“What is this?” he sputters, looking right at her, at the piss-stinking alley walls and trash cans. “What sort of trick?”
“Hi!” the coachman yells. “There’s a woman down there! Madam, are you hurt?”
Then an arm comes around his neck and someone’s pulling him down, off the seat, and holding a pistol to the footman’s head. A third person up on the carriage seat, a masked person in a tricorne hat and grey cloak. Like someone in a highwayman costume.
Like a highwayman.
Mother of all that’s holy, what rotten luck is this?
The footman pushes the pistol and leaps down to the ground, and something flashes. A knife? There’s metal at the coachman’s throat.
“Stop!” Prudence screams.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: How the Earl Is Rescued
2070
ALICE, DRESSED AS THE Holy Ghost and with her dagger in hand, runs along the side of Lord Ludderworth’s gaudy carriage in a strange dim alley in the rain. She grabs the footboard and pulls herself up onto the coachman’s seat.
All these months, she has avoided getting this close to any of the carriages she’s robbed. Wherever she is, she is here without Laverna, without any help.
“Drive backward!” she yells, but the coachman doesn’t hear her. He’s standing, looking at the ground on the far side. “Get the carriage out of this place!”
“Hi!” the coachman yells. “There’s a woman down there! Madam, are you hurt?”
Someone pushes her—the footman—she stumbles, nearly falls off the driver’s seat. The footman is reaching for something. Before she can think too hard about it, she’s got the pistol at the footman’s temple and is pulling the dagger out from behind her busk and placing it at the coachman’s throat, screaming at him to get down.
There is indeed a woman on the ground, a black woman but in a redingote of good quality, if it is a few years out of date.
“Stop!” she yells. She is holding her hand to her chest and squirming on the ground.
Nothing to be done about her at the moment. Alice forces the coachman onto his arse on the seat. The footman stands there watching, holding onto the bar as if the carriage were moving.
The stranger moans. She’s in pain, holding her hand—the horses must have trampled her. But she doesn’t seem to be in any real danger.
Alice pauses, glances around. It’s an ugly place, bricked in and stinking, full of strange-looking pipes and wire fences. Something like a slaughterhouse.
She’ll investigate, after she gets the three men back to where they ought to be.
“I’ll be happy to assist you, madam,” Alice says, “after this carriage goes back through the—through to where it is supposed to be.”
A hand grabs her pistol and wrenches her arm backward. Damn these thickheaded men! She stumbles down off the carriage and drops the pistol but does not fall, and she elbows her captor right in the pudding, turns around to see who it is.
It’s the Earl of Ludderworth. He bends over, groaning.
“What in the Devil’s name do you think you’re doing?” she screams at him.
“You won’t do my coachman any harm,” he gasps. “We paid your price. Now let us go. I don’t know what kind of trick this is, but you will set us free or I will see you hang.”
“Set you free? You addlepate, I’m rescuing you!”
He swings his fist at her, not even coming close to connecting.
“Oh no you don’t, my lord. Someone’s setting me up to hang for your murder, and I think we’d both rather that didn’t come to pass.”
She pricks his back with her dagger and he stumbles forward, but she doesn’t have time to march him through the gate. The coachman is clambering off his perch, and the strange woman is at the heads of the horses, walking around them to her.
Alice pushes Lord Ludderworth hard so that he stumbles toward the back of the carriage and disappears into the shimmering air. She turns to face the coachman. He’s got a rapier in his hand, the fool.
She waits until he thrusts it forward, aimed at her shoulder, then she ducks to the side, whirls and stabs the back of his knee with her dagger. His scream pierces the air and he falls flat on his face.
She puts her dagger in her belt and grabs him by the wrists, drags him backward and then kicks him so that he rolls through the window.
He disappears after his master.
The footman runs after them.
She turns again, and there is the stranger, holding some kind of weapon. It is nothing like a pistol, but it is very definitely pointed at Alice.
Alice holds up her hands to show that they’re empty. “I’m going to try to have the horses walk the carriage back through the gate now. It’s a rather shabby carriage despite the gaudy paint and the horses are terribly old. Not very valuable. I give you my word that I’ll replace the cost of what you’ve stolen here, and a little extra besides. There is honour among thieves, isn’t there? I have heard people say that, although I’ve never known quite what they meant.”
The stranger only raises her eyebrows.
Alice decides to take that as assent, and walks gingerly past her to the horses. They are terrified, but as she pushes gently on the harness, they step back. It doesn’t take much, then, only a push, and the horses walk the carriage back through the aura. It disappears into it, bit by bit, like the mouse. The last thing she sees are the faces of the horses, unaware of the disappearance of their hindquarters.
She and the strange woman are alone in the alley.
CHAPTER TWELVE: Shit Gets Weird; or, a Consequential Encounter
2070
THE PERSON IN THE CLOAK and tricorne hat leans Misguided by temperament, but not heavily enough to be an agent. Not a teleosopher, then; a naïf. A civilian, from 1788.
This much Prudence has gleaned from the EEG scanner, which could no doubt tell her more if it were not programmed with the needs of a teleosophic military operative in mind. But at the moment, Prudence cares very little about this person’s ideology.
