Christmas Past

by Susanna Fraser

  “You’re a scientist.” He’d never heard that precise term before, but it was easy enough to deduce that she was something between a natural philosopher and a physician. It seemed an odd role for a woman, but who knew what the world might be two centuries hence? Well, Mrs. Sydney did, but he doubted she’d tell him.

  “Yes. Or I would’ve been, once I’d gone home and finished my thesis.” Abruptly she deflated, looking less like a scholar in the midst of a debate and more like a frightened little girl.

  “You said your time machine was broken,” he said slowly.

  She ran a hand over its ordinary-seeming door. “It is.”

  “You cannot repair it?”

  “I’ve tried everything I know a dozen times.” She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “So you cannot go home.”

  “Never again.” Her voice wavered, and she burst into tears.

  Instinctively, Miles closed the gap between them and drew her into his arms. She was so tall that instead of her head resting on his shoulder like most women’s would, her cheek pressed against his, and her shaking sobs sounded loud in his ear.

  He patted her shoulder and stroked her smooth golden hair. They’d touched before, but never like this. Their hands had brushed when she’d admired a drawing of a cormorant in his sketchbook, and just a few days ago, she’d asked for his help in moving a heavy wounded officer. She’d gripped his wrist behind the man’s back, but that matter-of-fact touch had left them both arrested. He’d stared at her, transfixed by her bright, startled eyes and her parted lips, until their patient had recalled them to reality with a significant cough. Later that afternoon, Miles had tried to sound her out on whether she’d like to meet him outside the hospital. She’d brushed his overtures aside with such severity that he’d cursed himself as a cad for even attempting to seduce a virtuous young widow.

  Now that he knew what she really was, he understood better why she’d pushed him away the instant he’d tried to draw near. Naturally she wouldn’t want to indulge in a love affair in 1810. She’d been planning to go home in mere days.

  And now she was stranded here. He rejected every word of comfort that came to mind as hopeless and ineffectual. She could never go home, never see the family and friends she had left behind in the future. She couldn’t even have the distant comfort of letters she would’ve had if her people had gone to India or Canada. He couldn’t imagine being so entirely alone in the world. He tightened his embrace. He would do all he could for her.

  When she finished weeping and pushed a little away from him, he kept hold of her hands. “Have you considered what you will do, now that you must stay here?” he asked.

  She swallowed hard and met his eyes steadily. “I know what I have to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  “None of your business.” She pulled her hands free.

  “Perhaps not,” he said mildly, “but I think you’re alone here, and without anyone to share your troubles. I would be a friend to you, if you’d allow me.”

  “That—that’s very nice of you, and I appreciate it, but I’m not supposed to make friends here. That’s against the Protocol.”

  “The Protocol?” he asked. He could hear the capital letter when she spoke of it.

  “The Temporal Protocol. All time travelers take an oath and sign a contract. That we will only study events, never influence them. That we will maintain our distance from the men and women of the past. That we will protect the timeline at all costs. It’s—it’s the most sacred thing I know. If a time traveler didn’t uphold the Protocol, they could ruin everything. Go back in time to kill the President as a baby, if they don’t like his politics. Steal treasures for personal gain. God knows what else.”

  “So does this Protocol of yours tell you what to do in your circumstances?”

  She did not reply, but something about the sudden tightness of her lips, the chill, withdrawn look of her eyes, gave Miles a terrible suspicion. “No. Oh, no. You cannot mean to destroy yourself.”

  Now her eyes flashed. “I swore I’d do it if I had to. Now, will you go away so I can finish my job?”

  “No! You cannot expect me to. There is no worse sin.”

  “It’s not a sin. It’s—I think you’d call it a duty. Wouldn’t you give your life in battle, if you were ordered to? If you ask me, a lot of what soldiers do is pretty God-damned suicidal.”

  He blinked, shocked despite everything to hear such language from a lady’s lips. “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “Even in the most dangerous circumstances, no soldier tries to die.”

  “Still, if a battle’s outcome depended on you holding some position you knew you couldn’t survive, you’d do it, and no one would say it was suicide. You’d do your duty. Please leave me alone so I can do mine.”

  “That isn’t the same at all.”

  “Why? Because I’m a woman? That may be true for your time, but it isn’t where I come from.”

  That had been precisely what he was thinking, but clearly it wouldn’t persuade her. “It isn’t the same because I wouldn’t be killing myself, some Frenchman would. And there would always be the chance I’d only be wounded or taken prisoner.”

  “Maybe. But I have to do this. If I stay here and live another ten, twenty, fifty years, God knows what I’ll do to the timeline, just by existing. I can’t let myself change the past. It’s wrong.”

  He still couldn’t make sense of time travel, of the next two centuries mapped out before him as her timeline. It smelled of predestination, and he’d never liked that notion. He might not know much about her, or her present that was his future, but he wasn’t going to walk away from her now. “I won’t let you do this. I cannot.”

  “How do you plan to stop me?”

