HerOutlandishStranger

by Summer Devon

  A well-dressed man with silver hair and a neat figure stood in the doorway, yanking off tan leather gloves. He placed a large leather bag on the washstand, efficiently slapped the buckle open, pulled a stained leather apron from the bag and wrapped it around himself.

  “You’re Dr. Grace?” Jazz said. “Thank goodness. I think she’s nearly ready to push.”

  “I am Mr. Grace, a surgeon. But my patient! She is in a disgraceful state.” The surgeon pushed Jazz aside and threw the covers over her. Then he leaned down to reach under the covers for Eliza who was in the middle of another contraction.

  “Wait until the contraction is over.” Jazz grabbed his arm and tugged him out from the covers. “And wash yourself, you fool!” He was horrified by the doctor’s filthy hands. Hell, it looked like dried blood wedged under his nails.

  Mr. Grace turned away from Eliza and eyed Jazz with disdain. “Release my arm at once, sirrah. I have been in medicine for forty years, you puppy. I do not need your assistance. I assume you follow Alexander Gordon’s peculiar theories? Damn upstart Scots.”

  “I will not risk you giving this woman fever with your filthy hands. Out!”

  Jazz was more than a head taller and thirty years younger than Mr. Grace. The older man gave a disgusted grunt and strolled to the other side of the room.

  “I am too devoted to my patient to abandon her entirely. I shall wait until she has need of me.” He settled himself in a comfortable chair, then pulled out a pair of spectacles and a newspaper out of his frock coat pocket. When a maid came in with the basin of hot water, Mr. Grace ordered a glass and a decanter of brandy.

  Jazz tried to ignore the man who occasionally looked up from the paper, and clucked his tongue disapprovingly when Jazz pulled the covers back off. Cousin Ann proved to be calm and more than useful. She showed Jazz where to press against Eliza’s back to relieve some discomfort.

  “I have been part of several lying-ins,” Cousin Ann said. “I might have become a midwife had I not been the daughter of a gentleman.”

  During one particularly strong contraction, Eliza gave out a heartrending cry and Jazz groaned. Ann patted him on the shoulder.

  “Myself, I judge it wisest to abandon the covers. Then we will avoid some of the worst of the, ah, disorder,” she said chattily to Jazz. “You are much stronger than I so if you could just hold her leg so? I believe everything is moving along nicely.”

  By moving along, Jazz discovered, she meant that the baby was ready to be born.

  Eliza’s face turned scarlet as she gave a cry and a mighty push. Jazz remembered to reach over to catch the head and to check that the cord was not wrapped around the baby’s neck. He looked down into the solemn face of his daughter.

  Within seconds after cutting the cord, Jazz had the crying baby wrapped in a warmed blanket. He held her tight against his chest to warm her and looked into her shining, round and perfect eyes. He suddenly understood that he would kill anyone who so much as frightened her.

  “Excuse me, Mr., ah, White,” said Cousin Ann, “but I think dear Eliza would like a chance to hold her baby.”

  Jazz carefully handed the baby to Eliza. As he looked down at Liza’s pale face, he remembered they still had more work to do. He rubbed Eliza’s belly to help deliver the afterbirth.

  Grace gave an approving grunt from his chair. “Never approved of messing about more than needs be with a lady after a normal birth,” he commented. Jazz knew this was no normal birth but the most amazing event ever to occur in history. Since he suspected most people felt that way after witnessing the birth of their children, he didn’t bother to take up the point.

  Ann hustled the men out so she and Molly could clean up. Jazz protested. “I have to make sure that the bleeding is not excessive.”

  He really wanted to hold Eliza, and tell her how wonderful she was.

  “I know what to expect,” Ann said, patting his shoulder again. “If I see anything out of the ordinary, I shall let you know.” Jazz left the room reluctantly, though he wondered why he’d ever thought her ineffectual.

  He and the surgeon went downstairs and settled into the drawing room with the brandy bottle Mr. Grace brought down from the bedroom. He drank and cheerfully argued with Jazz about the causes of common obstetrical problems.

