The Brazen Woman

by Anne Groß

  True. DuBette nodded. The tablets themselves are gone, but before they were lost two copies had been made in hopes that future generations would decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and reveal the alchemical recipes. La Société has one copy and Bonaparte has the other.

  The hieroglyphs are indecipherable, scoffed Adelaide. Everyone knows that.

  To be honest, we thought much the same. Our efforts to translate the Book had been a mere academic exercise, an amusing trifle to occupy us on those rare days when spare time was found. Then we heard that the scarab had been found.

  The Emperor’s scarab? What does the emerald scarab have to do with any of this?

  It is said that one of the great tablets had a large missing piece. A corner had been deliberately chipped off to obscure the most important of all Thoth’s recipes. It was carved into a cabochon to be set into a pair of golden wings.

  Oh, breathed Adelaide, suddenly understanding. The Philosopher’s Stone. The emerald scarab is the Philosopher’s Stone!

  Dubette made an irritated gesture downplaying Adelaide’s revelation. Yes, well, in a sense I suppose it is. In any case, as you might imagine, everyone has redoubled their efforts to learn the meanings of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But that isn’t enough. We must also have the scarab.

  Rest assured, Bonaparte, too, wants his jewel. He knows full well its importance. So you must find it, Adelaide, before the Emperor does. If you fail, you will never be able to return to your beloved city of Paris. You will never be able to rise to the full height of your power and the voices of women will fall upon deaf ears for generations.

  Why me?

  Aren’t you the smartest one of us? Mrs. Southill teased.

  We’re just silly healers with our silly, stupid weeds! laughed Madame Griffe. We couldn’t possibly take on such responsibility.

  Of course we couldn’t, cried another witch. We need a philosopher for the job.

  Enough! Madame DuBette snapped. This conference is over. Let us remember to light candles for our Spanish and Portuguese sisters before we leave. They have endured much, and I am afraid the bloodshed in their countries will not soon be over.

  There was a flare of sympathizing warm colors in the midst of the crowd. Then, one by one, the women followed the draw of their flesh.

  When Adelaide returned to her body, her mood was not buoyed by her sore left cheek where her hipbone pinched her flesh against the hard wooden bench. Peevishly she looked across the table at Mrs. Southill, whose one great eye gazed at nothing at all in front of her. Adelaide reached over and tapped her face. “Come back, you old bat.”

  The eye blinked in surprise, then narrowed as slowly Mrs. Southill returned from between the folds of the universes. Adelaide jumped in alarm when the old woman snatched at the air between them. Peering between her fingers into her cupped hands, Mrs. Southill sighed in disappointment. “Still nothing,” she said. “It’s all so elusive.”

  SINK OR SWIM

  Mrs. Richard Ferrington, née Elise Dubois, leaned against the rail of the ship and stared out across the cold, gray water towards the cold, gray shore lined with cold, gray rocks. She shivered and pulled her husband’s army issued wool blanket tighter around her shoulders. She’d heard that they’d ship out just as soon as the weather changed and could safely leave Ireland, but it didn’t seem as though the weather would change any time soon. HMS Valiant had been anchored for weeks in the harbor. Elise shook her head in disbelief: could it really have been weeks? Maybe it was just days. It was hard to keep track.

  Every day was the same. In the mornings, the fog crept out over the water, dragging its skirts over the green hills of Ireland’s Cork; in the evenings, it slowly returned to the sea. In between morning and evening was nothing more than a long slog of dreary, wet boredom. She’d been told it would be much worse out in the Celtic Sea, but it was hard to imagine anything more awful than being stuck on a ship—essentially an overcrowded island. Despite nearly a thousand soldiers, officers and sailors on the Valiant, one ship in an entire fleet of troopships carrying similar numbers of souls, Elise felt thoroughly alone. The sea itself was her companion. Its lap, lap, lapping on the hull was like the sound of a chatty friend helpfully carrying the conversation.

