The Brazen Woman

by Anne Groß

A familiar thought occurred to her: perhaps death was the pathway back to Tucson. Each time she mulled this question, she felt a little less scared. Now after weeks of consideration, she found she could justify thoughts of suicide.

  It was possible that the shock of the cold water would stop her heart, but that was an outcome she doubted. Her heart was strong, despite her nicotine habit. Years of distance running had given her an enviable cardio system.

  She was a strong swimmer, so there was a possibility that she would freeze to death before drowning. Despite it being August, the weather was cold, and the water, she guessed, was even colder. Considering how much she was shivering, it was likely she was already suffering from the first stages of hypothermia. This worried Elise since, for all she knew, dying from hypothermia could send her straight to the Paleolithic Age and she’d rather not tangle with mammoths.

  Drowning was the only way to return to exactly the same place and time. She was becoming convinced she had to bookend her time travel with similar occurrences—something about the symmetry of it struck her as essential. She hoped the shock of the frigid sea would cause her to gasp and inhale water, then all she’d have to do was fight to keep her body submerged for longer than three minutes. She could do this, she thought. She could force herself to drown.

  Elise let the blanket slip from her shoulders and gripped the rail hard with both hands. She could feel her pulse increase through her palms, but it wasn’t her death that scared her. It was the terrifying sensory deprivation she remembered from her first trip through time. It had been a swift slide, dark as the night sky, and empty of everything. She had no idea how long it had taken her to fall through, but then again, time isn’t an issue when it’s suspended.

  As she leaned over the churning sea, she thought of the black-haired woman. In her recurring nightmare, the woman played the main part as a glossy black beetle drifting weightlessly in a black void. She made overtures to start a friendship, clacking her mandibles and waving her antennae; she made Elise want to pick up a shoe and stand on a chair.

  There was also a feeling of connection, of familiarity. The black-haired woman had been there when Elise first landed in that candle-lit room where people screamed in French and scattered like shadows. The woman intervened when a man bared his small, sharp teeth and took Elise by the throat.

  Did it even happen, or was it her mind trying to rationalize how a flash flood could have overtaken her from the heights of the Catalina foothills, where there was no wash?

  No. It happened. Elise had the emerald to prove it. Like a gift from fate, the emerald scarab had dropped forward from behind the man’s cravat. It revealed itself by dangling on its chain in front of her eyes like a lifeline. She caught the jewel, twisting the chain until it broke. She held it locked in her fist as the floor opened up and she fell again, this time sideways, landing in the muddy lane in front of the seedy, and not so quiet, Quiet Woman.

  Elise balanced her waist precariously on the edge of the ship’s rail with the weight of her legs being the only thing keeping her from flipping over the side. She didn’t have to do this, she thought. She could go look for the black-haired woman and demand answers, beat them out of her if she had to.

  For a moment, Elise wondered how she might find a nameless woman without the help of the internet, a photograph, or the ability to speak French. The impossibility of the task almost made her laugh. She leaned further forward. Her toes left the deck.

  The cold shock of water as it rushed over her head removed any desire to gloat over how right she was—she did indeed gasp when her body hit the salty sea and it burned in her lungs as momentum took her deep under. She was now a gherkin in a jar of brine, a flesh-lodged splinter in a salt bath, a pickled egg. She was decidedly not a mermaid.

  What she hadn’t anticipated, however, was the intensity of her body’s need to pull her back towards the sky. She may have wanted to die. She may even had had good reason to die, but her body wanted nothing more than another breath of life. She struggled against her instinct for survival as her desperation increased with every second. Luckily, the sheer volume of clothing that tangled around her legs worked well in countermanding her body’s orders to surface. She opened her mouth to scream, but had no breath to exhale. Fighting panic, she waited for the black portal to open up with Tucson, Arizona a bright dot on the other end.

  Hadn’t it already been three minutes? Why hadn’t the vortex opened? It felt like eternity. She tried to concentrate on the ship’s massive hull, roughed over with barnacles, and was only barely aware of her hands working feverishly to free her legs. Maybe she hadn’t drowned in Tucson during that flash flood. Maybe the flood was an independent occurrence, a coincidence. Maybe she should have looked for the black-haired woman after all.

  Tunnel vision was not what she’d wanted. It wasn’t the same as slipping through an opened tunnel. Five more seconds. Ten more. Thirty more seconds and her vision narrowed into complete darkness.

  ADELAIDE IS HUNGRY

  “America?” Adelaide called to a sailor who was coiling rope at the end of the quay at the London Docks. The crowd on the narrow platform surged in and out like the lapping tide against the ships that loomed on either side. Half the workmen were carrying bulky loads on their shoulders. The other half had just offloaded their burdens and were headed to get more. Adelaide was the stone disturbing the flow.

  “Your pardon, madam?” he shouted over the noise and commotion, craning his head around two men hauling a large wooden crate to look at her.

  “America?” She jabbed her index finger at the two-masted brig on her left. She tried to get closer to the man, but the crowd made it too difficult. Instead she asked another man carrying a stack of wooden planks on his shoulder. “America?”

  “Portsmouth,” he barked without stopping.

  Adelaide sighed and turned to let the flow of traffic take her back towards the warehouses lining the Thames. Although she understood little English, she was becoming fairly familiar with the rhythm of the Docks. The people who made their living on the Thames were a rough bunch, but manageable, and for the most part, much too busy to be dangerous. It reminded her of her own beginnings along the Seine River in Paris. She had started her business small, telling the fortunes of river workers using an overturned crate for a table and a three-card spread. Slowly word of her skill got out. Her crate earned a tablecloth and the attention of chambermaids. Then the tablecloth earned a table and the maids came from wealthier houses. She expanded her spread to five cards and charged more for the merchants’ wives, then ten cards. She moved from the Seine to a café, then finally she earned her own apartment. It could be a reproducible business plan if she spoke English. If only English wasn’t such a clumsy language.

  It had been two days since her visit with Mrs. Southill, and she still had found no passage to America. Her anxiety made it difficult to read her own future with any clarity. Each time she consulted the cards, they revealed too many possibilities. The one thing she knew with certainty was that the possibility of retrieving the emerald grew less likely with every passing minute. The longer it took her to find passage, the more painfully stretched the connection she had with the golem became, making the task laid before her by la Société all the more difficult.

  Tired of seeing men shake their heads no, Adelaide decided it was time to return to the inn where Dodo convalesced. He would be hungry, poor man, and might actually be happy to see her for at least the fifteen minutes it took for him to eat his dinner. She reached into her apron pocket and jangled the few coins she had left. The deposit they had placed on the room at the Dancing Bear had been enough to silence the proprietor for a while, but they would have to disappear before he began making demands of a full payment. She considered transferring Dodo to the abandoned shack they found when they’d fled the Quiet Woman. It would not be very comfortable, but at least it would be dry, and free.

  The scents of meat roasting on rotisseries, baked breads, and sweet fruit, all b
eing sold by shouting vendors along the street made her stomach rumble. Gone were the clever meals she’d had in Paris. Saucisson sec was a wistful memory and had been a cruel topic of conversation amongst the women of la Société. Now, if she wanted sausage, it would likely be stuffed with ground offal mixed with sawdust. It was never a good idea to save money with cheap sausage.

  The cook at the Dancing Bear did not have the same gift for blending flavors as did the fat woman in the kitchen of the Quiet Woman. The faces poor Dodo made while eating the inn’s bland and stringy stews and gelatinous puddings would have been hilarious had she not shared his fate. The meals did not improve the character of the Dancing Bear, nor did it improve the moods of the clients who slunk around the dining hall. Dodo, with his bruised and fractured body, was especially sensitive. His teeth might have been dislodged and his jaw broken, but there was nothing wrong with his tongue, unfortunately.

  Four coins left. Not nearly enough, but perhaps she could make Dodo’s evening more comfortable if she smiled sweetly to a vendor. She stopped a baker who carried a large basket of meat pies that trailed a particularly complex scent and held up four fingers. “Four coins; four tartes,” she said in her thick, French accent. She tried to communicate friendliness with her eyes and smile, and cocked her head coquettishly.

