Alice Payne Rides

by Kate Heartfield

  As for Col. Payne himself, her father has settled into a fairly steady state of detached, bitter bemusement. His rages now are few. She can keep him from wandering, most of the time. And on the few occasions when he’s got out, she’s been able to use the shimmer to retrieve him before he reaches the cliff edge, or the midnight road, or whatever peril he seems determined to find.

  She has worked so hard to make Fleance Hall their own, their fortress, and yet—

  “Why are you angry with me?” Jane asks, her voice quiet.

  Alice whirls back to look at her. “I’m not.” She means it. She’s afraid she won’t ever have the future she wants: A future in which every evening is spent in Jane’s company, listening to Jane ask short, nervous questions in her husky voice while Alice inspects her strange inventions and experiments. In which every night is spent kissing the hollow beneath Jane’s jaw and curling her fingertips in the hollow of Jane’s hip bones. In which every morning is spent walking side by side in easy silence on the muddy footpaths of Hampshire, until Alice has worked the restlessness out of her limbs and Jane breaks the quiet by taking Alice’s arm and pointing out some mushroom or nest.

  She steps in close, runs her left hand along the downy hair at Jane’s temple, down to the bun at the nape. The brush of her fingers at the back of Jane’s neck arcs Jane’s body like a bow.

  “I need my study,” Jane says.

  Alice doesn’t answer but kisses her, holding her shoulders, their bodices pressed together, the soft flesh above nearly kissing too. She tastes Jane’s mouth as if for the first time, then pulls her golden head to her shoulder, tight.

  She won’t let any harm come to Jane.

  A knock on the door, light, officious. The servants know to knock on these doors, upstairs. It’s difficult to say whether they’re more afraid of Jane’s machines or of confirming some unspoken suspicion about Jane’s relationship to Alice.

  Alice smiles, and steps away from her beloved, and opens the door.

  Satterthwaite’s face is grave.

  “My father,” Alice prompts him. “Missing?”

  He shakes his head, very slightly. “Miss Payne, would you like to sit down?”

  She forms a fist with one hand, her fingernails biting into her palm. She can read the expression on Satterthwaite’s face well enough. “Dead?”

  “I regret—”

  “Bring me to him.”

  CHAPTER SIX: In Which Prudence Talks to Her Sister; or Not

  2075

  Prudence walks through Capsule, the tent city north of Toronto, keeping her eyes open. This is the most dangerous place in the universe, for her. So far, she hasn’t seen any evidence that General Almo is looking for her, but if he ever decided to, this would be the place. It’s the one place in all of history where Prudence can be guaranteed to show up: the place where her sister lives with her family.

  Her brother-in-law Alexei is a nurse, when he isn’t running contraband. He can get her the smallpox vaccine patches she needs, or tell her where to get them most easily. That’s her excuse for choosing this particular piece of the future.

  Prudence grew up in this place. It looked almost the same in 2040 as it does today: the earth flat and brown, beaten by many footsteps, with little bits of wild chamomile or Queen Anne’s lace in the small spaces between tents, at the edges of things. The tents themselves are the very worst shade of slug-beige, but every family has found some way to add colour. She passes one with what looks like a handmade clay gnome by the door, and another with rainbow prayer flags stretched across the entrance.

  Even so, the overall effect is uniformity, stretching as far as she can see. There are letters and numbers painted on the tents, the only sure guide to a traveller looking for a particular family.

  She’s been trying to convince Grace to come back with her to 1789: the air is clean and the corsets are really not that bad. But Grace has refused. You think I’m going to bring up little Nick in the age that produced Napoleon and Byron? I’m trying to raise a boy who’s not an asshole, Prudence. Give him a fighting chance.

  So Prudence offered other times, other places. In theory, Grace and Alexei agree. 2070 is no place for a child, and they’re ready to leave Capsule. But they’ve demurred when it comes to making a specific plan. They’re not used to time travel, as Prudence is; the only time Grace has shimmered was in the mass migration of refugees that brought her and Prudence from 2140 to 2040 as children, and Alexei’s never shimmered at all. They don’t trust it, and they’re angry at time travellers for screwing up the world.

