“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Kendra dropped the ribbon, grabbed a green one, and tied the girl’s hair back into a ponytail.
“The countess shall hear about this!” Sarah threatened. “You shall be dismissed—without references! You shall be begging in the streets! You shall be sent to the workhouse! You—”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Your breakfast is probably getting cold,” Kendra snapped, and felt a petty satisfaction at watching the girl’s bosom swell in indignation. Her face was so red with temper that if she’d been older and heavier, Kendra might’ve worried about a stroke.
“Come along, Georgie!” Sarah practically snarled, and stormed out, her hair bobbing precariously.
Kendra waited until the girls had left before sinking into a chair. She put her throbbing head in her hands. She wanted to wake up from this nightmare. Now.
“Miss Donovan?”
She lifted her head, glancing around to meet the sympathetic eyes of Miss Stanton as she poked her head into the room.
“Oh, dear,” she clucked her tongue, and came all the way into the room. “I saw the girls leave. Were they simply horrid? You look done in.”
Kendra threaded her fingers through her hair in agitation. “It probably could’ve been worse.” She didn’t know how. “But I’m glad it’s over.”
Miss Stanton lifted her brows in surprise. “Over? My dear, Miss Donovan, it’s only begun.”
Kendra’s stomach sank. “What do you mean?”
“Your duties, Miss Donovan. The day has scarce begun. If the ladies want to stroll in the garden, they undoubtedly shall need to change into their walking dresses. At the very least, they’ll need their bonnets and shawls. If they want to go riding, they’ll need you to assist them with their riding habits. Then they shall most likely wish to change into their afternoon gowns before the full dress of evening.
“And you, Miss Donovan, will need to assist them,” continued Miss Stanton. “You will be required to mend and press their clothes, and redress their hairstyles.”
Kendra shuddered as what Miss Stanton was saying hit her with the force of a baseball bat between the eyes. For a horrifying moment, she envisioned being a lady’s maid for days, weeks . . . years.
No fucking way.
“Where are you going, Miss Donovan?”
Kendra hadn’t even realized that she was up and moving until she felt the doorknob under her hand. She glanced back at the lady’s maid—God, how did she live like this?—unaware of the stark desperation darkening her eyes.
“Home. I need to go home.”
Thankfully, the study was empty. Kendra made a beeline for the hidden door. Her hands shook as she pushed aside the tapestry. It was only when the door swung open that she found herself hesitating, a spidery sense of fear crawling up her spine.
Time travel. It was absurd. Unbelievable. Yet here she was, smack in the middle of the unbelievable. Having ruled out a brain tumor, psychotic break, or hoax, Kendra had to believe that she’d just spent the morning in the early nineteenth century.
In theory, time travel was possible. Albert Einstein had theorized if gravity was strong enough, it could conceivably cause a curvature in the space-time continuum, forcing time to literally loop back on itself. There were some science fiction freaks who even believed that there were natural gravitational hot spots in the world that could create such a vortex of space-time, allowing people to travel through time. But that was science fiction, for Christ’s sake.
Of course, there’d been experiments that had basically proven that time travel was possible. In 1971, scientists J. C. Hafele and Richard E. Keating had placed amazingly accurate atomic clocks—each with the capacity to measure time to the billionth of a second—on jets flying at 600 miles per hour. Using the atomic clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory as a reference point, they’d documented that nanoseconds of time had been both gained and lost on the clocks onboard the jets. In effect, anyone onboard the jets had leapt a nanosecond into the future and back to the past.
But there was a big difference between traveling nanoseconds in time and centuries. This shouldn’t be possible. But since she was standing here, maybe she’d encountered one of those alleged gravitational hot spots. Could that explain the unnatural darkness, the vertigo, the pain . . . the way her flesh seemed to bubble, dissolve, disappear . . . ? And if the passageway housed one of those vortexes, this would be her ticket home.
There were a lot of things wrong with that theory, Kendra knew—like, if there was a vortex beyond this door, one would think the Duke would’ve encountered more people appearing suddenly, or inexplicably going missing. She didn’t want to think about it. I just want to go home.