  The baker didn’t bite. “Your ha’ farthings will get you nothing from my basket. I’m not dispensing charity, madam.”

  Adelaide pointed to a single, large pie and held up one finger. When the baker turned to walk away, she stepped in front of him and raised her voice in the way that only a French woman haggling in a country market could, using a piercing combination of stubborn righteousness and sarcastic indifference. Unfortunately, even the cleverest arguments, if presented in the wrong language, were useless. The only thing Adelaide succeeded in doing was to cause the baker to take a step back in alarm, allowing him the space to fill his lungs to maximum capacity.

  Most of the English expelled from the man’s bellows was not anything Adelaide could understand, with the exception of “frog” which, much to her outrage, was a word that kept getting repeated. The more clearly she made her anger known, through wild gesticulations and puffed declarations of protest, the louder the baker became. Just as she was about to knock the basket of meatpies out of his hands, another man appeared as though conjured. “Je vous en prie,” he said gallantly, pressing a large coin into Adelaide’s hand. “Pray, take it.”

  She gaped at the new arrival, startled by his perfect French. “It is too much,” she protested. “I cannot accept your gift.”

  “You must. I insist. It is a pleasure for me to meet a compatriot. If I had flowers, I’d give you flowers. But I see no florists, so I must give you meatpies.”

  Adelaide smiled and blushed at the compliment. “Then, I accept your gift with pleasure.”

  After the mollified baker packaged up four pies in brown paper, the mysterious Frenchman introduced himself as Jacques Noisette, a sailor on a nearby ship. “And you are Madame. . .?”

  “Mademoiselle,” corrected Adelaide. “Mademoiselle Bonnediseuse.” She tried not to smile at the obvious pleasure it gave Mr. Noisette to hear the title of an unmarried woman. Carrying her package for her, he drew her away from the road to find a less crowded area squeezed between two warehouses. He offered her a seat on an overturned crate with a sweeping arm and a deep bow. As gracefully as she could, she lowered her broad bottom and balanced her package on her knees.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but those meatpies—they are not all for you, are they?”

  “No, no.” Adelaide looked at the bulky package, knowing it wouldn’t be difficult to eat them all herself. Their scent tantalized. “I’ve a friend who will share them with me tonight. He’s awaiting my return.”

  “A friend?” The look he gave her was significant. He’d taken note of the pronoun she’d used.

  “A friend.”

  Mr. Noisette nodded and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Is this friend of yours another of our compatriots?”

  Adelaide paused, knowing she shouldn’t reveal too much. Dodeauvie was supposed to be under house arrest in Lille for the crime of disseminating Royalist propaganda. It had been a stupid thing to do, but he hadn’t been able to help himself as his hatred of Napoleon and the Jacobins was stronger than his sense of self-preservation. It was likely that officials had already noticed Dodo’s absence, but if they hadn’t, Adelaide didn’t want to be the one to reveal his secret. “It is a long story,” she said simply, “and perhaps not very unique. My friend came to offer his aid, but now it is I who must aid him. He’s fallen sick, you see. And now we are both stranded in this unfriendly place.

  “But enough about my own troubles. I am tired of thinking of them—bored by my own story. Tell me yours so that I may forget mine. Why are you wearing the uniform of the Royal Navy? If you are a spy, you should take care. You are very loose with your confidences!”

  “I’m no spy,” laughed Mr. Noisette. “Though I’m proud to say I can speak both languages with very little accent. I’ll allow that has been helpful, especially in these times of war.

  “When I was just a boy, I begged my father to allow me to join the French navy. You know, La Royale is quite a dream for boys. ‘Honeur, patrie, valeur, discipline’—few boys were not swept away by the romance.”

  “I once knew a boy who wished to join,” Adelaide admitted with a smile, thinking of her brother. He had not approved of her own career choice, and made very little effort to correspond. “Instead he was apprenticed to a foundry. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was now making cannonballs for Napoleon’s army.”

