The Thief of Time Read Online Free PDF

of blood at my scalp and I know not how long I lay there, curled up within myself, before I realised that he had gone and that I could gather myself together and get up.
    It was hours before I found my way home, blinded as I was by the blood in my eyes, and, as I pushed open the door, Dominique screamed as she saw me. Tomas burst into tears and hid under the bedclothes. Dominique pulled out a bucket of tepid water and stripped me of my clothes as she tended to my wounds, my body in such pain that I had not even the energy to be excited by her attending to me. I slept for three days and when I woke, clean but battered, aching with pain, she told me that my pick-pocketing days were over for good.
    â€˜Say goodbye to Dover, Matthieu,’ she said as I opened my one good eye. ‘We’re leaving the minute you can get out of that bed.’
    I was too weak to argue with her and by the time I had recovered my health — several weeks later – our plans had already been determined.

Chapter 5
Constance & The Movie Star
    The most short-lived of my marriages occurred in 1921, and despite its brevity, it is one that I look back upon with a great deal of fondness -Constance was certainly my second-favourite wife of this century. I had moved back to America just after the war, seeking a complete release from all my associations with the hospital, the Foreign Office and the awful Beatrice, widow of my then recently deceased nephew Thomas. I boarded an ocean liner and set sail for the States, enjoying the pleasant and revitalising few weeks of sunshine and romance which the transatlantic crossing afforded me. I landed in New York and found that to my dismay the city was still obsessed by European affairs and hungry for more information about such matters as Versailles and the Kaiser. Strangers would hear my accent in a local saloon and immediately attempt to engage me in conversation. Had I ever met the King, they would ask? Is it true what they say about him? What news of France? What were the trenches actually like? Really, one of the greatest achievements of this modern age of global television networks is that complete strangers no longer need to ask for the most mundane of information. For that alone, we should be grateful to modern technology.
    Irritated by this constant intrusion into my life, and feeling a little lost in the city without friends or employment, I decided to spend one afternoon at a local theatre, watching the newsreels and some of the new kinescopes. The theatre I chose was really no more than a small room with a high ceiling, capable of fitting about twenty-five people in some discomfort, and it was half full as I took my seat in the centre of a row towards the back, as far away from the local
hoipolloi
as possible. The seats were hard and wooden and the place smelled of a startling mix of perspiration and alcohol, but it was dark and it was private so I stayed where I was, knowing that I would grow immune to the unpleasant scents of the populace soon enough. The newsreels began and they were the same old nonsense I had seen a thousand times in real life – war, appeasement, universal suffrage — but the moving pictures amused me. I saw
Easy Street
and
The Cure,
both of which featured Charlie Chaplin, and the crowd groaned when each began -evidently they had seen them before, many times, and were looking for new entertainment already – but almost immediately, they started to laugh along at the fairly slapstick affairs that they were watching. As the projectionist changed the reels in the middle of each feature, I found myself growing restless, anxious to see more, intrigued by the flickering black and white images before me, my mind finally released from the events of recent years, if only for an afternoon. I stayed and watched the same show several times over and by the time I left the theatre – by which time it was dark outside and my throat was dry and in need of liquid