Time to Control

by Marie Pinkerton

  I was getting close to hyperventilating, and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady myself. "So yeah, I want to run away. I want to go somewhere where I can be in control again. Where I can disappear in the crowd, and no one knows me, or pays any attention to me. I want to see if I can take money into the past, so that I can bring enough back with me to get a private castle on a hill. To not have to worry about work, and just spend my days tending my garden. To not have to deal with the obligations of my family. And most of all, to be away from you so that I don't give in to the temptation to give my life, body, mind, soul, and control to you." I plopped down into the chair, trying not to pass out.

  Eddie knelt in front of me, taking my hands and smiling broadly, the crinkles around his eyes showing.

  "Why do you have that goofy grin on your face? I just told you why I want you to go away."

  "That's called love, Schroeder."

  "What? No."

  "Yes." He squeezed my hands. "You don't need analyzing," he sang softly in a rich tenor that surprised me. "It is not so surprising / That you feel very strange but nice / Your heart goes pitter patter / I know just what's the matter / because I've been there once or twice / ....you're not sick you're just in love."

  "Irving Berlin non-withstanding, how do you know? You sing beautifully, by the way." Beautifully was an understatement -- he was turning me on again. Damn hormones.

  "Schroeder, I've been in love with you since the moment I realized Schroeder Kelly was most emphatically female." His eyes watched my barely covered chest heave with my almost sobs. "You're strong, intelligent, confident, snarky, beautiful, and I love you."

  I was crying in earnest now. "Then why haven't you said it until now?"

  "Because you weren't ready." I gave him an inquisitive look, which I was impressed he could read through the tears. "I call you sweetheart, baby. You call me Eddie. You weren't ready."

  "Oh." I blushed, not having realized I didn't call him by any nicknames. "I'm sorry, baby. Sweetheart. Honey. Babe. Hon."

  "Shut up," he told me lovingly, and kissed me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, and he carried me to the bed to demonstrate his love.

  ***

  At the free breakfast bar in the hotel the next morning, Eddie brought up the topic I was avoiding – Henry.

  “We have to find him,” Eddie said, once confirming no one was listening to us.

  “It's impossible,” I insisted. “Seriously, how do you propose to go about finding one man in London, when we don't even know when to find him?”

  “We have plenty of clues,” he said with a mouthful of waffles. He swallowed, then continued. “Charles said he died building the Globe, and we've been there. There's a ton of workers around. We ask if he's there, and if he is, we 'jump ahead' until we get to a time that he's dead.”

  I sighed. “We have one opportunity, per day, and who knows how many days this will take. It may be the right thing to do, but...it just feels that we're wasting our gift.”

  “A gift that wouldn't exist without Charles. His intention was to save Henry, and I think we owe it to him.” Eddie had his stern, gruff face on, and I didn't have the heart to fight more. I didn't have a chance of convincing him otherwise, and didn't have a clue of what arguments to even use that wouldn't sound selfish. I nodded, and we finished up our meal and went back upstairs to change into a new set of costumes and 'travel' privately.

  ***

  The now-familiar stench of Elizabethan London filled my nose -- we definitely arrived at the Globe Theater. One of these days I wanted to try the other side of the river, where people of a higher class lived. Maybe over there I wouldn’t need to worry about scraping filth off of my shoes before we returned.

  I looked expectantly over at Eddie. “Where to, my Lord?”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “Smart ass. Charles wasn’t specific about what Henry was working as, so I figure just ask around until we find someone who knows him.”

  I let Eddie do the asking, since I didn’t expect to get a great reaction as a female in this time period. The first few men didn’t have any awareness of Henry, and just pointed us around the theater. We almost walked around the perimeter before finding two laborers -- roofers, maybe, with the straw bundles under their arms -- that knew Henry.

  “Aye, he the fella that died a few months back,” one told the other.