  “He was lucky. I would have been better off working iron. My income would have been sure. I could have had a wife, a family. . .” his voice wistfully trailed off. “In any case, my parents were more than happy to see me in the navy. It was one less mouth to feed in a large family. I was just a small boy, you see, and my father couldn’t afford to give me much. The navy promised to educate me. It seemed like a good idea. Perhaps it was, but I wasn’t in La Royale for long—just long enough for me to recover from seasickness and gain my legs. In our very first battle, our ship was pitted against an English schooner. It was not anything unusual. I’ve seen much worse since then. But the first battle a man sees is always the worst. It’s always the one you think of when you wake in the middle of the night,” he paused, as though remembering some horror. “In any case, we were outgunned. Our ship was lost and I was pressed into service for the English.”

  “How horrible,” Adelaide cried.

  “It was indeed horrible at first—you imagine? I was only a boy, not much more than ten years old. I couldn’t speak English and was beaten when I didn’t understand the commands. I didn’t have a friend in the world. Every day I waited to see the sails of a French ship on the horizon, but a rescue never came. Eventually I learned the language and made friends. My loyalties changed. It was the English who taught me to sail, and on the seas, one is first loyal to one’s ship.” He laughed at Adelaide’s expression. “You think me a traitor.”

  “On the contrary, I’m shocked to hear how barbarously you were torn from your country. Your family. . .I cannot imagine what they must think.” Adelaide’s eyes welled with tears. “It has been so long since I’ve seen my own family. When I was torn from France, the members of my family were scattered to the wind.”

  “Ah.” Jacques nodded sagely. “Might I assume Bonnediseuse is not your real surname?”

  “You may assume whatever you wish.” Adelaide took a deep breath and assumed her role, rolling her eyes and wringing her hands in agony. “I beseech you, Monsieur Noisettte. Help me return to my family. Please, you must help me. My friend was to take me to my mother in America, but he was beaten unmercifully by bandits. They took all his money, all the funds given to him by my family to return me to them. Now neither of us can buy passage and he—oh dear God, poor, sweet man—he is at death’s door. And the ship that was
to take us both to America has already left.” Adelaide wiped tears from her eyes and clasped the old tar’s hands. “You can speak English. Perhaps you can find another ship for us. Which one of these is headed to America? Please tell me,” she begged, “I must see my mother! My friend tells me her heart is breaking and she hasn’t much time left. Every day that I am apart from her is agony!” Adelaide made a big show of looking around for eavesdroppers and lowered her voice conspiratorially, “Perhaps,” she whispered, “when my family is all together, we can help restore the Bourbons to their rightful place.”

  “Hush!” Mr. Noisette ordered, alarmed. “You must take care with whom you speak so openly about returning the King to the throne. Here in London one might think to be safe, but Napoleon’s spies are everywhere,” he cautioned.

  “Oh, I am lost,” Adelaide cried out, and exploded into hot tears. “My mother needs me and I’ll never see her again.”

  “Have courage,” Jacques said, clumsily patting her hand and offering his handkerchief. “I will help you. I promise.”

  As he walked Adelaide back towards the throng, he explained that Spain had finally asked England for aid against Napoleon’s continued aggression. England, always happy to do battle, was now mustering her troops to send men to the Peninsula. The entire Royal Navy would be needed. Even merchant ships were being pressed into use for transporting supplies and munitions to Portugal. As a result, precious few ships were left to travel to America. “It may take some time to find a ship headed west, but remain hopeful, Mademoiselle. I will find you tomorrow and give you what news I discover. In the meantime, enjoy your meal this evening. Bon appétit.”

  As Adelaide walked up through the narrow, damp streets of London, back towards the inn, she smiled. Jacques Noisette was the first bit of luck she’d had in a long time, and she hoped it was the beginning of a new trend. She had taken a small gamble in playing the role of the exiled Royalist noble, but even if the old sailor had been a secret sympathizer for the Republic, he couldn’t very well fault her, considering his own traitorous path. Adelaide shook her head. What contortions for a mere line in the sand between nations.