Places stayed. Hovingham – one free night. The Worsley Arms.
Easingwold – The George Hotel.
Places would stay again – 1
Places visited. Hovingham, Coxwold, Helmsley, Easingwold, York, Ampleforth Estates.
Places driven through by mistake…rather a lot. …
Places not stayed. The Old Vicarage Easingwold now closed.
Walks – Ampleforth Estates. York Walls
Hecklers spotted- One
Attractions visited – Railway Museum York
Attractions not visited. The Minster- there was a wedding on as in NOT just the ceremony….place closed.
Kippers spotted – On the menu
Pubs visited – The George Hotel, Easingwold, Yorkshire Terrier, Three Legged Mare, Guy Fawkes,York. Fauconberg Arms, Coxwold -where Malice spent her non wedding night with her her cousin/hubby in the Viking and The Coutesan backstory. The Malt and Shovel, Hovingham.
Faux Pubs – The Cricketers Arms, Hovingham.
Alcohol consumed – No telling.
Dundee mentions – one
Book character mentions- one
Pairs of shoes and boots worn – all of them.
‘Twice, the sight of him had almost caused her to expire. When she had walked into the church at Coxwold and seen him standing there with a carnation in his lapel—their wedding day—and then that night in his apartment. Very well. She lied. It was thrice. When she had knocked on the door of his room at the little inn across from the church.
Now, seeing him chucking wine down his throat as if the vineyard was about to run dry, casting his eye over some serving girl–her backside rather—and wagering what Lady Grace possessed, nausea rose in her gorge. When she considered a man who made her heart pound–a man who she should not be thinking of here–her heart also pounded wastefully. Whatever the problem with Cyril—and there were a good twenty dozen—you knew where you stood with him. That was nowhere at all.
She glided closer. She had come to speak with him, wife to husband. And she had chosen here to do it because it was public. Those who thought the sun shone from the backend of his brown velvet breeches had a lot to learn.
“My lord.”
Of course, she might have known Cyril would be more interested in looking at her breasts than her face. Maybe she should have ventured in here topless? Still, at least he was looking at her.
“Cyril. Husband.”
Now that jerked his chin up. If ever there was a way to bring a dog to heel, this was surely it.
“I knew I should find you here before me, my dearest. And involved in a wager too. My lords, you must excuse Cyril, especially when he does not possess the money to pay any debts. And, we are shortly to require every penny we own.”
“Malice?” He peered at her closely. “Malice? Is that you?”
“Most certainly it’s not Aunt Carter’s silver teapot, my dearest husband.”
But it is not your first unsettling experience, is it?
That got your attention!
Many of you fear you are going mad or perhaps caught in some nightmare; which is unsurprising after your recurring vivid dreams and the recent dislocation experience.
You are frightened and alone. Let me assure you. You are not alone. We have all been through the same thing: because each of us is related.
I see you looking at the different styles in the room, clothes, hair, cosmetics, and wondering if I joke. You think you know your family: parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. You were brought up to view family as those around you. You do not to think in terms of deep time: about generations past and those to come. But you will learn. Believe me.
Why am I here? You want to ask.
We all carry a double recessive gene from our common ancestress that makes us time travelling mutants.
Oh dear! How to put this simply?
Genes are what make you look like your parents or grandparents. If grandparents, you may have been told it skipped a generation: this is a recessive gene. Over centuries, families separate. Generations later, distant relatives meet and fall in love. When this happens often enough, you are the result.
Our common ancestress lived in the early 21st century. Her name was Brittany Carter. She wrote romantic fiction distinguished by the fact her heroines time travel: her granddaughter to the Viking age and another, in a thinly veiled autobiography, to the 18th century.
I know many of you read her classic novels when studying English Literature, and perhaps experienced a thrill of recognition in their pages. No doubt you were taught they were written by that literary giant Shehanne Moore. A pleasant fiction I am afraid. Brittany Carter wrote these works. Shehanne Moore was merely her nom-de-plume. A ruse used at the insistence of her publishers.