  The man with no front teeth spit on the piles of refuse at our feet. “Sure enough. Worked with Jamie on the stage. Hard worker, but not verra good at it. Got ran over by a carriage during the Queen’s visit.”

  “Nay, right after. I remember him carrying on about one of the Queen’s aides.”

  We got pointed towards Jamie, and thanked the men for their assistance. I could tell they were looking for a few coins for their information, and realized we had no local currency.

  Eddie gave them a nod and led me away, and I told him about my thought. “How do we get money here? It’s not like your wallet came back as a coin purse.”

  He thought for a minute. “I guess buy some from an antique website in our time. I don’t know; we’ll want to think about that.”

  We had a lot to think about. I hadn’t even broached the whole concept of whether or not we could save Henry’s life. What sort of ripples would that make throughout history?

  Thankfully, we needed no bribery to get Jamie to give us Henry’s old address. I would get my wish to cross the river -- Henry’s rented apartment was a fair hike away.

  Wandering London in modern times without a map isn’t easy. Doing it in Elizabethan London is even worse. It’s hard to not be distracted -- we were seeing sights that no one in our time period would imagine. Depending on the road we were on, the cobblestones might be viewable. I did keep lifting my skirts out of the muck, even though most other women out and about strode straight through without a concern. Dogs of indeterminate breeds -- I didn’t even know what breeds existed then -- fought children for scraps in the street.

  The buildings made the ones at the Renaissance Festival look high class. Some were barely past shanty, and it was obvious building codes didn’t exist yet. Housing was built literally on top of stores, more like an add-on in later years than intentional at time of initial construction. In addition, with no zoning laws like our modern times, a house may have a tavern on one side, and a merchant on the other. The streets were crowded; not just from the towering shops on each side, but shoulder-to-shoulder people. Or rather, hip to hip.

  The ladies’ fashion was padding around the hips, not all the way around like hoop skirts, but just left to right. The fancier the dress the woman wore, the wider it got -- one lady that almost ran me over had easily a foot on either side. I think one woman even had a wheeled contraption keeping the skirt up. With all the extra space needed by each female, walking down a nice street was like walking through a moving maze. I’d been to concerts that were less crowded.

  We finally reached Henry’s flat. He had the second floor above a smith’s wares shop. It made sense to me -- he probably used his father’s reputation, or his own skills from growing up helping his dad -- to get an in with the shop’s owner to rent the apartment. Having set the location in our mind for future travel, we ducked down an empty alley and I pulled the ring off of my finger. I may have given a longing look towards the pewter bowls in the shop, wanting to be sure to bring currency on our next trip.

  An email from Alan's personal account was waiting in my inbox when I got to the office, with no subject line. He never used a subject line – drove me crazy. I considered deleting it without looking, but clicked on it anyway. It was just one line -- “you're going to pay, bitch.” I shuddered. What a pathetic man. My mouse hovered over the delete button, but ended up moving it to a documentation folder in my mailbox, just in case.

  Matt, a sales rep friend of mine, came into my office during break and shut the door behind himself.

  “The guy in the suit walking around – he one of the investors, right?”


  “Technology consultant. Hired by the investors, but not an employee of them.”

  “So why were you eating burgers with him last night? On the other side of town?”

  My jaw dropped. I hadn't anticipated being seen.

  “Um, we were talking shop. I was giving him the scoop on Alan. Hey, did you hear Alan got fired finally? Got escorted out by security and everything.”

  “Don't change the subject. I'd buy your story a lot more if I hadn't seen you kiss him. Now what's going on?” He sat back in one of the chairs smugly.

  I sighed. The cat was out of the bag, and we hadn't even developed the story yet. “I don't have time to get into details--”

  “I'm not asking for details. What's the bottom line?”

  I brought my left hand into view. “We're married.”

  It was Matt's turn for the jaw to drop. “Okay, was not expecting that.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Married? Didn't we just start working with him a few weeks ago? How long have you known him? Is this why you went to New York?”

