Eleven o’clock: electronic chimes marked the passage of another hour of my life that I would never get back. Somewhere, green fields slumbered in the sun and lambs gamboled, but here, in a dark, over-air-conditioned room in the depths of the Royal Institute for Special Physics Research, I was trying, with little success, to pay attention to a lecture about the evolution of Napoleonic-era British monetary policy.
“The movement of the pound toward par and the consolidation of the gains were complicated by three developments,” Dr. Wu was saying. “A worldwide drop in prices on a gold basis; increasing economic distress, particularly in agriculture and in the metal industries in the Birmingham area; and extensive failures of country banks.”
It was important! Economic conditions after Waterloo had a catastrophic effect on the money supply and the banking system. Many small banks failed amid the deflation, including the one run by Henry Austen, Jane’s favorite brother. Its collapse would mean bankruptcy for him, and major financial and emotional agita for her. It probably helped precipitate her final illness!
But I couldn’t really listen. Just before this, as I was coming out of a gesture and dialect workshop, Dr. Hernandez had appeared, breathless, his perpetually wrinkled white lab coat unbuttoned and billowing behind him in his haste. He had taken me aside and told me that I would be going to 1815, instead of Angelica Lambert.
“Are you joking?” We had walked down the curving hallway, out of earshot of my fellow Jane Austen Project team members, who remained waiting for the elevator to the economics and media area. “What happened?” I had to lean against the gray metal wall for support as my knees buckled and I felt lightheaded. I tried to make it casual, like I always leaned against walls.
Dr. Hernandez smiled down at me, getting his breath now, visibly delighted at being the one to give me this news. He was in charge of the medical aspects of the project and my favorite of the Project Team leaders, really my favorite of everyone I had been spending the last 18 months with, stuck here in the Institute. Perhaps because we were both physicians, with an interest in public health and infectious diseases, but I also felt a human connection with him, which could not be said of everyone here.
“Of course not! But don’t say anything – the others don’t know yet.” He paused, looking at me, smile fading. “You’re not jumping up and down with happiness, though.”
Somewhere around the one-year mark, I had secretly begun to think of my post as time traveler-alternate, something I had beat out nearly 2,000 other applicants to achieve, as a colossal waste of, no pun intended, time. Endless days of reading Byron and Richardson and Burney and Sir Walter Scott, of learning to sew shirts, eat meat, dance the Scottish reel and get in and out of a carriage properly — all for nothing, except the joy of immersing myself in the world of Jane Austen, distraction-free. Fascinating, sure, but ultimately pointless, and it had grown harder to be so close to all this and to become ever more certain I wasn’t going. I should have been elated by Dr. Hernandez’s news, but mainly I was astonished, with an edge of fear, which was in itself another astonishment.
“Give me a moment and I am sure I’ll be. It’s a bit of a surprise. As you can imagine.” I pushed away from the wall; I felt I could again stand unaided. “What happened? Why is Angelica out?” Now my mind was ablaze with questions. Had she plagiarized her seminal work on “Pride and Prejudice”? Poisoned a colleague at her university? Inflated her qualifications? Held membership in a secret carnivores club? Everything I thought of seemed improbably evil or just not that important.
He waved my words away. “We’ll get into all that later. I just wanted to give you a heads-up, a little time to get used to that idea.”
A little time? It was three days before Departure! I nodded and made myself smile. I would have to master looking composed and hiding my feelings, there; why not start now? “Thank you, Doctor. Do you think it will be possible to visit my mother, before? I’d promised her, if—”
“An excellent idea, Doctor! I’ll wrangle you a leave from your afternoon and tomorrow-morning activities. But why don’t you–” he had started walking us back down the hallway toward the elevators “— go to this last morning class? I understand it’s particularly interesting — and better to let everything seem normal for now.” The last part of this was delivered sotto voce as we neared the others, who were still there waiting for an elevator, unfortunately, since I could have done with a few moments alone.
Dr. Hernandez excused himself and hurried back off to wherever he had appeared from, while the elevator doors opened with their characteristic little whoosh and the rest of us stepped in: Edmund Riding, Angelica Lambert, Liam Finucaine and me.
“Is all well?” Edmund asked me. He was the oldest of us, 47, and if I were to cast him as a Jane Austen hero, he would be Colonel Brandon, of the flannel waistcoat and tragic backstory. In real life, a paramedic, a high school English teacher in Leeds, and like all of us, a Janiac.
“Thank you, yes.” I hope my tone discouraged further questions, though being rude to Edmund was the last thing I wanted, for he was by far the nicest of the team members. Like me, he had trained as an alternate, to go only if Liam for some reason could not, and the hope flared briefly in my mind that maybe Edmund, too, would get to go. But that seemed unlikely, given how Dr. Hernandez had phrased his announcement.
A silence fell. I tried to think of some way to soften my reply, which seemed ruder as the silence lengthened. But before I could devise a sufficiently innocuous follow-up, Angelica had fixed her cornflower-blue eyes on me and was saying: “Heyday, Rachel! Only three more days, and you go home. How immensely you must be looking forward to resuming normal life! Your friends… your family… how they must have missed you, all this time.”
Angelica! Willowy and English and 31, the youngest on the team. She became a full professor at 27, on the strength of a ground-breaking — or so I am told; I could not get through it, despite several attempts — work exploring the matricidal subtext in “Pride and Prejudice.” But her professorship is only in America, at Duke, which she points out with self-deprecating charm whenever the subject arises. She spends as little time in North Carolina as possible, finding fellowships and other opportunities to be elsewhere. She rides exquisitely, accompanies herself on the harp, and has the golden-skinned, perfectly toned upper arms that Empire fashions demand. I pride myself on finding the good in everyone, but with Angelica I have come up empty. Well, she has great arms. I see her as a sort of Lucy Steele crossed with Mary Crawford: the anxious cunning of the first, the charm and sophistication of the latter.