But time travel I hear you protest, surely you need a machine like the fabulous TARDIS of legend, or perhaps a sacred circle of standing-stones to concentrate the Gaia force. Not at all! Our research at the Institute, shows time travel is simple. It is caused by the relatively common ability of psychokinesis: the power to move objects with the mind.
Historical records show many of you experienced poltergeist activity when you hit puberty. Would it shock you to learn poltergeist activity is in fact involuntary outburst of psychokinetic energy, brought on by hormonal changes? As you grew older you no doubt noticed the violent outbursts subsided.
About the same time lucid dreams began. Lucid dreams are a psychological term for vivid dream states where your conscious mind remains aware making it seem you are actually experiencing the dream as reality. If it seems so, it is because you are.
Such dreams are a psychokinetic by-product; a telepathic bond with your ancestors and descendants. It is widely known Brittany Carter wrote about her granddaughter, Malice, under the influence of such dreams. This is why we time travel during moments of heightened sensation, usually, but not exclusively, during sexual arousal.
At this point I need to tell you everything you understand about time is wrong. From an early age you were taught to view time as a progression of events paralleling birth, growth and gradual decline towards death.
Here are some ancient flick-books, please take one and pass the rest on. See how each photograph, taken exactly a year apart, shows the person moving from birth to death at a fixed rate.
Normally we do not question this.
But think for a moment, even identical twins do not die at exactly the same time. Age is relative. It depends on a series of complex interactions governed by genes and environment.
In the 20th century the oldest person on the planet died at the age of 140 – which is nothing now; while children with the disease progeria died of advanced old age when no more than ten. Some individual cells, like cancer, never die. Others can be indefinitely held in suspension, such as the 5,000 year old seed from a Chinese tomb that grew into a magnolia tree when planted by archaeologists.
Aging is not due to minutes flowing into hours; days into years.
Aging is not time travel. The minutes and hours of your life merely mark the earth’s revolution on its axis and the year its orbit around the sun. Even a light year is a measure of distance, 5.9 trillion miles to be exact.
Stephen King claimed time particles, or chronons, were formed by the past colliding with the present and evaporated when the present dissolved into the future. Michael Moorcock agreed. Moorcock envisaged humans, called Time Dwellers, evolving to live permanently within a single moment. For Moorcock the only answer to the question: ‘What is the time?’ was ‘The present’.
Einstein, the father of science, did not believe in time. He said it was nothing other than a measurement of space like height, width and depth. To him we were no more capable of seeing the bigger picture than a word printed on the page can read the novel it belongs to. Like fish in a barrel we cannot see or understand the world outside, never mind swim in it. He explained it thus:
If a fish swims in a tank at 4 miles per hour, inside an airplane travelling at 500 mph, that is flying across the earth rotating at 1,000 mph at the equator, and orbiting around the sun at 68,400 mph, in a solar system spiralling around the Milky Way at 515,000 mph, in a universe expanding at 158,000 mph. How fast is the fish swimming? The answer is 4 miles per hour. That’s relativity.
If we stepped outside relativity, we would see the past, present and future happening concurrently. It would be like looking at a road from a hilltop. This is how Brittany saw her granddaughter’s life 800 years in the past.
You must understand atoms are not like specks of dust. They are infinitesimal amounts of electrical energy clustered into a nucleus of protons and neutrons and orbited by electrons. If the nucleus was the size of a tennis ball, the atom itself would be four miles across. This means most of the universe is empty space.
The universe expands in every direction at approximately 158,000 mph; as does every atom in it. Think of drawing two circles on a balloon then blowing it up. The bigger the balloon gets the more distant the circles become and the bigger they get.
If we could compact or expand an atom, it would automatically shift to the point when the universe was at the same density. In other words it would time travel.
The electro-magnetic force holding the universe together is the same as Gaia, the life force within every living creature. Outbursts of psychokinetic energy are measurable electric currents. This is how we time travel. Psychokinetic outbursts cause our atoms to contract or expand, hurling us through time.
The final question I am asked in this introductory session is: Am I immortal?
Yes and no.
