"My household was very different than yours. My mother doesn’t look on time travel as much of a gift."
“But why?” asks Marie.
Because it’s the reason my sister is dead, I could tell her. But even that isn’t it entirely. My mother hated time travel long before Kit died. For as far back as I remember, it’s been as if she could see this evil inside me, something I couldn’t alter or eradicate. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand it, but I keep hoping that if I can stop using the gift, she’ll be able to care a little bit. “She believes it does more harm than good,” I reply quietly.
“Nonsense," Marie exclaims. "You and I are like Rapunzel! We can spin straw into gold if we choose."
I glance at her and then around the room. Buckingham Palace this is not. She sees my look and frowns. "We have money. My mother, and now Henri, are just ridiculously concerned with spending it. They think it will draw attention. If it were up to me we'd be living in a mansion overlooking the Seine, and I'd have a servant for every finger and toe. But you could do that, once you’re home.”
I flush. "That's not how I want to live. Once I'm done here, I'll never travel again."
"That's right," says Henri, with a touch of acid to his voice. “The perfect Mark will meet your every need and time travel will become a thing of the past."
Mark. The mention of him cuts me sharp as a chard of glass. I haven’t thought about him once all night, and I should have. He leaves for Nepal tomorrow and this would have been our final evening together, one I’d have loved though he’d probably spend the hours begging me to come with him, begging me to give up my virginity, or both.
“You seem to enjoy making Mark sound like some mercenary choice on my part,” I snap, angry at Henri and also myself. “Why is that?”
“Because,” he replies, “you’ve never said anything to imply he’s not.”
My mouth opens to argue and I close it. I don’t have to justify anything to a farmer who’s going to live alone for the rest of his life. But thank God I’m nearly ready to leave.
9
It’s another few days before I feel rested enough for the journey home, the hours enlivened by a constantly time-jumping Marie, who appears in the kitchen without warning, reminding this earlier version of Marie to warn a friend about standing too close to the stove, or to go check on Madame Brun’s sick baby and persuade her to take him to the doctor. It had never occurred to me until now that it was even possible for time travel to be used for good, but it doesn’t change how I feel about my own ability. I’m every bit as eager as I ever was to be rid of it.
I spend my final day with the Durands doing something no one would consider restful: laundry, which is an unbelievable pain in the ass in 1938. Marie and I are stuck indoors all day long, using a scrubbing board to clean every single shirt and dress and undergarment individually. The water is in heated copper tubs and the room is damp as a sauna the whole damn day.
“Jesus,” I say, wiping my brow on my sleeve. “Don’t washing machines exist yet?”
Marie shrugs, indifferent to the idea. “It’s not so bad.”
“Marie, we could wash all of this—all of it—in one hour without scrubbing a single thing. You can’t tell me that doesn’t sound like an improvement.”
“I doubt it works as well,” she replies.
“It works better.”
The next time Henri comes to the pump, Marie walks to the front door and calls to him. “If washing machines have been invented,” she tells him when he walks over to us, “I think I’d like one.”
“Tell the little thief to keep her suggestions to herself,” he replies.
He steps inside just as I’m grabbing the tub of dirty water to dump it. His hands fold over mine as he takes it from me. “Please don’t tire yourself today. You’ll need all your reserves to make it back safely tomorrow.”
“A washing machine would allow everyone to save their energy,” I reply with a small smile.
His mouth curves upward. “I’ll consider it,” he says softly, taking the tub to the garden to dump it.
Marie watches him go and then turns to me. “You’re better at persuading him than I am. What other appliances should I demand before you leave?”
My mouth opens, and then closes. She truly has no idea how drastically her life will change in the coming years. If she did, she wouldn’t be asking for appliances, she’d be asking for a safe place to live.
If they will die in the war, I can’t stop that from happening. But what if they survive? What if they survive badly, painfully, because they weren’t prepared?
I never had anyone to teach me the rules of time traveling. But I think I’m about to break a very important one.
Though I’m too nervous about tomorrow to have much of an appetite, Marie makes cassoulet for my final night here and I eat. Will I be able to hide somewhere in my own time before I pass out, naked and defenseless? If I’d known just how poorly I would fare over long distances, I doubt I’d ever have come here at all.
Henri appears worried too. “Do you think…” he begins, swallowing, “that your trip home will be easier?”
“Maybe,” I reply, unconvincingly. Returning to the point where I belong is definitely less work. It’s mindless, like the way you can drive all the way home with your mind on something else. But I sort of doubt it’s any easier physically, and that’s the real problem.
“You were somewhere private when you jumped?” Marie asks.
I nod. “I jumped from the woods. It should be fine.”
Henri flinches, imagining it, which makes me smile a little. When I first arrived, I thought he was nothing more than a very handsome jerk. And I still think he’s a handsome jerk, but he is also intelligent, funny, driven…and unexpectedly kind. All of these women Marie says he has to fight off when he goes to town—do they see all that in him? Or is he just a chiseled jaw and set of broad shoulders they can pin a couple of romantic daydreams on? Either way, he deserves to choose one and start a family. And with the war coming, I’m not sure he’s going to get a chance.
