He moved to sit next to her and drew her into his arms. “What we are doing is not so different than in my day when a man took a woman, or a woman a man, to be his or her lover. Of course, now it is much more out in the open.” He kissed her.
“Did you ever have a lover while you were married to Teresa?”
“No. Teresa and I were happy together in every way. She was my sun and my moon. I needed no other woman.”
“How terrible you lost her,” Cassandra said quietly.
“And that you lost your dear husband. Franklin—am I pronouncing it right?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Shhh, let’s not speak of the past or I will become too sad to carry on.”
Night fell as they were crossing the Alps. Through the flexi-glass domed ceiling, the stars appeared. She and Lauro made love under that sky, and to the harmonic pulse of the train, gliding effortlessly on its tracks.
Morning brought an early breakfast in the dining car and a transfer from train to car to boat.
“We could have continued by train through the Chunnel, but I couldn’t bear to.” Cassandra told him as they stood by the railing of the ship. Anticipating his question, she went on. “It’s a tunnel that goes underneath this huge expanse of water that separates Great Britain from the rest of Europe. This body of water,” she gestured to the silvery green sea, “is called, in English, The English Channel.”
“Oh very clever! ‘Chunnel,’ is channel crossed with tunnel.”
Cassandra nodded and smiled. The English word for ‘tunnel’ was the same in Italian, but he’d pronounced it ‘too-nell.’
“I went through it once and I vowed never again,” she said. “The thought of all those tons of water above me is more than I can handle. I have no problem with a time portal, but an underwater tunnel is another thing altogether.”
“I still can’t believe there is another way to get anywhere other than by boat, horse, or carriage.”
“I think this may be a good time to tell you about the other means of travel man has devised.”
“What more could there be other than traveling through air and traveling through time?”
“Traveling through outer space. The universe, Lauro. We can now travel beyond earth, to the moon, to Venus, and beyond. We have a small community of scientists living on and studying Mars. Man has been to Saturn and Jupiter. And more planets have been discovered in our solar system: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron….”
“Named for the rulers of the sky, the sea, the underworld, and the last was named for a centaur?”
“I’m not sure,” she laughed. “If you find them in your telescope, you’ll know what they come to be called, but I don’t think you will. They weren’t discovered for decades and decades after Galileo because later scientists were able to build more powerful telescopes. Anyway, don’t tell anyone about them.”
“No, no. I understand these are secrets of the future, and they will have no place in the past. I won’t be able to use them for my benefit or that of anyone else. I think I’m clear about why, and what the implications would be if I spoke of things the world isn’t ready to hear.”
“You seem to be, which is, in itself, remarkable.”
Lauro looked up at airplanes flying far overhead, and noticed with wonder the other kinds of crafts on the water. As Dover neared, he marveled at the large coastal cities and the vast technological world before him. Then Cassandra whisked him onto another train and they continued to London.
Chapter Nine
Lauro stared at the city around him with wonder as they traveled to the heart of London by car. For him to understand the advances that had been made in Siena was one thing, since that city had no tall buildings and had retained much of its original character. To witness an enormous metropolis like London with its skyscrapers and seething population was quite another. Cassandra hurried him quickly out of the cab and into the Bloomsbury townhouse she kept there so he wouldn’t go into complete overload.
In the week that remained until his and James’s departure, she took him to explore the city little by little. However, most of their time was spent in the lab, undergoing fittings for his Elizabethan clothing, studying virtual reality recreations of ancient London, and coming to understand the process by which he and James would be transported to the past.
James was in the middle of his final preparation, but Cassandra was happy to see how he took Lauro under his wing. They agreed the Italian would be James’s companion in London until he felt Lauro was ready to return to Italy, at which time James would help him arrange passage on a boat.
“Why are you going to this place and time, James?” Lauro asked as Cassandra was helping Shannon choose fabric for his cape. They were working in the lab, he at James’s side at the control console.
