy to be curious about them. "I can't figure out how the numbers move," Jules said. He fingered a small rivet which had a cross-shaped indentation at its center. "I'd swear that's a screw head. With the right tool I can open it up ..."
"For all I know, you may be the one who built it," Fogg said. He tried to keep his tone civil. Verne didn't deserve the overflow of other arguments. "Our future selves went to a great deal of trouble to make certain we couldn't do anything to the ship besides use it once. Perhaps we should take that as our cue, and focus on changing the past at the moment instead of figuring out the future."
"I did make to look at the newspapers in the library," Passepartout reported. "Not finding any other about M. Dumas." He held up the original newspaper clipping Verne had brought them as proof.
Rebecca glanced at the obituary between the two men's shoulders, then at the numbers on the control panel. "It appears we'll have some hours to find Dumas before the fight. Unless anyone has any last minute changes of plan?"
Everyone hung back, waiting for someone else to speak. They'd done this once, accidentally triggering the Phoenix's controls in a scuffle without knowing what function the machine served. Traveling back in time in cold blood took a little more resolution, even for people used to more ordinary forms of danger. "Well, then." Fogg reached out and firmly pushed the red button.
It was like the disorientation he'd felt in the library, many times stronger. The faint light from outside, where the gaslights outside the back door just reached to the Phoenix's windows, blurred and changed to a vague gold. The sky lightened and darkened, west to east, and then repeated itself.
Rebecca, to his left, had trembled once when the disorientation first hit them and braced herself on her cousin's shoulder. Her chin came up now, a trick they both had of defying fear with a head-on counterattack. "One wonders what it would be like to open the door and step outside right now," she said in a dryly academic tone.
Jules, at Fogg's other side, swallowed hard and stared at Rebecca in panic; well, he hadn't known her long. Or perhaps he had a keen insight. Phileas rested a hand on her arm, tried to match the calm tone. "One should go on wondering."
The light outside turned abruptly dim. A visceral shock went through them, like being in a train which had come to a sudden stop. The lighted numbers on the console changed and then winked out entirely.
"Is it over?" Jules said. "I guess it must be. We ought to leave before the ship goes somewhere else." He didn't move toward the door.
"Is never going to be a popular way to travel," Passepartout offered. "Horse and carriage, much better."
They left the Phoenix one at a time. The environment was familiar, when their eyes had adjusted to the dimness. It was the rented cellar where Alexandre Dumas had originally built the device. "Hopefully Dumas hasn't changed his customary haunts too much since we last saw him," Fogg remarked, still standing on the narrow outer deck of the time ship. "That trinket of the Cardinal's you left him, Verne, should have paid his debts for at least a few months. What was the name of the tavern where he was attacked?"
"Eight Horses." Rebecca didn't have to look at the newspaper clipping.
"I've never been there, but I think I've heard of it," Jules said. He was leaning meditatively on the side of the Phoenix with one palm. "There has to be some way we can keep this ship, you know. If we could learn how to use it ..."
"A friend of Rebecca's from the future," Fogg drawled the words with precise disdain, "assures us that would be a great error of judgement. I'm reluctant to go against that warning without a concrete end in view." He hopped down to the cellar floor.
The Phoenix shimmered in place. Jules, still touching it, yelped as if he'd been shocked. He flinched back; then his jaw set and he grabbed with both hands for the ship's railing. Phileas Fogg, beside him, moved faster. He caught the young Frenchman unceremoniously by the neck of his jacket and dragged him back like a kitten. The ship faded away like a mist. A brief wind rose in the enclosed cellar as air filled the hole it had left behind.
"I don't think that would have been very safe," Fogg said. He released Verne's coat.
"I might have had it." Jules re-settled his clothes, glowering. "Some sort of weight-dependent system -- when it felt the ship go back to its empty weight some mechanism sent it away in time. If we'd guessed, we could have brought a big rock or something."
"Don't get distracted by clever gadgets," Rebecca said softly. "We aren't here to steal a time ship for a pleasure cruise -- we're here to keep M. Dumas from dying. Tonight."
Jules looked stricken. "I'm sorry." Passepartout patted the young man reassuringly on the arm.
----
It was dark outside when they emerged into a narrow Paris street. A church clock a few blocks away diverged from Fogg's pocket watch by some six hours -- or a few days. He considered resetting his watch, a little queasily, and decided to leave it as it was for the moment.