"I’m going to tell you what happens," I say quietly. “Even though you said you didn’t want to know.” My heart thuds in my chest.
Henri and Marie-Therese look at each other. And they wait.
My hands twist on top of the table. "There’s going to be another war with Germany. Not just them. Japan and Italy too."
Marie Therese stiffens, her hand sliding to the base of her throat. Her father died in the last war. Millions of French men died with him. What are the odds Henri will survive if it happens again?
"Hitler's troops come to Paris,” I continue. “In 1940, I think. And there are airstrikes as well. Not just in Paris, but in the countryside. It doesn't last long. After a few weeks, France surrenders."
"Pah," says Henri. "Never. You're remembering wrong. We beat them in the great war. They wouldn't dare come after us again."
"They do, and they win. You don’t have the troops and you don’t have the weapons.”
“We have the entire Maginot Line defending us,” he argues.
I bite my lip, struggling to remember the little I know about France’s fall to Germany at the start of World War II. I wish I’d studied it a bit more. “It doesn’t hold. They’re going to cut through the north instead. Somewhere mountainous. Avon? Ardent?”
“Ardennes,” he says quietly, the truth finally sinking it as he realizes that I only know this because it’s become an important part of the past. “What happens then?”
“France will be occupied by the Germans for the entire war. They take over your homes, steal your livestock.” I could say so much more right now, but the truth of what will come is so gruesome it will seem impossible to them. Right now what matters is that they believe me and do what’s necessary to survive. “What I’m saying is, if you're capable of leaving right now, you should. Go to the United States, or if you insist on staying in France, head south. I think that’s where the French government
went, anyway."
They both look stricken. This hint I've dropped was far more than either of them expected.
"We can't leave," says Marie. "What if our mother comes home? How will we know? How will she find us?"
I’d expected an argument from Henri, but not her. “Marie,” I plead, “be reasonable. Do you really think this is what your mother would want? You stuck in this house with a bunch of German soldiers leering at you?”
She raises her chin. “What I know is that until I’m sure my mother isn’t coming home, I’m not leaving this farm.”
I look toward her brother, hoping he’ll hear what I’m saying and persuade her. But his jaw is locked tight. He knows it’s a lost cause.
"Then we need to prepare to fight," he says.
Our eyes hold and I'm possessed by a sudden urge to weep. He will die here. He was a small child during the last war, but he is exactly the sort who dies when his country is attacked, who will climb the roof of his barn when Nazis come to take his home and will care about nothing beyond killing as many as he can before they catch him. He has no sense of self-preservation.
"Not just fight. Hide food. Hide money. They are going to take everything."
He nods, a weight on his shoulders that wasn’t there when the evening began. It hits me hard for the first time, just how much danger he's in. Many of those graves in Normandy belonged to American and British soldiers, but so many of them belong to the French as well, and I can’t save him. Their future is already written, already in the past. It's not that Henri might die during World War II. It's that he might already be dead.
But Marie, at least, is likely to survive. And might avoid a great deal of suffering if she could just be reasoned with.
“What would persuade you to leave?” I ask her quietly, desperately.
“If I knew for certain about my mother,” she replies. “Then I might consider it.”
The gauntlet is thrown down. I refused to go back to see her mother when it was simply about satisfying her curiosity, but this is different. How can I possibly say no when it could change the course of the next decade for her?
My stomach begins to churn. It’s time for me to return home and put my days of jumping behind me for good, but it looks like that isn’t going to happen just yet.
“Then I’ll go,” I tell Marie. “I’ll go talk to your mother and find out where she went.”
"No," says Henri harshly. "You won't."
Marie turns her wide eyes from me to him. "How can you say that?” she demands. “Don't you want to know?"
He runs a hand through his thick hair and grips it hard. "What I want is for my mother to not realize, through a series of questions, that her death is imminent," he says. "And what is supposed to happen when you get your answer? You try to follow her, put yourself into the precise situation far more experienced travelers haven’t survived? Wherever she’s been, she’s been there too long. She won’t be able to travel forward to us.”
"I just need to know where she went,” Marie pleads. “I’m not saying I’ll follow her.”
"Amelie is not going," says Henri. "I forbid it."
Wrong words, Henri.
I smile at him. “I’d like to see you try to stop me.”
10
Madame Durand disappeared just after Marie’s birthday, so Marie has decided I should appear right around that point.
"My birthday was November 12th, and my mother had just given me the most beautiful coat—aubergine with fur cuffs. If I'm wearing that coat, it means you haven’t gone back too far,” she says. “Henri will be away at school, so if he's here, you've not gone far enough.” She gives me a few other landmarks, but they are less reliable, based on the state of a weathervane, a broken door—so I hope I'm not going to be forced to use them.
She's so excited about my trip she can hardly contain herself, whereas I feel mostly dread. Traveling back by years is not hard—you just count, like jumping squares in hopscotch—but landing in a particular week requires more specificity, and that is not my strong suit.
Actually, I’m not sure I have a strong suit where my gift is concerned.