  There, at least, Prudence is forced to agree with them.

  The tug-of-war between the Farmers and Misguideds over the course of history has become never-ending, each battle making the course of history worse. Prudence argued with her superior, General Almo. She pleaded with him to send her back earlier, to make deeper but more subtle changes. But he didn’t care what she thought. Like everyone else, he was obsessed with the big moments, with changing the symptoms rather than the causes.

  So in one timeline, she decided—would decide—to blow everything up. Maroon a generation’s worth of Misguideds in the future, then disable time travel itself. And she very nearly succeeded, or so Jane said. Right up to the moment where Almo put her in prison.

  Thanks to Jane, Prudence now has a chance to avoid that timeline. She got out. Deserted the army and went into hiding, to 1789. She may not have the resources that Teleosophic Core Command has, but she has two time-travel devices, years of training in propaganda and persuasion, and a group of willing noobs.

  Sure, there was a moment when she was tempted to make sure that her enemies would never be born, but she’s wary of messing with anything that could wink her own sister out of existence, since she knows from her diary that Grace doesn’t exist in very many timelines. Prudence remembers every moment of their childhood together here in Capsule: how they played in the sandpit down near H753, how they made fans out of the propaganda pamphlets that the Misguided drones dropped overhead, to cool their sweaty bodies in the cinder-block classroom. She won’t do anything that could let her sister vanish from history, from her own memory.

  So she’s gone rogue, but quietly. Gone back to first principles. Prudence is going to keep correcting history but she’s going to do it carefully, do it better than the Farmers or the Misguideds and all their delusions of grandeur. Get the small things right, early.

  The Magna Carta, for example.

  She pauses, looks at a teenager leaning against a wall with nonchalance that seems a little too studied. Prudence has relied on time, not space, to evade anyone who might be looking for her here. She visits Capsule at nearly random points over a ten-year period, so that if Almo wanted to catch her, he’d have to post agents continuously for ten years, or get very lucky.

  “Aunty Prudence!” A boy is running toward her, a four-year-old boy. She scoops her nephew into her arms.

  “How are you, Nick?”

  “I found a fossil. Just like you said. Do you want to see it?”

  She nods, trying to keep her confusion out of her smile. He’s referring to some conversation they’ll have when he’s younger. A conversation that is in the past for him, and the future for her. It’s simultaneously disorienting and comforting: there’s a possible timeline where she sees him again.

  She glances back at the wall but the teenager’s gone. It would probably please Almo to know that she’s looking over her shoulder, wondering whether he’s looking for her. And why should he bother? She’s a deserter, yes, but wasting agents’ time hunting her down would be throwing good manpower after bad.

  She shakes her head, and takes the small, sweaty hand of a four-year-old boy who knows her better than she knows him. They walk toward a tent that looks like all the others, a core of sun-faded drab beneath a jumble of more colourful additions: a pink curtain drawn across the door, a rainbow whirligig stuck into the top of one pole. The address T30 in fading bruise-coloured paint on the fabric.


  Grace comes to the door, squints against the sun, then puts her hands on her hips. “The prodigal returns. Come—”

  * * *

  —Prudence stands alone in the middle of Capsule and blinks for a moment, as if she’s forgotten what she came for.

  The vaccine, that was it. A camp for refugees from the future always has every major vaccine on hand, in case the horrors of the past resurface or are resurrected by imprudent time travelers. She needs to scope out the clinic, find out where exactly she should shimmer, and when. The clinic here at Capsule won’t be well guarded. As good a place as any to get what she needs. Her childhood home, though there’s no one here now she wants to see. Most of the friends she grew up with found their way either into crime or into the Academy, as she did.

  The sun is hot and bright but she shivers all the same, and wipes sweat from her right palm.

  Three steps in front of her, a brass plaque, stuck on top of a painted metal pole. An odd thing to find in a tent city. What could merit an official monument in a place built to relentlessly ephemerize the individual?

