FROM HILL STREET TO CHAWTON IS ABOUT FIFTY MILES: MUCH OF one short winter day and part of another. The weather had turned cold: ruts had frozen solid, and ice puddles shattered under our wheels like glass. I had long since stopped hearing the roar of London, as I realized only when the city was already behind us, along with its scruffy outskirts: brickworks, bleaching fields, shambles, tanneries. It all gave way surprisingly soon to stubbly harvested fields bordered by hedgerows. The sky was gray, and there seemed to be a lot of it.
I’d been busy: organizing and packing and choosing things to be sent ahead, because cargo space in the landaulet was minimal. Deciding who would come along—Wilcox, for the horses; Jencks to be Liam’s valet; North to be my maid—with the rest to stay in London on board wages, looking after the house. There had been tradesmen’s bills to pay, take-leaves of our new friends. The enforced inactivity of travel felt strange after all that. It was too bumpy to read the novel I had brought, so all I could do was stare out the window, remembering my previous long carriage ride, to London in September.
My sense of apprehension was nearly as great now, even if I was more used to this world. Being a houseguest had etiquette perils that grew more vivid as our departure for Chawton loomed, costing me sleep as I lay awake thinking of all the ways we might be exposed there. Also wondering what I was going to do about Henry: how long I could put him off and what would happen once I finally said no.
Though she never stated it openly, it became clear from Jane’s manner both that Henry had told her of his offer and that she was in favor of it. She’d been friendly before, but grew warmer, almost confiding; the strangely personal remarks about my hair were just the start. She kept up her flirtation with Liam, but he was no longer so obviously her favorite, the focus of her attention. Instead, I seemed to be.
Impossible not to be seduced by this; impossible not to feel its danger. We had gone to Hans Place a few times before leaving London, including the night before we started our journey. Henry was circumspect around other people: the Tilsons, the Jacksons, Mr. Seymour. If not for the subtle smolder in how he looked at me sometimes, I would hardly have suspected it myself. But then, he had contrived to take my hand and lingeringly kiss it after helping me into my pelisse as our carriage stood at the door, the other guests gone, Jane halfway down the stairs distracting Liam with a story about a quarrel between Madame Bigeon and the butcher’s boy.
“You are thinking about what I have said?” he murmured, eyes meeting mine.
“I think about it day and night.” I felt his hand tremble slightly as he pulled off my glove, kissed each knuckle in turn, and continued to hold my hand. My mouth had fallen open; my chest was straining against the prison of its corset.
“Precious Mary,” he whispered. “I will come down to Chawton as soon as I can. You will have mercy on me then, will you not?”
EVEN THOUGH THERE WOULD BE FEW OPPORTUNITIES TO SPEAK privately or as ourselves once we were staying at Chawton House, Liam and I said little as our journey got under way, except to marvel at the sights outside the window. A new constraint seemed to be oppressing us in recent weeks; Liam had grown more silent than usual, but so had I. My mind returned more than once to our conversation the day of Henry’s proposal, inconclusively, as if mining it for clues and not finding the answer I wanted.
Finally I said, “The Tilsons seemed to be having a very serious talk with you last night.” At Hans Place, they’d ended up in a corner with Liam, from which he threw a glance at me from time to time, as if pleading for rescue, while I sat on a sofa with Jane, she telling me in a low tone things about my future neighbors in Chawton that she felt I might need to know.
“It seems they are thinking of moving to Canada, and they wanted my advice.”
“Why would they think you know anything about it?”
“More about the Atlantic voyage, what it was like. If it was as terrible as they’d heard.”
“What would they do in Canada? With all those children?”
“Whatever people do there. Fur trading?”
“You think it has to do with the bank collapse?”
“They have some sort of cousin there. He’s encouraging them.”
The Tilsons did not go to Canada. Mrs. Tilson would die in 1823, age forty-six, in Marylebone, where they moved after the bank collapse. Her daughter Anna, fifteen, died a few days later, so some contagious illness must have struck the household. Mr. Tilson would outlive her by fifteen years, moving back to his native Oxfordshire.
Unless we’d changed history, and this was one more sign of how. I looked at the wintry landscape outside the carriage window and shivered.
“You tried to talk them out of it?”
“I told them Canada was very cold.”
A silence fell, but I sensed we were both thinking about the probability field, a suspicion confirmed when Liam went on: “There’s no reason they couldn’t think about it. It doesn’t mean they are going to go.”
“I am sure you were persuasive in your case against it.”
“I did my best.” Looking gloomy, he rubbed his eyes. “And what about Henry? Was he pressing you for an answer?”
“Not annoyingly. But I’m sure he wants one.” Liam did not answer, and I continued, “I’ve been thinking.” I paused, unsure how to go on, but finally said: “What about a long engagement?” Apart from a sudden intake of breath, and a certain intensity of gaze, he showed no reaction, and I went on. “It would give us an excuse to lend him some money, and try to save his bank. Because I keep thinking, if we’ve messed up history, why not do something useful? We know that the stress of the crash may have been part of what brought on Jane’s illness. So what if we could . . . postpone it?”
Liam looked away from me and out the carriage window. “A very generous notion,” he said at last. “I admire its audacity. There are so many things wrong with it, though, I don’t know where to start.” He fell silent.
“Well?”
“Well, like that research was unable to determine exactly what happened with the bank. We might give him every cent we had and it would still fail.”
“We’d need to keep enough till we go back. But they sent us with more than we could really spend, as far as I can tell, only for masquerading as gentry and impressing Henry. And since we’ve done that . . .”
Liam leaned forward, asking in a whisper, “But if something goes wrong? And we can’t get back?”
In theory, the wormhole can collapse, rendering it unusable, whether because of probability field disruption, or something else. There’s no way of knowing what happened to the three teams that never came back, but this is one possibility. I looked at him and could not speak as everything seemed to tilt slightly, rearranging the landscape of the familiar, stranding me in an alien land.
“I always thought it was why we were sent with such a lot. Just in case.”
“Just in case,” I managed to say.
“Or, it’s possible only one of us could get back. We have to consider that. I’ve no useful skills; I’d be dead in a year without money.”