Throughout our stay here, Angelica has displayed a consistent though subtle hostility toward me, in contrast to her winning manner with nearly everyone else, which I can only suppose means I threaten her self-regard, though how, I cannot imagine. Now I stared up at her – she is at least six inches taller than me, blond, Viking-infused Rowena to my dark, short Rebecca – at a loss for words. She cannot have been told, then, that she is not going — unless this is all some performance to keep face. Or, she refuses to believe it.
“Yes, it will be…agreeable. Indeed.” With Dr. Hernadez, under the influence of the shock he had delivered, I had spoken like myself; with my team members, I slipped back, without noticing or trying, into the period diction and accents we always used on each other. The endless drills had worked; yet, should that be surprising? The mind will make friends of anything.
This answer did not seem to satisfy her. “But then,” she went on, “It must seem discouraging, to devote all this time to studying the life and times of Jane Austen, so fruitlessly.”
“Not at all. It has been vastly interesting. You cannot believe in the value of learning for its own sake, if you can say such a thing.” I looked around at the others. Edmund was nodding in agreement; Liam was studying the floor. “Would you think it fruitless if you were the one not going?”
“Not in the least! But then — it is more closely related to my field, than to yours.”
I gave her a curt bow – a nod of the head accompanied by a slight dip of the upper body. It was something we had been practicing in the class we had just left, for we would need not only to look and sound like people of 1815, but also to move like them; gesture was essential to character, as the acting coach kept reminding us. This one signified, among other things, acknowledgment of what the other person had just said.
“No, more like this,” Angelica said, as she did the same thing I had just done, only more gracefully.
Liam unexpectedly involved himself. “Lower your eyes a bit, Miss Falk; do not look up at her. And keep your whole back more straight, all the way up.” He put a hand gently at about vertebra T3 to show me what he meant; the unexpected touch made me start.
Before becoming a professor, Liam had been an actor, with actual speaking parts in a professional troupe, so he always outshone the rest of us, even Angelica, in anything that involved moving or talking like a person of 1815. He had also written a biography of Beau Brummell’s valet that I’d enjoyed, a window on the whole period as well as on the improbable figure of Brummell. Liam’s name is Irish, his doctorate from Edinburgh, his accent BBC-unplacable. He is polite and easy in conversation, yet at the end of 18 months I know as little about him as when I began; I had never yet succeeded in deciding which Jane Austen character he most resembled. That he remained a cipher loomed as a problem in a way it never had until this moment. I would be going to 1815 with this man.
I looked up at him – he was even taller than Angelica, broad of shoulder and narrow at of hip, with the sort of face that costume-drama directors love; not at all handsome but markedly individual, and somehow old-fashioned. Its effect was heightened by the 1815-era clothes that all four of us all wore, our own little Institute costume drama. I resolved to have a real conversation with Liam before Departure, ideally alone. But if couldn’t stand him on better acquaintance, what would I do then?
With effort I brought my attention back to the moment. Now Dr. Wu was talking about the Restriction, the repercussions of forsaking the gold standard and then getting back on it. I looked down the row. Edmund looked serious and attentive, but then he always did. Angelica’s hand was halfway up, at her shoulder, like she wanted to interrupt and ask a question but not quite enough to wave her hand in the air. And Liam? It was hard to be sure — Dr. Wu had darkened the room so he could show slides about the fluctuating amount of gold in the Bank of England’s coffers and other topics I could not persuade myself to care about right now – but Liam might have gone to sleep. His head was pitched oddly forward. I wasn’t finding the talk interesting either, but I had the excuse of the shock I had received.
The lights came up; finally, it was over. I had glanced away at the crucial moment and now Liam was awake, if indeed he had ever been asleep, saying something to Angelica in a low tone that made them both laugh. I wondered if he would be disappointed at going to 1815 with me instead. Angelica flirted with Liam, but perhaps no more than she did with anyone else with male genitalia.
I glanced down at my tablet to see what I would miss if I was to be freed for the rest of the day, as Dr. Hernandez had promised. Cardplay, Period Lunch — with fork practice and meat, so it was work, not a break – two hours of sewing for Angelica and me while being read to from the poems of Cowper, while the men did some shooting; then riding practice for all. I could forgo all of this without a qualm. Cowper, I liked, but the sewing was driving me over the edge. I did not mind the thing itself; I was dexterous thanks to my years of suturing, but then people are far more interesting to sew than shirts. Out of boredom I had more than once accidentally stitched my work to my own skirt. Other times my mind roamed too freely and I began thinking of my shadowy, pushcart-pushing, sweatshop-laboring ancestors — family lore gave us someone who had died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, soon after arriving to America, but there was no way of sorting, all this time later, truth from legend — and wondering what they would have thought of all this. They would have taken pride in my education and accomplishments. My being unmarried and childless at 33, not so much, while my Jane Austen obsession would have been inexplicable. Or not. Was the universality of the concerns Jane Austen wrote about not the wellspring of her genius?
As we walked out of the room, I stole another glance at Liam. He was a Janiac; we had that at least in common. No one crazy enough to give up years of his life to travel into the dangerous, unsanitary past just for a hope of meeting Jane Austen could be all bad. Even Angelica must have some redeeming features that I had not yet identified.
Back in my living quarters, I squirmed out of my 1815 clothes and threw a few things in a bag. Before it would have seemed possible, I was on the bullet train to Cornwall, the undulating green landscape of southwest England a blur in the window.
