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  ‘And don’t forget the Honourable Ignatius Flint,’ suggested Mr Spinnaker meekly.

  ‘Oh, we had not forgot the Honourable Ignatius Flint!’ cried Mrs Spinnaker. ‘’Ow could anyone forget the Honourable Ignatius Flint? We was merely saving ’im till last, as being the most exotic of our number and therefore the most interesting.’ She leant closer to our table and said, ‘The Honourable Ignatius Flint is a young gentleman who came ’ere but a week ago. A young gentleman of a dusky hue, but so ’andsome! I reckon he is travelling under an assumed name, and that ’is father must be one of them Indian rajahs.’

  Myrtle perked up somewhat, as girls disappointed in love often will when they hear of an Indian prince in the offing. But she drooped again almost immediately as Mrs Spinnaker went on, ‘Between you and me, dears, we think there is a little romance going on between the Hon. Ignatius and our Miss Beauregard. He, too, breakfasts early. He ’as been paying the most constant attention to her.’

  ‘Aha!’ said Colonel Quivering. ‘There is Miss Beauregard now.’

  Naturally we did not wish to stare, but the colonel and Mrs Spinnaker had painted such intriguing pictures-in-words for us of our absent fellow guests that we could none of us restrain ourselves from turning to peek out of the windows. There, approaching along the curve of the promenade, we saw a wicker bath chair propelled by perhaps the largest and ugliest lady I have ever seen. Mrs Spinnaker was large in an agreeable, floury-dumpling sort of way, but Miss Beauregard’s nurse was quite enormous, and clad in a vast dress of black bombazine, which covered her right up to the chin, where the black ribbons of her black poke bonnet were tied in a tight black bow. Out of the depths of this bonnet, like a goblin peering out of a coal scuttle, a little, sour, wizened face regarded the passing world with black button eyes.

  But none of us looked long at this ogress, for we were far too busy gazing at her charge. Upon the embroidered cushions of the wicker chair reclined the loveliest young lady ever seen outside a painting of fairyland. She had pale skin and golden curls and forget-me-not eyes, and looked in all respects so like a porcelain shepherdess upon a mantel-shelf that it was hard to believe she was real, and alive. And yet a certain pallor in her cheeks, a certain restlessness about her manner, reminded us of what Colonel Quivering had said about her suffering from a Malady or Ailment, and so our admiration for her beauty was sweetly mixed with pity.

  ‘She is not all that beautiful,’ said Myrtle, torn between delight at the prospect of trying out her French conversation on this Vision, and annoyance at finding herself no longer the prettiest girl at Starcross.

  ‘Why, Myrtle,’ I said, ‘I do believe you’re jealous!’

  ‘Hush!’ said Mother.

  Colonel Quivering was drawing our attention to the far end of the seafront, where a second group of promenaders had come into sight. ‘And there is our Indian prince and his servants!’ he said proudly.

  The Indian prince wore a suit of white linen, and was followed at a respectful distance by two servants in coats of black broadcloth, one an Ionian, the other some manner of small Jovian hobgoblin. A wide straw hat shadowed his face, so that all I saw of him as he strolled over to greet Miss Beauregard was his smile. But I saw the servants plain enough, and was so amazed I dropped my toast. The Ionian was my old friend Mr Munkulus, I was quite sure of it … And his goblin companion was none other than Mr Grindle!

  I would have pointed out this strange coincidence, but there was no need. The Honourable Ignatius Flint chose that moment to sweep off his hat and make a very low bow to Miss Beauregard, who offered him her perfect hand to kiss. And Myrtle, watching this, cried out in an indignant voice, ‘Why, that is not an Indian prince at all! That is Jack Havock!’

  Chapter Five

  In Which We Disport Ourselves upon the Playful Bosom of the Ocean, and Jack’s Explanations Are Interrupted by a Distressing Discovery.

  Now, I don’t claim to be any sort of authority upon matters of the heart, but it seems to me that if a young lady has formed a Sentimental Attachment to a young gentleman, and that young gentleman not only fails to answer any of her letters, but then turns up at a resort hotel under an assumed name, making himself agreeable to beautiful young French women in bath chairs, then the young lady may be somewhat vexed. Myrtle turned bright red, and then stark white, and while I was waiting to see what other interesting colours she could go, Mother took her by the elbow and said, ‘Excuse us, everyone; Myrtle is unwell. I think we should return to our suite of rooms.’

