Free The Derring-Do Club and the Year of the Chrononauts by David Wake

journal.
    When she returned them to the drawer, she noticed a daguerreotype of a beautiful young woman, almost animated by the flickering light, who smiled with her head tilted alluringly and–
    Georgina snatched up the picture: who was this woman, this harlot, this strumpet to so litter Arthur’s bedside cabinet?
    She replaced it very deliberately with her face looking down at the varnished teak.
    The light went out.
    She slept, worried, and envious of her sisters, who were still safe at home. ‘Bleak House’ seemed an appropriate choice for this cold forbidding place.
    Miss Charlotte
    When the strange men finally left, there was a dreadful silence almost as if they had removed the air’s ability to transmit sound, and then, all too suddenly, the wailing began and it just didn’t stop. It stayed like that until the gin ran out, and then it became worse.
    “Ruination!” cried Madam Waggstaff, flapping her arms above the unconscious Mr Waggstaff.
    Three Gentleman Callers were turned away by the… Charlotte realised that these similarly dressed, if ‘dressed’ was the right word, girls were strumpets . The arrested man had thought she was one too. If only Charlotte could figure out what that meant?
    “Temporal Peelers!” Madam Waggstaff reminded them. “Here! Ruination!”
    When Mr Waggstaff regained consciousness, Madam Waggstaff thanked the Lord, the heavens, and Mary, the Mother of God, and more angels than Charlotte could have named. The big burly man, once his wits were restored, shouted incoherently, using words that Charlotte didn’t understand. They sounded coarse and she realised that each could be substituted with the b–word, so he was most likely one of those foul mouthed ne’er–do–wells that the papers were so fond of complaining about. Finally, fed up with the bawling explanations, he struck the nearest girl and retired to his armchair.
    Little Dove, one of the strumpets, was sent out with a shilling for more gin and when she returned it all quietened down. Come ‘chucking out’ time, no Gentlemen Callers even rang the doorbell and so – ruination, ruination – it was all apparently over.
    “Word has got around!” Madam Waggstaff explained to the ceiling.
    Charlotte made a pot of tea.
    Madam Waggstaff took a sip: “There’s no gin in this.”
    Charlotte made a face in reply.
    “Gin’s horrible,” she said.
    Charlotte stormed off to find a bedroom with a better perfume than the one with the spilt piss pot. The one she found didn’t have a number on the door either. She smelt the sheets, wrinkled her nose up, and then found fresh linen. She remade the bed as if she were a domestic, jammed a chair under the handle and went to sleep.
    Or rather she lay under the covers and thought hard.
    For the whole of the previous day, she had pretended to understand French tenses. What vexed her now was the phrase the man in the top hat, Chief Examiner Lombard, had used. He had said ‘He destroyed the world’. Not something like ‘he will destroy’ or ‘he attempted to destroy’ or any of the other multitude of options listed on pages 2–14, 17 and 23–45 of her textbook. He’d used the passé composé or the passé historique or… whatever: the past tense.
    However, manifestly, the man had not destroyed the world. The world still existed and continued to turn, albeit in a confusing and perplexing manner.
    She also realised that she couldn’t go and join the French Foreign Legion. Partly because it was French and so all her friends, the cadets, wouldn’t talk to her any more, but mostly because she’d only managed to travel seven miles and the desert forts depicted in the penny–dreadfuls were so much further than that. She couldn’t go return Zebediah Row because Earnestine would send her back to school, where the Reverend Long would cane her and Miss Cooper would give her lines. Also, having assumed a life of adventure and excitement in the desert, she hadn’t bothered to even