Her hand, at least, doesn’t seem to be broken, now that she’s had a chance to wiggle it. It still stings but the hoof seems to have just caught the edge of her flesh. A bad bruise, that’s all.
“I’m not a thief,” Prudence says, at last. “You are, though, I take it.”
“I am in a mask, and we are not at a ball.”
Prudence shrugs. “All right. Well, I can tell you that I have nothing worth stealing, and if you’ll walk back the same way you sent the carriage . . .”
“Your accent is strange. You weren’t born in England. Are you escaping your master? I can take you to some Quakers I know.”
A face appears at a window, behind bars, a little way down the alley. An angry, suspicious face. Shit. Four terrified horses and three terrified men make too much fucking noise. This is a disaster.
“I don’t need your help, thank you. You should do as you urged those men to do, and go that way. It’s all an illusion—a trick of electricity.”
She expects the word electricity to produce a frisson of delighted horror in 1788, but the highwayman makes no movement and if there’s an expression behind the mask and kerchief, Prudence can’t see it.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where we are.”
She was going to 1788 to get a naïf. She wanted Jane Hodgson, but a highwayman who is evidently very clever and very reckless will do nicely. And a highwayman will be likely to be greedy.
All right, then. Any teleosopher knows how to roll with change.
“We are in the Americas.” Truth! Always the best option.
The person in the tricorne hat whistles softly, but stands very still, only moving their head a bit to glance back toward the portal. The next question—when are we—trumpets in Prudence’s mind. But the person in the tricorne hat does not voice it. Does not think it, almost certainly.
It’s almost disappointing. It is such an exhilaration, to shimmer from one moment of space-time to another. Like the bo
dy’s shudder between waking and sleeping. To think that someone could be one of the few humans ever to experience that, and not know it for what it is—but it is for the best. Prudence’s concern now is to cause the fewest ripples downstream, before she brings the tsunami.
“And why did you open this wonderful gateway to England?”
“I need someone to do something for me,” Prudence says, “in England, at a very specific time. And that someone will be richly rewarded.”
The cloaked person turns and looks at the shimmer, still open. “How does it work?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Hmm. And if I want that knowledge as my reward?”
“The reward is fifty thousand pounds. In gold.” She watches to see the effect. It’s hard to tell with a mask, but the person moves, steps back slightly as if in shock.
“And what do you demand of me?”
“Nothing that will break the laws of England.”
The stranger waits.
“It won’t kill anyone or steal any goods,” Prudence says, taking refuge in the literal truth for the second time that day. Why does she find it so difficult to lie? She was trained to believe in every word she said, as a propagandist. Perhaps she doesn’t know anymore how to be anything but an honest liar. No one is wrong, the Farmers’ creed declared. Only misguided.
“Will it affect my life at all?”
“Not in the slightest. But I won’t tell you what it is unless you show me your face and give me your name.”
The highwayman stands, as if considering.
“I’ll think on it,” the highwayman says. “If I go back through the portal, how can I find you again?”
“I’ll open a portal to the same spot, by Dray Road, tomorrow.” Tomorrow for the highwayman, and tomorrow for Prudence. If the highwayman comes back, having decided to do the job, Prudence will keep them here in 2070 until the right moment. And if they don’t, she’ll still have time tomorrow to go back and try to find Hodgson.
She needed a naïf. She got one. Everything will be fine.
The highwayman steps back through the portal, leaving Prudence standing in the alley alone, trying to determine exactly why she’s so uneasy.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: In Which Alice Is Discombobulated
1788
ALICE STEPS THROUGH THE GATEWAY and sees the faces of the horses again. Why do they tarry? The coachman and the footman are scrambling onto the seat.
Someone grabs her arm. Alice turns, knife in hand, but it’s Jane. Jane pulls her after her, running, and through a break in the yew hedge that marks the edge of Fleance Hall’s gardens and the beginning of its fields. They peer at the carriage. The earl is shouting “Go, go!” and the coachman has the horses in hand now, if not himself.
“They came through the moment you went in,” whispers Jane. “Why did you come with them? Was it not safe to stay?”
Alice frowns. “Stay? I thought you would be worried if I stayed longer. But I’ve been invited back.”
The carriage wheels around and rattles over the dry field toward the track that leads to Fleance Hall’s stables. Three of its lanterns are still lit.
Jane steps back, frowns deeper. “You mean to say you met someone? But you were only there a moment. Three seconds, at most, between your disappearance and your appearance.”
Alice shakes her head. “I don’t understand. It was an alley. It was in America. I spoke with someone—a woman. She wants me to—”
“Alice, you were gone a mere moment. Ten seconds at most.”
The carriage rolls slowly on the dry field, rollicking as it goes, as the coachman pushes the horses faster than he should. Back toward Fleance Hall.
“We must get back,” says Jane. “Your father will want us, once the earl arrives.”
Alice nods and takes her hand. They run back, taking the shadows along the hedge, darting to the servants’ door.
As they undress and re-dress Alice, she relates her conversation with the stranger.
“Fifty thousand pounds!” breathes Jane.
