General Relativity

by Nomad1

Darling's remarkable resemblance to French traitor the Duc de Darling - no relation - sees him unwillingly sent to infiltrate a German-occupied château. Blackadder accompanies him even less willingly, especially when he learns exactly what it is they're looking for. (Blackadder/Darling.)

Notes: Written for twoam for Yuletide 2024.

General Relativity

"Orders, orders, orders. We've got more bloody contradictory orders than the caterers at the National Argument Championships." Blackadder sighed as he leafed through the latest drift of future toilet paper from HQ. "Listen to this lot. One fifth of all ammunition to be held back in stores as emergency reserve... Strictly no further ammunition to be issued while reserves remain in stores... Any men found on duty with unloaded rifles to be taken out and shot."

With what, exactly, headquarters failed to specify. He gave the rear of the last page a desultory glance - it made vastly more sense than the front, having been left blank - and added it to the pile. At least that was one thing headquarters kept them reliably supplied with.

"Well, damn and blast and dash it all, if we haven't got the ammunition, then I say we take Jerry on in a good old-fashioned battle of wits and ingenuity," George said boldly.

"Yes. Something of a one-sided conflict on your part, I fear, George," Blackadder said. Though he was arguably still an intellectual giant compared to the third occupant of their dugout.

"I never minded following orders," Baldrick said, having caught up to some prior point in the conversation. "My family has a proud tradition of service. When someone tells a Baldrick what to do, we don't think twice."

"Mm. Pity you never mastered the art of thinking at least once, or we might actually be getting somewhere," he said.

"My forebears had their place at the tables of princes," he went on, undaunted. "Well, under the tables of princes. And now I'm in the army, where I can rise up through the ranks and finally make something of myself."

"Yes, well, I wouldn't be too optimistic on that front, Baldrick. Even the Germans aren't killing us that fast." Although their laughably termed superiors were certainly doing the best to pick up the slack. The phone at his right hand began to ring, and he picked it up with fatalistic weariness. "Hello, German auxiliary ammunition dump. Collection in person only, we no longer deliver."

It was, of course, the only person who ever called him except when the lines were crossed. "Darling, you know the men get jealous when you call me up at work to whisper these sweet nothings," he said, and hung up on the indignant splutters.

He'd be lucky if sweet nothing was all he got from a summons to see General Melchett, but at least it got him out of the trenches for a while. "Well, I'm off to headquarters," he said as he stood up. "Let's see what Lady Fortune plans to drunkenly dribble into my ear tonight."

---

Among the primary attractions of Staff HQ over the dugout were the fact it was a good forty minutes away from the front lines, was warm, dry and comfortably furnished, and contained neither Baldrick nor any of the highly select group of things one could find oneself sharing a trench with that smelled even worse than Baldrick.

It also contained Captain Darling, who provided a little welcome variety by being just bright enough to know when he was being insulted.

"Ah, Captain Darling," he said as he arrived. "Need a little help alphabetising the stationery cupboard?"

"This is no time for your usual impertinence, Blackadder," Darling snapped. "Something's just come up."

"Yes, well, I do tend to have that effect on people. Just try not to poke me with it." He noted that Darling seemed tense even for a man who was usually more highly strung than the Women's Auxiliary Balloon Corps' corsets. "Something on your mind, Darling?"

Any response on Darling's part was forestalled by the arrival of General Melchett. "Ah, Blackadder," he said heartily. "Just the man I think of when it comes to being sent out to defy impossible odds and look death straight in the face!"

"What a coincidence," he said.

For once it seemed that he and Darling were in perfect agreement on something - that whatever this might be about, it was a job that fit Edmund Blackadder about as well as pullover knitted by Baldrick for a three-legged elephant. "Sir, I really don't think Captain Blackadder-"

"Has time for all this namby-pamby beating around the bush? Yes, yes! Let's stop shilly-shallying and get down to the nitty-gritty," Melchett said.

"Well, glad to know we can talk this over like adults," Blackadder said.

"Now, those weedy little swots over in intelligence may look like they couldn't take a hot buttered crumpet to the cheeks without blubbing, but they've uncovered a dastardly plot by the vile Hun to win the war by filthy treachery instead of good old-fashioned charging at the enemy across an open field," the general said.

"Well, frankly, sir, I can only say I'm shocked," Blackadder said. "I didn't know we had an intelligence department."

Darling made another effort to butt in. "General, I really must protest. Captain Blackadder is clearly completely unsuited-"

"To standing around gabbing with this weary old warhorse when he could be out there amid all the mud and blood and the guts? Yes, by all means, let's get down to business," Melchett said. "Blackadder, we've received alarming news that the Germans could be in a position to get their hands on a device that would change the whole course of the war."

"That would be the course of the war where they slowly slaughter our forces in convenient-sized batches as we send them out in mindless repetition of the same battle plan that's failed the last fifty times?" he checked.

"Exactly! Now, a cowardly group of Boche officers have holed up in a French château behind the front lines, living it up in the lap of luxury while they send their men out to perish at the hands of our brave Tommies."

"Completely unlike our Staff HQ in this French town hall, a mere forty minutes away from the thick of the fighting," Blackadder said, looking around at the ornate furniture and grand marble fireplace.

"Well, quite," he agreed. "The French duke who owned the château fled at the first sign of fighting, but our men caught up to him in a bar in Swaziland and plied him with alcohol until they were able to debrief him and pump him thoroughly."

"Yes, well. Fairly typical behaviour for the British while on holiday, in my experience," he said.

"This is serious, Blackadder!" Darling said. "There are papers in that château that could cause disaster if they fall into enemy hands."

"Mm, yes, or enemy eyeballs, for that matter," Melchett put in. "As for other enemy body parts, well, it's too disgusting to think about! Luckily, we have a secret weapon in the form of Captain Darling."

"Secret? I'd say it's downright imperceptible." Blackadder eyed him up and down dubiously. The man had petty bureaucrat written all over him, in triplicate.

"It just so happens that Darling here bears a remarkable physical resemblance to the absent Duc de Darling-" Melchett said.

"No relation," Darling put in hastily, looking rather green around the gills. Blackadder gave that the arched eyebrow it deserved.

"-Which gives us the perfect chance to infiltrate the château! Now, naturally, this means Darling will be forced to pretend to be a complete cowardly custard, the sort of worthless little squit who would sell his grandmother to the Germans at the first mildly threatening wave of an overly sharpened pencil."

"I'm sure you'll find he'll excel in the role," Blackadder said politely. "General, if I might ask, where exactly do I fit in to all this? Need someone to risk life and limb doing battle with papercuts and that tricky sticky carriage return on the typewriter while Darling's away?" If so, he'd be more than happy to wish him a hearty bon voyage, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen and sod off.

Melchett gave him a reassuring clap on the shoulder that rocked him on his feet. "No, no, this old soldier will just to have soldier on alone, damn and blast these blurry eyes and dicky fingers."

"I hate to have to leave you, sir," Darling said, with what Blackadder was quite sure was true feeling, if not the one the general took it for.

"I know, Darling, I know," Melchett said, doling out another violent thump, "but I'd only slow you down out there on the battlefield, and besides, I could never play the role of the duchess."

"The... duchess?" Blackadder echoed carefully. Enlightenment was at last beginning to dawn, with all the warmth and comfort of a German flare over no man's land.

Darling smiled nastily. "Oh, yes. You didn't think I'd be crossing the German lines alone, did you?"

Oh, to coin a phrase, bugger.

---

Apparently, the Duc de Darling - no relation - had been forced to flee the château in the dead of night, accompanied only by his wife, her lady's maid, the butler, the underbutler, his personal chef, valet and tailor, two gardeners, six thoroughbred horses, twelve suitcases containing appropriate summer and winter wardrobes, and the entire contents of the Château de Darling's wine cellar. There had been no time to secure any vital military secrets that might be in imminent danger of falling into German hands.

"Yes," Blackadder said. "Forgive me, but exactly what kind of military secrets are we expecting the Germans to recover from the home of some inbred French nob with an inherited title that, ever since the Revolution, is about as meaningful as the A1 classification that declares Private Baldrick the pinnacle of human health and fitness?"

"The instructions," Melchett said grandly, "to build a time machine!"

"Ah-hah," he said slowly. He swivelled towards Darling, who he'd always suspected of harbouring sufficient sanity to recognise what kind of lunatics he was surrounded with.

He looked vaguely hunted, but of course he wasn't about to question what the general said just because it was stark raving bonkers. Instead he opened a file that was stamped Top Secret to read the details from it. "The current duke inherited the designs from his ancestor, the first Duc de Darling-"

"No relation?" Blackadder said helpfully.

Darling twitched. "-Who claimed he got them at the battle of Waterloo from a small, gnome-like, outlandishly dressed man who smelled like a compost heap."

"Well, this was the French army a hundred years ago," he said. "That could have been anyone."

"The old duke wrote in his papers that the gnome creature disappeared into a wooden box, inside which a voice was heard to say, 'Right, boiled rock-'" Darling squinted at the file for a moment, "I'm sorry, this part may have been mistranslated from the French - 'Did you get rid of whatever was jamming the doors?' The gnome was then heard to say, 'Yes,' whereupon the box, 'went sort of wobbly for a bit, and then disappeared'."

"So, a wooden structure mysteriously disappeared at a battle where both sides were fighting with hundreds of cannons," Blackadder said. "Yes, I can see why that's the sort of enigma that has the higher-ups in a tizzy."

"You may well scoff, Blackadder," Melchett said. "Indeed, a man should never scoff at the urge to scoff. I personally make a point of scoffing regularly and often. A commander who scoffs at scoffing may soon find he's scoffing on the other side of his face, and imagine what kind of mess that would be!"

"Mm. Moving back in the vicinity of the point, why are we giving the nonsensical drivellings of an early 19th-century French Darling the time of day?" he asked.

The man he was forced by an appalling lack of better options to refer to as 'his Darling' glowered at him. "The current Duc de Darling's father had the designs for the time machine authenticated, and confirmed that the sketchbook was the work of Leonardo da Vinci himself," he said.

"Ah, so it's very artistically drawn utter cobblers," he said.

Melchett displayed a true leader's ability to completely ignore all previous input and get back to the course of action he'd decided on before they started. "Anyway, the point is, we can't have Germans running around in history willy-nilly, poking their sticky fingers into all kinds of orifices!" He move to wave at a map of no man's land that utterly failed to incorporate the way the terrain had been chewed to pieces by both sides' bombardments since it had been drawn. "Now, you'll approach the château through the tunnel that was dug as part of Operation Surprise."

"The same Operation Surprise where our men came up directly underneath a German pillbox, and then had to crawl out from under the edge of it one by one, directly into the arms of a big mob of waiting Germans?" he asked.

"The very one!" Melchett chuckled heartily. "They won't be expecting us to use that again."

"Well, not after the last four attempts, no," he said.

---

Back in the dugout, Blackadder reconvened with what he could only loosely term his men to make preparations for the mission ahead.

"Right. I see three major problems with the plan as Melchett's outlined it," he said. "One, I'll be relying on Darling to keep his head in the face of danger, and he's got about as much spine as that copy of Captive in the Valley of the Inexplicably Underdressed and Remarkably Friendly Warrior Women that's been doing the rounds of the trenches since we got here. Two, the Germans blew a hole in the middle of the tunnel because they're not complete idiots, meaning a significant portion of the approach is going to involve scurrying through a crater in no man's land in drag. And three, the whole thing is bollocks."

"Oh, but, Captain, think of the absolute havoc Fritz could wreak if he got his hands on a bally time machine!" George said, eyes bulging with alarm. "I mean, Jerry could go back and win the war before it even began. The next thing you know we'd all wake up being efficient and have to go round eating sausages and quaffing beer in leather shorts."

"Truly a fate worse than death," he said wryly. "No, George, I'm afraid the chances of the Germans nipping back and fiendishly undoing the deaths of millions on both sides are remote. The only time-related travel these designs are going to be doing is crossing the border with me to Switzerland, where I intend to live out my days in blissful neutrality among tedious little men who don't care about anything but tinkering with clocks. A genuine da Vinci ought to buy me a more than big enough wodge of cash to bribe the border guards and set myself up in style." There was an outside chance he might have to cut Darling in on the deal, but he thought he could probably live with the sacrifice.

George laughed with the airy lightness of a man who had plenty of space between his ears for the sound to echo around in. "That's what I like about you, Cap, always keeping our spirits up with a jolly joke and a bit of tomfoolery," he said. "You're such a card."

