He took his key out of his pocket and put it in the lock, turned it, and opened the door. When he saw the inside of the room, he actually jumped a couple inches off the floor.
There was a pretty blonde woman sitting on the edge of his bed. She was wearing a dress, but it was a drab gray and a lot less poofy than those that he’d seen Rose and Julie wear. She seemed to be in her mid-twenties.
But none of this explained why she was sitting on his bed. Sage’s wife, after all, was about a decade older and in New York.
The woman on the bed clearly registered his confusion. She gave a sweet little giggle and asked, with an air of apology, “Did you forget it was Friday, my dear?”
Tim registered that his eyes were ridiculously wide as he tried to decipher what was going on and just what he should do about it. Clearly, the most important thing was to not break character with whatever Sage would do.
Tim mustered a smile. “Well, yes… I just lost track of the days. You know how boring it can get in Congress.”
The woman giggled again. She crossed her legs, leaned back a bit, and responded, “Yes, well, that’s why we leave all that politicking to you men, isn’t it?”
Tim laughed. He now had a pretty strong working theory about why this woman might be here, but he had to be sure in order to avoid some pretty catastrophic embarrassment. He decided to test his theory. “And then there’s girls like you…” he trailed off.
“To keep your minds off of it, yes,” said the woman. She uncrossed her legs and reached to allow Tim to give her a hand up. Tim obliged.
“Awfully considerate of you, isn’t it?” Tim asked.
“Quite,” she said. They were now standing face to face. She put her arms around him, placing her hands on his back and pulling herself close to him. She gazed up at him with admiring eyes. “Shall I begin now?”
She moved one of her hands from his back to the back of his head, pulling him toward her lips. Without really thinking about it, Tim allowed himself to kiss her back.
Unlike his kisses with Julie, this one wasn’t sweet and soft. This kiss was fierce and passionate. Tim couldn’t pretend he didn’t enjoy it. He didn’t really see anything wrong with liking a kiss with this woman. After all, he didn’t have a girlfriend.
But when she started to pull him down onto his bed with her, he realized he couldn’t let it go any further.
“We need to stop this,” he said, with a bit of regret.
The woman looked up at him, clearly surprised and hurt. “Why?”
Tim hesitated. He could think of dozens of valid reasons, not the least of which was Sage’s own wife back in New York, but he knew none of these would likely satisfy her. “There’s someone else,” he said after a moment.
The woman’s eyes widened. “You have a second mistress?” she practically roared with anger. She hesitated for just a moment, then slapped him across the face. Tim was more shocked about the fact that she slapped him than by how much it hurt, although it did smart quite a bit.
“I’m afraid so. It’s not that I haven’t cared for you,” Tim lied. At least, he was lying in the sense that he personally had no sort of emotional connection with her. But he assumed that the real Russell Sage actually did care about her and probably also knew her name. He couldn’t get himself worked up too much about ending this adulterous relationship for the man, though.
“I once thought you did,” huffed the woman, who was now heading toward the door.
A few hours later, when he got to the MacPhearson house, Tim threw Julie a disgruntled look after she opened the door and he walked over to a chair in her living room.
“It looks like your lady MacPhearson’s diary isn’t as great a source of information as you thought it was,” he said.
“What? Why?” Julie asked. Billy looked as perplexed as Julie sounded.
“Well, Sage is having an affair,” Tim revealed. “I found a blonde woman sitting on my bed this afternoon.”
“I’m not sure I understand why you’re upset,” joked Billy, with a wink.
Julie paused for a second, then blushed. “Oh, crap! You’re Russell Sage!”
“Well… Yes,” Tim said. He’d expected a different reaction than this.
“Okay… Don’t be mad, but--” Julie said, then stopped herself. “Wait, first let me run and get the diary.”
As she fled the room, Tim and Billy exchanged an amused glance.
“What’s going on?” Billy asked, as she returned a moment later, out of breath and blushing quite a bit.
“Maybe I already sort of knew that Russell Sage was having an affair, I just kind of forgot that Russell Sage was… well… you,” Julie said.
Billy laughed. “So you forgot his name, or what?”
“I still think of Tim as Tim! Plus, I’m mostly skimming over the parts where it talks about the stupid affairs anyway. It doesn’t much impact our mission who’s having an affair with who, does it?” she asked, her voice ringing out almost an octave above normal.
“Well, it mattered to me today!” Tim said, slightly angry. It really would have helped him out to not have been struck out of the blue with this situation. He rubbed the spot on his face where he had been slapped earlier that evening.
Then, Julie’s eyes widened, as if the information was hitting her for the first time. “Wait, you didn’t… You aren’t… What did you do with her?!”
Tim was a bit ashamed of himself, but he was a little pleased with the jealousy he heard in her voice.
“She kissed me, and then I broke it off,” Tim said.
Julie sighed in relief. Billy chuckled. “I’ll bet the real Sage won’t be too pleased with you when he comes back.”
Julie had been flipping through the pages of her diary, and now she spoke up. “Well… Sorry I didn’t get the information to you sooner. But… turns out her name was Sally Oswald.”
