The Clock People by Mark Roland Langdale

Author:Mark Roland Langdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

The Shadow Time

Scarlet followed the thief, making sure she didn’t get too close, trying to remain in the shadows in case he saw her. Once or twice he stopped and looked nervously around as if he felt somebody was watching him. It was not so easy to remain in the shadows, as the Shadow Time was still hours away, the time when night replaced day, the moondial replaced the sundial.

The thief walked on. He had an uneasy feeling that somebody was following him, but he’d only seen one person acting a little suspiciously and that was a child, and a girl at that. Now if it had been a boy he would have been concerned, as there were a lot of waifs and strays on the streets of London, many adept at picking pockets. Once upon a grim time he had been one of those boys, so he knew how cunning they could be. Tick tock, tick tock, the mind of the thief ran like clockwork as a quote from a Shelley poem sprang to mind like a cuckoo out of a cuckoo clock: ‘And here like some weird Archimage sit I, Plotting dark spells and devilish enginery, The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind’. The thief pulled a face. What on earth made him think of a quote by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley? How was it that all of a sudden he was a lover of poetry, a patron of the arts? Was it simply because he had gone up in the world and was playing the part of a well-to-do gentleman of leisure?

Every time the thief looked around Scarlet turned to look in a shop window or asked somebody for the time as if she knew them and was simply passing the time of day. Once she ducked down an alleyway, as she was sure he was staring right at her, his black eyes burning into her soul. Another time she bent down and tied her shoelaces, even though her shoes had buckles on them. The thief was used to shaking people off his tail, constables who thought they could outwit him, but he knew all the shortcuts, all the alleyways and twittens which make up the maze that is London. It was far easier to get lost in the mazy labyrinthine streets of London than it was to get lost in Hampton Court Maze and it was even easier to get lost in the maze of the mind.

Scarlet imagined the thief would want to give the Clink jail, the Tower of London and Scotland Yard as wide a berth as possible. Scarlet hoped he didn’t live too far away as she might have to make her way home at night – that and her parents might start to wonder if she’d been kidnapped and sold into the white slave trade!

Scarlet had followed the thief along Ironmonger Lane and into Cheapside. Being a thief she imagined he lived on the seamier side of the street in the East End of London, in Lambeth, or around the area that was known as the Elephant and Castle.

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