  She steps forward, and sees an embedded black screen within a brass frame, and a single word engraved across the top: PRUDENCE.

  Prudence freezes. Looks around, turning one slow, complete circle. A little girl with a rusty bicycle, and a skinny dog. She’s alone, or close to it.

  She examines the plaque more closely. On the right edge of the frame, a small oval depression. It looks like a fingerprint sensor. Did some future version of Prudence leave this here for herself? She has been known to leave herself notes, but a big metal pole with a screen on it doesn’t seem like her style.

  Fuck it.

  She places the pad of her index finger on the sensor, then steps back as the screen illuminates.

  General Almo’s face fills the screen. She turns again, her hand at her hip, ready to shimmer out of here. She sees no one.

  “Hi, Prudence. I hope you’re doing well. We miss you.”

  He pauses, as if waiting for her to say something. Fat fucking chance. She looks around for cameras, but sees nothing likely.

  “Of course,” he continues, “we missed you as soon as you went away, but we understood. The pressure gets to everyone, and after so many failures in the Rudolf Project—what was it? Eighty? Ninety?”

  “Seventy-one,” she mutters.

  “It’s no wonder you wanted to give up. I thought that was all it was. But then, we noticed something mysterious in the historical record that hadn’t been so mysterious before. A disappearance that we hadn’t logged and investigated. Evidence of meddling. Evidence of you, Prudence.”

  He never used to call her Prudence. He called her Major Zuniga, but of course she isn’t Major anything, now.

  “It turns out you’ve been meddling with history,” the man on the screen continues. “You ever read the Chesterton story ‘The Hammer of God’?”

  The pause Almo allows, when talking to a camera, is not much shorter than the pause he’d allow if Prudence were in the room, able to respond and be heard.

  “It’s about a man who spent too much time up in a belfry, and started to think of himself as being a kind of god, and the people below no better than ants. Time travel can be like that, I know. You see people’s lives shifting, disappearing even, while you stay constant, or your brain tells you that you do. And you start to think they don’t matter, not like you matter. And you find that you’re lonely up in your belfry, and afraid. Afraid of what you might do.”

  No, she wants to say, and she even mouths it, silently. No. That is how you feel, not how I feel. I’m afraid of screwing up but not out of contempt, never out of contempt. Don’t assume your experience is universal. You always do that; it’s your weakness as a general.

  “So you turn chickenshit,” Almo is telling whatever camera recorded this message. “You’re not the first, Prudence, believe me. You went AWOL. Big fucking deal, honestly. As long as you don’t rub it in our faces, we’re happy to let you be.”

  He rubs his forehead, as if genuinely concerned. “But we can’t have you going rogue, Prudence. We’ve got enough on our hands with the motherfucking Misguideds. Come back now, and you won’t be punished. I said we miss you, and I wasn’t lying. You screwed up, sure. But you’re a good agent. In fact, we miss you so much that we left you a little . . . sign. Something to show we care. If you check your diary, I think you’ll find that you had a sister.”

  She pauses midscowl. A sister? She wants to ask him to repeat himself; she isn’t sure she heard correctly.

  “You won’t remember her, I know. Take your time. Go read your diary—I bet you still have a diary somewhere in what we used to call prehistory. Her name was Grace, and she had a child. Your nephew. You loved her more than anyone. Now, you can ignore me if you want. Carry on. Live your life. After all, you won’t remember her, so there’s no real grief, right? Some people say they have sliptime dreams but I’ve always put that down to random neurons, myself. Still, maybe you’ll dream of her. What do I know?”

  He gives her his most kindly smile: 50 percent avuncular, 50 percent professorial, 100 percent asshole.

