Word Hunters Read online

  The fridge at home was always full. The next meal was only ever hours away. There was always fruit in the bowl whenever you wanted it. Food was something you could assume would be there. It had scared him, he realised, to be without it. It was worse than the hunger, thinking about food and having no idea when you might find some – or if.

  He cooked a huge omelette, while Doug stuck his face in a bowl of congealed duck fat and Lexi kept watching the portal.

  They ate all they could and then filled Al’s bag with bread and cheese and jars of things that were labelled in French and that they didn’t even recognise.

  They locked the door on the way out and Al slipped the key back under it, where it would look like it had fallen sometime during the night.

  Al took the next shift – two hours or as close as he could make it, staring at the portal, while Lexi slept on some empty sacks. Much of the time he stood with the bar of soap in front of him on a head-high windowsill. He thought about Grandad Al and the old photos and New York in the 1860s and sleep. He particularly thought about sleep. And then his mind snapped back to the portal and to his fear of losing it. He was wide awake again, focused.

  They saw the night through in two-hour shifts and caught up on sleep the next day, still one at a time with the other watching the portal.

  By the second night, whoever was sleeping dreamt only of the glowing button, blinking, fading, slipping beyond reach.

  The OK soap ads appeared the next morning and all that day the portal glowed even brighter.

  ‘It’s like jetlag,’ Lexi said as she stretched her arms and legs after a sleep.

  Al was eating bread and cheese. ‘Yeah, I know. I feel like someone could take my appendix out now and I wouldn’t notice. I don’t think I can go on much longer.’

  It was late afternoon.

  By nightfall, when that day’s edition of The New York Times was off the newsstands and there were few new readers for it, the portal started to dim. Then a crack appeared.

  ‘Now,’ Lexi said, shaking Al’s shoulder. ‘We need to go now.’

  There was another rush of small bumps and a short straight drop. They fell into another night. There was land below – a dark country at the edge of a black sea. But there were lights too – the soft glow and then clear lines of street lamps, a grid of them, then light spilling from buildings.

  They landed in thick warm coats at the edge of a street. Al’s was black, Lexi’s was light brown with ivory buttons. When she moved, she felt the new leather of her boots creak. There was a mist in the air and it glowed around the lamps.

  ‘I don’t think we have to look too far this time.’ She pointed to a sign that read ‘Brooklyn OK Club, meeting

  7 o’clock tonight’. Her hands were in some kind of fur tube and she pulled them out in a panic to check the portal. ‘No soap.’ She laughed. ‘I’m glad that’s over.’

  A carriage stopped and four people climbed down, then walked up the steps into the building. The men were wearing top hats and the women had furs around their shoulders.

  ‘That looks like what we’re dressed for. Let’s see when this is.’ Al reached for the single silver buckle on his black satchel. When he opened it the leather smelt new. Then Doug burped and it smelt like 14 kinds of cheese. ‘The time’s good. Really good.’ He showed the peg to Lexi.

  ‘This is it, then.’ She folded the fur hand warmer and pushed it into her pocket. ‘I guess it’ll be in there. Or at least that’s where we have to start.’

  ‘If we’d stayed longer at City Hall last time, do you think we’d have missed it completely?’ It had been bothering Al. ‘Does it come up once and, if you’re not in the right spot, is that it? Or would there have been another chance when the ads got published? Maybe that was the real chance.’

  ‘I think you might be mistaking me for Caractacus. Put it on the list, if you want.’ She didn’t want to think about it, or to think that one wrong move could see them stuck. ‘Maybe us being there triggers it. But let’s go get this one. And let’s hope it’ll fit in your bag.’

  As they crossed the road, she took a closer look at the sign about the meeting. There in the middle of the ‘O’ of ‘OK’ she could make out the initials ‘WH’ and ‘TH’. They were on track. There was still no sign of Grandad Al, though. If he hadn’t done ‘okay’, he wouldn’t know to head to Brooklyn on this particular night five years after Nantucket. It was too much to hope that he’d be in the crowd. But they were closer at least.

