Bertie whistled up a carriage out on the street. Smith was the last to climb on board, his massive frame causing the springs to squeak loudly as they absorbed his weight. The driver offered to take their baggage into a wire basket on the roof, but the marshal insisted on keeping both of the large canvas sacks inside the carriage with them. The rifle, discreetly enclosed within a soft leather case, sat propped between his knees. Young Bertie had trouble keeping his eyes off it.
Feeling a lot less conspicuous now that she was hidden away within the folds of the warm, dry cattleman's coat, Cady returned Smith's hat to him. He kept it in his lap while they rode to the Frontier Club, his fingers picking at the brim. He was subdued, but agitated, his face a relief map of furrows and creases. Cady took his hand at one point, as a young woman might do with her fiancé, but he did not respond in character. His fingers continued to pluck nervously at the brim of his hat as he peered through the windows of the hansom cab as though expecting to be set upon by Apaches or bandits at any moment.
“You must tell me all about your adventures in the Wild West, Jane,” said Gracie. For a moment, Cady was caught out, having relaxed a little for the first time in hours and forgetting that she was still playing a role.
“What would you like to know?” she asked.
Gracie leaned in as if to impart a secret. Her fiancé mirrored the gesture and all three of them met in the middle of the carriage like conspirators.
“We have heard that all of the old certainties and hierarchies and ways of doing things fall away on the frontier,” said Bertie.
“I have been told that women in the colonies enjoy much greater standing thanks to the responsibilities they must carry out on the frontier,” said Gracie. Her eyes positively shone with excitement in the light of a passing gas lamp.
“We are great believers in the equality of the sexes,” said Bertie, unconsciously imitating Smith's wary scanning of the streets outside the carriage, lest someone should overhear such radical views. “Have you read the works of the Marquis de Condorcet? Sur l’admission des femmes aux droits de cite, perhaps?
Cady sketched an apologetic expression.
“I still haven't got to that last Harry Potter yet.”
“I’m not familiar with him,” said Bertie. “Is he a student of John Stuart Mill?”
“Albus Dumbledore,” said Cady, and Smith did squeeze her hand then. Hard.
“Ow! Honeybunch, remember your strength.”
“And you remember not to tease people here, Jane. It will be noted and you will be found out.”
“I'm sorry,” Cady said, but to the young London couple, not to Smith. “Wild Bill here is right. But so are you, Gracie. You should go to the New World. You should help make a new world.”
She looked out of the carriage window. The fog had closed as leaden and grim as a funeral binding, but Cady could tell they were rolling through another slum, or what she thought of as a slum; row after row of closely packed terraces, mean little hovels, overcrowded and grimy.
“This world sucks,” she said, mostly to herself, as she watched a thin man, barely clothed, and covered mostly in bruises and scabs, dragging himself through the crush of foot traffic, one hand waving an empty bottle, the other grabbing at a wrought-iron railing to hold himself up in the final extremes of what was probably mortal drunkenness. If he fell asleep on the streets tonight, he would not wake up tomorrow.
“What a delightfully expressive turn of phrase,” exclaimed Gracie. “The Old World does indeed suck, doesn't it, Bertie?”
“It does, my love, and that is why we will make a new one, far from here. It sucks,” he said, trying the phrase out for himself.
“It sucks, it bites, it blows chunks,” said Cady, stopping only when Smith kicked the side of her boot.
The Frontier Club met in a couple of private rooms above the ground floor of a popular ale house in Aldgate, not far from their own room at The Spotted Goose. Cady had been expecting a clubhouse, an old sandstone building perhaps, full of stuffed animals and looted artworks. But the Frontier Club was an association, not a building, and the F-word spoke more to the member's gently radical politics than it did to geography. Bertie and Gracie were not unique in hoping to find more freedom beyond the shores of England, but most of the Club's patrons dreamed of changing the world, not their home address.
