The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

MATERIALIZING WAS FAR more startling than any practice session we’d attempted in the ODEC, chiefly because not only was I (as usual) extremely disoriented and confused, but I landed completely naked. Outside.

My balance wobbly, I felt warm grass and earth under my feet, and then collapsed at once sideways so that the smell of moist, sun-warmed soil filled my nostrils. I spent a few moments just breathing. Consciousness—the here-and-now of the human mind—is linked to the body’s surroundings by a thousand strands, most of which we’re never aware of until all of them are severed. The modern analogy would be to what happens when an errant backhoe slices through a fat underground cable, in an instant cutting off countless phone calls and Internet connections. One’s senses are always tracking sights, sounds, smells, and sensations. When a witch Sends you, all of those are interrupted, and your mind doesn’t know what to do with itself until it has knit itself into its new surroundings. It takes a minute.

Sun, dappled by the branches of a tree, warmed my left side, as my right side felt the bumps of grass and earth, scattered twigs, knotty roots. As my consciousness adjusted to the new environment, I noticed an absence of the constant ambient noise of modern civilization. In its place was tremendous birdsong and the buzz of insects.

A whizzing noise droned over me, barely overhead, like a huge insect, and terminated in a thunk. I looked over to see an arrow that had just embedded itself in the protruding root of a huge tree. Its fletchings of grey feathers were just a vibrating blur. It would have hit me if I hadn’t toppled over.

Immediately the hazy sun was blocked by a tall figure looming over me. Naked, dizzy, and unarmed, I could not protect myself from him. Erszebet had just sent me to my death as surely as she’d sent General Schneider. What fools we’d been to think otherwise! He stepped directly over me, standing astride me, as if I were not there, his long robes covering my naked middle. A minister? A chieftain?

But the figure shouted in a woman’s voice, deep and stern: “Samuel! Hunting is not for rabbits, you must trap them. We have told you so already. Save your arrows for the deer and do not shoot them so close to my house.” A native English speaker, with a lilt almost Appalachian or Irish. A distant voice, a boy’s, plaintive, giving her some back-sass.

“Samuel, you saw no such thing, it is your devilish fancy getting the better of you again. You are disobedient. Go in to your mother.” A pause. “Go in to your mother, I say. You may fetch your arrow back later. It is easy to find—in the root of the tree.” And then, a whisper in my direction: “Do not move until I tell you to.” And back up: “Samuel! Now!”

A long pause, as I began to collect my wits. Massachusetts Bay Colony. August 1640. The village of Muddy River, someday to be more attractively renamed Brookline. Yes, it was coming into focus now.

Finally, the woman stepped back from me, and I could see her clearly. She was a Puritan, in a fitted dark blue top and long skirt, and a simple white cap. A large white collar covered her throat and shoulders. I had expected her to look like this, and yet seeing it was dizzying. She was not wearing a costume, she was simply wearing her clothes. I was here. It was happening.

I would judge her to be about forty years of age, but I knew her from our research to be closer to thirty. She gave me a critical look. “Why have you come?” she demanded. “This is no place for us. How thoughtless of you, to appear where anyone may see you or harm you. That arrow would hit you another time. And the boy saw you. You have made me a liar to say he didn’t. If he calls us out, we’ll both be hanged.”

“I . . . I’m sorry, Goody Fitch, I . . .”

“Stay down,” she said, completely unsurprised that I called her by name. “I will get something to cover you.” She turned and walked out of my view.

I raised my head a little. The silence and birdsong continued their counterpoint, and in the distance now I could hear, and smell, a river. The still air had the clinging, heavy humidity of high summer. I was a stone’s throw from a small wattle-and-daub house with a thatched roof, a small door, but no windows on the back wall. A hundred paces away in either direction, barely in view, were similar dwellings. The land had mostly been cleared, with big axe-scarred tree stumps still protruding from tilled ground here and there, but a few huge old trees, too much effort to chop down, remained scattered about. I was beneath one such, a sugar maple.

Behind the house was a fine, verdant kitchen garden, and beyond that, a forest, densely leafed, mostly oak, some pine. The boy whom Goody Fitch had scolded had been to the right of me—to the south, I realized, superimposing the map of Muddy River over what I could see. That meant it was the Griggs family. Samuel Griggs . . . the name was not familiar, but I hadn’t memorized the whole village, just enough that I could passably seem to be familiar with it. Perhaps he would die before he reached maturity.

It was a settlement of fewer than two hundred souls, so of course I could not convince anyone that I belonged here. But these lots were large—a dozen acres or more—and so it should have been easy to arrive unnoticed. That had been the intention: I was to arrive on the property of someone we believed to be a witch, out of sight of prying eyes. A fine scheme if there were no complications.

Dear reader: there are always complications. Every fucking time.

Goody Fitch returned with a thin dun-colored woolen blanket and offered it down to me. “Come inside quickly,” she said. “We are about the same size, I will clothe you. And then you must leave quickly in case Goody Griggs comes here, set on by her son.” A pause, as I gathered the blanket around my shoulders and carefully got to my feet. She did not offer a hand to assist, just stood watching me, evaluating. “But before you go, you will tell me why you are here.”

“I’m here on an—”

Her eyes flicked sideways, noticing some distant movement. “Inside.”

Her caution seemed extreme; we were in the middle of the wilderness. But I pursed my lips closed to reassure her and followed her around the house, past an axe resting on a pile of recently split firewood. Rosemary bushes grew to either side of the door, flanked by chamomile plants. A remarkable coincidence: Rebecca East-Oda’s cellar hatchway was framed by the same set of plants.

The atmosphere in the house was far more pleasant than I’d expected. The floor was pounded dirt, and therefore both cool and cooling. There were glowing coals on the hearth but the room was not hot, as the southward-facing door stood open. Two windows—one east, one west—were unglazed, so a very feeble breeze could move through the space. Beside the hearth was an open doorway into a back room, where I saw beds.

This main room was uncluttered and unadorned, every item in it neat and practical and made of wood: two small benches, a stool, one central table and another along the wall; two chests.

“Sit,” said Goody Fitch, gesturing toward the stool. She disappeared into the back room and returned a brief moment later with clothes draped over one arm: a sleeveless white linen smock, a reddish skirt and matching waistcoat, a simple decorative collar, and a long apron (somewhat stained). In her other hand, she held a linen cap, a small drawstring bag, and a belt.

“Of course I have no extra stays,” she said. This I knew to be the equivalent of a corset. “This is the best I can manage for you. My extra petticoats are wrapped away, so you must do without them, or stockings. I have an extra set of boots, tattered but useable. They are by the door.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking the clothes she offered. I began to put on the smock. “So you know, I am not a witch. I was sent here by a witch to fulfill a task. Would you consider helping me?”

She tch’d without responding directly, making it clear this was an imposition. “Are you hungry?” she asked, as if to avoid the topic of magic. “Thirsty? I have ale, and there is also some meal I can cook. I cannot give you any wheat as my husband will notice the absence, but he does not pay as much attention to the maize.”

“The maize is more plentiful and therefore less dear,” I said deliberately, fastening the smock closed at the neck.

“Yes.” She crossed her arms and stared at me. “Are you from elsewhere in the colony, that you know that?”

“No. You are . . . historical to me,” I said. She nodded, understanding. “Let me tell you my errand?”

“I’ll not stop you from speaking,” she said, going to a barrel in the corner and taking off the wooden lid, then scooping out cornmeal and putting it into an iron pot. “But do not assume I’ll help you. ’Tis impossible to do magic safely here. These halfwits are all obsessed with Satan.” She poured a frothy liquid into the pot from a pewter pitcher, and then attached the pot to an iron arm that hung over the hearth coals. She raked the coals and blew on them a little. “This will take some time,” she said. “Give you a chance to explain yourself.”

It would have been extremely rude for me to say so, but I was in no hurry to be fed. My digestion was a mess. Our research into the fate of the late General Schneider had uncovered evidence of an epidemic that had started in the village of Nagybörzsöny at the same time as his brief stay there. It was some sort of bowel complaint that had taken a number of lives before burning itself out. The village’s isolation had prevented it from spreading farther, and the surviving locals had, of course, attributed it to witchcraft. But the lesson to us was obvious: time travelers could infect historical communities with diseases to which they had no immunity, and vice versa. So I’d been given every vaccination and antiviral drug known to modern science before stepping into the ODEC, to protect myself. And to protect the people of Muddy River, I’d taken a course of antibiotics that had killed everything in my gut, and scrubbed with disinfectant immediately before the mission. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I ate Goody Fitch’s gruel.

I began to tie the skirt at my waist, and opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything she spoke again, and as she did so, also came to fuss over my skirt.

“They’ve been mad with witch-hunt zeal because ’38 nearly killed us all,” she said. “Muddy River had just been chartered, we had all barely begun to build our homes and clear our gardens, and we were almost destroyed before we could take root. We had to plant the corn twice because it rotted in the frozen ground, then the spring was too wet, the summer too hot, and full of tempests, then it rained all autumn until October, when the snow came and never left. Many other settlements along the Charles did not survive the year. They attributed Mother Nature’s handiwork to witchcraft, and the survival of the village to the Lord’s Grace. I saved the village, but they do not know it, and they may never know it. If they even suspected, they would not thank me, they would kill me for witchcraft because they believe witchcraft is the work of the devil. Stupid folk.” She tied the drawstring sharply tight around my waist. “That was the very year they excommunicated Anne Hutchinson, one of the best among them. And then brought in a slave-ship. And they call themselves Christians. Thick-waisted you are, for your size,” she said.

“I did not grow up wearing stays. No women of my time did.”

She made a bemused sound, and then continued her monologue as she helped me into the waistcoat. “Stab themselves in the foot. I cannot imagine this place will ever amount to anything.”

“Why did you come, then?” I asked.

“I wanted to meet new witches,” she said. “I am from a family of chroniclers and sages, I have always been encouraged to learn as much as possible. I was curious to compare information with the witches here—I assumed there must be some. My husband was never a Puritan but he favored their thinking and was anxious to be gone from England for his own reasons. So we sailed to Boston. Later we took the first chance to settle away from the peninsula. I had great hopes. But the settlers are all such sanctimonious asses that none of the native witches will speak to me about witchcraft, or anything else. They fear I will try to lead them away from their own gods and beliefs, that is how relentless and irritating these Puritans are. There are so many plants here we don’t have back home, and I fain would learn them, but I find nobody who can teach me.”

That was my in. “Like partridge-berry?” I said as casually as possible. “Or perhaps you still call it squaw-vine?”