  He shrugged. “Stay by your side until you change your mind.” She didn’t truly want to die, of that he was certain. Surely he could think of some way to persuade her out of her misguided version of duty before it was too late. He’d seduce her into living with his wits, with his body, whatever it took.

  “I won’t. You can’t take me with you when you’re on duty, and you’ll have to sleep sometime.”

  “Then I’ll have done all I can.” He shook his head in exasperation. “Hang it all, you cannot kill yourself at Christmas. You’d make it a dreadful day for whomever happened upon your corpse, and wouldn’t that change their timeline, to have that memory to dwell upon year after year?”

  Her eyes narrowed in the first sign of doubt he’d seen since she announced her purpose.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I’m invited to a dinner with some officers from the KGL—the King’s German Legion, that is.”

  “I know who they are,” she said. “I’ve been here three weeks, and I studied far longer before I came.”

  “Well, they’ve promised us a proper German Christmas with a proper British feast of roast beef. You must come. Keep Christmas with us.”

  She smiled but shook her head. “Isn’t it rude to bring an uninvited guest?”

  “Ordinarily I wouldn’t, but it’s Christmas, and I don’t think anyone will complain if I appear with such a beauty on my arm. But don’t worry. There will be at least two other ladies there, nothing improper for you.”

  She flushed. “I’m too tall to be a beauty here.”

  Daringly, he captured her hand and brought it to his lips. He’d been wanting to kiss her since the first day he saw her. “Not to me.”

  Now she smiled at him. Whatever she believed her duty to be, hers was the face of a woman who wanted to live.

  “That’s only because you’re so tall yourself,” she said.

  “Trust me, a man who’d find you too tall to approach would still gaze and admire.” He offered her his arm. “Come with me. It’s Christmas.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she rested her hand in the crook of his elbow, and he led her out of the stable and back, he trusted, toward life.

 
…

  “Are all women in the future so tall?” Captain Griffin asked as they reached the outskirts of the city.

  She’d expected him to keep arguing with her. But this was easier. She could talk about science and statistics and the ways the world had and hadn’t changed. “No,” she said. “I’m taller than average there, too. But the average is taller. At least, for the population as a whole. The upper classes in England are already as tall here as English and American people in my time. Everyone else catches up with them in the twentieth century, because of better nutrition, mostly.”

  “You must have been well-nourished indeed.”

  He spoke admiringly, and Sydney reminded herself he wasn’t calling her fat. “No, I’m just Swedish.”

  “I thought you said you were American.”

  “Oh, I am, but I’m three-quarters Swedish. America will have immigrants from all over the world soon.”

  Hopefully that wasn’t enough information to spoil the timeline. But what if it was already too late, now that the captain had seen her time machine and knew when she’d come from? What if he went insane from his brief glimpse at the future and its apparently magical technology? Or what if he decided to sell his commission and move to America?

  No, he seemed too grounded to go crazy, and he had no reason to leave a perfectly good life just because she’d given him foreknowledge that America wasn’t going to collapse. Still, she could’ve changed his whole future from the day they first met by paying attention to him. He was as attracted to her as she was to him, she could tell. What if he was supposed to be off impregnating some Portuguese woman with a child who’d never be born now, and it was her fault? Or what if he was supposed to marry some petite, demure young lady someday, and she’d given him a taste for tall and outspoken?

  She took a deep breath to steady herself. Backing out of dinner now would only make Captain Griffin that much more determined to stick to her side. All she could do was wait until he was distracted enough that she could escape and do what she had to do. If only he hadn’t found her. The longer she had to wait, the longer she had to dread the end.

  They were picking their way down a steep street in the deepening dusk as the short midwinter day ebbed toward darkness. Candlelight shone out from the windows of houses and shops, reminding Sydney of Christmas lights back home. She took a deep, calming breath against the sudden rush of homesickness and tried to call back the academic attitude she’d taken toward Lisbon when she first got here. This was one of the newer streets, the buildings plain, classical, and almost exactly alike, like so many areas rebuilt in the half-century or so after a great earthquake had all but destroyed the city. She knew an assistant professor of seismology who’d come back to witness the quake and gotten her doctoral thesis out of it—Sydney had promised to meet her for lunch in January 2014, once they were both back from Christmas, to give her impressions of the rebuilt city. She sighed. She had to stop thinking of everything, big and small, that could never be. It wasn’t helping.

  Captain Griffin gave her a considering look. “Is Sydney your real name?” he asked after a moment. “It doesn’t sound Swedish.”

  “It’s my real first name,” she said, grateful again that he’d asked her an easy question instead probing her feelings. “I’m Sydney Dahlquist. I decided to go by Mrs. Sydney when I came back here because it makes sense as an English last name.”

  With the help of researchers who worked as consultants for the Historical Epidemiology department, she’d put together a plausible backstory for a widowed Englishwoman in Portugal—she’d become a London merchant’s daughter, married to a clerk with one of the English families in the port business here. Finding herself a widow, she’d taken rooms in Lisbon and offered her nursing skills to her countrymen’s army. It probably wasn’t a good enough cover to bear close examination, but it was enough for the two weeks she’d intended to be here collecting blood samples for Professor Krakowski’s study of the epidemiological impacts of the Napoleonic Wars.

