To have a good chance at success, they needed results quick, but it’d been two days and they had nothing solid to show for it.
He was anxious to be able to do something useful. So far, he hadn’t even been able to provide any leads to which Representatives might be behind a compromise, even though he was seeing most of them on a daily basis. He felt bad not just because they weren’t making quick enough progress, but because he personally didn’t feel like he was making any contributions to the team.
He kept trying to put these thoughts to bed, so that he could get some rest, too, but this was apparently impossible to do without the aid of air conditioning. So he just lay there, hoping against hope for any sort of breeze to come through the window and cool the heavy still night air.
He stayed awake for what seemed like forever, working through the conversations he’d had or overheard in the House and rehashing the speeches the various congressmen had made, seeing if there were any clues he could piece together, any words that seemed out of place. He began to realize that eight hours in bed could really seem like an eternity if you couldn’t fall asleep.
And then he was waking up to his alarm clock, with sun already streaming through the window. He felt downright fatigued and wanted more than anything to pull the covers over his head and sleep in.
Instead, he stumbled to the closet, got dressed, and headed downstairs to the kitchen where Mrs. Peinture, the owner of the boarding house, was still serving breakfast. He nearly fell asleep in his eggs, but instead settled for trying to wake himself up with three cups of coffee.
He tried all day to figure out what the four congressmen who he knew had heard about the compromise were thinking. He tried to eavesdrop as best as he could without being conspicuous, and throughout every part of the debate they had that day he tried to figure out if there was anything that sounded even slightly off.
The three Democrats from New Jersey who had been at the Curtis house never got up to speak that day, nor did Zollicoffer. Nobody said anything about a potential compromise at all, either during official speeches or in the chatter between them. Tim was starting to think that whatever discussion was brewing was happening in actual smoke-filled rooms like the one that Rose had eavesdropped on.
Much to Tim’s disappointment, he learned just about nothing that day except the fact that no matter how much coffee you drank in the morning, there was no bathroom in the Capitol. He had to leave the building twice within the first two hours to use a nearby privy. The second time he left, after deciding that, no, he could not make it any longer, he found himself cursing the president. He got a bathroom in his house / office, but here there were, almost 300 elected officials working in this building and not a bathroom in sight. And this was supposed to be a democracy.
Chapter 14
Panic at Miss Peinture’s
On Wednesday night, Tim almost felt a little better once he found out that no one else gathered any information that day. Only almost, though, because they actually really needed any information they could get. If they didn’t stop the compromise soon, it might gain enough momentum that they couldn’t stop it or the Emperors’ plan. On the bright side, he was so exhausted by the time he crawled into bed that he fell asleep before he even broke a sweat.
The next day, though, he finally caught a break.
First thing in the morning on Thursday, before the day’s session even started, he was approached by James Abercrombie, the balding man with white hair who had accused him of being hungover on Monday.
“Have you heard what your Northern Democrats are doing now?” asked Abercrombie.
“What makes them mine?” asked Tim, legitimately confused for a moment. He’d only had one cup of coffee this morning and was already beginning to think it might not have been enough.
“Well, they’re from the North. I know you’re a Whig, of course, but you know you Northerners all think alike,” Abercrombie smiled, to show there weren’t any actual hard feelings.
“Well… what are they doing now, then?” asked Tim, still confused.
“Right. They think they’ve come up with a way for us to solve the current problems and settle at least some of our nation’s differences over slavery,” he said.
Tim finally understood where the conversation was going and was excited to finally have a bit of political gossip. “What are they planning?” Tim asked.
“Well, I don’t know the specifics, but they think they can get the Democrats to concede Kansas and Nebraska as being non-slave states if it is agreed that all future territories, whether current or potential, can vote on whether they enter as slave or free states. That, and there are a couple other perks that go well with the Democratic platform,” he said.
Tim thought about this for a moment. “What do you mean potential territories?” Tim knew that the United States had already acquired all the territories that would make up the future forty-eight states of his own timeline.
“Well, it could be anywhere, of course. Cuba seems ripe for the taking, and there are plenty of parts of Mexico that we haven’t conquered yet,” said Abercrombie with a bit of a grin.
“So are you in favor of this compromise?” asked Tim.
“Me? Of course not! I plan to vote in favor of the bill because my constituents want Kansas to be open to slavery in case they want to move there. None of them are thinking of moving to other places that may someday be a territory, and I don’t want the Democrats getting their special deals. But the Democrats wouldn’t need a Southern Whig like me to pass a bill if they had one that wasn’t dividing their own party. They have all the votes they need to carry it themselves. I know there are some Southern Whigs who might be on board, but that’s just the Northern Democrats tossing around scare tactics about how the slavery issue, if left unresolved, could someday divide the Union.”
Tim nodded, trying to act surprised by the idea that the North and South could be divided.
“Well, who are the Northern Democrats offering this compromise?” asked Tim.
“I don’t know exactly,” said Abercrombie. “I haven’t been approached myself. This is rumor I’ve heard from some of the Democrats from my state, you see.”
