“That’s not your recollection?”
It was a moment before he answered. “It seems so far away, doesn’t it? Like something that happened to someone else. The institute, all of it.” He was right, but I didn’t want to admit that we both thought this, and he went on: “And what does it mean? Five percent of the billions of, I don’t know, colliding quarks that make up an average day in 1815?”
“It would be something macro.” I looked around the dim room, asking myself what I was doing here. If I’d woken up to find Liam standing in my bedroom, I would not have taken it as calmly as he had. “Like a person choking to death who is supposed to live to 1882.”
“But she didn’t. So maybe it’s as they said. The probability field is like a mesh net; it’s elastic. She chokes, but she doesn’t die. Equilibrium restored.”
“How can you be so nonchalant about this?”
“Because it’s useless to worry about things you can’t control?”
I did not agree, but this was a philosophical labyrinth I had no wish to step into. “What about Tom? You told me it was a bad idea to try to help him. Maybe that was where we went wrong.” Cramped from my pretzel pose, I stretched my legs out and put my feet on the bed.
Liam said after a pause: “You think Fanny Knight choked on a piece of cake because you saved a climbing boy?”
“I’m not saying there’s direct causality. But if the field is dynamic—and it is, action at a distance connecting in quantum, unpredictable ways?”
There was another long silence. Two flights down, the clock struck twelve.
“You were right to do what you did that day.”
“But even if—”
“Someone rescued me once. They’d no reason to do it, except human decency, and my whole life was different because. If that’s where we went wrong, with Tom—too bad.”
“How did they rescue you?”
He ignored this, going on with increased energy: “And I don’t believe it. One climbing boy, more or less—people like that don’t change things. If we’d run over Wilberforce in our carriage, maybe.” I shivered, recalling my first morning in 1815, when I’d nearly been mowed down myself. “Little people don’t matter. Except in the aggregate.”
“They like their lives as much as the great ones.”
“I mean, they don’t change things.”
He said this with such assurance that I was silenced for a moment, wanting to believe him. But finally I had to say it, what I realized I had come to his bedroom and woken him up for: “If we have really disrupted the probability field, what happens then? And we come back, and the world we know is gone, and we have to be rectified, and forget who we are?” Only the nonconforming memories, I reminded myself, but this was no comfort.
It was Liam’s turn to go silent. At last he said: “We took that chance, didn’t we? Along with everything else. Are you sorry you did this, now?”
The sleeping house was still, but outside I could hear wind in chimneys, the cry of a night watch, horseshoes on cobblestones a long way off. It was as if a thought passed between us, quiet as a sigh. “No,” I said. “I’m not. Despite everything.”
“And what do you mean, then, by ‘everything’?”
“If everything’s gone. We go back and—I don’t know—” I stopped. “It’s unknowable, though, isn’t it? What would it even be like? Like trying to picture the world going on without you after you’re dead. You know it has to, but—” I stopped, not pleased with where my train of thought was taking me.
“Does that scare you?” Liam murmured. “I don’t know. I’ve always rather liked the idea of the world going on without me. I suppose it’s why I was so taken by the idea of time travel. Our world is going on without us now, and we’re none the worse.”
“That’s because we’re alive, silly.”
“I suppose we are.” He laughed quietly.
I considered again that he had a nice laugh. It was of a piece with his versatile voice, his graceful walk, his breadth of shoulder and way of holding his long head sideways as he held my gaze. His eyes.
Which were fixed on me, glittering in the semidarkness, a look on his face like he’d just thought of something. Uncomfortable, I dropped my gaze and found myself staring at his hands instead, which were still wrapped around his knees as he sat up in bed. It was not much help; they were strong-looking, with knobby knuckles and long fingers. His sleeves, pushed back past the elbow, offered a view of forearm I never got by day: milky pale, with visible musculature and sleek, dark hairs that I resisted the urge to reach over and stroke. They would have a soft nap, like velvet.
And just like that, I didn’t know what to do. My heart was racing and I forgot to breathe; I tried to twine a curl around my finger and felt curlpapers. I’d come here in curlpapers? Mother of god, as Liam would have said.
I took my feet off his bed, which now struck me as suggestive, one step away from climbing under his covers, and stood, a stranger to my own body, legs obeying mind’s command, but awkwardly. I picked up my candle.
“I’d better go. Thanks for letting me vent. Sorry I disturbed you.”
For what if I did pull back the covers and slide in next to him, close enough to smell the salt on his skin, to hear his breath quicken? Just to get warm, I would say. Let’s talk this over in a little more detail. He would not resist me because men, in my experience, can’t. Or don’t. A direct approach, managed right, rarely fails.
But I couldn’t do it. I was paralyzed.
He peered up at me. “You didn’t.” In the chiaroscuro of my candle’s light he looked puzzled and innocent.
“I was—I feel better now that we talked, though. Thanks. Good night!”
My mouth was dry and I got these words out with difficulty, then turned so fast I extinguished the candle and had to feel my way toward the door. It should have been a relief not to see or be seen, but the darkness felt more intimate, knowing he was in it.
“Good night then, Rachel dear. Come back anytime.” There was a creak and a rustle as he settled back down, and my blind hand found the doorknob.
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES TO WATERY NOVEMBER SUNSHINE, EVERYTHING that had happened the night before was still in my mind, but I was no longer stunned. It was as though in sleep I had adjusted my thinking to contain these ideas, the way scar tissue might grow over a small foreign object in the flesh. Probability field disruption. An invitation to Chawton. And Liam. I stared out at the patch of sky I could see from my window and let my mind play over these things.