Jules Verne, still subdued, seemed to be thinking along similar lines. "If it's really last Saturday," he muttered, "I could send a telegram to myself -- my other self -- in Calais. Or to the three of you in London."
"Apparently you're going to resist the temptation," Rebecca said. "None of us received any such message. We'd remember." Fogg pondered the remarks his own "other self" had made about being a possibility rather than a certainty and wondered if it was that simple. The whole concept gave him a dull ache in mid-forehead.
After six blocks and a wrong turn or two, Jules led them down a half-flight of stairs in a narrow, twisting stone street to a door which read Chevaux Huit in uneven, faded paint. The structure had fallen on hard times but its original fabric, of well-cut stone, remained sound despite lichen and smoke staining the surface. It was easy to imagine Athos or D'Artagnan themselves visiting this tavern when the building was new. The space inside, a single large room, was noisy and rank with too many unwashed bodies.
For all of his social blunders in more formal settings, Jules and his Bohemian attire fit in here like a pilot fish in a school of sharks. Passepartout made himself just as unremarkable, despite his upper-class servant's clothes, by some mystic valet's art. It was the Foggs, too rich and well-dressed and far too foreign, who were drawing stares. Phileas pondered the chances that they might cause the brawl they'd come to stop. "We should circulate and get out quickly if we can," he said in an undertone. Rebecca, clinging close to his arm like a conventional lady, nodded a fraction.
Jules had set off through the crowd at an apparently random angle chosen either by inspiration or by his better knowledge of Dumas' habits. Now his voice rose above the din in a whoop of enthusiasm. Rebecca smiled indulgently; the two Foggs smoothly changed direction, moving as one.
They found their friend at a shabby table in a back corner, hugging Dumas like a lost child reunited with a parent. Jules' eyes were sparkling with tears of relief. Alexandre Dumas, who was not entirely sober, primarily looked puzzled by the attention. "There, now." He patted Jules uncertainly on the back; the younger man failed to take the hint and let go. "Good evening," Dumas addressed the Foggs over Jules' shoulder. "It's been a while ... is something wrong?" From his glance back toward Jules, he seemed to regard the problem as his friend's sudden lack of emotional equilibrium. He let his arm rest protectively around Verne's shoulders.
"We've been warned that your life's in serious danger, M. Dumas," Rebecca told him. "It's a bit complex to explain here. We'd do better to get you somewhere quieter and more private."
"Especially private." The hairs were standing up on the back of Phileas' neck. Knowing that they were launched on the process of changing the past -- even if it was currently the present -- felt like hurling a rock on an Alpine glacier and watching the avalanche. His right hand was close to his pistol. He felt unshakably certain that an enemy was watching them.
Dumas gently peeled Jules' arms from around his neck. "I believe I have mentioned before, Mademoiselle, that I will gladly follow you anywhere -- provided you call me Alexandre." Rebecca was sufficiently charmed to smile in response.
Fogg seethed quietly to himself. The situation was far too dangerous to allow the distraction of a personal spat. "Let's go, then." Passepartout was approaching from another part of the crowd; Phileas waited for the valet to reach them before urging their whole small party toward the door.
A minor, wordless disagreement ensued. Dumas, though lacking the foreknowledge of the others, was well aware that the tavern was an unsafe environment. His instinct, reinforced by the deep vein of chivalry in his soul, was to put Rebecca in the safer zone in the middle of their group. Hers, and everyone else's, was to put Dumas in that relative position. The conflicting priorities led to considerable jostling until Rebecca let Dumas take her arm. Jules and Passepartout fell in on either side of the pair, while Fogg himself took point. Rebecca kept close to Dumas, making the novelist happily red-faced and not incidentally shielding him from any potential gunfire to their right. Fogg made a mental note, by analogy, that Jules' fervent hugging of his older friend at first sight may have been more practical-minded than it looked. He continued scanning the crowd in full paranoia mode, prepared to shoot instantly and damn the consequences if anyone got in their way. No one did. The tavern's clientele seemed highly perceptive about certain specific subjects.
The chill early-winter air of the street outside was a physical relief as well as an emotional one after the stifling heat of the overcrowded tavern. Jules sagged visibly when they got outdoors. "Thank God. We did it; you're safe now, Alexandre."