"Yes, well, a card is all you'll be getting from me, George, when I make my daring escape across the border faster than you can say 'sod this for a game of soldiers'. Now, how are those dresses coming along?" he asked.

"Ah, well." George toed the ground rather bashfully. "One does what one can with limited resources, obviously, and it's a frightfully amateurish job, embarrassing to put one's name to, if I'm honest..." He left the dugout and ushered the third member of their unholy trinity back in. "Now, Private Baldrick is modelling the latest in haute couture for lady's maids. It's simple, yet striking, in stylish black with a sleek silhouette."

It was Baldrick in a sack. He posed coquettishly. "Would Madame like help on with her dress?" he asked.

"No, thank you, Baldrick. If I wanted to contract a variety of socially embarrassing diseases I can think of more fun ways to do it," he said.

"So can I, sir," Baldrick said lasciviously. "So can I."

"Oh, God." Blackadder reluctantly tried on the evening dress that George had 'just spun up, a mere trifle, really, sir, it was nothing' for him. "This is the worst plan that imbecile Melchett's come out with since..." he thought about it, "Tuesday."

The dress was a little cream number that didn't appear to be a reworking of either George's or Bob's from the concert party, raising a number of questions about the British fighting Tommy's ready ability to produce endless qualities of tulle, taffeta, lace and sequins on demand. It was padded in strategic places and concealing in others, the overall effect displaying all the graceful femininity of your average bulldog. He was going to have to make the most of a shawl, a slouch and a fervent hope that the Germans were all blind, drunk, or, ideally, absent. Still, at least the moustache ought to add a touch of verisimilitude.

An awkward cough from the doorway alerted him to the arrival of Darling, now togged out in an overly fancy civilian suit that would last less time on the front line than the nightly rum ration. "Ah, well done, Darling," he said. "You look like an upper class prat with absolutely no taste or sense of occasion." Coupled with the air of petulantly weedy ineffectualness that came naturally to him, he was the very picture of a member of France's vestigial aristocracy.

"Erm, point of order, Cap, I think find you'll those are my civvies he's wearing," George put in reproachfully.

"Ah, well, that explains it."

Darling gave a queasy smile. "I see you managed to find something suitable in the back of the wardrobe," he said.

"Oh, Darling, you say the sweetest things." He reached for his helmet with a sigh. "Right, gas capes on, everybody. We don't want to give the Germans a preview of the coming attraction." Shot by a German sniper due to excessive use of sequins was very low down the list of ways he wanted to go, a ranking currently topped by 'peacefully, aged a hundred and seventeen, atop a big pile of cash'.

"I suppose this is it," Darling said weakly.

"Not too late to shoot yourself in the foot," Blackadder suggested. "I'd do it for you, but I'm afraid we're suffering a bit of an ammunition shortage at the moment."

"I could shout bang in a loud voice if you like, sir," Baldrick volunteered.

"No, thank you, Baldrick. We'll keep that one in reserve for when we pop up in the enemy trenches surrounded by a quite literal army of large, angry Germans, all armed to the teeth with grenades and machine guns."

"Gosh, I wish I could be going with you, Cap," George said.

"Well, George, I did argue strenuously with the general that you should be the one in the dress, but he was adamant that only the world's most colossal idiot could possibly mistake such a galumphing great lout for a woman." Which was, Blackadder felt, fair comment. He adjusted his helmet. "Right. If we don't come back, remember me like this. Extremely pissed off that I had to go!"

---

Luckily, if there was one thing Darling was a natural at, it was dropping down to crawl on his belly with no thought to personal dignity.

"Now, whatever you do, don't ping the wire," Blackadder said as they squeezed out through a gap in their defensive line. "The Germans have all got ears like my Aunt Mildred whenever someone opened a bottle of gin."

"Aw, it's all wet down here," Baldrick said in dismay as he got down on the ground. "My new frock's going to be ruined."

"Well, you can send your dry-cleaning bill to General Melchett when we get back," Blackadder told him. "All right there, Darling?" He detected a distinct lack of forward motion from the shadowy lump on his right.

It was so deathly quiet he could hear the man swallow. "Yes, just... getting the lie of the land," he bluffed.

"Ah, well, essentially there's some land and you lie on it. You'll soon get the hang of it. Even Baldrick managed to pick up the basics on the third or fourth attempt. Now, let's just get to the place on the map where this tunnel is supposed to start." And hope whatever poor sods Melchett had sent ahead of them to re-excavate the entrance had actually done the job instead of just kicking some mud around and planning to blame the shelling for burying it again later.

"But how will we even find the blast crater in this darkness?" Darling said.

"I believe the usual technique is to fall in and slide to the bottom face-first, trying not to swear loudly enough for the Germans to shoot you. Do stop me if I'm going too fast."

Not much chance of that out here. It was probably no more than two dozen yards to the edge of the crater, but they crossed it with all the speed of an arthritic tortoise in an egg-and-spoon race that just been told its mother-in-law was waiting at the finish line. After an eternity of inching his way forward with shoulders tighter than the ammunition budget, he heard the sound of a sliding thud and splash from just off to his left.

"I think I've found the crater, Captain B," Baldrick reported from down below. "It turns out it's conveniently located at the bottom of this big hole."

"Yes, well done, Baldrick." Blackadder scrambled down the muddy slope after him with only marginally more grace, ending up ankle-deep in rancid water. "God, the public baths round here have really gone downhill." He offered Darling a hand down in the splendidly comradely spirit of shameless self-preservation. If one of them made too much noise they all got in the neck, not to mention countless other body parts. At least now they could risk standing up, or in Baldrick's case shambling semi-upright. "How are you feeling, Darling?"

"Ah... not too good, actually, Blackadder," Darling admitted. "Rather wishing I'd finished the book I was reading before we left."

"What was it, a history of paperclips? No, don't tell me, I wouldn't want to spoil the theatrical adaption." He squinted around the waterlogged crater that in theory concealed the entrance to the remaining stretch of tunnel. Concealed it extremely bloody well, considering his eyes had adjusted just enough to helpfully inform him that there were some dark bits next to some other dark bits. "All right, let's just hurry up and find this-"

There was a loud crack of splintering wood from under what he would insist to his dying day had been somebody else's foot. That might not give him enough time to do much insisting. A burst of bright white flares went up from the enemy trenches, flooding no man's land with eerie false daylight.

He sensed more than saw that Darling was about to dive for cover, the bloody fool, and grabbed him in a tight hug before he could move and draw fatal attention to them all. Their best hope was to stay extremely still and hope to be mistaken for broken wreckage that had been shattered by all of the fighting. Luckily, it was a role that took very little acting skill.

Nine bloody seconds, he'd heard some know-it-all claim was all the time that Very lights lasted. Maybe the Germans really did have the power to control time.

There was a desultory burst of machine-gun fire, though not focused on them, just sweeping left to right. Blackadder politely pretended not to notice Darling's trembling, which at least gave him plausible deniability for the fact that both his own bad knees were acting up again. He contemplated their position and current mode of dress.

"If we die like this, Darling, this is going to be really bloody embarrassing," he said.

But the Very lights faded, and so did the gunfire, and at least now he'd managed to get a glimpse of the tunnel entrance they were heading for.

"Nice of the Germans to light our way for us," he said, releasing Darling with recovered suavity. "All right back there, Baldrick?"

"Yes. Luckily, I was cunningly disguised by the fact I'd already fallen over," he said.

"Excellent." They sloshed their way over to the tunnel entrance on the German side of the crater, a wooden-framed doorway made for someone of sub-Baldrick proportions. At least the cover of the overhang finally made it safe to light a match, though Darling had some trouble with his shaky fingers.

"Bit, er, chilly out here," he excused himself.

"That would be the ball-shrivelling terror," Blackadder told him.

"Ah. Yes."

He finally managed to get a candle lit, which was not entirely an improvement, illuminating as it did his waxen face and Baldrick's... well, just Baldrick. They peered without enthusiasm into the narrow passageway that burrowed through the earth towards the German lines.

"All right, Baldrick, you can go first," Blackadder volunteered on his behalf.

"But it's dark in there," he protested.

"A regrettably common trait of tunnels, I'm afraid, Baldrick, especially at night," he said.

"There might be rats."

"Well, we haven't got time for you to stop and have dinner, so you'll just have to leave them for later."

Blackadder himself took up a rear-guard position, the better to heroically leg it in the event of surprise Germans. Not that there was much prospect of moving fast in any direction. They were forced to creep along the tight space stooped over, the creaking timber framework dripping water on their backs. They'd made it less than a dozen paces when Darling panicked, turning to clutch at his elbow. "Gas, gas!" he said in terror.

There was a terrible smell in the tunnel ahead, but, alas, one that Blackadder was all too familiar with. "No, Darling, I'm afraid that's just Baldrick," he said.

"I get nervous on these night missions," Baldrick said.

"Yes, well, hurry up, or else it's going to be a bloody day mission by the time we get there."

They shuffled along the tunnel in stifling silence. Were they under the enemy front line yet? Impossible to tell. No voices or sound of machine-gun fire made it down into the depths, though once they heard the hopefully distant thud of a shell impact. Finally there was a hushed whisper from Baldrick up in front.

"Sir, it's a dead end! And there's some sort of wooden frame-y pole-y ladder-y thing..."

"Could it, perhaps, be a ladder?" Blackadder suggested wearily.

"Oh, yeah," he said, in tones of revelation. "You're a natural at this secret mission business, Captain B."

"Yes, well. I like to apply a certain sadly rare natural talent that I call 'having a functioning brain'." He sighed. "All right, better leave the helmets down here. We'll probably get a better reception if they think we're a wandering cabaret drag act than if we look like enemy soldiers."

They manoeuvred awkwardly in the tight space. He ended up wedged in rather close proximity with Darling, since the shaft at the end with the ladder was the only point where they could stand upright. At least he smelled better than Baldrick, though the usual aggravating waft of ink, Brilliantine and unfairly frequent chances to wash was currently losing to the stink of fear. Perhaps some comradely words of encouragement were in order.

"Don't faint on me now, Darling, I'm not carrying you up the bloody ladder," he said.

That put some stiffness back in his spine, or at least his shoulders. "Don't forget I have the hard part of this mission, Blackadder," he said. "You're just the escort."

"Do you often use men in dresses as escorts to help you with your hard part?" he said. "Well, if you're so important to the mission, by all means go first. Go on, up you go."

Darling quailed, but apparently the urge for petty one-upmanship slightly won out over cowardice, and he made his cringing way up the ladder to the surface. Blackadder followed, on the theory that staring at Darling's backside at least beat looking up Baldrick's skirt. Not that he could see much either way with Darling the one holding the candle.

"What's the hold-up?" he asked as Darling paused at the top. In the candlelight he saw a concrete slab above their heads that must be the floor of the German pillbox. Maybe the Germans had deployed someone with half a brain to plug the gap beneath it and this mission would be over before it began.

"There's something blocking the way..." Alas, Darling went on before Blackadder could get too optimistic. "I think it's a sandbag." It took a certain amount of wrestling for him to get it free and hand it back to Blackadder, who immediately dropped it down the shaft. There was a thud and an oof from below.

"It's all right, I'm not squashed," Baldrick's voice drifted up a moment later.

"Oh, good," Blackadder said vaguely.

"No, by a fortunate coincidence, my head got in the way."

"Well, luckily you don't keep anything of importance to the war effort in there. Come on, Darling, get a move on," he said impatiently.

Darling was making a real production of wriggling out through the narrow space beneath the concrete floor. Blackadder was forced to put a bracing hand on his backside to help shove him forward through the gap. His voice came back muffled from the tunnel ahead. "Rather a... tight squeeze," he said breathlessly.

"Yes, I'm sure you would rather, but I'm not giving you one of those unless you pay for the privilege," Blackadder said. He was sure that the kick in the head he got for his trouble was bloody intentional.

Once Darling was through, Blackadder squeezed through after him with what he flattered himself was more grace and was definitely more haste. He had no particular desire to experience being groped by Baldrick. Darling, being possessed as a welcome novelty of some actual sense of self-preservation, had already extinguished the candle, and they emerged into a darkened trench. There was no sound of any Germans nearby, a stroke of luck that he didn't trust for a minute.

"Perhaps the Germans have abandoned this section of the trenches," Darling said in tones of rising hope.

"Oh, for God's sake, do try and think like a soldier, Darling," he said scathingly. "They've obviously skived off back to the dugouts to be out of the line of fire." Exactly what he would have been doing at this time of night if not for Melchett's latest bout of lunacy.