  “Matt, no. No details. And this stays between us, you understand? We're going to make an announcement, and if it gets out before then, I know it's you. I'll beat you up.” Matt was six five and two hundred fifty pounds of solid ex-college football player muscle. No one was beating him up, and I knew that.

  “Congratulations, then,” he wished me, and left. I stared at the ring. No one was going to believe we knew each other before last week. I had never been to New York, and certainly never met with a technology consultant before. And getting married in three days just seemed, well, silly.

  My phone rang with a bug report, and I was off working again, and lost my train of thought until Eddie came in later in the day.

  “Enjoying your visit, sir?”

  “You know,” Eddie told me offhandedly, “it’s a good thing you live in Dallas. Plenty of rich people here.”

  “Um, you’re welcome?” I didn’t know what to make of his bizarre, and rather random, statement.

  “Well, I was thinking about what we talked about in London. We need money. Buying antique coins was my initial plan, but that’ll get cost-prohibitive.” I cocked an eyebrow at my millionaire husband. “What? I live relatively frugally. No reason to spend more than I need.

  “Anyway, raw materials are something that have historically held their value. Gold and silver are too heavy, but gems are perfect. We can buy some uncut gems here, take them back, and sell them. Small, lightweight, and very portable.”

  I nodded, catching on. “That could work. Would it be reasonable for us, in our costumes, to have so much in jewels?”

  Eddie made a face. “I don’t want to lose out on a bad ‘exchange rate.’”

  “What about we just bring a few back initially. Change them out, knowing we’ll be taking advantage of. Don’t bring the nice ones, just enough to get us started. Use the money from the sale to buy fancy clothes, so that we are authentic. Then, go to a nicer shop to sell the rest of the gems.”

  “That’s...rather genius,” Eddie admitted to me.

  “Those of us lower down on the pay scale tend to get creative with our methods,” I said, smugly.

  He kissed my forehead and headed towards the door. “You, work. I'm off to buy sparkly things.”

  Somehow I felt like I got the bad end of that deal.

  By the time the end of the work day rolled around, I was starting to think something was up. My work email address was pretty private; it wasn't posted on the internet, and I didn't have communications straight with clients. I normally got one, maybe two pieces of spam a week. But now I had gotten ten this afternoon alone, and they were increasingly graphic.

  Alan, maybe, I thought. Petty and childish, but that was Alan. I deleted the emails and shut down my computer. I usually just locked the workstation, but Joseph had told me I could have the rest of the week off to find a new place to live and get settled. Eddie was supposedly done in town, but was staying to spend more time with me and fly out to my parents that weekend.

  Chapter Five

  “So, how do you want to do this?” I wondered out loud.

  “It’s not like it’s an exact science. Well, maybe it is, but I certainly have never heard that we've mastered time traveling before.”

  “Really, Eddie?” I laughed. “I don't call what we're doing as having mastered time travel. We'll need to travel a lot more before I'd make that claim.

  “Anyway, my thought is to think of when we were there last, at the alley next to Henry's apartment, but 'tweak' the time so that we hit when the Queen was visiting Southwark. Aim for early morning, so we can catch Henry on his way to work?”

  Eddie nodded his approval, and slid the ring onto my finger.

  Like before, the stench was the first sign that we had arrived at our destination. Ironmonger's Lane wasn't nearly as bad as Southwark, where the Globe resided. Here, someone upstairs may look out the window before emptying the chamber pot onto the street. It was still very working class, though, and our servant costumes weren't too out of place.

  We found a good spot across the street from Henry's house, and Eddie leaned against the timber of a shop. He had a lot more faith in their durability than I did. I stood next to him, trying to stay out of the way of carriages and Londoners starting their day.

  About twenty minutes, thirty carriages, and two squashed toes later, a man left Henry's door. “We're on,” Eddie said, pushing himself off the wood frame and taking my elbow to cross the street.

  “Henry Davies?” Eddie called, and Henry turned around.

