The congregation started to arrive. Their faces were obscured by hats and umbrellas.

Oxford swore and leaped to May 25.

After waiting for just over an hour, he saw her at last, coming out of the church.

She was a small, mousy little thing; her hair colourless, her skin white, her limbs thin and knobbly. She said a few words to the vicar, then to an elderly woman, then to a young couple, then walked down the path, out of the churchyard, and turned left.

A strangely warm mist clung to the city but it wasn't thick enough for concealment and Oxford knew that he stood a good chance of being spotted.

He'd have to risk it.

He vaulted over the graveyard wall into someone's back garden and went from there to the next one, bounding along behind the houses that lined Silverthorne Road until he reached an alleyway. Striding to the corner, he peered around it back in the direction from whence he'd come.

Moments later, the girl walked into view.

Luck was with him; the road was quiet.

Oxford leaned against the wall and listed.

Her light footsteps grew closer.

He reached out as she passed and jerked her into the mouth of the alley, twisted her around, and pushed her against a wall, clapping a hand over her mouth.

He pressed his face close to hers and asked the question.

"Is there a birthmark on your chest?"

She shook her head.

"None? Nothing shaped like a rainbow?"

Again, a shake of the head.

Oxford let go of her and, with a last look at her strangely calm face, strode away and sprang to a different time and place.

Deborah Goodkind stood motionless, her shoulders against the bricks.

She shook her head once more and smiled.

She raised her right hand and banged the heel of it against her ear.

She did it again.

And again.

And again.

And she started to giggle.

And she didn't stop.

Not until the year 1849, when she died in Bedlam.

October 10 and November 28, 1837

Lizzie Fraser, like Deborah Goodkind, was not where-or when-she was supposed to be.

Edward Oxford was close to where he'd accosted Mary Stevens the previous day. He was crouching behind a wall on Cedars Mews, a narrow lane leading off from Cedars Road, which crossed Lavender Hill not far to the north.

This lane was part of the route that Lizzie Fraser walked to reach her home on Taybridge Road after she finished at the haberdashery shop where she worked every day.

In theory, she passed this way at around eight o'clock each evening, but it was now Tuesday and Oxford had been here seven times so far without seeing her.

His suit was sending small shocks through him at regular intervals.

From behind the wall, he could see people passing the end of the lane. Their tightly laced clothing and restrained mannerisms were not real. Their horses and carriages were illusions. The noises of the city were an incoherent mumble scratching unceasingly at his consciousness. He vaguely remem bered how, when he first arrived in the past, London had seemed weirdly silent. How wrong! How wrong! The cacophony never stopped! Nightmare. Nightmare. Nightmare.

He beat his fists against his helmeted head, burning his knuckles in the blue flames but feeling nothing.

"Every day at eight o'clock, damn you!" he groaned.

No.

He couldn't do this any more.

"Find her!" he said. Then he looked up at the clouded sky and bellowed: "Find her!"

He hurdled over the wall and ran out of the mews into the main street.

Women screamed. Men uttered exclamations.

Oxford sprang onto the side of a passing brougham. It lurched and veered under his impact. The coachman gave a shout of fright. The horses whinnied and bolted, nearly jerking the stilt-man loose.

"Where is Lizzie?" he screamed.

"Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" cried the driver.

"Tell me, you damned clown! Where is Lizzie?"

The horses pounded along the street, with people crying out and scattering before them, the carriage swinging and swaying dangerously behind, its wheels thundering over the cobbles.

"Get off? Get off!" yelled the terror-stricken coachman.

Oxford hung on desperately, with one of his stilts dragging along the road.

The horses stampeded headlong into a small street market and their flanks caught the side of a cheese stall, sending it flying, before they then ploughed head on through a poultry stall. Chickens, geese, feathers, and fragments of wood went spinning into the air.

Shouts. Screams. A police whistle.

"Fuck!" said Oxford, and hurled himself from the vehicle. He hit the ground and bounced fifteen feet into the air, landed, and started running.

A scream of dismay came from the coachman but was cut off when, with a terrific crash, the horses and carriage collided with the corner of a shop. The splintering of wood and bone was immediately drowned by the smash of breaking glass and masonry as the side of the building collapsed onto the wrecked vehicle.

Oxford sprang through the panicking crowd and started laughing hysterically as men, women, and children dived out of his way.

"Go away!" he ranted. "You're all history! You're all history! Ha ha ha! Where's my ancestor? Restore! Restore!"

He jumped over a nine-foot wall into a patch of wasteland, stumbled, fell, and rolled.

Lying on his back, he dug his fingers into the grass beneath him.

"Where the hell am I?" he asked.

Shouts came from beyond the wall.

He sat and pushed himself upright, issued instructions to his control panel, took two big strides, and sprang upward.

He landed back behind the wall on Mews Lane on November 28 at a quarter to eight.

Edward Oxford squatted and wept; and he waited.

She walked past half an hour later.

Lizzie Fraser was just fourteen years old.

In the year 1837, she was considered mature enough to work. In Oxford's age, she was just a child.

The tears continued to run down his cheeks as he quietly called: "Lizzie Fraser!"

January 12, 1839

Tilly Adams was seventeen years old. On Saturdays, whatever the weather, she spent the mornings walking in Battersea Fields, picking flowers in the summer and catching insects in the winter. She dreamed of becoming a botanist, though she knew this was an unrealistic ambition.

"You must learn to cook, to sew, and to maintain a household," her mother insisted. "No man wants a wife who knows the name of every insect but can't grill a lamb chop. Besides, you'll be that much more successful as a mother and wife. What women scientists are there, after all?"

The destiny that her mother recommended-and which society insisted on-was, she knew, her only real option, but while she still could, she was going to walk in the park on Saturday mornings to do the thing she loved best.

" Lucanus cervus!" she exclaimed, bending to look at a large black insect she'd spotted crawling at the side of the path. A stag beetle.

A long thin shadow fell across it.

"Tilly Adams?"

She looked up.

She fainted.

Later, a young man spotted her, took out his flask, and poured brandy between her lips.

She regained her senses, coughing and spluttering, looked down at herself, and uttered a cry of shame, for the front of her dress had been unbuttoned and her underwear pushed up.

"I didn't do it," said the young man, reddening. "I found you like that."

Tilly Adams stood up, put her clothes in order, and ran all the way home.

She never spoke about the stilt-man.

She never went into Battersea Fields again.

She gave up botany and began to hunt for a husband.