The meeting rooms were unheated, save for one small fireplace in the corner of the larger room, and Cady was happy to stay in her duster. Most of the two dozen or so club members were rugged up against the chill and remained wrapped in their scarves and greatcoats even as the room warmed up with their body heat. Supper was a potluck affair; sandwiches, thick soups and heavy mugs of warm ale. Bottles of gin appeared from nowhere. She fell on the modest buffet, inhaling half a loaf of bread and a bowl of pea and ham soup. It was mostly pea. The ham was a couple of scraps of pig fat stuck to the bottom of the pan, but she was so hungry by then that she didn't care.
Smith stood guard over their luggage in one corner of the room, but soon found himself surrounded by an audience hungry for stories of the Wild West. His fans were mostly men, Cady noted, while she soon attracted a circle of mostly young women who, like Grace, were easily impressed by tales of her adventures with the legendary archaeologist, Doctor Indiana Jones, and the even more legendary artifact hunter, Miss Lara Croft.
“And is it true,” asked Gracie, who had assumed the role of MC for their small group, “that women on the frontier are not just required, but expected to do everything a man can do?”
“Going backwards in high heels,” Cady said with a wink to appreciative laughter.
A thin faced man with a prematurely receding hairline, the only male in their group, laughed along with the women, but said, “Surely you don't do everything, though? You would not be expected to fight off savages, would you? I cannot imagine myself getting the better of a Zulu warrior or a Comanche brave. By what deviltry would you do such a thing?”
His question elicited a round of feminine dissent and protest.
“Oh pooh-pooh to you, Chumley!”
“Don't you bother with him, Jane. He's new to the Club.”
“He's only been here a month. The cheek of him!”
“I'm only asking out of curiosity,” protested this ‘Chumley’.
Cady smiled disarmingly at him. She was feeling generous. “Don't let them tease you, Chumley,” she said. She was well fed by then, full of soup and sandwiches and half a pint of increasingly tasty ale, and she felt more comfortable and in control of her circumstances than at any time since waking up in that grim little attic room with Smith. “Tell you what,” she went on, “why don't you try and strangle me, like a big bad Comanche, and I'll show you how I'd get the better of him.”
A brief flight of excited giggles broke up and disappeared in gasps and cries of surprise at her challenge. Chumley—had she heard them right, was that even a real name?—smiled uncertainly, but his expression really turned rubbery when Cady took his hand and placed it on her throat.
“Oh, my!” said Gracie, her pale cheeks blushing bright pink. The other women cooed and gulped and fanned themselves, and Chumley looked as though he might faint at the skin-on-skin contact.
“Go on,” said Cady, gently. “Strangle me.”
She felt the merest tremor in his fingers. Maybe he was about to close them gently around her throat. Maybe it was just a nervous twitch. She moved before he had a chance to tighten his grip.
It was one of the first techniques they taught at that class on campus, the self-defense course she'd taken with Georgia that had been such an epic fail when she'd actually needed it. Here, with no pressure, she executed it without a problem. A simple hip rotation and wrist lock. Cady shifted her stance, turning her body side-on to the attacker, as she had learned. This had the effect of taking most of her vulnerable areas off-line and, more importantly, of opening a gap, just a small gap, between her throat and her very gentle, very compliant attacker's hand. Her ow
n hand snaked in over the top, took a firm grip on the fleshy mound below Chumley's thumb, and peeled off the one-handed strangle as she turned her body back toward him.
Even as she performed the maneuver, Cady silently chastised herself. She had forgotten to take his balance, to extend his arm out straight and pop his elbow against her upper torso. She hadn't distracted him with a shout or a soft tissue strike. She'd basically done it all wrong, again. But this time it didn't matter. Poor Chumley had no idea what was happening as she bent his hand back against the wrist, forcing the joint into hyperextension. He cried out in alarm and began to collapse under the pain. Cady held up the little finger of her other hand.
