A Flight in Time (Thief in Time Series Book 2)

by Cidney Swanson

  Jillian’s obsession with safety meant she could answer almost any question DaVinci threw at her. Besides her mummy fears, DaVinci had also been terrified they might be “duplicated,” as Edmund had been. It had taken several tries for Jillian to explain to DaVinci that the duplication only worked in one direction (returning to the present with things from the past) and that merely using the machine didn’t cause the duplication. It was only if you brought something (or someone) with you from the past that space–time would duplicate the item or person. It was another way time healed itself. Jillian wasn’t crazy about the way the descriptions made her and her friends sound like aggressors who injured space–time, but she hadn’t hit on a better description.

  Jillian’s obsession with learning everything she could from Khan’s notes had proved useful in other ways, too, leading to a finding which had eluded Halley on her first use of the machine. Jillian had discovered that, with some additional programming, the machine could be set for both day of year and time of day, which had opened up many possibilities.

  “Edmund, come on!” said DaVinci. “Tell us!”

  Jillian, who was pretty sure she knew where and when they were going, felt a twinge of guilt. With Jillian at the controls just before school had started, Edmund and Halley had taken three journeys back in time. Because Jillian knew where the pair had gone before, she suspected she knew where they were traveling tonight. Poor DaVinci was the only one out of the loop.

  “Please tell us,” Jillian said to Edmund, out of politeness.

  Jillian saw Edmund glancing nervously at Halley. Saw Halley give him an encouraging smile, as if to say tell them.

  Edmund’s normally steady voice shook a little as he spoke. “It is my wish,” he began, “to invite you all to Yuletide at my family’s estate in 1587, where Halley and I request you to witness a private marriage.”

  Halley smiled softly at his side. “Our marriage.”

  Jillian felt her chest tighten. Marriage? Halley was getting married? Jillian was . . . happy for them. Of course she was. This was a happy occasion. Who wouldn’t be happy for Edmund and Halley? In spite of how much she wanted to be happy for them, a lump formed in Jillian’s throat.

  Halley was looking from DaVinci to Jillian for a response. Jillian tried to speak, but her mouth felt as if it were lined in tissue paper.

  “For real?” demanded DaVinci. She squealed and clapped her hands together. “This is so cool! I’m so happy for you both! I can’t believe it! Oooooh! Your wedding dress is in that garment bag! Your actual wedding dress! Halley!” At this point DaVinci squealed again and threw her arms around Halley, and then Edmund, and then Halley again.

  “Congratulations,” said Jillian, at last managing to form words. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy.”

  She hugged Halley and, swallowing back the lump in her throat, she even managed to tilt the corners of her mouth into something smile shaped as she stepped back.

  But really, it was so unfair. Couldn’t the universe spare a little happiness Jillian’s direction? Not to mention, Jillian had just lost all hope of sharing her own news. It would be rude to bring it up now. As if dropping out of college compared to . . . marriage. Her heart pinched, and she realized how much she’d been counting on her friends’ encouragement.

  She tuned back into the conversation to hear Edmund explaining that Elizabethan ceremonies were short, lasting only a minute or so.

  “But still,” said DaVinci, “it’s a wedding!” And then her eyes narrowed. She looked from Halley to Edmund and then back to Halley. “Is this about Edmund’s refusal to ‘take you abed’ or whatever he calls it?”

  Edmund’s tanned cheeks flushed with color. Jillian tried to think of something to say to take away Edmund’s embarrassment.

  “We just want to be married,” said Halley. “Not everything is about sex.”

  “Tell that to my English professor,” said DaVinci. “And anyway, why not just get married here? I mean, I’m thrilled we’re going to Edmund’s castle or whatever, but think of how much fun it would be to have a Big Fat Danish Wedding here!”

  “Edmund has no legal existence here,” Halley explained. “You need a legal identity to get married in the US, so we’re getting married in the past.”

