Chapter 2 Passages in Time #2
It was strange, but he was comforted lying in the darkness – the images that the daylight hours revealed scared and disturbed him.
At first, when he’d come around in the mill yard, he’d been sure he was gripped by some insanity brought on by the smoke in his lungs.
Either that or he was unconscious, and the images were part of some futuristic nightmare.
Somebody had been calling to him – a woman whom he now knew as Miss Hale.
He’d opened his eyes, wondering who she was, only for his mind to be assaulted with a scene beyond description.
Two huge red machines stood behind her – they had to be some kind of fire tenders, but he had never seen their like before.
They were big enough to be traction engines, but he could see no funnels or steam, and the wheels were made of some strange unidentifiable material.
All around was activity, but not activity that he knew or understood.
Where there should have been mill workers, there were strange men and even a woman – firemen, he was sure, for they had helmets, and all wore a uniform of sorts.
But the fabric was not like any he was familiar with; odd for a man who had worked with cloth his whole life.
He’d never seen a woman like her before – Miss Hale, the woman in whose home he now rested.
She had told him to call her MJ – what kind of name was that?
He’d refused, explaining it would be imprudent of him to call her by her Christian name when they had not been introduced by friends.
Unlike others he had met during the day, she alone had understood his use of surnames and had called him Mr. Thornton as he requested.
She unnerved him as no woman ever had. He had never known any female so forthright in manner or speech, not to mention the clothes she wore – trousers and shirts that hugged her body as if they were a second skin, leaving nothing to the imagination.
No Victorian lady would have worn such garments.
She was kind, though. From the moment the ambulance had arrived, she never left his side.
The vehicle that had transported him to hospital – the ambulance – was not as large as the fire tender, but its blaring siren and flashing lights had him cowering away from it and the people who jumped out from it.
Miss Hale had realised how the noise and lights terrified him and had called for them to switch them off.
“They are scaring him – I think he may have hit his head – he seems disorientated.”
“What’s his name?” a man asked after the siren was silenced and the lights stopped.
“He’s insisting it’s John Thornton – I think that’s the character he is dressed as.”
“Okay, John, my name is Brad, and this is Ann. We are paramedics and we need to check you over.” He reached out to undo Mr. Thornton’s waistcoat.
“My name is Mr. Thornton – only my family call me by my Christian name,” he told them, pushing Brad’s hand away.
“If that’s what you want, Mr. Thornton, but I need to listen to your chest and heart, so you must let me undo your waistcoat and shirt.”
“No, there are ladies present – it would be improper.”
Brad had laughed. “Well, Ann has certainly seen plenty of naked chests before, and I expect the other women have as well. After all, it is the twenty-first century.”
Only Miss Hale understood how that had shocked him. She’d taken his hand. “Mr. Thornton, please let them look after you. I realise that all of this appears unreal to you, but you have my word, nobody will hurt you and I will stay if you would like me to.”
He’d not understood why she would do this until she explained that her father had been a minister. “At home in Helstone, he worked with homeless people – I have had a lot of experience helping him,” she’d explained.
He’d nodded and, realising he needed a sympathetic person on his side, he’d accepted her offer to stay with him at the infirmary.
He’d had to admit that this strange and alien place was 2019.
What his eyes saw but his brain could not understand was confirmed by Miss Hale and the doctors at the infirmary – somehow, he had moved through time.
Of course, that was not what the doctors thought; they believed that something had happened to his brain in the fire that caused him to think he’d been born in the nineteenth century.
He couldn’t blame them for coming up with that conjecture.
Even to his own ears, his insistence that he was from 1851 had seemed like the ramblings of an unhinged or damaged mind.
The infirmary had terrified him and not just because the doctors looked at him as if he were mad, though that was bad enough.
It was more the lack of anything familiar.
He’d assumed he was being taken to the infirmary with which he was familiar, which during his time was new and in which Milton took justifiable pride.
However, they brought him to an enormous complex constructed of materials he didn’t recognise – well, apart from glass.
The place was too bright; large windows allowed daylight to stream in and lamps in the ceiling shone brighter than the sun, but he could not identify the source of their power – certainly it was neither oil nor gas.
He was used to dim light and dark shadows.
Even during the day, a candle burned on his desk in the mill office.
There, the dark strained his eyes; here, the light hurt them.
It wasn’t just the light that was unnerving.
The noise was, if anything, more frightening.
He was used to noise – he owned a mill – but these noises were unfamiliar, coming from machines attached to him and to the other sick people in this place.
These machines alarmed shrilly whenever he moved, and several types of bells and buzzers seemed to ring all the time.
Once again, Miss Hale had comforted him by trying to explain these various things and what they did to him.
Her hand was never far from his, and he felt himself reaching for it constantly.
By far the strangest thing was a type of window on the wall through which he could see people talking.
But where were they? Where did they come from and where did they go?
The scenes and people he could see changed frequently.
Although he had been told that apart from a little smoke inhalation he was well, the medical personnel would not hear of him leaving.
They couldn’t just discharge him when he had nowhere to go and no visible means of support.
He was told they were waiting for a bed in the psychiatric unit, but that it would be a day or two before one became available.
When he’d asked what that was, he realised they were talking about a mental asylum.
He couldn’t enter one of those places; people didn’t ever escape them.
His pleas to leave fell on deaf ears, and he’d become so agitated that not even Miss Hale had been able to calm him.
In the end, the doctors had given him some sort of medication, laudanum he suspected.
He’d read of its sedating effects. He’d fallen into a sleep, but his rest had been tormented with wild dreams and images.
When he woke, he was alone; Miss Hale was not at his side.
Before he could panic, his eyes alighted on a note addressed to him.
It was from Miss Hale. Her writing was as clear and thoughtful as her spoken word.
She wrote that he was not to worry. She had merely left to get some clothing and toiletries for him, and she would return later.
He had no choice but to believe her words and rested quietly, waiting for her return.
Relief flooded through him when she appeared at the door to his room.
She arrived bearing gifts as she called them: clothing similar to what others in this strange place wore.
It was then that he asked – no, begged was a better word – for her help.
She had been so kind and sympathetic that he hoped to convince her to help him escape this place before he was committed to an asylum.
At first, she was adamant in her refusal.
He was careful not to mention again that he was from a different time, but he implored her to listen to him.
“I don’t know why or how I am a stranger to this place, but if I am not John Thornton, I need to find out who I am.
I cannot do that if I am locked up in an insane asylum. ”
“Psychiatric units are no longer called insane asylums. That phase died out after Victoria’s time.”
“Is it not a place where people with sicknesses of the mind are sent?”
“Yes, but you will be treated well.”
“Will they be able to explain why I have no understanding of this place or time? Will they seek answers or just sedate me with laudanum?”
“There it is again, the wrong word – that drug has long since gone out of use. Its modern equivalent has a different name.” MJ was puzzled by the man’s speech and alarmed by his desire to leave. “They would help you, Mr. Thornton. You would receive therapy and medication.”
“And if, after all this treatment, I still insisted that I was John Thornton, I would have to stay in this asylum, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes, I suppose you would.”
“I don’t belong here. I need to find out if my family is safe and if any of my workers died. I will have no peace until I do. Please help me leave this place. Once I am beyond its doors, you will never see me again.”
“How would you survive out there? You appear to know nothing of this place. It would be dangerous for you – too dangerous.”
“Then stay with me – you are a kindly woman. Help me discover the truth.”
MJ stared at the man who claimed to be a mill owner, one whose history she knew better than anybody else in Milton. It wasn’t possible that he was who he claimed he was – but could she just let him leave without helping him?