Byron's Child

by Carola Dunn

  “Faringdale? Your brother?” Giles looked stunned.

  “I’m Jodie Zaleski and this is Giles...“ Jodie’s voice trailed away. “Emily Faringdale? What’s your brother’s name?”

  “Roland, Viscount Faringdale. And he is the greatest beast in nature,” she said vehemently, her grievances overcoming her fear.

  “What’s he done? Is that why you were crying?” Jodie, too, was distracted from the extraordinary situation.

  “He says I must marry Lord Thorncrest. Lord Thorncrest is a friend of Byron,” she added, as if that explained everything.

  “Byron the poet?” Jodie clasped her bag, which contained the biography of Lord Byron’s daughter she had bought that morning. “George Gordon, Baron Byron? Who wrote Childe Harold?”

  Emily nodded, puzzled.

  “A friend?”

  “Ye gods,” said Giles, “we’ve travelled through time.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Jodie said uncertainly. “That only happens in science fiction.”

  “How else can you explain this?” His gesture embraced the dimly lit stables, Emily’s uncomprehending face, the smell of horses and the sound of their shifting feet. “Five minutes ago we were in a sunny laboratory. What’s the date?” he asked Emily.

  “The twentieth of February.”

  “Year?”

  Her eyes widened in alarm. “1816.”

  “You see?” Turning to Jodie, who could think of nothing whatever to say, he put his hand to his chest and frowned. “Damnation, I haven’t got my calculator.”

  “Your calculator!” Jodie felt the beginnings of hysteria. “Here I am stuck in the past with no clothes and all you can worry about is your damned calculator!” She shivered.

  “If I can work out what brought us here, perhaps I can reverse the effect,” he pointed out reasonably. “I’ll have to make do with pencil and paper. Can you provide pencil and paper, Miss Faringdale? And something for Jodie to wear, so I can have my pullover back?”

  Reminded of their indecent condition, Emily blushed again. Her timid answer was drowned by a renewed rumbling of thunder and the rushing hiss of a sudden downpour.

  “I wonder if it was something to do with the lightning,” Giles muttered.

  “Please help,” begged Jodie, her teeth chattering.

  Emily picked up a shawl she had dropped unnoticed in the straw, and handed it to Jodie. “I do not know who you are, and I cannot understand half the words you use, but I will try to help you,” she said bravely. “Only I daresay Roland will be very angry if I take you over to the house. If we could wait until he leaves tomorrow… but you cannot spend the night here.”

  “He’s leaving tomorrow?”

  “For two days, to arrange the marriage settlements. Then he will bring Lord Thorncrest back for the formal betrothal.” Emily dashed away a tear.

  “You shouldn’t let your brother dictate to you.” Jodie’s feminist blood was rousing. “Sneak us into the house tonight, and I’ll deal with him when he comes back. He sounds like a regular tyrant.”

  Giles grinned. “Be careful what you say about my great-to-the-nth-power grandfather.” Both girls stared at him and he shrugged. “Since the title always passed in the direct line, that, after all, is what Roland Faringdale must be.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Wearing his multi-Great-Grandfather’s nightshirt, Giles lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the sliver of moonlight on the ceiling. His mind racing with speculation, he was almost unaware of the discomfort of the sheetless, too-short bed, the musty chill of the nurse’s room.

  A floorboard creaked. He turned his head as the door to the night nursery opened. A ghostly figure appeared: Jodie, in his multi-Great-Aunt Emily’s all-enveloping nightdress.

  He raised himself on one elbow. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m cold and I can’t sleep.” Her voice was small and frightened. “Can I get in with you?”

  Giles moved over to make room. She spread the quilt from her own bed over him, then slipped in beside him.

  Catching the glint of a tear on her cheek, he put his arm around her with a silent vow that the gesture was purely for comfort.

  She snuggled against him. “Talk to me. Tell me about your lab, how you set it up at Waterstock Manor, what you do there, how it got us into this mess. Where did you go to school?”

  “Cambridge, with some post-grad work in America and Germany.” Despite his good intentions, Giles could not prevent his body’s reaction to her closeness. He rolled over on his back again and forced himself to concentrate on his story. “I had quite a few job offers, but as I told you, I didn’t want to leave my home.”