  “Yes, I suppose it would not kill me to wash my hands before attending a birth,” Mr. Grace admitted. “Though I tell you, sir, I believe this is piffle.”

  For a fleeting moment, Jazz wondered if he’d managed to mangle history by arguing with Grace. He tried to rouse some concern in himself for the shifts he might have caused but couldn’t succeed in giving a damn. The DHU didn’t exist in this world and he did.

  The surgeon took his leave an hour later after declaring that Eliza seemed in no danger of excessive bleeding. Jazz stretched, then settled onto the too-small sofa.

  He awoke at one a.m. when Molly laid a timid hand on his arm and shook him.

  “Cook has left some food in the kitchen for you, sir,” she mumbled. “Jack-the-groom put your horse out back, sir. Madame would like to see you if it’s convenient. She says the household is to go to bed, so if you’ll excuse me, sir.”

  He was bounding up the stairs before Molly finished the message.

  The bedroom glowed in the light of a single candle. Cousin Ann lay asleep on a chaise lounge near the bed, a blanket over her.

  “Is everything okay?” he whispered.

  “Oh, it suits me beautifully,” she said, beaming into the bundle in her arms. “I would blow out the candle but I cannot stop admiring her. She is wonderful.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I am calling her Margaret, after your mother,” Eliza said. “I hope you approve of the name?”

  Jazz nodded, too touched to speak. He certainly wasn’t going to tell Eliza that his mother’s name was simply Mag. “You’re very generous,” he said at last.

  “So are you, to give me a treasure like this,” she said. He glanced at the sleeping Ann warningly. Eliza laughed. “Ann would sleep through cannon fire, I believe. Thank you for helping Margaret into the world.”

  “It is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he whispered under his breath. “The best thing I’ll ever do.” He went to the bed and kissed Eliza and then the sleeping baby.

  “You should rest while you can. She’ll wake up soon enough.”

  She made a face. “I feel as if all my blood is singing and I’ll stay awake for weeks. Unlike sleepy Maggie here. I hope you don’t mind that odious nickname? I can’t help but think she’s a jolly soul and Margaret seems so formal for someone so small.” She yawned. “Oh I do wish I could relax.”

  He grinned at her. “I know the solution.” He slipped from the room and sprinted down the stairs to find a book to read to her.

  *

  Jazz slipped out the back of the house. He stealthily opened doors until he found Wimble. He roused the butler.

  “I’ll pay you if you bring me daily updates.”

  The butler sat up in bed and scowled, a fierce expression he’d never wear while on duty. Under his wild gray hair, he looked even more like the infamous member of The Way.

  Before he could object, Jazz went on, “I’ll pay you a pound a day for information, gossip really, that will harm no one. And mind you.” Jazz shook a finger in his face. “I want to hear if either mother or daughter experiences a problem the instant you know. Don’t contact Grace right away. I am first. And if that tall man with the missing fingers appears, send Billy to me immediately.”

  Jazz didn’t want to wander far in case Wimble summoned him, so he spent his days reading and drinking bad coffee in the common room of the inn or lying on his bed, fiddling with the CR and having conversations with it. This is what I did at home, he thought. Nearly all I did. “CR, why didn’t I notice that my life was a shadow?”

  The CR had no good answer, though it submitted a supposition that Jazz’s words and tonal quality suggested evidence of depression and suggested
20 mg subdermal insert of Bifexlin.

  “Hell, CR, I would if I could.”

  *

  The word from Wimble and the bootblack was comforting but uninformative. Apparently those males didn’t think about supplying details such as how well the baby was fed or if Eliza was too pale.

  He wondered if Eliza was hiring a wet nurse for Maggie and at that moment had a clear vision of the last time he saw Eliza. She was lying in bed, still exhausted, but smiling down at the baby at her breast. The image was almost painful for him to conjure. Could he return to his home when the two people he cared most about were here?

  Absolutely. Of course he could. No question about it.