  ‘You’re here for OK?’ the man on the door said when they reached the top of the steps.

  Lexi couldn’t believe it was so easy. ‘We’re definitely here for OK.’

  She and Al took a step inside the meeting room and checked for a portal, but nothing showed itself. ‘OK’ was everywhere, though. A woman passed them each an ‘OK’ ribbon from a box and there were banners on the walls reading ‘Vote for OK’. There were wooden chairs set out in rows, most of them with people on them already.

  ‘I’m assuming this isn’t all about soap,’ Al said.

  ‘Have you noticed how this one keeps being “okay”, however you spell it? It’s not like “harrow, halloo, hello”. I thought it’d change more.’ Lexi was starting to wish the rules were the same each time. Or, if they weren’t the same, she wished she understood them better. ‘I wonder why we had to meet Mr Pyle and find out about his soap?’

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ a man said, looking right at her. He had a medal on the breast of his black coat. ‘You are the twins, aren’t you? The ribbons go here.’ He indicated his ribbon, which was on his lapel. ‘Do you need to wear those keys? Could the ribbons go over them, perhaps – just for now?’ he kept smiling. He didn’t seem to need answers. ‘I’m Talbot. You’ll have been told to look out for Talbot, I assume? Mr Talbot? Follow me.’

  It felt as if they had no choice. Al checked the room as they went and he could see Lexi doing the same. It might not be the crazy ancient past, but things had gone wrong before when they’d least expected it.

  Mr Talbot took them to the right and along the side of the audience, to steps leading to a door beside the stage. He knocked on it and it opened.

  ‘Oh, the children,’ another man’s voice said from inside. ‘The twins. Thank you, Mr Talbot.’

  The door opened fully and Mr Talbot ushered them in. Al could feel himself tensing up. But it was 1840, a meeting house. No one would be here shooting kings or invading or robbing.

  ‘Right,’ the new man said, even before the door had closed behind them. ‘We’re planning to keep the introductions brief – brief, but rousing. We need them in the right frame of mind when the president comes on.’ He had a dark moustache, a satchel quite like Al’s and a small bunch of flowers in one hand. ‘You’ll go out as soon as the president has finished speaking.’ He passed the flowers to Lexi. ‘You’ll give him this.’ He was staring at the flowers as if they needed to be checked again. ‘They’re mostly things you could find in your garden. Nice and simple. We think that’s the right message.’

  He opened his satchel and took out several copies of a document.

  ‘Are they for me?’ Al said. He wondered what he might have to do with them.

  The man checked the documents and didn’t look up. ‘Only if you want to be ready for any last-minute questions OK might have about Texas.’ He ran his finger further down the page. ‘We’ve reached a settlement with Mexico to deny Texas’s request to become part of the United States.’

  Lexi and Al glanced around the room, but still nothing was glowing. It was dark backstage and a portal wouldn’t have been hard to see. How much ‘okay’ would there be in 1840 before the portal appeared?

  ‘Andrew Morrell.’ The man finally looked up. ‘Aide to the president. I’m the one who exchanged letters with your parents. I thought you’d look more alike, but no matter. They might
have dressed you more alike. You’ll have to take the coats off.’

  ‘Questions OK might have?’ Al wanted to get back to that, and away from Andrew Morrell’s focus on details that didn’t make a lot of sense.

  ‘Yes, OK – the president, Mr Van Buren, Old Kinderhook.’ He looked at them both to make sure his point had got through. ‘Did your parents tell you nothing? OK. From Kinderhook, New York, where he was born. OK’s what we’re going with now. OK clubs, OK ribbons. It sounds—’ He paused, to find the right word. ‘Affectionate, like the right kind of name for a man of the people. We need to undo all the talk going around about him hosting huge banquets for European ministers when money was tight in ’37. They’re wrong about him, you know. He wears the finest suits to be found in Manhattan, but they’re all bought from his own pocket.’

