You’re a real charmer, aren’t you? I thought as I lowered my smelly, bruised body into a large copper bath tub that had been set in front of the fire in the room Garrick told me was the spare bedchamber. Delightful dream, indeed.
But there was nothing to be done until the morning – unless I woke up in the night to find I was home in my own bed – and meanwhile a shirt, a heavy silk dressing gown and towels were draped over a chair by the fire to warm and arnica for my bruises and a hair brush and comb had been set out on the dressing table next to my bag. Garrick had told me to drop my own clothes outside the door and had nodded seriously when I had told him that the laundry instructions for the yoga pants and top were sewn inside.
I spent twenty minutes soaking and scrubbing and getting the panic under control. Either this was a dream and I would wake up, or it was real and somehow I would get home. I had got here, after all. Perhaps the Almack’s mirror would work as a door if I was on this side of it. That seemed logical, if anything about this did. The Earl had seen me in it, it had to be some kind of portal.
I got out at last, towelled myself dry and put on the shirt. It didn’t open all the way down so I had to dive into it, flapping about until it was hanging right. I climbed into bed, and let out an involuntary yelp as it tried to swallow me. A feather mattress, I realised – no coiled metal bedsprings. Yet despite all the evidence, I couldn’t quite believe it, that this was 1807. I was going to wake up in the twenty first century, I told myself as I drifted off. Would I even recall this dream?
I woke to the sound of a polite cough. More super-efficient valeting, I thought as I surfaced and fought my way up onto my elbows, batting ineffectually at the heaps of bedclothes. I was definitely still there… then… not now. Or was this now now? The anxiety rose up making me feel sick, then I pushed it back down. I had to keep calm, at least until I got out of this. I could have the screaming habdabs afterwards.
‘There is hot water on the washstand behind the screen, Miss Lawrence.’ Garrick was just inside the door, his gaze fixed firmly on the far corner of the room away from me. ‘If you will excuse the bath remaining here for the present, I will remove it once you are having breakfast which will be served in half an hour. Your garments are on the chair. Might I suggest you retain the robe as well?’
‘I think I will be warm enough, thank you, Garrick.’
Another polite cough. ‘For his lordship’s peace of mind, Miss Lawrence.’
He slid out in approved Jeevesian manner and I got out of bed and considered the most pressing issue – if one ignored the over-ridi
ng problem that I was still in the early nineteenth century. There was a chamber pot in the washstand behind the screen, but that meant some unfortunate servant, Garrick perhaps, would have to deal with it. On the other hand, the night before he had shown me a dark little cupboard with a flushing loo of sorts tucked into a cupboard between the drawing room and the dining room. A bizarre location, but presumably handy for the gentlemen during long after-dinner drinking sessions. I shuddered to think what happened after the flush, which involved energetic pumping with a handle at the side, but it couldn’t be worse than assorted privies I had encountered when backpacking around Europe on my gap year.
Garrick had made an excellent job of my clothes. Wrapped in the robe, which trailed exotically behind my bare feet, I tiptoed along the passageway – the apartment was all on one level – until I found the door to the drawing room. The walls were thick and the sets of doors double, so at least there wasn’t the embarrassment of sound carrying and I didn’t have to sing while I used the facilities.
When I tiptoed back a door opposite the drawing room was ajar and voices were audible. I stopped. Eavesdropping isn’t nice, but I would be a fool to ignore the opportunity to gather any information I could.
‘… appears to have passed a peaceful night, my lord. I have to say, on examining the garments that I pressed this morning, I am unable to account for their manufacture and construction without considering them further proof of Miss Lawrence’s belief that she has travelled here from the future.’
‘My God.’ The deep, drawling voice could not hide the undercurrent of excitement. ‘What a stir this will cause at the Royal Society.’
For a moment I was amused at the thought of the Earl solemnly producing my sports bra as evidence of time travel to an audience of the great and the good of Georgian scientific society. For a moment.
They looked up as I burst in. ‘No! You can’t do that – don’t you see, you can tell no-one about me.’
Chapter Four
Lord Radcliffe shot to his feet. ‘Miss Lawrence. Good morning.’ After one look he averted his gaze. It was a damn good thing I hadn’t been pottering about the kitchen first thing in the morning in my underwear when the time vortex, or whatever it was, had struck. They’d both have had apoplexies.
‘You can say nothing and do nothing.’
‘Why not?’ The Earl sat when I thumped down onto a chair. The realisation that was dawning on me meant my legs were not going to hold me up. ‘This is fascinating. Babbage and Walpole are both in town – they will be beside themselves.’
Scientists? I thought vaguely, not awake enough for this. Babbage was early computers, wasn’t he? But Walpole?
‘Everyone will want to talk to you, explore this. We know so little about space and time – I was at a most challenging lecture about that only last week. We cannot attribute this to supernatural phenomena – this is the nineteenth century after all. There must be a physical explanation. Why should we not learn to navigate in time as we are learning to navigate across the globe?’
‘Because this is the past and if you do anything differently as a result of my presence here you will change the future! The slightest thing could have a profound effect. You cross the street five minutes later than you might have done and a carriage is held up and two people do not meet, or do meet. A fight happens, or not. Someone is killed and never lives long enough to give birth to a child who … Oh, I don’t know… starts a war, stops a war, finds the cure for cancer. I suppose,’ I added bitterly when they both just stared at me, ‘if I suddenly vanish it will be because in the new future I will never have been born.’
‘But these changes are happening already,’ the Earl pointed out. He was almost glowing with excitement and enthusiasm, swept up in the rush of a scientific discovery when all I could think about were the possible consequences. To me.
‘I was to have gone out riding before breakfast. Garrick would probably have walked along to the porter’s office and chatted for a while. You may well have saved my life back in that alleyway. The attackers have injuries they would not have had, thanks to you, Miss Lawrence.’
‘Cassie,’ I said and ran my hands through my tangle of bed-hair. ‘Oh hell, I suppose there is nothing to be done about it. I am here and we can’t change that until we get into Almack’s and see if I can walk into a mirror and vanish. It seems the only possibility for getting back, unless I stand around in that ghastly alleyway.’
Silence. When I looked up the Earl said, ‘Cassie?’
‘When I come from everyone uses first names, Lucian.’ I waited for the explosion but he simply raised one eyebrow.
‘How very informal. Everyone?’
‘Friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, many employers and employees. It depends upon circumstances.’