In response to news of my unexpected visit, my mother had sent word she was finishing something that could not wait and would not be able come meet me. She sent a car. Its driver was waiting on the platform holding up a tablet with my name in large blinking red letters, a sight my eyes lingered on with premature nostalgia as he led me to the car. I would not need that name, there.
But by the time we had completed the 20-minute drive to my mother’s, she had closed the door to the studio and was making tea, with every appearance of having never done anything in her life except think about my well-being.
My father died five years ago, acute myocardial infarction as he was getting out of a swimming pool, so now it was just my mother and me. She had moved to Cornwall when I left New Haven for the Institute after being chosen as alternate. She couldn’t be too far away, like Brooklyn, or too near, like London. She said that the landscapes of Cornwall inspired her work, which I had thought one of her jokes, since her paintings are abstract and always have been, though changing in other ways over the years.
But that afternoon, looking at her newest pieces in the glass-walled modern addition to the back of the old stone cottage she rented here, I finally understood. There was a something of Cornwall in them: the colors, the mood. Would she stay here after I was gone? We had not discussed it, yet I supposed not. She had to miss her friends back home. It was like her to come to England to be near me, though not very sensible, since we were allowed to leave the Institute only rarely; crucial to Preparation was immersion in the total environment.
“And so you are really going! That is phenomenal! What a triumph!” She knew everything about
Angelica and the others. I had described them all in such detail that they were as real as characters in a book to her, with their tics, their hidden motivations, the secrets we loved to speculate about.
“I don’t know if I could call it a triumph,” I said. “But it is exciting, certainly.” I looked around the room, feeling uncertain again all at once. “I hope it will be a triumph.”
She took my face in her hands, turning serious, and as my cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk’s, I felt 6 years old again, but not in a bad way. “It will be okay. I have full faith in you.” She kissed my nose; she smelled like paint and cinnamon. “I love you so much, my darling! What happened; do you know? Why isn’t Angelica going?”
I shared what Dr. Hernandez had told me, which wasn’t much, and seemed even less in the retelling, amid tea and scones and the coastal afternoon light. “But I was thinking about it on the way here. I think it is the influence of Jessica York.”
“Yes! Of course! Rachel, absolutely. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
Dr. York, now at least 80, was a Ph.D. mathematician who became fabulously wealthy starting a search-engine company decades back and then devoted herself to her first love, literature. Among other things, she restored Chawton House, turning it into a center for the study of early women’s writing. Though she had no official role and never appeared at the Institute, it was general knowledge – if by general knowledge we mean never officially stated but somehow insisted upon by everyone – that she was bankrolling The Jane Austen Project, as she had an earlier one to determine, once and for all, who actually wrote the plays of Shakespeare.
At one point during Preparation, the only time I was privileged to meet her, Dr. York invited the entire Jane Austen Project Team to Chawton House for tea, what was supposed to be the culmination of a field trip to Hampshire. The van broke down on the way there, there was a sudden rainstorm, and we were all late and annoyed and wet, the physicists in particular, since they had been trying to fix the van, naturally without success – it was a van, not a particle accelerator. Even Angelica seemed at a loss, her charm faltering when faced with this semi-legendary personage, as we stood in the great stone-floored reception hall, shivering, gripping our tea cups for the limited warmth they provided. After being introduced to all of us, Dr. York said the proper polite things and then turned her gaze on me like a powerful searchlight.
“Dr. Falk.”
Her tone made me quail, but I am not one to show fear. “Dr. York.”
“And what do you think Jane Austen died of?”
“I would love to be able to say I knew.”
“You don’t think it was Addison’s, then? Why not?”
“All we can say for certain is that it was far too soon.”
“We shall make detailed observations on this issue, Madam, when we are there,” Angelica said.
Determining what Jane Austen died of was one of the secondary objectives of the Project; the primary one being to get hold of and copy the letters that she wrote to her sister, Cassandra. Cassandra outlived Jane by almost 30 years and is thought to have burnt the majority of the correspondence shortly before her own death; only 94 letters from Jane to Cassandra remain, though they were prolific letter writers when apart, which they were often, thanks to the custom of frequent and prolonged visits to friends and relatives. Since those letters – elliptical, gossipy, full of irony – are one of the main sources of biographical information about Jane Austen, an opportunity to read the lost ones is of tremendous value to scholars.
Because of the absence of letters around the time of stressful or exciting episodes in Jane Austen’s relatively quiet life – like her parents’ abrupt decision to move to Bath, taking the unmarried daughters with them; when her Aunt Leigh Perrot was on trial for shoplifting, facing the disgraceful prospect of transport to New South Wales; after she refused an offer of marriage, 12 hours after initially accepting it – scholars suspect that Cassandra burned the ones containing sensitive material, seeking to ensure those that survived to be handed down to younger relatives would paint an innocuous portrait of her beloved sister. Which did not work, anyway – the nephew who first published excerpts from the letters, in the 1880s, felt obliged to bowdlerize them.
That the Project leaders considered the medical aspects of the project somewhat important could be seen in the fact that Edmund, a paramedic, and I, a physician, were chosen as alternates. That they did not really consider it important could be seen in who was actually chosen: Liam, an ex-actor and an English professor, and Angelica, an English professor who had studied naturopathy in her spare time, earning an online degree. The first time I heard this, from Edmund, I laughed; I had thought, from the deadpan way he said it, that he was joking. Unfortunately he wasn’t, and Angelica was in earshot.
Dr. York now turned her gaze to Angelica. “I am confident you will do your very best.” Something in her tone, however, implied that wasn’t going to be nearly enough, and even I felt bad about the look that she gave Angelica, so much so that I said, hoping to change the subject:
“As a great a mystery as her death was, I find her life a much greater one. What must it have been like, to be Jane Austen? To be so much brighter than everyone around you – to know you were – trapped in a time and a place with no use for brilliant women? What could that possibly have been like?”
