“I could work as a midwife.” I thought of all the lives I might save; for a crazy moment the vision tempted me.
“If only one of us could go, I certainly wouldn’t let you stay here.” He sounded nettled. He added, looking out the window: “Unless you want to marry Henry, and be Jane Austen’s sister-in-law. As you say, if we’ve messed with the probability field, why not do it properly?”
“Are you out of your mind?” I demanded, realizing we both were, a little. Before I thought better of it I leaned across the seat and took both his hands, looking into his eyes. “Liam! We’re not going to be stuck here, so stop talking like that. But you’re right; we need to be careful. We can’t give away all our money.” I paused. Our gloved fingers were entwined; I was close enough to see the flecks of gold in his blue irises. He looked, I thought, terrified. “But maybe there is still some way we can help them. We have to think how.”
Liam’s nostrils flared as he took a breath and stared at me, squeezing my hands for an instant so hard I yelped and he let go. “You’re a very good person.” He fell back against his seat and closed his eyes. “I wish—”
“What?”
A pause. “Let’s say, I wish I’d met you sooner. Like, when I was seven.”
I smiled. “I would have been three. We wouldn’t have had much in common.”
He opened his eyes and seemed to consider this. “Do you mean we do now?”
I was puzzled by his teasing tone, but grateful. “Would I have to have grown up in your town, to accomplish this? Where in Ireland did you say it was?”
“No, no, I would have—Where did you grow up? In New York, then?”
“In Brooklyn.”
“In Brooklyn. And what was that like?”
“Nice.” I tried to think how to sum it up for him. “We lived in an old house. My parents and I, I mean, and my grandmother.” For an instant it all rose before me in memory: the worn stone steps at the front, the faint smell of old wood when you stepped inside, the slant of sunlight on the stairs down to the kitchen, which was on the lowest floor, like in our rented house in London. “It would have been built not so long after when we are living now. We had a garden in the back, where my friends always came over to play because they mostly lived in apartments. My mother had a studio on the top floor, with skylights, and it always smelled wonderful, like paint. Has, I mean, she still has.” I stopped, seeing it too clearly now and suppressing a sudden wish to cry. I thought of the world as it had seemed in my childhood and how I’d felt then, warm and safe in my family’s love. “I miss her so much.”
“Do you?” I thought he sounded puzzled. “So she’s an artist?”
“She would set up a little canvas for me next to hers and have me do projects.” I smiled as I thought of this. “And they were always taking me to museums and concerts and things, well before I had any idea of anything, except that it was extremely important. I remember first going to the opera when I was six. With my father. The Magic Flute.”
“Did you like it?” His tone was cautious.
“Actually? I loved it. It was like the music picked me up and body-slammed me—” I looked out the carriage windows to see we were approaching a town. “Do you think this is Guildford? It must be, right? It’s getting on toward dark.”
That was the midway point where we’d arranged to spend the night: Jencks and North had traveled ahead of us by mail coach to smooth our way, making this arrival at the Angel far different from the night we’d walked into the Swan to be insulted by the innkeeper. Having been shown up a dim, creaking flight of stairs to find our rooms waiting, our things unpacked, the promise of dinner in the best private parlor, I washed up, my mind not on the challenges ahead but on the world I had come from. I seldom allowed my thoughts to stray there, and now I understood why: a rare mood of homesickness had overtaken me with the vision of my mother, painting in the attic, wondering if I would be all right.
I drank too much claret at dinner, and talked too much about my childhood, as if by talking about it I could live it again. “My father taught me to play chess,” I explained. “It amazes me, when I think of it; he was a cardiologist, and he taught at a medical school, but I always felt like he had time for me. Like I was the most important person in the world, to him. I suppose, though, memory—there had to have been times—I remember when I was little, having to go to sleep before he was home, and being so, so disappointed.” We were done picking at the duck, still sitting over the plates, room half in shadow. Liam’s eyes were fixed on me; it was hard to say with what emotion. “He died suddenly, five years ago. I miss him every day. He had an undiagnosed heart problem. It’s ironic, right? He would have been quite fascinated by his own condition.” I pushed my plate aside and put my head down on the table, fighting back tears. Had I ever been quite this drunk in 1815? Or maybe it was just emotion. “I miss him every day.” Liam reached over and patted my shoulder tentatively. His touch sent a jolt through me, and I sat up. “I’m sorry.” I tried to laugh. “I’m wallowing.”
“Wallow away, Rachel dear. We’ll be at Chawton House soon enough, and on our best behavior.”
“I’ve gone on and on about myself, and asked nothing about you.”
“Don’t worry.”
I stood and immediately felt dizzy. “We’ll be making an early start, I suppose.”
“Breakfast at half-seven, the man promised me.”
I turned to go and then turned back. “Liam. Will you give me a hug? I need a hug.”
He got up without hesitating and came around the table to enfold me in his long arms. It was a better hug than I’d expected, not perfunctory; but then, he’d been an actor. We did not, as so often happens, carefully keep our torsos apart; there was an illicit thrill in this as I rested my forehead on his neckcloth and inhaled the aromas of bay leaf soap and coal smoke and carriage interior and linen and Liam. He swayed slightly, like a birch tree in a breeze, and stroked my hair. I felt his breath on my scalp, and then, as I moved in closer, felt the flutter of his erection stir, grow, and solidify against me.
We stayed like that a long while, saying nothing, breathing harder. I lowered my arms from where they’d been chastely around his shoulders, admiring the musculature of his back on my way down, and pulled him tighter, eliciting a groan. His hands slid down past my waist to seize my butt and lift me up, pushing us together with such force that the air left my chest as my feet left the ground. Surprising, but not unpleasant; he stuck his tongue in my ear, nibbled at my earlobe, and blazed a wet trail of kisses down my neck, breath hot and fast. “Oh my god,” he whispered. “Rachel.”
Then he let me down and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, gaze on the floor. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be doing this.”