Tim laughed. “That would explain something that Abercrombie-- one of my fellow congressmen-- asked me on Monday. He mentioned her name. But speaking of Congress, we’ve got more important things to be talking about than the sordid love lives of the people we’re impersonating.”
“Only yours is sordid,” Julie countered in a mock-defensive tone. “MacPhearson’s been quite the prude since her husband died, seemingly content to just judge everyone else’s love life.”
“Fair enough,” said Tim, who then launched into an account of what he had found out from Taylor, his fellow representative from New York, that afternoon.
“That’s great!” Billy said, when he finished. “That means we have another lead on where we can look for the Emperors’ drones.”
“Right,” Tim said. “I’m starting to get the vibe that things are going to start moving quicker in the House. There are substantial rumblings about this compromise idea, and someone even got up and spoke about it today. I think we want to destroy the mind control machines before it gains any more traction.”
Julie nodded. “So you’re thinking before Monday?”
“Yeah,” Tim said. “Does that sound like a good idea?”
“It sounds like it would get us out of 1854, at least. No offense to you, Julie, but I’m not sure how long I can stay in the Widow MacPhearson’s house with only you for company,” Billy said.
Julie laughed. “I get to go out and meet Rose, but I’m getting plenty bored, too. I’ll be ready to get out of here. But do you think we’re prepared? We only know two of the people being controlled.”
“That might be enough,” Billy decided. “If we can figure out where this Theodoric Westbrook guy lives, if he really is being controlled, we can destroy his machine.”
“Right, but just his,” said Julie. “Hence, the problem.”
“But if we go after them, won’t they come after us? Unless the system the Emperors are using is so unsophisticated that they’re not going to know when we get rid of one of them, they’ll at least start getting really agitated when we smash one of the machines. If they don’t start chasing us
outright, they might do something to reveal themselves,” Billy argued.
Julie thought about this for a moment. “We’re not going to do anything about it tonight, so why don’t we sleep on it? Rose wants us all to meet her tomorrow. Why don’t we decide then, as a whole group?”
“She’s able to get out?” Tim asked.
“Yeah, apparently she’s allowed to go riding by herself on Saturdays, so she’ll be able to get away from the family. She says she knows of a meadow not so far from her house, just outside the city,” Julie said.
“We were talking about it earlier today. We figure if we shave my facial hair and I wear one of the wigs Julie and I found in her house today, I can probably get away with going out in public, just for a bit. We can hire a carriage to get us to the edge of the city where she’s talking about, and walk from there.”
Chapter 17
Rose in the Meadow
The next day, when Tim, Billy, and Julie sat in the grassy clearing, they heard hoofbeats on the track leading up to it.
“Hi there, Joanna,” Billy said, as she approached.
Rose looked around from horseback before she said, “There’s no one else here, so you can call me Rose. In fact, please do call me Rose. I’ve been pretending to be Joanna non-stop for a week now, and I think I really got the short end of the stick having to play a kid on this mission… I hardly get any time on my own at all!”
“All right, Rose,” Billy revised emphatically as Rose led her horse over to a tree and tethered it there. “We’ve got quite a few things to tell you.”
“Okay… But wait a second, ‘cause I’ve got something that’s going to blow your mind,” said Rose. This was the sort of thing that Rose might just say for no reason, so Tim wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
“All right,” Billy said. “I’ll bite. What happened?”
“Yesterday evening, completely unscheduled, a well-dressed man comes to the house. Turns out he was a congressman,” Rose said. She paused for dramatic emphasis.
“Yeah, whatever,” Tim teased. “I see congressmen every day.”
“All right, good point, sourpuss,” said Rose, sticking her tongue out. “Anyway, I actually got a good chance to eavesdrop on this one. It was George Vail, Democrat from New Jersey. He wanted advice from my pretend father about-- okay, sorry, I’m going to need a drumroll here.”
Julie grinned, and then gave a verbal drumroll.
“Thanks,” Rose said. “He wanted advice on what to do about being approached by Harry Hibbard about his plan to compromise on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. He’s a Democrat from New Hampshire. I found his address in my father the Justice’s desk last night. So… I think that’s one of our guys, no?”
“It really might be!” Julie said excitedly. “Now, listen to what we have for you!”
They briefed her first on their lead on another one of the Emperors’ drones, but she seemed especially intrigued by Tim’s account of his meeting with Sally Oswald. They told it to her because they decided Rose could use a mental break before they decided what to do about their new leads.
“Oh man, that’s perfect!” Rose said. “She slapped you!” She looked at Tim’s face, and seemed disappointed when there was no real sign of the red mark the slap had originally left.
“It wasn’t perfect from where I was standing,” Tim complained.
Rose laughed merrily. After she stopped, she said, “Okay… at some point, we’re going to have to stop reveling in Tim’s tawdry romances and decide what to do about this Theodoric Westbrook dude.”
“Yeah, okay,” Billy said. “Well, I think we should find out where he lives and take action tomorrow night.”
Rose rubbed her hands together. “Sounds good to me! I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“Yeah, but that can’t be the reason we do it,” Tim said. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet.”
“But you’ve said yourself, things are starting to move in Congress, and we need to move before they do, right?” asked Billy.