“Ladies,” she said as though giving instruction, which was exactly what she was doing. She laid the tip of her pinkie against Chumley's locked up hand and pressed, ever so lightly. He fell to the floor. Her admirers clapped and cried out their appreciation as she hauled him back to his feet with a strong two-handed grip.
She gave him a peck on the cheek for his help.
No hard feelings.
Chumley blushed almost as feverishly as Gracie.
“Oh, my word,” he said. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“Fort Apache,” said Cady, “in the Badlands of Deadwood, from Marshal Raylan Givens.”
The small circle of women burst into applause, while Chumley gazed at Cady with the moon-faced, cow-eyed intensity of a newly converted true believer.
A deep voice growled just behind her.
“My dear, a word if you would, please.”
Smith.
She felt him take her elbow in a strong grip, a hold she had no chance of breaking no matter what little parlor tricks she might care to try.
“Of course, darling,” she trilled as the marshal drew her away, out of the meeting room, into the dimly lit hallway. Behind her, the Frontier Club came together and responded as a whole to the excitement, the gentleman members now hazing poor Chumley about having allowed a mere woman to get the better of him, the mere women testifying that “Miss Jane” would be back presently to turn them all into feather dusters, just you wait and see. The atmosphere was convivial, good-natured. It was all in good fun.
But not out in the hallway.
“What the hell were you doing?”
Smith's hand tightened around her upper arm, and she did move then, turning slightly to dig her shoulder into his body and jerk her arm out through the gap between his thumb and the tips of his fingers. The move worked as it should have, but only because he let it. Cady did not doubt that if he wanted to, Titanic Smith could crush her tiny bones without effort.
“Nothing,” she protested. “I wasn't doing anything.”
“I saw what you did to that barber's clerk,” Smith growled, his voice low and threatening.
"How do you know he's a barber's clerk?" she started to ask, but stopped herself when she realized Smith was just using some Old Western slang. Back in her day, he'd probably have called him a fag.
“It was nothing,” she said, less guiltily, more forcefully this time. “Just a little aikido, a self-defense move that, quite frankly, these women could do with learning. We might have fallen in with the world's most liberal adventurers' club here, and it still feels like 4Chan to me.”
Smith looked at her as though she was speaking in Fortran or C++, which to him, she guessed, was about right. Maybe there were limits to his universal translator or maybe …
“I told you we had to keep our heads down,” he said through gritted teeth. “I told you we had to lay low, like fugitives. Because that's what we are. We got to belly through the brush here and you need to get that through your pretty little head. Because every time you poke that head up, you make increasingly short odds of having it blowed clean off.”
“Listen, you,” she said, hearing her mother in her voice and not liking it much, but plunging on anyway. “I know what total surveillance looks like. That's the world I live in. Or lived in, until you dragged me out of it. Remember that? When you dragged me out of my perfectly acceptable life into your personal shit show? Well, that place? Where I came from? An all-powerful all-seeing spy state isn't a paranoid delusion. It's Facebook and Google and Edward Snowden. And long story short, I know what being watched all the time feels like. I. Fucking. Monetized it,” she said, stabbing her finger into his chest to emphasize each word.
“And this,” she went on as she waved her arms around at the upper floor of the ale house with its dank peeling wallpaper and the smell of wet feet, “this is not it. So chill out. We'll eighty-six this bitch just as soon as your not-so-goddamned-smartwatch reboots. But for now I've had it, okay? I want to get another drink and a sandwich and spend a little time hanging with my home girls here who could do with some mentoring on how to dejunk the patriarchy so that, maybe, just maybe if I ever get home, Gamergate is a fucking historical footnote and not my own personal reality show.”
Smith folded his massive arms and slowly straightened up, looking down upon her as if from a judge's bench.
“I have apologized for the necessity of roping you into my troubles. I have done so more than once. We have reached the end of that particular trail, missy, and the time is nigh for you to be removing the cloth from your ears.”
He leaned down toward her again, getting right into her grill.
“This here, what you are doing, this is exactly what will bring the apprentices. I do not know how, I do not know why, I just know that this will do it.”
