Alice Payne Arrives

by Kate Heartfield

  She glances at Auden, who is looking at her more intently than he ought. Good; he’s giving her a reason for her blush.

  “An alley!” says Jane.

  “Bricks and all,” groans Ludderworth. “And there, the highwayman attacked us again, and pushed us back the way we came. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, there we were in your father’s fields, with no alley to be seen.”

  “It was night,” says Jane. “And there was a great deal of confusion, I’m sure, after you were set upon.”

  “I know what I saw, Miss Hodgson,” says Greenleaf. “Begging your pardon.”

  “And it was not night when we came out, although we had only been in a few minutes,” says Ludderworth.

  “Best not to tell these men they’ve imagined things until we’ve heard the whole story, eh, Jane?” barks Father.

  Jane blushes and looks down at her hands. And now Auden is looking at Jane, not with the same intensity as he looked at Alice but with a frown, as though he is trying to make sense of her. Good luck to him!

  Alice tries to catch Jane’s eye. Damn Father. He was never abrupt with people, before. Jane knows his ways well enough but it is one thing to put up with it in private, and quite another in front of visitors. She’ll feel even more like a servant, an appendage, undervalued.

  “Jane is only applying science,” Alice says, smiling. But Jane does not look at her.

  “Science indeed,” growls Ludderworth. “It was an electric device of some kind, I feel sure, that moved us from one place to another. First the automaton, now this. This is no ordinary highwayman but an inventor bent upon using his machines to commit crimes. We will need a full investigation so that Her Majesty’s government can pass the appropriate laws.”

  “To begin with, perhaps we can apply our reason to the problem,” says Auden. “Perhaps there is a secret entrance to a brick structure of some kind. A tunnel, perhaps. You stumbled into the highwayman’s lair, and he, desperate, attacked you and pushed you out.”

  “But then where is this place?” Father asks, leaning forward.

  “Damned if I know,” says Auden, and glances again at Jane, who stands at one end of the room, and then at Alice, who is on the other. “My apologies, Miss Payne, Miss Hodgson.”

  Alice grins at him.

  But he is looking past her, and does not smile back. “Perhaps,” he muses, “there is some device nearby. A wire, or lever, and a horse kicked it and opened the secret gate. I will take a hound over that part of the road.”

  “But you’ve done so already,” says Alice. “Surely you would have found it.”

  “Then what is your explanation, Miss Payne?” Auden asks.

  “My explanation?” She blinks, tries to focus on his face, his fascinating, ever-shifting face. She would like to watch it move for hours; she would like to freeze a single expression on it.

  “Miss Payne, you have said that Miss Hodgson inclines to a scientific view. What is yours, then? Surely you don’t believe that the Earl of Ludderworth and Mr. Greenleaf and Mr. Jones all drove into Fairyland.”

  She smiles. “Oh, I am sure Jane’s approach is the right one. But Jane has taught me that a good natural philosopher never discounts any possibility, Captain Auden.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Well, if I am to find any clews on the road, I should be at it. Thank you for the port, Colonel Payne. It is lucky I was passing when Lord Ludderworth arrived. Poor Grigson is still out beating the bushes with the two footmen, so I will find them to give them the news. I trust you will be comfortable here, my lord, and Mr. Greenleaf and Mr. Jones. May I call upon you again if I have fresh questions?”

  “Of course,” says Ludderworth. “I’ll make my excuses now too, if I might, Colonel, and Miss Payne. My men and I have not slept, and it seems we should have.”

  She bows her head and drops a small curtsy, and Satterthwaite steps forward to take the overdue guests to their rooms. Jane leaves the room before Alice can even catch her eye.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: On the Limits of Patience

  2145

  PRUDENCE STEPS INTO 2145 and sees General Almo more or less where she left him, at his desk, the lights on his display table glimmering and shifting. It’s been perhaps two minutes here—long enough for one portal to close and another to open—while she’s spent a day in 2070.