  I started to protest, for I would far rather have run outside to greet my old friends Mr Munkulus and Mr Grindle, and Jack himself, once he had finished exchanging good-mornings with the fair Miss B. But Mother gave me a Commanding Look, and believe me, when you are on the receiving end of a Commanding Look from someone 4,499,999,989 years your senior, you tend to take notice.

  Back in our suite, Myrtle closeted herself in her room with Mother, and a great deal of sobbing and consoling went on, while I kicked about in the sitting room, casting wistful looks at the sunshine outside and wishing I could be down on the beach, running in and out of the plashy billows, building sandcastles, etc., etc.

  At last Mother and Myrtle emerged. Myrtle collapsed at once upon the sofa, looking pale but not particularly interesting. She must have been crying, because her nose was red and her eyeglasses had steamed up.

  Mother came to me, and, putting her arm about my shoulders, said softly, ‘Art, do you think you could go and seek out Jack? Let him know that we are here, and see if there is some innocent explanation for his strange behaviour?’

  ‘Oh, the explanation is quite clear,’ said Myrtle, in a hollow sort of way. ‘He prefers that French creature to me. It really does not matter. Let us go bathing.’

  ‘Are you sure, Myrtle?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Oh, quite sure,’ said Myrtle, with a sigh. ‘Just because all the Hopes and Dreams of my Young Life lie in Ashes, it does not mean that you and Art should not be able to enjoy your holiday. Come, let us go down …’

  And she picked up her patent bathing costume, which had been left draped over the sofa arm in its mothproof carrying bag, and led the way downstairs.

  I still felt faintly troubled by the mysterious appearance of the ocean, and by my encounter earlier with that slinking shadow on the balcony. As Mother and I followed Myrtle out into the sunlight on the prom, I asked her, ‘Mother, do you not think there is something queer about Mr Titfer and his hotel?’

  ‘Of course there isn’t,’ snapped Myrtle, before Mother could reply. ‘There isn’t, is there, Mother? Art just sees mysteries and adventures everywhere. It is due to all those penny dreadfuls he reads, and the unsettling influence of our misfortunes in the springtime.’

  Mother smiled, stopping on a landing to look fondly down at us. ‘Well, my dears,’ she said, ‘there is something queer about Starcross, to be sure, and Mr Titfer certainly appears to be a most singular gentleman. But as far as one may tell it does not seem to be a dangerous sort of queerness. The Solar System is a very large place, after all, and there is room in it for all manner of oddities, I’m sure. So I propose that the best way of dealing with this one is to take an invigorating dip. However it comes to be here, the sea looks most inviting.’

  I quite agreed with her, and yet part of me remained wary. Perhaps Myrtle was right for once, and I had been unsettled by our adventure with the First Ones. At any rate, some sixth sense kept warning me that danger lurked near by.

  But it’s jolly hard to maintain a sense of lurking menace when the Sun is shining, and there are sand and sea to be enjoyed. There was no sign of Jack Havock and his friends, nor of Miss Beauregard, and as we walked down the ramp from the promenade I felt my spirits soar like a hot-air balloon. We each took one of the bathing machines which waited on the sand in front of the hotel, like a line of gaily-painted sentry boxes on wheels. As I stripped off inside mine, and hung the sailor suit I had been wearing on the hooks provided, a clockwork motor whir
red into action and carried the machine gently down the strand and into the sea, so that when I emerged, resplendent in a wool serge bathing costume with red-and-white hoops, I had only to descend the three steps to find myself shoulder deep in the warm, gentle swell.

  Soon Mother and Myrtle emerged from neighbouring machines to join me. Mother wore a simple bathing dress of blue worsted, while Myrtle modelled her new patent bathing costume, the Nereid, a quite remarkable garment which combined all the latest advances in dress-making and hydrodynamics (see Mr Wyatt’s illustration). Myrtle was so proud of it that she cut a neat little curtsey on the top step of her machine and called out across the water, ‘What do you think, Art?’

  Well, I thought that any Nereid who was silly enough to go sporting in the briny dressed up in all that clobber would sink straight to the bottom in a twinkling, and good riddance. But I have learned that it is sometimes best to varnish the truth slightly when Myrtle asks for my opinion (my shins are quite black and blue with the indentations of her beastly boots). So I said, ‘Very pretty’, or words to that effect, and indeed there was something quite pretty about the way her over-skirts flowered out around her as she came smiling down the steps.