I time my departure fairly early in the morning, so that if I land in the right place I'll be there to see Marie leave for school in the coat. I walk to the barn with Marie and, to my surprise, Henri comes too.
He looks as if he might not have slept, and he definitely hasn’t shaved. I imagine placing my palm over his rough jaw and telling him to go back to bed, imagine the feel of my lips brushing his skin as I say it, and then I blush, shocked at where my mind goes at the strangest times.
"I wish you wouldn’t do this," he says gravely, shoulders slumped.
"I won’t let her know what's coming," I whisper. "I swear it." My plan is to introduce myself as a friend of Marie's from the distant future, one with whom Marie has discussed the circle of light, and explain that my aunt disappeared searching for it, and I'm hoping to track her last days.
He holds my gaze. "Be safe," he says. He actually looks like he means it.
I force a smile. “I guess that’s better than a few weeks ago, when you were planning to shoot me.”
I close my eyes, needing to shut out Henri's worried face and Marie's hopeful one in order to focus. In my head I look back, the way I might if I was just remembering the past. There are small hints when you are about to travel—a slight breeze over the skin, a weightlessness—I feel those hints now, and I allow them to come. The breeze is barely noticeable, and then it picks up as my body grows lighter and lighter. With the rush of wind and darkness closing in, I can feel time around me, almost like a rope I cling to. My body wants to fly forward, toward home, but instead I force myself backward, estimating the way I might if I were measuring a small distance in my yard. I go slowly, given the need for accuracy, counting by months rather than years, and when I reach what I believe is November of 1935 I take a deep breath and land on the other side of the barn, up to my knees in snow.
Marie never mentioned snow, and surely snow in early November would be memorable? I can’t see the broken weathervane from here so I creep through the barn’s back door, jerking to a stop when I see Henri in the distance, standing beside their car. He's younger, dressed in much finer clothes than I’ve seen him in. He looks like a handsome prince, one of those carefree rich boys who attend Eton and worry about nothing more than sports and girls and gambling. Except there is utter grief on his face.
I’ve arrived after their mother is gone, I realize. A part of me wants to continue to watch this version of him, so handsome and stricken and lost as he stares blankly at the fields, but it’s dangerous, and my legs are growing numb. I close my eyes once more and move further back, this time creeping along—moving by inches, rather than feet.
When I land the snow is gone, but it is still chilly. The weathervane and the shed door are broken, because Henri is not home to fix them. This may not be the week she left, but it’s probably as good as I’m going to get. I grab the horse blanket off the hook and huddle in the barn’s corner, waiting for Marie to leave on her way to school. I’m tired. It’s not the obliterating exhaustion of traveling from my own time, but it’s worse than I should feel having gone back only a few years. I’m contemplating curling up in the hay for a minute when Marie finally appears, looking very young and happy, wearing the new aubergine coat she told me about. I wait one more minute, and then I cross the yard and knock on the door, saying a silent prayer that Madame Durand likes strangers a little more than her son.
The woman who answers does not look old enough to be a mother of teenagers, but I see Henri and Marie in the slope of her cheekbones and the shape of her eyes, which widen at the sight of me.
"Bonjour," I begin in halting French. I know she speaks English, but it seems rude not to at least begin in her language. "J’espère que vous pouvez m’aider.” I hope you can help me.
Her eyes narrow just a touch. I see Henri's keen intellect in irises that are brown, rather than gr
een. His guardedness too. "What do you need?" she asks in English. "You should not be here."
I take a deep breath. "Marie told me you might be able to help me find my aunt." At the sound of her daughter's name she softens just a bit, and then, with obvious reluctance, she opens the door and asks me in.
I don’t realize how cold I am until I’ve followed her inside, but as the warmth reaches my frozen feet I begin shaking with it. She looks at me and hesitates again. "I shall get you some clothes. Go stand by the fire."
I sit on the hearth and she returns with a blanket, a sweater and a pair of trousers. "These belonged to my son when he was much younger. We do not need them back."
She goes to the kitchen while I pull on Henri's things, which drape over my frame, making me feel like a child. When she returns with a tea tray, she gestures to the seat across from her and pours a cup for me, more dutiful than willing. As a time traveler, she is unsettled by my presence, but with a daughter not much younger than I am now, she can’t bring herself to let me freeze.
"So what is it you need?" she asks, frowning as she hands me the cup.
I find, when lying, that it works best if you stick as closely as possible to the truth, and that is what I do now. "My aunt disappeared searching for the circle of light. I told Marie, and she said you might be able to give me some information."
She lifts her head, fastening me with those questioning eyes, so like Henri’s. "She would not have discussed this with just anyone,” Madame Durand says. “In fact, I’m inclined to think she wouldn’t discuss it with anyone at all, and that leads me to suspect that you are lying.”
I take a nervous sip of my tea. “I’m not,” I reply. “But I guess a liar would say that too.”
“You must finish your tea and warm up,” she says, “before you go on to your next destination.” There’s a finality to the words—which means I’ve failed. Marie is going to be so disappointed and I realize that I am too. I did want to give her some closure, if nothing else.
Across Time: Across Time Book 1 Page 6