“It would have driven me around the bend,” Edmund offered.
“I think me too,” I said.
Liam was shaking his head. “No, for something more than just intelligence was at work. I mean, what depths of moral despair did she have to sink to, before she could reconcile herself to that world? How did she manage to not end up like Shakespeare’s sister, at least as imagined by Virginia Woolf? And what was going on in her head, all those years that she apparently wasn’t writing?”
Dr. York looked approvingly at him. “The lost years are of great interest to me. Still, the tragedy of her dying at 41, with so much still to do – that is what my mind, now that I am more than double her age, returns to again and again.” She paused; her eye had again fallen on me. “And if we were to learn it was something simple – something modern medicine could have cured – I do not know, in fact, if I could endure it.”
An impressive silence followed this remark. I wondered, but did not ask, what choice she had, except to endure it. After all, it was what it was; Jane Austen was more than 200 years dead. But we were all awed into silence by Dr. York, I think: not only by her great age and vast wealth, but by her manner of expressing herself, and we merely nodded in concert.
I had told my mother about this encounter, for there is very little of importance I do not tell my mother; though like anyone else, I have my secrets. That I agreed with Jessica York in being tormented by the notion of Jane Austen’s early death was one thing I did not feel like sharing; this feeling bordered on interference, and interference is above all what the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, Time Travel Division, wants nothing to do with. That is why, since its inception, it has restricted itself to missions of a purely fact-finding nature, as opposed to things like strangling Hitler in his cradle, which, however tempting, are universally acknowledged to be too dangerous, too likely to create unforeseen and unfixable complications.
But as I was thinking of this, my mother, as though reading my mind, said:
“They have made such a point of how you are not to change history, you are not to change history – don’t you think they doth protest too much?”
“No.”
“I think that some of them secretly, or not so secretly, do want to change history. Why the sudden switch, to put a doctor on the team? None of the other teams even had doctors as alternates, did they?”
“True, but on The Medici Project they all nearly died of the plague. I think that was when they decided to get doctors involved.”
“There isn’t any plague in England in 1815.”
“Fortunately! But there are lots of other nasty things to die of.”
“Which was true of all the other expeditions.”
This argument was starting to feel circular. “They need a doctor to try to figure out what Jane Austen really died of!”
“What does it possibly matter, what a person died of, when they’ve been dead already this long? I think you are being naïve, Rachel. I think they – and by they, I mean, of course, Jessica York — really want you to save her, but can’t come out and say that. And that’s why you are going, and not Angelica. How would an English professor save her? Read her a sonnet? York won that fight, and you are going. That’s what I think.”
“No. I agree Dr. York probably had something to do with the switch, but only because she wants to know the cause of death, and she doesn’t trust Angelica to be able to figure that out. Changing the past has a lot of hazards. You could change the present in some unplanned and very negative way.”
“That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve met the loveliest man down here.” My mother was always meeting the loveliest people. Her propensity to find the best in everyone, including the most sad, unpromising creatures, had mystified me as a child and later made me envious. Some people tell me I have this ability, but they are people who have never met my mother, of whom I am but a pale imitation. “A retired physics professor! He likes to walk on the beach with his adorable fox terrier, which the reason I started to talk to him in the first place. But do you know what we talk about now?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Theories of time travel!”
“I hope you haven’t talked about the work of the Institute. You haven’t – tell me you haven’t.” The existence of the Institute, and the results of its work, were not secret, but secrecy surrounded nearly every aspect of projects before they were completed. This, along with the adjustment aspect, was why time travelers, alternates and the rest of the project teams were virtually under house arrest at the highly secure Institute headquarters, and why I had signed detailed agreements about what I could and could not reveal, to close family members only, and why my mother in turn had signed a short agreement promising, in effect, to talk to no one, about any of it.
“Rachel! What do you think? I am as silent as the grave.”
Her turns of phrase are sometimes too vivid; this one sent a chill through me, as I reflected that it was possible I would not make it back out of the early 19th century for a long time, maybe never, and my mother could die without knowing what had happened to me. She was a vibrant 73, but there are no guarantees.
“Okay, so what do you and Professor Fox Terrier talk about?” I asked, more sharply than I had intended.
“He says, since time travel has become possible, then it has always have to been possible, because, at least in theory, time travelers would have already been here from the future, futzing with our past.”
“That’s not a new idea. What’s his point?”
“It’s so clear, when he talks about it – I bet he was an excellent teacher; I wish you had time to meet him, but – Basically, that travelers from the future could have altered our present and past many times, and we would never realize. Because the past we have is the only one we have.”
She went on like this at some length, but I stopped listening. I was familiar with these ideas. The first time I heard of them – in a physics class, as an undergraduate or maybe earlier – they were thrillingly strange. I thought I would find them even more strange and thrilling once I understood them better, which in my youthful arrogance I expected would happen as a matter of course, without exceptional exertion on my part. That was before I had realized the complexity of the underlying mathematics. I used to think I was good at math; maybe I wasn’t bad. But there is a math ceiling that people hit, those who aren’t geniuses, and I hit it about then.
String theory and probable universes are good terms to throw around for sounding impressive, but how many people comprehend them in any but the simplest way? Not me. Not my mother. And it slowly began to anger me, to hear her talking about this.
It was like someone idly gossiping about a mutual friend, not knowing that I and the friend had been in love once, and that I had failed him, and lost him forever. That was approximately my relationship to the physics of time travel. I always put on a thoughtful expression and stopped listening when Dr. Kimball or Dr. Scott started talking about some technical aspect of the project. But this didn’t happen often, as they rightly considered Angelica and Edmund and Liam and me too dim to understand.
