“Well,” Liam began with the hushed caution of someone delivering bad news, “it seems he has asked us to be his guests at Chawton Great House.”
I shrieked with glee and bounced on the seat. Liam winced and pointed toward Wilcox, outside on the box. “But that’s great. When does he say we can come?” I asked in a whisper, then paused. “Or was he just being polite?”
“He said he would call soon and we could discuss the details.” Liam, resting his head in his hands as though worn out from his labors of impersonating Dr. William Ravenswood, went on, “He wanted to give you a horse.”
I felt a gush of laughter welling up within me like a sneeze, like an orgasm, and choked it back, mindful of Wilcox. “He wanted to what?”
“He was a long time after explaining he had a handsome mare that he thought would be suitable for a woman of your size.” I thought Liam might also be trying not to laugh.
“It was a Shetland pony?”
“I told him we were set for horses, but we had never seen anything of England and would like to get out of London—if he knew of anyone with a house to let in some pretty part of the country he could recommend. So at that, he insisted that we come to Chawton, and if we liked Hampshire, he would help us find a place of our own, but that we would be his guests for now.”
“So we will be just down the street from Jane Austen.”
And the letters. And “The Watsons.”
I was still taking this in when Liam said, “He was wild to find some way to thank you for saving Fanny’s life.” There was a pause, as the horses clip-clopped down Sloane Street, which was fitfully lit by flickering lamps and oddly quiet, considering it was not so late. “You did, didn’t you? She would have died, had you not been there?”
I looked at him in dismay as I realized where he was going with this. How had I avoided seeing it myself? “Impossible. She marries a baronet, and has nine children, and lives to 1882.”
“So she would have saved herself, without your help.”
“She would have to have,” I said slowly, picturing Fanny at the moment she had held her hands up to her throat. “You have another theory?”
“Perhaps our being there at tea caused her to choke. We made her self-conscious.”
“So we were both the cause of the problem and its solution?”
“That would be tidy.” He paused. “I don’t believe it, though.”
“You’re saying we’ve disrupted the probability field.”
Liam rested his forehead in the heel of his hand. “It seems like it, doesn’t it?”
I stared out the window, at London bumping past, seeing again in my memory the steel-gray corridors of the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics. How excited I had been to be there, how amazed to be going to 1815. Had I considered that this could happen? I’d thought so, but now faced with it, I realized I really hadn’t.
UPSTAIRS, NORTH HELPED ME INTO MY NIGHTGOWN AND DRESSED my hair, braiding the back sections loosely for night and rolling the front into curlpapers. I usually enjoyed this private, indulgent part of the day and North’s calm presence. But she must have sensed I was tense; she asked me if something had happened.
After I gave a brief account of Fanny’s choking, she clucked her tongue. “So you saved her life, miss! That’s two for you that I know of.” We were in front of the glass as she worked on my hair, and our eyes met in the reflection, my face a question mark. “Tom. What would’ve been his lot, if you’d not bought him from that man? How long do you think they last, climbing boys?”
I looked away.
When North finished and left, I sat at my dressing table for a long time. I thought of Fanny as she had looked when she couldn’t breathe, Tom the morning I had found him in the drawing room. Those coins stolen from my bag, my first day in London. Money had velocity; how many hands had it passed through by now, how many lives had it altered?
But the intervention need not be so dramatic. We had shifted the current of events just being here: hired servants who would have found different jobs or gone hungry; occupied a house that would have been rented by someone else or stood empty. Common sense suggested that such small things should not change the course of history, yet surely they could, through some course of causality impossible to trace back. Mission intensity, and likelihood of probability field disruption, was measured according to the three major variables: how far in the past, how long spent there, and the degree of involvement needed to accomplish the project goals. People had traveled much further back than we had—but they never stayed long in the remote past, and they rarely did more than observe cautiously. Our mission was 8.5 on a ten-point scale. I had known this; yet my knowledge, until now, had been abstract.
I looked into the mirror at my scared face. In the weak light from the dying fire, my head bristling with curlpapers, I was like a vaguely familiar stranger: the same dark eyes and wedge-like chin, but altered. What am I going to do, I asked my eerie reflection. What am I going to do?
I pulled off the counterpane and wrapped it around me, picked up my candle, and tiptoed out into the hall, floor icy against my bare feet. I hesitated before Liam’s door, then eased it open like a housebreaker, slipped in, and closed it behind me.
I whispered: “Are you awake?”
His room was darker than mine and colder, a barely open window letting in a waft of night air. I heard a rustle and a creak, a quick intake of breath. “Rachel?”
I lifted my candle for a look around. “I wanted—” There was a Windsor chair in the corner; I moved it closer to the bed and sat down. The room smelled of night, and something else vaguely familiar, like bay leaf soap and wool, earthy but pleasant. “I wanted to talk to you.”
He had sat up, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. His gaze paused on my curlpapers. “What’s happened?”
“I just needed to talk for a minute. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”
Tousled and blinking, but alert now, arms wrapped around his knees, he inclined his head with the hint of a smile. “Don’t worry.”
“I knew I wouldn’t sleep—thinking about what you said—”
“There’s a difference between us then. I couldn’t see how lying awake would change it.”
“I can’t fall asleep on cue. The mind doesn’t work like that.”
“Oh, but you have to train it.”
“Can you do that?” I was intrigued, despite myself. “You’ll have to show me sometime.”
“I can show you now.”
“You’ll probably tell me to breathe, and think about something nice. It’s time to panic.”
Liam laughed, long and low, somehow secretive, and I felt better. Unlike me, he did not have the laugh of an insane person. “Very well. You first.”
I leaned back. My feet were cold; I tucked them under me. “What I recall, our mission had a point zero-zero-three chance of ‘significant’ probability field disruption, which would mean a disruption of more than five percent of the field at any given point.”
“Does that number comfort you?”