Page 2 of Strangers in Time

He nimbly clambered over the school’s low gate and dropped quietly inside the darkened grounds.

St. Saviour’s was two stories tall and built of only the finest forged brick and quarried stone. For some inexplicable reason, as with St. Paul’s, no bomb had ever scored its hardened, noble hide.

Imperious white columns fronted the entrance. Dramatic moldings soared horizontally overhead. An elegant fanlight topped the pair of imposing solid oak front doors. A statue of asolemn-looking gent clad in a frock coat and gripping a walking stick and a book stood as weathered guard outside. Whether this chap was St. Saviour, Charlie didn’t know. Hedidmanage a smile at the thought of a hallowed saint in a ridiculous coat destined to stand in the rain and muck for all of eternity.

Charlie would not be going in the front door. For East End blokes like him, the tradesman’s entrance would be the expected one for all their natural lives.

Unfortunately, he found the rear portal hadtwolocks fronting it, stacked one on top of the other. This was an unexpected dilemma.

Charlie took out a sturdy piece of metal with a precise bend at the end and a protruding bit of blackened iron on its top side shaped in the form of a rectangle. He had been given the tool by his mate Eddie Gray. Eddie said his father had claimed it could defeat 90 percent of the locks in all of England. One like it had passed to Eddie when, years before, his father had died during a botched armed robbery. Eddie, who was good at making things, had fashioned a second lockpick and given it to Charlie. Eddie had also patiently instructed him on how to overcome a lock with it.

Charlie worked away intently, twisting the metal this way and that, while feeling through his fingers the guts of the lock moving around. It would be easier and simpler to pinch things from the open stalls of Brick or Petticoat Lanes back in the East End. Yet he didn’t like stealing from his own kind, and they had no spare boots there anyway.

He finally heard a soft click. Charlie turned the knob and it rotated freely. However, when he tried his instrument and skill on the top lock, Charlie could make no progress. After a few minutes of concentrated effort, he withdrew the pick in despair. This must be one of the 10 percent of the locks his tool couldn’t conquer.

Bloody well figures.

The high-set windows on the sides of the building were iron-barred. There was no iron left in the East End; it had all been stripped and melted down for the war effort. But this wasn’t the East End. One ventured “up” to the West End, but “down” to the East End, and thoseterms were literal in all possible senses. He had been told by one constable that in Charlie’s world you had your costermongers, fish curers, and thieves, with the latter adding up to about nine in ten of the population, the bobby reckoned. And he had included Charlie in that criminal group, although the lack of hard evidence at the time had sent Charlie on his way with only a stiff caution instead of the darbies put on with a swift ride to the clink to follow.

Charlie clutched the bars, hoisting himself up and peering through the glass. Looking in instead of out was his lot in life, it seemed.

Then he let go and fell to the damp earth.

He’d been lied to. There was probably no money in the till here. There was probably no till. The two boys who had told him about this opportunity didn’t have parents and had stayed with a hodgepodge of distant relatives, friends, fosters, and child minders. Recently, they had been sent to an orphanage just outside of London, but had broken out, they had informed Charlie, after telling him how awful it had been.

“You ain’t even got a name in there, Charlie, just a number,” said Lonzo Rossi. “I was bloody T207 or some such, but I always just been Lonzo.”

Eddie Gray, Lonzo’s best mate, had said nothing, but had looked off into the distance with an expression that spoke to Charlie of traumatic experience.

Charlie jogged back to the east and soon found himself in the heart of Covent Garden. A minute later the rain was bucketing down so hard that he could barely see; his sore feet felt encased in stone. And he still had a four-mile trek ahead of him to Bethnal Green. He stumbled along until he saw a bit of light coming from an alley. He peered down its mouth, conscious of the silence all around him, except for thedrum-drumof the falling rain. In the drench, he saw a glimmer of light from a shop. At this hour that was truly remarkable. And it drew Charlie like metal to a magnet.

A SLYPOT OFGOLD

CHARLIE CREPT DOWN THEalley until he reached the soft glow of feeble light. Darting under the green awning and out of the rain, he looked at the neat, gilt-lettered sign on the dirt-streaked plate glass window:

THE BOOK KEEP

I. OLIVER, PROPRIETRESS

Below that were adverts that looked hand-stenciled.

A book a day keeps the bombs away.

And:

Reading books is far better than burning them.

Scrim tape had been applied to sections of the window to prevent the glass from shattering and becoming a weapon itself during a bombing. Triple-layered black curtains fairly covered most light from inside. However, the owner hadn’t pulled them all the way closed. There was a gap through which Charlie could see into the space. If an air warden came by, the shop’s owner might be given a tongue-lashing and even a caution. Yet Charlie also knew folks had gotten lax about such things.

When he peered through the gap the first things Charlie saw were books. He had been in a library before. Most recently to get out of the rain and avoid the accompanying chill and pneumonia that often followed. There, every single volume had been properly shouldered next to its neighbor.

Charlie had actually resented the clean, regimented lines of these books. Nothing in the world should be that uncluttered, he had thought. It simply did not seem right when the world itself was all sixes and sevens. Yet here teetering book stacks were haphazardly placed on the floor. In crevices and corners balls of dust rode alongside feathery cobwebs. A rickety ladder with brass rollers ran along a slender, cylindrical tube attached to shelves which bulged and flinched under the weight of leather tomes that were stitched to their wooden-framed hides, wordy ships yawing in storms on dry land. The overhead naked bulbs popped and wavered and seemed indifferent to their intended purpose.

It was then that Charlie saw the two men, who were a study in remarkable contrasts.

The first one was in his forties, tall and too thin, and harried looking, like everyone these days. His longish full hair was brown; his skin was pale, and, like Charlie’s, it had the odd freckle strewn here and there. The man wore an old, rumpled gray woolen vest, and a white shirt stained with a long day’s grime. The rolled-up sleeves revealed bony forearms spotted with thickish moles like the eraser bump on a pencil. There were also some deep burns on his skin that looked quite painful. His pants were as worn out as his vest, his shoes shabby, the heels uneven from constant wear over rumpled pavements. Rimless specs covered hazel eyes.

This gent must be the shop’s owner, I. Oliver, thought Charlie.

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