I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I WAS ASLEEP, BUT I WOKE UP SHIVERING. Liam was slumped with his head against the window, wig slid sideways, snoring. I pulled my shawl tighter around myself, coveting his waistcoat, neckcloth, and cutaway jacket—a light weight, but wool—and Hessian boots, the tall kind with tassels.
I had lots of layers too, but they lacked the heft of menswear: a chemise, then a small fortune in coins, forged banknotes, and letters of credit in a pouch wrapped around my torso, topped by a corset, a petticoat, a frock, and a shawl, a synthetic re-creation of a Kashmir paisley. I had a thin lace fichu around my shoulders, over-the-knee knitted cotton stockings, dainty faux-kid gloves, and a straw bonnet, but no underpants; they would not catch on until later in the century.
The darkness was becoming less dark. I stared out; when did countryside turn urban? We had pored over old maps, paintings, and engravings; detailed flyover projections in 3-D had illuminated the wall screens of the institute. Yet no amount of study could have prepared me for this: the smell of coal smoke and vegetation, the creaking carriage, the hoofbeats of the horses like my own heartbeat. And something else, like energy, as if London were an alien planet, its gravitational field pulling me in.
Anything could happen to a person in Regency London: you could be killed by a runaway carriage, get cholera, lose a fortune on a wager or your virtue in an unwise elopement. Less dangerously, we hoped to find a place to live in a fashionable neighborhood and establish ourselves as wealthy newcomers in need of guidance, friends, and lucrative investments—all with the aim of insinuating ourselves into the life of Henry Austen, gregarious London banker and favorite brother of Jane. And through him, and the events we knew were waiting for them both this autumn, to find our way to her.
I eased next to Liam, the only warm object in the cold carriage, my relief at getting away from the Swan curdling to anxiety about everything that lay ahead. Queasy as I was from the bumping carriage, with the stink of horse and mildew in my nose, with the gibbet and the meat pie and the innkeeper’s rudeness still vivid, the Jane Austen Project no longer seemed amazing. What I’d wanted so badly stretched like a prison sentence: wretched hygiene, endless pretending, physical danger. What had I been thinking?
THE ROYAL INSTITUTE FOR SPECIAL TOPICS IN PHYSICS WAS NOTHING anyone like me would know about; I was far out of its Old British ambit of analysts and scientists and spies. I learned of it by accident, in Mongolia, in bed.
Norman Ng, though a conscientious colleague and all-round mensch, was indiscreet. He liked having secrets, but never kept them, as I should have understood before I’d started sleeping with him and found I’d become the subject of salacious gossip among our whole aid team. Though this might not have stopped me; Mongolia was dark and cold and grim after the earthquake, the worst place I’d ever signed on for. Or the best, if your aim was to relieve human suffering; there was no shortage.
Late one night, peacefully postcoital, Norman told me about a friend of his from school, one Dr. Ping, now at a little-known government research center in East Anglia.
“You’re trying to tell me that Old Britain—No, that’s crazy. You made that up.”
“They have mastered practical time travel,” he said again. The wind howled; the yurt poles creaked. “Rachel, they are far ahead. People don’t understand this, but they will. When they see the results, we will all clamor to be Old British, even more than now. The Chinese will forgive the Opium Wars. The Americans—But you guys apologized already for independence, I forgot.” Norman was Old British, with his Cambridge degree and elite ancestors who’d come from Hong Kong just before the Chinese takeover at the end of the twentieth century, but it suited him to play the outsider.
“It’s mind-boggling. It’s impossible.”
“You know about the Prometheus Server?”
I yawned; I’d been up since dawn. “Tremendous energy source, supercomputers, whatever.” More of what our world was already full of, in short.
“You sound so casual! An order of magnitude beyond earlier technology! With enough energy, and enough data, you can calculate anything. Including wormholes, and probability fields, and simulate every possible scenario. And once you can do that—”
“Okay, let’s just pretend this is true. What have they done with this fabulous ability?”
“Research.”
He said it so portentously that I laughed. “Can you be more specific?”
“I don’t know what all the missions have involved.” I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but his tone seemed affronted. “I’ll tell you, though, there’s one being planned—this is what made me think of it. I don’t know the details, but it involves Jane Austen. She’s important somehow, to history, I don’t know why—”
“Because she’s a genius,” I interrupted; Norman knew how I felt about Jane Austen. Everyone did.
“And because of Eva Farmer. You know who she is, right?” The name was familiar, but I could not immediately connect it to anything. “One of the inventors of the Prometheus Server? Apparently also a huge Jane Austen fan. She’s on the board at the institute, and she’s . . . I don’t know exactly. She’s huge. She’s taken a personal interest in the Jane Austen thing.” I rolled over on my side, closer to Norman. I was still having trouble believing, but I was interested. “And there’s a medical component. They’ll need a doctor.”
At this, I said nothing for a long while, just listened to the wind and the creaky posts and the sound of my own breath. Something had shifted inside of me: an icy shiver, a portent like a cold finger on my clavicle.
“Norman,” I said at last. “You’ll give me an introduction to your friend?” The Old British were big on introductions; one did not just show up, self-sponsored, to anything. But the world ran by their rules now.