Chapter 19 The Scientist
The sensible thing would be to ignore the mysterious note from a stranger who knows my real name, my impossible origin, and enough about time travel to ruin breakfast.
Naturally, I am not sensible.
I am also not alone, despite the note’s instruction. James reads come alone and reacts as if the paper has personally insulted his bloodline.
“Absolutely not.”
“That is not a plan.”
“It is an excellent plan. Brief. Clear. Difficult to misinterpret.”
We are in the library at Ashbourne House, because apparently all impossible conversations migrate there eventually.
Rain taps against the windows. A fire snaps in the grate.
My engagement ring glints on my finger every time I turn the note over, which is rude of it.
I had approximately six hours to enjoy being newly engaged before the universe reappeared with paperwork.
James stands beside the desk, coat still unfastened from riding back from Carlton House, hair slightly disordered, expression grim.
Beatrice sits in the window seat with Kitty beside her. Kitty is pretending not to be interested and failing so thoroughly she may injure herself.
Between the carriage ride home and breakfast, James and I told them the truth.
Beatrice asked seventeen questions before I finished the first answer.
Kitty considered the matter, said it explained my shoes, and demanded to know whether thieves still exist in the future.
Apparently temporal disclosure is less dramatic when your audience has already watched you bully a duke and resuscitate a royal baby.
“If I bring an entire ducal security detail,” I say, “M.W. may vanish.”
“Then M.W. may live a long and peaceful life far away from you.”
“He knows I fell through time.”
The room goes quiet.
Even after all this, saying it aloud still feels like dropping glass.
James folds the note once, precisely. “All the more reason not to walk into whatever trap he has set.”
“Or all the more reason to find out how he knows.”
Beatrice takes the note from me and reads it again. “‘You are not the first person to fall through time.’ That sounds less like blackmail and more like a warning.”
“Many warnings are traps wearing better hats,” James says.
Kitty leans forward. “Could be both.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Very comforting.”
“Ain’t here for comfort. I’m here because you make poor choices when curious.”
I open my mouth.
Close it.
Hard to argue with the youth when the youth is correct.
The note gives a location: a shuttered instrument-maker’s shop off Fleet Street, behind a bookseller and across from a coffeehouse where no respectable woman would willingly go without either a chaperone or a weapon. The meeting time is noon.
So, obviously, we compromise.
I go in alone.
James waits across the street with two footmen and the expression of a man contemplating three separate murders.
Kitty shadows the alley because she is “small and no one looks down,” which is both strategically sound and socially devastating.
Beatrice remains in the carriage, tasked with looking innocent and failing only slightly.
The shop smells of dust, brass, lamp oil, and old wood.
Shelves line the walls, mostly empty except for cracked lenses, tarnished calipers, and bits of apparatus whose purposes are either scientific or criminal.
A long table stands beneath the grimy front window.
On it sits a brass microscope, a galvanic pile, several coils of copper wire, and a chipped teacup.
The teacup bothers me most.
Science is one thing. Tea implies confidence.
“Miss Hart,” says a voice behind me.
I turn too fast and nearly knock over a barometer.
The man in the doorway is perhaps forty, perhaps fifty.
Thin, dark-haired, clean-shaven, with wire spectacles and the hollow-eyed look of someone who has spent too long making peace with insomnia.
His coat is old but well brushed. His cravat is tied correctly, which seems unfair in a man who has apparently lured me into a secret time-travel meeting.
“Dr. Marcus Webb,” he says. “And the Duke of Ashbourne is across the street, pretending not to watch the door.”
Well.
There goes the element of surprise.
“He does not pretend well.”
“No,” Webb says. “But he looms with conviction.”
Against my will, I like him for half a second.
Then I remember the note.
“How do you know my name?”
“Hart, not Hartford? Your modern name appears in no record here. Your public story is too neat in exactly the wrong places. And you kept correcting yourself when frightened, according to three servants, one duchess’s maid, and a thief who tried to sell me that information before deciding she liked you better. ”
Kitty.
I am going to promote her and ground her.
“That does not answer the question.”
Webb’s expression sobers. “Because I was what you are.”
The room tilts, but only slightly. I am getting distressingly practiced at having reality kicked sideways.
“From when?”
“Later than this.” His mouth curves without humor. “Not your later, I suspect. The calendars become slippery when one is talking across broken time. I came through in 1807. Ten years ago, by the clocks that now govern my digestion.”
“You’re from my world?”
