“Your boy had a fall, Brown, and needs time to recover. Since it occurred on our property, I feel . . . We will let him rest here. We will pay you the agreed amount, but we will not need your services further today.” Or ever, I added silently.
No one spoke, and I thought this might work. “Thank you, Jencks. Can you pay him and show him out?” I held my hands out for his tankard of porter.
Jencks ignored my gesture and looked at Liam. “Sir?” he said. “The job is not done, you understand.”
“Pay him and show him out,” Liam said in the bored tone he affected with the servants, taking the porter from Jencks.
Brown darted behind me and grabbed Tom’s elbow. He whimpered, then let out a cry as Brown twisted his arm, hissing something indistinct but menacing.
“Let go of him!” I said.
“I’m na leaving without the lad.” He gave Tom a shake. “Come, then, look lively.” Tom’s head was down. His expression was unreadable, since his face was covered with soot, but his posture was naked misery, one arm awkwardly extended in Brown’s grip, the rest of him curled in on himself, as if trying to be as small as possible, or to not exist at all.
“You have no choice,” I snapped. “Just go. Jencks—”
“I paid five quid for this one at the workhouse not twelve months past. Leave him here? Are ye mad?” When he began pulling Tom out of the room by the arm, I stepped into their path. Brown stopped. He was working his jaw and breathing fast but seemed hesitant to shove me aside.
“I will give you five pounds for him,” I said. The room got quiet: Grace frozen in front of the door to the laundry, Jencks and Liam in the doorway from the hall. The only one moving was Mrs. Smith, who was starting a fire in the stove, yet I felt her listening too. “Five pounds, and whatever was agreed on to clean our chimneys. You will not get such an offer every day.”
Brown stared at me long enough that I had time to wonder what I was doing.
“Ten. I spent a great deal training this one. And eats me out of house and home, he do.”
“Six.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared back at him. “Six before I change my mind.”
“Seven.”
“Done.”
He whistled. “Indeed! Fine folks will have their fancies.” He released the boy, shoving him a little. “When they toss you to the gutter, Tom my lad, you’ll know where to find me. If luck’s with ye, I’ll take ye back.”
AFTER HIS CLEANING, TOM TURNED OUT TO HAVE LIGHT BROWN hair that stuck up like the quills of a porcupine, a sweet, anxious face, scarring on his knees and elbows, bruises all over. He shyly insisted he was ten, though I would have guessed six. We dressed him in one of Liam’s shirts, wrapped him in a blanket, and put him in a corner of the kitchen near the stove, where Mrs. Smith gave him porter, followed by bread, milk, and ham. When I turned to go upstairs, she followed me into the hall.
“A word with you, miss?”
We went to the little room where we had our morning conferences.
“What will you do with the lad?” she asked once she had closed the door behind us.
“What would you advise?” She did not answer. “Did I do wrong, do you think?”
“’Tis a parish boy, you know. That’s what he meant about buying him from the workhouse. He might be an orphan, a child of some shameful union.”
“Which would not seem to be his fault.”
“No one said it was, miss.”
We stood in silence.
“Let him rest, and then? Perhaps he can stay. We could use another hand, could we not?”
“Very badly. But he is barely past leading strings.”
“He will grow. Especially if fed.”
“Boys are known for that.” Unexpectedly, she smiled.
UPSTAIRS, I FOUND LIAM STANDING BY THE WINDOW IN THE LIBRARY, arms folded, apparently doing nothing but waiting for me. “Are you mad?” he demanded in a furious whisper. “Are you stark raving?” Out of words for the moment, I closed the door behind me, walked to the big dark desk, and leaned back against it. I was still trying to come to terms with my own actions, and being scolded didn’t help. “Is it changing history you’re after?”
“It’s not like that.”
He was staring down at me, eyes blazing blue, breath audible, face reddening. “And that . . . Brown . . . will take our money, and go to the workhouse, and buy himself another child! Do you think you can save every climbing boy in London?”
“Do you think that’s an argument for not saving one?” He did not reply, just kept staring at me, but his anger seemed to leave him. He looked stricken. “What was I supposed to do, send him on with that horrible man?”
He turned away abruptly, sat down at the desk, and rubbed his eyes with his palms, then rested his face in his hands, so the next words came out muffled: “What you were supposed to do, was not interfere. As we both know.”
The chief danger of time travel, aside from the obvious physical risks to travelers themselves, was of somehow changing the past so as to decisively alter the future you’d come from, setting in motion some version of the grandfather paradox. Opinion at the institute was divided on whether this was possible; previous missions had created ripples of change, but just nibbles around the edges. A statue of the poet Randolph Henry Ash, which had long stood in a traffic circle in Hampstead, had disappeared overnight, along with all records of its creation. A short street of terraced Georgian houses in West London, leveled for a nineteenth-century department store later destroyed in the Blitz and turned into a miniature park, reappeared one winter morning, vacant and run-down but otherwise unscathed. This had to be passed off to a puzzled public as a conceptual art project. Still, the institute could not know everything: what changes might there have been involving not stone and mortar but the quiet facts of people’s private lives? This question sometimes troubled me when I lay sleepless in the small hours.
“A year of creosote exposure, a lifetime of inadequate nutrition . . .” I meant that Tom would not live to be old, to reproduce, to leave any trace in this world at all, let alone alter the probability field and change the historical record. But I found I could not say this so flatly; the injustice of it made my own anger blaze up instead. “So what have I changed? Must every day of his short, pathetic life be full of suffering?”
Liam took his hands from his face. “Rachel,” he muttered. I waited for him to go on, but that seemed to be all; he looked at me searchingly.
“Well? You could have stopped me. You’re the man; you control the money, you could have countermanded my orders. Nothing would have delighted Jencks more. So why didn’t you? You’re complicit, too.” He said nothing. “Don’t pretend otherwise.”
“Rachel,” he said again, and this time his voice shot a shiver through me, as if my own name were a term of endearment. I remembered he’d been an actor; for a moment I expected a soliloquy. Instead, there was a long silence, in which we did not look at each other. Something had just happened, but I was not sure what.
“Perhaps we should write to Henry Austen,” he said.