“Yes, she is a wonder, our Miss Hodgson,” says Auden, smiling his gratitude at Prudence.
“Come to think of it,” says Prudence, “I am due to have the procedure again, as the effects only last a few years. Captain Auden, would you be so kind?”
That was a lie. A spontaneous one.
“Of course,” says Auden.
They didn’t plan on this bit, but it works. The servants peer at them as Auden approaches, and Prudence pulls the shoulder of her robe à l’anglaise down, thanking the gods of fashion for the narrow shoulders of eighteenth-century dresses.
Still, she can feel herself blushing, for no reason at all, as Auden cups one hand around her shoulder and, too gently at first, daubs the patch on. She turns to inspect his work and sees his face closer up than she usually does. She barely notices that scar beside his nose, most of the time.
He’s standing close, blocking the view with his body, and she wants to smack some sense into him. Let them see! Be damned with propriety! They won’t trust what they can’t see.
Then she realizes that he’s spotted her tattoo, and that’s what he’s hiding from them. One more strangeness about Prudence Zuniga. Wise man. She’d nearly forgotten about the black seedling tattoo, its little roots spreading like veins. The sign of the Farmer. She went out for it with three other rookies, the night she got her acceptance message. She’d been prouder of this little bit of ink than of any grade she got at the Academy, and her grades were damn good.
A hot tear wells in one cheek, and she blinks angrily. Of all the moments. She’s tired; her eyes are tired. And she can’t wipe her eye now.
“There,” Auden says, turning to the servants. “It’s nothing at all. No blood.”
In the end, the housekeeper, the maid and Satterthwaite agree to the procedure. The cook, the groom and the footman all claim to have had smallpox anyway as children, and perhaps they’re telling the truth. She lets Auden be the one to administer the patches. Race theory is starting to appear in the late eighteenth century, and who knows what bile these people have been exposed to.
“At least we managed to do one thing without setting history on fire,” Prudence says, as she and Auden are left alone in the quiet room. “Although, who can say? Perhaps we saved the life of someone who is bound to become the greatest monster in history.”
“I would place my wager on the housemaid,” says Auden darkly, and Prudence laughs.
She and Auden use the small serving staircase to return to the middle floor where the Colonel’s study is.
“I beg your pardon,” he says, touching her arm lightly on the staircase, “But you seem distraught, Miss Zuniga.”
“Do I?” It comes out too brusque, but brusque is not so bad. “Well, we did kidnap an infectious king of England and lock him in a tower, so I have a lot on my mind, Captain.”
“Of course. Would you permit me—”
“Yes?”
She stops walking, turns to look at him.
“The seedling, on your arm.” He’s a bit pink. “You may know that when I am not here, or about my business as constable, I keep a small farm at New House. I fancy myself a—well, I am no botanist, but I do make a study of plants, and I wondered what sort of plant it was. Perhaps something that grows in America? It was unfamiliar to me.”
She grins, a real, spontaneous grin, despite everything. “You’re wonderful, Captain Auden. I mean it. You make it hard to be a cynic. Hard, but not impossible.”
His eyebrows bunch together. “You mock me, Miss Zuniga. Because I am a simple man and I like plants. All right, I admit it. I like plants.”
“I like them too.” She loses her smile; she can feel it vanishing, against her will. “But I can’t keep them alive. I have no idea what kind of plant it is. Just something out of some tattoo artist’s imagination, and then we all copied it. My fellow soldiers and I.”
“I see. It’s a bond not easily broken, I know. My regiment is called the Pattern, because it is known for being so well ordered, so disciplined. But you know what it used to make me think of? Knitting. A knitting pattern. And what happens when it unravels.”
She nods, understanding what’s underneath the words more than the words themselves. “Everything unravels. Time travel’s hard that way. It messes with you, the inevitability of entropy. But you have to be able to see the beauty in the seedling. That’s what the Farmers believe. Used to believe, anyway.”