Baldrick, regrettably, managed to seep out to join them like a bad smell, and they stashed their gas capes under the edge of the pillbox. "Right, come on, let's get away from the front line," Blackadder said. Something he was more than happy to do regardless of which side of it they currently happened to be on.

They advanced further up the hill with relative stealth; Baldrick helpfully located a communications trench by falling in it, and they were able to grope their way along through the trench system under cover of darkness.

Well, at least until some utter bastard challenged them at the juncture with the support trench. "Halt!" It was followed by something interrogative in German that didn't take too much imagination to translate. Fortunately, Blackadder had planned ahead for just this eventuality.

"We surrender, wholly and unconditionally," he said immediately, raising his hands. "We're prepared to give full details of the British battle plans, which, believe me, won't take long out of your day." No response. "Oh, come on, I know you all speak English! You couldn't walk round London before this all started without tripping over half a dozen German pork butchers and barber shops. One of you bastards still owes me ninepence for that bloody awful haircut that I got on Richmond Road before the war."

There was a weighty pause, then a burst of hearty Teutonic laughter. "Ha ha, and the English are saying ve Germans have no sense of humour!" said the challenger in heavily accented but, yes, otherwise perfect English. "These varm-hearted jolly japes vill help us keep our peckers up, as they say, ja?"

"Yes, well, I'd appreciate if you kept them down around me, if it's all the same to you," he said. "This is rather a cramped trench."

They were permitted to go on their way with no worse than a few obnoxiously cheery backslaps, and made their way out through the German lines without further trouble.

"That was a rank display of cowardice in the face of the enemy, Blackadder!" Darling hissed, once they were safely away from any chance of having to actually face the enemy.

"I'll display my rank any way I like, Darling," he snapped back. "I'm the one in command here, not you! I was a serving officer for more than a decade while you were still working as some petty little wages clerk in a bicycle factory."

"You know nothing about me or my history beyond your sneering, laughably biased assumptions," he said, raising his chin stiffly. "And anyway, they made sewing machines."

"I was an apprentice rag and bone man's assistant before the war," Baldrick said. "I used to dream of the day that I would one day have a little horsie of my own, so that I wouldn't have to keep pulling the cart for the other rag and bone men."

"Good to know you've always maintained hopes and dreams above your station," Blackadder said, temper defused. He sighed as they walked on. "All right, let's go and find this château, then. These French relatives of yours couldn't have built it somewhere more convenient, like a few hundred miles south of Paris?"

"My family is English!" Darling insisted heatedly. "I can trace my family tree all the way back to the noble Percy family who fought for the king in the battle of Agincourt."

"That would be the king of France, presumably," he said.

"They were granted the Duchy of Northumberland!"

"Until they lost it for shacking up with their French Darlings, no doubt," he said. "So that's where being the scion of a noble line gets you, is it, Darling? A dubious claim on a region of the country voted 'most likely to be invaded by Scotland', some embarrassing French relatives and a job as General Melchett's whipping- oh, sorry, office boy. No, I think I'll stick with the Blackadder family tradition of leaving the descendants with nothing but a stack of unpaid bills, an amusing novelty clock and a lingering sense of resentment, if it's all the same to you."

The Blackadders, as a rule, had generally been less preoccupied with tracing their roots than with making their roots as untraceable as possible, via a complex web of forged documents, stolen identities, bastard children, red wigs and questionable Scottish accents, rampant recycling of the same small handful of first names, and the occasional midnight flit across national borders.

With any luck, he'd have his chance to practise at least one of those himself tonight. Possibly anywhere up to five. But first he needed to get his hands on those da Vinci sketches if he wanted to finance his escape. That meant, loath as he was to admit it, going ahead with the original plan. He sighed as he pulled the shawl up over his head and straightened the borrowed dress.

"Fine, show me to this ancestral castle of yours, Darling, and remember - what's yours is mine!" he said.

---

After much stumbling round in the dark and an embarrassing interlude of Darling attempting to ask directions in his schoolboy French, they found their way to the château. It was a rather squat-looking structure with towers at the four corners, set into a dry moat in the midst of a small park.

"Rather stumpy, isn't it, wouldn't you say, Darling?" Blackadder said.

Darling - no relation - scowled.

It was also clearly the scene of a swanky party in full swing. They ducked into the bushes as a portly older officer staggered out, being almost held up by the buxom woman on his arm.

"God, the German higher-ups are almost as hardworking as our lot," Blackadder said.

"What now?" Darling said, crouching in the shadows beside him.

"Allow me, sirs," Baldrick said, stepping forward with unexpected initiative. He primped his wig, did a little shimmy to shake out his maid's dress that Blackadder would be seeing in his nightmares, and strode up to the entrance to announce them to the gathering within. "Mon Sewer the Ducky Darling and Madman the Dutch Chesty Darling!" he declared confidently.

That was, depressingly, probably the best cue they were going to get. Blackadder linked his arm through Darling's.

"Right, come on, Darling. Let's go and meet the new neighbours."

They stepped through into an entrance hall with black and white floor tiles and an ornate ceiling that was probably coved or ribbed or groined or some other unbearably pedantic architectural term that only people from historical preservation societies cared about. There were also a number of family portraits on the walls, including a Napoleonic duke who bore a suspicious resemblance to Darling and a matronly woman who also greatly resembled Darling, albeit without the moustache. Frankly she might have looked better with it.

"Monsieur le Duc!" Before they could reach the far end of the hall they were intercepted with inquisitive bonhomie by a large, bald German general with a monocle, a beer stein, and a very unfortunate ability to speak fluent French. As he babbled a stream of questions Darling froze, out of what was presumably some blend of rigid inability to improvise, instinctive urge to kowtow to anyone who outranked him, and wholly understandable terror in the face of French grammar.

Blackadder stepped in to do the talking, stridently and in an outrageous French accent. "My husband is appalled at your mangling of our beautiful language," he said. "It pains him to hear the language of love and delicate froufrou pastry concoctions spoken in harsh German tones. Isn't that right, Darling?"

A sharp elbow to the stomach helped Darling look convincingly pained. "Yes," he wheezed, doubled over.

"Nor can he bear the embarrassment of speaking to you in German, where he can only ask for a glass of lemonade and tell you his brother is tall but his sister is short. No true Frenchman could live with the shame of being thought to be bad with his tongue. He insists that we all speak in English, so none of us can recognise our bad accents."

"Of course... madame," the general said, settling after some hesitation on this form of address. He drew himself up. "But we must ask, why have you returned to the Château de Darling? Our intelligence was very clear that you had 'run away like whiny little babies and also taken all of the good wine'."

"We've come to surrender," Darling blurted at once. No prompting required there - he was an absolute natural.

"We fled before the advance of the English, but now we see they have advanced no further than our own French workers when they are on strike!" Blackadder put in. "We have come to offer you our support and the secret to opening that one tricky back window that always sticks." There was always one.

"Ah, the tricky back window!" the German general said heartily. "Truly it has vexed us many times. And also the dresser drawer upstairs where the knob comes off when you pull it."

"My husband has always been willing to fiddle with the knobs of senior officers," Blackadder said gravely. "Isn't that right, Darling?"

The visible twitch, he felt, only made their portrayal of a married couple that much more convincing.

"Ah! Then please, do join our little gathering," the general said. "I will alert the others to prepare a more suitable welcome."

Darling hunched his shoulders as the German moved off. "I don't like this, Blackadder," he said, peering after him worriedly. "That was an extremely ominous remark!"

"Of course it was ominous, Darling," he said. "The Germans could make, 'Hello, would you like to cuddle with this cute little fluffy bunny and stroke its twitchy nose?' sound like a murder threat."

"Oh, I'd love that," Baldrick said wistfully, coming over to join them. "I could call him Billy the bunny and he would be my special little bunny friend."

"Yes, well, I'm afraid if there are any rabbits around here I fully intend to eat them," Blackadder said. "Come on, let's see what kind of grub the German higher-ups have got on offer. I'll take bloody sauerkraut over whatever that mush was that Baldrick served us for lunch."

"It's funny you should mention grubs, sir, actually, because-"

He sighed, cutting that story off before it could develop in a distinctly unpromising direction. "Baldrick, go and mingle and see if you can find anything out from the help, would you?" Of course, this would be somewhat limited by Baldrick's inability to understand either French nor German, but he seemed to get by all right without comprehending English.

"But I don't know how to mingle, sir," he protested.

"Well, then, just ooze."

They moved through into a grand salon where highly decorated German officers milled around amid even more highly decorated furniture. There were silver trays of rather sad-looking nibbles - though, to be fair, he'd never actually attended a party in his life where the things looked appetising - and yet more portraits of past Darlings on display in fancy frames.

"God, there's more gilt in this room than I've felt in my entire life," Blackadder said. He became aware that Darling was still attached to his side like a limpet. "You're not going to be one of those clingy husbands who can't bear to be parted from their other half, are you, Darling?"

"Don't think I'm letting you out of my sight for a minute after some of the stunts you've pulled, Blackadder," Darling said.

"Ah, so you're one of those jealous and controlling types," he said. "Well, I'm relying on you to defend my honour from all these strapping six-foot Germans, since a vigorous knee to the goolies often offends." And judging by the mostly geriatric standard of female company, probably even Baldrick ought to watch his back.

"Honour? You've never known the meaning of the word," said Darling.

"Listen, Darling," he hissed, "I've been out there at the sharp end being shelled, shot at, sent out into minefields, forced to stand twenty-hour watches in ankle-deep muddy water, and subjected to some of the most inane conversation known to man, while you've been living it up as the general's chief handkerchief-folder! And furthermore-"

As a uniformed man passed close by they both abruptly remembered they were surrounded by German officers, and put on their best serene, carefree smiles, despite the fact that nobody could possibly have missed their hissed back-and-forth sniping.

Their portrayal of a long-time married couple was, Blackadder felt, going swimmingly.

They made their way over to the buffet table to sample the selection, such as it was. If an army marched on its stomach, it was clearly just as well neither side in this conflict was going anywhere fast. There was a definite, regrettably familiar odour of turnip.

Darling cleared his throat, obviously conscious of the eyes on them. "These, er, vol-au-vents aren't bad," he said.

"Yes." He examined one. "I wonder where they're getting the voles."

The friendly general from before reappeared. "Monsieur le Duc! We have prepared a special reception for you and your wife in the library," he said.

"Ah," Blackadder said, smiling smugly at Darling. They followed the general through into the next room.

Where they were immediately apprehended by a number of large Germans with rifles.

"Ah," he said.

---

"We knew at once you were not the true Duc de Darling," their captor informed them. "You are far too assertive and manly, and your wife is much too nice."

"You're making a big mistake," Darling blustered, or rather blubbered, as they were led upstairs to one of the tower rooms.

"You will suffer a fate worse than death!" the general said.

"God, there's been a real inflation in the threat index these days," Blackadder said. "Whatever happened to just plain old death? How about a fate slightly better than death? A fate more or less about equal to death, all things considered?"

"For God's sake, don't antagonise them!" Darling said, cringing beside him.

"Well, snivelling in the face of the enemy isn't going to change anything, Darling," he said. Or else he'd be trying it himself.

"Behold, the room that will be your prison for the rest of the war!" The general threw the heavy oak door open to reveal... a large, lavishly appointed bedroom with a big four-poster bed.

"I'm sorry, I think you might have got turned around on the staircases," Blackadder told him politely. "It's an easy mistake to make, it's quite a big château."

"Ha!" He threw back his head and laughed. "It will be crushing to your freedom-loving French souls to be confined to these four walls, gazing always upon this same set of mediocre still-life watercolours, reading only uninspired novels and drinking inferior wine. You will have to learn to live with our rigid German love of scheduling, without your servants here to wait upon you foot and hand. Your delicate lady's maid has been put to work in the castle kitchens."

"Yes. You'll live to regret that move, I can assure you," Blackadder said.

The Germans slammed and locked the door on them and descended the stairs, still laughing. Darling sank down to sit on a plush red velvet armchair with his head in his hands. "This is a disaster!" he said.

"Disaster?" Blackadder kicked back in the opposite chair. "Darling, this is the least disastrous disaster since the general's morale-boosting 'Nothing Will Stop Us' parade through no man's land was cancelled due to rain. We're going to see out the rest of the war in a bedroom that Marie Antoinette would reject as being a bit over the top, several miles away from a front that moves about as often as Baldrick changes his underpants. The biggest risk I can see is that we get too drunk, forget we're not really married, and accidentally shag each other silly."