  “I don’t blame you. I might have thought it ridiculous before, but after coming back a couple of centuries and finding your ancestors right here in the same place—well, it makes sense.” Jodie sounded interested, more relaxed. “So you decided to set up your own lab. Doesn’t that stuff cost millions?”

  “I’m rather well-off,” he said apologetically. “Of course, I couldn’t have afforded it on my own. I found a small college in America that had been given a huge endowment strictly for buying research equipment, though they had no buildings to house it. I was happy to provide suitable buildings, and for tax reasons I offered to work for nothing.”

  “I bet they jumped at it. You said that was an accelerator we were standing by? I thought they were miles long.”

  “Some of them are. Mine just spits out electrons. Have you heard of tunneling?”

  “Only the kind they did under the English Channel.”

  “I don’t want to get too technical, but it’s a phenomenon where electrons disappear on one side of a barrier and reappear on the other. We’re trying to find out just where they go in between. A colleague of mine, an American woman at a lab near London, came up with a theory that they travel through time. I didn’t take it very seriously, though the maths looked good, but it seems she may be right.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? So your electrons decided to take a hop to 1816 and brought us with them?”

  “Something like that. I’m sure the lightning had something to do with it. It packs a hell of a high voltage. If only I had my calculator!”

  “It’s going to take a long time figuring it out by hand, isn’t it?” said Jodie flatly. “We’ll be here for a while, then. What about paradoxes? What if we change things so that the world we go back to, if we do, is different?”

  Giles frowned at the ceiling. “I don’t think there’s much danger, if we’re careful. Dr. Brown, the woman I told you about, had some law she called the Conservation of Reality. She claimed that any changes will tend to die away, like ripples on a pond. I think it only works for small deviations, but we should be okay as long as we don’t do something drastic. Killing Roland, for instance, would surely be a paradox no mathematical law could deal with.”

  “I guess that would make you pop out of existence, like my dress did. I wouldn’t want that to happen. Apart from you being my ticket home, I kind of like you.” With those words Jodie turned her back to him, fortunately for his resolution. “I think I can sleep now. Good night, Giles.”

  “Good night, Jodie,” he answered softly.

  He lay for some time, staring into the darkness, thinking about the pretty, plucky girl at his side. Not by so much as a hint had she blamed him for their predicament. Nonetheless, he was responsible for her, and he would get her home if it was humanly possible.

  As her breathing slowed in sleep, his mind once again filled with theories and numbers. If only he had his calculator!

  ~ ~ ~

  When Jodie woke the next day, Giles was already up. The world seemed brighter in the morning, just as Mom had always told her. After all, she had been given a chance any historian would die for: to see her own period in person.

  Eager to begin, Jodie hopped out of bed and went into the day nursery. In daylight the room was shabby, dusty, doubtless waiting to be refurbished for the next gen
eration of Faringdales. Giles, dressed in his tracksuit, was at the battered table, scrawling his calculations on the paper Emily had brought last night. He seemed to have mastered the quill pen.

  “Good morning, my lord.” There was no response. “Giles, I said good morning!”

  He looked up in surprise. “Sorry. I get a bit wrapped up in my numbers. Good morning. You sound pretty chipper today.”

  “It finally sank in what a fantastic opportunity this is for research. How long can we stay?”

  Emily had not provided slippers. The wood floor chilled Jodie’s bare feet. Forgetting her nightgown’s floor-length skirts she pattered towards the table to sit down. She caught her foot in the hem and stumbled into Giles’s lap.

  At that moment Emily opened the door and stared at them in shock. Daylight revealed her as a slim, pretty girl of nineteen or thereabouts, with medium-brown hair in ringlets and large, soft brown eyes. Beside her was a shorter, slightly plump girl, a year or two older, with fair, curly hair and a look of even greater shock in her blue eyes.

  “Oh!” said Emily, and turned scarlet. “Oh dear.”

  Jodie felt her cheeks reddening, as if in sympathy. “I tripped,” she explained, wriggling out of Giles’s arms. “I’m not used to long dresses. At home I mostly wear pants or shorts.”