“It would set us up for life, with a bit of good management. We can pay Father’s debts, restore Fleance Hall to what it ought to be. No more shooting and gambling parties with Father’s disagreeable friends. We’ll hold salons, and invite Olaudah Equiano and the Duchess of Devonshire and Fanny Burney, and we will definitely not invite Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke. Oh, and we’ll finance the campaigns of all the best Whigs, and get slavery abolished and democracy rooted. And we’ll build that little cottage with clematis and roses, but we won’t need it because you and I will be mistresses of Fleance Hall and too rich to care what anyone says about it.”
Jane smiles, raising her eyebrows. She pulls a pin out of her mouth, which gives her a chance to get a word in.
“It is a pretty fancy. But how can any of it be true?”
“We saw the truth of the gateway, at least, with our own eyes.”
“Did we?” Jane asks, wearing her puzzled face. “While you were talking, I have been thinking about the difference in the time . . .”
“Of course. You never listen to me. I don’t blame you.”
“And I think perhaps it could be more than just a gateway to America. It could be a gateway to another time.”
“Another . . . time.”
“That would explain it, you see? It is sunset on June twenty-ninth on one side of the portal, and some other date and time on the other, so when you came back through, it was still sunset at June twenty-ninth. The markings on the concentric wheels of the device must be like the lines on a compass, a guide of some kind.”
Alice, for once, has no words. “Do you think it is possible?”
Jane, for once, smiles. “No. But what else would explain it?”
As Alice sucks in her breath so Jane can pin her bodice closed, it begins to seem an invention of her mind from start to finish. How could any of it be true?
She pulls Lord Ludderworth’s purse out from under the loose floorboard and transfers his coins to a small reticule of her own.
“In any event,” she says, “I suppose we shall learn more tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? You don’t mean to go back to this stranger and accept her commission?”
“Well, no,” says Alice, discombobulated. “Well, possibly. We must learn more about what all this is, and how else can we—I mean, I won’t do what she asks, unless it seems wise. But it is too soon to prejudge.”
“To prejudge! How could it possibly seem wise? What evidence could one possibly duplicitous stranger give you, in one day, to make you return to her and carry out her instructions, whatever they may be? She will likely be waiting with a group of Bow Street Runners. You have only her word to suggest she was in America.”
Jane is looking at her as if she is stupid. Jane, who cannot see past the bridge of her nose, who looks at the world through spectacles and lenses and bottles.
“There may be a risk in inaction too,” says Alice, low and soft like a purr or a growl. Less than an hour ago, Jane was in a snit about not being consulted enough, and here she is making up her mind for both of them, and acting as if Alice is a child for considering all possibilities.
If she wanted to, Jane could go home, and her mother would forgive her for being unsatisfactory, and even if she never married, she would at least have a roof overhead for the rest of her days. Alice does not have that choice. No one will take care of Alice if she does not take care of herself. She cannot turn away the offer of fifty thousand pounds as if it were nothing.
Jane is shaking her head. “Sometimes I think you see me as a great experiment, that you say things to get satisfaction from my shock. Little Jane, poor and plain, small bubbies and a big brain. That’s what the boys used to say, to shock me. You could try it, rather than declaring your intention to disappear into some other time and place and carry out some unknowable scheme at a stranger’s behest.”
Alice feels her cheeks heat, and she blinks from surprise. “That I see you
as an experiment! You! Who can’t understand a thing unless it is struggling in one of your cages, impaled on one of your pins!”
Jane turns and walks out of the study. As Alice follows, down the garret staircase, she hears Father’s voice, and the earl’s.
They’re here.
Jane is at the bottom of the staircase now, and she turns and heads in the direction of the front of the house, where the drawing room is. She must know full well this means Alice will have to hang back and wait, so that they don’t seem to arrive together. There is nothing to raise suspicion in a woman and her companion being together, but Alice and Jane have gotten into the habit of making separate entrances nevertheless. If anyone in either of their families guessed the truth about them, everything would be over. They’d never see each other again.
Alice waits, and listens to Jane’s voice raised in polite greeting. She curses under her breath and strides into the drawing room herself.
The room seems full of men, all standing, all drinking. There are two in the Ludderworth livery, sickly green and gold. There is Father, at the decanter, and Lord Ludderworth himself, a glass of port shaking at his lips.
“Alice,” Father says, turning. “Look, Lord Ludderworth is safe. And his men too.”
She strides forward. Auden is there too, watching her, his hat in his hands.
And there’s the coachman who gave her so much trouble.
“And Mr. . . .” she says, looking at the coachman.
“Mr. Greenleaf, at your service, Miss Payne. And this is Mr. Jones, footman.”
She nods, and then inclines her head to Ludderworth. He has put down his glass, holds out his hand, so she gives him hers. His whiskers brush the top of it.
“Miss Payne.”
“Well, you must tell me the solution to the mystery,” she says brightly. “Did your carriage run off the road?”
Ludderworth shakes his head. “We were taken, through some abominable trickery. One moment we were on the road, and the next, we were in an alley. And with us, a woman, pretending that we knocked her down. An accomplice of the highwayman, I have no doubt. He was there too.”
Alice Payne Arrives Page 5