Remember Michael Moorcock’s Time Dwellers living within a single moment? Like them we can dwell in a single moment of time and so do not age. But in that case, how did Brittany and Malice manage to live with their lovers?
That is relativity. As we cannot exist outside our immediate space-time environment, we take it with us, like a deep-sea diving suit. It is perhaps no more than an atom’s thickness but enough to keep us safe.
If you would care to get to know each other and work out your complex and often confusing relationships, there are refreshments next door. However, before you leave let me assure you, my fellow time-travelling mutants, you have long and interesting lives ahead of you, and many difficult skills to master. But master them you will. For we already know your future.
Paul Andruss is the author of 2 contrasting fantasy novels
Wanting to engage readers and build an audience 2 novels are available as free downloads in different E-books formats.
Thomas the Rhymer – a magical fantasy for ages 11 to adult about a boy attempting to save fairy Thomas the Rhymer, while trying to rescue his brother from a selfish fairy queen.
If you enjoy the Harry Potter & Narnia books & films? Thomas the Rhymer is right up your street
Finn Mac Cool – rude, crude and funny, explicitly sexual and disturbingly violent, Finn Mac Cool is strictly for adults only
Finn mac Cool is a modern retelling of the Irish Myth cycles with a science fantasy edge.
Finn Mac Cool is a must for those with Irish ancestry or anyone interested in Irish legends and folklore. Ever since being a child Paul was fascinated by the phantasmagorical and strange. Blessed with the type of mind that squirrels away peculiar facts, he supposed it was only natural these should become a central feature in his novels.
As Paul got older he often forgot where he found these oddities in the first place. Odds and Sods: A cabinet of Curiosities was born as an on-line notepad and sort of grew from there. Now it showcases the curious stuff he’s come across when researching his novels. He also get a tremendous kick from sharing it with friends.
Mitchell Killgower. Vie? I’m sorry? Oh right. I have no idea. But if I was to hazard a guess, it’s probably because Brittany, my worst half, has told all kinds of lies about me.
Mitchell. Indeed I could. But as I said to Brittany, when she asked me if the tedious old bastard who runs it, beguiled women, ‘No, he beguiles something far worse. Ideas.’ I don’t know if Shey would be too pleased if you got any.
Mitchell. I know. But as you’ve so often said yourselves, it’s not raining either.
Mitchell. The one who kept Shey’s latest heroine offering in about. Next?
Mitchell. I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask her but she’s dead. Unless you’re planning on joining her? Whatever way I seem to have with women does not extend to wives, or pretend ones. But she squirmed whenever I went near her. So I didn’t because I’m not all bad.
Mitchell. A friend.
Mitchell. Frankly? If you gentlemen helped me secure my inheritance, you could stay where you damn well wanted. In fact, if I’d known you gentlemen and ladies were so helpful I’d have paid you, not Brittany, to sort out my ex sister-in-law, Christian and her husband, (who is also my uncle) Clarence, and ruin my son, Fleming. How does that sound?
Mitchell. The question is, does she want to marry you?
Mitchell. I think you’ll find the word is ‘thought ‘and I also thought, I’d be –
making the mistake of his life to let her back in.
Mitchell. So please don’t label me a romantic. I’m not.
Mitchell. Fine. Have it your own way. Anyway, dudes it has been nice meeting you all.
Mitchell. Not what Brittany found out. Well… not as you seem to think.
The Writer and The Rake. Chapter one the illustrated preview version. Time Mutants series.
Chapter 1
Present Day. Dundee, Scotland.
If life was what happened as she dreamed, then what a bloody nightmare hers was right now. Flashlights pinged. “Sign this, Ms. Carter,” “Ms. Carter, over here,” “Brit-tany, Brit-tany,” screeched legions of adoring fans.
Some were trampled underfoot as she sashayed up stairs that dripped in red velvet, her carefully coiffed, exotically scented, chestnut hair framing her face, pink lips pouting, figure, slim as an ice pick in the little lime-green number she’d ordered from Saskia’s online. A snip at a thousand quid.
At least, in her fantasies people asked her for her autographs, her fans were being trampled and the dress cost that.
The truth?