“Near it. Near enough to know what a mobile phone is. Near enough to know the word antibiotic. Far enough that the lab you fell from may have existed differently for me.”
My skin prickles.
“The Array,” I whisper.
His eyes sharpen. “So that is what they called it in your branch.”
Branch.
The word lands like a diagnosis.
“You worked on it?”
“On a predecessor. Smaller. Cruder. More arrogant, if you can imagine such a thing.” He gestures to a chair. “Please sit before you decide to faint for narrative symmetry.”
“I do not faint.”
“You have at least twice since arrival, according to my notes.”
“Your notes are rude.”
“My notes are thorough.”
I do not sit.
He sighs, crosses to a cabinet, and removes a leather ledger. He opens it on the table. The pages are full of tight handwriting, diagrams, dates, names, columns of events marked expected, altered, and uncertain.
I see my own public name halfway down one page.
Miss Emma Hartford. East End fever. Weston appendectomy. Princess Charlotte: survival event confirmed.
My stomach drops.
“You have been watching me.”
“Yes.”
“That is horrifying.”
“Also useful.”
“Many horrifying things are useful. Leeches, for example, in extremely limited circumstances. That does not make them socially acceptable.”
He closes the ledger partway. “I had to know whether you were another displaced person or merely an unusually dangerous American.”
“And?”
“Both.”
Fair, but still offensive.
The door behind me opens.
James enters without waiting for permission.
“You were to remain outside,” I say.
“And you were not to meet strange men in abandoned shops. We are both adapting.”
Webb studies him over his spectacles. “Your Grace.”
James’s gaze moves over the apparatus, the ledger, Webb, then back to me. “Emma?”
The question beneath my name is simple: Are you safe?
I do not know how to answer.
“He says he came through time ten years ago.”
James goes still.
Not disbelief. Worse. Belief, and all the fear that comes with it.
Webb folds his hands. “I did not summon Miss Hart to threaten her. I summoned her because she has created the largest documented alteration I have ever seen.”
“Charlotte,” I say.
“Charlotte and the child,” he confirms. “A royal death avoided. Succession altered. Political futures shifted. Medical legitimacy accelerated, perhaps by decades if you survive long enough to exploit it.”
“Exploit is a charming word.”
“Accurate ones often are not charming.”
James steps closer to me. “What danger does this pose?”
Webb looks at him for a long moment. “To whom?”
There is a terrible answer.
All of us.
Webb opens another drawer and removes a small device made of brass, glass, wire, and desperation. It looks like a clock had an argument with a music box and lost to lightning.
“Time displacement leaves resonance,” he says. “A path. Most close behind us. Some do not. Strong historical divergences appear to amplify the residue around the displaced person.”
I stare at the device. “You built a temporal Geiger counter out of lamp parts.”
“I built a crude resonator out of available materials after ten years of failure and several small fires.”
“So yes.”
His mouth twitches. “Essentially.”
James does not look amused. “Can it send her back?”
The question lands between us like a knife dropped point-first.
Webb’s eyes move to me.
I cannot look at James.
“No,” Webb says.
James exhales, almost silently.
I feel the relief in him and hate that relief has teeth.
“Not safely,” Webb adds.
James’s relief dies.
“Do not do that,” I snap.
Webb tilts his head. “Tell the truth?”
“Drop hope like a match in a powder room.”
“Hope is already in the room, Miss Hart. I prefer labeling the explosives.”
I hate him.
I also understand him.
He turns the device gently. “A body is too much. But a small signal may travel along the original fracture. A phrase. A pulse. Perhaps a pattern that certain instruments in your origin point might detect.”
My mother.
The thought hits so hard I grip the table.
James notices. Of course he does.
“Emma.”
I hear my mother’s voice. See her badge swinging. Her hand reaching through bending light. For months, grief has been a room I visit at night and lock before morning. Now Webb has opened a window in it.
“A message,” I say.
“Possibly.”
“Possibly is doing a lot of work.”
“Possibly is all I have.”
James’s voice is careful. “And the cost?”
Webb looks at him with something like approval. “Excellent question. The cost may be nothing. Or the signal may call attention to her.”
“From whom?”
“The people who built the machine that lost her.”
My pulse jumps.
Webb continues, “If they are searching, a signal could guide them. If they are not, it could wake instruments best left sleeping. A retrieval attempt, if possible in her branch, might not distinguish between message and messenger.”
James’s hand closes around the back of a chair.