The Jane Austen Project
Kathleen A. Flynn
DEDICATION
To Jarek
EPIGRAPH
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
—T. S. ELIOT, “BURNT NORTON”
CHAPTER 1
SEPTEMBER 5, 1815
Leatherhead, Surrey
WHAT KIND OF MANIAC TRAVELS IN TIME? SOMETHING I WOULD wonder more than once before it was over, but never as urgently as that moment I regained consciousness on the damp ground. Grass tickled the back of my neck; I saw sky and treetops, smelled earth and rot. I had the feeling that follows a faint, or waking up in an unfamiliar bed after a long journey: uncertain not just where I was, but who.
As I lay there, I remembered that my name was Rachel. Body and mind snapped together and I sat up, blinking at my surroundings, which were indistinct and flatly gray scale, and rubbed my eyes. I reviewed known side effects of trips through wormholes: palpitations, arrhythmia, short-term amnesia, mood swings, nausea, syncope, alopecia. Changes in vision had not come up. Maybe this was new to science.
Wind rattled the leaves, counterpoint to a repetitive squeak that might have been some insect long extinct in my own time. I marveled at the 1815 air, moist and dense with smells I had no words for, reminded of the glass-domed habitat re-creations at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where we used to go on field trips. Once, children, the whole world was like this.
Liam was about a meter away, same distance as in the air lock, but now facedown and ominously still. Arrhythmia can confuse a heart enough to stop it. And then what? Could I really be so unlucky as to lose my colleague at the start of the mission? I’d have to pose as a widow, the only sort of lone woman entitled to any protection and regard here—
“Are you all right?” I demanded; he did not answer. I slid closer and reached out to check his carotid, relieved to find a pulse. His breathing was fast and shallow, skin filmed in cold sweat. Past him, a clump of white trees, name forgotten, glowed in the gloom. My own heart was banging in my chest; I breathed slowly and stared at the white trees.
Birch! And another word came to me: dusk, something barely noticed in my own time, in a life illuminated by electricity. Natural light; we’d learned the vocabulary of that, along with waxing, waning, crescent, gibbous, and the major constellations. I saw again in memory the steel-gray corridors of the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, as the year I’d spent there glided before me like a time-lapse video clip: the dancing and riding practice, the movement and music lessons, the endless reading. Our walk to the air lock, last checks, solemn handshakes with the rest of the Jane Austen Project Team.
I was here. We’d done it.
“Are you all right?” I asked again. Liam groaned but rolled over, sat up, and scanned our surroundings of field, birch, and hedgerow. The portal location had been chosen well; nobody was here.
“It’s dusk,” I explained. “That’s why it all looks like this.” He turned toward me, dark eyebrows arching in a question. “In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.” His words came slowly, voice soft. “But thanks.”
I looked at him sideways, trying to decide if he was being sarcastic, and hoped so. In our time together at the institute preparing for the mission, something about Liam had always eluded me. He was too reserved; you never knew about people like that.
I stood, light-headed, straightened my bonnet, and took a few stiff steps, brushing dirt and grass off my dress, conscious of the swish of all my layers, the slab of banknotes beneath my corset.
Liam lifted his head, sniffing. He unfolded himself, rising to his feet with a surprising grace—in my experience tall men shamble—stretched his arms, repositioned his frizzy doctor’s wig, looked to the right, and froze. “Is that what I think it is?”
My eyes adjusting, I saw a road: a lane wide as a wagon, forking a little way off. And in the Y of the fork, a gibbet: a man-size iron frame, like a sinister birdcage, holding something that—“Oh.”
“So they really were everywhere,” he said. “Or we are just lucky.”
Now identifying one component of what I’d been smelling, I stared in dismay at the corpse, which seemed to gaze back at me, blank-socketed. Not freshly putrefying, not a husk, but in between, though in this light it was hard to say for sure. Maybe he’d been a highwayman; the people here displayed condemned men near the scenes of their crimes, as warnings to others. And maybe we would end up like him, if things went wrong.
I had forgotten to breathe, but the reek lingered in my nose. I’d been around dead people ever since medical school; I’d autopsied them, but not like this. On one occasion, though, during my volunteer stint in Mongolia, someone had been misidentified and had to be exhumed—
With that, I gagged and bent over, clutching my throat, seized by dry heaves. When they’d passed, I dried my eyes and straightened to find Liam peering down at me, brow furrowed.
“Are you all right?” His long hands, pale at the ends of the dark sleeves of his coat, lifted and fluttered in the fading light, like he was about to touch me but didn’t know where. Shoulder? Elbow? Forearm? What’s the least intimate part of your opposite-sex co-worker to grab if she’s in distress? Unable to decide, he brought his hands back down to his sides; despite the horror of the cadaver, this was funny.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just great. Let’s get out of here.” We had both turned away from the gibbet. I’m not superstitious, but I hoped our way to the inn wouldn’t lead past it. “North. If the sun set over there”—the horizon seemed brighter in one area—“then it must be that way.”
“Well, yes, because there’s Venus, right?”
“Venus?”
“That bright object in the west?”
I repressed annoyance at not having noticed this myself. “Yes, exactly!”
We turned away, took a few steps, and then Liam stopped and whirled around.
“Mother of god. The portal marker.”
I cursed under my breath as I turned too. Could we almost have forgotten something so important? Two disturbances in the grass could only have been the outlines of our two bodies. Liam took the metal marker from an inside pocket of his coat and pushed it as far as it would go into the earth right between them, blue spiral top barely visible. “Spectronanometer?” he asked.