  “Wait. Can you even do that?” asked DaVinci. “Not the get-married-in-the-past part. Can you go back to a past where you already exist?”

  “Khan recorded that he did it,” replied Jillian. “He nabbed some out-of-print physics text from himself.”

  “And you swear this won’t make more duplicate Edmunds?” DaVinci asked suspiciously.

  “You have to grab something from the past and take it with you for that to happen,” said Halley.

  Jillian was relieved for once to not be the one answering the questions. Actually she had a question of her own.

  “Halley and Edmund, won’t you need a legal identity to get married in sixteenth-century England?”

  “Yes, there are legalities,” said Halley. “We took care of them on those three trips you helped us with.”

  “Three trips?” asked DaVinci. “What did you need? A royal decree or something?”

  “Not quite,” said Halley. “In Edmund’s time, people had to declare their intention to marry in front of the whole parish on three successive Sundays.”

  “Oh my gosh—of course!” said DaVinci. “I’ve heard of this!”

  “You have?” asked Jillian.

  “Yes,” replied DaVinci. “It came up in my English class. It was something called ‘announcing the band,’ I think.”

  Halley laughed. “Close. ‘Reading the banns.’ It’s a chance for anyone who objects to a marriage to say something.”

  “Right!” said DaVinci. “You had to read the banns to get married. Unless you were like Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. They paid a big old fine to some bishop and got married fast.”

  Jillian blinked.

  “She was pregnant,” continued DaVinci. “And the banns couldn’t be read during certain times of year—Advent maybe?—which would have meant Anne looking way pregnant due to the delay, so Shakespeare or his dad got someone to put up a small fortune as insurance against anyone else later claiming Will and Anne couldn’t legally marry.”

  “Wow,” said Halley. “You really paid attention in class. That’s almost exactly how Edmund explained it.”

  “But how did you explain your identities those three Sundays?” asked Jillian, curious. “If you were in Edmund’s church reading the banns, wouldn’t people ask who the heck you were?”

  “Or recognize Edmund as, you know, Edmund?” asked DaVinci.

  “In 1587, which we chose for our visits,” replied Edmund, “I was a boy. No one in 1587 had seen me as I am now, an adult.”

  “For our identities, Edmund researched his family tree and found a branch of the family from the north with lots of sons, several of whom ended up moving to London, and he pretended to be one of them. To explain my weird accent and language, I became a cousin from France, fleeing religious persecution.”

  “We are poor,” continued Edmund, “so a large wedding will not be expected.”

  “Plus he sort of bribed the priest,” added Halley.

  Edmund looked offended. “I merely invited him to attend the family Yuletide feast.”

  “Promising him a haunch of peacock, I believe,” said Halley.

  During this discussion, Jillian had turned her attention to the computer screen on the podium between the Tesla coils. After swiping at the dust that had collected on the surface, she began the process of making the journey to Edmund and Halley’s wedding possible. She would be happy for them. She would absolutely be happy. Later, when she was alone, there would be plenty of time to feel the hurt of Halley’s perfect life and her own imperfect one.

  “Hey,” said DaVinci, “if we’re going to Edmund’s time, I call dibs on his brother!”

  “That should be interesting,” murmured Jillian as she keyed in a series of comm
ands. “Edmund’s younger brother will only be five or six years old in 1587, right?”

  “Aye,” said Edmund.

  “Fine,” said DaVinci, sighing heavily. “No hot sixteenth-century boyfriend for me. In that case, to assist me with this terrible disappointment, I get first choice of the bridesmaid’s gowns.”

  Although not technically afraid of flying, Jillian was terrified of falling, and this included the horrific sensation of tumbling that preceded arrival in another time and place. Neither Halley nor Edmund had thought to tell Jillian that “falling” was a part of time travel, or she might never have agreed to try it in the first place. But while she dreaded the sensation, she stood in even greater dread of disappointing her closest friends, so she’d gritted her teeth and borne it, trying not to remember the time she’d preceded Branson out a third-story window.