“Yes,” admitted Tim. “I wouldn’t mind another day, though, just to make sure we plan everything well enough that nothing will go wrong.”
“But if we can’t figure something else out Monday, we’re in the same spot but a day later and closer to the end of the game. Right now, they’re winning. We’ve got to make a play. Something could go wrong no matter what, and delaying isn’t going to get us any yardage,” argued Billy, clearly agitated.
Tim wasn’t really ready to make a commitment, in spite of the abundant sports metaphors. “What do you think?” he asked Julie.
Julie thought for a moment. “I think it’s time. We’ve got to take the first move now.”
“That’s the vote, then,” said Tim, a bit grateful that he didn’t have to make the call.
“So what’s the plan?” asked Rose.
A couple hours later, Tim was looking over the stack of papers in Sage’s desk. He knew that congressmen didn’t have secretaries in 1854, not even Senators did, but he did wish there was someone he could call on to sort through these hundreds of papers for him.
He assumed that since Theodoric Westbrook was a Representative from the same state, there was at least a good chance that Sage would have his Washington address somewhere, but an hour and about five hundred assorted documents later, he hadn’t found anything. He finally decided that he should attempt to ask his fellow boarders for assistance tonight. Both of them were fellow representatives and might have been to Westbrook’s residence before.
Tim was never the most talkative person under normal circumstances. He was also afraid he might give away the fact that he wasn’t really Russell Sage if he talked too much to people who knew him well. Thus, he hadn’t talked much previously at the common meals at the house.
“Theodoric? Why would you want to talk to that old windbag? Even his name is atrociously boring,” proclaimed Henry Bennett, a fellow New York Whig, when Tim explained that evening that he wanted to be reminded of Theodoric’s address so that he could pay him a visit before session reopened on Monday.
“I have the address in my room,” stated Edwin Morgan, another Whig from New York who lived in the house. It seemed that Representatives from the same state and party tended to live together a lot of the time. “But I would ask you to relieve our uncouth colleague’s curiosity, as it is a burden I myself share.”
Tim couldn’t believe it. The two sounded like they were still making speeches in front of the House. If these two thought Theodoric was a windbag, the poor guy must really have quite a reputation. Tim reflected for a moment on what would be safe to reveal, and he decided that if his colleagues were going to talk as if they were still in the Chamber then he had better do his best impression of 19th century formal speaking, too. “It’s this matter with the compromise some of the northern Democrats have been lobbying for as of late. I have heard that he may be intimately involved in the proposal and I would like a bit of clarification.”
“Why, yes… I would be interested in having that as well,” Morgan said. “From the whiffs that I have caught in the Chamber, I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of the thing.”
“Would you like some company?” Bennett asked.
“No!” Tim said, a smidge too emphatically. He calmed down a bit and added, “I believe it will be better if we can talk one on one. No need to intimidate the man.”
“Right you are,” Bennett observed with a nod and another bite of his dinner. “Why, Theodoric wasn’t one of the gentlemen living in that house where the homeowner went missing now, was he?”
Tim opened his mouth to answer, but was soon glad he didn’t get a chance before Morgan began. “No, no, those were some of the Maine Democrats. Thomas Fuller told me about it yesterday. He thought he might have been in danger himself, and so he spent Thursday night at the house of that David Disney from Ohio. He told me he was going to go back to his own place last night, after some other congressmen assured him it was both safe and ethical to
do so, even without the owner there.”
Tim had to make an effort to only act the proper amount of intrigued by this news. He had just been told that the man out of whose room Billy had noticed the strange green light was now back in Billy’s house. Maybe he thought that Billy had been frightened off for good. Not only that, but Tim also had a lead on a possible fourth member of the Emperors’ brain-warped crew.
After dinner, Tim got the address of Theodoric Westbrook from his housemate and couldn’t resist going immediately back to Julie’s house with the news.
He got there at around 9, and Billy and Julie were both as astounded as he was with their luck in finding out another possible lead.
When Tim got home that evening, in spite of being exhausted from the amount of walking and mental exercise he’d been throughout that day, it took him hours to get to sleep. He couldn’t believe that in less than 24 hours, they’d be trying to foil the Emperors’ latest plan. He only hoped they would succeed.
They had decided that in order to avoid suspicion, they should all go to church that Sunday as the people they were impersonating usually would. For Sage, that meant going to the Second Presbyterian Church, out on New York Avenue.
Tim had gone to church in the 21st century, but noticed heavy contrasts between the experiences he’d had there and what this church was like about a century and a half before. Although he recognized a lot of the features of the sanctuary, like the pulpit, the stained glass windows, and the pews for the parishioners, there were a lot of features that were strange.
First of all, the candles throughout the sanctuary actually served a purpose, rather than just being part of a tradition. In fact, there were many more candles, to make up for the fact that there were no lightbulbs, and of course none of them were those electric fake candles like some of those at Tim’s church back home. Another thing that Tim noticed was that the pastor, who didn’t have a microphone, was still able to make his booming voice heard throughout the large worship hall without a problem. This feat required a different type of personality than that possessed by Tim’s pastor back in his own time, a rather soft-spoken man with a lapel-mike.
Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 13