  It was politics, Lexi realised. As their parents often said in the 21st century, politics should have been about big things, but too often it was about how wrong your dress was or how your hair was cut.

  ‘Is that how OK started?’ Al asked him. It felt unusual to say something so direct, but he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t. ‘You came up with it for this campaign?’

  ‘I think it is. I think we started it. Or one of the others saw it in a newspaper.’ He looked around, as if whoever saw it might be nearby. ‘Yes, that was it. It was the Boston Morning Post, sometime last year. It was that game they were playing, printing expressions with the wrong initials and spelling, as if they’d been written by people who didn’t know better. It’s ours now, though. Whenever people think OK, it’s the president they’ll be thinking of.’ Suddenly he stopped and ignored them completely. ‘Mr President—’

  ‘Andrew.’ An older man stepped forward and stood beside Al, though he didn’t seem to notice him. The top of his head was a bald dome, with grey woolly hair sprouting from the sides, and mutton-chop whiskers. He had a top hat in one hand and an elegant cane in the other. ‘You have that bill ready for me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Andrew Morrell turned the documents so that the president could see them.

  As he took the pen that Andrew Morrell offered him, the president seemed to see Lexi and Al for the first time.

  ‘You’re the children who come on at the end.’ He had an accent that wasn’t quite American. ‘You’re – what is it – a symbol of our future? Try not to make me look too much like an old man.’ He smiled. ‘So, how do you see our future?’

  ‘I think—’ Al wasn’t sure if he was brave enough to tell a president what to do, but he had to give it a try. ‘I think you should end slavery now.’

  Al knew there was a war to come if it didn’t happen, and President Lincoln would be shot at the end of it. In the meantime slaves in some places would be slaves for another quarter of a century. He couldn’t guess how different the United States or the world might be if the change came now, in 1840, and it didn’t take a war. Or maybe the war in 1840 would be worse. Maybe the slave states would win.

  The president smiled again, and nodded. ‘I’m sure you know I have a moral objection to it, and that will not shift. I have never kept slaves and I never will. But our Constitution appears to allow it, and there are states that see themselves dependent on it. States have rights. I can’t make laws that trample on those rights.’

  ‘What about amending the Constitution?’ Al knew it could happen, because one day it would.

  ‘Amending the Constitution? Do you know what that would take? Become a lawyer, young man, and then a senator and then a better president than I dare to be, and maybe you’ll talk those southern states around, but I don’t see it being an easy matter.’ He looked down at the documents again. ‘It’s good to have high ideals, though. Don’t lose those.’ He paused before signing. ‘This is Texas?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Andrew Morrell said. ‘This is Texas. If you’d be so good as to put your name to it, give it the OK—’

  The moment the president signed the first copy, the ‘a’ in Van Buren turned into an ‘& more’ button and started to glow. Andrew Morrell lifted the page away for the president to sign the next one. The button glowed against his white shirt front.

  Al wanted a distraction, a chance to grab the page and run.

  ‘Sir,’ Lexi said. ‘It’s wrong of me to interrupt, but you were right about my brother. He has his heart set on becoming a lawyer and I know he’d be forever grateful if you allowed him a few minutes to read that first bill you’ve just signed.’

  ‘Why not?’ The president looked flattered. ‘He’s a bright boy. Why not?’

  Andrew Morrell took the document and passed it to Al. He seemed less happy about the idea. ‘You’re not to leave this room with it. There’s light over there.’ He nodded in the direction of door that had a lamp next to it. ‘Just a few minutes, though. We’ll be starting soon.’

  Al thanked him and took it. He and Lexi moved over to the door.

  ‘I bet it leads outside,’ she said. ‘We’ve probably got two days to get to Nantucket with this. It doesn’t matter if they lose it. They’ve got more copies, and surely Texas becomes part of America, anyway. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘But the next step’s Boston.’ Al put his hand up to stop her opening the door. ‘Boston in 1839. We already know that. Andrew Morrell said. Boston’s much closer to Nantucket. I googled it. Nantucket’s an island. Boston in 1839 – we won’t get much better than that.’