  Even if he managed to escape the clutches of Steele and the DHU, he wouldn’t be a part of their lives. And any alternative was ludicrous. He’d be bribing servants for the rest of his life. Eliza and Maggie wouldn’t appreciate a mournful spectator trying to seize occasional sightings of their activities. He’d certainly have to flee London when Eliza finally announced her marriage.

  But what about when Maggie married? He had to smile as he imagined himself, the uninvited guest, peeking around a tree trying to catch a peek of a radiant Maggie on her wedding day. Now there was an image a gothic writer would love. He’d been reading far too many of those books as he waited for Wimble, for Steele, for a sign that he should leave.

  At least he had a name he could remember. Maggie, Margaret, Magpie. Eh, would he be allowed to tell his mother she had a grandchild named after her? A lovely granddaughter who died of old age a couple of hundred years before her grandmother was born. At least he’d carry home the memory of Maggie’s tiny nose, round, impossibly bright eyes and her mother’s charming mouth.

  Sickening idea, staying here. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life as a pathetic voyeur, a man without a home.

  The time was coming for him to leave, and he knew it. Just a few more days, he told himself.

  He’d wait just until his informants told him Eliza had taken exercise. Billy reported that Eliza had taken a walk in the garden.

  His room had no chair, so he settled onto the bed to play another game on the CR. Yeah, soon, he’d take off.

  First he’d wait until Maggie was less fussy about eating. Billy said the baby cried less often.

  Jazz knew he ran out of reasons to delay his return.

  On the twenty-first day, Wimble himself came to deliver the report. Jazz thanked Wimble for his services, then caused the man to murmur, “merciful heavens!” at the vast quantity of money Jazz absently shoveled into his hand. “Give some to Billy too. He needs a new coat.”

  After the stunned Wimble left, Jazz sat down and wrote a note saying goodbye to Eliza and Maggie. He explained that he had been told he must leave. He added that because of where he was going he would never see them again, but would miss them every day of his life. And then he threw that version away.

  After several more tries he pared the letter down to winnow out the parts he thought Eliza might see as attempts to defend his indefensible behavior. He smiled grimly as he envisioned her brows raised and her mouth curled in a frown of distaste as she read his feeble reasons for abandoning her and Maggie forever. Best not to even mention any reasons.

  He delivered the note via messenger.

  Now he had nothing left to do but await his own return instructions, not a complicated part of his assignment.

  He knew the instructions by heart. A whole departmental committee was required to approve the start of any extended transport, but only one person arranged the delivery of the return instructions for a time traveler—the traveler himself. Actually most agents simply carried their return instructions with them or in their heads, but Jazz had an extended assignment. He was told to deliver his instructions the moment he knew he was done.

  Jazz had heard the process of return explained, but since it was full of DHU jargon, he’d tuned out the lecture, except for bits that contained the steps he must take to get home. Those parts of the directions he had feverishly recited daily, during training.

  Really, his job at the end of his mission-placement was to do nothing but wait. The letter was delivered after an agent’s return without the need to involve human transport. Something as simple as a careful pattern of fingerprints buried on a piece of rock would distinguish the point in time and place the agent would wait.

  The words he memorized made a simple job sound complicated. Jazz packed his fake leather satchel. He’d be home within two days.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jazz spent the whole of the next day inside the small inn where he’d carefully hidden the small rock with this return. Nothing occurred. No shifting, shimmering sensations gripped him.

  He feared the worst. There were only two ways those directions would fail to materialize in the future—If the DHUy died or went native and then went back to destroy the evidence of his return instructions. Without the careful clues in place, no one at the agency would know which had taken place—death or rogue.

  The day after he was supposed to return, he sat in the coffee room, first drinking coffee then switching to alcohol as the daylight waned. Now and then, Marsh the innkeeper sauntered through the coffee room to build up the fire in the generous fieldstone fireplace.

  “Something else, sir?” he asked Jazz.

  “Another of whatever that was.” Jazz pointed to the glass that had contained amber foul-smelling liquid. Brandy or port or something.