  “Wherefore?” He asked, suspiciously. He eyed us both, but thankfully not leering unlike most of his compatriots.

  “We know your father,” I answered promptly, but shut up when Eddie whacked me on the rear. Guess he was the designated speaker.

  Eddie explained that we knew Charles, and that the man sent Henry his well-wishes. His suspicion alleviated, with a “By your leave” Henry nodded and left for work.

  We let Henry get a little bit ahead of us, and followed him. Henry went a more direct way towards the river than we had taken the day before, and hopped into a boat-taxi instead of walking down and across the London Bridge. We lost him there – we had no currency yet to pay a ferryman.

  I had done some research on my flight home from New York (my husband is rich – I can afford in-air WiFi now), and knew that we could buy pre-made clothing from a draper on Lombard Street. Eddie had a small pouch inside his tunic with a few of the lesser gems, and we stopped off at a not-so-reputable goldsmith's next to a tavern. As rough as the stones looked to my untrained eyes, they must have been in excellent condition for Elizabethan times. Not knowing the worth, Eddie didn't haggle much, and we left with ten gold crowns. I think that was highway robbery, but I didn't had a fair idea of an exchange rate.

  We backtracked towards Henry's place, then wove our way through the crowds to reach Lombard Street. Street-signs didn't exist, making me doubly glad that Eddie and I had studied a London map before we left. One draper looked the same as another, each willing to take our shillings.

  The draper that we chose at random wasn't like a modern day clothing shop. There was no racks of different sizes of the same style, jeans on one, blouses on another. The shopkeeper offered us wares to try on, with a young girl available to assist me in dressing.

  Oh, crap, I thought, realizing that I had my bra and panties still on. It wouldn't be good for the girl to see my future clothing.

  “Eddie?” I ventured softly, blushing. “A word, please?” I pointed towards the room divider that served as a dressing area. He stepped in behind me, and I immediately twirled on him. “Quick, help.” I hoisted my costume up, yanked my panties down, and shoved them into his tunic. He stared open-mouthed.

  “Unhook my bra, will you?” I turned away from my husband, and stretched my shoulder blades together to make it easier for him to unfasten the bra through my clothing.

  Eddie's brain finally caught up,
and he made quick work of the clasps. “Why on earth are you wearing this?”

  I gave him a “well, duh” shrug. “Blame modern society. I feel naked without them.”

  His breath tickled my ear as he whispered in my ear. I froze, one arm out of the bra strap. “You can be naked over my knee when we get home for doing a stupid stunt like this. You knew we were going shopping. No excuses. Now hurry it up.” He gave my rear end a whack with promise of more to come, and I rushed to get the bra all the way off so that we could continue.

  Eddie traded his tunic for a doublet, velvety soft. The blue fabric was slashed, showing a vibrant yellow cloth underneath. His hose were suitable for the merchant class we were going with.

  Thankfully, citizen women rarely wore the farthingale, the whaleboned structure with the large skirts. I did let the draper's girl dress me in a bumroll, the stuffed pillow intended to poof out my petticoat and skirts. Gorgeous glass beads trailed down the outer skirt, emphasizing the contrasting color of the underskirt. If I understood it properly, having multiple skirts, and treating them like a mix-and-match outfit, was a sign of wealth. Did I feel like the crimson on top? Or the robin's egg blue?

  Since it was presumed I did housework and helped my husband with his business, the stays (the proper name for the corset, I learned from an askance glare) were loose, not limiting movement. I actually loved the fine linen shift, and purchased several – the thin soft fabric wasn't necessarily meant as a nightshirt, but I planned on wearing it that way.

  Our crowns didn't go nearly as far as I had expected. We left the shop with four shillings left, and I knew we would be needing to sell more gems before going to more shops. The merchant had tied our goods up with twine, and Eddie slipped his fingers under the knots to carry them away with us.

  Lombard Street was more crowded than Ironmonger's Lane, and we wandered through several streets before finding a lonely alley to travel back to modern times.