She stopped suddenly as she was buttoning the waistcoat, and then resumed. “How do you know about that?” she asked. “That is the very plant I am most keen to understand. It seems to me it requires magic to find out all its possibilities.”

“And cranberries,” I added, “but maybe those are easier to understand.”

“Cranberries are magnificent,” she agreed. “And the elderflower, which I know from its cousin in England. But the squaw-vine is something else again.”

“It grows near pine trees,” I said. “Do you know that much as yet?” She nodded cautiously, looking at me with new interest. Thank you, Rebecca, I thought. Well done.

“I know a lot about it,” I continued, in an offering tone. “How and when best to harvest it, what parts of the plant are most useful—I know a great deal, although not of course what can only be known through magic, since I’m not a witch. But I can help you. If you’ll help me.”

She was tempted by this offer, I could tell, but remained uncertain. “Do you understand the danger you are putting both of us in?” she asked.

“I also know some interesting things about skullcap,” I added. “And bee-balm.”

She shook her head. “I know them already. They haven’t the scent of the squaw-vine. They’re just medicinal, not magic. The squaw-vine calls to me. But in a language I do not speak.”

“We’ll fix that,” I said. “Help me with my errand, and when I return, I’ll tell you everything I know. And then you’ll send me back to where I came from.”

A pause. “I will,” said Goody Fitch. “What are you called?”

“Melisande,” I said. “I am unmarried.”

“I am Goody Fitch,” she said. “My Christian name is Mary.”

“I know,” I said, then briefly told her my errand: that I must obtain a copy of the newly published Bay Psalm Book, coop it safely into a barrel to protect it from the elements, and then bury it in a very precise spot in a field to the northwest of the palisaded village of Cambridge.

Instead of questioning why I needed to have the book, or to bury it, she simply asked, “Why there, particularly?”

I considered how fully to answer. “That is where a descendant of yours will eventually live,” I said. “Someone I know in my time. They need a copy of the book. If I do not . . . reserve one for them now, they will never be able to get one.”

To my surprise, she responded to this news with an outburst of laughter. “How preposterous to imagine civilization ever flourishing in such a backwater!” she said. “And how disappointing to think my own begotten will not have the sense to get out of such a place!”

I bristled on behalf of my adopted city. “Cambridge becomes one of the greatest places of learning in the world,” I said—rashly, for it is always ill-advised to speak of future times. “It easily rivals, arguably outshines, its British namesake.”

“Bollocks,” she said, amused. “A terrified village with the greatest invention in the world—a printing press!—and all they do with it is publish religious nothings. The only school in the New World and what do they teach? Only religion. And only their religion.”

“Well, in fairness,” I said, “if it weren’t for their religion, none of this would exist right now. You wouldn’t be here.”

“I’d be in Virginia,” she agreed briskly. “Where the religion is mercantilism. It is a marginally preferable religion, although the Americans suffer more under it than they do under Christianity. Anyhow . . . we’ve finished dressing you, so let’s not tarry. Tell me directly what you need from me.”

“Most of all, I need you to send me back to where I came from when I return here,” I said. “And if you can point me the way to Cambridge, I’d be grateful.”

“Easily done. You’ll need toll for the ferry,” she said, and went to one of the chests against the wall. There was a small locked box sitting atop it, about the size of a breadbox; she opened this with a key that she wore around her neck on a thin leather strap. From the box, she removed two tiny spheres, one a lead musket ball, the other larger, much lighter in color and weight, and highly polished. “Each of these will suffice for the ferry toll in one direction. I would give you some commodity money, but my husband keeps track of that and he would notice the absence of a cabbage head.”

“Have you a shovel I might borrow?”

She thought a moment. “Yes. But ’tis a strange thing to meet a young woman roving the land by herself, stranger yet if she is brandishing a shovel. Say you are my cousin newly arrived from Shropshire and you are returning it to Goodman Porter in Watertown, you will need to take that road anyhow. There is none in Cambridge know me enough to ask questions that would get you into trouble. I think there be a cooper there, very near the bookseller’s shop. I can give you nothing to buy his services, though, nor any way to get the book.”

“I don’t suppose I could ask you to assist me magically?”

“You can ask whatever you wish, but I will not risk it. I would have in England, if I felt your cause was just. Not here. Still, I wish you luck. You must be desperate in your cause if it forces you to come here. Fortify yourself with the maize-meal and then be off.”

AS I ATE the tasteless, dry, crappy meal, which would make Cream of Wheat seem like a gourmet dessert, I reviewed what was to happen next. Which meant reviewing what had happened previously—in the distant future, I mean.

The day after I’d accepted Tristan’s offer, just after sunrise, the whole crew had come back together at Hanscom Field, an Air Force base–cum–executive jet terminal northwest of Boston. For me, air travel had always meant Logan Airport. But it turns out that the kind of people who fly around in private jets fly through Hanscom Field—as do air travelers from the parallel universe of the military. I, Tristan, Erszebet, Oda-sensei, and even, to my amazement, Rebecca piled onto a plane that fit somewhere in the Venn diagram crossover between those two worlds, being a small eight-seater jet with military markings. Before we’d even had time to explore the plane’s comforts, we were landing at Reagan National Airport across the river from Washington, DC. En route Tristan had monopolized the plane’s washroom for a little while and changed into his Army uniform—the first time I had seen him so attired. It was the dress uniform with necktie and all kinds of little badges and insignia that might as well have been a secret code to me. He looked, if I may say it, swashbuckling, in a repressed sort of way.

I had been assuming a government van would pick us up at the airport, but instead Tristan led us across the skybridge to the Metro station and dealt out keycards. “Faster than fighting traffic—it’s only three stops up the line!” he explained. We got on the next northbound train, passed through Crystal City a few minutes later, and shortly pulled into the Trapezoid City stop. I picked up my bag and got ready to detrain, but Tristan caught my eye and shook his head. “Trapezoid City is a shopping mall, Stokes—not the real deal. If we have time, we can go there when we’re done!”

Erszebet was bemused by the Metro, and the Metro was fascinated by her. To date, we hadn’t been out together much in public. So I’d had few opportunities to see how random strangers reacted to her looks. Reader, I don’t think it would be boastful for me to say that I am not a bad-looking woman. I get my share of looks and compliments. But sitting near Erszebet on a subway train was enough to make me believe that invisibility potions were a real thing and that she had slipped one into my coffee.

The next station was called simply TRAPEZOID, but I could have guessed as much from the fact that more than half the people getting on and off the train were dressed in military uniforms of one service or another. We all followed Tristan up the escalators to a bus terminal complex aboveground, and from there to a huge, modern security checkpoint—a separate facility in its own right, built far enough from the subdued limestone façade of the Trapezoid proper to provide a security buffer. We’d arrived during the morning rush, and so ended up standing in line for a few minutes—long enough for me to stare across the parking lots at the front of the famous building, and to develop a sense of this-can’t-be-happening unreality every bit as strong as anything associated with the ODEC. As the headquarters of the American military and presumed ground zero for any hostile military strike, the Trapezoid had, for me, always been more mythic than real. Like Mount Olympus or the River Styx, it was a thing alluded to in books and movies, or used in synecdoche to mean the American military as a whole. The terrorists had targeted it on 9/11, and I could see part of the memorial that had been built on the side where the plane had crashed into it. In a weird way, it was almost a letdown to see that it really existed and that it was, at the end of the day, just another wartime office building with windows and doors like any other.

Lacking normal credentials such as a birth certificate, Erszebet had to be whisked through a special lane by aides who had come down to meet us. Tristan stayed with her. The rest of us presented our Massachusetts driver’s licenses and got scanned for concealed weapons. Erszebet’s idiosyncratic 1950s-era wardrobe left very few places where she could have hid anything. I suppose they x-rayed her clutch. A lot of walking ensued. Erszebet in her heels and Frank Oda with the weight of his years were not particularly fast walkers, so we dawdled and shuffled down endless corridors in the bowels of the Trapezoid until we came to an elevator that took us up to a nicer-than-normal office zone. “The Acute Angle,” Tristan explained, “the nice one, with the view over the river.”

Anywhere else they’d have called it what it was: a corner office suite on the top floor. It was nice, old-school, paneled in wood, hung with pictures of battleships from the Age of Sail, Washington at Valley Forge, and the like. After passing through a couple of layers of receptionists and aides, and surrendering our electronic devices, we were ushered into a conference room, invited to take seats, and plied with ice water. Erszebet insisted on water with no ice and gave us all a piece of her mind about the American obsession with putting ice cubes into everything.

We waited there for twenty minutes or so, which Tristan seemed to think was only mildly remarkable. Then another door—not the one we’d come through—was opened by an aide, and in walked a man in a civilian business suit. Even I, with very little taste in clothes, could tell that this was a fine suit indeed. “Dr. Rudge!” Tristan said. “Good to see you again!”

Rudge was trailed by a couple of younger civilian aides who quietly took seats along the wall of the room and opened up their laptops as the rest of us did introductions. “Oh, please, don’t get up,” he told us in the sort of mid-Atlantic accent that I associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and midcentury newsreel announcers. “I’m so sorry to be late, we were detained in the West Wing—everything’s running late there today. Dr. Stokes! Charmed! I’ve heard so much about you and I’m looking forward to talking about the Breton language at some point if we ever have time. Old family connection—long story. And you must be Mrs. East-Oda.”

And so on. Dr. Constantine Rudge was as immaculate in his manners and breeding as he was in his attire. In his early forties, he had the gravitas of an older man, but was styled younger, with somewhat longer hair than most men in the Trapezoid, and heavy, stylish eyeglasses that I thought of as European. His jovial confidence made me feel somehow as if I were missing something—was this guy really famous? Powerful? Important? Later I Googled him, to discover that he was classic Yale, Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright, City of London, and all that, but kept a low public profile. Rudge was the head of IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which like a lot of the intelligence world was a blend of civilian and military personnel. He’d been the boss of the late General Schneider. As Tristan had already explained, he would be an advisor—a “dotted line” on the org chart—to the newly re-founded and upgraded DODO.

Anyway, he got off on the right foot with Erszebet by kissing her hand—incidentally giving her a chance to admire his cuff links—and greeting her in what sounded like passable Hungarian. To my astonishment they actually conducted a short exchange in that most difficult of tongues before Rudge begged off, apologized for his butchering the beautiful Magyar language, and switched to High German. Catching my eye at one point, Rudge remarked, “Dr. Stokes will have noticed an Austrian accent. I lived in Vienna for some years in my twenties, working on a dissertation about interwar banking. It took me to Budapest frequently.” And yet somehow Rudge managed to say all of this with little eye rolls and shrugs that actually made it seem self-deprecating.