  “Well?” he asks. “How are you finding it? No changes at this end, yet, but I don’t expect any after one day.”

  She nods, hopes she looks like a team player. “It’s a long game this time, General. I’ve published the books but we’ll need other changes to reinforce them or they’ll choir-preach. So I’ve connected with a couple of young people who will be involved in the 2091 Berlin Convention. Radical Misguided converts. Helmut Kauffmann and Rati Kapoor. If I change their life plans, they won’t meet Tremblay next year. Trying to seed events but also steering them away from activism to avoid stream-correction. The changes might take a bit of work before they show up.”

  Her connection with Rati and Helmut might be visible to him; there must be some record of the apartment in their name, of her presence on the security cameras. And indeed, if she hadn’t come into their lives, Rati and Helmut would have become leaders in the movement to broaden access to manufactured organs, which would eventually have led to the disintegration of the household model of taxation and to the obsolescence of civil marriage. The Misguideds have agents at the Berlin Convention working to strengthen the declaration and polarize public opinion, so the Farmers are trying to head them off by working before 2091.

  The thing that none of the Farmers will admit is that all their work only stretches the dialectic to greater extremes, accelerating the pace of the very change they’re trying to stop, and pushing it in directions the Misguideds don’t want it to go. History doesn’t self-correct in response to an attack; it metastasizes.

  The general has his own version of a diary, but unlike laypeople, he doesn’t need to keep it in prehistory to keep it from changing. It’s a new technology, one that Prudence doesn’t understand. Somehow, the general’s display table exists in a bubble of space-time. Its energy costs don’t bear thinking about.

  “Major Zuniga,” he says, not looking up from the table, “you have family in 2070, don’t you?”

  He knows full well she does.

  “My sister.”

  During the long moment in which he does not answer, looking at his table, she wills him not to say What sister? Every time she shimmers, she thinks: perhaps this is the moment it all changes.

  But instead he says, “Do what you must, but remember that you’ll spend weeks of your life on this, even if it passes in a blink of an eye from my perspective. I need you young and healthy and there is so much work to do. If history won’t nudge in the direction you want in Toronto in 2070, I’ll redeploy you somewhere else. ‘Our patience will achieve more than our force.’”

  “Edmund Burke?”

  “Exactly.” General Almo looks up at her. “Report back tomorrow. I’ll be here.” His mouth curls at the joke, a sign that he still has faith in her, that he’s giving her more slack than she deserves.

  She nods and salutes, spending a moment longer than she should taking in one of the few sights that have been a constant for her last ten years: his big shoulders, belly running just slightly to paunch pressing against the grey regulation T-shirt, perfect shave still leaving a shadow on his golden skin, close-curled hair going grey at the temples. If all goes according to plan, she’ll never see this man again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Complication Arises

  1788

  “ALICE,” FATHER SAYS, just as she says, “Father.”

  He frowns. “I have important news.”

  She inclines her head. “Then you must speak first, of course.”

  “When Lord Ludderworth and his men first burst in upon me, before we sent for Captain Auden, His Lordship was distraught.”

  “As well he might be.”

  “Indeed, but what distres
sed him most was the idea that he might become a laughingstock, I think. That people might disbelieve his story, call him a drunkard or an idiot. And it soon became apparent that by ‘people,’ he chiefly meant you, Alice.”

  “Me!”

  “Yes.” Father takes both her hands in his. His face is lit up by port or elation or some combination. “It seems he had intended on asking for your hand today. It came out of him as a kind of lament, but I assured him that not only would I have consented before, but that I do now.”

  Her hand! She is thirty-two now, and thought she was safe. The prospect of marriage evaporated when she was twenty-two years old, when Father went to war, and there was no one left to try to marry her off. Since his return, they had both seemed set on the project of ensuring that Alice could live at Fleance Hall comfortably until her death as an old maid.