  “Pants?” Emily retreated a step as Giles politely stood.

  “Trousers. Breeches.” Jodie turned to Emily’s dismayed companion. “Sorry about that. You must be Lady Faringdale. Hi, I’m Jodie Zaleski and this is… Emily told you?”

  “Giles Faringdale?” she said hesitantly. “There is a family resemblance. But I cannot believe that you came from the future! Emily must have misunderstood.”

  “Indeed I did not. It is no stranger than Voltaire’s tale of Micromégas, the traveller from Sirius. You remember, Charlotte, we read it together.”

  “Emily!” Her sister-in-law sounded appalled.

  “They will not tell Roland that we have read Voltaire.”

  “Of course not,” Jodie assured her. “But why not?”

  “Because Voltaire was a freethinker. My brother would be excessively displeased.”

  “You mean the infamous Roland censors your reading?”

  “He tries.” There was a flash of mischief in Charlotte’s blue eyes, though she continued with dignity, “However, he is my husband. Pray do not speak ill of him to me.”

  Jodie warmed to her. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  Giles looked at the baffled faces of the young ladies and he laughed. “She means all right. Okay is an American expression, though by our time it’s spread all over the world.”

  For the first time, young Lady Faringdale smiled, her round cheeks dimpling. “American! Of course, that explains a great deal,” she said, then sobered. “I do not wish to seem inhospitable, but how long do you expect to be here? Roland is only away until midday tomorrow.”

  “Not a hope,” said Giles flatly. “Even with a slide rule, it’ll take longer than that, if they’ve even been invented. I’ll have to go into Oxford and see if I can find one.”

  “Hey, great.” Jodie was enthusiastic. “I can’t wait to see Oxford in 1816.”

  “You’d better stay here. The less we wander around the less chance there is that we’ll mess up the time stream irreparably.”

  “Giles Faringdale, if you think you can keep me cooped up in this place while you jaunt about the countryside, you’ve got another think coming. I’m the one with an interest in exploring, remember. It could make my career.”

  “Mine too. If I can come up with a solid theory.”

  “You don’t need to go to Oxford to do that. I’ll go and you stay home. I’m just as capable of buying a slide rule. I’ve got my credit card—oh!” Baffled, Jodie fell silent.

  Charlotte, distressed by their argument, quickly intervened. “You cannot go today anyway. We must decide on a story to tell Roland, though I cannot like to deceive him.” She glanced at Giles, who had returned to his formulae and was not listening. “He will have to be a long-lost cousin.”

  “From America,” Emily suggested.

  “I’m getting chilly,” Jodie said. “Let’s go in the bedroom, folks, and I’ll get dressed. He’ll never miss us.”

  Charlotte and Emily were fascinated by her bra and pantyhose, but she steered them ruthlessly back to the subject at hand as she put on a borrowed gown.

  “How do we explain my presence?”

  “You must be Cousin Giles’s sister.” Charlotte was positive. “For propriety’s sake. If I had known last night, I should never have allowed you to share these apartments.” She cast a reproachful glance at Emily, who blushed.

  “It was my fault,” Jodie hastened to take the blame. “You need not worry, he is a perfect gentleman.”

  “In some situations, no gentleman is perfect, and in any case it is improper. Yes, you must be brother and sister.”

  “We don’t look at all alike.”

  “Half-brother and -sister then.”

  “Lord Byron!” said Emily in a strangled whisper.

  “Pray do not repeat gossip, Emily. If anyone should ask, we shall say that after Cousin Giles’s mother’s death, your father married a Red Indian. That will explain your black hair.”

  Jodie collapsed in laughter. “As a matter of fact, I am part Chinese, but I guess Native American will do.”

  “Jodie,” mused Charlotte. “That is bound to make people ask questions. We shall introduce you as Judith.” Her firm tone silenced Jodie’s objection. “You lost your luggage on the way from America, and were robbed by a pickpocket in Oxford.” She went on to detail how she would deal with the servants.

  “Very ingenious,” Jodie applauded. “A splendid plan.”