  “I know Sydney doesn’t sound like a woman’s name to you, but names like that were trendy for girls when I was born—Ashley, Madison, Jordan, Sydney.”

  “Delighted to make your true acquaintance, Miss Dahlquist. Or is it Mrs.?”

  “It’s Miss,” she said.

  “Good.”

  They stopped and stared at each other for a moment. Any of Sydney’s boyfriends back home would’ve followed a look like that with a kiss. But that wasn’t done here, not in public, so he turned away and they walked on in silence through the twilight. Lisbon hummed with people preparing for Christmas Eve mass and dinner, but they were so used to the British army’s presence that they barely glanced at the rifleman with a tall blonde on his arm.

  In spite of everything, the crowd’s festive spirit was contagious. As they walked past an open doorway where a large family was just arriving, she caught a whiff of fish and potatoes, and her mouth watered. Just an hour ago, she’d been ready to end everything, but now she felt at home in her body, fully here for almost the first time since she’d come to 1810. She was alive, and she was hungry—for food, for another Christmas, and above all, for the man at her side.

  Abruptly she decided to stop worrying about the women she was keeping him away from. If she couldn’t go home, was it really so wrong to enjoy herself for the little time she had left? It was only one night, and it wasn’t like she was going to tell him all about the years remaining in his war. No matter how much he liked her, surely one night wouldn’t keep him from marrying whatever English girl he was destined for—always assuming that was his destiny, and not falling in the breaches at Badajoz or defending the La Haye Sainte position at Waterloo. Wait, weren’t the Rifles at the Battle of New Orleans, too?

  “Captain Griffin?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you should happen, almost exactly four years from now, to meet a surgeon calling himself Mr. Cody, can you tell him Sydney says hi—that is, sends her greetings?”

  “Hm. Where might I expect to find this gentleman?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Hmph. Of course not. He’s from your time as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lover?”

  Was that jealousy? She grinned. “He wanted to be, but no. We were in the same lab—we studied together. I was thinking you might tell him what happened to me, so he can carry word back to my family.”

  His arm tightened, drawing her closer. “I’d gladly do so. But if you know our paths will cross in four years, why don’t you simply wait and meet him there?”

  It was tempting. Oh so tempting. Four years in the past, maybe even four years with Captain Griffin. “I can’t. Four years is much too long.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “We didn’t exactly go back in time without thinking about it. The National Institute for Temporal Research consulted all kinds of experts—scientific, historical, and philosophical.” She knew it must sound weird to him, but every care had been taken in setting up the Protocol. “The point is to study the past, to observe and learn from it—not to live in and influence it. It was decided that two weeks is the longest anyone could safely stay. Most expeditions are even shorter, the ones that are just collecting water samples and so on.”

  “You’ve been here more than three weeks.”

  “Yes. I kept hoping next time I tried to fix my time machine, it would work. Or that they’d realize what went wrong and send someone for me. But then I realized that was stupid, because of course any rescuer would’ve come before my original time was up. I should’ve done what I needed to do before now.”

  “Well, you’re not going to do anything tonight but come to Christmas dinner.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, wryly obedient.

  “Good girl.”

  “I don’t know your first name,” she said after a moment. She’d gotten used to the greater formality of the nineteenth century, but now that the captain knew her secret—and
knew her name—it felt strange to keep calling him Captain Griffin.

  He smiled at her. “It’s Miles.”

  She tested it. “Miles Griffin. I like it.”

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  They smiled at each other, the tension of his determination to keep her alive in the past forgotten for the moment. “Can we not talk about all this anymore?” she asked. “If I’m going to go with you and have one last Christmas dinner, I just want to relax and have fun.”

  “Gladly.”

  “Do I have time to change my dress?” The brown wool she wore now was the shabbiest of the careful replica dresses the wardrobe consultants had made for her. She didn’t have a grand collection of silks and muslins like the heroine of a Regency romance, but she did have one blue gown in a softer, finer wool that would pass for an evening dress, should she need it to blend in. She hadn’t had a reason to wear it, but for this night she would.

  “You do. However…” He studied her for a moment, and she found herself blushing as she had back when she was fourteen and Jared Logan had asked her to the homecoming dance. “I will not speak of any of those things we agreed must remain unspoken. I have no wish to damage your reputation, but I do not mean to allow you out of my sight.”

  Sydney felt her face heat even more. But—she’d already been wondering what this night might lead to beyond dinner. If he was so determined to keep an eye on her, he couldn’t just escort her back to her rooms and leave her alone when the party broke up.

  “I’m not worried about my reputation,” she assured him. She wouldn’t be here long enough for it to become an issue. “And my rooms are quiet and private.” She’d found the perfect spot for someone who didn’t want to draw attention to herself—an apartment above a seamstress’s shop whose proprietor lived in a house next door with all her extended family.