She looks, unseeing, at the bare walls of this staircase, walls that should be covered with paintings. Will be, once Alice gets around to it. Things will change here. But she is here, now, on this step on this staircase. “I like plants too, Captain. I was reading my diary recently, and came across an entry about when I was a child. I had an herb garden in a pot, someone gave it to me for my birthday, a kit, you know. And the day after I planted the seeds, my sister found me digging them up, tears rolling down my cheeks. And my sister . . .” She pauses, swallows. “She asked me why I was digging up the seeds. I told her I was afraid that they wouldn’t come up. I wanted to check on them, I guess. See? I told you. I like them, but I’m bad at them.”
He nods, smiling kindly. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“I don’t know whether I’ll ever see her again.”
“Ah. Well, the good thing about time travel is that everything’s possible.”
“Maybe.”
He seems to understand that she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, and gestures with his arm for her to continue up the stairs, ahead of him.
They cross the gallery that stretches from one side of the house to the other, and she glances down through the arcade at the great hall, the heart of the house, where the Colonel’s body lies.
They go through the old man’s drawing room, and enter the study, and find it empty.
CHAPTER TEN: Where Alice Went Next
1789
Alice runs up to her rooms and brings down the breeches, shirt and boots she wears when she’s a highwayman. She wriggles in, as Jane helps her out of her corset and skirts. Then she opens a cedar chest and pulls out her father’s uniform jacket. The red wool and silver lacing have not dimmed, although the white of the facings has yellowed a bit. She throws it over her shoulders.
“Well?” she demands.
Jane cocks her head. “Aren’t the breeches meant to be white? And I don’t think those boots are right at all.”
“But these fit me. I think anyone who gets close enough to wonder about my breeches and boots will have quite a few questions beyond that. I don’t want to pass for a soldier, just not draw too much attention. Look, beloved, you haven’t seen the best bit yet.”
When Alice was a child, she thought the 17th Light Dragoons helmet was the most astonishing thing she had ever seen, and she has not changed her opinion since. It’s a dome of black leather, upon which a brass crest rises like the prow of a ship, and out of the crest tumbles a plume of scarlet horsehair. Three inches of sheepskin line the bottom edge, and in front, a black metal triangular plate rising to a point in the middle, with a white skull-and-crossbones painted on it. It is as though the dragoons had been unable to decide whether to go to a masquerade as pirates or as centurions.
Alice ties her hair in a male style, with a black ribbon at the nape of her neck, and tries the helmet on. It is too big for her, so she takes her torn and stained green handkerchief and stuffs it into the helmet. It settles nicely, then, and she tucks stray tendrils into it. It’s heavy, but not uncomfortable.
“There. Do I look fearsome?”
“I feel as if I’m about to be boarded,” says Jane, putting her hand to her heart.
“Time for that later. Now, what about you? Shall we shimmer over to Auden’s house and steal his old uniform?”
“I’ll go as I am. Don’t fuss, Alice. I’ve never heard of a war yet that didn’t have women in it. I won’t stand out.”
Colonel John Payne loved nothing more than maps. On his rare visits home, when Alice was a child, he would show her m
aps of the world, the two round halves of the globe staring out at her like the gilded eyes of an owl, and the sturdy inhabitants of the Earth rising mostly nude from the bottom margin, or cherubs swooping entirely nude from the top. She would trace the trade winds with her chubby child’s finger.
So Alice knows where to find the maps of America, the maps they need. They look at New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, places that might as well be out of legend. Jane finds the latitude and longitude of Charleston, and Alice finds a smudged “Hart’s Mill” on one of her father’s hand-drawn maps in his diary, next to the crossed-swords symbol that designates a battlefield.
“The evening, the letter said,” says Jane.
“The evening of May 11, 1780,” Alice agrees.
Jane is not as practised as Prudence with shimmering, and the time wheel is much cruder than the belt Prudence wears, which has sensors that somehow read the intentions of the person pressing the button.
But Jane does her best to take them a bit wide of where she thinks the battlefield was likely to be, to reduce the chance that they’ll be seen, walking out of thin air. To give them few moments of quiet to get their bearings.
Instead, they walk into the sound of gunfire.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Where Prudence Went Next
1789
It takes Prudence and Auden the better part of an hour to search the house and grounds well enough to be sure that Alice and Jane are not there.
“But you do remember them,” Prudence says, when they meet back in the hall, alone, their faces mirrors of each other’s concern.
“Of course I remember them,” says Auden, blanching, the freckles and scar standing out on his face. “Do you mean to say that you don’t, Miss Zuniga?”
“No, I do,” Prudence says, rubbing her hairline with the heel of her hand. “I do. Which means they’re not erased from the timeline. But they’re not here. And neither is the time-wheel.”
“If they went to some other place and time—”
“They’d try to return back here the moment after they left. Unless they weren’t able to. Unless they’re in trouble.”
She’s so angry she can barely think. How dare Alice go off half-cocked somewhere? And if Almo is somehow involved—
“Your diary, Miss Zuniga—”
“First place I checked. No clues there. We’re not forgetting any plans. If they used the time-wheel, they did it without telling us.”
Auden leans on a side table, taking some of the weight off his bad leg. “Why would they do something so foolhardy?”
“Ha, well, you know Alice,” Prudence says, before remembering that Auden doesn’t know many important things about Alice, including her double life as Hampshire’s most notorious highwayman. She moves on hurriedly. “There’s the question of where they went and why, and there’s the question of why they haven’t returned. And the second question, at least, I suspect I can find the answer to.”
“That seems backward,” Auden says with a frown.
“Welcome to time travel.”
Almo wants to get her attention? Well, he’s got it. She’s sick of tiptoeing around him, anyway. Bastard. She’ll find out exactly what he’s done, and then she’ll make him wish he never tried it.
She shifts her bodice up a bit so she can get at the shimmer belt. He steps toward her, but she holds out her other hand to stop him. “You stay here, Captain. I won’t be a moment.”
He shakes his head, but she’s already opened the shimmer and steps through into 2145, where General Almo is waiting for her.
CHAPTER TWELVE: In Which Alice Is Foolhardy
1780
The moment they step through and Alice smells gunpowder she pulls Jane down into a crouch. They are behind a bit of old fence, and a foot away, a soldier lies, staring at the sky. The air is white with smoke or fog or both; she thinks she can smell the sea, under the electric stench of spent powder.
Alice can make out a dozen dark-coated shapes on the ground; the dead, or nearly dead. Shouting in the distance.
“No guns,” Alice whispers. “I don’t hear any guns. No drums. I think it’s over, or nearly over.”
“I can get us here earlier in the day. And farther away.”
Alice leans forward as if sniffing the air. “It’s May? You’re sure it’s May, in the evening? It’s warm.”
“It’s South Carolina.”
“Mmm. We’re here now. Let’s see what we see and then go back if we must. That shouting: that must be the victors, giving orders. I want to get a little closer.”
“This may be the most foolhardy of the many foolhardy things you’ve done,” Jane mutters, rising to her feet.
They stay low and within the trees that line the clearing. The ground slopes upward, and they can see a windmill breaking the mist on a low, bare hill, and the shapes of men and horses flitting around it. Three shots crack the air, and they freeze like rabbits; more shouting, but no more shots, and they move forward, toward the higher ground.
Ahead of them, on a ridge, a beaten dirt road winds to the mill. Men are running and walking along it. Most are in pale green coats but a few are in red-and-white uniforms like the one Alice is wearing, and they all seem to be comrades.
“Our side,” Jane whispers, as they crouch behind a boulder. “We can’t get any closer without being seen.”
When Colonel Payne came home from the war, people spoke about the change in him, in tones of pity and dismay. It was not a change that anyone could have described, not at first. He had never been a steady man—not even a good man, truth be told—but now he was more bitter miasma than man at all. A cloud descended on Fleance Hall, and though it had no name, it was real and evident.
The effect of all of this on Alice was not in question. Of course the cloud was there, and of course Alice must live under it. Poor girl. Though she was twenty-seven years old when Father returned, and not a girl anymore at all. Men are storms whose effects women must not interrogate; the effects, like the men, must simply be borne.
But Alice will have no more clouds over Fleance Hall, not if she can help it. She will not have one of Father’s secrets knocking on the door one day and hurting her, hurting Jane.
She turns to Jane and kisses her lightly, and smiles as the ridiculous helmet brushes against Jane’s hair, pulling a golden strand onto the piratical plate. “You stay here. If I don’t return by nightfall, shimmer home.”
“No,” Jane says, her expression grave and her hand on Alice’s wrist. “You’re not doing this.”
“If I don’t, I’ll always wonder. You know I will, love. I’ll try not to go out of sight.”
Jane closes her eyes and lets all the breath leave her body before she nods slightly. Alice kisses her forehead, because that’s the angle of kiss least likely to throw the horsehair plume in their faces or bruise Jane with the alarming brass prow of the helmet.
She straightens, slowly, and peers toward the road. Half a dozen soldiers in green coats and red ones, two carts, four horses. One man, on the road near the line where the woods end and the open land begins, has a musket drawn, looking out into the mist.
Alice strides forward with intention, hoping no one will notice the colour of her breeches. They are only one of several things wrong about her uniform, and then of course there is the matter of her sex. Still, if there is one thing she has learned on the road, it is that movement makes the man, or the woman. Every step is an offer, every stance a demand. From her calves to her shoulders to the tip of her father’s ridiculous helmet, she wills herself to belong here.
And she thanks whatever gods control the weather in South Carolina for this fog.
The glances of the men on the road are casual, fleeting, as Alice passes them by, head just slightly low to convey the impression of some urgent errand and hide her face. But she looks at them quite carefully, if quickly. Scans their postures, their faces, their voices.
Out into the open land, where long skeins of electric-scented smoke have yet escaped
the sun.
“Quickly now, quickly, lads. We may have won this skirmish, but there could be a hundred more across that creek. No time to lose.”
She freezes. Her father’s voice.
“They’ve as good as lost, sir,” someone answers him. “Charleston is burning, and by month’s end, all the good Loyalists of South Carolina will be—”
“Look to your work, Corporal!”
Her father’s voice, barking orders, does not yet have the querulous, desperate note she came to know in his final years. But it is his. She’d stake her life on it. He’s turned slightly away from her, so she can walk behind him, hang back and listen without him seeing her. She maintains her occupied air as best she can.
Colonel Payne watches as three young men load muskets and rifles onto a low, one-horse cart.
“Some of these are loaded, sir,” one protests.
“Then have a care.”
“Yes, sir.”
A man comes running past Jane, from within the woods, nearly bumping her shoulder. “Colonel Payne, sir.”
They talk lowly for a moment, then her father lifts his head, lifts the selfsame helmet that Jane is wearing now. He looks past her, toward the tree line.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: In Which Jane Is Foolhardy
1780
Alice has kept her word to stay in sight, but the mist out on the open ground transforms her into a dark shape. Jane risks standing a little higher to peer over the boulder.
Jane has never wanted to prevent Alice from going out on the road, or from writing essays or arguing with politicians or any of the other dangerous things she does. She would not be Alice Payne if she kept herself safe. But she wonders sometimes if Alice treats danger as its own reward, and if that might explain her faint, occasional reluctance to involve Jane too closely in her adventures. Alice would say, of course, that she is protecting Jane, but perhaps she’s saving herself from examining her choices too closely, from the gaze of another.
Something moves at the end of her vision and Jane ducks lower. She peers toward the movement, not toward the hilltop with the living soldiers moving across it, but at the battlefield. In the mist, pale shapes move over the field but there are only a few and moving haphazardly. She puts her hand to her mouth to stop a gasp as she sees, so close that the mist does not obscure her, a woman. She is on her hands and knees, crawling, her gaze on the ground, her plain linen cap covering most of her hair.
Alice Payne Rides Page 6