I didn’t much care, all I knew was that Erszebet clearly thought Rudge was the only person of any sophistication in the room, which meant that the rest of us didn’t have to expend energy trying to keep her happy. Tristan checked his watch a couple of times, once raising his eyebrows and saying to me, “Looks like we won’t have time to go shopping after all, Stokes!”

Finally General Frink showed up, preceded and followed by more aides, some civilians, others in uniforms of various services. He had a row of three stars on each lapel, which even I knew made him a very big deal. I wouldn’t need to Google this fellow. He was the Director of National Intelligence, reporting directly to the President. He was Rudge’s boss, and now Tristan’s. As he blew in, he was in full conversation with two members of his entourage, and scarcely seemed to notice that he had entered another room with a different set of humans in it. His crew formed a sort of football huddle around him for a minute and they held an acronym-studded conference that didn’t concern us. Then half of them speed-walked out of the room. Of those who remained, some took up seats along the wall. General Frink slammed his formidable arse down into a chair that had been pulled out for him by a junior officer. That seemed to be Tristan’s signal to sit back down—for he had exploded out of his chair when Frink had entered the room, and stood at attention waiting to be noticed.

A civilian aide skimmed a sheet of paper onto the table directly in front of General Frink. Frink reached into the breast pocket of his uniform, which was stiff with ribbons and decorations, and drew out a pair of reading glasses, put them on, and scanned the page for a minute before finally looking up and acknowledging our presence. “Yes,” he said, “Department of Diachronic Operations.” His eyes scanned the row of faces on our side of the table, and I suppose it was a credit to his powers of discipline that he lingered only briefly on Erszebet. The civilian whispered something in his ear, and I was pretty sure I heard the sibilant word “Asset,” which was the term that the late General Schneider had used to refer to Erszebet. Frink’s eyes went back to her for a moment and he nodded. He then thought silently for a while, and heaved a sigh.

“I am going so far out on a limb for you people,” he said, “that if I hadn’t seen even stranger things during my career in Intelligence I would shitcan this project in a heartbeat. But all the evidence points to this being real. Roger Blevins has vouched for it, and that means a lot to me.”

“Roger Blevins?” I blurted out.

A few moments of silence ensued. Everyone was startled—most of all me. I’m not a blurter in general. But hearing that name in this context could not have been more astonishing. Tristan kicked me under the table.

More whispering from the civilian aide: a buff-looking bro in his early thirties, with heavily gelled hair. “You’re Stokes,” Frink said. “Roger’s your mentor. At Harvard.”

This really did render me speechless, but Tristan kicked me again just to be sure. “General Frink, if I may, Dr. Stokes here is just a little surprised to hear Dr. Blevins’s name brought up, because she doesn’t know of his connection to the program. Operational security.”

“Ah, I see. Very good, Lyons. Ms. Stokes, the connection goes way back—Roger and I went to school together,” General Frink explained. “When we first began observing these historical anomalies, he—along with Dr. Rudge here—were part of the brain trust we brought together to seek explanations.”

I was thoroughly tongue-tied now, but the ice was broken as far as Frink was concerned. He pulled off his reading glasses and fidgeted with them as he went into a long mansplanation of what magic was and why the United States needed to avoid a “Magic Gap” with other nations.

“Excuse me,” Erszebet said sharply, as Frink began wandering into an explanation of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory that even I could sense was painfully cack-handed. “Have you taken up a day of my life and quite a lot of taxpayer money to bring me in your foul-smelling airplane, all the way here, to this room, where you do not have the courtesy of introducing yourself to me . . . just so you can inform me who I am, and why that is important to you? Is this what you have done here?”

It was the first time I’d ever been grateful for Erszebet’s . . . Erszebetness. Frink gave her a slightly offended look and tried to carry on his monologue, now aiming it exclusively at me, but she was having none of that.

“This is a yes-or-no question I’ve asked you,” she said, standing up and placing herself in front of me to intercept his gaze. “Are you incapable of answering yes or no?” She looked at Tristan, appalled. “Do not work for this man. This man is an imbecile.”

Within three minutes, she had berated Frink into a huffy submission, enough that he rose to his feet and gruffly shook hands with each of us. During this little outbreak of sociability, I also learned the name of the civilian aide-bro: Les Holgate, who went around and shook hands with the perky vigor of a man who had sat through one too many free webinars about the importance of networking.

Erszebet was unconvinced: Frink’s effort at politeness lacked the requisite enthusiasm, and Les Holgate overdid it. We all resumed our seats. Frink took the floor again, and explained to us about How Things Are Done In This Town, including brief introductions to the concepts of Belt Tightening and Fiscal Responsibility. This led to another brief vituperative interjection from Erszebet regarding taxpayer money being used to bring four people to him when wouldn’t it be cheaper for him to just hop aboard a civilian flight and take the T to Central Square, thus saving money that was better used for the collective good? I had not credited her with such socialist sensibilities before. Nor have I seen her express such sentiments since then, so perhaps she was merely being disagreeable for effect.

It was the kind of sermon that would only be delivered before bad news, and indeed Frink went on to explain that we would be given just enough seed money to figure out how to use magic to self-fund.

Erszebet, alarmed, put aside her ’tude to explain very plainly that there could be no changing water to wine or lead to gold—to say nothing of plutonium. She wanted it understood that magic could not be used that way in any era, or it would long ago have led to the self-destruction of the human race.

“I say, to heck with gold!” announced Les Holgate. “There’s something a lot more valuable than that: Microsoft stock. Why not go back in time to the 1980s and buy up some of that?”

Erszebet drew breath to burn Holgate to the ground, but was cut off by a few words in Hungarian from Dr. Rudge. “Miss Karpathy, if I may.” He turned his attention to Holgate. “Les, this is covered in the briefing documents. Maybe you didn’t get a chance to scan them. I know you’re more of a PowerPoint guy.” This was delivered in such a light tone that Holgate’s face didn’t start turning red until a few seconds later. “The Sending—the movement of the subject to a DTAP, or Destination Time and Place—is a magic-based process. As such, a DOer—a Diachronic Operative—can only be Sent to a place and time where magic works. Between 1851 and now, magic hasn’t worked anywhere. So the most recent DTAP we can Send people to is late July of 1851. The Microsoft gambit can’t work. And we can’t go back in time and kill Hitler either.”

Holgate hadn’t fully caught on to how deeply Dr. Rudge had just buried him, so he came back for another round. “Okay, well then, go back and invest in whale oil futures or something.”

“That is in essence what we propose to do, Les,” Tristan said. And he went on to explain the Bay Psalm Book gambit.

Some years earlier, a copy of this 1640 volume—the first book ever printed in North America—had been unearthed in a church basement, and sold for millions of dollars at auction. Tristan suggested we go back in time, find another copy, conceal it someplace where we could retrieve it in the present day, and put it up for sale. The operation would be relatively simple. It wouldn’t involve killing anyone, or any other heavy-handed intervention in history. It would be confined to the Boston area. And it would generate enough revenue to keep DODO afloat for the better part of a year.

General Frink liked this idea immensely. Dr. Rudge, acting in his advisory capacity, asked a couple of good questions about the money end of things, then nodded approval. Frink wound up the meeting briskly, and sent us all back to Cambridge to begin the research required for this escapade.

A few minutes later, having been reunited with our electronic devices, we were out-processing through the security checkpoint, and headed back down the escalators to the Metro stop. We even had time for a quick turn around the Trapezoid City shopping mall, where a young man in the food court approached Erszebet—fresh from raiding a high-end cosmetics boite—and asked her for her autograph. He had no idea who she was. He simply assumed that she was a movie star.

The Bay Psalm Book gambit had been news to the rest of us. But on the flight home, Rebecca became unexpectedly useful. I had considered her a reluctant soldier, signing on only because Frank wouldn’t do anything without her and she was too indulgent to deny him. But as we flew back, she volunteered a newfound suspicion that her accused ancestress from the Salem witch trials had, in fact, been a witch.

When we got back to Boston where she could get access to genealogical records, Rebecca then traced this unfortunate woman’s lineage back another half-century, to Muddy River, a settlement just inland from Boston. We could not, of course, know if Goody Fitch was a witch, even if we could be sure that her granddaughter Mary Estey had been. Erszebet was cavalier and vague about the hereditary nature of magic, but when pressed by Tristan to give it serious thought, said she supposed it was a matrilineal affair, although she knew plenty of instances of a woman receiving the ability through a paternal ancestress. Goody Fitch being Goody Estey’s maternal grandmother, we had a good chance—but no certainty—of success.

And for the burying site of the book, that too had been Rebecca’s call. As steward of the oldest house in the area, she was well versed in local history going back to the founding of Cambridge, when it was still the small, wooden-walled village that Goody Fitch had just mocked. Rebecca’s present-day backyard included a large boulder, the only unadulterated topographic detail for blocks in all directions. In the colonial era there was a creek running near the eastern side of it, but that bed would dry up in a year or two, when a mill was built on the Watertown Road and the creek was diverted to power it. We determined I would bury the book, in 1640, against the western side of this boulder, at a distance of my arm’s length and to the depth of my arm’s reach.

Rebecca and I then researched what I would need to do to “pass” as chronologically local—the manner of dress, of speech, of courtesy—while Tristan established how to best protect the book from the elements during its long rest. He determined that of the resources available at the time, a small watertight barrel filled with flour or dry sand for “packaging” was our best bet.

I consigned all we had learned to memory, and then prepared to be the first DOer (Diachronic Operative) going back to do the first Deed (or as we spelled it, DEDE—“Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect”) under the banner of the Department of Diachronic Operations.

HAVING FINISHED THE maize (which sat like a cannonball in my sterilized belly), I rose, and Goody Fitch beckoned me to follow her to the small barn that was a moment’s walk downwind from the house. As a few sheep and one sullen cow stared at us incuriously from the pen, she examined the row of neat farm tools and handed me a long-handled shovel with a pointy tip.

“My husband and son are out with the oxcart to check the fields, but Goodman Griggs is on his way to the ferry landing this hour,” she said. “I’ll ask him to convey you on the cart. It will save you an hour of walking.”

Goodman Griggs was dressed like he was right out of Central Casting, in dark doublet and breeches with a wide-brimmed felt hat and a barber’s bib of a collar. He was a farmer, as anyone in this settlement must be, and a bit grizzled. He seemed to do a double take when he saw me, before turning his head sharply away. For a moment I feared I had been detected as a poser, but he said nothing. He radiated the sort of pompous complacency that suggested fundamentalism, so I ran through all my memorized scriptural passages in case I needed to demonstrate my affected faith. But he was not one to speak. He nodded gruffly when I was presented to him, as if he did not approve of me but could not say no; he made no gesture to help me up into the cart, which was filled with barrels of corn and squash.