  Once, after a long sleepless night, she’d stumbled up on deck just before dawn. Nature’s anticipatory hush before daylight didn’t last long—honking geese passing low over the water, the tips of their wings slapping the surface as they rose to follow the fog in “v” formation, shattered the peace—but for five eternal seconds Elise felt her entire body had been hollowed out by silence. As the world woke, the low tide whispered in the roundest tones. The slanted light, muted by the ever present Irish clouds, bounced off the still water, creating a checkerboard of gray and grayer squares delineated by crossing lines of foam. The lines stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, trapping floating vegetation. It made her almost believe there was enough magic in the world to find a way back through time to her home in the twenty-first century.

  During the day, no one was allowed to disembark except for the 95th Rifle Regiment. She could hear the crack of their guns across the harbor as they practiced skirmishing in the grassy hills. Every day they were rowed ashore, and every evening they’d come back with the fog, stars in their eyes and grins on their faces. Only the riflemen were allowed to fill their lungs with the air of exertion, stretch their legs, parade, joust, and imagine themselves as heroes of war. The resentment Elise felt towards them made her gut hurt.

  The regular infantrymen were forced to stay onboard. They lounged in boredom, played cards, and drank with the local women who rowed to the ship and were hauled over the rail. Harbor discipline was lax. Most of the officers had taken rooms in Cork, and the ones left onboard turned a blind eye to the shenanigans happening in the deeper decks of the ship. There was a “don’t ask; don’t tell; don’t even trip over it” policy that everyone profited from.

  Most of the men had been pressed into service under disturbing circumstances, but for this small moment of time their bodies and souls had been returned to them. They used the freedom to dance to the beat of drums and fifes. What thoughts they had of the future were for the glory of battle which, naturally, led to thoughts of their death and served only to fuel their desire to drink as much as they could while they were still breathing. As a result, the only sober ones on board were the sailors on watch, forced into mental clarity by the threat of the lash, and Thomas, who lurked nearby.

  Elise had grown used to smelling Thomas’s pipe at odd times during the day. Even as her own nicotine addiction welcomed the spicy odor, the unwelcome reminder of him made her stomach clench with anger. No one at the Quiet Woman public house had said anything about the split lip he’d given her. They’d looked past the bruise like it didn’t exist. For Elise, however, the shame of Thomas’s backhand lingered, like an unearned intimacy. Just the thought of it burned, even though the actual wound was healed. They had barely spoken two words to each other in the weeks after that horrible night when she told him she was from the future, so she was surprised when he'd vouched for her nursing skills by displaying the long line of neat sutures she’d sewn in his side, winning her a place in the ranks and a chance to get back to the States.

  Except, despite marrying Thomas's employer for the privilege, they weren't going to the States. She was convinced that if she could just stand in the exact spot in Tucson, Arizona where she fell through time, she’d find a way to return to the 21st Century. But apparently Napoleon Bonaparte caused everything to change. Now she was going on a long trip to a war in Portugal she hadn’t signed up for, with a husband she didn’t want, and a strong regret that she hadn’t paid attention in her high school history class.

  She took a deep breath of the sweet smoke of burning tobacco as it wafted across the deck. Her eyes closed involuntarily as her stomach flared with heat. Thomas was somewhere close. The smell of his pipe seemed to follow her everywhere and snatch at her thoughts.
He usually kept himself out of sight, but on a crowded ship it was hard to ignore his presence. She hated that all the little reminders of him made her palms itch and her throat catch.

  Yesterday she’d run into him sitting with a trio of grizzled sailors. They all had their pipes clenched in their teeth while they knotted lengths of cord into satchels. Out of sheer boredom, she’d paused to watch as Thomas was again shown how the rabbit circles his hole twice before jumping in. He was determined to learn, despite being all thumbs. As his satchel grew into a tangled mess, she breathed in as much of his second hand smoke as she could suck down. She was about to ask if she could join, maybe share a bowl, when one of the sailors noticed her and snarled. “You lost, lass?”

  All four looked up. Thomas’s lips moved in what could have been either a smile or a sneer—it was hard to tell since one corner of his mouth was disfigured by a long white scar that crossed his cheek, and the other corner was wrapped around his pipe. His blue eyes would have given her more information, but she deliberately avoided looking into them, knowing how his gaze affected her.

