“No,” said Josiah. “I’m not officially here. I met Fred purely by accident in the lane.” His accent, Freddy noted, had become more British.
“You drive the poor man to distraction,” said the woman to Josiah, hands on her hips. “The things he believes about you!”
“Not my fault,” said Josiah. “And I’m sorry about the milk. I do try to keep out of his sight.”
“Please, miss,” said Freddy in her best approximation of an English accent, which she suspected made her sound a bit too much like someone mangling a Mary Poppins imitation, “I have this message for Mr. Coleridge.”
“Do you, now?” said the woman. “And where did you spring from?”
Freddy looked at Josiah again. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. I depend too much on him. I shouldn’t. I don’t really know anything about him. She thought of him as her friend sometimes, but she knew he wasn’t really. She knew he didn’t react to things in the same way as ordinary people.
“Porlock. He’s from Porlock. From Dr. Potter,” said Josiah.
“Let the lad speak for himself,” said the woman.
“He’s shy,” said Josiah.
“Mr. Coleridge is working and cannot be disturbed,” said the woman.
Freddy bobbed her head. “I was told it couldn’t wait, miss,” she said.
The woman drummed her fingers on the door frame, then nodded. “I’ll see what can be done. Please come in,” she said.
Freddy followed her through the kitchen and down a corridor to a drawing room. Josiah, uninvited, slunk along on her heels. “Porlock?” she hissed at him. “Dr. Potter?”
“Nearby village. Sam’s doctor in nearby village,” Josiah whispered back. “You can work with that, can’t you?”
“I know his name. He’s a poet, isn’t he?” she asked, but they had reached the room, and the woman was showing Freddy to a seat. Josiah went straight to a window nook and drew the curtains over himself.
When the woman had gone, Freddy said, “Sam Coleridge? Is he the same as the poetry guy?”
“If you haven’t heard of Coleridge,” said Josiah, his voice muffled by the curtains, “you’ve been living under a rock. Isn’t your mother an English professor?”
“That doesn’t mean I’m the world’s biggest poetry fan,” said Freddy just as the poet’s full name came to her: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Josiah had brought him up in class. There had been an epic battle between Josiah and Mr. Dillon about the possibility of opium causing poetry. But there was definitely something else, too. It seemed important that she should remember it. Something with a book, thought Freddy, and Roland and Mel and … tentacles. No. Not the tentacles. But other things … like … pleasure-dome…?
“It isn’t relevant, anyway,” said Josiah. “He’s just Three.”
Pleasure-dome, thought Freddy again, and then she had it. Her hands clenched into fists. She knew something important: something Josiah didn’t know.
A man entered the room. He was unexpectedly young. When Freddy thought of the poets whose works her mother taught, she almost invariably pictured a bunch of crusty old men. Sam couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. His brown hair fell past his shoulders, and he was just a little bit chubby. Mostly, he struck Freddy as distracted. His eyes flicked about the room, doing a full circuit before they lit on Freddy. His mouth was twisted into a sort of anguished grimace.
“Please forgive me,” he said all in a rush as Freddy rose to meet him. “I have some urgent business I must attend to. Your visit has come at a very inconvenient time. I beg your pardon.”
“But—” Freddy started.
“Dr. Potter is very kind,” said Sam loudly, “but I have sufficient quantities of laudanum for now. If you will excuse me—”
“I’m not from Dr. Potter,” said Freddy, “actually.”
Sam, already turning towards the doorway, paused. “You’ve gained entry on false pretences? Why?”
“Robin Goodfellow,” said Freddy. It was all she could think of. It usually didn’t take more than a mention of Cuerva Lachance or Josiah for the Threes to fall in line. Of course, it tended to be Josiah himself doing the mentioning. He had never hidden behind the curtains before.
“What of him?” said Sam.
“You’ve seen him,” said Freddy. “And the other one. The one called … called…”
“Mustardseed?” said Sam.
“My name is not Mustardseed. You made that up,” said Josiah indignantly from the alcove.
“Oh, is he here?” said Sam. “I’m sure the farm can spare some milk—”
Josiah poked his head through the curtains. “If you try to give me milk, I shall flay you,” he said and withdrew once more.
Freddy, turning back to Sam, was surprised to catch the merest ghost of amusement on his face. It was gone in an instant, but she knew she had seen it. You sneak, she thought with admiration. You don’t think he’s a fairy. You’re teasing him. She had never associated the idea of a sense of humour with her mother’s parade of dry old poets, either.
“I know them both. What of them?” said Sam.
Freddy drew a deep breath and removed her hat, letting her curly hair fall free. “Well,” she said, “at the moment, I’m with them, too.”
And then she told him everything.
It wasn’t what they normally did with the Threes. Some of them could handle the idea of time travel, but many couldn’t. Josiah would make up some story: he was generally his own twin brother, and Freddy was his guest. If everybody thought he was a god, Freddy became a god, too. If everybody thought he was foreign, Freddy was from his country. Some of the Threes had seen Cuerva Lachance travel in time, and those ones got an edited version of the truth. None of them got the whole truth, or none of them had until now. She didn’t care. Until now, they had been flitting aimlessly back and forth through time. Josiah said this was because of the rules, but she was tired of following the rules. Whose rules were they, anyway? And there was … the thing with the pleasure-dome. She didn’t think she had a plan yet, but it was possible a plan was on the verge of being born.
Josiah kept putting his head through the curtains to squeak at her. She ignored him. For almost seventeen months, she had been running around frantically, lying about herself to everybody she had met. She hadn’t known she had been missing telling the truth so much.
Sam listened without interrupting. At some point, he sat down on a hard little couch and folded his hands over his knees. His distraction gradually vanished. By the time she had ground to a halt, he was totally focussed on her.
The silence between the two of them stretched out, broken only by Josiah’s whispered running commentary, which went more or less like: “And now she goes and spills her guts to a Three, of all people, and completely disrupts the space-time continuum, thank you very much, and bring on the paradox, why don’t you—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Freddy. “You keep telling me the past can’t be changed; the present can just be acted upon.”