A seventeenth-century rustic cart is no BMW convertible. It is not even a carriage, for it has no springs, is purely utilitarian, and bumps one fiendishly with no regard for dignity or comfort. The ox that drew it was flatulent. Being grass-fed (not because it was environmentally correct but because grass was then the cheapest and easiest way to feed an ox in summer), its gas was less odorous than I’d expected, but still was nothing pleasant, and with the fine film of sweat that covered me, I was to feel the putrid scent molecules clinging to my skin all the rest of the day.

Shortly, we had come through the woods and arrived at the Charles. No clean-cut banks as I knew it, however: across the river was an enormous marsh, broader by half than the river itself. A narrow channel had been hacked and dredged through it so that the ferry could reach the landing. Beyond that, shimmering in the heat, I could see a palisade of vertical logs. This barrier, I assumed, was to protect the town’s most valuable commodity—four-year-old Harvard College—from marauding Indians. There had recently been a war between the Pequot and Mohegan tribes, won by the latter with help from the settlers. But now the Mohegans were quarreling with the Narragansetts. I had not educated myself as to where that feud would lead, lest I inadvertently say something too prescient for 1640. (I was pretty sure it didn’t turn out well for anyone, though.)

The ferry service was very new, and at present comprised just a dock on either bank plus a flat-bottomed boat, a raft with skeletal bulkheads, really. Standing beside it were two young rowers who looked like brothers. Despite the unflattering Puritan uniform, they had the agreeable build of a crew team, but I knew better than to stare, and averted my eyes.

“I do not know her, she came from Goody Fitch,” Goodman Griggs said to them in a grumpy tone as he pulled up the ox. The two younger ones gave me a quizzical look, then turned their attention to their work: the three men, forming a line, began to unload the barrels of vegetables into the ferry. I waited until they had finished, then took from the drawstring bag at my belt the little musket shot. I presented it to the nearer ferryman (the younger one) as casually as I could, as if I was accustomed to such barter. The fellow looked at me oddly, and again I feared I was about to be unmasked. He examined the musket shot to make sure it wasn’t scant—lead is such an easy metal to carve off bits of. He put it in his own satchel, wiped his brow with the back of his arm, and paid me no further heed. I took that as allowance to board the ferry.

The older brother, stabilizing the last of Griggs’s open barrels, glanced at me and . . . smiled. His teeth were grey but well-shaped.

He caught himself smiling, blushed, and looked away.

They were strong and fast, those two rowers, for such an unwieldy boat cutting across the current. The older brother was nearer to me, avoiding my gaze; I found my eyes straying from the water to him, and enjoyed watching his movements, sure and confident and smooth despite the oppressive heat and his heavy clothes. He must have felt my stare, for at one moment, between strokes, he turned slightly to look at me, and—as if despite himself—he smiled shyly. I smiled back. He blushed again and looked away. I had not expected Puritan flirtation!

When we got to the north bank of the Charles, there was another dock at which the boat was roped, and two boys there waiting. I’d watched them splashing water at each other as we approached, and laughing merrily, but now they were all business. I envied them the freedom to frolic in the river—it looked wonderfully cooling. The palisades came down to the river’s edge a stone’s throw to either side of the landing, creating a sense of urgency and purpose, the pretense of a city without any sign of one from here. I’d have to walk several hundred yards up the slope, nearly to the future Harvard Square, before I’d reach actual civilization.

One of the boys quickly counted the barrels of corn and squash, and nodded, looking satisfied. He turned and ran up toward the town. The other lad helped the two ferrymen to unload the cargo. I disembarked, glancing one last time at the older rower. He was already staring at me, and our eyes met again. Again he smiled; again I smiled; again he blushed, and turned away. I am not one to make eyes even in my own era. Only an hour in this strange new world and already I was contemplating pulling a Hester Prynne! How very disorienting it all was.

I began to walk up the wide dirt path to the village, using the shovel as a walking stick.

Of all the skills I’d had to learn for success in this DTAP (Destination Time and Place), the hardest of all was thievery. Language was no issue, nor was my accent: settlers were coming through Boston from all over England, and the English regional accents of the time were even more diverse than today’s. Learning to dress myself had been simple enough. I’d found a stable at which to practice riding horses for the first time since I was ten, although I was quite certain I’d have no chance of it here. A trip to Plimoth Plantation had felt almost like a cheat sheet, supplemented by a visit to the Americas wing of the Museum of Fine Art. A costume shop that kitted out Boston theatres rented us a colonial outfit—smock, stays, petticoat, skirt, waistcoat, stockings, garter, collar, coif—which I’d practiced lacing and buttoning myself into and out of until I could do it fluidly. I’d memorized and practiced quoting certain passages from the Geneva Bible (very popular among the Pilgrims), and taken a crash course in celestial navigation from an MIT grad student, whom Tristan signed to secrecy and paid well not to ask any questions. This was only the first of many whom we would later call HOSMAs—Historical Operations Subject Matter Authorities—and whom we would end up hiring to teach DOers things they would need to know.

All of that had been a cinch. Harder by far was to work out how to steal a book from under its owner’s nose. First, there was my own moral and ethical conditioning to overcome. Then there was the matter of simply how to do it. Having so little recon to rely on, Tristan had proposed five possible schemes, and I’d memorized all of them step by step. They all seemed preposterous. Especially now that I was here.

I reached the village—a loose collection of small thatched-hut buildings, some wattle-and-daub, but many full-timbered, and many with second floors. A subtle but pervasive odor of waste wafted about the hot, dusty streets, and I felt the porridge curdling in my stomach. There were no street signs, but having memorized the map of Cambridge for this era, I knew the bookseller would be on the right at the first intersection I came to, at Water and Long Streets (or as I knew them, Dunster and Winthrop). A block farther up Water would be the Meeting House, which was also the church. We had considered my taking a copy of the psalter from the pews there, but decided that in such a small community a newcomer would be eyed ceaselessly, and perhaps suspiciously, at church. I would have to pinch it from its secular source.

There was the bookseller’s, just ahead. It was a two-story building with planks lying on the ground in front of the threshold to approximate a front stoop. The door was open, and two front-facing windows were unshuttered. I saw a wooden floor within, and a long table, and many barrels and crates: it was not specifically a bookshop, but a shop that happened to sell books. I leaned the shovel against the building and went to the doorway. I wiped away a layer of grime and dust from my face, using the sleeve of the waistcoat, and looked in.

Behind the long table (his position suggesting he was the proprietor of the place) was a round-faced, proper-looking gentleman of perhaps five and twenty, frowning up at a taller fellow on my side of the table. The taller fellow was frowning back down at him. The proprietor looked unaccustomed to frowning. The tall fellow looked quite used to it. They were both in grey doublet and breeches. The shorter man also sported a canvas merchant’s apron. Between them, on the table, was an impressive stack of leather-bound books.

“It will destroy my profit to reprint them,” the tall fellow was complaining. “Let alone rebind all the reprints. I have created an errata to go with it, that suffices. ’Tis selling well enough for you, isn’t it?”

“’Tis selling very well, but the errata misses half the errors and I am forever deflecting comments about it from the people who have given me their money for it,” said the merchant, in the tone of a parent issuing a firm but gentle rebuke. He had a benign energy to him. Instinctively I liked him more than the other fellow. “It makes them disinclined to give me their money for other purchases.”

“It’s the only book you’re selling,” protested the printer.

“I’ve got Bibles coming over from England, due next week,” said the merchant. “And there is plenty I sell here beside books.”

The printer looked taken aback. “Why be you importing Bibles from England when you have finally got a printer in your own backyard?”

“Maybe he is not a very good printer,” said the merchant, as kindly as possible. “Also there is a new book written by a doctor, about the circulation of blood. ’Twill be here on the next ship.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about the blood, ’tis a ridiculous rumor,” said the printer, quite put out. “And nobody decent will ever want to read about such unsavory subjects. Especially in this town, where we have a college!”

I decided this was a fortuitous accident, and that I could use it better than any of the scenarios Tristan had proposed for the theft. So I stepped into the shop.

The merchant gestured to the pile of books. “They are no good to me, Stephen. Reprint them. I’ll buy them from you at a higher price if that will help keep you from ruin.” At that moment, they both saw me, and paused from their discourse to examine me. The merchant nodded and then returned his attention to the books, while Stephen the Printer ogled me a moment longer, before saying hurriedly to the merchant, “You’ve a wife and babe to feed and another due this leaf-fall, Hezekiah. ’Twould be wrong of me to take money from your children’s mouths.” He said it not as if he really meant it, but as if he knew he must because there was a witness present.

“’Twould be wrong of me to sell any more of this printing,” said Hezekiah matter-of-factly.

“Is that the new psalter?” I asked.

“’Tis,” said the merchant, looking at me with some skepticism. “You’re not here to purchase one, are you?”

“No, sir, I am here to purchase three. My master sent me to fetch them up,” I added, since nobody dressed as I was dressed would be in a position to buy one for personal use.

“Who’s your master, then?” asked the printer, in an almost lecherous voice.

“A squire of Boston,” I said with a little attitude. “He wants one for himself and two for family gifts.”

Stephen gestured to the pile. “I’m Stephen Day, I’m the printer, have a look.”

“I’m Hezekiah Usher, the bookseller, and I’m not selling these books,” said the merchant, still very matter-of-fact. “You’d best come back in a sennight.”

I made sure to look crushed. “Oh, but Goodman Usher, it is a long way from Boston, and I’ve the harvest to help with when I return. I’ve not the time to return. Might you sell some of these to me, even if they be not perfect?”

“Yes. Look,” commanded Stephen Day. The merchant was about to protest, but instead smirked and raised his eyes to God with a shrug of resignation. I walked to the table, ignoring the intense stare of the printer, and picked up a book. The leather was supple. When I opened it, the binding was stiff and fresh, a faint smell of glue still on it, as well as the clean smell of paper, and another smell, almost metallic, which might have been the ink. They were elegant, the shape a little narrower than modern books, with a bold exquisite font on the first page: “The WHOLE booke of psalmes faithfully translated into ENGLISH metre.” By modern standards, yes, okay, the typesetting was an embarrassment, but the book itself was handsome. I thumbed through a few pages, pretended to study a leaf, set the volume aside, thumbed through another with a studious expression. Then another. Then a fourth. The two men watched me.

“What do you look for?” asked the printer.

I was about to give him a polite smile and then remembered that this population never seems to do that. “You said these had faults and I am looking to find the least faulty of them.”

