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"And your costume is something more than it seems?"

"You are very perceptive, Henry."

"Eat, Mr. Oxford. We shall talk afterwards."

An hour later, the time traveller, feeling bloated and a little sick, accepted a brandy, refused a cigar, and told his host almost everything. He omitted the queen's assassination and, instead, claimed that he'd travelled back through time simply to meet his ancestor.

They had moved to the morning room after the meal and were sitting in big wooden armchairs beside a crackling fire.

Beresford was drunk.

He was also incredulous.

And he was laughing.

"Great heavens above!" he roared. "You're as fine a storyteller as that Dickens fellow! Have you read Pickwick?"

"Of course I have. This isn't a fiction, Henry."

"Balderdash! What can be more fictive than a man from the future being propelled into the past by a suit of clothes?"

"Yet I maintain that that's what happened."

"You're a strange one, I'll admit," declared the marquess. "Your speech is rather too direct for an Englishman, your manner too casual by half. I have you down as a foreigner, my friend!"

"I told you-I was born and raised in Aldershot."

"In the year 2162, you say. What's that? Some three hundred and twenty-five years from now?"

"Yes."

Beresford refilled their glasses and lit another cigar.

"Let's just say I'm prepared to play along with your rum little game, Edward," he said. "You say you require my help. In what manner may I be of assistance?"

"I need you to purchase for me a complete set of watchmaker's tools."

"For what purpose?"

"I have to repair my suit's control unit. I'm hoping that watchmaker's tools will be fine enough for such work."

"Control unit?"

"The circular object you saw on my chest."

"And am I to take it that when this `control unit' is repaired you will once again be capable of flight through time?"

"Yes."

"Phew! I have never heard such a tale in all my born natural! Yet I have it in mind to humour you! You will remain here as my guest and I shall get you your tools!"

"There is something I can tell you," said Oxford, "that might lend credence to my story."

"Really. What is that?"

"Five days from now, you will have a new monarch."

Slowly, over the next seven days, Henry de La Poet Beresford's amused disbelief began to waver.

The death of King William IV at Windsor Castle had, of course, been expected and came as no surprise. The fact that Oxford had predicted Victoria's ascension to the throne on June 20 wasn't particularly amazing-more a lucky guess, in all probability.

However, after extracting a vow of silence from his host, Oxford revealed a great deal more about the world he'd come from, especially about the different technologies and power sources available to future man. The human race, it seemed, would lose none of its inventiveness as time progressed.

It was the way the man spoke and moved, though, that most convinced the marquess. There was something indescribably foreign about him, yet, conversely, the longer he spent with him the more Beresford believed that his odd visitor was, as he claimed, an Englishman.

"You are evidentially a sophisticated individual," he said one morning, "yet-if you'll pardon my bluntness-you lack the social graces I would expect from a gentleman."

Oxford, who was seated at a table and using the watchmaker's tools to poke at the incomprehensible innards of his "control unit," responded without looking up.

"No offence taken, Henry. I don't mean to be rude; it's just that in my time social interaction is far less ritualised. We express our feelings and opinions just as we please, openly and without restraint."

"How barbaric!" drawled the marquess, dangling a leg over the arm of his chair. "Are you not permanently at one another's throats?"

"No more so than you Victorians."

"Victorians? Is that what we are now? Why, I suppose it is! But tell me, my friend: what possible advantage can there be in the abandonment of our ritualised'-as you would have it-behaviour? Are not manners the mark of a civilised man?"

"The advantage is liberty, Henry.