  Tonight, with a wedding at stake, there was no question of backing out. So Jillian donned her farthingale and stomacher, admiring the pleated skirt and richly embroidered frontispiece of the bodice. She tied on her snood, a head covering DaVinci found snicker-worthy. Halley had to help tie on everyone’s crisp white neck and wrist ruffs.

  They all looked splendid, thought Jillian, especially Halley, her dark hair and light-brown skin set off beautifully by an emerald green wedding gown. But all that beauty came at a cost. Dressing for December in England involved more heavy woolens and velvets than were strictly comfortable during a balmy Montecito November.

  “Dying here,” declared DaVinci, fanning herself. She was stuck in the middle of the platform, hemmed in by the others.

  “Just another few seconds,” Jillian called over the crackling of the massive capacitor banks as they surged with power.

  “Thou wilt be shortly most glad of thy garb,” shouted Edmund, who’d slipped back into his natural speech in anticipation of the visit. “’Twas bitter cold, the winter of ’87.”

  A bright arc of electricity burst out, and the travelers were locked in place, burning with the heat of space–time as it protested their incursion into the past. And then, just as Jillian began to feel the terror of her fall, they tumbled in a heap onto blessedly solid ground.

  At first, the ground beneath her seemed burning hot, but after a handful of seconds, Jillian realized it was burning with cold. She opened her eyes. In every direction for as far as her eye could see, each pebble, each lump of dirt was delineated with rime—a layer of hoarfrost bright as diamond dust under the moon’s light.

  “It’s . . . beautiful,” she murmured, pushing up from the ground.

  “You need to seriously . . . rethink . . . your word choice,” mumbled DaVinci. “It’s dark. And freezing. And lots of other things besides beautiful.”

  The others were still brushing ice and clumps of frosty dirt from their clothes when Halley’s exclamation drew everyone’s attention.

  “Look, there it is!” Halley was pointing.

  Jillian turned and found herself looking at the great manor, Hensley, where it rose in a glory of smoking chimneys and turrets outlined against the starry sky. Below the chimneys, tiny windows glowed like luminaries that had been plucked down from the sky. For a moment, all four stood in silence, looking, breathing steam into the night. But then raucous laughter drifted toward them from the manor, followed by music, as strange to Jillian’s ears as it must have been familiar to Edmund’s.

  “Come!” cried Edmund. “There’s no time to waste!”

  This was true—in less than fifteen minutes, the fabric of space–time would drag them back to where they belonged.

  Edmund took them to a side door through stone walls three-feet thick and then along a narrow corridor leading to the Great Hall. Just before they would have entered the hall, Edmund indicated a narrow staircase. They climbed it, arriving at a sort of balcony overlooking the entire hall.

  “The minstrels’ gallery,” Edmund explained. “It hath the most privacy.”

  “Not to mention the most commanding view,” murmured DaVinci. “Where are the, you know, minstrels? You said this was a private ceremony, but aren’t we at risk of discovery here?”

  “Nay,” said Edmund. “The musicians are all below. Grandfather built the minstrels’ gallery in imitation of other great houses but found he preferred the musicians should perform within easy calling distance.”

  Below, a gray-haired man was demanding a carol for dancing. The musicians struck a chord, which sent half the guests clamoring to the center of the hall while the other half beat a retreat, evidently preferring drink to dance.

  “Magical!” murmured Jillian, gazing down at the assembly.

  The view from the gallery was spectacular, allowing the travelers to see intricate patterns of the dance, which would have been hidden down below. Skirts, full and heavy, swirled, seeming to propel the dancers like spinning tops. Several of the men wore capes tied on one side, and these, too, whirled in the procession of dancers. Jillian couldn’t begin to name the odd instruments, only one of which—vaguely guitar shaped—resembled anything modern.

  To one side of the hall, a fire blazed, popping and crackling and sending the occasional ember toward the dancers. It made the eight-foot-wide fireplace at Applewood—Jillian’s home—seem like a doll fireplace.