  Oh, what fun we had that morning, there in the seas of Starcross! Even Myrtle soon forgot that her heart was broken. We both sploshed and frolicked and swam about, doing the doggy paddle just as Father had taught us in the main water tank at Larklight, and Mother circled us, gliding through the water as gracefully as any dolphin or Ganymedian aqua bat (she has been both in her time, of course).

  When Myrtle and I grew weary we paused awhile upon a tethered raft, where we sat in the shade of a parasol and ate ice creams, which were brought out to us by a mechanical mermaid with a waterproof ice box. We applauded Colonel Quivering as he sped past us in his regimental water-wings, a shark-like dorsal fin jutting jauntily from the back of his regulation army-issue swimming costume. We watched Herbert Spinnaker ascend the tall diving platform on the pier and perform a graceful swallow-dive. He fell in a slow, dreamlike way, turning over once, twice, thrice! before he splashed into the water. The gravity here, outside the influence of the hotel’s generators, was gentle, and made us all feel light and buoyant. But it was still stronger than the one eighth or one tenth of British Standard that one would expect on a small asteroid like Starcross.

  I pondered on this a bit, and then said, ‘Myrtle, I believe we are on the planet Mars.’

  Myrtle gave me one of those Looks, over the tops of her spectacles, as if wondering whether it might not be kinder to have me confined in some form of Asylum.

  ‘I have thought quite hard about it,’ I explained. ‘Starcross used to be part of Mars; Mother told me that. I think that Mr Titfer has some sort of machine in his hotel which transports the whole place back a few thousand centuries to a time when these hills and cliffs were still part of the Red Planet.’

  ‘But there are no seas on Mars!’ objected Myrtle. ‘There is hardly any water at all on Mars! That is why they have had to build so many canals all over it!’

  ‘That is true,’ I agreed. ‘But in pre-history, Mars had rolling oceans much like this.’

  Myrtle considered this, and began to look alarmed. ‘Mother!’ she cried, and when our maternal relative surfaced alongside she complained, ‘Art says we are on pre-historic Mars!’

  ‘Does he?’ asked Mother, wiping the water from her eyes and smiling sweetly at me. ‘Jolly good, Art! I wondered when you would work it out!’

  ‘But it’s impossible!’ Myrtle cried. ‘How could Mr Titfer do such a thing?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it was his doing,’ Mother replied. ‘It would require a science far more advanced than his mechanical tea pots and other toys. I should imagine that some strange natural phenomena affects Time here at Starcross. Do you not recall how ruinous the hotel appeared when we first saw it? I believe we must have been looking through some crevice in the face of Time, and seeing the hotel as it was twenty years ago, soon after the mines here were abandoned. I imagine that, every twelve hours or so, a larger crevice or cranny opens, and the hotel and its environs pass through it into pre-history.’

  Myrtle looked most discomfited. ‘Can it be safe? Surely there will be Dinosauria, and other creatures with insatiable appetites and ever so many teeth?’

  Mother smiled her most reassuring smile. ‘Evolution on Mars followed a somewhat different course to that on Earth,’ she said patiently. ‘The Martian oceans of this period were almost devoid of large predators. On shore, of course, it was a different matter; this was the age of the sabre-toothed sand clam and the terrible Crown of Thorns, a sort of land starfish which reached the most enormous size. But no doubt that is why Mr Titfer has erected that impressive-looking fence around his property.’

  I think that when Mother took on human form she cheated a little, and gave herself the eyes of a hawk. I would never have noticed the fence if she had not pointed it out. It was a spindly affair of iron posts and taut wire cables, and it seemed to ring the hotel, running from the headland on the western side of the bay, up into the dusty hills behind and down to the sea again in the east.

  ‘It looks a flimsy sort of fence, and barely capable of stopping an ordinary starfish, let alone a giant pre-historic Martian one,’ said Myrtle, sounding fearful, and then, remembering her tragic position, ‘Not that I should mind being eaten up, of course. Indeed, I should positively welcome it, as an end to my many sorrows.’

  ‘Oh, chin up, dear,’ said Mother. ‘I should imagine that fence has a powerful electrical current running through it. It would hardly be in Mr Titfer’s interests to expose his guests to danger.’