  Her face pink with pleasure at the compliment, Charlotte asked anxiously, “Do you suppose Cousin Giles will agree?”

  “Agree?” said Jodie in astonishment. “He doesn’t have a choice. He opted out of the planning so he’ll just have to put up with whatever we say. He’s a reasonable man.”

  “Things must be very different in your time. I would never dare tell Roland what to do, though sometimes I can coax him. I was distressed to hear you disputing with Cousin Giles.”

  “You’d better get used to it.” Jodie’s dark eyes held a martial sparkle. “I’m not about to lie around like a doormat for him to wipe his feet on. Let’s go tell him our story.”

  Giles was far too involved in his equations to object to anything other than being dragged away from them to change his clothes. Jodie thought he looked great in the late viscount’s knee-breeches and frock coat—he was too tall to borrow from Roland—but Emily shook her head.

  “Shockingly old-fashioned,” she said.

  Jodie and Giles exchanged a glance and burst out laughing.

  “She is right,” Charlotte said. “You must order new clothes when you go into Oxford for your mathematical device.”

  “These are fine,” Giles protested. “I can’t repay you, so I don’t want to spend more than I really have to.”

  “Jodie, pray tell him he must buy decent raiment,” Charlotte appealed. “Roland never quibbles about paying my bills.”

  “You tell him. After all, you are his great-grandmother.”

  She blushed but went on gamely, “I cannot allow my husband’s long-lost cousin to wear a coat twenty years out of date and shoes with huge silver buckles.”

  Giles threw a mischievous glance at Jodie. “We’ll just say American fashions lag twenty years behind Europe’s.”

  “Odious wretch,” Jodie said, recalling the phrase from the Regency romances that had sparked her interest in history. “However, since I am able to wear Emily’s clothes at least one of us shall uphold the honour of America, so if you want to go around looking like Benjamin Franklin, go ahead.”

  “Benjamin Franklin!” Giles yelped. “I’ve got much more hair and much less waistline, though an equal interest in lightning.” He turned to Emily. “Is there a lig
htning rod on the stables?”

  “Several. The old stables were burned down in a storm and Roland had a number of lightning rods built into the new stables. There is something special about them; I cannot remember what.”

  “I must see them.” He headed for the nursery door.

  “Not now!” Jodie called him back. “Charlotte has to get the servants out of the way so that we can arrive again.”

  She wondered how anyone so timid towards her husband could possibly rule a houseful of servants, but Charlotte seemed to know what she was doing. She had already trusted her personal maid and Emily’s with part of the story, since they had provided the clothes. To explain her visit to the unused nursery, she had told the housekeeper, Mrs. Briggs, she intended to refurbish it.

  Now Jodie and Giles were hidden in a spare chamber, where Emily’s abigail, Dinah, pinned up Jodie’s hair in a respectable coiffure. Meanwhile, Charlotte dispatched the footman to Thame on an invented errand and sent all the housemaids to clean out the nursery. Once they were out of the way, she went to the housekeeper’s room to consult her and the butler about the redecorating.

  Emily and Dinah smuggled Giles and Jodie down to the front hall, and Charlotte’s abigail, Matty, went to announce their pretended arrival to her mistress.

  ~ ~ ~

  “They swallowed it hook, line, and sinker,” Jodie whispered to Charlotte as she followed her into the drawing room. “You were splendid. You ought to be on the stage.”

  “On the stage!”

  “Oh, sorry. I forgot actresses are not respectable. I’m going to have to learn to think before I speak.”

  “Yes, do be careful,” said Charlotte worriedly. “Emily and I will do our best to teach you and Cousin Giles how to go on, but we have only a day and a half. I fear Roland and Lord Thorncrest may not be so easily taken in as Potter and Mrs. Briggs. I dread to think what Roland will do if he suspects we are deceiving him, yet I do not dare tell him all.”

  Jodie was beginning to dislike the present Lord Faringdale excessively.

  Chapter Three

  Reminded of the Earl of Thorncrest’s impending arrival, Emily lost her animation. Listlessly she drifted to a sofa and sat drooping. Jodie joined her.