Tim nodded. “I suppose that makes sense.” It also explained why he himself hadn’t been approached, although he wasn’t sure why none of the Democrats from his state had talked to him about it. He guessed that he probably hadn’t been keeping up all the social obligations that Sage usually would.
For the rest of the day, Tim strained to hear anything he could about the compromise. Again, no one who got up to speak so much as mentioned it.
But around the chamber, unofficially, Tim heard hushed talk about the possibility of a compromise, although he still never heard a name attached to it. It seemed as if the authors of the proposed compromise didn’t want their names to be known but were seeing how much support they could drum up for it.
Still, even though Thursday seemed a little bit late to be the first time he could really contribute something to the group’s intelligence on the plan in the works, he was awfully excited as he walked home to have something to share.
He was even starting to picture himself in Cooper’s Kitchen, now a gathering spot for the three of them, telling the other two what he had learned.
The imagined scene was a peaceful and happy one, which was why it was so jarring, moments later, when he opened the front door of his own boarding house to see an out of breath, wild-eyed, and sweaty Billy-disguised-as-Cooper sitting at the kitchen table accepting a glass of water from a very confused looking Miss Peinture.
“What’s going on?” asked Tim.
“Mr. Sage!” said Miss Peinture, who didn’t seem to know what to make of the situation. “This is Cooper. He owns another boarding house in town, and I had no idea that the two of you knew each other. I’ve met him before, of course… You congressmen come and go, but those of us who own houses here stay on. I would have turned him away, but he’s in such a state… Do you kno
w him?”
Tim had fully expected Billy to be the one who answered Tim’s question, and the fact that he didn’t worried him a bit. Billy was usually not one to have nothing to say, even in a crisis. His strange behavior was making Tim antsy.
“Yes, ma’am” said Tim. He wasn’t sure what it was about Miss Peinture, but even though Tim looked like he was just as old as her, he still had the uncontrollable urge to call her ma’am. He wasn’t sure how to explain Billy’s sudden appearance to Miss Peinture, so he lied vaguely. “I was expecting him. We’ll go to my room, now. Don’t worry about us.”
“Well, all right,” said Miss Peinture. “Only, I’ve never seen him in such a state.”
“Right, well, thank you,” said Tim, awkwardly. He beckoned toward the stairs, nearer where he was standing. Billy got up and came over, but still didn’t say anything.
Only once they got into Tim’s room and closed the door did Billy talk. When he did, he spoke in a frantic burst.
“Sorry, I just couldn’t figure out what to say in front of her. I’ve been caught. They’re onto me, so I had to get out of there. I don’t think they know I’m here, so I should be safe right now, but…” Billy said all that in one breath, and then stopped again.
Tim looked at him. He was gaping, but stopped long enough to say, “You have to slow down. What happened, exactly?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Billy admitted. “But all my things have been ransacked. They took my notebook, with all the information from Hopkins in it… It was in a locked drawer and everything, but they got it… I’m not sure they’re going to know what half of it means, without having talked to him first, but it’s definitely going to be enough to confirm whatever suspicions they have about me.”
Tim frowned. “So, what do you mean by, ‘they’? You don’t think the Emperors themselves are following you, do you?”
“No, they’re probably out of this time already, I know that… But I mean the people who they’re controlling. Since we followed them into the past once already, it makes sense that their mind-control protocol would include something about what to do if they found out someone was onto them. I think at least one of them is one of my boarders… Thomas Fuller,” said Billy. He’d recovered his breath by this point, but was still sweating far more than the weather, which was a bit cooler today, justified.
“So, wait… You know who one of the mind-controlled people is?” asked Tim, excitedly.
“Yes, I do,” said Billy.
“Well… how’d you find out?” asked Tim.
“Rose’s eavesdropping the other day gave me an idea. I wondered if maybe the mind-control thing was something that you could hear happening, and I had three potential suspects living under my roof. So I snuck into their hallway at night… Well, I mean, it’s not really sneaking, since I own the place, but… Anyway I couldn’t hear anything coming from any of the rooms. But I thought I saw a weird green light coming from under one of the doorways. From Thomas Fuller’s room.”
“Really, it was something that easy to spot?” asked Tim, surprised. He was starting to wonder how this strange phenomenon hadn’t already been spotted by Billy’s other boarders, or Billy himself for that matter.
“Well, it probably wouldn’t have been anything I would have noticed had I not been looking for things out of place, but I was, so I saw it. I extinguished the two lamps that I keep burning on that hallway at night, and there was definitely some non-natural light coming from under there,” Billy explained.
“You’re sure it couldn’t have been a fire or something?” asked Tim.
“It was green, though,” said Billy. “And steady for awhile… not flickery like a fire or anything. I debated whether to open the door… I only got it, like a half an inch open… Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, and it was filling the room. I would have opened it more, but I knew that if I caught him, he would have known I was onto him.”
“But he must have figured something out anyway, right?” asked Tim.
“I would say so. Maybe part of how the Emperors were controlling his mind was telling him to be on the lookout for people trying to sabotage their plan. We did it before, and it must have at least occurred to the Emperors that we might be disguised.”
“Right, I guess it’s not surprising that the Emperors somehow warned their drones to be on the lookout for us,” said Tim.
“Exactly. And clearly, Fuller figured it out. This afternoon, I went into my private bedroom at the inn when I finished cleaning up after lunch. I have a desk in there with a lock on it. Well, Fuller must have taken a hatchet to it or something, because the desk was chopped to bits when I got in there, and everything important from the drawer was gone… That’s even where I kept the Dominus Temporis, and it was gone when I got in there.”
“Wait… The Dominus Temporis is gone?” asked Tim with a sense of urgency he hadn’t had so far during the conversation. The whole point of them going back and fixing the changes the Emperors had made to events was to put them off balance and help Hopkins in re-collecting the Domini. Only once he possessed all of them would Hopkins be able to set things right and make it so it was like the Domini had never existed and time had never been changed, except that those who had travelled through time would remember what had happened to them.
“Listen, Tim, I understand how important it is… Why do you think I’ve been panicking this whole time?” Billy asked in a rushed voice.
Tim thought for a moment. “Maybe it’s not as big of a deal as we think.”
Billy raised his eyebrows. “How do you figure?” Tim wasn’t sure that this turn of phrase had existed in the 1850s, but the way he saw it, they had bigger issues at the moment. Tim’s door was closed and he had no reason to believe anyone was listening in on him.
“Well, if they know that they’re looking for the Dominus, then, they’ll probably have some way of getting it back to the Emperors. They want them just as bad as we do,” Tim reminded him. Tim reasoned that if the Emperors got the Dominus back, then at least Hopkins could have a chance to steal it again.
“Well, right… which is why it’s bad that I lost it,” Billy said, talking slowly, as if Tim only had half a brain.
“What I thought immediately was that if they had it, we might never find it again,” Tim said, cutting Billy a break on being rude on account of the rough afternoon he’d had.
“And that could still happen,” Billy pointed out. “For all we know, they weren’t looking for anything specific, just suspected me of being a threat. Or they were just looking for something weird, knowing that I didn’t quite fit in. If they were looking for something weird, they certainly found it,” said Billy. “And no matter what, we were collecting the Domini and now they’ve gotten one back, or else we’ve lost it and may never be able to find it again. It’s a point against us no matter what. Plus, I’m pretty sure that if Fuller finds me again, he’s going to kill me.”
“How do you get from a missing Dominus to there?” Tim asked, surprised.
“Well, after I found my desk torn to shreds-- not a good sign no matter what-- someone knocked loudly at the door. Think how police knock on doors in movies. I tell them I’m busy and to come back later, because I want some time to think about what to do. I still had Hopkins’ taser weapon on me, so I was thinking of just facing Fuller down then and there, if it was him at the door, but I didn’t want a situation where one of my boarders was dead with a wound that looked like it’d come from another planet. I mean, I know they’re only supposed to stun people, but I didn’t want to risk it.” Billy explained.
“Sure,” Tim agreed, seeing the prudence of that line of thinking.
“And so then, I hear a crash and a breaking sound that can only have been from that same hatchet or whatever it was that destroyed the desk,” Billy said, shuddering slightly at the memory. “And you’re not likely to take a hatchet to someone’s door after they’ve already told you to come back later unless you’re planning to hurt that per
son pretty badly.”
Tim nodded again, seeing little sound argument against this point. “Well, you can’t go back there, then.”
Billy laughed. “Yeah, I figured that out the moment I climbed through the window to jump out. You ever jumped out of a second story window, Tim?”
“No…” Tim said.
“Neither had I. Lucky for me, there was a bush under mine. Kind of cushioned the fall, but also did this,” Billy lifted up his pant-leg a bit and revealed a number of scratches and abrasions on his lower leg.
Tim’s head was still spinning. “I don’t think you should stay here, either, though. Probably the reason you got found out was that you did things the guy you were impersonating wouldn’t have done, or didn’t do things he would have, right?”
“I guess so,” Billy agreed. “But I find it too coincidental that all this happened the day after I found out who one of the people being controlled was.”
“Well, either way,” Tim continued, “I think it would be out of character for my guy, Russell Sage, to have a long-term male guest staying in his room… Especially when everyone knows that you own a boarding house in the city.”
Billy cocked his head to the side. “I guess that makes sense. What were you thinking instead?”
“Well, Julie’s house, of course… She has a lot of room there… I don’t think anybody would notice, once you’re in there… It’s just that here there are so many people coming and going all the time, you’d practically have to hide in the wardrobe every time I opened the door, and you couldn’t make any noise during the daylight hours,” Tim said.
“You’re right. I don’t want to leave right now, though. I definitely wasn’t followed when I came from my boarding house, but Fuller could still be looking for me. Wouldn’t want to give him a break by walking around in broad daylight,” Billy pointed out.
“Right,” said Tim. “So, I’ll walk you over there after dark, then.”
Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 11