  When we had finished our ices, and washed our hands in sea water, and Myrtle had dried hers upon a small hand towel which she withdrew from a waterproof compartment in her costume, she and Mother plunged once more into the waves, vowing to swim out to that small island, where the trees and flowering shrubs offered a pleasant shade. But I struck out for the shore, for trees and flowering shrubs don’t interest me much, and besides, I had just seen Jack, Grindle and Mr Munkulus come out of the hotel and make their way over to the seaside cafe. I had not forgotten Mother’s request, and I was determined to find out if Jack had an explanation for his actions.

  When he saw me coming along the promenade, Jack looked first startled, then abashed. But Mr Munkulus and Mr Grindle did not hesitate to show how pleased they were to see me, leaping up and running to hug me and shake me warmly by the hand. And who was this emerging from the cafe with a tray of sandwiches and jugs of beer and lemonade and bowls of iced sprune clamped carefully in his powerful pincers? Why, it was none other than my dear friend Nipper, that amiable giant crab who has been Jack’s friend since childhood!

  ‘Art, my dear!’ he cried, setting his tray down upon the table and scuttling over to lift me up in his claws and peer intently into my face with all four eyes. ‘Why, how you’ve growed, and how glad we are to see you! Mrs Spinnaker told us there were Mumbys here, but Jack said that it could not be you, that it was a common enough name and that doubtless some other Mumbys had come to stay.’

  ‘It is not that common a name,’ I said, as Nipper let me down. I could not help thinking that Jack had hoped we were some different Mumbys, after the way he had been behaving with Miss Beauregard.

  I turned to him and we shook hands, and he said awkwardly, ‘I’m pleased to see you, Art. But please don’t call me Jack. While I’m here I’m the Honourable Ignatius Flint.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Jack Havock is so much better a name …’ And then the penny dropped. I glanced about to make sure no one had overheard me call him ‘Jack’. ‘You are here in disguise!’ I said excitedly. ‘Upon Her Majesty’s service! I knew that there was something odd about Mr Titfer! No doubt he is a black-hearted villain, this hotel is but a front for his criminal activities and you have come to bring him to justice!’

  ‘Mr Titfer?’ asked Jack, looking quite amazed. ‘Why, no; he’s a good fe
llow, and makes the most wonderful hats. But there is something amiss here, you’re right.’ He sat down, and indicated that I should do likewise, and called out to a passing automaton for another glass, which he filled with lemonade for me. Then, leaning closer, he confided, ‘Sir Richard Burton and Ulla thought there was something strange about this place, and came to take a look at it. That was several weeks ago. Since then, nothing has been heard or seen of them. So I have left the Sophronia at Modesty docks, with Ssilissa and the Tentacle Twins to watch her, and come to search for clues.’

  ‘And is that why you were making yourself so friendly towards the French young lady in the invalid-chair?’ I wondered. ‘Myrtle is in a most terrible taking about it.’

  ‘Ah, Myrtle …’ Jack looked, for a moment, a great deal younger, and somewhat alarmed. He had fought space battles against government gunships and gigantic spiders, but even he quailed at the thought of my sister in a bad mood.

  ‘I think she would have liked a reply to her letters, too,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes, those … I certainly meant to …’ Jack shook his head, setting aside for a moment the Myrtle problem. ‘As for Delphine – I mean, Miss Beauregard – there does seem more to her and that nurse of hers than meets the eye.’

  ‘Though what meets the eye is very agreeable,’ said Mr Grindle, leering.

  ‘Please, Grindle,’ rumbled Mr Munkulus. ‘Miss Beauregard’s a lady, and it won’t do to talk of her in that unmannerly way.’

  ‘Who was talking of Miss Beauregard?’ protested Grindle. ‘It was her nurse I meant, that Mrs Grinder. A fine figure of a woman.’

  ‘I think they’re up to something,’ said Jack darkly. ‘I don’t know what, but they’ve come here for more than the sea air. She is forever having Mrs Grinder wheel her off on constitutionals among the rocks and scrub, and I have seen her measuring the air, or the temperature or some such, with all manner of curious instruments when she thinks no one is watching. That is why I befriended her, in the hope that I might find out why she has come here, and what she hopes to accomplish, and whether she had anything to do with the disappearance of Ulla and Sir Richard. If Myrtle chooses to take that amiss, then that is her lookout.’