Then he was through and staggering a little, himself, across the platform. His muddy shoes slipped on wet metal. Skeeter windmilled and lurched against a stack of luggage waiting to be ferried through. The topmost steamer trunk, a massive thing, slid sideways and started to topple toward the edge of the platform. The corner of the trunk was well out beyond the periphery of the open Britannia gate, teetering out where it would plunge the full hundred feet to the Commons floor. As Skeeter went to one bruised knee, furious shouts and blistering curses erupted. Then somebody lunged past him to grab the steamer trunk by the handle before it could fall.
"Don't just sit there, goddamn you!" A short, skinny tourist stood glaring murderously down at him, arms straining to keep the trunk from falling. The young man's whiskered face had gone ashen under the lights overhead. "Grab this trunk! I can't hold the weight!" The kid's voice was light, breathless, furious.
His whole knee ached where he'd landed on it, but Skeeter staggered back his feet and leaned over the piles of trunks and cases to secure a wet-handed grip on the corner that had already gone over the end of the platform. Hauling together, Skeeter and the tourist pulled the heavy trunk back onto the platform. The tourist was actually shaking, whether with fright or rage, Skeeter wasn't certain.
But he wasn't so shaken he didn't blow up in Skeeter's face. "What the hell did you think you were doing? Were you trying to shove that trunk over the edge? Goddammit, do you have any idea what would've happened if that trunk had gone over? If you've been drinking, I'll make sure you never work on this station again!" The young man's face was deathly pale, eyes blazing against the unnatural pallor of his skin and the dark, heavy whiskers of his mutton-chop sideburns and mustache, which he must've acquired from Paula Booker's cosmetology salon, because up-time men didn't grow facial hair in that quantity or shape any more. The furious tourist, fists balled up and white-knuckled, shrilled out, "My God, do you realize what you almost caused?"
"Well, it didn't fall, did it?" Skeeter snapped, halting the tirade mid-stream. "And if you stand there cursing much longer, you're gonna miss your stinking gate!" Skeeter shouldered the trunk himself, having to carry it across his back, the thing was so heavy. The short and brutish little tourist, white-lipped and silent now, stalked through the open gate on Skeeter's heels, evidently intent on following to make sure Skeeter didn't drop it again. So much for my new job. After this guy gets done complaining, I'll be lucky if I still have the job scrubbing toilets.
It was, of course, still raining furiously in the Spaldergate House garden. Skeeter did slip again, the muddy ground was so churned up beside the crowded flagstone walkway. The furious man on his heels grabbed at the trunk again as Skeeter lurched and slid sideways. "Listen, you drunken idiot!" he shouted above steady pouring of the rain. "Lay off the booze or the pills before you show up for work!"
"Stuff it," Skeeter said crudely. He regained his feet and finally gained the house, where he gratefully lowered his burden to the floor.
"Where are you going?" the irate young man demanded when Skeeter headed back into the downpour.
He flung the answer over one aching shoulder. "Back to the station!"
"But who's going to cart this out to the carriage? Take it to the hotel?"
"Carry it yourself!"
The skinny, whiskered little tourist was still sputtering at the back door when Skeeter re-entered the now-visibly shrunken Britannia Gate. He passed several other porters bent double under heavy loads, trying to get the last of the pile through, then was back on the metal gridwork platform. All that remained of the departing tour was a harried Time Tours guide who plunged through as Skeeter reappeared. Then he was alone with the mud and a single uniformed Time Tours employee who swung shut the big metal safety gate as the Britannia shrank rapidly back in on itself and vanished for another eight days.
Skeeter—wet, shivering, exhausted—slowly descended the stairs once again and slid his timecard through the reader at the bottom, "clocking out" so his brief stay in the London timestream would be recorded properly. The baggage manager was waiting, predictably irate. Skeeter listened in total, sodden silence, taking the upbraiding he'd expected. This evidently puzzled the furious Enyo, because she finally snapped, "Well? Aren't you going to protest your innocence?"
"Why bother?" Skeeter said tiredly. "You've already decided I'm guilty. So just fire me and get it over with so I can put on some dry clothes and start looking for my friends again."
Thirty seconds later, he was on his way, metaphoric pink slip in hand. Well, that was probably the shortest job on record. Sixty-nine minutes from hired to fired. He never had liked the idea of hauling luggage for a bunch of jackass tourists, anyway. Scrubbing toilets was dirtier, but at least more dignified than bowing and scraping and apologizing for being alive. And when the job was over, something, at least, was clean.
Which was more than he could say of himself at the moment. Mud covered his trousers, squelched from his wet shoes, and dripped with the trickling rainwater down one whole sleeve where he'd caught himself from a nasty fall, that last time through. Wonder what was in that lousy trunk, anyway? The way he acted, you'd've thought it was his heirloom china. God, tourists!
Maybe that idiot would do them all a favor and get himself nice and permanently lost in London? But that thought only brought the pain surging back. Skeeter blinked away wetness that had nothing to do with the rainwater dripping out of his hair, then speeded up. He had to get out of these wet, filthy clothes and hook up with the search teams again. Very few people knew this station the way Skeeter did. If he couldn't find her...
He clenched his jaw muscles.
He had to find her.
Nothing else mattered at all.
Chapter Seven
Rain had stopped falling over the slate rooftops and crockery chimney pots of London by the time the arriving tour sorted itself out at the Time Tours Gatehouse and departed via carriages to hotels, boarding houses, and rented flats—a British word for apartment that one of the guides had needed to explain to her. Jenna Nicole Caddrick sat hunched now in a rattling carriage, listening to the sharp clop as the horses, a teamed pair of them in harness, struck the cobblestoned street with iron-shod hooves in a steady rhythm.
She shivered and hugged her gentleman's frock coat more tightly around her, grateful for the first time that she was less well endowed than she'd have liked through the chest, and grateful, too, for the simple bulkiness of Victorian men's clothing, which helped disguise bulges that shouldn't have been there. Jenna huddled into her coat, miserable and scared and wishing like anything that Noah had come through with her. She hadn't expected London to be so cold or so wet. It was only the end of August here, after all; but the guides back at the gatehouse had told them London's entire summer had been cold and wet, so there wasn't any use complaining to them about the miserable weather.
Miserable was right. The ride jounced her sufficiently to shake her teeth loose, if she hadn't been clenching them so tightly. The air stank, not like New York, which smelt of car exhaust fumes and smog, but rather a dank, bleak sort of stench compounded of whatever was rotting in the River Thames and coal smoke from hundreds of thousands of chimneys and horse dung scattered like shapeless anthills across the streets and a miasma of other stinks she couldn't identify and wasn't sure she wanted to, either. Everything was strange, even the lights. Gaslight didn't look like electric light, which was a phenomenon all those period-piece movies hadn't been able to capture on film. It was softer and yellower, adding a warm and yet alien color to everything where it spilled out across window sills or past half-closed shutters.