The Project Team was confident its forgery was too skillful to be detected: relatively small sums spread over many banks, with meticulous attention to ink, paper, and surviving examples of real banknotes. But we had trusted the Artifact Fabricators with our lives in a way I had not fully appreciated until this moment. I looked up at Liam, who was watching the door where the clerk had gone. Expression blank, he might have been anyone waiting for his change.
As the minutes stretched out, sweat trickled down between my breasts and came to rest on the money belt. “If he doesn’t come back, I’m making a run for it,” I whispered. Where would I go? Could I even get out of this store? It was more crowded now, and we were crushed up against the counter. I smelled tobacco and unwashed hair.
“Do not even think such thoughts,” Liam breathed, adding audibly: “Remember, we have to ask about tailors when he comes back.”
The man returned, not to have us arrested, but to apologize; there had been trouble finding change. To write down, on a torn-off piece of the brown paper used to wrap packages, information about tailors. The one specializing in jackets was famous: on St. James’s Street, patronized by Beau Brummell himself, who had risen from obscure origins to become the arbiter of male fashion, essentially inventing Regency menswear. Another tailor, almost as renowned, specialized in pants, and then several mantua makers for me.
“What about shirts?” I asked. “Can any of these people make a shirt? I do not sew fast enough.”
The clerk glanced at me, scratched his head, and wrote something else.
BY THE TIME WE WERE BACK AT THE GOLDEN CROSS, THE LAMPLIGHTERS were at work. We had visited the shirt tailor, the pants tailor, the jacket tailor, and a mantua maker. We’d bought stockings, hats, shoes, gloves, and two trunks to hold it all; quills, ink, paper, tooth-cleaning sticks made of marshmallow root, and a first edition of Mansfield Park, passing several five-pound notes from the Bank of Ireland.
In my bedroom, I noticed that all the coins in my reticule, a sort of handbag, were gone, though I had tied the string tightly and kept it close, or so I’d thought. It was less than one pound, but the loss was jarring. I tried to console myself by supposing that my pickpocket needed the money more than I did, but this led to a worse thought: What if his getting it altered history?
The institute’s guidance was that we were to interact as little as possible with anyone but our target subjects, for fear of significantly disrupting the probability field, possibly influencing macrohistoric events in unforeseeable and damaging ways. Yet the McCauley-Madhavan theory had established that the field could survive some disruption—our mission would have been impossible otherwise. Of the previous thirty-six missions to the past, twenty-seven teams had returned more or less unscathed, while six had required some memory modification, and three had never come back. So far, no one had changed history in an important way. But our mission was unprecedented in how close it would require getting to the people we’d come to find.
“You must resist the temptation of involvement,” I remembered Dr. Ping, the Project Team leader, saying. “It is a seductive age, despite its many disgusting aspects.” Yet could we resist involvement and still—what? Have money stolen? Patronize a shirt-making tailor who looked on the verge of starvation? Maybe we’d saved his life today, with Liam’s order of twenty-one shirts.
I studied my dress in the dim light and decided to take it off. We’d been nearly back when a passing wagon went through a nearby puddle, sending a clot of mud onto the lower section of my dress and through it to my petticoat, as well as onto Liam’s boots. All I could do was rinse that part in my wash water and hope for the best.
The inn had given us a sitting room adjacent to our two bedrooms. I checked that the hall was clear before hurrying out in corset and chemise, thinking as my hand touched the doorknob that I could have grabbed my shawl as well, but I didn’t go back for it. The prospect of appearing before my colleague in underwear had given me pause only that morning, but now I was too tired to care; had I not routinely worked out in the institute’s gym wearing less? And I saw my earlier concern for what it was: the affectation of an 1815 attitude, a self-indulgence in going native, or imagining I had. I would have to watch out for that.
“What a day, huh?” I surveyed the offerings on a table by the hearth where a coal fire burned: a slab of meat pie, a chunk of boiled meat, boiled cabbage accompanied by boiled potatoes, and a boiled pudding thing draped in bacon. And wine, fortunately.
Liam was by the window, looking out; we had a view of a dim alleyway. His boots were gone—he must have sent them for cleaning—and his coat off. He had removed his neckcloth and wig, and seemed to have just dipped his head in his washbasin.
“Here,” I said, handing him his money belt. Taking it, he shot a glance at my outfit. And a second one before he averted his eyes, saying nothing but turning pink, sitting down at the table and resting his head in his hands.
“Are you all right?” I asked, remorseful. We had to work in close quarters for a long time; I needed to be careful about boundaries, respectful of other people’s taboos. Many of the Old British were prudes, another revival of their Victorian glory days.
He lifted his head and poured us wine. “It was quite a day, but—maybe we’ll get used to it. Would you like some of this? No saying which animal, but thoroughly boiled.”
Our own world was vegan from necessity, food the product of technology, not nature. You could synthesize something like meat, but it was unpopular, part of the lost world before the Die-off, that era of chaos and selfish mistakes no one wanted to remember. We had eaten it, though, as part of Preparation, to get used to it.
I took a bite of the boiled pudding thing, which was soft yet unyielding, and chewed and chewed, willing myself to swallow; the faux meat of Preparation was nothing like this. My knife felt heavy and cold; my fork had the dullness of pewter and only two tines. But I attacked the food with determination. And wine.
As we ate in silence, I revisited the day’s events, their intensity softened by firelight, quiet, and alcohol. “That was smart, to start spending banknotes. A test. If one aroused suspicion, we could have pretended to be victims of fraud ourselves. Which would be much harder in a bank, with a couple thousand.” I poked the boiled thing with my fork: what made it so springy? “And you were wonderfully calm.” Liam shook his head. “You were nervous?”
“You weren’t?”
“You never showed it.”
“If you showed everything you felt,” he said, and paused, chewing and chewing the same piece of food, finally spitting out a chunk of gristle and depositing it on his plate, “it wouldn’t be the world of Jane Austen, would it?”
“Very true.” I raised my tiny wineglass in homage to this notion, drained it, and poured us each more. “But you were an actor before, right? That must help. You never said much about that.” He’d never said much at all about himself; this was a good time to learn more, before we would be surrounded by servants and in character at all times. “What’s your favorite Shakespeare play? What sort of actor were you?”
Liam looked wary. “The usual sort, who couldn’t find work.”