  Father’s method of ensuring this is to speculate in shaky ventures in the Americas, and to drink when they fail. Alice has her own methods.

  Marriage! And to Lord Ludderworth!

  “He . . . he loves me?” she whispers.

  “Indeed.”

  “But I do not love him.”

  “Alice, don’t be a child. This will make you Countess of Ludderworth—to think, someone of your heritage being a countess!”

  Your heritage, he says, as if her mother were some unfortunate accident that befell him. As if he stumbled.

  “You’ll gain not only a title—something we never considered in our wildest dreams—but money too. His Lordship is a wealthy man. You’ll have enough to keep Fleance Hall. Or you could sell it. I suppose you will have houses enough, and won’t want this one.”

  “But I love Fleance Hall. It’s all I want. I don’t want to be countess of anything.”

  “Alice. You and I know full well that another opportunity will not come for you. No man of substance, and of lesser generosity of spirit than His Lordship, will look past your—”

  “My skin? You must have looked past it, with my mother.”

  She sets her jaw. He never speaks of her mother, and the very mention makes his face redden.

  “Alice, if you do not marry Lord Ludderworth, you won’t get Fleance Hall when I die.”

  The words make no sense. She reorders them, and they still make no sense.

  “I don’t understand. The property is not entailed. It is not a family seat. You bought it outright. You can will it to whomever you wish.”

  “Indeed. And I will not leave it to you, unmarried, and with no fortune of your own to sustain you. Without a house of this size to maintain, without servants, you may find some work that will keep you from starving. I have raised you up to a higher class and colour, Alice, and if you insist on sinking back down again, you will do it without my participation.”

  She can barely hear over the drumbeat of her blood in her ears.

  “Father,” she bites, “you are an ignorant fool.”

  She almost thinks he will strike her. They stare at each other for a moment. Then, to her shock, he nods.

  “Yes,” he says, the thickness of shame in his voice. “I am. I have lost everything, Alice! I have tried to keep it from you, the worst of it, but I have many debts.”

  So quickly he changes, like the weather, from a pompous ass to a haunted shadow of the father she knew, the father whose confidences she held even as a little girl, whose respect was as dependable as Christmas.

  If Father only knew how many times she has gone to his creditors, paid them what she could to keep him out of prison for another month or two, asked them to keep it silent from him. Her story is always that she sold her mother’s rings. She never visits the same creditor twice, so she’s running out of ways to stanch the bleeding without attracting notice.

  She sighs, unties the reticule from her belt and hands it to him.

  “Here,” she says, more coldly than she intends. “I won a game of faro at Mrs. Thackeray’s soiree the other night. You can put this toward some of the debts.”

  Father takes it and holds it in his hand, weighing it, looking straight at her. Then he shuts his eyes tight, opens them again and pours the contents of the bag onto his hand. Lord Ludderworth’s coins fill his open palm. She’ll have to sell the rings and watch, when she gets a chance to send Jane to London.

  “Your pardon.”

  They turn to see Wray Auden standing in the doorway. “I forgot my hat,” he says, holding it up.

  “How odd,” says Jane, standing in the door.

  How long has Jane been there, listening? Did she hear about the horrible proposal? Could she possibly think that Alice might consent to it? Her face is as still as stone. To the world, it wears no expression, but Alice can see it as anger. But anger over their argument, or something else? “I could have sworn you had it in your hand when you left.”

  Auden smiles. “The memory is an unreliable witness, as I am sure we will be reminded tomorrow when I question our poor victims some more. Good night, ladies, and Colonel.”

  Alice uses his departure as an excuse to go straight up the stairs without another word to her father, but Jane won’t be caught. She goes into her bedroom and closes the door, and that has always been a signal between them. Alice stands in the corridor, her skirt in her hand, and thinks for a moment.

  She needs to know more, and she needs to know it now. They have a device that can send them through time! Surely they can solve any problem that way. She can prevent Father from ever going to the war. She can find out whether she can keep collecting tolls as the Holy Ghost without Auden catching her.