"That will never happen, ever!" Darling said shrilly. "Whatever you heard about last year's Staff HQ Christmas party."

Blackadder raised a single finely tuned eyebrow. Seeming to realise that he'd said too much, Darling hurriedly turned about and made a performance of searching the room for any other way out.

"I wouldn't bother if I were you, Darling," he said as he removed his mud-encrusted boots. "Even your ancestors probably weren't daft enough to build a secret door into the outside wall at the top of a tower."

No, happily they were quite securely imprisoned, and he for one had no intention of making even a token attempt at escape. He shed his feminine disguise, such as it was, and sprawled experimentally on the bed in his shirtsleeves. Excellent. Clearly the French were not subscribers to the British army's rather literal-minded belief that nothing stiffened the men's spines quite like making them sleep on mattresses filled with rocks.

"What on earth do you think you're doing, Blackadder?" Darling demanded as he turned round and saw him. "We need to maintain our disguise or both our heads are going to be on the chopping block!"

"Darling, I hardly think impersonating members of the French aristocracy is the best way to avoid that," he said. "And frankly, if a group of German soldiers burst into my bedchamber in the middle of the night, I very much doubt that whatever happens next will be significantly improved by me being in a dress." He draped an arm over his face and sighed wearily. "Oh, do stop fretting and just come to bed, Darling."

---

In his time as a professional soldier, Blackadder had slept through heavy shelling, air raids, the screams of the slowly and painfully dying, and George's efforts to move around a dugout quietly. None of this apparently equipped him to doze off while Darling lay beside him doing his impression of the world's most rigid man, and not in the way that was entertaining to make fun of.

"Darling, if you get any more tense, Baden-Powell's scouting association will be able to use you as a campsite," he said. "If I wanted to spend the night with someone staring fixedly at the ceiling and pretending I wasn't there, I'd have paid for a prostitute."

"You really have no sensitivity whatsoever, do you?" Darling said prissily.

"Look, I have soft, sensitive squishy bits on the inside, just like you," Blackadder said. "And I'd much prefer them to stay on the inside, not end up decorating a stretch of worthless mud in France that we've filled with so much cordite, shrapnel, poison gas and barbed wire that there's nothing to be gained for either side in capturing the bloody place."

"That's cowardly and seditious talk," Darling accused him.

"No, Darling, it's sane and rational talk," he said. "I'm not surprised you don't recognise it, working for General Melchett. We're three years into this conflict, and what have we accomplished? We aren't winning. The Germans aren't winning. We're all just sitting in big muddy holes, picking lice off each other and trying to find a rhyme for 'bomb' in hopes of flogging the results to the Times Literary Supplement for the price of a bottle of booze." He let his head flop back against the pillow. "God, I'm sick of this war."

There was a brief lull.

"It is hard, you know," Darling said tremulously out of the darkness. "I know you think we have it easy over at headquarters, but it is. Writing the casualty lists. Deciding on the duty schedules. Finding the right way to frame the general's orders so they're-"

"Slightly less barking than Battersea Dogs Home?" He could have taken issue with the risible suggestion that their situations were at all comparable, but in all honesty he lacked the will. It was all so sodding pointless, all of it. Even a man like Darling was wasted in this mess, and God knew there wasn't much of him to waste.

Still, things were starting to look up at last. "Well, we're well out of it now, Darling," he said. "General Melchett will just have to find someone else to darn his socks."

"They'll never get that tricky bit around the heel done the way he likes it," Darling said, with sniffy hauteur.

"Mm."

The silence that fell over them this time was arguably the most peaceable between them since the war began. Admittedly, this was also the first time Darling wasn't actually obstructing him from anything more pressing than access to the chamber pot. Perhaps, removed from their mutually opposing roles in the vast, creaking edifice that was the military bureaucracy, they were actually capable of reaching a fragile détente.

In that case, might as well immediately take shameless advantage of it. "So what exactly did happen at this Staff HQ Christmas party?" he asked, rolling to one side to prop himself up on his arm.

"Nothing!" Darling squawked, at something rather higher than his customary pitch. It was not altogether convincing.

"Well, I must say, Darling, I didn't know you had it in you." He cocked his head inquisitively. "Did you?"

"You really have no sense of taste or decorum at all, do you?" he said, seeming to recover a degree of composure in the familiar exchange of barbed words.

"None whatsoever, actually," he agreed. "I've always considered it part of my charm."

Darling huffed, close enough for him to feel the breath stirring his hair. "You don't have any charms I can see, Blackadder."

"Well, that's because it's dark, Darling," he said. "And for someone who claims to be so repulsed by me you do seem to be rather encroaching on my side of the bed."

"That's because it's cold in here," he defended himself weakly.

"God, you really are a soft lot huddled over there in your HQ, aren't you? The Germans could probably end the war in a week by hijacking headquarters' supply of napkins and fancy toilet paper."

"There's nothing soft about me, Blackadder," Darling insisted.

"Is that so, Darling?" He was on the verge of testing that claim in a way that would be unwise but potentially fun when, in accordance with long-held tradition, this promising direction was interrupted by a small, grubby, lost-looking figure appearing in the doorway, childishly oblivious to any chance of being unwelcome.

Of course, none of the other buggers that this sort of thing happened to had the further misfortune of that figure being Baldrick.

"Psst," the apparition said from the doorway.

"No, I'm not bloody pissed, I barely even got a chance to try the wine," Blackadder said irritably, flopping back against the bed in frustration. Beside him, Darling drew the covers up over his fully dressed chest like a maiden aunt, in a way that would surely have been highly suspicious to anyone other than Baldrick. Or George. Or Melchett. God, he needed to start keeping a better standard of company.

Unfortunately, this latest development did not bode well for his future hopes on that front.

"I'm here to rescue you, sirs!" Baldrick announced proudly.

"Well, go away, we don't want any," he said, hiding under the covers himself.

"Have no fear, Captain B. I have a cunning plan."

If Blackadder had actually wanted to be rescued he would have had quite a lot of fear, but as it was, he just sighed and stared up at the ceiling. "All right, then, let's hear it." Given Baldrick's usual facility with explanations, they would hopefully still be here when the German guards returned to bring them their breakfast.

"Well, sirs, it just so happens that after you were captured, I ingratiated myself with the kitchen staff. Though we did not share a common language, I could tell they took to me, since they gave me the immediate responsibility of unblocking the drains. After that, I was able to move about the castle undetected, on account of how I ponged so bad that no one wanted to come near me."

"Yes. You might have washed before you came in here." He flapped a useless hand in front of his nose, and sat up with a groan. "Oh, God. All right, come on, Darling, out of bed. Looks like the mission's back on after all."

He should have known that it was too good to be true. Oh, well, back to plan A; nicking the da Vinci and hightailing it for Switzerland without looking back. At least he'd managed to pick up some blackmail material on Darling along the way.

---

Once again resplendent in his evening gown - if nothing else, chivalry ought to ensure someone else got shot first - Blackadder led the way down to the library at the base of the tower, pausing at every landing to loudly remind his companions to be on the lookout for "Guards!"

Alas, it was a large château, and they made it to the bottom unmolested. "All right, Darling, what does this bloody sketchbook look like, then?" he asked resignedly.

"Ah, well, erm, it's, ah..." He drew himself up. "I should think a genuine da Vinci should be obvious even to you, Blackadder."

"Meaning you have no idea," he said. "Darling, you've been about as helpful to this mission so far as a porcupine at the international balloon-blowing championships. All right, everyone split up and look for something that looks like it was written by the sort of smug, tedious git who thinks that writing back-to-front makes him look clever."

They each took a wall to search through the contents of the château library. Unfortunately, the Darling genes apparently bred true when it came to the desire to accumulate mountains of useless paper, and there were countless musty volumes to search through.

"Any luck, Baldrick?" he asked as he came to the end of a shelf.

"Well, I don't know, sir," he said. "It occurs to me, right, that I might have an easier time identifying backwards writing, right, if I was actually able to read forwards writing."

"Ah," he said. "Yes." Perhaps they'd still be here to be discovered by the Germans at dawn after all.

But finally, Darling let out a cry of triumph. "I've found it!" He held up a sizeable sketchbook, big enough to block out his admittedly less than muscular torso.

"Well, that's going to be a bugger to sneak out under my skirts," Blackadder said. And more so to smuggle over the Swiss border.

Just then, lamplight appeared in the salon next door, and a German voice called out something harshly interrogative. Or possibly something warm and lighthearted. Hard to tell with German, really.

Either way, they were rumbled. "Oh, damn," he said, snapping his fingers with extreme good cheer. "And we were so close to escaping, too."

Private Baldrick, with his usual unerring instinct for the least useful thing to do at any given time, leapt into action to bar the doors. "Not to worry, sir - I cunningly scouted out an escape route earlier," he said.

"Baldrick, you pick the worst bloody times to start aspiring to delusions of competence," Blackadder told him.

"Thank you, sir," he said brightly. He opened another door to reveal a set of steps leading down into the ground, a promising direction for a Baldrick escape plan when one had no desire to escape. They hurried down into a cobwebbed space that looked suspiciously like one of the château's now-emptied wine cellars, and was also very much a dead end.

"Would this plan by any chance involve us digging our way out through the ten-foot-thick walls of a French medieval castle?" he enquired mildly.

"No, sir. I did think of that, but then I discovered this." He pulled a dusty sheet away to reveal... a wooden box.

"It's a crate, Baldrick." He walked around to inspect it. "A large one, I'll grant you, but nonetheless I fear you may have got the wrong impression when you heard our latest military advancement referred to as 'the tank'." Or maybe the right one, considering the bloody things seemed to spend most of their time broken down, stuck in shell holes or bogged down in the mud, when they weren't actively on fire.

"No, sir, look!" Baldrick pointed out the large clock face set into one side of the box.

"Ah, it's a novelty clock. Well, I'm afraid the Darling dukes have still got a long way to go if they want to compete with Big Ben."

"Actually-" Darling spoke up from behind him.

He turned round with a glare. "Darling, if you're going to tell me Big Ben is the name of the bell, I can only assume your grammar school contemporaries failed to do their civic duty in beating the snot out of you for being such an unbearable little know-it-all."

"The plans, Blackadder!" Darling thrust the sketchbook in front of his nose. "It appears the Duc de Darling has built a replica of da Vinci's time machine!"

"Ah, so pointless timewasting runs in the family." He swivelled round to face the third member of their trio. "Baldrick. Is your plan, perchance, that we escape the castle by getting in this time machine and travelling back to a time before the Germans got here?"

"Well, actually, that's better than my plan, sir," Baldrick admitted. "Because, see, I was thinking we could go back to the time of the dinosaurs, right, and get hold of a rabid, enraged Brontosaurus..."

"Yes. I'm going to have to stop you there for several reasons, not least the horde of rabid, enraged Germans that are no doubt on the verge of breaking into this cellar."

"Perhaps we should have a look at the inside of the machine," Darling said. "To, er, see if it's truly complete and assess it for any useful intelligence."

"You mean, perhaps we should hide in the box like a bunch of snivelling cowards in hopes our enemies are even less capable of basic logical reasoning than our allies?" He considered that plan. "Well, I'm game."

They piled into the box and pulled the door up after them. The inside looked... well, exactly like the sort of thing Blackadder would have put together if he planned to convince some credulous fools that he'd built a working time machine. Lots of cogs and switches and levers and miscellaneous dangly bits, very little intuitive sense of what using any of them might be supposed to accomplish. There were even onboard toilets, which made it a significant improvement over most of his recent accommodations. He idly set a few cogs to spinning.

"Well, I've got to hand it to you, Darling," he said. "Your relatives have put more work into this thing that I would expect of the French upper classes." Or at least their servants had. "Must be those swotty little overachieving schoolboy genes at work."

Darling twitched, but made an unconvincing show of ignoring him, comparing the designs in the sketchbook to the interior of the machine with the air of a man who itched to go around putting labels on things.

Baldrick pulled down a folding panel to peer at the controls. "Cor, it's amazing that Leon Aardvark the Wincy invented all these things," he said. "Cogs. Plungers. Egg-timers. Umbrella handles."

"Yes. I think, perhaps, Baldrick, the builders may have improvised a little on some of these components." He tugged experimentally on a lever that looked like a repurposed broom handle, half surprised when it didn't come off in his hand. The whole construction must be quite shoddily put together; he could feel the floor and walls shaking slightly around them even though all they'd done was wander round and poke a few controls.

"The Germans are quiet," Darling observed, hovering fearfully by the door.

