A Beggar’s Kingdom

“Well, if Devi says … You mean in the future that Devi just finished telling you doesn’t exist, or some other future?”

“Everything you’re thinking of, Ash, I’ve thought of,” said Julian. “Yet here it is. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m not lying. There is a difference.”

“Oh, a huge one. If you were lying, it would mean you were sane.”

In silence the two men sat in their open sunny flat. Julian was oddly comforted by the shellshocked look on Ashton’s normally placid face, as if his friend didn’t know how to begin to begin to figure out how to help him. You can’t help me, Ash, Julian wanted to say. You can’t help a husk whose fruits have fallen and rotted on the ground.

“Explain my injuries,” Julian said.

“I can’t explain them,” Ashton said, “but you entered a triathlon event without my knowledge. You spent a year growing a sick beard without explanation and shaved it off without explanation.”

“I shaved it off because in 1666 men didn’t have beards.”

“Oh, that’s why. You’re boxing, caving, fencing. I can’t explain any of those things. 1666. Is that when you became a landlord in a brothel?”

“Yes.”

“You, Julian Cruz, son of a professor and a principal, were a caretaker in a house of women who got naked and had sex for money?”

“Yes.”

“I’m supposed to believe this?”

“That’s the part you find unbelievable? Not wormholes and—”

“Frankly, yes. Okay, from the top. You fell in love with a girl, but then she died.”

“Yes.”

“And you found a charlatan who showed you how to travel back in time to find her.”

“A shaman, but yes.”

“Potato, potahtoe. You traveled into this past.”

“Yes.”

“Not once but twice.”

“Yes.”

“And you found her, and fell in love with her again, and she with you, and both times, she died.”

“Yes.”

“And you were a landlord in a brothel?”

Persuasion #1: Julian showed Ashton the list of casualties from Mallory’s yellowing but intact Bill of Mortality. “Look at the paper. It’s from 1665. Why is it still in such good condition?”

“That’s your proof? How the hell should I know?”

“Because,” Julian said, “the paper is only a year old, not four hundred years old.”

Apoplexie 1

Burned in his bed by a candle 1

Canker 1

Cough 2

Fright 3

Grief 3

Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1

Lethargy 1

Suddenly 1

Timpany 1

Plague 7165

“What’s timpany?” Ashton said.

“That’s your question?”

“How does one die suddenly?”

“That’s your question?”

“How does one die of grief, I wonder.”

“To paraphrase John Green,” Julian said, uncle of nieces besotted with Hazel and Augustus, “slowly, and all at once.”

Persuasion #2: Julian took Ashton to the Silver Cross, off Craig’s Court on lit-up Whitehall. It was a Friday night. They ate. They drank. They read the plaque on the wall. “THE SILVER CROSS HAS BEEN THE SITE OF A PUBLIC HOUSE SINCE THE 17

CENTURY AND WAS EVEN THE SITE OF A LICENSED BROTHEL.”

Persuasion #3: Julian tried to hand Ashton his breeches and tunic.

“You got them in a costume store,” Ashton said, pulling his arms behind his back.

Persuasion #4: The Elizabethan gold coin.

“It’s fake,” Ashton said.