As I sat, looking out the little 18th-century window at a little corner of Cornwall sky and water and not listening to my mother, I more grew aware of the things that she wasn’t saying. Of the fact that this might be the last time we ever saw each other, for example, and the talk of string theory and probable universes began to seem, not just irrelevant, but positively offensive.
“Lily,” I said. “Lily, for God’s sake. Please. Enough already.”
She stopped in mid-sentence and studied me. “Are you all right?”
“They don’t want us to change the past. I am sure of it.”
“Very well, then. As you say.”
“It would be fundamentally wrong. It would be meddling. When they say the first principle is noninterference, they mean it.”
“Of course. And yet — wouldn’t it be nice if Jane Austen were able to get a few more years on earth, write a few more books?”
“No!” I said, perhaps more emphatically than necessary.
“Are you all right?” she asked again.
“I am about to travel to 1815. How all right can I be?”
I was sorry as soon as I said it. All the worry that she had been keeping at bay with her chatter emerged at once and hung in the air between us like a noxious cloud. Her shoulders slumped; I had a sudden vision of what she would look like at 93, frightened, small and old. And what if I was not there for her?
But then she smiled – the vision faded — and she patted my hand. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You will be great. I am so proud of you. Do you know, dear, how much I love you?”
I fell asleep to the sound of the sea, in the narrow guest bed with the sheets smelling faintly of lavender. When I woke up, I was instantly awake, and already thinking: Tuesday! I go to 1815 on Thursday! Coffee, toast, conversational topics started and abandoned, and there we were on the platform, shivering in a gust of wind and staring at the electronic display that promised my train would arrive in three minutes. It had been promising that for at least the last five minutes, or else I was already starting to become unstuck in time.
And then the train came, disgorging a loosening knot of passengers. I hugged my mother tightly, hoping the gesture would say what I could not, for words had suddenly had failed me.
Returning my hug, she spoke, but not to say anything I had expected.
“Why, Professor Mortlake! What a nice surprise! I didn’t know you’d gone to London!” This with her arms still around me, and then we detached, and I was pulled forward to be introduced. “Rachel, Professor Mortlake is the nicest and most fascinating person, bar none, that I have met since moving to Cornwall!”
I felt confident that my mother would have said this of any Cornwall friend she happened to run into at the train station with me — and been equally sincere every time! — but I could not help laughing as I held out my hand. “Honored to meet you, Professor. I’m Rachel, Lily’s daughter.”
Professor Mortlake put down his bag to shake my hand. He had a lot of gray hair standing up in all directions and an equally wild white beard. He seemed disproportionately flustered, as if running into an acquaintance at the train station and being introduced to her daughter was too much to take at this early hour, but I have known enough academics lacking in social skills that I found nothing strange in this. His eyes were striking: a luminous light brown, like caramel. “You are Rachel?”
“I’ve told you about her!”
“I’m sure you have, and will. But this is my train. I must go. Nice to meet you, Professor! Lily, don’t do anything Jesus wouldn’t do.” This was an old admonition between us, the circumstances of the silly joke that birthed it lost in the mists of time. We hugged again, tighter.
“Goodbye, my darling, good luck!”
And I hurried onto the train, our opportunity to cry at parting lost, probably just as well, though
I teared up as the train pulled away, from the figure of my tiny white-haired mother waving energetically, and the taller form of Professor Mortlake, arms at his sides, a dazed expression on his face.
“I think she is pregnant,” Liam said. “And that’s why she was booted off.”
It was night, back at the Institute. The announcement had been made – brief and cryptic; contrary to what Dr. Hernandez had implied, nothing had been explained – and Angelica had left, was gone by the time I returned from Cornwall. Edmund and Liam and I were having dinner on the rooftop terrace of the Institute cafeteria, amid the bamboo grove, Greater London a vast glow to the northeast. We were still in costume, but decidedly out of character – it was the shock, I think, of our fourth being gone. However little affection Angelica inspired in me, we had spent a lot of time together. It felt strange and lopsided, to be here without her.
At night, the atmosphere of the cafeteria changes. There is less choice of food but it is better; the wine and beer come out, and you can sit on the terrace and order by touchscreen instead of going through the line with a tray. Red wine for Edmund and Liam, white for me; an array of tapas, since the theme of the week was Spain. I thought the faux jambon Serrano excellent, and had said so, which had elicited a laugh from Liam.
“You like it better than the regular kind?”
“Of course!”
We had been eating meat as part of Preparation, to desensitize ourselves for 1815, when we would have to eat it all the time if we did not want to stand out or go hungry. I found it horrible, yet fascinating: people had eaten flesh for millennia, finding nothing to reproach themselves for in the suffering of innocent animals! To be sure, one could buy meat – as the Institute did, for us – but it was a discreditable vice, worse than smoking, heavily taxed. Carnivores met in secret, gorging themselves on flesh in private establishments that catered to their peculiar craving.
“I’ve grown rather fond of the meat, myself,” he said.
I could have lived without knowing this about Liam. After months of careful neutrality, he seemed different tonight, edgy, almost eager to offend, even before the offhand remark about pregnancy, which had caused Edmund and me to look at each other, open-mouthed. Finally, Edmund gave me a little shrug. I wished again that he was going to 1815 with me.
“Why would you think that?” I asked Liam, unwilling to encourage him to enlarge on the topic, but also unwilling to give implicit assent. “What would possibly make you think an astute, ambitious person like Angelica would be derailed from a thing that she has long wanted to do and prepared for, which will make her career – by something like that — it’s insane!”