  ‘How much closer?’ She was looking back towards the president. She wasn’t convinced yet. Andrew Morrell was looking their way, as if they couldn’t be trusted.

  ‘Less than half as far. And a year closer. It’s got to be the place.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She turned him to face the light, so that it would look as if he was reading. She reached into his backpack for the peg.

  It was like falling through a doorway, hardly a stumble before they were out of the cloud and dropping into cold fresh air and a bright day.

  There were ships moving in and out of the harbour and red-brick buildings packed in tight near the city centre, right up to the edge of a large park. Lexi and Al were heading for the streets though, and they landed in front of a church. It had a tower with clocks on each side and a steeple rising from the top.

  ‘If this is Boston, I guess we’re looking for the Morning Post,’ Lexi said. She scanned the shopfronts across the road. ‘The name’ll be on the building, won’t it? Newspapers seem to do that.’ She checked to see what Al was wearing. ‘I think you’re a copy boy again, the 1839 version. You keep getting that.’

  ‘Which is a shame, since I’ve got my heart set on becoming a lawyer.’ He laughed, which was something he couldn’t do when she said it to President Van Buren.

  ‘Hey, I’ve read books from this century. That’s how they talk.’

  She was wearing a bonnet, a jacket with fine stripes and again multiple skirts. She looked to Al like someone who would talk just that way, like the kind of girl who, in period films, turns pale and faints. Her key badge was on her jacket, and he checked to see that his was where it should be, too.

  She signalled for him to turn around and started to open the top of his duffel bag. As the air rushed in, Doug smelt the sea, rubbish in a nearby alley, clam chowder.

  ‘Andrew Morrell was expecting twins.’ It hadn’t clicked with Al at the time. ‘How does that work? Word hunters can’t all be twins, can they? Grandad Al didn’t have a twin.’

  ‘Maybe only twins get “okay”.’ She reached down inside the duffel bag. The activated peg was buried among all the gear they’d brought. ‘Or maybe it’s what Caractacus said about the dictionary adapting. It could be different if you’re by yourself.’ She pulled the peg out. ‘Yep, this is Boston in 1839. Which means we’ve got a newspaper to find. And then Grandad Al.’

  Two women had stopped to talk on the corner of the stree
t and Lexi walked right up to them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘We’re looking for the offices of the Boston Morning Post.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ One of the women had a parasol and she used it to point down the street that ran along the side of the church. ‘You’re two blocks away. You’ll find them on Congress Street.’

  They followed her directions, past the church, a shoemaker and a butcher. When they reached Congress Street, they saw an office building with the signs of several businesses on it. One of them was the Boston Morning Post. It wasn’t the big deal of the New York Times building of 1865, with men in uniform on the door and five floors all working on the paper.

  They walked into an empty foyer where a board with a list of businesses told them the Post was on the third floor. Four letters – a ‘W’, a ‘T’ and two ‘H’s – had been taken from the name of another business, the Boston and Hartford Whaling Company, and rearranged nearby. ‘WH’, ‘TH’. Tucked behind the ‘W’ was a small scrap of paper – the torn corner of a bus ticket.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Al said. ‘No buses in 1839, but if you’ve never seen a bus ticket it’s just a piece of thick paper with “Fulham” on it. So, “WH” is probably from the 20th century. If there were more “H”s—’ He wanted to add their names.

  ‘There are, in other names up there. But maybe we should focus on the job, rather than plundering the sign.’

  Lexi was right. Two sets of initials had been enough for them, and would be enough for any future word hunters as well.

  She glanced around the foyer and groaned. ‘No lifts. You’d think they could have invented lifts before making buildings like this.’ She walked over to the stairs and stopped. ‘They could at least have invented better clothes for girls.’ She grabbed her skirts, lifted them above her ankles and clumped up the first flight of stairs. ‘I can’t even see where my feet are going.’