“They are all from the same plates,” said the printer impatiently. “I don’t know if you can read but they’re all exactly the same.”

“Not so,” I said, and presented the book I held. “Do you see how the printed area is slightly askew on this page? The others I looked at also had uneven pages. I am trying to find one where the paper was set just right on the press. I do not know the term for it, but I know what I am looking for.”

The printer huffed a bit at that. The merchant chuckled and reached for a book. “Let us see if we can find any perfectly set books. If we can, Goodman Day, then I’ll buy them off you and sell them to my customer.”

I expected Stephen Day to instantly declare he’d sell the books to me directly, as his profit would be greater and Goodman Usher had already refused to carry them. That is what any enterprising person of my era would do. But this notion did not seem to enter Stephen Day’s head. How very particular this society was: everyone kept to their place.

Or perhaps Stephen Day was simply dull-witted.

In any case, he agreed to this readily, and the two of them began to help me search for a book with every leaf of every octave perfect. As the three of us perused them, the men resumed arguing over the fate of the remaining books. Now their eyes were busy and their attention distracted. Good. I placed one book down to my right rather than back onto the pile (which was to my left). Each time I returned a book to the pile and reached for a new one with my left hand, I would push this hijacked volume an inch or so farther to the right, so that eventually I had inched it all the way around a small barrel on the table, where neither man could see it without searching for it. Their argument had continued to grow until they were truly bickering, so that when we finished reviewing all fifty-odd copies on the table, they looked not to me but to each other, teetering on the edge of vitriol.

“I shall have to disappoint my master,” I said decisively. “None of these would be to his standards. Good day.”

“Do you hear that?” said Hezekiah Usher to Stephen Day, as I turned to leave.

“This strumpet is failing to obey her master,” said Stephen Day to Hezekiah Usher. “He told her to bring back three copies of the psalter, and she leaves here without even one. He did not tell her to check the quality of the work—”

But I was already out the door. I grabbed the shovel with my right hand and continued up Water Street.

My left hand clutched the hijacked copy of the Bay Psalm Book.

Reader, I had walked out the door right in front of them, holding it in plain sight, but they did not see it. Not only had they ceased to regard me, but even to the degree I was in their peripheral vision, they did not see theft. What I had just done was unthinkable to them. They could not see what they could not imagine. Still, it had been a shuddery moment, and I barely suppressed the urge to run, or at least look nervously over my shoulder. But I had it, and had gotten cleanly away.

Shovel—check. Psalter—check. That was the hardest part. Now to the cooper’s, and then to the boulder, and then the return trip. I could do this! Feeling more confident, I held myself more upright and walked more briskly. I turned right at the next intersection, passed a leather-worker and an apothecary, and then on the left, as I knew from the old maps, there was a cooperage.

The cooperage had a yard that fronted the street. It was crowded with buckets, barrels, and casks, and on a huge tree stump in the center was a stash of metal hoops of different sizes. Various axes, knives, and adzes rested on a long, low bench beside this. The lovely smell of wood shavings neutralized the general stench of filth. The cooper, a man of Tristan’s build, dressed in Puritan garb of faded maroon with a leather work-apron, hatless and collarless, was bent over a large half-finished barrel, using a hammer and what looked like an adze to pound a hoop into place around the staves.

“Are you a dry-tight cooper?” I asked.

“Can be,” he said without looking up. “What is your need?”

“I have a thing in need of storage,” I said, and held out the book.

He looked up. He was handsome, and held himself like somebody extremely comfortable in his own body—very different from the other men I’d encountered today. His eyes glanced briefly at the book but then strayed to me, and considered me a moment—the whole of me, not my face. His look gave me shivers. Then he suddenly shook his head, made eye contact, and said, “What, then?”

“I need this bound into a dry-tight vessel,” I said. “’Tis an errand for my master in Boston.”

“Your master in Boston. Is that the book everyone has been speaking of?” he asked, without much interest.

“The first book printed in America,” I said, and I confess I was (and to this day, remain) awed by the thought.

He shrugged. “That’s fine for those who read,” he said. “It does less for our common good than did the first grist mill or the first forge.”

“. . . True,” I said.

He set down the adze, held out his hand. “Let me see the little treasure,” he said. I stepped off the street into the yard (in truth, there was hardly any difference between the two) and offered it to him. He took it in his large callused paw of a hand and regarded it. “Too small for a firkin,” he murmured to himself.

He looked up at me. There was something slightly charged in his look—this had been true of Goodman Griggs, of the ferryman, and of the printer. Perhaps it was simply how Puritan men always looked at women. Perhaps my fear that they would find me suspicious was causing me to imagine things. “I have no barrel of the right size, but there is a lidded bucket I could alter to suit your need.”

“I thank you,” I said. “If you are sure it will be watertight.”

“You could throw it in the ocean and a hundred years from now there will be no moisture in it,” he said with casual confidence.

“I must probably still pack the book in something to keep it from getting bumped around on the journey,” I said.

“I’ve some felt in the shop for oiling staves. Wrap it in some of that, ’twill suffice.”

“Again, I thank you,” I said, starting to feel slightly unnerved by the intensity of his eyes. He looked at the barrel he’d been working on, considered it, and then seemed to decide it could be left alone for a bit, for he then glanced around the yard until he found a small lidded bucket. He tossed the book into the bucket, with no reverence for either its physical or spiritual worth.

After snatching some felt from the back of his shop, he hunted through the hoops for a small one, and used his cooperish tricks to seal the top as tightly as any cask. I stood waiting, confused by how handsome I found him and wondering how best to negotiate the payment. All I had was the white wampum bead from Goody Fitch. I knew that white wampum was less valuable than purple, but beyond that had no idea how this would rank against, say, the musket shot.

When he finished, he held out the sealed bucket. I smiled gratefully and reached for it, but just before my hand touched it, he raised it out of reach. “Now for the issue of payment,” he said. “What have you for money?”

“Just this, from my master,” I said, pulling the wampum out of my drawstring bag. I offered it to him.

“’Tis a pretty bead,” he said, “and a good start, but it will not cover this.”

“I have nothing else,” I said.

“Of course you do,” he said in a low, meaningful voice. I felt a prickling down my spine.

“I do not know what you mean,” I said.

“I think you do,” he said, staring at me. Before I could move away, he reached toward me with his free hand and clapped it around my rib cage. I reflexively pulled away, but he had me fast. “That’s a body not wearing a corset. I could tell just from how you hold yourself.” I shuddered and tried to pull away; he held on tighter. “Your master sends you out to do his bidding, with insufficient currency, unlaced. Do you think I don’t know what that means?”

“My . . . corset is damaged,” I said, trying to keep my composure. I could not hit him with the shovel, as I wanted to—he had the book! I had to keep him close enough to get the book back!

He laughed at my claim. “And how does a maid’s corset get damaged? Did your master damage it? I trust there was enjoyment in the damaging.”

“You have completely misconstrued—”

“Don’t worry,” he said easily. “I will not report you to Reverend Shepard. But your master has set you up to be generous to me in exchange for my generosity. Luckily, it is an exchange I am happy to indulge in.” He pulled me closer to him and then wrapped his arm around my waist.

I put a hand on his chest to repel him, but he mistook it as a sign of intimacy, and looked pleased. I could not avoid this problem, so instead I would have to use it: “You have hit upon the truth,” I said resignedly. His smile grew much broader.

“Good,” he said.

“However,” I pushed on, trying to keep my voice calm (I knew it would be best to sound suggestive, but I could not quite push myself to that extreme), “I have urgent errands to attend to, and you’ve a barrel not yet finished. Give me the bucket now and I will return here in an hour with the freedom to . . . be generous.”

He looked even more pleased. “After you are generous, I will give you the bucket,” he declared triumphantly.

“My errand requires the bucket,” I said. “But I will leave you with the wampum bead, plus a little taste of what’s to come.” I glanced up and down the street, but nobody was about. Knowing this was foolish—and yet necessary—I reached down and lifted my skirt halfway up my leg. I did not need to point out to him what was missing—no petticoats, no stockings, nothing but a skirt. I doubt he often saw a woman’s ankle, let alone her shin, and I was flashing him up to the knee. Immediately he pulled me against him and I could feel him growing hard. I made myself smile. He no longer looked at all handsome to me. “I shall enjoy being generous with you,” I whispered, and kissed him on the cheek. Blech.

At this he looked so radiant I feared he might fancy himself in love with me. He kissed me back, and released me. “You will return,” he said sternly.

“Upon my soul, I will,” I answered.

He gave me the bucket. I thanked him with a smile, and then hurried down the lane, my heart beating so hard that I could feel it pulsing in my neck.

Reader, I am relieved to inform you that the next leg of my undertaking was without incident, although it was fucking hot and dusty work. I knew I had to take the Watertown Road (the Massachusetts Avenue of later centuries) to a certain bend, where it would intercept the creek that I could follow to the boulder. Easily done. It was peculiar recognizing the boulder in a world that was otherwise so unfamiliar.

The shaft of the shovel gave me a nasty splinter in the web between my thumb and forefinger, and digging the hole took longer than I’d anticipated, perhaps because my body was fatigued by the stress of the day. As I worked, I unearthed a midden—a deposit of oyster and clam shells that had apparently been left there by the natives. I buried the bucket, reburied the shells, and stomped the earth down as firmly as possible. Then, shovel in hand, slightly begrimed on face, hands, boots, and skirts, I returned to the village. Sticking to the western wall (as far from the cooperage as possible), I hurried down to the ferry landing.

Luck was with me again, for the ferry was on this shore. But of course I had nothing to pay for passage with.

Except an offer of generosity. Clearly all the men who had been eyeing me today could tell from my posture that I was unfettered beneath my waistcoat. That accounted for their unsettling looks. Now that I understood this, perhaps I could use it to my advantage with the ferryman.

Although there was his younger brother to consider. The younger brother had not eyed me—perhaps he didn’t go for girls, or was nearsighted, or was a fierce Puritan. In any case, he was in the way.

I went directly to the older brother. “I’m here for my return trip,” I said with a smile.

He flushed slightly, so I knew I had him in the palm of my hand. “Good day,” he said, and held out his hand. “Your fare.”

“I thought the earlier fare I rendered was for a two-way trip,” I said.

He shook his head slightly. “Who told you such a falsehood?”

“’Tis how the service worked in my town back in England. I’m new to America and I made a rash assumption,” I said. “If I had known to ask it, sure my master would have given me more for the fare.”

“Your master should have known the toll without you asking,” said the young man. His eyes strayed very briefly to my clothed but uncorseted torso, and then back up to meet mine. “I do not like how your master treats you,” he said quietly.

I made myself blush. (I did not know I could do that until that moment.) “It is my lot, for now,” I said. “I erred grievously in not establishing what I would need for the ferry toll, but I pray you let me across this one time. Next time I shall be prepared.” I gave him what I hoped was a doe-eyed, damsel-in-distress look, feeling ridiculous and very glad Tristan was not there to tease me for it.

The ferryman considered me a moment and then moved his oar away, so that I could enter the boat. “Go on, then,” he said, both kind and grudging. “I’ll make excuses to my brother. But see that your master does not see fit to try to cozen us again.”

“Cozen you?”

“He knows what he is doing, sending out an underdressed female servant as a . . . commodity.”

I blushed even more deeply, this time sincerely. “I am astounded to hear you say it. I will speak to the minister about him.”

He nodded approvingly . . . and then gave me the same shy smile I’d enjoyed earlier in the day. How very charming: he could only allow himself to ogle me if he was certain to receive no satisfaction for it.

The trip back across the Charles was uneventful, and so too was the long, hot walk back along the road I’d taken the cart ride on this morning. I met not a soul. The sun was starting to lengthen the shadows when I wearily returned to Goody Fitch’s home.

The witch was in the front room of the house, settling an iron pot over some covered coals in the hearth. It smelled mostly of vegetables and slightly of mutton, and not at all of seasonings. There was a girl, perhaps eight years old, sitting by an open window, spinning yarn with a drop-spindle and looking bored. Her eyes lit up when she saw me.

“Mama, is this the woman?” she said.

Goody Fitch looked over her shoulder. “Yes.” And to me: “My daughter is as I am. I told her about you.”

The girl, dressed almost identically to her mother—or rather, identically to me, since she was not yet corseted—put her spinning down and came to me with a wide-eyed unsmiling look of reverence. “Where have you come from?” she asked.

“Somewhere else,” said her mother almost tartly. “Children listen, Elizabeth, they do not speak.”

“Perhaps she would like to listen to me tell you about squaw-vine,” I said, eager to fulfill my part of the bargain so that she might fulfill hers by sending me home.

“Yes. But more than that. If you be willing to tell us more about what you are doing, we want to help you in a greater way than just this day’s work.”

“Really?” I asked, pleased but astonished.

She gestured to the stool, now situated in the center of the room to catch the faint cross-breeze. Gratefully, I sat on it. “I have been meditating on this matter all day,” she said. “I am a settler, a pioneer: I know the importance of planning with a mind to future generations. My daughter is gifted, far more subtle with her skills than I was so young, but she will never be allowed, in this place, to show herself as she is. If you can use her, and the ones that come after her, then our coming here will perhaps have served some purpose, even if not the one I intended.”

The girl plunked herself at my knees and looked up at me with an almost imploring look. “Hello, Elizabeth,” I said. “I am Melisande.”

“I know,” said the girl. “You already told me.” I grimaced in confusion, having no memory of such a thing, and her mother frowned at her. “I did not mean that,” said the girl, but she sounded uncertain, as if she were following a prompt that did not make sense to her. I was very fatigued and could not think about this peculiar moment with any depth.

Given this remarkably happy development, I stayed with them for the next two hours, explaining (in terms that would not bewilder them) the fundamental essence of DODO. Goody Fitch, once again, fell into gales of laughter at the claim that this small-minded enclave of religious extremists could ever blossom into a force that influenced the whole globe—but all the same, she insisted her daughter listen to me. Somewhere inside, she took my descriptions to heart. We pledged mutual benevolence and peace, and as the sun came in at a blinding angle through the southern window, I prepared myself to be Sent home.

Diachronicle

DAY 323

In which we learn quite rudely that nothing is ever simple

I WAS IN THE ODEC. As before, the sudden severing of my connections to the world of 1640 Boston left me disoriented, and obliged me to sit down. As I got my wits about me I had the presence of mind to grab for the oxygen mask, just in case the chamber was full of helium. But I was naked, and soon shivering with cold. Glancing down at myself, I was delighted to see that I had brought back with me none of the dirt and dust and grime of 1640. Even the splinter from the rough-hewn shovel handle had stayed behind, although my skin was still angry-looking. My clothes—T-shirt and jeans—were nowhere in sight.

I slammed a big red button that cycled the door. During the weeks of preparation for this day, the Maxes had come back in force and made a number of improvements. No longer did test subjects have to be released from the ODEC by outside helpers wearing oven mitts. Now the door opened automatically. For a moment my nakedness must have been hidden from view by a cloud of vapor—long enough for me to snatch a blanket from a hook by the door and wrap it around me.

The big room that had formerly contained the ODEC, the control panel, and everything else had been rearranged, tidied up, and cut in half by a wall of glass. The control panel was on the other side of it. Through it I could see Tristan, Erszebet, Rebecca, and Oda applauding and giving me the thumbs-up.

The Maxes had also installed a shower stall in the corner of the ODEC chamber, and plumbed it with a system that would inject a sterilant into the hot water. I went in there and warmed up with a long shower, scrubbing myself all over with some manner of liquid soap that was supposed to kill all bacteria and viruses. I emerged from that to find more pills awaiting me on a stainless steel tray, and swallowed those. Meanwhile the ODEC and the chamber surrounding it had been sprayed down with more disinfectant and irradiated with germ-killing purple light.

I stepped out into a small dressing room where my clothes were awaiting me, and put them on. Then out through another door into the control room, where I was received as a conquering hero.

“So you have survived,” said Erszebet proudly. “I knew you would. You are not like General Schneider.”

Rebecca looked at me with wide eyes, shaking her head. “I . . . I don’t even know what to ask you.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because I don’t even know what to say. Let’s go check the site and see if it’s there. I can describe the rest later.”

But: “Stokes!” came an exuberant voice from the hallway, and of course when I exited I was briefly embraced by Tristan—who’d been on the phone to his higher-ups in DC, giving them the good news. It was almost exactly like being grabbed by the cooper, but without the erection or the general sense of ickiness. I realized how tense I had truly been. There was nothing more I needed in that moment than to feel that comforting clutch.

I did not say such a thing, of course; I just nodded, clapped his shoulder, and waited for him to release me. “Tell us,” he said. “Tell us all of it.”

“On our way to the boulder,” I said.

His face lit up. “You did it! You buried it!”

I tried not to preen. “Sure. But I want to go there while I still have a very clear sense of exactly where I buried it.”

“She did it!” he shouted to the world at large. “Good work ethic, Stokes. The professor’s car is behind the building.”

I could not believe how immediately overwhelmed I was, by the air pollution and ambient city noises, by the seams in my blue jeans, by the squishiness of the car seat. I felt strangely bereft of something. As we drove through Central Square and up Mass Ave, I gave the four of them—Oda was driving—the clearest depiction I could of my day. Erszebet was gleeful to hear that she lived in a better time period than the poor miserable Puritan witches. “It heartens me to hear somebody else suffered even more than I did for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she informed us.

We were learning to ignore her when she got like this.

Finally we arrived at the Odas’ house and the professor pulled into his driveway. An eager cluster of five, we all went through the gate into the garden and straight through to the back of the property.

There was the boulder, looking more worn and slightly shorter than it had four hundred years ago, but not by much, and mostly because it was now surrounded by landscaped gardens. It was almost impossible to imagine where the stream had been, but it was this near side of the rock I wanted anyhow. I recognized a particular bulge in the stone and oriented myself around it, lay on the ground, and reached toward the stone, then tapped the earth below my shoulder.

“It is right under here,” I said. “In a sealed wooden bucket.”

They already had the tools for digging handy. We all dug. Even Erszebet took a mostly symbolic turn at it.

An hour later, there was a hole five feet deep and twice that wide, obliterating Rebecca’s vegetable garden. The back of the property resembled an archaeological excavation. And indeed it was: we found a rusty toy truck that looked to be from the 1950s and some bones that looked to have been buried by a dog. Below that, the rust-skeletal remains of a nineteenth-century lantern. Below that—as my heart beat more quickly—the broken-up oyster and clam shells I’d held in my hands four hundred years ago, a few hours earlier . . .

And that was all.

There was no bucket.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JUNE 16

Temperature today about 75F, bright and sunny, no breeze. Barometer steady.

All vegetables: deceased. Flowers: largely trampled. South-side peonies (blooming), flame azalea (blooming), and most rose bushes still in good form. South-facing herb bed generally doing well.

The garden has been completely destroyed in the interest of digging up the book Melisande says she buried four hundred years ago. No sign of it. I have never seen her so distraught or confused. We stood about a large hole that had been my vegetable bed. Tristan offering condolence that “at least the soil is getting aerated.” Mel circling the hole, shaking her head, climbing into it, searching on her hands and knees, trying to dig even deeper with her fingers.

Erszebet, retro-chic handbag clutched to her side as usual, watching all of us with superior amusement. “Obviously not here,” she said. “We have to try again on another Strand. This is quite normal.”

Mel looked up from the hole, gave Tristan a questioning look. Tristan and Frank also swapped glances. “What do you mean by ‘another Strand’?” asked Frank.

She shrugged. “I mean another Strand. Of time,” she clarified, seeing their confusion. “You have your fancy technical language to explain it. I have only what it really is. There are many possibilities and you cannot completely control which Strand you are on when you are summoning. It is not up to you. Magic does not make you omnipotent. So Melisande went back on just one Strand, and that one Strand did not change things to your liking. Maybe she will go back on another Strand, and then another, and when enough Strands have been shifted a little by this, then maybe it will help here and now.”

“That makes my brain hurt,” Mel said, sounding tired. “Do you mean I have to go back and redo everything I just did? Relive the entire day?”

“Of course,” said Erszebet. “Several times, most likely.”

Melisande groaned and threw herself onto the earth at the bottom of the hole, a dry-dock Ophelia. “I’d almost rather go back to working for Blevins.”

Erszebet (scolding): “You have a simplistic notion of how complicated things work. It is like when the euro came into being.” (Uncomprehending looks from all of us.) “If somebody had made up a new coin and called it the euro and walked in someplace to use it, it is not suddenly money. But because many people all agreed to make up a new coin, and then use these new coins over and over, now the euro is used and the old coins are not.”

Tristan (irritated): “Bad metaphor. That was an economic policy move on the part of governmental bodies, it wasn’t—”

“It may have been decided by governmental bodies, but it did not happen, it was not real, until many people stopped doing things one way and started doing them another, consciously and deliberately. Now, of course one uses the euro. One does not think about it.”