“Because of Shakespeare. Do you remember in Siena when we talked about the great playwright who would become like the Dante of the English language?”
“Si, si.”
“Well, there is some controversy over whether he really wrote the plays himself, or his name was merely attributed to them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We have very little historical information about William Shakespeare. By all accounts he received no more than a cursory education and was not a man likely to be intimately acquainted with the topics he wrote about, especially the British court. I have always been fascinated by this controversy, because a controversy it certainly is. Therefore, I’m going back to Shakespeare’s time to meet the man and try to discover if he really wrote the famous plays. I plan to put the issue to rest as no one but a time-traveler can do.” James smiled smugly.
“You’ll be a witness to history.”
“Yes. And the reason this lab is situated where it is, is because this location is very near where Shakespeare’s company was producing their plays in the year we’ll be visiting.”
Cassandra stopped what she was doing and joined the two men in the control room, looking over their shoulders. On the control panel screen was a type of window into the distant past. They were looking at an alley in London in the year 1602. There wasn’t much to see but darkness. When a rat scurried through the window’s field of scope, it lit up in red.
“The red color indicates the heat coming from the animal’s body,” James explained. “When we send someone back into the past, we know they’ve arrived because their bodies also light up in red from the heat sensors. When we’re waiting for them to return, we watch this monitor until they appear at the designated portal exit location, which in our case will be here in this alley. The heat sensor helps us confirm their identity by giving us the exact dimensions of their body, already on file in the computer.”
“How did Elton Carver know this time-machine would work?”
“He based his experiments on what is called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge.”
“Einstein! I’ve learned of this great scientist.”
“Yes, he and his partner, Nathan Rosen, developed the theory, based on the idea of the existence of black holes, or worm holes, though the first solution of the Einstein equations was done by Karl Schwarzschild. Schwarzschild predicted that if a mass, represented by the letter M, were compressed inside a critical radius, R—”
“Um, James?” his mother said.
“Oh. Well, suffice it to say that Schwarzschild broke the math down to a black hole, a white hole, and two universes connected at their horizons by a worm hole. What this theory, which turned out to be fact, accomplishes is allowing us to travel faster than light, through the wormhole. When we move faster than light, time moves backward in relation to us. We set the coordinates to the exact time in history we want to stop at, and it is there we emerge from the portal exit.”
“I get it!” He turned to Cassandra, his face lit with understanding. “I get it!”
“If anyone can understand this, it’s you.” She put her hand on his shoulder. He grasped it and squeezed.
“We’ll wa
it until it’s late at night. Late enough, that is, that no one will be likely to be around to see us emerge from the portal. Early enough, though, for the Inn of the Bear to be open—a good inn, we think, and close to the portal exit.”
“Yes, your mother showed me in the virtual reality program.”
“Listen to him use words like ‘virtual reality’,” James said. “I’m impressed.”
Lauro grinned proudly.
On his final day in London, Cassandra took the Italian to some of the sites he would see for himself in the 17th century. They wandered through the Tower of London, and Cassandra explained about the history England would have recently passed through. She talked about King Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, and his six wives, then they walked across the London Bridge and she warned him to expect to see severed heads displayed there as a warning to the citizens to obey the law. She tried to prepare him for the fact that the city would be filthy and would smell terrible—far worse, she believed, than Siena during his time, from the fact that it was simply so much larger and more densely populated.
And as the day wore on, her resolve to part with him began to fail. She dropped Lauro off at her townhouse, telling him she needed to stop by the lab. When she arrived, Professor Carver was there alone, as she’d hoped. Everyone else was likely taking it easy on the evening before the big day. As she walked in and saw her boss sitting in front of the console, checking and rechecking coordinates, her promise to herself to stay strong crumbled. She burst out crying.
He leapt up and grabbed her in his arms. She stood limply in his embrace while tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Cassie, you caught the spell, didn’t you.” He gently stroked the back of her head.