"Yes. Rather unusual for them," he said. "Baldrick, as much as it pains not to mention baffles me to admit it, I think your imbecilic plan may actually have worked."

"Permission to shout 'wahoo', sir?" Baldrick asked.

"Perhaps not right now," he said dryly. "Still, as a reward for this unparalleled feat of usefulness, you can have the responsibility of opening the door."

He and Darling took up positions against the walls to either side of it as Baldrick lowered the door and stared out gormlessly.

"Well, what's out there?" Blackadder asked, after it became clear that he was not going to have the initiative to report back on his own.

"Nothing," Baldrick said.

"Ah, good. Well, then-" Blackadder moved towards the door, and then stopped. "Ah. Ah-hah." He peered out. He peered up. He peered down. Then he withdrew back to his corner. "Right. Well, we appear to be floating in an infinite void of time and space," he told the others.

"That's preposterous!" Darling said.

"Well, fine, it might not be infinite. Do feel free to step outside and check, Darling," he said acidly.

They all stared out at the void. Blackadder avoided questioning why they still had air inside what basically amounted to a leaky wooden shed, in case the universe noticed this oversight and decided to correct it.

"So does this mean the time machine works?" Baldrick asked.

"I hope so, Baldrick, because otherwise roughly three hours without Darling there to do his filing has apparently been enough time for Melchett to find some way to blow up the earth," he said.

"What are we going to do?" Darling said, pale-faced with horror.

"Well, you've got the bloody time machine plans!" he snapped. "Figure out how it works!"

The two of them pored over the sketchbook together, with Baldrick pressed into service where he would be most useful in this endeavour, namely as a table. Blackadder turned his head this way and that, contemplative.

"Mm. Ah, yes. Mm-hmm..." Finally he stepped back. "No, I don't know about you, but I haven't spontaneously evolved the ability to read backwards 16th century Italian."

"Surely we should be able to work it out from basic principles," Darling said, swallowing queasily. "I mean, these three reels with numbers... I'm fairly sure this label here says 'years' in French."

"So we're thinking years, months, days?" Blackadder said, pointing at the reels in turn. "Yes, I suppose that would make sense." He had to admit it was a welcome change to be able to bounce ideas off someone who could technically be described as 'thinking' at all. "Right, then. When should we go?" He rubbed his hands together, suddenly a great deal more upbeat about his future prospects, or, indeed, his past ones. If he really had his hands on a genuine, working time machine...

"Well," Darling said hesitantly, "it would make sense to travel back a fairly substantial interval of time. Just to make sure it was obvious that it had worked."

"Yes, yes." Blackadder nodded along, sure that for once he and Darling were entirely on the same page. He rubbed his chin, musing thoughtfully. "Say, ooh... three years?"

"Perhaps a little more than three years, just in case?" Darling suggested.

"Ah, yes, better test the months reel works as well." He adjusted it with a finger. "What about, say, oh, I don't know... three years and two months?"

"Three years and two months sounds good," he agreed, head bobbing on his neck as he nodded with great enthusiasm.

"And that would take us back to..." He feigned a small start of surprise. "Well, just before the war began, funnily enough!"

"What an extraordinary coincidence," Darling said.

"Extraordinary," he agreed. "Right, hang on to whatever you can grab, gentlemen, and I do use that term extremely loosely." He looked around for inspiration, gave up, and yanked a few random controls. There was a general sense of what he could only describe as wibbliness, which gradually petered out.

"Right," he said after a few moments. "You can stop holding onto me now, Darling."

"Just... making sure you didn't make an immediate run for the Swiss border, Blackadder," he excused himself as he let go.

"Well, if you're that concerned about it, you can go first," he said.

Darling quailed a little, but either he was genuinely concerned, or else he had designs on the Swiss border himself. He poked his head out and then gasped in shock. "My God, it worked!" he said.

They followed him out of the time machine. "Oh, Captain B, can it really be true?" Baldrick said, turning to stare around at the scene with an open-mouthed gape. In other words, his usual expression. "Have we travelled back to a time when everything was peace and goodwill to all mankind?"

"Yes, well, bad news about the entire recorded history of Europe, Baldrick, but if you mean back to before this particular war was officially declared, then, yes, we may well have done." He did some gazing around of his own at a space that was now done up with exposed beams and a candle chandelier, like some sort of Elizabethan townhouse. "Well, I know the Germans are all about stark efficiency, but I must say I don't think much of their redecoration efforts if they got rid of all this," he said.

"Yeah, you'd think it would be dead useful to have all these windows underground," said Baldrick.

"What? There can't possibly be windows, Baldrick, we're-" He turned around and saw there were, indeed, windows. "Where the hell are we?"

He went over to the windows to look out, Darling moving to stand beside him. It was immediately evident they were no longer at the château. Instead, they were looking down on what appeared to be a city street.

"Is this Paris?" he hazarded.

"God, it's filthy," Darling said, bringing a hand up to cover his nose, though Blackadder doubted there could be anything wafting up from below that smelled much worse than Baldrick did. "And all those grubby little urchins, playing in the gutter dressed in rags. You don't get scenes like this back in England!"

Blackadder, however, had been listening rather closer to the cries of the happy little children at play below. "Well, unfortunately, Darling, I regret to inform you that unless the phrase 'sod off' has crossed the Channel, we are in fact looking at a street in London." He frowned. "Don't quite recognise this bit, though." A certain pervasive fishiness made him think Billingsgate, but there were far too many wooden buildings for that to be right. "Looks a bit like some of the old buildings around Drury Lane, but they tore most of those down years ago."

"Ah, we must be near the theatre!" Darling said brightly. "Look, there's a group of people down there dressed in... Shakespearean costumes..." He trailed off.

"Yes," Blackadder said. "Oddly convincing Shakespearean costumes, aren't they?" A dark suspicion was beginning to set in. "Darling, when you said that first number was labelled 'years', did you actually check whether the second one said 'months', or have we, in fact, set this time machine to take us back three hundred and twenty years?"

"Does this mean we've missed the beginning of the war?" Baldrick piped up.

"The beginning of the war, the beginning of modern medicine and scientific thinking, the beginning of a basic understanding of the principles of hygiene... Actually, you missed most of those anyway. You'll fit right in," he said.

"But why would we be in London?" Darling said. "There must be some reason the time machine brought us here."

"Darling..."

What would have been a no doubt devastatingly witty putdown of Darling's reasoning capacities was interrupted by the sound of a door opening out in the hallway behind them.

"Quick, back in the time machine," he said instead. As they piled in, he hurriedly ran through a reversal of the sequence of controls that had brought them here. "All right, put that back there, reset these, move that lever up to here, and... absolutely nothing happens. Excellent."

There was no time left to come up with an alternative plan as the door onto the hall opened. Footsteps entered the room, paused, and then slowly circled the box.

"What," said an acerbic voice, "is this?"

"It's a box, my lord," a second voice said helpfully, with the sort of earnest gormlessness Blackadder recognised all too well.

"Yes, I can see it's a box," the first voice said with strained patience. "What is it doing here?"

"Well, it's, er... taking up a bit of the floor, blocking the light from the windows, and getting in the way of getting to the shelves, my lord."

The lord of the house clearly gave up on help from this quarter, two questions too late in Blackadder's estimation, and tried the third man who'd come in with them. "Percy, did you by any chance order an even more enormously fashionable ruff to be delivered to my house?"

"Oh, no, my lord!" he said hastily, as if he assumed this to be an entirely serious question. "The fashion these days is towards depth rather than width." There was a pause in which Blackadder could only assume he was showing off this fashionable ruff with misplaced preening.

"Yes. Unfortunately, there's only one of those you have any chance of aspiring to, and you're not even likely to manage that one given you have absolutely no useful skills and rely entirely on freeloading for all your meals." He paced around the outside of the time machine again, giving the corner where Darling was hiding a desultory kick that made him flinch. "Well, if neither of you two fleabrains are responsible for it, then what exactly is it doing in my den?"

"Oh, Edmund, Edmund!" Percy said with sudden excitement. Blackadder frowned a little at the coincidence, not least because no one wanted to hear their own name from the lips of a simpering prat. "Perhaps it's a gift from a secret admirer!"

"Percy, I hardly think anyone's going to go to the trouble of breaking into my house and constructing a wooden box that's too big to fit through the front door just to say, 'Fancy a shag?'"

"Yeah, 'cause you haven't got any admirers," said the servant. "'Cause everybody hates you 'cause you're mean and you're stingy and they all say Lord Blackadder never did anything nice for anyone."

"Yes, thank you, Baldrick," the lord in question said sharply.

At this point, the trio inside the time machine huddled together to hold a swift, whispered conference. "Blackadder!" Darling said. "It sounds like we've arrived in the home of one of your ancestors."

"Yes, and a big, swanky townhouse in the middle of London, too," he said indignantly. "He's a bloody peer of the realm, and what did I inherit? Baldrick." He'd have preferred one of the candleholders, or even a floorboard.

"But isn't it amazing, sir," Baldrick said, "to think our families should have been so entwined down throughout the centuries, brought together by the power of density?"

"Yes, like finding out you've got a rare and horribly embarrassing hereditary disease," he said. "God, no wonder the family fortunes have slid downhill with the Baldrick dynasty clinging onto them like a blood-sucking limpet." Nothing sapped a man of his will to live and last vestiges of faith in humanity quite like a few minutes' conversation with Baldrick.

"Should we-"

But whatever Darling had been intending to suggest was interrupted by a rather pointed kick to the door of the time machine. "I hope you realise we can all hear you in there," the lord said from outside. "Come out, or else be subjected to my manservant and live-in-idiot's frankly excruciating efforts at elementary problem-solving."

They trooped back out into the den and Blackadder and his ancestor eyed each other with mutual disdain. God, what a getup. Tights, leather boots, a dangly earring, and actual bloody snakes on the sleeves of his doublet, which Blackadder was not in any way impressed by or jealous of. At least he looked less of a tit than the gangly prat beside him, although that was admittedly such a low bar that an earthworm would struggle to squeeze under it.

On the other hand, he himself was currently wearing a mud-spattered woman's evening gown bodged together by George from the castoffs of soldiers' bad drag acts, so he had to concede he was probably losing this particular sartorial face-off.

Still, at least his nose wasn't nearly as bad as that.

"Cor, it's uncanny," said Baldrick the manservant. He was chiefly distinguished from modern-day Baldrick by the beard and lack of glasses; the grime and distinctly dungy smell had alas been passed down through the ages, possibly literally.

"What is?" Lord Blackadder said. His voice had a bit of a nasal whine to it, too, Blackadder noted smugly - nothing like his own suave baritone.

"Well, he looks exactly like you, my lord, except for the fact he's a girl."

"Being in a dress doesn't make him a girl, Baldrick, any more that the fact that someone's put a hat on you makes you a certified human being."

"Ooh, oh, I saw a Shakespeare comedy like this once!" Percy the prat leapt and clapped his hands in excitement. "There were these twins and they were separated at birth - or, no, wait, maybe there was a shipwreck. Actually, I think there might have been two sets of twins..."

"Percy, the only thing worse than the plot of a Shakespeare comedy is listening to your drivelling attempts to explain it after the fact," Lord Blackadder said. "They may be all the rage right now, but I doubt most of those plays of his will stand the test of time. His Richard IV was dreadful, for a start."

Blackadder decided it was time to break in. "Yes. Much as I hate to cut this fascinating cultural critique short, I do have a prior appointment to clean out the dirt from under my fingernails, so-"

"Not so fast, Big Nose," his ancestor said, with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. "How did you get in here? If you're a long-lost relative looking for money, I warn you now, you won't get so much as a farthing out of me."

"Yeah, 'cause he hasn't got a farthing," the bearded Baldrick put in. He seemed to have slightly more situational awareness than Private Baldrick, though still not enough to anticipate that his master was about to smack him upside the back of the head. "Ow!"

Darling, who until now had been staring slack-jawed at the other Blackadder - should've known he'd have a thing for men in tights - stepped forward, raising his chin. "Look, as it happens, we've travelled through time to get here," he said.

"You mean you came through the herb garden?" Lord Blackadder said. "Well, I came through Mrs Miggins' pie shop, but you don't hear me making a performance of it." Then he clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oh, God. Men in cheap, unconvincing dresses, vaguely poetic nonsense about walking through the flowers... you're bloody actors, aren't you? Listen, I don't want to sponsor my own acting troupe, so sod off before I have you all arrested for vagrancy."

"Oh, but Edmund, you can't turn him away when he's so clearly family," Percy said.