“You don't know much, do you?” Cady shot back. She refused to cower under his glare. And it was a real glare, too. This was a harder, meaner side of him that he had not allowed her to see before. As far as she was concerned, that just made it all the more important she stand her ground.
“Everything alright out here?”
It was Gracie, surprising them both when she put her head around the corner.
“Yes,” they answered in unison, but with such force that the words landed like fists, knocking her back where she had come from.
“Good-o then,” her retreating voice cried out from inside the room.
Cady's hand was inside the pocket of her leather jacket, her fingers stroking the can of mace. If this guy so much as laid a hand on her, she was going to hose him down. No way was she going to be dragged through the past by some Lynyrd Skynyrd, stupid-hat guy in manheels and a belt buckle as big as a fucking football.
“Do you even know what a temporal paradox is?” she said quietly. “An alternative timeline? A stable time loop? A butterfly effect?”
She could see from the way his expression softened from an angry scowl into something that looked like deep thought, that perhaps she wouldn't have long before he actually did. His hand, she saw, had reached into a vest pocket to stroke that damned watch again. Seizing the moment while she could, Cady pressed on.
“Well, I do. And I got some good news and some bad news for you, Marshal. Good news is that you have grabbed up somebody with half a chance of understanding what the hell is happening here. The bad news, for you, is that you are going to have to cowgirl up and accept that I am the smartest guy in the room, and if anybody is going to get us home it's going to be me. Not you.”
She could see by the look on his face that he was less offended than interested. But he was still a little offended. Ugh. Men.
“I got no doubt you were really good at what you did back in 1870 or whenever it was. But that's not what you're doing now. You don't even have the language to describe what's happening. The theory of relativity is like fifty years away in your personal future. For me, it's old news. Wormholes. Quantum entanglement. Superstring theory, it's all old news.”
Cady had no idea what actual role any of those things had to play in time travel. But she'd wasted enough time on iO9 and Boing Boing to know they were sort of relevant.
Sort of.
And she was certain that as soon as she could get online again, she could quickly cram enough study to offer a Masters-level
explanation of the phenomenon compared to anything Smith had offered.
He seemed to reach the same conclusion after a few seconds digesting her bite-sized rant.
“All righty then,” he said, with obvious reluctance. “But remember … You don't belong here. You are a pebble skipping across the surface of this pond. Ripples follow you. Try not to be a damned boulder.”
13
A barmaid ringing a school bell broke up the meeting of the Frontier Club a few minutes before the alehouse downstairs closed its doors. By then “Bill Hickok” and his betrothed had been inducted as honorary members of the club and “Jane” in particular had become fast friends—besties, as she insisted—with Gracie and the other ladies, the “Frontier Grrls,” as she also insisted on calling them.
At one point, she had half a dozen of these drunken, Victorian proto-feminists falling about laughing as they growled at each other that they were all “frontierrr grrls” now and their gentlemen had all best watch out.
“Grrr, grrr.”
Smith did relax, but not much. He told more stories about life on the actual frontier, stories which Cady supposed were mostly true, unlike hers. The gentlemen of the club, most of whom had never been closer to a frontier than the wilds of Cockfoster, gave up plying him with pints of ale in the face of his continued refusal to drink them. But they happily hung off his every word about prospecting in California, marshaling in Tombstone, and scouting with the cavalry.
“He is a seriously handsome brute of a man, your Mr. Hickok isn't he,” Gracie breathed into Cady's ear, along with enough gin and ale fumes to power a small ride-on lawnmower.
She caught herself before she said, "Seriously not."
Instead…
“Sherioushly … hot,” she said, slurring her words a little as she breathed her own highly concentrated fumes back in the face of her new best friend.
Nineteenth century beer, it turned out, packed a hell of a punch.
Smith said nothing about her being drunk when he came over with their bags, handing her the smaller satchel with all of the lighter items in it, including her notepads and pencils.
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