Mel stood up and brushed the moist dark soil from her jeans. Erszebet is appalled that Mel “dresses like a man,” and not even a proper gentleman but a farmhand. She keeps trying to get Mel to wear dresses and lipstick. Some of her advice is not without merit, for she has tastes that are highly refined, albeit stuck in the 1950s. But today jeans were the right attire.

“How many times must I redo it before it takes?” Mel asked, sounding exhausted.

“I cannot say for certain, but I will try to determine, because I like you,” said Erszebet. Reached into her bag, pulled out the frazzled-mop-looking thing.

“What is that?” Tristan demanded, in such a tone I realized he hadn’t seen it before.

“My számológép,” she said, haughty. She began to pick through the strings—the strands—of it. Tristan turned to Melisande with a questioning expression.

“Calculator,” Mel translated. “Not like a desk calculator, more like an accounting device.”

We all watched Erszebet as she selected a strand, examined it, muttered to herself, pulled it away from the mass. It was entangled with another strand near the bottom. “Yes,” she said, shoving the whole thing back into her bag. “You have to go back. We will see a difference next time.”

“You mean the book will be here next time?”

“Almost certainly not!” Erszebet scoffed. “But we will be closer to the book being here next time.”

“Excuse me,” said Frank with his gentle smile, “would you show me how that object works?”

Erszebet looked almost shocked, and squeezed her arm tighter over the bag. “I cannot give you my számológép,” she said. “I made it myself with my mother. It took years. I would sooner cut my hair off and give it to you.”

“I don’t want to keep it, I just want to look at it.”

“It will mean nothing to you. And if you start to fiddle with it you might change it. So, no.”

“May I ask, at least, what you use it for?” he said. Mel, with a hand up from Tristan, climbed out of the hole and reached for the sweatshirt I handed her. It was early evening and the air was beginning to cool.

Erszebet looked at the object in her hand as if Frank’s question put it into an entirely new light. “What do I use it for? It is . . . a kind of cheating.” She laughed a short, harsh, scold-me-if-you-dare laugh.

“Cheating?”

“Every action has reactions which have reactions. So, many consequences. You must keep track of all the possible consequences or bad things maybe happen. Nobody has the capacity to hold that much information in her mind at once. The számológép helps me to track the possible consequences.”

“And how does it work, exactly?” asked Frank, his face now glowing with anticipation at getting his Physics Itch scratched.

“It will be easier to show you after Melisande has done it a few times.”

“A few times,” said Mel under her breath, sounding like she had the flu. “All right. But I need a decent meal first.”

“I’ll get you home,” said Tristan, tossing her one of my clean gardening rags to wipe the dirt off her face. “Good work, soldier, we’ll try again tomorrow. Erszebet, let’s go. Eh . . .” He looked at the hole, then at me. “Sorry about the garden, ma’am. I’ll call some men to come in tomorrow morning and tamp all the soil back down in there.”

“Won’t save the tomatoes,” I said.

“Well, we need it intact so we can dig it up again,” he said, almost sheepish.

When they were gone (Erszebet now bunking with Mel, who has moved to a larger apartment), Frank and I gazed at each other through the deepening twilight, over what had been the best of my cucumber patch. “Such an interesting thing, that . . . számológép,” he said, pronouncing it wrong. “I wonder if I could figure out how it works, what she’s doing with it.” (I should have known that would be his takeaway from the entire day: not the failure, not the future, not the ruined garden, but the interesting gadget.)

I thought about what was in the attic. I wished it were not in the attic, and that being unavoidable, I wished I did not know that it was in the attic. But that glowing, boyish eagerness on his face . . . for more than fifty years now I have been charmed by it.

“I know where to find one,” I said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Diachronicle

DAY 324 (COLONIAL BOSTON DTAP, 1640)

In which, having not succeeded, I try, try again

THE SECOND TIME, THE ARROW struck me before I fell out of its way.

I cried out, too dizzy and disoriented to keep quiet, and found myself remembering what Goody Fitch had said the first time: “It would hit you another time.” What she’d meant was, it does hit me another time. She knew. She knew I arrived here more than once. What else did she know?

In a dreamlike state, I heard her shouting out to Samuel, heard her tell me not to move, waited until she came back with the blanket—and this time, a small roll of linen that she used to bandage my calf. The wound was only a superficial graze, really, enough to require tending but not enough to lame me. Enough, however, that it would make the slog of the day even more of a slog.

What followed was a six-hour stretch of déjà vu, ameliorated by the benefit of hindsight-as-foresight. The witch and I had almost the same conversation we’d had before. I declined the maize, knowing what it would do to my innards. When she offered me the musket ball and piece of wampum, I begged her for a second wampum bead, and she gave it to me. I asked her if I might wear her corset, since I was going out into the world and she was not, but she declined, as she expected Goody Griggs to be by to quilt midday and did not want to appear slovenly to a neighbor.

“Always feel free to ask me, though,” she added. “Sometime it might be available.”

That was the closest she came to telling me she knew that I was visiting her multiple times. Now the daughter’s comment when I’d given her my name—“You already told me”—made sense too. Once I’d returned from my tasks in Cambridge, I was determined to interview Goody Fitch, to ask her to explain her understanding of the Strands, as Erszebet called them. Perhaps if various witches described it, we could, between all their descriptions, come to grasp it.

The déjà vu returned as Goodman Griggs gave me his furtive, grumbling look and drove me to the ferry. The ferryman once again ogled me and the boys once again splashed water at each other across the Charles. With a slight limp, trudging, shovel in hand, I again strode up Water Street, into the shop where Usher and Day were arguing about the quality of the printing. The same trick worked to steal the book again—remarkable, how at ease I felt, now that I knew I would accomplish it—and finally I approached the cooperage. I felt my pace slow. Even if I offered this unsettling fellow both of the wampum beads (one was intended for the ferry back to Muddy River), I suspected he would claim that it did not cover the fee. My real trouble was my want of a corset.

But at least I knew what I was in for, and that was oddly comforting. I presented myself to him with a slight brazenness, so that at least I avoided the unpleasantness of being groped—I came near to actually teasing him, promising future “generosity” before he even asked for it. I had his full attention and cooperation, and I was out of there sooner, and less grossed out, than last time.

So: déjà vu continued up the road to Watertown, and into the copse of trees where the creek was, and the boulder. I took off my apron, wrapped it around my hand while I was shoveling, and thereby saved myself the splinter of the last visit. My muscles were sore from all the digging yesterday—for my body knew that to have happened yesterday, even if I was now situated long, long before yesterday. Also, I was terribly hungry. And my leg was now throbbing like a motherfucker badly. So I was not in good humor.

I found the same Native American midden, and this time, when the hole was deep enough, tossed the shells in first and then put the bucket in atop them. I buried it, and then in a state of filthy exhaustion limped back to the ferry, where I paid my way and therefore had no need to even talk to the ferryman; miserably, I dragged my fatigued butt back to Goody Fitch’s, and barely had the energy to thank her or speak to her daughter. I had no energy at all to follow through on my earlier intention of interviewing her regarding the Strands of time. Still, she made the same offer she had the first time, which was heartening.

This time, her daughter did not say, “You already told me.” I took that as a good sign: this must be the visit she’d been referring to the other time. There need be no more. Two visits should suffice. Please, God, let two suffice.

Goody Fitch sent me forward to the ODEC, where I arrived shivering and naked, the superficial gash on my calf crusted and angry. I went through the decontamination procedure as before. Tristan, without the excited fanfare of the previous day, drove us back to the East-Oda homestead, where Rebecca tended my wound with a salve she had whipped up herself—a combination of modern antibiotics from the pharmacy and herbs from her garden. The menfolk once again dug up the backyard. Or rather, Tristan dug, while Frank Oda watched with the interest of a schoolboy who was illicitly attending a ballgame.

Early that morning, Tristan had “sent some men around” to fill in the hole. This had further torn up the yard and made a terrible noise, as it involved the kind of pounder that is used to smooth out new asphalt laid down over potholes. The neighbors were up in arms, Rebecca told us with a sigh, although mostly she was upset about her garden. Tristan of course was indifferent to the controversy.

Once I was sufficiently bandaged and plied with painkillers, we went downstairs and out the back to see how the digging was coming, ignoring the black and calico cats who were trying to trip us. Frank Oda was leaning against the boulder with a cup of tea; we three women stood on the small back deck of the house, staring over the railing. The midden of oyster and clam shells—which I had deliberately placed under the bucket this time—had been unearthed . . . yet still no bucket.

As I watched, it seemed to me that my exhaustion, or perhaps a side effect of the painkillers, was affecting my eyesight, for Tristan suddenly looked slightly blurred, as if I were looking at him across a lit BBQ grill.

“You see?” said Erszebet, sounding satisfied. She gestured casually toward Tristan. “It’s coming along.”

“Is he . . . wavy?” I asked.

“He’s not wavy,” she said in her usual being-derisive-about-Tristan voice.

“Something is wavy,” said Rebecca decisively.

Tristan stopped digging and leaned on the shovel, breathing harder than he had yesterday although the soil was looser and the hole was smaller (but then, this time, he was the only one digging it). “Ma’am, could I trouble you for some saline drops?” he asked Rebecca. “I’ve got something in my eyes.”

“No you don’t,” Erszebet informed him. “That’s just the glimmer.”

A childlike surge of excitement overrode my exhaustion, briefly: “Like in . . . like in old stories about witchcraft? You mean ‘glamour’?” I asked. For with her accent it was difficult to tell.

She shrugged. “I don’t know what it is called in old stories. We called it pislákoló, this is ‘glimmer’ or ‘glamour’ or something in English. I never knew the English term for it, magic was nearly gone by the time I was fluent in your language so there was no occasion to describe it. And now the word ‘glamour’ is ruined by that magazine.”

“What is it, exactly?” said Tristan. “What’s going on?”

“It happens because it is the spot . . .” Erszebet paused, then sighed noisily, as if put upon. “When magic existed, this was common knowledge and nobody ever had to explain it any more than you would have to explain why you sweat when you are hot or need air to breathe. But I will try.” She pressed her elbow upon the deck rail and leaned her chin into the back of one lithe hand, lips pursed—Lauren Bacall imitating Rodin’s Thinker. “This spot is where we are trying to make change. When there is no magic happening, things look normal. But when magic is happening, then what-could-be becomes . . . louder, or bigger, than whatever-currently-is. That causes the glimmer. So glimmer is a good sign.” She reached into her bag, pulled out the számológép, and began to finger certain strands with seemingly random dexterity. Then she put it away, looked directly at me, and declared, “I think seven more times back to this DTAP without complications, and we will find the bucket when we dig for it here.”