  “Never mind her, Patrick. She’s touched,” Thomas grumbled.

  “Oh hell, that’s just what this ship needs,” Patrick said, “another woman as not right in the head. The bloody army has no business allowing camp followers. It’s not good for morale.”

  “Right, and what would morale be like if no one gets their laundry done or their meals cooked?” snapped Elise.

  “So the Queen’ll be boiling laundry then?” Thomas asked. His voice was gentle, teasing. “Since when?”

  “If you’re so against women on board, why are you making dainty bonnets for the ladies?” Elise waved her finger at the complicated macramé in Patrick’s hands. “Try it on. I bet it really adds a flair to your ugly mug.” She’d wanted to walk away with dignity, but when he rose, indignant and puffed to intimidate, her flat feet had churned her legs into a ridiculous sprint across the slippery deck.

  The memory of the men’s mocking laughter echoed in her brain, and she seethed at all of them—the sailors, the infantrymen, the riflemen, the wives, the officers, everyone. They were all horrible, especially Thomas. They were all ignorant and backward. Not one of them would survive five minutes in the 21st Century. Elise furiously ground a corner of her husband’s blanket against her eyes.

  Her salty tears were lost in the already damp blanket. Everything she owned, which was nothing much to speak of, was soaked with a mist of salt brine that never dried. Ireland was the pits, Elise thought gloomily, having never actually stepped on the country’s soil. She had briefly considered escaping her current situation and swimming to shore, but what was there for her? Nothing but little huts with thatched roofs. Sheep. Rocks. More sheep. She’d heard the town of Cork was more urban, but that couldn’t mean much in 1808. London had been urban—about as urban as it gets—and she’d hated it. And anyway, wasn’t Ireland all about the sweaters? She didn’t look good in lumpy cable-knit sweaters, she reasoned. Elise shivered under the wool blanket around her shoulders, an ironic fashion accessory given her thoughts, as yet another spray of mist passed across the deck. Sure, the humidity was doing wonders for her skin, but a ruddy complexion didn’t mean much if your bones hurt from the damp cold. Sinking lower into her black mood, she pictured herself back in Tucson, Arizona.

  August in Tucson, when the stifling heat of the day was dramatically broken each evening with monsoon rains, was her favorite month. Cactus grew fat between the wood of their ribs like lungs filling for a long sigh of relief. The spiny ocotillo, normally just a cluster of tall sticks jutting into the sky, dressed itself with green leaves and a corsage of red flowers. The scent of creosote bushes painted the air in freshness. The streets were washed clean of an entire year of desert dust. It had been the start of monsoon season when Elise was stolen from her home and dropped into damp and dreary London by God-knows what forces, losing 200 some-odd years and a few months. All her friends were now gone, her nursing career, her entire way of life and any hope for blissful sun-soaked heat. London had been cold, but at least there were cheery fireplaces at the Quiet Woman. On the Valiant, if you were cold, you just put on more wet layers of wool, assuming you had more layers.

  As she often did when she was alone, Elise dug between her breasts and pulled out a filthy handkerchief, dislodging stray crumbs of the rationed ship’s biscuit that she ate for most of her meals. In the center of the square of linen, hidden and protected, was the emerald scarab. How it could be so warm when she herself was so cold, was only one of its mysteries. Elise wanted to shrink herself to the size of the emerald and tuck herself into the warmth between her own breasts, a feat of magic about as likely as being able to return to Tucson. That and the rest of the irritating thoughts rolling in her brain—the corset that was a thousand times more uncomfortable than a bra with a popped wire, the weather, the wafts of Thomas’s pipe smoke, the riflemen’s freedom, Ireland, cable knit sweaters—made her want to scream in frustration. Instead she took a bracing breath to concentrate.

  Something told Elise that the emerald scarab was the key to her fate. Whether from her own body heat or from something more mystical, there was a power being radiated that she couldn’t even begin to understand. On one side, it was nothing more than a large cabochon carved to look like a beetle. Flipped to the backside, however, the emerald was dusty and unpolished with etchings of tiny hieroglyphs like the inverse of braille. For the hundredth time, Elise drew her finger over the writing and wondered what the symbols meant.

  It was Richard who had presented her the scarab as a gift to his new wife. But the gift hadn’t been an act of generosity; the emerald hadn’t been his to give. He’d taken it from Elise months earlier when he’d discovered her unconscious in the street the night she’d fallen through time. He gambled that returning the jewel would trigger in his new wife memories of an auspicious past full of wealth and high standing. It stood to reason that an amnesiac woman found with such an enormous gemstone would be a member of the British noble class, and he’d held on to it without her knowledge until he could secure her in matrimony.

  His plan had worked. Her memories began the instant the emerald was pressed into Elise’s open palm. “What’s yours is now mine,” Richard said, with complete belief in the inevitability of civil law.

  Fuck inevitable, thought Elise as she squeezed the jewel in her fist and glared towards the misty horizon. She was tired of inevitable. She ached to take charge of her own life again and the emerald was the first scrap of self-determination she’d felt in weeks. She gripped it in her fist, holding on for dear life. With the emerald scarab back in her possession, she remembered everything:

  It had started like any other day. . .

  No, that wasn’t right, Elise shook her head, not any other day.

  It’d started in Tucson, in Emmet’s bed. She’d awakened with dry-mouth, a churning stomach, and the feeling of her heart pounding against her skull. It was the kind of morning that made Elise consider setting fire to all the trees in the neighborhood because that’s where the cicadas hid, and their shrill song was like a power drill into her brain. Quietly, heels in hand and half-dressed, she’d slipped away from the sleeping mass of twitching muscle that was her previous night’s conquest and headed out to meet her friend and coworker Anita, who was fresh off a nursing shift at the hospital. On mornings like that, hair of the dog was her first priority. Her second was Ibuprofen.

  There’s something about a hard hangover that filters an entire day like a sticky film you can’t rub off your corneas. No matter what you do—shower, hydrate, exercise, medicate—there’s nothing that adequately removes the fragility created by a bender. That evening after a long nap, Elise was still feeling the after-effects, so she’d decided to head to the foothills to run the trails and sweat out the last of the poison.

  For Elise, running was as self-indulgent as drinking. Pounding the dusty mountain paths was her joy. Her blood perfused. Her lungs opened. Her skin fi
ltered. Trail running was more about the feeling it created than it was about health. But this time, no amount of churning blood could erase the buzzing in her head. She’d felt like there was a neon light in there behind her eyes, illuminating the desert in front of her with a pulsating sound, but she chalked the sensation up to the impending torrential rains that were sweeping across the valley.

  The monsoon arrived faster than anticipated. Having lived in Tucson for almost ten years, she was used to the dangers of the late August rains, but never had she seen anything like the wall of water that had rushed down the trail. Now she wondered if what she’d been feeling that morning wasn’t a hangover, but overlapping fault lines of time quivering against an intense pressure, a kind of metaphysical earthquake. Had she been frothed between two separately moving currents of time and thrown to the surface like sea foam? That could explain the sudden appearance of a tsunami in the middle of the desert. It caught her up in muddy water and churning stones and spit her out, a masticated mess, into the nineteenth century.

  She’d been pulled from a sunbaked desert landscape to a cold and crappy London pub via, what? Death by drowning in mud? Was she dead? Elise carefully wrapped the scarab back in the handkerchief and returned it to her bosom. The feel of it sliding along her skin sent a shiver down her spine. A strange warmth pressed against her sternum as it settled heavily.

  Gazing at the ship’s inky shadow on the churning waves, she narrowed her eyes at the sea. She could be in hell, she thought, a colorless and cold hell. A gull landed gracefully on the water, making her smile wryly. Even the birds were gray in hell. She pressed the scarab hard against her flesh to reassure herself that the pain she caused herself meant she was very much alive. She couldn’t help wondering, though, what alive meant. If time had no fixed point any longer, why should life?