Phileas hated it when people said things like that. "Relatively safe, not absolutely. Heading off one disaster's no guarantee another can't lurk around the next corner -- and I doubt we'll be given a second chance to recover any other mistakes. Any deaths that happen from here on out are permanent."
"Life's back to normal, then," Rebecca remarked. The prospect of action made her eyes glitter. She still had one hand on Dumas' arm, the picture of modestly ladylike grace, and she had three weapons in reach that Fogg knew of.
Dumas released Rebecca's hand in order to face each of the four for a good look, one after the other. "I am not that drunk," he enunciated distinctly. "Therefore you actually said that. Therefore something bizarre has occurred. Would anyone care to tell me what it is?"
"This still isn't a good place." No one else was in sight on the street, but there were too many upstairs windows on both sides for Fogg to keep track of without constantly turning his head. "Where do you live now, M. Dumas?"
"I ... there have been some financial reverses." Dumas looked fixedly at the cobblestones of the street. "I expect I'll wind up visiting my son. Again."
Phileas recalled that Dumas had a grown son, several years older than Verne, who had something of a literary career of his own. The younger Dumas' reputation was not on the same scale as his father's, but he'd had considerably more success at holding on to the proceeds of his writing. Phileas supposed it said something in Dumas' favor that he was reluctant to lean on family charity. "Don't worry about that. We have to find somewhere to stay in any case," Fogg said. "Anything nearby that has accommodations, at this point."
Dumas named a boarding house which proved to be two blocks back the way they had come. The concierge recognized Dumas, a few minutes later, with more disdain than welcome. A few British bank notes brightened the man's mood considerably. A few more produced the admission that there were rooms available to rent, three of them on the same floor -- just below the attic, not of the finest quality, but with a stairwell entirely to themselves. Fogg was getting tired after his unnaturally prolonged day. It annoyed him more than it should have that proximity to Alexandre Dumas had put them into the category of customer asked to pay in advance. Rebecca, well aware of his mood, silenced Phileas with a discreet kick to one ankle and carried on with the negotiations herself.
Pounds sterling were exchanged for three keys with (Phileas suspected) a slight surcharge for being friends of Dumas. They waved aside the assistance of a yawning teenaged page, since none of them had any luggage, and went to find their rooms themselves. Although the rooming house was far from first-class, the layout seemed ideal. As promised, the rooms in question were in an annex of the building which had no direct connection to the rest of the top floor. The staircase dead-ended at their three rooms and nothing else, so they could feel almost as much privacy as if they'd engaged a connected suite. Fogg began to breathe more easily, when they were alone in the enclosed space, than he had since that first moment of intertemporal nausea in his own home. "Thank God for that. I almost felt that someone had been following us from the tavern."
Rebecca was checking one room after the other along the small hallway, a silver-chased derringer in hand. She stopped. "I was watching, and I didn't see anyone," she said doubtfully.
Phileas sighed. He knew that his cousin had great respect for his training and skills at intelligence tradecraft -- and rather less confidence in his mental equilibrium. Since he agreed with the second opinion no less than the first, it was hard to debate the point with her. "I confess I didn't see anyone either, not even a shadow," Fogg said. "It would take the highest caliber of professional to elude us both -- and probably considerable luck on his side. I may just be tired. We could keep a watch, I suppose." He checked the third room himself, his own full-sized pistol at the ready.
Alexandre Dumas was beginning to look more than a little irritated. "Would someone mind explaining what we're watching for?"
"Very well." Phileas faced the older man. He leaned one hip against the frame of an open doorway to give his tired legs some rest; the others clustered around. "Even Jules hasn't heard half of the latest parts. I should go back a bit. When you showed us the Phoenix a few months ago, you told us you'd built it from Richlieu's plans without knowing what it was. We accidentally found out the answer to that question; it's a time ship. As an ordinary ship moves through the ocean, or my dirigible moves through the air, your Phoenix can go from point to point in time at will. Although we didn't have much control over the steering, as it turned out. We were fortunate to get back with our lives."
Dumas' eyes were gleaming with real interest. "Where did you go? Or when, I should say?"