"Percy, if my own dear mother turned up on my doorstep looking for cash, she'd be out on the street faster than you can say, 'Serves you right for not leaving me a bigger inheritance, you grasping old hag.' Besides, if he's any relative of mine, then he must be a bastard."

"Well, just because a child might be illegitimate-"

"Yes, he's probably that too."

"-doesn't mean that he shouldn't be provided for," he said with passionate conviction. "My father always made it known far and wide that any bastard of his who came forward would be taken in as part of the household."

"Well, that's because you're the legitimate heir," Lord Blackadder said. "The old bugger's going to hold out till he's a hundred, desperately hoping he can pump out something slightly brighter than the moths that try to eat Baldrick's underpants to take over the Duchy before he carks it."

A rather pleasing possibility dawned. Blackadder turned his attention on Percy. "Tell me," he enquired politely, "would you by any chance be Lord Percy, heir to the Duchy of Northumberland?"

He perked up delightedly. "Indeed! Lord Percy Percy at your service," he said, with an overly elaborate bow. "You've heard of me?"

"Oh, your family name has come up once or twice," he said, turning to raise a pointed eyebrow at Darling. Lofty aristocratic origins indeed.

"I... think perhaps there might be two noble Percy families," Darling said weakly.

"Yes, well, there's only one Blackadder dynasty, and I don't remember you being invited to any of the awkward family dinners," his ancestor said. He hopped up to sit on a nearby table, showing off his tights and fancy boots. Git. "Who are you, and which dark and foetid corner of the family swamp did you crawl out from?"

Blackadder spent a moment composing an answer that would adequately explain all the nuances of their situation yet also be perfectly pitched to his audience's demonstrated level of comprehension.

"We came here from the future in our magic box," he said.

"Right." His ancestor leaned back sceptically. "Well, that's about the most convincing story I've heard since Lord Broxtable claimed he would have joined the efforts to repel the Spanish Armada but he'd just found out his new cannons weren't waterproof."

"It's true, my lord, my other lord!" Private Baldrick said. "We come from a world where any man can make something of himself, no matter how humble his beginnings! Where the gutters are clean enough to sleep in, and you can watch pictures move and talk to people even when they're not in the same room."

"Baldrick, we come from a hole in the ground full of muddy water where we've all got lice and dysentery and there are hordes of marauding Germans waiting to bayonet us," Blackadder said. "As far as creature comforts go, I'd hardly call it an advancement." He certainly wouldn't mind swapping the dugout for this townhouse, even if it came with a pair of tights and a glittery snake necklace that would blind the average magpie.

"Our time-travelling machine was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself," Darling said.

"Oh, God, da Vinci, da Vinci, everything's a bloody da Vinci," Lord Blackadder groaned. "You can't walk down the street without someone trying to flog you three knock-off first-draft Mona Lisas and a souvenir miniature easel."

"Yes," Percy said. "I was by a stroke of great good fortune able to see my way through all the fakes and secure a rare, genuinely authenticated paintbrush used by the master himself - and for a very reasonable price!"

"No, you weren't, Percy, you paid a queen's ransom for a broken knife handle with some pig bristles glued to it," he said.

"Yes, well, we happen to have the genuine genuine article," Blackadder said. "Show them the sketchbook, Darling,"

"You're not making yourselves sound any less like actors, you know, darling," his ancestor said.

Private Baldrick reopened the time machine so they could fetch the book, and Lord Blackadder and his two pet vegetables strolled in to inspect the inner workings.

"It does have a lot of spinny things and dangly bits, my lord," Percy observed, gawking around in fascination.

"So do the toys they make to amuse small children, Percy, but I suppose those are a bit advanced for you." The lord affected a deliberately unimpressed expression as Darling opened up the sketchbook displaying the plans. "So. How does it work?"

"We don't know," Private Baldrick announced flatly.

"Yes, well." Blackadder jumped in to do some hasty editing. "What Baldrick means to say is that we've thus far made only a preliminary study of some of the most basic functionalities, avoiding overly hasty exploration of uncertain modalities until such time as we can fully ascertain the complete range of possibilities expressed by combinatorial arrangements of the controls."

"Meaning you don't know," his ancestor said.

Blackadder stepped in closer to eyeball him sourly. "Well, I don't see you and your pair of trained monkeys being any help deciphering it," he said. "Not unless you just so happen to know someone who can translate 16th century Italian."

"So... modern Italian, then?" his ancestor said.

Blackadder exchanged a slightly chagrined sidelong glance with Darling, and then coughed. "Yes," he said smoothly.

The lord sat back on the time machine's bench seat and laced his hands behind his head. "Well, then, gentlemen, that leaves only one question," he said. "What's in it for me?"

Blackadder withdrew a short distance to have a hissed discussion with Darling.

"Don't start getting overconfident now, Blackadder," Darling said with a stern glare. "It's obvious the Blackadder family line is selfish, conniving, backstabbing double-crossers all the way down."

"Are you flattering me for any particular reason, Darling, or is this just a spontaneous listing of all my best qualities?" he said. "Look, I'm fairly confident I ought to be able to outwit a 16th-century lord who's never seen a pair of trousers and two hangers-on whose presence would lower the average intelligence of an empty room. Just sit back, Darling, and watch a master negotiator at work."

---

"All right," Blackadder said eventually, tongue poking out slightly as he totted up the final details of their agreement. "So that's both our wristwatches, the twelve shillings Darling has in his wallet, the dirty photographs I have in mine, the dress and shawl, an itemised list of all the future events we can remember, and Private Baldrick's emergency backup miniature turnip."

"Oh, bloody hell," Private Baldrick groaned in dismay.

"Right," Lord Blackadder said. He looked them up and down with an expression of distaste. "You might want to make a bit of an effort before we go and see the queen. It's not going to do anything for my standing in court if I introduce you as a relative looking like something that washed up out of the Thames downstream of Baldrick's gutter."

"The queen?" Darling said in alarm. Of course that little titbit would have his sycophantic instincts all a-tingle.

"Yes. I'm afraid you're going to have to prise Lord Melchett off the royal backside like whatever undoubtedly tedious thing sailors do to remove barnacles if you want him to translate your papers for you."

"Did you say Melchett?" Blackadder said, but his ancestor was already heading out of the room to do whatever additional primping he apparently considered required for a visit to the queen. That left Blackadder and Darling temporarily alone, Percy having been sent off some kind of fool's errand - any errand he was given would automatically qualify - to keep him out of the negotiations, and Baldrick accompanying his turnip to its final resting place with the air of a mother whose last remaining son had just been called to join the war effort. They exchanged dubious glances.

"He did read classics," Darling offered, rather weakly.

"Pity he didn't read anything to do with elementary military strategy. Let's just hope the Melchett family history is a bit more illustrious than yours, or we might be better off asking Baldrick to translate."

"At least I'm not the one having a posturing competition with my own ancestor," he said. "It's like watching a cat trying to look bigger than it's own reflection. You're just jealous Lord Blackadder is wealthier and far more dashing than you are."

"Oh, you thought he was dashing, did you, Darling?" he said. "Is the rakish yet slightly effeminate earring or the tights and leather boots ensemble that does it for you? Don't think I didn't notice you ogling that codpiece earlier."

"Well, it's obviously rather absurdly overstuffed," he attempted to defend himself, though if Blackadder wasn't mistaken he was blushing a little. Interesting.

"Have a lot of expertise in the area to help you compare, do you?" he said.

Darling was spared his efforts to come up with a weak retort as Lord Blackadder returned to the room, now wearing an ornate cape and carrying a truly stupid feathered hat. "Right. I'll introduce you to the queen, but if she has your heads cut off, I'm not sewing them back on."

"Is that a serious risk?" Darling asked nervously.

"Depends. How are you at entertaining a vain, spoiled toddler with an insatiable hunger for gifts she'll be bored with in two minutes and a sense of humour weaker than the flavours at a puritan potluck?"

"Well. Good to know the royal family has maintained its standards through the years," Blackadder said. He spotted the two turnip-bearers returning. "Baldrick! Guard the time machine." They last thing they needed was Percy the prat to wander back in while they were out and take their ride home on a jaunt to the dawn of time. He'd probably be outwitted by whatever fish creature had just hauled itself out of the swamp.

"Yes, sir, Captain B."

"Yes, my lord," the wrong Baldrick said at the same time.

"He's not your lord, I'm your lord," Lord Blackadder said irritably.

"And I didn't mean you, I meant Private Baldrick," Blackadder said.

"Well, which one of us is the public Baldrick?" he said, beginning to sound slightly frantic.

"Oh, God." Blackadder sighed heavily and pressed a hand to his forehead. "Both of you just guard the time machine." From each other, if nothing else.

"Yes, not my lord," said the bearded Baldrick.

"Yes, my not lord," said Private Baldrick.

Really, getting his head cut off could only be an improvement.

---

"Well, Darling, don't say I never bring you anywhere nice," Blackadder said as they passed through the lavish surroundings of Richmond Palace. He eyed the ornamentation discreetly, in hopes of spotting anything small and unattended he could pocket and make a tidy sum selling on to future historians. Alas, probably not worth the risk.

Lord Blackadder preceded them into the queen's chambers, going down on one knee and sweeping his hat before him in a bow. "Majesty."

"You know, Blackadder, it's terribly rude of you to keep asking to see me when I haven't asked to see you," the queen said in unsettlingly girlish voice. "If you're not careful, I might start getting sick of the sight of you!" She gave a sharp-edged smile.

Oh, wonderful. Once again his love-apples dangled over the barbecue pit at the mercy of a powerful lunatic. At least there were no armed guards in immediate evidence. The queen was attended by a daft-looking old biddy sitting sewing by the throne, and a man who he assumed could only be Lord Melchett. Not the most immediately obvious resemblance to the general, though he certainly had the towering height, and there was something distinctive about the nose.

"Ah, but, you see, ma'am, I'm the one who's sick," Lord Blackadder said. "Heartsick every moment that I spend away from you."

Again: git.

The queen gave a pleased titter. "Oh, I can't stay mad at you, Edmund," she said, with a careless little flap of the hand. "I'm sure when I have you executed I shall regret it almost immediately."

"Glad to hear it, ma'am," he said rather grimly as he rose. He gestured to the two of them waiting behind. "Madam, may I present to you my distant cousin, who by very great coincidence is also named Edmund Blackadder, and his associate, Monsieur le Duc de Darling?"

"That's French, majesty, for 'the Duke of Darling'," Melchett explained helpfully, leaning down.

"Oh, golly, another French duke. They don't want me to marry this one as well, do they?" she said, looking round at her advisors.

"You weren't so down on marriage when you were a little girl, my lambkin," the woman beside her said, still at work on her embroidery. "You always used to love your royal wedding playset."

"Yes," the queen mused. "Until I lost the executioner's axe, and then it wasn't as much fun. All right. Send them in." She raised her chin in an affectation of indifferent boredom as he and Darling entered the room.

"Madam." Blackadder echoed his ancestor's deep bow, albeit with, he fancied, greater suavity and less of a sense of servility.

"Your majesty," Darling said with either breathless reverence or panicked terror, crashing to his knees like a man who was born to the position. Which, given other recent indications about Darling's inclinations... whoops, no, hold that thought for a more appropriate arena.

The queen, completely understandably, showed barely any interest in Darling anyway. "Gosh, two Edmunds," she said rather dazedly. "I had a dream like this once. Except that you weren't wearing that horrid greeny-brown whatever it is. In fact, you weren't wearing much at all, actually."

"Ooh, that's very naughty, my poppet," the woman beside her said sternly, and the queen jumped guiltily. "Well, running around without so much as your underthings on. You'll catch your death of cold! I remember when you were a little baby and you didn't want to have a bath..."

"Shut it, Nursie," the queen said flatly.

Lord Melchett chose this moment to butt in. "Yes. One wonders, majesty, why Blackadder would bring his curiously similar cousin and a French nobleman to the court when we do, after all, have a rather tense relationship with the French."

"Mm, that's true." She narrowed her eyes. "Not fishing for favours, are you, Lord Blackadder?"

"Never, ma'am," Lord Blackadder said smoothly. "I'm merely here regarding a rather foolish bet my cousin made with me - against, I must say, all my earnest attempts to persuade him against it."

"Not about how pretty my nose is, I hope," the queen said suspiciously.

"Of course not, ma'am. That would be most unfair," he said. "After all, how could anyone who hadn't beheld it in person possibly have the slightest inkling of quite how pretty it is?"

"Good God," Blackadder said in disgust, pitched low enough that only Darling could hear him. "If he lays on the smarm any thicker we're going to slide out of here on a tidal wave of grease."

