“It smelled like cabbage?”
“It stank! And so do I.”
“Can I tell you? I love the smell of your skin, the smell of your sweat. First I thought it was your soap I liked, but then I decided it was you.”
“The kind of stink that comes from inside, you can’t get rid of with washing,” he intoned. “The stink of poverty and doom. I’m disgusting. I disgust myself.”
“Will you stop already?” I rose from my chair next to the bed and lay down beside him with a sudden wish to cry. “Move over a little.” I hid my face in his neck. “I need to smell you.” But his smell had changed; it was of rank fever sweat and Peruvian bark.
“You’ll get what I have,” he protested; his unshaven chin rasped my forehead.
I put my arms around him. “Don’t worry. I love you so much. I don’t know why, but I do.” I felt a weight lift from me as I realized this was true. How had I failed to see it?
“You can’t possibly.”
“Oh, but I do. So deal with it.” He was silent. “Somehow we have to figure out how to make this work,” I added, more to myself than to him.
How, though? I tried to envision us together in our own time, introducing him to my mother. Would I move to England for him? Maybe, though my imagination faltered at the details. I tried to picture him in my apartment in Brooklyn, in my neat white bed, and failed. But maybe the problem wasn’t Liam: that world had grown so dim I could hardly remember it. Was I getting sick too? I closed my eyes, and saw Box Hill; the long afternoon shadows, the peace and the slowness. Maybe we shouldn’t go back; maybe this only works here, I thought, and fell into sleep like falling off a cliff.
CHAPTER 20
SEPTEMBER 5, 1816
Leatherhead, Surrey
WE STOOD IN THE MUDDY FIELD WHERE THE HACKNEY DRIVER had left us, in a steady cold rain, my arm aching from holding the umbrella high enough to shield Liam’s head as well as my own. Though this was the field where we’d landed, my spectronanometer was silent. I squeezed it harder, then tried Liam’s. Nothing.
I put my non-umbrella-holding arm back around Liam, whose eyes were closed, teeth chattering despite the blanket he was wrapped in. Typhus lasts two to three weeks in an uncomplicated case. But by the end of August, he’d been as febrile as ever, newly delirious, and presenting with symptoms of pneumonia. Discussions about staying in 1816 were over: the problem would be getting him to the portal site.
It rained the whole week before the Opportunity of Return, as well as the day of; the roads were a sea of mud. My worries about the carriage getting stuck had made it hard to decide when to set out. We needed to be on time but not early, otherwise we’d just be shivering there, waiting. But we couldn’t be late: the Opportunity of Return, which began at 5:43 P.M., lasted twenty minutes.
The driver had been suspicious; I couldn’t blame him. Liam was flushed and blotchy, shivering in his blanket like a shipwreck victim plucked from the sea, leaning on me as we wobbled down the stairs. A journey with someone so ill was hard to explain, especially one ending in an empty, wet field. I gave the driver a ridiculously large tip and instructions to return in an hour. By then, I hoped, we’d be gone.
Or, if the portal failed, we’d need a ride back. But if we spent an hour out in this, Liam’s pneumonia might kill him.
I looked around the field, squinting against the rain, cursing myself for having spent weeks in Leatherhead without coming out here earlier to look for the marker and test the spectronanometers. And why not? Just because I’d sort of wanted to stay in 1816, and had not thought past that? Later, when Liam got sick, I’d been busy, but still. It seemed, in a blaze of painful self-knowledge, that this was how I’d lived always: sleepwalking, unprepared, thinking only of myself.
There’d been a clump of birch trees, and there they were. But where had we been in relation to them? I tried each spectronanometer again, again without result. The sight of the gibbet—today empty—put me on more solid ground; I remembered where I’d been standing when I first noticed it. I’d been so appalled I’d gotten dry heaves, and Liam had tried to comfort me, but something stopped him. He’d been afraid to touch me! The memory made me smile, and I turned to look at him, just as he folded and fell, landing knees first, then hands, then face.
“Hey,” I said, sinking to the ground and shaking him. “Don’t give up. We’re nearly there. I think I know where the portal is now. Come on.”
When he lifted his head off the ground, one side of his face was covered in mud. “Just leave me here,” he muttered. “Can’t.”
“Can you crawl? You can do that, right? One hand, one knee, one hand, one knee . . .”
He made it a few feet, blanket unwinding behind him, and sank down. It struck me I should make sure I was urging him in the right direction, so I struggled to my feet, unbalanced by the weight of my newly wet skirt as well as by the oilcloth-wrapped bundle I had in a bag over one shoulder, and squelched off, letting my umbrella fall away. I sank to my knees and waved my hands frantically an inch above the wet ground where I thought the marker should be, encountered nothing, crawled a few feet to the left, and tried again. Useless.
Then my hand hit metal and closed around it. I felt a galvanic shock and heard a vibration as shrill as a bat squeak, followed by a beep from the spectronanometer. I leaped up with a yelp and turned back to Liam—was he in range? But the portal marker grew louder, more insistent, unbearable. I put my hands over my ears, and everything went black.
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, I WAS IN A BED, IN A ROOM I’D NEVER seen, white and windowless, lit by electricity’s cold glow. Hearing a robotic beeping and a faint, relentless hum, I blinked and tried to focus. The air was antiseptic-smelling; an IV in my arm delivered clear fluid from a nearby bag hooked to a metal pole. I was alone. But my mother should be here, I thought; why isn’t she? I closed my eyes again.
“Congratulations, Dr. Katzman,” Dr. Ping said, dry yet kind. They’d taken the IV out—it had been a precautionary rehydration, I appeared to be in excellent condition, I was told—and given me a fluffy hooded garment to wear over my hospital gown; I was confined to the infirmary until all the medical results came back. “It’s clear the mission was a brilliant success. The Project Team can’t wait to hear your account of it all tomorrow. We start at nine, in the big conference room.” He paused and added: “Eva Farmer will be there! She wants to have lunch with you.”
It took me a moment to remember who Eva Farmer was. “What time is it?” The lack of natural light was disorienting. How did people manage; how did they know when to sleep?
“About four P.M.”
“How long have we been back?” I hesitated over the pronoun. But if Liam had been out of range, and I’d come back alone, Dr. Ping’s words or manner surely would have told me that.