  But first, she can find out whether fifty thousand pounds is worth doing the bidding of a woman in America. She can find out—and here her brow tightens on its own, and she sniffs sharply, caught off guard by a sudden unmooring thought—she can find out who the woman is.

  Jane spoke of the marks on a compass. If one were to move the lines from their current setting, just a little . . .

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Concerning the Course of History; with Revelations

  2070

  PRUDENCE STEPS BACK THROUGH the portal, into her workroom in suburban Toronto in 2070, and for a moment can’t process what she sees. A second portal is open just opposite.

  Between the two portals stands the highwayman, pointing a pistol at Prudence’s gut.

  Prudence elbows the button at her waist and the portal closes behind her. She’s seen experiments where teleosophic scientists shoot bullets through shimmers, and they do just exactly what you’d expect. If General Almo hears a bullet whirr past his ear, or worse, she’ll be investigated. Project Shipwreck will never happen.

  “Time,” says the person in the highwayman costume, their face covered in a mask and kerchief. “It’s time, isn’t it?”

  The shimmer’s on the far side of her workroom, a perfect circle cutting through the chalkboard covered in equations. Her workroom doesn’t smell quite right; there’s something greasy or metallic, like her father’s workroom in the basement of her childhood home.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I used the device you left behind, when the horses knocked you down. I tinkered with it a little.”

  Shit. Shit! Prudence pats her pocket, but of course it shouldn’t be in this pocket but in the reticule with her eighteenth-century clothes.

  But it isn’t there. It’s in the possession of an eighteenth-century highwayman.

  Prudence can almost hear the gears in her own mind turning. This naïf, if they truly are a naïf, knows more than they should. All right. Then? Next.

  “But it was not set to open here and now.”

  “I tinkered with it.”

  Prudence raises an eyebrow. The time-wheel is the sort of thing anyone could use without much knowledge, even if they don’t use it well. The mechanical circles are deliberately simple and external, as a fail-safe, to make sure that the device will work only in a predictable way for a teleo even if the history of technology changes while the teleo is jumping.

  The cons
equence, of course, is that anyone can work it. But a naïf wouldn’t know what the markings meant. They’d have to take a guess, and then walk through, hoping for the best.

  The time-wheel has its fail-safes built in. Her plan needs a fail-safe too. The wheels turn: yes. Yes, this could work.

  “Well, that was risky,” she says. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Madam, I am the one holding the gun.”

  Prudence shrugs. “Shoot me then. I’m not saying a word until I know who you are.”

  She crosses her arms across her chest, waits for the masks to come off. She doesn’t know how reliable an eighteenth-century pistol might be, but at a two-foot range, it doesn’t have to shoot straight or fast to cause a lot of pain.

  The highwayman rips off the mask, and pulls down the green kerchief.

  “I’m Alice Payne, daughter of Colonel Payne. I was born in 1756, in Jamaica, and I live in Hampshire now.”

  A woman. Explains the kerchief over the mask, which seemed like overkill. Explains a lot, really.

  Prudence points at the two rickety office chairs. “Can we sit? You can keep that pointed at me if you want.”

  “Answer one question honestly, first.”

  Prudence nods and watches Alice get it ready: a slight frown, a quiver of the lip.

  “You are my mother. Aren’t you?”

  The air comes out of Prudence, through her nose, a snort that sounds like a laugh but isn’t, that makes Alice frown. Goddammit, that is not a question she ever expected from anyone.

  “Your mother?”

  “I didn’t know her,” Alice says.

  “And you think . . . wait. Are there really so few black women where you’re from, that you meet any random black lady, and you think, ‘This must be my mother’?”

  “You’re not, then?”

  “No. Definitely not. I’m sorry.”

  At least she now knows one thing: the EEG scanner was right. This woman is a genuine naïf, albeit a bright one. She’s going to have to be a true recruit to the cause, then, not a patsy.