“I must agree with Rachel there,” Edmund said.
“It does seem mystifying,” Liam agreed. He leaned back and put his fingertips together, glancing upward as if the answer were somewhere above us, in the bamboo, or the light-polluted night sky.
“Unless, perhaps, the father were someone so important, so influential, that she felt it would be better for her career to hang onto this foetus than go on the Jane Austen Project?”
“With all due respect, Liam, that makes no sense. Do you truly think we women go around looking for influential men to have sex with, so we can subsequently have their babies and… and blackmail them? If that’s what you are implying?”
“That’s Darwin for you, at least up until the blackmail part,” Liam said. At the look I gave him, he went on: “All right, all women don’t — I am sure you don’t, for example.” As I continued to glare at him, he added, “Maybe many women don’t — but you have to admit, she is one of a kind.”
Since I did have to admit that, I was silenced for a moment.
“Who do you think the father is, then, in this, er, scenario?” Edmund said, the same thing I had been about to ask.
“I have my suspicions, but I am too much of a gentleman-in-training to name anyone.”
I wished I were not the only female at the table. There were things I would have felt freer observing if there had been another woman, even Angelica, present: like, how could anyone have sex in the confined conditions of the Institute without everyone else soon knowing? We lived in such proximity, in such an unvarying routine, and with so little free time that it was no place for romance, at least, to bloom unnoticed. This seemed obvious, but I felt awkward saying it. Maybe everyone had been having sex here but me?
A clandestine affair – no, on further thought, I had to allow it to be possible, at least in theory. There were winding corridors, rooms empty at night, out-of-the way corners. The Project team members lived at the Institute for the duration of Preparation, as did support staff; the scientists did off
and on; there were also various Board members and dignitaries passing through.
And from which of these categories of people did Liam think came the father of Angelica’s presumed child? It was absurd, of course; he was proposing this notion for some reason of his own; he could not actually believe it.
Maybe he had been having an affair with Angelica himself, that he spoke with such assurance on the subject? No, but that was madness.
“But not too much of a gentleman to impugn Angelica’s honor,” I said at last, and realized too late how silly I sounded, suddenly affecting 1815 mannerisms in the middle of a conversation that had been so free of them. Edmund and Liam both started laughing, and then I did, too.
“All right, it was just a theory then,” Liam said, and gave me a little smile I was not sure how to interpret. “A person can have a theory.”
“I will grant you, her departure is so inexplicable, so mysterious, that one is tempted to look for an equally improbable reason to explain it.” I felt I could concede that much at least. And now that I had started talking 1815, I felt safer keeping on with it. It seemed to put a chilly, formal distance between us — a good thing. “But I can assure you, it is not — that.”
Our glances locked for a moment. I did not want to be the one to look away, but finally I was. The specter of the absent Angelica seemed to hover between us; for a moment I missed her. She must have been keeping Liam in check somehow; how was I otherwise to understand the change in his manner? What restraint did he feel free from, now that she was gone?
I thought about mentioning, but did not, that Angelica, like me, had been implanted with long-acting contraception as part of preparation for travel to 1815, just as we had been vaccinated against everything anyone could think of: part of an array of sensible precautions against the hazards of travelling to the past, which, for women, had to include the specter of rape, and pregnancy with its many attendant hazards.
Consensual sex, of course, was the elephant in the room; intercourse out of wedlock in 1815 could lead to many social and emotional complications; officially, it was not recommended. But not forbidden; how could it be? We were all grown-ups, after all. Pregnancy was the real danger.
“Whatever happened, we must wish Angelica the best, and congratulate Rachel,” Edmund said. He raised his glass in my direction. “I wish you both the smoothest of journeys.”
“Thank you, Edmund. I am sorry – I am sorry we cannot all go.” This seemed close enough to the truth.
He smiled. “May I say, I am not. What Angelica was saying to you in the elevator yesterday morning – of course, she said it only to provoke you, in that way she always had — but if she had said it to me, it would be only the simple truth. I have loved this year and a half. I will be immensely a better teacher for it. But I will be very happy to wake up at home, in my own bed, in my own life.”
Silence followed this remark, as Liam and I looked at each other at the same moment.
“That is fortunate,” I finally managed to say. “That events coincide so closely with your wishes, that is lucky indeed.”
I felt I had not been seeing things very clearly up until now. How could Edmund endure all this and not want to go to 1815? Why had I assumed that no one else had noticed Angelica’s hostility to me, simply because no had ever spoken of it?
Perhaps seeing something in my face, now Edmund asked me, confidingly, as one might ask a child: “But you are glad to go, surely. You are not frightened, are you?”
“Perhaps I am frightened,” I surprised myself by saying.
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Liam said. “You seem to me very courageous.”
“Do I? Why?”
“I think it was that story you told us about when you were living in Mongolia, about learning to ride a horse. Without a saddle.”
“I was 25! I thought I was immortal. It wasn’t courage. It was sheer stupidity.”
“You say it like they are two different things.”
“To me they are. Courage is about taking intelligent, reasonable risks.”
“That is a difference between us, then.”
“So what is courage to you?”
“Don’t make me make sweeping statements. But your intelligent, reasonable risk requires no special bravery at all, in my mind.” He looked at Edmund, as though for help.
“Don’t look at me — I have already avowed myself a coward for being happy about going back to Leeds. I have nothing to offer on this subject.”
“And so how would you view this trip back to 1815 in the spectrum of intelligent, reasonable risks?” I asked Liam.
He began to laugh. I had never heard him laugh so unrestrainedly. Finally he said: “I view it with sheer, heart-stopping terror.”
“So why are you going?”
“Are you mad? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“What are you afraid of then, in 1815?”