"Perhaps you should be taking notes," Darling said snidely. "I must say, it's a novelty to meet a Blackadder who's heard of the old adage of using honey rather than vinegar to gets what he wants."

"Well, I'm sorry, Darling, but I'm not using honey on you no matter how much you beg."

The queen, however, was apparently susceptible to this kind of flannel. "Oh, you," she said, with a coy little flap of the hand. "So what's the bet?"

"Yes, tell us, Blackadder, do," said Melchett.

"Well, actually, Melchy, me old mucker, it's you we were coming to see," Lord Blackadder said. "Now, dear old cousin Eddie and his fantastically wealthy associate here came to the city to complete a business deal and purchase what they were told is a lost creation of the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci."

Lord Melchett gave a patronising chuckle that was not the general's machine-gun bleat yet somehow managed to be equally as annoying. The queen tittered as well, and her nurse followed suit, without showing any evidence of comprehending why they were all laughing.

"Oh, Blackadder," Melchett said, shaking his head. "That's the oldest trick in the book! Everyone knows that the art markets are veritably flooded with counterfeit da Vincis."

"Yes, well, nonetheless, my cousin's associate was quite adamant. You know how passionate the French can get."

Blackadder eyeballed Darling, a man whose greatest passion in life was tidy filing, and second greatest was apparently doing everything in his power to prevent Blackadder from disordering said filing by failing to go out and get himself killed as ordered. Probably just as well they had him playing the part of a Frenchman who didn't speak much English. Even if he was discovered to be entirely fluent but pretending not to be, it would only make him more convincing in the role.

"Monsieur le Duc put up an extremely sizeable bet that the mechanism he had bought was indeed a creation of da Vinci's, and he would get it working to prove it. However - isn't it always the way? - when he opened it up, he discovered that the instructions were in another language. So. Melchett. Quite a lot is riding on your ability to translate some old scribbles in backwards Italian."

"And why should I assist you in your endeavours, Blackadder?" he said, with the smug air of a man who was absolutely going to, just for the petty pleasure of lording it over him afterwards.

"Surely the opportunity to be the first translator of a new work by the master ought to be reward enough in itself?" Lord Blackadder said.

"Ha - and half of your winnings when it's proven to be an obvious fraud!" Melchett said.

"One might argue that gives you rather a motivation to declare it a fraud," Lord Blackadder said.

"I'm sure Lord Melchett will be perfectly honest, Lord Blackadder," the queen put in. "Because if he's not, I shall have to have all of your heads cut off for hiding a new masterpiece from me instead of bringing it to me as a present."

She smiled perkily.

Blackadder reflected that perhaps being a courtier to the queen wasn't actually that much of a step up from being used as target practice by the German army.

---

"Why, but this is extraordinary!" Lord Melchett said, peering into the interior of the time machine. "Truly the most ingenious of mechanisms!"

He pulled the hanging chain again. There was a flushing noise.

"Yes, well, never mind the onboard toilets, can you fix the time machine?" Blackadder said impatiently.

"It certainly puts that nonsense of John Harington's to shame," Melchett went on. "I wonder if I might perchance be permitted to borrow these plans...?" He was already sidling towards the exit.

"Not so fast, Melchett." Lord Blackadder stepped up to bar his way before he could descend the ramp. "You're about as subtle as Henry VIII asking if anyone's met any nice girls lately. We let you out of that door and those plans will be up for sale faster than Sir Walter Rayleigh when he gets word of a new root vegetable. You haven't even proven you can translate them yet."

"Yes," Blackadder said. "No doubt you'd be completely stumped if we asked you to set the mechanism to, oh, just as an example... 1917."

"Au contraire, Captain Blackadder," Melchett said smugly. They watched from the doorway as he began to move around the cabin, setting levers and wheels with at least a semi-convincing pretence of knowing what he was doing.

"Well, he may be an annoying git, but it looks like the Melchett line has definitely gone downhill in the brains department in the last few centuries," he said to Darling.

Darling looked vaguely constipated, instinct to leap to the general's defence apparently somewhat more conflicted when there was no actual chance of the old walrus coming through the door behind him. Alas, they were not so spared from other unwanted visitations. Bearded Baldrick had, in an act of extreme unhelpfulness even for Baldrick-kind, let Lord Percy back in.

"Oh, Edmund!" he said delightedly, in response to the apparent unanticipated excitement of having successfully tracked the man down to his own house.

"Oh, God," Lord Blackadder said in tones of deepest depression, burying his face in his hands.

Blackadder turned back to Darling. "As to what direction your family line's gone in, that's still up for debate," he said.

"Whereas yours clearly hasn't evolved in the slightest down throughout the centuries," he retorted. "The two of you are practically indistinguishable!"

"Is that so, Darling?" he said. "Because I seem to remember you telling me how dashingly attractive you found him."

"I said no such thing!" Darling said, blanching in horror, though his ears had gone red.

Melchett appeared to be finished with his adjustments to the controls, emerging from the doorway to address Lord Blackadder. "You know, Blackadder, I really don't think the queen is going to be very impressed by a rather impractical oversized clock that can tell the date in different centuries," he said. "And I must confess I'm not overly sure what this part about a... road into time, or perhaps a journey over time, is supposed to actually do."

"Not so strong on the old Italian translation after all, eh, Melchett?" Lord Blackadder said smugly.

"Well, step outside and we'll give you a demonstration," Blackadder said, ushering Melchett down the ramp to join his ancestor. "Come along, Darling. Don't dawdle."

"Hadn't we better get Private Baldrick?" Darling said.

"Darling, no plan involving bringing Baldrick along can possibly be described as 'better'," he said. Still, the havoc that could be wreaked on the family fortunes by leaving his ancestor a double dose of Baldricks to wrangle didn't bear thinking about. He'd probably get back to the future and find he was a bloody private himself, assuming the empire even still stood. He raised his voice. "Baldrick! In here."

"Yes, my sir!"

"Yes, Captain Not-my-lord!"

Both Baldricks obediently headed towards him.

"No, not you, you idiot," his ancestor snapped at his manservant. "Get back here!"

That stymied them both, and they flapped around like tethered chickens, utterly bewildered as to which direction they should be moving in or who they were supposed to be obeying.

"Oh, God, we'll be here all bloody day," Blackadder said wearily. The simplest thing would probably be to just physically manhandle the correct Baldrick aboard, but this did have the possibly lethal downside of requiring touching Baldrick.

"Where are the plans?" Darling said suddenly.

They looked around the interior of the time machine, but the da Vinci sketchbook was conspicuously absent. Then Blackadder spotted Lord Melchett creeping his way towards the hallway with his cloak looking suspiciously stiff and rectangular.

"That bastard Melchett's making off with my bloody da Vinci!" He'd stolen that thing fair and square, and fully intended to use it to finance his early retirement. Unfortunately, the odds of getting Baldrick to grasp that an order to intercept it was actually aimed at him were about as remote as Staff Headquarters from the front line - and the nearest other option wasn't much better. "Percy! Get that sketchbook off Lord Melchett!" he yelled.

"What?" Lord Percy swung round cluelessly to look in his direction, and managed to collide with the fleeing Melchett out of sheer ineptitude. The sketchbook dropped out of the back of Melchett's robes.

"Ha!" Lord Blackadder pounced, backing him against the wall. "Thought we wouldn't notice you making off with the goods, eh, Melchett?"

"I merely thought this masterpiece ought to be in the hands of the queen, instead of whatever sordid, grubby plans you no doubt have in mind for it," he defended himself.

"Oh, really, Melchett? That excuse holds about as much water as a hedgehog's knitted bag. And if anyone's going to buying the queen's attention with dubiously obtained artwork, it should be me!"

As the two of them squabbled Darling turned back to Blackadder. "I suggest we leave before your ancestor decides to go back on our deal and keep the plans for himself," he said.

"Darling, that accusation is baseless, scurrilous, beneath you and probably accurate," he said. "Quick, back in the time machine." He looked back over his shoulder as he made a dash for it, and spotted Percy standing there gormlessly with the sketchbook. "Percy, give the da Vinci to Baldrick!" he ordered. "Baldrick - yes, that's you, Private Baldrick - come on, we're leaving."

He joined Darling in the time machine and eyeballed the positions of the controls, trying to assess whether they bore any resemblance to the configuration that they'd started from. If he'd realised the machine bloody worked, he might have paid a bit more attention.

"Well, better hope that windbag translates Italian better than General Melchett directs battle plans, or else we're going to end up back in Neanderthal times," he said. "I always thought the Piltdown Man was a dead ringer for Baldrick, albeit capable of walking a bit more upright."

"So... back to 1917," Darling said in leaden tones.

Back to the war, the trenches, the ever-present stench of death... the basement of a German-occupied château. Blackadder glanced sideways at Darling. "You know, it's quite vital we keep this device out of German hands," he said.

Darling's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Since when have you ever cared about a mission objective?" he said.

Since it might just be his pretext to escape this mess. "If we pop straight back to the same place and time that we left from, we'll be apprehended by the Germans in a trice." Not that he would have minded, but right now he had a better idea. "It's a sacrifice, but I say we should skip ahead in time, just to make extra sure that they're gone from the château."

Holding Darling's gaze and daring him to object, he reached a finger towards a wheel he was fairly sure was the year counter and pointedly nudged it forward a notch. Then another. He wasn't falling for that 'over by Christmas' bollocks again. In fact, just to be extra safe... he ticked them all the way to forward 1925.

Beside him, Darling drew in a sharp breath. "We'd lose eight years of our lives!" he said. "They'd mark us down as deserters."

Trust him to be worried about the bloody paperwork. "We have a time machine, Darling," Blackadder reminded him. "We can skip on ahead past the end of the war, find out what happened, and then pick a more convenient time to go back to." Namely after the worst of the danger was over but while there was still enough general confusion to get away with smearing themselves with some mud and claiming they'd been prisoners of war for all this time.

Darling stared at him with a mad expression of fearful, rising hope, and opened his mouth to say something, which Blackadder imagined to be along the lines of, 'Oh, Blackadder, you're so brilliant and also very dashing, I would marry you in a heartbeat if I were a girl because I'm exactly that sort of clingy drip.' Alas, this presumed hymn to his praises was lost to time, since that was when Baldrick finally blundered back in.

"Baldrick, even by your standards that was an impressively slow time to cross a room," he said. "I can see all that military training in advancing very slowly in full view of the enemy has taken hold."

"I was saying goodbye to my-"

"Yes, yes, very tragic," he said impatiently, turning away. "Shut that door, we're leaving before they realise those dirty pictures we traded would barely have been considered racy in Queen Victoria's time, my old wristwatch is broken, and your rare breed of miniature turnip is actually just a radish that's been dipped in white paint."

He conducted a quick mental checklist as he reached for the broom handle lever that seemed to have started the machine going before. "Right. Most importantly, still got my head. More regrettably, still got both of you. Does Baldrick have that sketchbook?"

"Yes, my lord, Captain B, sir!" Baldrick said.

Blackadder sighed wearily. "So much for that six months we spent on the concept of military ranks." Still, trying to teach Baldrick enough military discipline to match up to your average chimpanzee was about to cease to be his problem. He pulled the lever, and the time machine wibbled its way into the void.

"All right - 1925, here we come," he said. "Hopefully, the next time we open this door the war will be over, and the worst we'll have to contend with are a bunch of Darling's annoying French relatives having moved back in and left the place stinking of garlic. With any luck, they'll have restocked the wine cellar and we can nick a crate or two on our way out."

Hmm, that could be a good racket to run with a time machine - hop back a few centuries to pick up some cheap booze right after it had been bottled, swipe it through a few cobwebs for veracity, and then sell it on at an enormous markup as a rare vintage. This time travel business had possibilities.

"Imagine, a world without war," Baldrick said wistfully. "A world where everyone can live together, in peace and harmonicas."

"Baldrick, no one who's ever listened to you speak what passes for your mind will ever know peace again," Blackadder said. He leaned back against the wall. "No, I'm afraid that 'war to end war' bollocks was always just that. Personally, I'd settle for a war I don't have to participate in." Of course, it would probably help if the British Empire hadn't insisted on annexing everywhere the upper classes thought would make a nice place for a holiday. And also Australia.

Darling let out a shaky breath. "The end of the war," he said, as if he'd never dared to let himself believe in such a thing. "I could go back home to Croydon. See Doris again."

"Yes. I wouldn't tell her about your propensity for men in tights who wear dangly earrings, if I were you."

"And I could start a family of my own," Baldrick said, inspired.

"Mm." Blackadder wrinkled his face doubtfully. "I think meeting another member of your own species may have left you a tad optimistic on that front, Baldrick."

There was a sudden lurch as the time machine reached its destination and abruptly tipped sideways at an angle, causing him to collide with Darling, and, worse, almost get a lap full of Baldrick. He held the latter off at arm's length.

"Well, we've landed," he said. "Must say I don't think much of Melchett's bloody navigation skills. This has got to be the worst parking job I've seen since someone told Bob Parkhurst that that show-off Flashheart was giving out signed cigarette cards."

That someone had been him, for scheme-related reasons that regrettably hadn't panned out, but that was neither here nor there.

"Are we back in the château?" Darling asked nervously.

"If we are, they've certainly let the old place go." They seemed to have landed on distinctly uneven ground. "Baldrick, see if you can get the door open." He listened for a moment to see if he could pick up any sounds of, say, a mob of armed Germans stationed outside, or, less pessimistically, a group of attractive young Frenchwomen being given a tour of the wine cellar. Everything was dead silent.

"Perhaps the Germans have retreated and they dynamited the château on their way out," Darling theorised.

"There goes your inheritance, then," Blackadder said. "If you're lucky, they managed to take out those portraits in the hall while they were at it."

Baldrick managed to open the door, but it only lowered a little way before something blocked it from descending any further, creating a steep upward ramp. Blackadder prodded him up it. "All right, what can you see out there?" he said.

Baldrick poked his head out and took his time making a thorough assessment of the situation.

"Mud," he reported.

"Mud," he echoed. "Right, well, that's narrowed it down to 'probably somewhere on earth'. Anything else?"

"Well, we haven't quite completely fallen over in the mud, 'cause we're lying on some springy metally stuff."

"Barbed wire," he said with weary patience. Then actually listened to himself. "Barbed wire? Oh, bloody buggering hell! That idiot Melchett's landed us right in the middle of no man's land!"

Worse, either somebody had spotted Baldrick's head or they'd got over their momentary bafflement at the appearance of a big wooden box and decided it was enemy action. He heard the distant boomph of the heavy guns, followed by the scream of a shell, thank God. If you had time to hear them pass by, they hadn't bloody hit you. But it hit somewhere a whole closer than he liked, sending up a great spray of mud to splatter Baldrick - small change there, then - and rattling all of the time machine's controls.

"Right, out of the time machine!" He'd rather not be delivered to the Germans in a ready-made coffin. Assuming it was the Germans actually shelling them, and not their own sodding side.

Another shell burst even nearer, bouncing the whole time machine in place and causing it to slip sideways as the barbed wire heaved up and the sandbags jumped. No, definitely the Germans with that kind of aim. He clawed his way up the ramp after Baldrick, not aided by Darling's scrabbling panic behind him. "Darling, I know you're always keen on a spot of bottom-fondling, but now is really not the time!" he said.

As he poked his head out above the shelter of the time machine, he was keenly aware of the absence of his helmet. As much bloody good as a tin hat would do him against a direct hit by a shell. Somehow they'd arrived back in what looked like the mid-evening, the sun on a downward arc but unlikely to conveniently set in, say, the next three seconds.

He really, really should have known better than to let anyone named Melchett determine their destination.

At least the way they'd landed leaning on the barbed wire meant the lowered door of the time machine formed a makeshift bridge that got them... more or less across, with only a minimum of hopping and swearing. He scrambled over the sandbag parapet, kicking Baldrick unceremoniously down into the trench ahead of him and then turning back to haul Darling after him over the wire. There was no time to disentangle as they jumped down into the trench and dashed for the dubious safety of the next bay along. They huddled together in mutual cowardice as the Germans found their range and the time machine exploded into fragments behind them.

"Cor, that's dangerous," Baldrick said. "All those bits of broken wood gone everywhere."

"Yes, well, I'll make sure you're first in line for the working party when they send us up there to clean it up." The shelling seemed to be over, so he released his human shield. "I'm sorry, Darling, but I'm not in the mood to cuddle tonight."

Darling gave him an unimpressed look, but disengaged without a trace of the usual twitch. If he was developing an immunity, Blackadder was really going to have to step up his game.

Right now, though, Darling was clearly more preoccupied with the fact that their transport through time had just gone boom. "The greatest achievement in human history, destroyed in an instant," he said dismally, blatantly also mourning the loss of his chance to leg it for freedom.

"Yes, well, fortunately, it was only humanity's second-greatest creation, and we've managed to save the greatest one, me," Blackadder said. "And at least we still have the- where's the bloody da Vinci sketchbook?" There were a definite lack a large papery objects about Baldrick's person. Blackadder bore down on him threateningly. "Tell me you didn't leave it in the time machine."

"I did not leave it in the time machine," he recited obediently.

Long and bitter experience made this answer less than reassuring. "Well, where is it, then?" he demanded.

"1597," Baldrick said.

Blackadder pressed a hand to his forehead and briefly contemplated the void. Specifically the one that they'd passed through on their trip through time, and why he hadn't shoved Baldrick out into it when he had the chance.

Tragically, this foolish oversight allowed Baldrick to continue with his explanation. "See, you said-"

"'Does Baldrick have that sketchbook?'" He had a fatalistic premonition of where this was going. "And you said-"

"'Yes,' because-"

"The other Baldrick had it," Blackadder completed for him. "Yes. Baldrick, could you step a little closer, please? I'm too depressed to kill you from all the way over here."

"Not to worry, Lord Captain B," he said, cheerily oblivious to his impending execution, "for while I was guarding the time machine with my Great, Great, Great, Great..."

"He wasn't that bloody great, Baldrick, get on with it."

"Great, Great Grand-Uncle Baldrick, we came up with a cunning plan. See, for him then is now, right? But after a while the then will stop being now and become then for him as well, and then eventually now will become now for everyone..."

Blackadder could see from the slightly strained look on Darling's face that he was actually trying to follow this, and shook his head at him. "Don't even try, Darling," he advised. "The destination is absolutely never worth the journey." He turned back to Baldrick. "You mean 'time will pass'," he said.

"Right," Baldrick said, face screwed up with the unaccustomed effort of this poor approximation of reasoning. "And so we thought he could leave something in the then for me to get in the now when the then becomes now."

"Yes. Normal people call this concept inheritance, but well done for making it this far," he said.

"Of course!" Darling said. "Since they know the date that we came from, they can arrange for the sketchbook to be delivered to us here all these years later!"

Oh, dear, the poor optimistic fool. Blackadder raised a single eyebrow at Baldrick. "So. Do you have the sketchbook?" he said.

Baldrick paused dramatically. "No," he said.

"Yes. I fear this ambitious plan has been rather scuppered by the fact that no one in your family line can read, write, or retain anything that they've been told for periods of more than eight seconds."

"That is an issue, yes," he admitted.

Darling let out a frustrated huff. "So we're back in the war, without the time machine or plans to show for it. Are we sure this is even one of our trenches?"

"Oh, yes," Blackadder said. "You can tell by all the discarded dog-ends, the fact the barbed wire is a piddling little line draped along the front of the trench like tinsel instead of an impassable thicket ten yards deep, and most of all by the fact that everybody's immediately scarpered toward the rear lines in the face of a potential enemy assault." The three of them wound their way through the twists and turns of the trenches to follow this sterling example.

"But why would we have landed here instead of back at the château?" Darling said as they headed back along the communications trench.

"Because, Darling, everyone around me is an incompetent idiot. We'll be lucky if we haven't been sent back to 1914 to relive the early years of the war instead of getting to skip past any of it."

"It just seems odd, is all," he persisted, that paperwork-addled mind apparently convinced there ought to be some sort of order amid the chaos. Fat chance. "You set the controls on the time machine before and it took us to your ancestor. And now, with Lord Melchett setting the controls to send us back-"

There was an angry roar from the officers' dugout ahead of them. Not the sound of attacking Germans, but rather that of someone who devoted considerably more time to orchestrating the wholesale slaughter of the British front line.

"Ahh! Repel the Hun invaders! Ahh!" General Melchett made a concerted effort to thrash Baldrick, the only purported invader conveniently a foot shorter than he was. Which really ought to have been more than enough clue that he'd cornered a characteristic exemplar of the typical fighting Tommy rather one of the six-foot slabs of Teutonic manhood that made up the German army.

Behind him George was, God help them all, attempting to be the voice of reason. "Sir, sir, it's Captain Blackadder!" he said.

"Don't be ridiculous, man, he looks nothing like Captain Blackadder!" Melchett said as he continued trying to whip Baldrick.

Blackadder stepped out smoothly from the shadows of the trench. "I believe he means I am Captain Blackadder," he said.

"Well, you can't both be Captain Blackadder, can you?" the general said derisively. "Ha! Your low Boche cunning is no match for the quick wits and daring of our brave boys."

"Yes, that's certainly the level of incisive reasoning that's brought the British army to where it is today," he said.

Darling leapt forward, one of nature's toadies to the last. "Sir, it's me, Captain Darling!" he said.

"Good God, look at the state of you, Darling!" Melchett said. "Stopping out at all hours, coming back in strange men's clothes... it's like I don't even know you any more!"

"Er... you sent me on a mission behind enemy lines, sir," Darling reminded him.

"That's certainly no excuse for slacking on standards! I expect to both you and Blackadder to report to my office at once where you can explain yourselves." He gave Baldrick a final parting thump that knocked him to the ground before storming off back to his car.

"I say, Cap, it's frightfully good to see you and Balders back at last," George said. "I knew you'd make it, even if some of the chaps were starting to think you must be goners after all this time."

Given George's typical levels of demented optimism, this statement provided remarkably little insight into whether they'd actually made it to 1925 after all and just found the British front line exactly where they'd left it. "How long have we been gone?" Blackadder asked.

"Gosh. Well, hmm, let's see." The question clearly represented a strain on George's limited intellectual powers. "Er... well, you left quite late last night, and, criminy, it's already gone half seven in the evening!"

"Meaning we arrived back here at about twenty-five past seven," Darling said. He gave Blackadder a rather pointed look. "Or as the navy would call it... 1925."

Blackadder shot him a venomous glare in return.

If they ever managed to reconstruct the time machine, the first thing he was doing was going back in time to give Leonardo da sodding Vinci a thorough kicking for being too clever by half in his design for the controls.

---

Spinning an explanation good enough to satisfy Melchett proved a relatively easy task, since the general was clearly accustomed to relying on Darling to handle such fiddly little administrative details of his meetings as notetaking, record-keeping and producing coherent sentences vaguely related to the topic. Given the choice between nobly taking responsibility for his part in losing the world's only functioning time machine versus joining Blackadder in weaving the Bolleux Tapestry, Darling was more than willing to lie like the all-trenches synchronised playing dead team. Blackadder made a mental note to implicate him in schemes more often.

Because, alas, it seemed he wasn't getting out of here any time soon.

"You're extremely lucky, Blackadder, that the general trusts my version of events," Darling said as they left the office.

"No, Darling, he nodded off during your supremely tedious rendition of events and then pretended he was following because he's under the delusion that we didn't notice his input on the conversation briefly got far more intelligent," he said. "And anyway, this is your fault for not keeping better track of those plans."

"I seem to remember you reminding me that you were the one in command of the mission," Darling said.

"Yes, which is why I was the one in charge of the time machine controls and you were the one who should have been making sure we had the plans aboard. It's no good leaving anything in Baldrick's hands - either of him. He probably swapped that da Vinci sketchbook for some magic turnip seeds, assuming he didn't just burn it."

"Perhaps he just got the timing wrong," Darling said. "Who knows, some future Baldrick might still deliver those plans to another Edmund Blackadder a few generations down the line. You should write a letter to your future descendent, just in case."

"Yes, I've already started one. So far I've got, 'You utter, utter, utter, utter bastard.'" He sighed and leaned back against the wall. "No, let's face it, Darling," he said. "We're not going to get our time machine out of here. Baldrick isn't going to turn out to have been keeping da Vinci's lost masterwork under his bunk, a great relief to art historians everywhere. We're not even going to get to see out the war as prisoners in some rich Frenchwoman's boudoir, drinking bad wine and having extremely ill-advised argumentative sex."

Instead of taking offence, Darling simply leaned against the wall beside him for a few moments of companionable silence. Then gave him a sidelong look. "I could probably arrange a bottle of the general's least favourite Merlot in the room where we keep the spare furniture," he offered.

Blackadder contemplated that idea for a few seconds.

"All right, you're on," he said.