Limehouse Jack
Time Travel is like a cloak of invisibility, a duty, a responsibility – and a temptation. Just a tweak to history and Hitler may never have been born, the Holocaust didn`t kill millions of Jews, the Twin Towers still hover proudly over Manhattan, the atom bomb didn`t devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Go a little further back and the Great Plague disappears, slavery vanishes. Tempting. Impossible.
History evens itself out. It is not possible to change a single event in isolation without affecting hundreds of thousands of infinite variables. Chaos Theory comes into play. A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a typhoon in the China Seas.
Limehouse Jack is a Time Traveller. He operates in the shadowy half world on the edges of History. He is an apprentice knight, steeped in chivalry, born of the mysterious mythology that surrounded Camelot and the pure, holy faith that drove and possessed the world wide, time wide, knightly brotherhood that spawned him.
Jack does not change to try to change history. He thwarts those who would do so, for reasons good or ill. He is harassed in his endeavours by a deadly adversary whose aim is to change history and profit from the Chaos that must surely ensue. The Trickster is a Shapeshifter, Mordred, the Black Knight, offspring of the deadly union between Arthur, the Once and Future King and his sister, Morgan Le Fay, the witch. She has given her son the powers to tamper with the fringes of Time, careless of the wider implications. She wants Arthur dead by Mordred`s hand, Mordred King and the World driven down different, perilous chasm of Time.
Jack`s power and authority come from Merlin, the magician who has divined Morgan’s impulse and fights to preserve the World from her malignity. Mordred and Morgan Le Fay seek out crucial hinge points in Time where an event can be twisted to their purpose.
Jack arrives back in the present day from such a hinge point, wounded seriously in a successful battle to prevent the premature death of the Second Lord Protector of England, Richard Cromwell, whose assassination would have set back the course of democratic debate in England for a hundred years.
Jack`s life is saved by Tilly, a fourteen year old girl who becomes his ally in his next important mission, to prevent the assassination of Winston Churchill in an effort to alter the outcome of World War Two and allow the Third Reich to complete its thousand years of control.
Jack`s enemy, the Trickster senses Jack`s interest in Tilly and embarks on a series of feints and attacks to draw Jack out into the open. This direct assault doesn`t work and the Trickster isolates Tilly by killing her friends as babies by going back in time, then by attacking her grandfather as a baby and later, as a young man, a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, whose continued existence is essential if the plan to kill Churchill is to be foiled. Jack is drawn into battle on Tilly`s behalf and the climax of the book comes when Jack is sucked back into nineteen forty and left stranded with no means of return to the present day. Jack`s faithful ally, Polly, a talking magpie goes back to the rescue with Tilly. Their efforts are alternately helped and hindered by the eccentric and disgraced wizard, Merlin who has a stake in Jack`s continuing life and future.
Jack, Tilly and Polly beat off the marauding Trickster to save the grandfather`s life so that he can fly his Spitfire to the rescue of the beleaguered statesman, saving countless future generations from the scourge of Nazism.
This book is the story of Jack and Tilly and their struggle to stop the World from being destroyed.
Don Webb
Don Webb is the prolific author of Essential Saltes (1999), When They Came (2006), and many other works of fiction and nonfiction. A resident of Austin, Texas, Webb teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension.