Alice Payne Rides

by Kate Heartfield

  The woman doesn’t see Jane, doesn’t seem to see anything but the soldier whose curly head she cradles.

  And then, Jane takes a step back as she sees the soldier’s arm flail, hears a long, loud groan.

  The woman on the battlefield puts her finger to her lips, raises her face, looks around.

  She’s young—hardly a woman at all, Jane realizes, but just a girl. Her face is lined not with age but with anguish. The girl’s eyes burn blue, the precise blue of Jane’s late sister’s eyes.

  She doesn’t see Jane. She’s speaking to the soldier, whispering some long stream of words that seems more complex than mere platitudes to a dying stranger. And perhaps he’s not dying. She’s pulling long strips of linen out of her basket.

  In the smoke beyond, Jane’s eyes discern half a dozen figures moving. Standing, crouching, crawling, dragging.

  A twig snaps. She crouches lower, turns. Two soldiers in green coats are walking briskly toward her, their muskets at their sides. Do they see her? She makes herself as small as possible as the men pause just on the far side of the boulder.

  “I don’t know what you expect the colonel to do about it,” says one of the men. “Charles King has already set sail for New York, and though he’ll take a long route to dodge the French, he’ll be walking into the Merchants in eight days’ time, no matter what anyone here says or does about it.”

  “Walking into the Merchants and carrying smallpox with him,” says a gruffer voice. “All those letters from the officers to their families, the bag that carries them. It was Albert Gray who collected them. And now Albert Gray is in quarantine for the bloody pox.”

  “I don’t think they’d come through these woods anyway,” says one, absently, as if hardly listening. “More likely on the far side of the field, over the creek.”

  “All the same, let’s finish up here,” says another, gruffer-voiced. “If another wave does come, and we fail to spot ’em, it’ll be our hides. Hi—what’s that?”

  A rustle. Jane holds her breath.

  “A redcoat. One of ours. Soldier! Lost your way?”

  The familiar voice of the third man jolts Jane so that she nearly falls on her arse.

  “I followed three of them into the creek,” says Wray Auden, sounding both more and less weary than the older Auden she knows. “They’re dead. Made sure of it. They won’t be fetching reinforcements.”

  “Reinforcements might come anyway,” says the gruff-voiced man. “To you English lads it might look no different from any other place, but this is my own country. When the men die, they’ll send the boys. They won’t be cowed so easily.”

  “You sound almost proud, sir,” says Captain Auden, his voice smooth as honey.

  “I am proud. Proud when it’s the king they’re fighting for. When it’s not, I know well enough to never let down my guard.”

  “Whisht,” hisses the other greencoat. “What’s that?”

  Silence for a few moments. “Something’s moving out there. Look, another. And there.”

  “Women,” says Captain Auden. “Women tending to the dead.”

  “Or readying their rifles,” says gruff-voice. “Another thing you might want to remember about this war is that the rebels will take anyone. I’ve seen dozens of baggages and bitches toting guns or loading cannon in my time.”

  “I’ve been fighting this war from its beginning,” Auden growls.

  “Then you know,” says the other.

  “We have our orders,” says the softer-voiced of the greencoats. “Shoot anything that moves.”

  “I won’t be party to—”

  “You boys of the 33rd. The Pattern, that’s what you call yourselves, eh? All book and no balls.”

  A metallic scrape—a ramrod in a bore.

  Jane can’t see Captain Auden’s expression, but she can imagine it, as she hears the low chuckles of the other two men. She realizes first what has to be done, and second that she’s the only one in any position to do it.

  Captain Auden doesn’t know her yet; he hasn’t yet bought New House. He won’t recognize her.

  She backs away from her boulder as silently as she can manage, keeping low. Then she leaps to one side and runs toward the men at a fearful clip.

  They have their backs turned to her. By the time they turn to her, guns drawn, it will look as though she’s been running through the woods. She hopes. It occurs to her, just as the green-coated men turn their muskets on her, that moving toward a man who just loaded his musket while saying “Shoot anything that moves” is more foolhardy than anything Alice has ever done.

  “God save the king!” Jane yells, raising her hands, and then, as a result, tripping on her skirt. She lands facedown in what is mostly moss, but scrapes her hands on a bit of old log and bangs her knee against something.

  “Good God,” says Captain Auden, rushing toward her and helping her up. “Who are you? State your business!”

  “I’m Mr. Lowell’s daughter, sir,” she says, adopting as innocent a tone as she can muster, and the careful, even syllables of an American. “He sent me to tell you that you’re needed urgently. The rebels have attacked the camp at—” Blast. Damn! She tries to remember the names on the map, to think of a likely place where a camp ought to be, but she can’t see anything in her mind’s eye but musket smoke and the face of the blue-eyed woman. She lets her voice crack, and breaks into nearly real sobs.

  “The camp at Sparling’s Crossing?” says the soft-voiced greencoat, who turns out to be older than Jane expected, a jowly fellow with vague eyes. “Tell us, woman!”

  She nods, grateful. “It’s on fire,” she says.

  The gruff-voiced man, whose face is all cruel angles, looks out once more at the battlefield, then back to Jane. “If you’re lying—”

  “Come on, miss, you’d better tell this to the colonel,” says Captain Auden. “First, please, have something to drink. That’s a long run.”

  He offers her a wooden canteen. She is, in fact, thirsty, and tilts a few drops of the warm, tinny water into her mouth.

  The men usher her forward, toward the road where their fellow soldiers are loading weapons onto carts. Toward Alice. Away from a decision that might have changed Captain Auden for good. Will they find a different Captain Auden in 1789 than the man they left behind? Or was the Captain Auden they know saved from this decision already in some way, or by some other version of Jane, for some other reason?

  All in all, a worthwhile risk. She tells herself this, as she stumbles forward through the woods, ahead of these men and their loaded guns, toward their comrades.

  Alice’s father will recognize her, but perhaps she can convince him she only bears an uncanny resemblance to the girl he knows across the ocean. After all, there is no earthly explanation for why Jane would be here, and she is nine years older than she ought to be in 1780.

  But the officer who comes striding toward them is not Colonel Payne, to her great relief, but a green-coated young man in a black-plumed helmet. He confers with Auden and the other men for a moment, then glances at Jane.

  “Light companies ride to Sparling’s Crossing,” he says to the gruff-voiced man, who must be ten years his senior at least. “The infantry can finish loading the guns.”

  The green-coated men from the woods run off and give orders, and men on horseback circle and collect on the road, their horses whinnying.

  The officer steps closer to Jane. “You’ll have to come with us. Can you ride?”

  “She can ride with me,” says a red-coated soldier, trotting up on a piebald horse and stopping beside a rock, expectantly.

  Jane studies the soldier’s posture for a moment, then runs to the rock and swings up behind Alice.

  “By all that’s holy, are you a horse thief now?” she whispers, settling on the rolled blanket behind the saddle, wrapping her arms around Alice’s waist. The coat still smells of cedar and dust.

  “Who the hell . . . ?” the green-coated officer mutters, but Alice is already riding down
the road, weaving in and out of the other horses as they ride to a camp that is almost certainly not on fire.

  “I’m going to veer to the right on the count of ten,” Alice whispers. “Are you ready?”

  “But will the horse—”

  “We’ll find out.”

  Jane pulls the time-wheel from her pocket, sets it to the second set of calculations she’d made, back in the study.

  “Ready.”

  “Nine. Ten!”

  Their horse veers off the dirt road and into a beech copse and out of sight of the men on the road forever.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Of the Substance of the Horrible Event

  1780

  It’s hotter, and not foggy at all, on the other side of the shimmer. The piebald mare rears and whinnies, and Alice pats its neck, calming it.

  “Excellent,” she says. “That was very well done. Very well done indeed. You are a mare of great courage.”

  “A mare some soldier will no doubt miss,” Jane says.

  “Hmm. Well, perhaps we can find a lovely situation for her. Where are we, Jane?”

  They are in a narrow, cobbled alley between two burnt-out buildings. The smell of ash is strong, but there’s no smoke, no fog, no gunfire.

  “We’re in Charleston,” says Jane. “Around noon on May 15, if I got it right. Did you discover anything about your father?”

  “Nothing. There wasn’t time for much. We could go back, earlier.”

  Jane takes a moment to answer, and when she does, her voice is unnaturally light. “Let’s see what this day has in store for us. Perhaps if we know what the terrible event is, we will have more luck in finding its causes.”

  “Mmm,” Alice says. It must have been difficult for Jane, alone in the trees like that. Truth be told, she doesn’t have much stomach to witness the battle whose aftermath they saw. She lets the horse sniff the air, lets it test the cobbles beneath its feet. For the moment, she feels entirely herself and entirely comfortable, her legs comforting the horse, and Jane’s legs comforting her. Jane’s arms around her waist; Jane’s left hand lowers a little as the right moves up, over the red coat that covers her breasts, and Jane’s right hand grasps Alice’s chin, tilts her head back. Jane’s lips on her cheek, her ear.

  “We don’t have to stay here at all,” Jane says.

  A woman passes them on foot. She looks resentful, and with a small thrill Alice realizes it’s not because she’s recognized that both of the people embracing on the back of a horse are women. It’s because of the red coat Alice is wearing, because of the fact that this city was under siege for weeks, and fell to the British only three days ago.

  “Let’s have a look around,” she says.

  They turn into a wider street. The place is noisy but not with the ordinary sounds of a town or city; there’s shouting nearby, and someone is singing a song, not in joy but in mocking triumph.

  Two gaunt children watch them from a doorway, one dark-skinned and one pale. If only she had something in her pockets—a few chestnuts, even. But she does not. Alice vows to return here and bring food—a bit of bread. Some apples, even some chocolate. She knows full well it’s silly—there are uncounted numbers of hungry people in every time and place—but she’s seen their faces, now, these two.

  They pass a coffeehouse or tavern. It’s deserted now, and clearly the conquering British had not yet got around to supplying it with food and coffee, as the only thing left on the trestle tables is a single hat. Over the door, a flag of dark blue, with a crescent in the corner bearing the word LIBERTY.

  In a few years, Charleston will be part of an independent America. But today, these people know only that the British army has reasserted its might, its right.

  A boom like thunder, and the horse screams, and bolts.

  The houses shake and glass falls into the street.

  Jane’s arms tighten around Alice’s waist as Alice pulls on the reins, brings the horse to a frantic stop, and stares at the great cloud of smoke rising from the centre of Charleston.

  It’s a pillar of fire, with dark objects flying out from it as if blown by a hurricane. Something whips past Alice and embeds in a window shutter; she turns to see it. It’s a bayonet, stuck in the wood, shuddering.

  “Good God,” Jane says.

  “All hands!” someone shouts.

  “Fire!”

  Alice slides down off the horse, her shin jolting from the quick landing, and helps Jane down after her. She pats the mare on the rump, to send it away, but the horse circles around her, nervous but not cowed.

  The women run to a conduit nearby where a man is filling buckets. Alice takes one and Jane the other, and they run toward the fire, trying to go as quickly as possible without spilling the water.

  “It’s the weapons in the storehouse,” yells a man running past, to no one in particular. “There’s mountains of ordnance in there. Thousands of muskets. Ammunition. Powder. The magazine is on fire. Get out. We have to get out!”

  Jane drops her bucket and takes Alice’s hand, and they run with the crowd. As they pass a charred body, its limbs at unnatural angles, Alice puts her hand to Jane’s head and pulls it toward her shoulder, guides her gaze away.