  “If you do decide you’d like to have a family again, all you have to do is come home. Come to my office at noon GMT on November 30, 2145. One small change can bring your sister back, and you’ll be welcome in the Farmers again. No court-martial and no questions asked. I’ll wipe your record; I can do that, you know. If not, not. Suit yourself. You have stolen TCC property, and you’ve carried out illegal operations, and most of motherfucking all, you deserted us. This is your one chance—your one chance—to make all of that OK.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Concerning Colonel Payne

  1789

  Alice does not feel small in her father’s library, despite her aunt’s best efforts. When she was a child, and Col. Payne was seldom at home, she was forbidden from entering this room. Aunt Harriet, God rest her miserable soul, lost no opportunity to tell her so, with the tight set to her mouth that always accompanied any conversation with the illegitimate child Colonel Payne had brought home from Jamaica.

  That child was meant to be a mere temporary inconvenience for Aunt Harriet. A few years of education in England, so that when Alice returned to Kingston, she’d be able to apply for “privileges,” exemptions from the rules that prevented persons of colour from inheriting property or participating in the life of the nation.

  But soon after Alice came to England, there was war in Jamaica, as the enslaved tried to take back their freedom. Colonel Payne’s estate there was burned to the ground.

  One of her earliest distinct memories is of her father telling her that her mother was dead, and that they had nothing to return to, in Jamaica. It was a poor investment now, he said. A bad gamble.

  He was going to buy a commission, he said. As a military man, he’d command respect, and there would be, as he put it somewhat darkly, opportunities.

  So he went away again, and Alice would wait for his visits, for the presents he’d bring. In those years, before the war in America, he was kinder.

  “Will your cousins try to take Fleance Hall?” Jane asks, interrupting Alice’s thoughts.

  “Hmm? Oh, probably. That’s why I want to find the will, before we see the lawyer’s version of it. I know he kept it in this desk somewhere. Have a rummage in that drawer, will you, dear?”

  The library is round, in the tower that runs up one side of the house. Directly above it, on the top floor of the house where Alice and Jane spend most of their time, is Jane’s study. She does not feel small in this room, not at all, though it is dim and dusty and smells faintly sour.

  Alice cared for her father, not out of duty or even twisted gratitude for the man who brought her a doll every time he came home. She cared for him because he was old and sick and there was no one else to do it. And yes, now that he is dead, she wonders if she could have loved him better, in his final illness. It is a voice as brittle and obtuse as Aunt Harriet’s, and Alice will p
ut it away, just as she will take that dusty antelope head off the wall. She will keep the maps and the samovar. Order new fabric for the wing chair.

  Jane is frozen, staring at a bit of paper in her hand.

  “What is it?” Alice cranes her neck to see, but Jane turns it away from her view. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She snatches it out of Jane’s hand.

  She reads: Know ye that I, John Payne of Kingston, Jamaica, do hereby manumit, set free and discharge from all further servitude the mulatto child Alice Payne, daughter of my Negro woman Mary . . .

  Alice hands the paper back to Jane with a tight smile. “I’ve seen it before. It’s all right, Jane. Let’s keep looking for the will.”

  Somehow it is always Alice who is reassuring white people that it is all right, when it is evidently the furthest thing from all right. Jane, at least, knows well enough to leave it there, and she keeps pulling things out of pigeonholes.

  She won’t find the manumission for Alice’s mother, because it doesn’t exist. If Jane finds any documents pertaining to the fifteen-year-old girl Colonel Payne enslaved and pretended was something like a wife to him, Jane does not mention it. When Alice was a young woman, she used to tell herself that her mother did not die in Tacky’s War but instead escaped and went to live with the Maroons, or took ship with Queen Cubah in Kingston and went to sea.

  Alice at last puts her hand on it: a thick wad of paper, full of items crossed out and rewritten and crossed out again in her father’s increasingly shaky hand. Lists of holdings in several countries, which may or may not now exist. She sighs. It will take a long time to sort through, and no doubt her cousins will contest it, saying that the Colonel was already of unsound mind when he wrote it. But at least the part about Fleance Hall is as clear as it could be: To my daughter, Alice Payne, I leave Fleance Hall and all its attendant estate.

  Behind the wad of papers, there’s a letter, small, folded, with a broken seal. Correspondence with a lawyer? She opens it, and reads: