Arthur of Brittany, but not King Arthur, not yet. By rights, he should have been king of England, as his dead father was next in line. But Arthur was a child, so the barons chose his uncle John instead. And when Arthur grew old enough to try to take some of his family lands by force, John captured him and his sister and shut them up here.
Then in the spring of 1203, Arthur escaped from the castle dungeon and made his way somehow to Paris. He bided his time. By 1215, the barons will turn on John and welcome Arthur as king. King Arthur. That’s history. That’s what happened.
And that’s what Wray came here to change, to set in motion a plan to abduct the boy, drop him off in some time and place where he could do no harm, and change history so John will remain king.
Wray convinced them he was the best one for the indoor parts of the operation, being white (unlike Misses Zuniga and Payne), and experienced with fighting (unlike Miss Hodgson), and a man (unlike any of them).
But Wray fouled the whole thing up. Mentioned the escape plan to the boy within earshot of a hidden guard. Got himself into the dungeon with his would-be abductee.
The boy who would be king looks as though he’s already had half the life knocked out of him. He hasn’t even lifted his head. Sixteen years old, and about to lose his eyeballs, his testicles and probably his life’s blood.
Damn it. Somehow, Wray doesn’t think the boy will escape this time. History will change, but not as he intended.
Loud voices in Norman French, and the sound of dogs baying, the sound of people running.
“Now, Jane,” says Miss Zuniga.
They all turn.
Miss Hodgson is not there.
The door is still ajar, and the guards are coming.
“Jane!” Miss Payne screams like a banshee, the mallet still in her hand. “Prudence, did she go through the door?”
“Go through the shimmer,” Miss Zuniga says, stepping to the door and shutting it. “Now.”
“I’m not leaving—” Miss Payne protests.
“She didn’t go through the door,” Miss Zuniga says. “So she’s not here. Go on. We’ll find her.”
Miss Payne looks as if she could strangle her. “Surely—”
“Go!” Miss Zuniga shouts.
The guards are coming.
Wray grabs the boy Arthur by the wrist and pulls him to his feet. He puts the boy’s arm around his shoulders and trudges over to the shimmer. The boy is walking, just barely, almost automatically.
Wray glances back at his companions, not asking permission. It is his fault that the boy is in the dungeon in the first place, and he’ll be damned if he’ll leave him there.
“Ah, fuck it,” Prudence says, and pushes Alice through beside them.
CHAPTER FOUR: How She Met Herself
1789
Prudence follows the others through the shimmer, through the shock that sets her teeth on edge, still, after hundreds of times.
Back to Jane’s study in 1789, to the creaking of wrought hulks and the dripping of cloudy stills.
Jane is there, her back to the others. She is staring at someone who is standing next to a shimmer, and the someone is the cloaked version of Prudence.
Prudence, from another time. Shit.
“You’re still here,” Prudence says.
Cloaked Prudence gives her a curt nod. “Not for long. Everything’s good now, all right? Fixed. Don’t go back and stop Wray from travelling. Don’t do anything. Just . . . carry on.” She waves her palms at them, as if she’s doing a Jedi mind trick.
This isn’t the first version of herself Prudence has met. She tries to avoid it. It’s better, safer, to send someone else to deliver a warning, when a warning is unavoidable.
That is, after all, what brought Prudence here to 1789: Jane Hodgson travelled forward in time to warn Prudence not to try to destroy time travel for good. Sure, it had taken a while for Jane to convince Prudence that the outcome of that choice would be betrayal at the hands of her commanding officer and lifelong imprisonment, but eventually it had worked as intended.
Lecturers at the Academy relished the chance to tell the horror stories of their colleagues who had spent their entire lives reliving the same ten minutes, trying in vain to get it right. Both versions of Prudence knew well enough the stories of time travellers who wasted their whole lives trying to choose the time and manner of their deaths. Futures are so seductively infinite.
So Prudence had it drilled into her: redos are only for missions under orders, and for life-or-death.
And yet here she is, herself, staring back at her. A redo.
So it’s life or death, for someone.
“You yanked Jane through a shimmer,” says Prudence. “Saved her life.”
“My life!” Jane looks from one Prudence to the other.
Future Prudence nods, curtly. “It’s done now. Don’t go back.”
“You knew this,” Alice accuses Future Prudence, her hands two fists at her side. “You knew Jane was in danger if we went to the dungeon, and yet you told us to do it anyway.”
“I told you it was the only way, and I wasn’t lying,” Future Prudence says, her voice strained, clipped. She turns to Present Prudence. “And I knew I could save her. And I did. This is the least shitty of all possible worlds, believe me.”
“And what are we supposed to do with this asshole?” Prudence gestures at Arthur of Brittany, who is lolling against the feet of one of Jane’s skeletons.
She does not like looking at her doppelganger, never has. It always makes her queasy, but it’s worse this time. That Rossetti painting that hangs over General Almo’s desk in the twenty-second century: How They Met Themselves. A man and a woman meet a man and a woman, identical except for the fact that one couple seems perfectly composed while their doubles are broken, distressed.
A painting that no one else in this room knows anything about, because it’s 1789 here and now, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti has yet to swan out into the world. These people know nothing about the three-and-a-half centuries that yawn between them and Prudence’s birth, and she’s tried to keep it that way. Prudence has long been a time traveller by profession; she is used to combing vocabulary and references out of her speech. But it’s exhausting. She sees her future self now in her mind’s eye, the way she will be if she spends the rest of her life living among the people teleosophers call naïfs. Exhausted by half a life spent not saying what she wants to say, because her only friends wouldn’t understand it.
Lonely.
Her actual future self shrugs. “You changed history. He doesn’t become king. That’s all you should know right now.”
“I beg your pardon, er, Miss Zuniga,” Auden interrupts, addressing the cloaked Prudence. He scratches his temple to the accompaniment of a clatter from the chains that still hang from his wrists. “I’m afraid I don’t see how history has changed. No one knows what happened to Prince Arthur after the spring of 1203. That’s the mystery we were trying to solve. He disappeared. Everyone suspected John of killing him, but there was no evidence. As far as history goes, Arthur has left the stage, just as he always did.”
“That’s how you remember it now, Wray,” says Future Prudence, her hands on her hips. “That’s what you remember being taught.”
She calls him Wray, not Captain Auden. What has changed in this Prudence’s life that allowed that to happen?
“Yes,” Auden says, uncertainly.
Future Prudence smirks. Goddamn, she’s insufferable. “You changed the past, which means you changed what’s true. If you’d put in a note in your pocket about what you went in to do, when you came back out the note would say something different, in your own handwriting. Or it would be gone. Or it would be a lizard.”
“What was our intention, then?” Alice asks. “Why did we go to 1203?”
Cloaked Prudence turns away, paces like a teacher. “We Farmers have always loved the Magna Carta. It’s proof that progress can arise out of the competing demands of self-serving people. Sma
ll and slow. In the old timeline, though, it barely made a dent, at first. John had it annulled. The barons rode up against John and invited Arthur in. Arthur won. And King Arthur, who had much deeper and wider support than John had, had no need to make the barons happy. The Magna Carta was a mere blip, a first attempt.”
“How extraordinary,” says Auden. “I knew that changes in history could change our own recollections, but I would swear on my life I have always known that John remained king after the barons rose against him. He reissued the Magna Carta, and though he died not long after, his successors reconfirmed it.”
“Thanks to you,” says Future Prudence, pointing accusingly at Auden. “You got this boy out of the way. The effects downstream are pretty small, to be honest, but they’re there. You changed the year of women’s suffrage in three countries and several articles of the United States Constitution. But English history lost its real King Arthur.”
“That’s why Captain Auden went back,” says Present Prudence. “We wanted to change history.”
“I know you didn’t remember that,” says Future Prudence to the others. “Something happened—some change as soon as he arrived—that made us forget, made us believe that he only went to observe and investigate the way that Arthur escaped from the castle and rejoined his followers. But we wanted to get Arthur out of the way.”
“It seems that is precisely what we’ve done,” says Alice.
“No,” says Present Prudence, rounding on her. She would like this accusatory edge to come out of her own voice but she can’t help it. These people with their muskets and hair powder. They’re completely unprepared for time travel. And whose fault is that? Prudence has failed again. She can see the accusation in her own eyes.
“Yes, Alice,” says Future Prudence, her voice softer than the earlier version’s. “You did it but you did it wrong. You meant to go back and abduct Arthur, take him out of France and out of the picture, in a way that would look very much like an escape gone wrong. You were going to fake his death. Instead, you disappeared him. You created a historical mystery.”
A historical mystery that will look like a flashing red light in space-time to a man in the future with a keen eye for meddling by time travellers. A mystery that could give General Almo a reason to come after Prudence.
And her future self told her to do it, said that the other ways were worse. This is the least shitty of all possible worlds.
She looks at her future self, opens her mouth to ask the questions she knows she’ll regret asking.
“I’m going to go, before I fuck anything up,” Future Prudence says. She steps through the shimmer and it dissipates, leaving no trace.
Prudence shakes her head, clearing the fears away. It must be fine, or her future self would have warned her. Right? Prudence may be an asshole but she can count on at least being a self-serving asshole. Almo has no way to find her, no tracker. He might know what she’s done, but there’s not much he can do about it. She’ll just have to be more careful.
“I feel I’m not quite clear on the rules of time travel, still,” says Jane.
Prudence turns to her. “My mentor at the Academy used to say that time travel is like life: there are no rules, only consequences. The only rule is to always ask yourself what could possibly go wrong, and assume that it will. As in life.”
Jane opens her mouth to reply—to argue, presumably—but Auden interrupts them.
“He has a fever,” Auden says, his hand on the teenager’s forehead. “A high one. No wonder he’s in such a state.”
“Jesus Christ. Step away from him and go wash your hands, Captain. Please.”
She squats in front of the teenager.
He speaks, and she’s shocked enough that it takes her a moment to understand what he’s said. She’s no expert in the pronunciation of the langues d’oïl, but it sounds sufficiently like “où est ma sœur” that she understands.
She stands and walks to Auden, who is scrubbing at a basin with a bar of lye soap, the chains making a racket. She whispers, “His sister?”
“Eleanor,” Auden says. “Also in John’s custody. She remains a prisoner for the rest of her long life, albeit a well-treated one.” His expression clouds. “Or so I remember.”
The teenager from the thirteenth century lets out a terrible scream.
“Blast him, he’ll wake Father and frighten the servants,” says Alice.
But Prudence is staring at the teenager, whose eyes are bugging out of his spotty face, whose mouth is so wide in his terror and anger that she can see the red spots on his tongue.
Smallpox.
Fucking hell.
She’s been vaccinated, like every child born after the terrorist attack of 2054, when an early time traveller unleashed the virus in Manhattan and wiped out 30 percent of humanity. Unfucking that, while planting information to ensure the unfucked timeline would still have enough knowledge of it to vaccinate their children, was the first major mission of Teleosophic Core Command.
“Have you all had smallpox?”
Alice nods. “I had it as a child.”
Wray says, “I did not, but I was inoculated, in America, during the war.”
Alice adds, “Do you mean—has the boy got—but the servants!”
“And not only the servants.”
They all look at Jane.
“You haven’t had it, Jane?” Prudence asks, sharply.
“But you’ve been inoculated,” Alice says. “That should be protection enough.”
Jane grimaces. “I—”
Alice runs to her and takes both her hands.
Vaccination. Another way Prudence has failed to protect her new crew of time travellers.
She’s been thinking about them as naïfs, not as colleagues. As part of the scenery. Smallpox is a hazard of their own time, no less than any other period to which they might travel. Still, she should have realized that popping in and out of other places and other times would put them at greater risk.
“Get her out of here, Alice,” Prudence says. “Wray, quarantine the boy here. No servants come in here anyway. I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Here?” Jane blinks. “Quarantine him here?”
“For now,” Prudence says.
“You’re leaving? Now?” Alice glares at Prudence.
“I’m going to get something that will save Jane’s life, and when I say I’ll be back in a moment, I mean it. Go on, get her away from this room.”
Prudence opens a shimmer and steps into the outskirts of Toronto in 2070.
CHAPTER FIVE: Being a Short Chapter, with Kissing
1789
Alice takes Jane by the hand and leads her out of the round tower study where her beloved spends most of her time.
“Don’t touch that alembic; it has a crack in it,” Jane calls back to Captain Auden. “In fact, don’t touch anything.”
Alice pulls the door closed behind them. Jane’s study is the top floor of a round tower at one corner of Fleance Hall. It adjoins Jane’s bedroom, and Alice keeps pulling her through it, away from the infected boy, toward the two dressing rooms that form a putative barrier between Jane’s bedroom and her own. She and Jane usually sleep in Alice’s room at the far end of the wing, where the bed is a little bigger, and the mysterious fumes from Jane’s experiments can’t reach.
Damn Captain Auden! She should never have agreed when Prudence recruited him to help with the adventures Prudence calls, with some pomposity, “the missions.” Yes, Captain Auden had discovered Jane and Alice coming through a shimmer, but that could have been remedied some other way.
Alice must admit that Captain Auden’s dogged pursuit of any historical mystery has served them well, and has distracted him from seeking the Holy Ghost.
And damn it all, Alice likes Wray Auden. She likes playing billiards with him in the evenings, while Jane tinkers and Prudence combs the Colonel’s library. Auden doesn’t talk unnecessarily, and when he does talk, his words tease out meanings like a card through w
ool. She likes his company and the quickness of his mind.
Still, there’s a constant edge on her affection for him, like a black border of grief for innocence lost. She knows that Wray Auden would, in one possible future, take her to the magistrate and see her hanged for her crimes. A future version of Jane told her this. And she remembers her bloody kerchief, how he carried it with him, how he frowned over the mystery he could not solve.
She can’t tell him the truth about herself, not ever, and so she can’t let herself believe he is a true friend. He’s a constant risk to Alice’s freedom, and to her life here with Jane.
And now he’s brought smallpox into their house, because Auden and his overdeveloped sense of duty would not leave well enough alone.
“This is ridiculous,” Jane protests, pulling Alice to a stop.
Alice grits her teeth but stops pulling Jane through the bedroom, drops her hand.
“What is ridiculous,” Alice says, “is that you have cajoled every one of our friends into buying an inoculation ribbon. You have written letters to the editors of every reputable newspaper in England and half of the disreputable ones. You refused to speak to Mrs. Greene after she said that inoculation wasn’t safe enough for her precious children. And you have not been inoculated yourself?”
“You would know if I had been inoculated, Alice. I’d have been ill. I’d have a scar.”
“I thought—I don’t know, I suppose I assumed you had been as a child, before you came here.”
“No. I meant to, my love, I did, but it never seemed a convenient time to have a fever—”
Alice throws up her hands and turns away, bites her lip. Here in the heart of the house, a new threat to keep at bay. She paid the last of Father’s debts last month, telling him the money came from a wise investment. (It was not a lie, by a precise definition; the investment was in a tontine early in the century, in which the final surviving shareholder was to inherit the whole, and Alice managed to be present at both the beginning and the end of the arrangement, and a blackguard went to his grave unsatisfied.) She has no pecuniary need to go out as a highwayman anymore, and only does it to satisfy her sense of justice against the rakes and villains of Hampshire.
Alice Payne Rides Page 3