“How,” she asked, her words muffled in his blazer, “can it be the spell of the past, if here, in the present, I’m still so completely in love with Lauro? How can I let him go? I can’t do it.”
“Come on, come sit with me.” He led her to the small sofa in the lab lounge and she sat.
He extracted an open bottle of wine from the mini-fridge and poured it into two water glasses. “I keep this stash on hand just in case.” He handed her a glass as he sat next to her. “I know how you feel.”
“You do?”
He gave her a handkerchief from his pocket and she wiped away the tears.
“I never told you what happened to me in Harlem, when I visited 1924 for that one month.”
“No.”
“Well, you’ve read my journals, my self-censored journals.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cassie, this is just between you and me.”
“Of course.” His wife Jeannine, back in Boston was so beautiful, a kind and understanding woman who allowed her husband to be gone for months at a time to oversee the time-journeys of his staff. What had he hidden from her, and did Cassandra really want to know?
“Do you remember I wrote about the people I met on that trip? Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker.”
“Yes.”
“I never did say much about Josephine.”
“Oh, Elton!”
“No, no, nothing happened, exactly. Nothing that would have compromised my marriage, but I never told Jeannine.”
Cassandra’s tears had dried. She waited for the professor to continue.
“Josephine was only eighteen when I first saw her at the Plantation Club. It’s an understatement to say she was beautiful and alluring. I was only one of many admirers. But because I had money, and well, as she said, ‘a certain something’ other men didn’t have, she was drawn to me too.”
“That certain something must have been your confidence—a man from the future, knowing what you already knew.”
“Yes, I’m sure. I was much older than she, but she didn’t know how much. Well, anyway, I think it’s terrible for a man my age to get involved with a woman that young, even if he’s not married. So even though Josie seemed so much more worldly than her years, I told myself, ‘eighteen is way, way too young for you to be messin’ with.’”
“Yeah.” Cassandra nodded and sipped her wine.
“But during the month I wandered around Harlem, staying in the finest hotel, dropping money at the best clubs… you know, I even bought a car just for the time I was there, a gorgeous Lincoln Town Car—man, I loved that thing.”
Cassandra laughed. She’d read her boss’s publication of his trip, but him hearing him reminisce in person was priceless.
“I was sportin’ fine suits, a feather in my hat, spats on my shoes—I looked good, Cassie, oh, I looked good.”
“I know you did.” Cassandra smiled at the perfect vision the Professor created.
“One night, soon after I’d arrived in the time period, Josie saw me sitting near the stage of the Plantation Club, champagne and caviar on the table, surrounded by celebrities, and she wanted to know who I was. She came right up and introduced herself to me. I grabbed her a chair and we spent the rest of the night talking and laughing. She was smart as a whip, boy, and did I mention she was beautiful?”
“You did,” said Cassandra, amused.
“That night she was wearing a thin dress with these little straps over the shoulder. It was made of light pink beads. It was short, above her knees. It shimmered every time she moved or laughed, and when she crossed her legs, the lace tops of her stockings showed, hooked to a garter. I tell you, it was all I could do to keep my wits about me. We were out every night, together with her crowd and the folks I was meeting right and left. We were rarely alone, always in a group, but always with eyes for each other. Then one night, she asked me to take her for a drive in my car.”
“Uh-oh.”
“It was late, or I should say, early in the morning, after the clubs closed. We drove out to Rockaway Beach, which was a deserted strip of sand and sea grass back then. It was chilly out there, though it was summer, so we didn’t get out of the car. We just sat and watched the sun rise over the Atlantic. We talked and talked until, when we finally ran out of things to say, she put her hand on my cheek and turned my face to hers. She kissed me.”
Cassandra softly exhaled.