  “Will you look at those tapestries,” murmured DaVinci, pointing to the walls behind Edmund’s grandfather. “That would take me decades. Actual decades of work.”

  “Aye,” said Edmund. “The hangings were ordered when my grandfather was but five and thirty and delivered just before I was born.”

  “This is absolutely the best view in the whole place. I can’t believe we’re here, seeing all this!” DaVinci clapped her hands together. “Thank you, Edmund! Thank you both.”

  “You’re sure the priest is coming?” murmured Halley to Edmund.

  “Oh, aye,” said Edmund. “The stairs creak with his approach even now.”

  Jillian tried to listen, but there were a lot of competing sounds.

  “I did love to watch the feasting as a boy,” said Edmund. “I would sneak up here to avoid being sent to bed. Sadly, by the time I was nine or ten, it became a haunt of ladies and gentlemen and so was lost to my use.” A smile softened the angles of his face.

  Halley leaned over and kissed him.

  Jillian looked away. Somehow Halley’s happiness made her own seem so far off, so unobtainable. She reminded herself that she had a loving family. Branson. Money. For all the good money ever did, paying for an expensive education she couldn’t even appreciate . . .

  DaVinci addressed Edmund, interrupting Jillian’s gloomy thoughts. “After you getteth hitched, please, please say you’ll fetcheth us some Christmas grog for a wedding toast?”

  Edmund opened his mouth to reply but was at that moment interrupted by the arrival of the priest. Greetings followed, some with kissing, as Edmund insisted was proper, and some with bowing. (DaVinci flat out refused to kiss anyone.)

  And then Edmund and Halley took hands, looking at each other with such tenderness that Jillian found it impossible to be sad. And when she thought of how Halley didn’t even have a dad to give her away, she came close to tears.

  The ceremony itself was short and to the point, as Edmund had promised. He was instructed to speak first.

  “Before God and these Christian souls,” he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing with emotion, “I take thee, Halley, unto my wife and thereto plight thee my troth.”

  Halley, her eyes shining with tears, spoke in reply. “I take thee, Edmund, unto my husband and thereto I plight thee my troth.”

  Once each had placed a ring on the other’s finger, the two were declared married.

  “That’s it?” DaVinci whispered to Jillian.

  Jillian, dabbing at her eyes, didn’t know.

  “You may kiss the bride,” said DaVinci, much to the amusement of Edmund. “In, uh, the country of the East Mountain of Montecito, that’s how we do it, anyway.”

  Halley leaned toward Edmund. “Husband? Wh
at thinkest thou?”

  Edmund took Halley’s hands and kissed her with a passion Jillian was worried the priest might not approve of. The priest merely smiled, however, but was evidently as eager as the four friends could hope to exit and join the festivities below. After stealing another swift kiss, Edmund led the old man downstairs.

  DaVinci called after him, “Don’t forgetteth the ale to drink thy good health.”

  Jillian found herself giggling. It was completely preposterous, her best friend Halley now married, here in the sixteenth century. Halley chortled, too, and the three girls in the gallery hugged one another, Jillian’s heart overflowing with a happiness she didn’t have to fake. A moment later, a sudden gust wafted rich scents up to the gallery, causing all three of them to turn their attention to the Great Hall.

  “That smells . . . divine,” murmured DaVinci.

  Servants had just pushed through a door on the opposite side of the hall, bearing a huge tray with three peacocks toward a table that already groaned with food.

  “That’s what the priest wanted to be downstairs for,” said Halley. “Oh, I wish we could stay!”

  “Edmund probably has other ideas of how to round out the evening,” murmured DaVinci with a waggle of her pale eyebrows.

  Jillian meanwhile was inhaling so deeply she was getting dizzy, each new breath revealing a new scent perfuming the hall. “Oh,” she said, sighing. “That’s saffron. And ginger. And mint. I wish we could stay!” She checked the time. “Six minutes to go,” she said softly.