Not even a mouse at her book signing in some shitty Scout hall.
Another parking ticket to stuff in the overflowing glove compartment. If only the compartment was a magician’s box that would make it vanish. A thwack, as one windscreen wiper tangled with the other, breaking it off and pinging it across the car bonnet in the rain battering off the tarmac.
And need she ask herself what that noise was? The tinkling of a broken tail light. Not hers. As for the dress? Sufficient to say that Zaskia’s wasn’t Saskia’s. So it was stuck in transit somewhere over Europe. She’d fit it all right. For the past week yogurt was all she could afford. Her stomach growled with hunger.
She stuffed her cigarette in the ashtray and creaked open the car door.
“Well, doesn’t this just make my day, ma’am? Stoopid. Stoopid.”
The icing on the cake. A shaven-headed, Neanderthal in a long leather coat, down on his haunches, squinting at his car bumper lying in the road. American, so probably born with a legal writ in his hand. She’d planned on picking up Rab by nine and it was already ten minutes to.
“Look, please don’t blame yourself.” She dragged her cigarettes and lighter from her raincoat pocket. “An accident can happen to anyone. I’m perfectly certain if it’s the first time—”
“Do you think I meant me?”
Forget being sued. On a sliding scale in a galaxy of last things, Rab disappearing to the pub for a quickie because she was late, was her biggest fear. She flicked her lighter, dragged the hot smoke into her lungs, let the heavenly scent waft up her nose.
“Well, darling, I sincerely hope you aren’t meaning me. I mean, I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Brit. Hey, doll, is something up?”
Rab, proceeded by his beer belly, dark quiff plastered to his forehead, his feet rammed into unfastened trainers, splashed through the puddles, guzzling what looked like a half bottle of voddie in a brown paper bag. Or was it a full bottle? It didn’t bode well for taking her revenge on Sebastian when she was doing her best to stay calm.
“You might say, darling.”
“Fine. Why don’t I just get in the car then? Just—”
He almost fell his length while pawing the door handle. When she’d thought about picking him up, she should have realized it would be out of the gutter. She glanced the other way. At least he was here. Sebastian’s was only a fifteen-minute drive through the city and over the road bridge. They’d be there by nine thirty.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am.”
“Yes?”
Ignoring Rab, and the butterflies rising in her stomach, she flicked her gaze over the man on his haunches, streetlight gilding his face.
“Did he just say, Brit?”
She forced a smile. If he had her name and went to the police with it, that would be the end of the plan to sort Sebastian.
“Brita? Yes.”
He stood up, wiping grit and plastic specks from his palms, his voice just audible above the water gurgling down the drain, inches from her toes. “An unusual name. It’s not short for something, is it?”
“It’s second generation Norwegian actually.”
“Really? You don’t sound Norwegian.”
“Oh, I don’t sound a lot of things, that’s why everyone up here calls me a Sassenach. But my grandfather was Norwegian and my mother is English.”
“You don’t say. Brittany Carter? Yes?”
“And what’s that to you?”
Cold trickles of rain ran down her spine as she shot a glance at her car and more importantly Rab sitting like a mountain inside. With that long shiny raincoat and shaved head, this stranger’s faint scent of hot exhaust, mugging old ladies, and extorting money at knifepoint from women like her, were probably as much as he knew. Not that she had much money. He’d be sadly disappointed. Even if he read her books, it wouldn’t do to go leaping about the street. The trick was to appear calm even if she was actively fighting the urge to finger her neck. Waft a little smoke his way. “Well?”
“Fame, success, riches.”
“I think you must have mistaken me for someone else.”
“Nope.”
“Trust me, darling.”
“Fame, success, riches.”
“In your dreams. Last month’s royalty statement wouldn’t pay for a loaf of bread.”
His lips cinched. “I should have added, the choice is yours. So long as you do it wisely.”
“Goodness. That sounds just like a book blurb.”
“Perhaps.” He dug in his pocket. “It only takes one thing.”
Good God Almighty. An autograph? He was a fan? A man like him? Her publisher had stressed the importance of appealing to all sorts. Men. Women. Why argue? Especially when she hadn’t appealed to anyone and this man pulled out a folded square of soggy paper. This was an awful lot better than exchanging insurance details.
“Hold on.” She opened her bag. She wasn’t exactly short of pens. “Although I must ask, do you mean, perhaps it only takes one thing? Or, perhaps? And then, it only takes? Oh, never mind. You’ve bought my books? The Captive Viking? The Captive Viking’s Bride? Then, of course, there’s my latest, A Viking for the Saxon Prince. It’s not as it sounds. The Viking is a lady. Her name is Frigga. Yours is?”
“My name? I don’t see what my name—”
“Unless you want me to guess, which I have to tell you darling, I’m in no mood for. You want a personalization, don’t you?”
She stared at the silver raindrop trickling down his face. An escaped lunatic was the last thing she needed tonight.
“Well, I—I just need you to sign if you are Brittany Carter, then all these things I mentioned can be yours.”
“How kind, but I still need your name.”
“Morte.” His voice rumbled like distant thunder in his chest.
“Mort? How interesting. Short for Mortimer, or Mortmain, is it?”
He shrugged, his face dead as stone. The smile wasn’t a smile. “If you say so, lady.”
“Well, if you’ll just open the paper?”
She waited while he pulled the ends of the piece of paper apart. Screeds on it, in fancy rain-smeared lettering she could barely get her eyes in gear to decipher, stranger than the black symbols etched into his shaven head.
What were they? Crude attempts at reproducing crop circles? A problem with his barber? She screwed her eyes up tighter. She’d signed that mortgage with Sebastian without thinking after all. Now he kept defaulting. She couldn’t even get a credit card company to touch her. Shouldn’t she at least try to see, look knowledgeable, prevaricate? This might be an insurance disclaimer. He moved closer.
“Is there something wrong?”
She jerked up her head.
“Oh I—I—”
“Let me, ma’am.” He shrugged and turned around.
“I’m sorry?”
“You can sign it right there. Use my back as a desk.”
How obliging. More so than any man she’d ever met and she wanted to get to Sebastian’s tonight. Besides, she’d dreamed of this. What possible harm could there be? She tossed the cigarette aside, stepped forward, wedged the piece of paper between his soaking shoulder blades.
“All good wishes.” She scrawled in the wet creases. “‘To Mortimer, my only, I mean my number one fan, with love from Brittany Carter.’ How’s that? Now, if you don’t mind, I really must be getting on my way.”
“Not at all, Brittany. It’s very good of you to sign. Just . . . just remember what I said about choice. It’s important you choose wisely, do you understand?”
“Your car . . .”
He’d asked for her autograph and now she glanced down in the yellow light. That was quite a dent in the boot.
“Don’t worry about it.” A shrug of his expansive shoulders. “I won’t need it where I’m going.”
“Somewhere close at hand, is it? After all, you wouldn’t want to get wet in all this rain if there’s a problem with it.” Or cadge a lift. She dropped the pen back into her bag. “Now, talking rain, I really must go. But, so lovely to have met you, Mort. Take care of yourself, won’t you?”
She nearly shot out of her skin. Thunder clapped right above her head. The street lamps flickered. Sparks showered on the cobbled road inches from her toes so she’d done her damndest to stand there and muffle the shriek. Mort merely stared.
“You should go.”
“Yes.”
“Now.”
“I will. Don’t hang about yourself. Goodbye.”
She sloshed towards the car, relief and alarm coating her skin. Rab had fallen over and was sprawled across her seat. She shoved him upright, squeezed inside.
“There you are, Brit. What was all that about?”
She stuck a cigarette between her teeth. “Not that you were paying any attention, but it was a fan.”
“You?”
“Well, I do have some, darling.”
“Did I say you didn’t?”
“You didn’t have to.” She glanced in the mirror. “His name’s Mort and he wanted my autograph.”
So badly he was splayed on his knees kissing the paper in a dancing sea of rain, raising it heavenwards, the hem of his coat frothing in a perfect circle around him. The unlit cigarette dangled from her lower lip. Who needed a legion of fans when she’d one like this? She’d better be careful driving away. It would be terrible to run him over.
“Jesus!”
Rab’s yell split her eardrums. The bolt of lightning hadn’t just struck behind them. It had struck Mort. Her fan. Her only fan had flames licking all over his coat. And he knelt there, doing nothing. She must save him. She couldn’t lose her only fan. There would be no one to buy her next book.
“Quickly Rab, the extinguisher.” She raked under the seat. “Get the car rug. Hurry. Hurry. Phone 999.”
“Jeez, Brit, what the hell do you think I am? Superman?”
“Now. Now.”
She stumbled out, grabbed the extinguisher. Flames pooled at the hem of Mort’s outspread coat. They spread like golden butter up the coat itself while he sat with his eyes closed, his dark brows in a straight line, his lips too. The acrid smell of burning leather stung her nostrils. Fortunately her eyes didn’t water. She could see.
“Mort!”
Her unlit cigarette was still wedged between her teeth. It gave her something to bite down on as she took aim. Foam scooted in a frothy jet, spattering Mort’s rugged face, covering his eyelids like snow. “It’s fine, darling. I’ve got you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“You don’t have to be afraid.”
Shock obviously did things to a person. It’d done things to Mort. He couldn’t see blackened, smoking holes punctured his coat and seared his flesh. He hadn’t even fallen over.
“Rab has phoned an ambulance.”
“That too.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ve interrupted a process here.”
She bit her lip, the cigarette along with it, scooshed more foam. “Well, if that’s your head going up in flames, I’m glad I did. Or you’d be crisped, darling. Now, just let me get that blanket for you.”
“Do you think that is going to solve anything? A goddamned blanket?”
She turned. The poor man. She shook the blanket out and tucked its soft folds around his shoulders before he got even more aggressive. At least it would be warm. Good for shock.
“There. Let’s just get this properly round you. That’s it. There. Till the ambulance gets here.”
His dark eyes, weary beyond ages held hers. “No. You don’t understand. This is about choices. You just made the wrong one.”
He saw her coming. If he’d known her effect he’d have walked away.
When it comes to doing it all, hard coated ‘wild child’ writer, Brittany Carter ticks every box. Having it all is a different thing though, what with her need to thwart an ex fiancé, and herself transported from the present to Georgian times. But then, so long as she can find her way back to her world of fame, and promised fortune, what’s there to worry about?
Georgian bad boy Mitchell Killgower is at the center of an inheritance dispute and he needs Brittany as his obedient, country mouse wife. Or rather he needs her like a hole in the head. In and out of his bed he’s never known a woman like her. A woman who can disappear and reappear like her either.
And when his coolly contained anarchist, who is anything but, learns how to return to her world and stay there, will And when his coolly contained anarchist, who is anything but, learns how to return to her world and remain, will having it all be enough, or does she underestimate him, and herself?
‘Fraid not. That honor goes to Mitchell Killgower.
Morte.
But Mitchell and me are kind of related. I’m a descendant.
Morte
One thousand years.
Morte
Christ no. That would mean doing Brittany the heroine.
Morte.
Put together.Brittany’s your worst nightmare. But hey that’s not why. She’s also my great I have never counted how many times grandmother.
Morte.
Cos she gets it right. This thing we have to do, or be doomed forever, unless we can find some poor unsuspecting stranger to ensnare.
Morte
I don’t spend it there. Nup. I spend it wherever. I have spent itchasingnymphs throughthe glade of Mount Olympus,doing battle with the Mongol hordes, nothing to the shoppers on Seventh Avenue.And please, please can we just not mention the Victorians?
You might say with this condition I have, I don’t get a lot of choice.
Morte.
You betcha.
Morte.
Sure it is little fellah. Ain’t nothing to be scared of.
Morte
Matter of fact I brought yah this.
Morte’s Hell-fire cookies.
Morte.
It’s what all the best Time Mutants eat at Christmas.
She glided closer. She had come to speak with him, wife to husband. And she had chosen here to do it because it was public. Those who thought the sun shone from the backend of his brown velvet breeches had a lot to learn. 