Elton’s gaze was far away. “Her lips were so soft, like none I’d ever known. I succumbed, Cassie, but just for a brief moment. Then I told her, even though I wished I could kiss her all night and all day, I didn’t feel right about it. So I turned the car around and we went back to the city. She was angry—or hurt, I suppose. That was just a few days before I was supposed to return to the future. I wanted to go to her, to tell her I was sorry, that I wanted her, wanted to stay. I came so close to thinking what I wanted was to forget my other life and stay there in that illusion. Because, of course, it was just an illusion. But what if I stayed, I asked myself. The gold I deposited in the bank when I’d first arrived would last me decades, even through the Depression. I almost, almost, forgot about Jeannine, my wife of ten years, that’s how badly I was under the spell. Can you believe it?”
She did believe it. She swirled the golden liquid in her glass. She took a sip. It tasted woody, tart and sweet in different areas of her mouth. As much as she knew Elton adored his wife, she believed it. “I wish we could somehow make ourselves immune to the spell.”
“We can’t. It goes with the territory. But we have to be strong enough to resist it.”
“Still, I shouldn’t be under the spell any longer. It wasn’t until Lauro and I had been in the present for weeks when we finally, you know, slept together. It was in this time, not the past, that we really fell in love.”
“Really.” Her boss folded her arms and looked at her under his brow.
“You’re right,” Cassandra said after a moment. “I fell in love with him soon after I met him. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. I didn’t want my journeys to end up being one love affair after another. It’s not very scientific.”
“It is though. We’re not anthropologists. Our field is experiential. We go, we live, we feel. And you are the one who put a
finger on the phenomenon, ‘the spell’ as you call it. When I went to Harlem and back, I didn’t realize what had happened to me. Your calling attention to it is what made me realize exactly what happened back there. For years, I’ve been thinking about Josie. How do you explain that? It’s been ages since I made that journey, and I’m still mooning over that woman. Once the spell is cast, it’s cast for good.”
Cassandra thought about her friend Evie, and how even a year after their journey to New York City of 1853, she wasn’t able to live without Caleb, the man she’d fallen in love with there.
“So,” Carver went on, “you’re in love with Lauro. You probably always will be. You know that, I know that. But you have to let him go. You have to.”
Moonlight drifted through the window and onto the bed. Cassandra stood in a ray of bluish light. Lauro faced her, barely an arm’s length away. He brushed one strap of her nightgown off her shoulder, then the other. The garment fell to her breasts as lightly as a cloud, but not beyond. Lauro pulled it down until it fell of its own accord to the floor. Cassandra took a small step to the side and nudged it away from her feet. Lauro ran his hands over her breasts, down to her stomach, outlining the curves of her muscles with his fingers as if he were assessing the quality of a sculpture.
“My love,” he breathed, and fell to his knees, his hands grasping her slender hips.
He pressed his lips to the area just above the faint triangle of reddish-gold hair. His hands slid around to grasp her from behind. She grabbed the thick locks on his head with an audible gasp. His kisses continued, his mouth finding her most tender places and lingering there, tongue, lips caressing her.
“Lauro,” she whispered, barely able to speak.
She dropped to her knees and kissed him. She unbuttoned his shirt while he kissed her neck and shoulders and drew it off his chest and arms. She unbuckled his trousers and they laughed as he tumbled onto his back to yank them off. She grabbed the soft cotton bedspread and pulled it around them as she rolled on top of him. He flipped her back to the floor, the creamy white blanket forming a cocoon around them. Cassandra wrapped her legs around him and grasped his strong shoulders. He filled her up, reaching that place that set her spine tingling. He continued to move inside her as the moonlight played over their faces. As she felt him about to erupt, she rolled him over again and sat astride, letting the blanket slide down her back. As she moved in a slow rhythm, Lauro traced her breasts with his fingertips. The sensation was too much. She climaxed wildly and her ecstasy fueled his. He arced and bucked, bringing her to further spasms of joy. She collapsed into his arms as he grabbed her hair and kissed her over and over.
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