  The piebald mare is still there, running but not in any clear direction. Alice runs to her and she slows.

  “We take the horse with us,” Alice says, and she leads the mare to a nearby stone and mounts, pulling Jane up behind her. She rides away from the explosion, back into the alley, away from the people. But no one is looking at them anyway. “Ready?”

  Jane hesitates, again. She’s fiddling with the time-wheel.

  “Ready?” Alice prods.

  “Ready.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: On the Fragile History of Grace Zuniga

  2145

  Noon, November 30, 2145. But not precisely noon. Prudence deliberately arrives thirty seconds after the time Almo set, and manages to arrange her shimmer to appear behind the wood-and-paper screen that he keeps off to one side in his office. She has always suspected that he put the thing there to try to unfuck the godawful feng shui that comes with having an office with no door. There’s only one way in or out of the place, and that’s time travel.

  This place has always made her nervous. But what choice does she have?

  She sighs, and steps out from behind the screen, and takes some small consolation in his fleeting expression of surprise, the fact that he’s halfway out from behind the desk, and not peering expectantly over it as he no doubt was half a minute ago.

  “Ms. Zuniga,” he says, with a hint of ironic familiarity, a hint of disdain, just enough emphasis on the Ms. to tell her that they’ve stripped her of her rank. Which she fully expected them to do, of course, but it stings nonetheless. “You decided to show up after all. I commend your good sense.”

  In the video, he’d called her Prudence. Was that him being good cop or bad cop? She leaves the shimmer open behind her. One step back and she can be out of here. Safe.

  “Eighteenth century,” Almo says, looking Prudence up and down. “The year is 1785, give or take. Am I right?”

  She curtsies, holding her skirt between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and raising her middle fingers. He responds with a joyless, brittle laugh.

  “It wasn’t enough for you to erase my sister,” she says, the words my sister feeling foreign to her mouth, words she does not remember ever saying aloud before, “but now you’ve abducted my friends?”

  “Abducted!” He scoffs. “I haven’t abducted anyone. In point of fact, your friends were the ones who removed your sister from this timeline. Indirectly. Everything has consequences, Prudence. You knew that once.”

  So it’s back to her first name after all.

  “Tell me where they are.”

  He shakes his head, slowly, his gaze on her. “I believe if anyone here owes an explanation, it is you, Prudence. Tell me why you left. Why you deserted.”

  Over his desk, the painting of How They Met Themselves. Just
as creepy as ever.

  Prudence swallows. “I found out about a timeline where you screw me over. Sir.”

  He barks a laugh. “Good Christ. Was that it? You know as well as I do that we see the shadows of things that may be, not that will be. You threw everything away based on something I haven’t even done? So petty.”

  He loves that Dickens quote. This is probably the tenth time she’s heard it. She spreads her arms wide. “What can I say? I am a petty son of a bitch.”

  He concedes the point with a smile, a nod of his brown curls. He’s thinner than last she saw him, or maybe she’s just starting to forget.

  “You always were good with details, that I’ll grant. And it’s true that the smallest change can shift the world. Take, for example, your own parents.”

  “What about them?”

  “Ah, yes. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? In some timelines, including this one, your mother once worked with a man named Marcus Larsen. Soon after she married your father. Never heard the name? No, she would not have mentioned it, would not have brought him home, not even as a colleague or a friend. And no, they never had an affair, in any timeline that we have seen. They were both far too honorable to act on their feelings, or even voice them to each other. But for six months, a year or two before you were born, your mother became, shall we say, withdrawn. She and your father—how shall I put this? They were not intimate very often, during those months. Your father never knew what cloud had come over their marriage. One day, it passed. Your mother chose to forget Marcus Larsen, chose to love the one she was with.”

  Prudence balls her fist. Her mother’s private life, her emotions, are not General Warren Almo’s sandbox. She’s going to get this asshole.