The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [146]
Shouts. Screams. A police whistle.
"Fuck!" said Oxford, and hurled himself from the vehicle. He hit the ground and bounced fifteen feet into the air, landed, and started running.
A scream of dismay came from the coachman but was cut off when, with a terrific crash, the horses and carriage collided with the corner of a shop. The splintering of wood and bone was immediately drowned by the smash of breaking glass and masonry as the side of the building collapsed onto the wrecked vehicle.
Oxford sprang through the panicking crowd and started laughing hysterically as men, women, and children dived out of his way.
"Go away!" he ranted. "You're all history! You're all history! Ha ha ha! Where's my ancestor? Restore! Restore!"
He jumped over a nine-foot wall into a patch of wasteland, stumbled, fell, and rolled.
Lying on his back, he dug his fingers into the grass beneath him.
"Where the hell am I?" he asked.
Shouts came from beyond the wall.
He sat and pushed himself upright, issued instructions to his control panel, took two big strides, and sprang upward.
He landed back behind the wall on Mews Lane on November 28 at a quarter to eight.
Edward Oxford squatted and wept; and he waited.
She walked past half an hour later.
Lizzie Fraser was just fourteen years old.
In the year 1837, she was considered mature enough to work. In Oxford's age, she was just a child.
The tears continued to run down his cheeks as he quietly called: "Lizzie Fraser!"
January 12, 1839
Tilly Adams was seventeen years old. On Saturdays, whatever the weather, she spent the mornings walking in Battersea Fields, picking flowers in the summer and catching insects in the winter. She dreamed of becoming a botanist, though she knew this was an unrealistic ambition.
"You must learn to cook, to sew, and to maintain a household," her mother insisted. "No man wants a wife who knows the name of every insect but can't grill a lamb chop. Besides, you'll be that much more successful as a mother and wife. What women scientists are there, after all?"
The destiny that her mother recommended-and which society insisted on-was, she knew, her only real option, but while she still could, she was going to walk in the park on Saturday mornings to do the thing she loved best.
" Lucanus cervus!" she exclaimed, bending to look at a large black insect she'd spotted crawling at the side of the path. A stag beetle.
A long thin shadow fell across it.
"Tilly Adams?"
She looked up.
She fainted.
Later, a young man spotted her, took out his flask, and poured brandy between her lips.
She regained her senses, coughing and spluttering, looked down at herself, and uttered a cry of shame, for the front of her dress had been unbuttoned and her underwear pushed up.
"I didn't do it," said the young man, reddening. "I found you like that."
Tilly Adams stood up, put her clothes in order, and ran all the way home.
She never spoke about the stilt-man.
She never went into Battersea Fields again.
She gave up botany and began to hunt for a husband.
February 19, 1838
The Alsop family had recently left Battersea, moving to the little village of Old Ford, near Hertford, so that David Alsop could take over a vacant blacksmith's on the outskirts of the little community. Being new to the neighbourhood, they hadn't yet settled in and made friends, so spent most evenings in their home.
The time traveller popped into existence above Bearbinder Lane, landed on the ground, and bounced on his stilts.
It was a quarter to nine.
The lane ran along a shallow valley. There were dark fields sloping up on one side, while the village high street ran uphill to the main settlement from a junction on the other. The Alsop cottage was on the corner, secluded and a considerable distance from the other dwellings.
In the distance, Oxford could see a man on a ladder fiddling with a dysfunctional