He laughed again. “What have you got?”
I did not answer. His levity had begun to unsettle me; it was if he knew some joke I was not in on,
was vibrating to some frequency I could not hear. Edmund was just looking at us quietly, as though watching a tennis match. I felt the rudeness of this conversation that seemed to exclude him, so I made a point of looking at him as I said: “I’ve had so little time to get used to the idea that I am going, instead of envying those who were. I thought I would be thrilled. I didn’t expect to be afraid. But I am.”
“Oh, having more time to know wouldn’t make it any easier,” Liam said. “You can put your mind to rest on that point.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“What are you afraid of then?” I asked. “Of failing? Of dying?”
“Those are the obvious ones.”
“Sorry if I am being obvious,” I said, my tone sounding more petulant than I had intended.
He laughed again, annoying me further. “You know what the oddest thing about it is – how we all of us always secretly feel superior to the dead. Well, that little advantage will be gone, won’t it? We will be right back there with them. In the trenches. Succumbing to malaria and gout and fuck-all. Carriage accidents. Lead poisoning.”
“I hope not! Not if I can help it. But what do you mean, about feeling superior to the dead?”
“You don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“Of course you do. You’ve surely stood in a graveyard, feeling smug. They are down there, and you are standing in the sun. As if you somehow were better, wiser — instead of simply born a little later.”
I stared at him. “How does the rhyme go?” he went on. “Remember me as you pass by; as you are now, so once was I.”
“I have never once stood in a graveyard feeling smug.”
“Liar! How do you feel, then, when you stand in a graveyard?”
“Sad, sometimes? Respectful?”
“Help me out here, Edmund,” Liam said. “Have you never felt superior to the dead?”
Edmund blinked at us. “I have not, but unlike Rachel, I understand exactly what you mean. As young people feel superior to old ones, and vice versa; as women imagine themselves superior to men, and the reverse; as we English feel incredibly lucky to be English. It is the human condition to think whatever state you are in is the best and the most enviable. And so we imagine that we not only luckier to be alive, but that the dead are fundamentally different from us. But of course, they are not. It’s only a matter of time.”
His words seemed to cast a general chill around the table. We looked at one another uneasily, and again I regretted Angelica was gone. She would have stopped this conversation, well before it had reached this point.
“On that note,” Liam said, serious suddenly.
“Yes,” Edmund said. “I think it’s time to turn in, don’t you? It’s nearly midnight.”
They stood up at the same moment; I was a beat later. We walked to the elevator bank in what seemed to me guilty silence, as we if had somehow said too much. My living quarters being a floor above theirs, I got off the elevator first, with an exchange of solemn, period-authentic bows and earnest good-nights. I went to bed and could not fall asleep for a long time, despite, or perhaps because of, knowing that I had to get up early for an outing to the Remote Site, where we would have our last horsemanship class. Which seemed ridiculous, on the last full day before Departure – if we had not mastered riding by now, one more lesson was not going to make the difference. But in fact, we were all quite comfortable on horseback; I had unlearned my bad Mongolia habits and could now ride sidesaddle. Maybe they just wanted to keep us busy, without time to be nervous. I laughed silently at this idea, for I was always able to combine being nervous with whatever else I might have to do, and then found myself growing sleepy at last, picturing the view of the sea from my mother’s living room.
Wednesday afternoon, in the biggest meeting room of all, somewhere deep in the depths of the Institute, there was a long steel table, a screen on the wall, and little else. Everyone connected with the Project was there: the Institute board, the project team leaders, and Edmund, who sat away from the table, in a chair pushed against the wall, wearing his usual look of calm attentiveness.
The Chairman, who wore exquisite suits and typically said very little, opened with some remarks about the importance of Jane Austen to modern civilization and, by extension, the importance of this Project to humanity, and the humanities. He spoke in such banalities that it was hard to focus, though I tried. He talked about how the development of time travel had enabled people to answer questions once thought unanswerable, and about the Institute’s unswerving commitment to the principle of noninterference. He said he looked forward to reading the lost letters to Cassandra Austen, which he confidently expected would cast the entire field of Austenalia in a new light, as well as to learning, finally, what the great writer really died of. He congratulated Liam and me on our excellent opportunity, and wished us a safe voyage and a safe return.
He gave the floor to Dr. Kimball.
Dr. Kimball described the recent checks and rechecks of the probability modeling system that confirmed, as forecast, tomorrow at exactly 11:43:23 a.m. would be the moment when the wormholes would align — that’s not how he put it, but I was losing myself in the fluency of his scientific language – and two human-size animals could safely travel to July 17, 1815, arriving on the outskirts of Leatherhead, Surrey. He held up the spectronanometer, a tiny device looking like a piece of jewelry, which I was, in fact, to wear around my neck. This, when in proximity, would amplify the vibrations put out by the portal marker – he held that up too, a little length of blue metal pipe shaped in a spiral at the top, a pointed tip at the bottom. This would mark the spot where we had come from, and would enable us to come back. We had only to stick the portal marker firmly into the ground, at exactly the point where we landed, and return to it on one of the Opportunities of Return. We had three within our expected lifespan: this was very fortunate, he explained, for some earlier teams had had only one. To underscore the importance of this fact, he took out an actual piece of paper – though this information was surely on our etablets, like everything else – and unfolded it with a rustle.
“February 8, 1816, at 5:14:12 p.m. December 18, 1816, at exactly 2 p.m. And Dec. 21, 1830, at 3:27:45 a.m.”
The last date sent a murmur through the room. Dr. Kimball looked up from his paper. “We do not expect that that one will be either necessary or desirable, of course. But it seemed worth mentioning, just in case.”