"Right into the path of your Cardinal Richlieu; about 1640, I think," Phileas said. "The Sun King was twenty or so, and Richlieu was trying to have him poisoned." It seemed better to omit the part about several of the people they'd met in the past being doppelgangers of themselves -- including a historical Porthos who resembled Dumas. "The attempt failed. Passepartout was able to learn enough about the controls to bring us home." The valet beamed at the implied praise. "The ship seemed to be more of a danger than an asset at that point, so we let it float off by itself in the stream of time. Our one priority by then was to get rid of it."
Dumas' jaw set. "You might have told me so. Considering that I'd spent two years of my life and a considerable sum of money building the device in the first place."
"There wasn't any other choice, Alexandre," Jules put in with quiet intensity. "It was the scariest thing I've ever been involved in -- and after the last year, that's saying a lot. There's more, too. I wrote you about America -- what I didn't tell you was that while we were there we met someone who was trying to rebuild the Phoenix. A young inventor named Al Edison -- and he'd gotten the design from Aztec stone carvings in Mexico that were hundreds of years old. His version could only go from place to place, not time to time, but that was bad enough. They were going to use it in their Civil War like some kind of siege engine. All we could think was that the original Phoenix had been bouncing back and forth in time completely at random."
Phileas caught Verne's eye and took back the thread of the conversation. "I'm not sure how someone would catch a runaway time ship like a runaway horse, but the trick was apparently managed. Tonight the Phoenix appeared in my back garden in London, apparently under very accurate control. I say 'tonight' because I haven't seen the sun come up since. In fact, it was nearly a week from now. The four of us were brought back in time to prevent you from being murdered in that tavern tonight, Dumas."
Jules held out his ragged-edged newspaper clipping. Alexandre Dumas read it over silently, to all appearances becoming more sober by the second. "This could easily be a hoax," he said. "Any printer's shop could have made this to order; there's no proof of anything you've told me."
"It really happened, Alexandre," Jules said. "Or it was going to ... this paper was days old when I saw it in Calais. You were killed and buried. At least you would've been, if we hadn't gotten you out of that tavern tonight. And we don't know why it happened, or why we were allowed to come back and help."
"You keep saying allowed and brought back," Dumas said sharply. "By who?"
"The pilot of the time ship was myself," Phileas admitted. "A future self -- about sixty to all appearances, and with a damnable taste for striking enigmatic poses. I suppose I'd better start from the beginning."
He made the recitation as detailed as any after-mission report, since Rebecca had missed half of the evening's events and Verne even more. He drew on nota bene for a word-for-word repetition of his older self's spoken remarks -- the smug delivery made him suspect that many of them had a double meaning -- but summarized at many other points, such as his own conflicts with the man. Dumas seemed particularly fascinated by their brief scuffle in the garden. "So this ... older twin ... could feel exactly what you were thinking and doing?" the author asked.
"Nothing so direct. He could remember having been me, and recall what he'd done and felt at the time." Phileas would have preferred to skim over that portion of the evening. "At any rate, he seems to have told us the truth in the essentials. We did find you where and when we expected to find you, and you could have easily been killed in a brawl in those social circles."
"I think you may have exaggerated ideas about Montmartre," Dumas said. "I admit les Chevaux Huit can be a bit lively. I have seen fights there, especially on Saturday nights. But I've never known anyone to be killed. I certainly wouldn't wade into the middle of such a fight myself. I'm an old man, Mr. Fogg. You don't live to be old without learning a thing or two. When tankards and fists start flying, I generally hide under the table."
Rebecca, already familiar with the points being discussed, had been talking quietly to Passepartout a little distance away. "Accidents can happen anywhere," she said. "Some drunkard in the crowd discharging a pistol without intending to hit you. The important thing is that you are safe now. I suggest that we retire, if you two are quite finished growling at each other. A night's sleep would do us all a world of good."
"Dear lady, you are as wise as you are beautiful." Dumas swept up her hand and kissed the first knuckle briefly. "However much or little danger I may have been in, you certainly took risks with the intent of saving my life. I would be a cad if I were not eternally grateful. Monsieur, Mademoiselle." He bowed toward them all and moved a little unsteadily into the first bedroom.
They'd all seen, when the doors were opened, that the first and third bedrooms along the corridors had two beds each while the middle room held a single one. "I'll look after him," Jules said quietly. "The important thing is that we saved his life, whether he believes it or not. I'll never be able to repay you for this." He followed his friend into the first room and closed the door.