  After Marsh silently brought Jazz a glass—only half full, Jazz noticed—the innkeeper took up an offer to join a table of patrons. He frequently stopped in his duties to gossip with the guests, apparently all locals since they seemed to know one another.

  Jazz occasionally gazed over the other tables. Interesting how easily the men interacted. He’d begun to understand the appeal of gathering in groups.

  Wallowing in alcohol and black thoughts, Jazz stared into the dingy, half-filled glass in his hand, and considered the possible reasons he was still waiting for the letter.

  Didn’t make any sense that he’d stay back. He didn’t actually fear prison for his less-than-circumspect behavior on the assignment. Eh, they knew they’d sent an almost unwilling amateur into the field.

  He must have died somehow in this era. If it wasn’t Steele, perhaps he’d done it himself. He’d heard that even suicide was hard to arrange for DHUies. The whole ridiculous to-and-fro passages through time blurred the mind and sanity so they’d soon learned that suicide was a common problem for career DHUies and somehow had almost eliminated the possibility.

  But of course it was Steele. He wasn’t interested in going out to confront the man. “Come on Steele,” he mumbled to himself. “Come and get me.”

  He stretched out his legs and again stared at the other patrons of the inn. He must have been a sight. Even the scruffy farmer in the corner, who’d been trying to cadge drinks from everyone in the room, avoided his glance.

  Just as well no one came near. Jazz didn’t want company unless it was Steele to settle the matter, or perhaps explain why he’d been after him in the first place and then why he abandoned the chase.

  No, he didn’t want the loony DHUy company either. Eliza’s face was the only one he wouldn’t mind seeing across from him now.

  He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling as he tried to examine the mess in which he found himself. But for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why he was still here. Trapped in a stinking primitive world with nothing, without even a networked CR, to distract himself.

  He smiled at the inn’s low smoke-stained ceiling with its thick timber supports. As ceilings went, it was a far more interesting structure than any he could recall in his own time. He had to admit it wasn’t the world he despised. Stinking was an apt description, though lately he was amazed to notice he’d grown to like the busy, noisy, filthy place filled with the astonishing variety of people.

  He tapped the scarred wooden table in front of him and remembered
how impressed he was at the wooden table at the DHU. The whole of this cheap inn was constructed of wood.

  Yes, certainly, the time and place had its points, now that the scents didn’t constantly leave him floundering for air. The books, the plays…and the out-of-doors world, the wild spaces were rare at home—they were more captivating than he’d suspected. A field or woods as seen from the back of a galloping horse was breathtakingly exhilarating, a slice of freedom he had grown to treasure—no matter how many disparaging comments Peter made about his seat.

  Perhaps the greatest freedom he enjoyed was walking among his fellow humans and not feeling the ill-suppressed hatred at the sight of his uncovered arm.

  He had a good life in that other world, he reminded himself. His space that he had carefully planned, quiet and safe, and filled with his projects and CRs. Seers, he usually thought of them now, thanks to Eliza. Huh, nope. At the thought of his home in the future, he felt indifference.

  At least there he’d be able to get the treatment he needed to recover from this whole adventure. Otherwise he was trapped in this stinking world without Liza and Maggie, and without any way to dull the tooth-sharp pain of their absence. No possibility he chose to stay behind.

  Jazz shook his head hard—like Marsh’s dog after it waded in the stream running behind the inn. As if a good shake could clear out the maudlin thoughts.

  He rarely indulged in a foray into self pity and now he remembered why he avoided it. Damn useless state of mind. Alcohol was not a satisfactory answer, and he should have recalled that from their first landing on English soil. But perhaps he’d order another glass of something to drink anyway. Couldn’t a person drink himself to death? He vaguely recalled seeing the phrase.

  He went outside into the cool evening air, trying to ignore the way the world seemed to sway. He leaned over the stream and splashed cold water on his face. Just like Spain, he thought.

  But the method to reduce tipsiness didn’t work because he was seeing things. The figure trotting through the break in the hedge next to the garden looked just like Wimble.