By 1830 the railroads were starting to transform the English landscape. What if our little portal marker had the misfortune to be in the path of the people laying track? But I would not worry about that. One of the two earlier Opportunities of Return would surely work; that was self-evident. All the same, the notion of an 1830 return, of somehow spending 15 years of my life in the early 19th century, cast a little frisson of doubt that persisted through the rest of the presentations for me, a lingering chill.
I glanced at Liam, who had arrived at the last moment and seated himself next to me, the only empty seat. As far as I could tell from profile view, his face was empty of all expression.
Dr. Hernandez went next. He addressed the medical risks we faced in 1815 — a long list, none of it news to me – and what had been done to reduce our chances of succumbing to them. He talked about Jane Austen, the symptoms she had presented with before her death at 41, and theories about what had caused it. About steps the medical part of the team – that would be me – would take to reach a more accurate diagnosis.
Dr. Wu spoke next. He outlined how money worked in 1815, and what we would be taking with us: the staggering sum of £75,000, divided between Liam and I, and packed onto our bodies, in my case in a sort of flexible money belt of the thinnest fiber (he held it up): mostly letters of credit, carefully forged by a team of experts and representing a wide variety of banks, in England and abroad. We would have some bank notes and coins but not too many. “Bulk.”
This led to a question from one of the board members. “Isn’t it true that time travelers are not allowed to carry anything?”
“I will take that question, if I can,” Dr. Hernandez said.
“Please do,” Dr. Wu said, sitting down with a look of relief.
“This is a myth,” Dr. Hernandez said. “It arose after a member of the Chaucer team tried to carry too many supplies, to disastrous effect.”
“So what will they carry, then?” another Board member asked.
“The clothes they stand in. The money. The spectronanometer, the portal marker – am I forgetting anything?”
“I believe you said we could take some antibiotics – strictly for personal use,” I said.
Everyone looked at me in surprise. The guinea pig had spoken! Uncharacteristically, I blushed.
“A small amount, yes, of course,” Dr. Hernandez said, and looked around the room as if waiting for another question. None came. He sat back down.
“Are you done, then, Dr. Wu?” the Chairman asked.
“Quite!” Dr. Wu bleated.
“Then, Dr. Porter, if you please….”
Dr. Porter got up. His title was Director, yet he never made pronouncements or gave orders; he seemed to operate from the sidelines, yet everyone looked to him. His lectures to us had all been about English society and its customs, so I had guessed he was a social historian of some kind, yet it was curious that, after all this time, I did not know for sure. As he began speaking, he looked at Liam and me.
“The Jane Austen Project is the 10th mission for the Institute, but in many ways it represents a first. This is the first time we have expected our travelers to interact so closely with their target subjects as you. It is heady responsibility that we task you with, Liam and — Rachel. But we know you are more than capable of accomplishing the mission with grace and a minimum of interference, and we look forward to seeing you again, six months or two years from now, bearing the fruit of your labors. In 1815 you will be tested as never before, and it will be a test not only for you personally but for the preparation and historical accuracy of the Project Team’s work. I am fully confident that both you and it are ready for the challenge.”
A pause. Liam and I exchanged a glance.
“I wish the best to, as I may now call you, the names you must get accustomed to: William and Caroline Ravenswood. For the benefit of the Board members who may be unfamiliar with the particulars, I can briefly summarize the fictional biography of our intrepid time travellers. You are brother and sister, until recently in possession of an extensive property in Jamaica that you, William, came into on the occasion of your father’s recent death. The untimely predecease of an older brother meant that William, though he trained as a physician, found himself a plantation owner.” A pause, as Dr. Porter glanced down at his etablet. “But you are morally repelled by slavery, by the inhumane practices that have made your wealth possible, and therefore you have freed your slaves and sent them to the free colony of Sierra Leone, sold the estate and sailed to England, your fortune reduced but not gone, to take up a quiet life in England as a physician and the sister of a physician, who will keep house for him. Being — and this is unusual, but not unheard of, and for our purposes obviously necessary – that you were brought up in Jamaica, you do not, of course, have a very large circle of friends or acquaintances in England. In fact, you know not a soul.” Another pause. “We have provided you with another forgery, a letter that, when you judge the time is right, you will copy out and send to Henry Austen, Jane Austen’s dearest brother and as of mid-1815 still a banker in the West End of London, introducing yourselves to him on the strength of your acquaintance with the Freeman and Hampson families of Jamaica.”
He paused again, this time looking around as if waiting for a question, but none came, and he went on: “These were wealthy landowners related to Henry and Jane Austen via the paternal grandmother. Though that grandmother, Rebecca Austen nee Hampson, died long before the birth of her grandchildren, this connection would be known to them, and indeed, a member of that family was the godfather to Jane’s youngest brother, Charles. Therefore, it is hoped that this connection – as well as William Ravenswood’s evident wealth — will interest the gregarious, socially ambitious banker Henry to take up the acquaintance. After this,” he leaned over his etablet and glanced at Liam and I –“it is up to you. To win him over, to forge a deeper acquaintance that will lead to your meeting his sister, and eventually in travelling to Chawton, Hampshire, to safeguard for posterity those letters from Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra, that we know were consigned to the flames by Cassandra, shortly before her own death in 1845. As well, of course, to observe Jane Austen’s illness up close and to finally answer the crucial question of what she died of.” Another pause.
“You are highly trained and brilliantly qualified for this mission, so there is no need to wish you the best of luck, but I will do so anyway, along with my best wishes for a safe and informative journey.”
He began to clap, and the rest took it up. At the urging of the Chairman, Liam and I stood up, and the clapping grew louder. I found my eyes on Edmund, who smiled at me.