I heard myself groan before I could contain it. Seven more days of being ogled by the cooper. Of digging a deep hole in virgin soil with an unwieldy shovel. Of that long, swampy trudge back to Muddy River. “And it has to be me, correct?” I said. “We cannot swap me out for Tristan. That would be like resetting the counter to zero?”

She nodded.

“I’ll take the next DTAP,” said Tristan. “Scout’s honor.”

“What if the next one requires conversational Sumerian?” I asked.

WE WAITED A couple of days for my leg to heal, and then Erszebet sent me back again.

And then she sent me back again. And then again and again and again.

It was as if I inhabited a perverse universe at the intersection of Groundhog Day and a computer game. I knew what I had to do to get to the next level, so to speak . . . and I could do it, increasingly well, but dammit, that did not release me from the requirement of repeating it.

There were always slight variations, of course. For that was, in a way, the whole point of what Erszebet called the Strands. They were never exact clones. They were more like a family of similar pasts that all got to vote on what their shared future was going to look like. My next visitation, the witch’s house was sited slightly closer to the river; otherwise, all was the same. But the time after that, Goodman Griggs was blind, and his son drove the cart for him—and thus, being a young man responsible for the well-being of a household, he had not been out illicitly shooting rabbits as I arrived. The time after that, it was the younger ferryman who looked at me, not the older. In that Strand, the witch had only a son, but said she would pass the word on to any other witches she met, not that there were likely to be many in such a society. The next time around, the printer Stephen Day was drunk, and as I left the shop, I heard him slur to Hezekiah Usher, “There is something about that woman, she seems so familiar . . .”

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JUNE 22

Temperature about 75F, pleasantly humid. Slight SW breeze. Barometer falling.

Seedlings planted in container garden on front steps: kale, lettuce, seed onions. Tea roses transplanted to south side of house to avoid further damage to root system; hate to do that this time of year, but no choice, really.

The digging continues. Tristan has ceased claiming the aeration is good for the soil. Has offered to have fertilizer mixed in after the final dig. Neighbors registering complaints about the early morning noise. Cats stressed even though they are strictly inside.

Today was the fifth dig. Each time we collect to watch Tristan at work, the glamour is stronger. It feels almost as if, when I attempt to look directly into the hole, some force shunts my vision aside. A very strange sensation, but Erszebet says it is a good sign. Frank is pleased with himself for coming up with an acronym: GLAAMR, for Galvanic Liminal Aura Antecedent to Manifold Rift. I hope he is not just being optimistic.

It is clearly exhausting for Mel to make these excursions day after day, but she keeps her chin up. Tristan getting increasingly agitated (in a contained but obvious way). “Can you make it happen any faster?” he asked Erszebet today.

Erszebet’s answer: “No.” And then continued, as if the same conversation, “I am ready to go to Hungary now to spit on the graves of my enemies.”

Tristan: “We’ve already had this conversation. We need money. What we’re doing now, that’s how we get money.”

“I know, I was present at the rude idiot’s office in Washington, DC, when you volunteered me for this indentured servitude.”

A pause as he reclaimed his cool. “The sooner we’re successful, the sooner we fly you to Hungary to spit on the graves of your enemies.”

“I cannot alter the laws of the universe, even if you tell the idiot I can. But when I Send back Melisande this time, I will try very hard to summon her toward a Strand that is especially conducive to change. That is the most I can do.”

Diachronicle

DAY 335 (COLONIAL BOSTON DTAP, 1640)

In which I am foundationally challenged

FOR WHAT I HOPED MIGHT be the final repetition, I just wanted to hurry through the motions and be done with it. I realized the witch was aware of all my other visitations, but referred to them only occasionally and only very obliquely—they were, in a sense, all happening at the same moment in time to different versions of her. And to all of her non-witch neighbors, of course. But part of what it was to be a witch, I was beginning to realize, was that all of those different versions were somehow in closer touch with one another than was the case for non-witches. So on this visit I was less conversational, got out the door faster—finally (to my great relief, uncomfortable though it was) borrowing the witch’s corset. Happily, Goodman Griggs was also leaving earlier, and his ox had more oomph to his step as the sun had not gotten to its hottest point yet. I was over the river in record time, walked out of the shop holding the Bay Psalm Book scant minutes later, and even the cooper was prompt and respectful (perhaps because I was finally dressed like a goody rather than a hussy). The day felt like the last fortnight of high school, senior year: I had to show up, but no Powers On High expected me to do anything but phone it in.

I was in such a good mood, and now so familiar with the way, that truly I was operating on autopilot as I approached the creek that would lead me to the boulder. This may account for why I did not quite register that something was suddenly extremely different: the creek, which had heretofore dwindled in size and force as I approached the boulder, was now running rapidly and loudly. I looked at it . . . and stopped in my tracks. It had been recently dredged and the banks cut back to allow for a faster flow. I was moving upriver, so looked ahead to see how far this man-made alteration went.

I saw the foundation to a building. My jaw dropped open in shock. The earth and vegetation all around the boulder had been cleared for many yards, and the boulder itself incorporated into the half-built foundation, although it was of course much higher than the other foundation stones, high enough to be a section of wall for the ground floor. The site was unmanned at present, but there were stacks of lumber and shaped rock; instruments and tools rested on canvas tarps, and beyond the boulder, near the stream, was an enormous mixing vessel with bags of sand around it. The stone foundation must have cost a fortune; hewing and bringing in the stones alone would have been an ambitious undertaking.

What was this thing? How could it have come out of absolutely nowhere, and what was I to do about it? Clearly I could not bury the book here. With a sigh of resignation, I collected myself and began to slog back toward the Cambridge palisades. The tall gates being unmanned by daylight, I let myself through and headed back to the bookseller’s.

Merchant Usher and Printer Day had just finished arguing, with Usher apparently the victor, for Day was gloomily boxing up his stacks of books. I begged pardon and placed the bucket down so they would not think to ask about it.

“What might be the building under construction up the creek, off the Watertown Road?” I asked.

The merchant laughed without malice—or humor. “That is the most ambitious undertaking the devil ever spurred anyone to. It is to be a maple sugaring factory. A very enterprising company from back home has decided to stake a claim in the future fortune of the colony, and has determined that sugar maples are what Providence has provided to enrich us.”

“The name of the company?”

“The Boston Council for Boston,” he said.

“Have you a share in it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I was invited to invest, and I confess I was tempted, to engage in something so forward-thinking. But I fear it is a bit too forward-thinking. Every joint-stock company of the New World so far has failed, or been taken over by the crown, and I see no sign this one should fare any better. When the town requires palisades for safety because all the American tribes are at each other’s throats, and the factory is half a mile’s walk outside the palisades . . . I fear they are doomed.”

“’Tis a wondrous thing,” the printer said to me, dismissing Usher’s concern. “Any bettering in our circumstances is to be applauded.”

“Only when it is done well, Stephen,” said Hezekiah gently, as if in regretful rebuke.

Thanking them, but rather flummoxed, I left the keg on the step of the booksellers, as it was not worth it to cart it back to Goody Fitch’s, who would then be left with what to do with it. I took the ferry back across and walked in great agitation the now-familiar route to the witch’s home.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JUNE 28

Temperature 70F, raining steadily.

Seedlings: no sign of germination, but it is too soon. Flame azaleas and peonies a smidge beyond peak. Herb garden thriving. Roses seem adjusted to new spot. The rain helps.

A complication has arisen in the project, that being the foundation of a factory having sprung up where this house now stands. Tristan phoned, asked us to come in to brainstorm. Frank was distracted poking about with the quipu-like object I had brought down from the attic, and I did not want to interrupt him, so I told them to come to us. We settled in Frank’s office and I made a fire, for ambience. A summer thunderstorm was passing through, and rain was lashing the windows.

Melisande was exasperated, Tristan grim. Frank curious, when brought up to speed, and questioning Erszebet, who demonstrated boredom.

“Does that mean there is a parallel universe in which our house does not exist?” Frank asked Erszebet.

“I do not know if it is parallel, I have never measured it,” she said. “But clearly, something like that. If I were you, I would not try to return to that world.”

“Why did you send me there in the first place?” Mel demanded, cross. She sat closest to the fire and held her hands right above the flames, still chilled from her return. Calico trying and failing to convince her to scratch his head.

“You think I have control over the universe?” said Erszebet. “If I had such control, I would not have allowed magic to be ruined in the first place. There is no certainty. There is never certainty.”

“How do we get rid of the factory? What are our options?” Tristan asked.

Erszebet said, “You cannot get rid of it, you can only uncreate it.” Then explained that the usual means of resolving such problems is to go back to an even earlier time and prevent the conflict, by slightly (and multiple times) altering something prior to the event in question. All shoulders in the room sagged at this notion.

“Could we not simply go back to 1640 and try again?” I suggested. “There has only been one reality in which there was a maple syrup factory, and many more in which it didn’t exist, so perhaps we can simply continue the effort in another Strand without the factory—sidestep the problem, so to speak.”

“You can try that, but clearly things are tending toward the factory being there, so I recommend that you address the factory.” She yawned expressively to make sure we’d noticed how dull this sort of talk was.

“Why?” asked Frank, who was as usual the least exasperated person in the room. “Why are things tending toward the factory being built?”

“Yes, what are the mechanics here?” demanded Tristan, almost interrupting him.

“There are no mechanics,” said Erszebet disdainfully. “It is magic. Magic does not speak your language, Mr. Military-Physicist. Study it as hard as you wish, some part of it will always elude you. I am giving you the best advice there is.”

“You are saying,” said Tristan (patience exaggerated), “that we must go back to a time before the factory was built, and prevent the factory from being built.”

“Several times.”

Tristan swore under his breath.

“All of this effort for an unreliable result is why time travel has never been a smart use of magic,” she added in a superior tone. “I knew it would be a terrible way to try to influence anything.”

“Why didn’t you say that when I first suggested it to Frink?” Tristan demanded.

“Agreeing to try it was the quickest way to earn a salary, which gives me a chance to go to Hungary and spit on the graves of my enemies.” She added darkly, “Not all my enemies are in Hungary, you know,” and with that glanced briefly toward Mel, who was staring at her hands poised just above the flames and did not notice.

I requested Erszebet to help me with the tea, and, once alone in the kitchen with her, asked why she had shot that look at Mel.

She tossed her dark hair back over one shoulder. “I am only still alive because of Melisande.” She is so beautiful, and so very present in her young body, that it is continually difficult to remember how old she really is.

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“There is no benefit to my staying so long,” she said. “Now I am treated like Tristan Lyons’s trained dog. His Asset. If I had died in natural time, I would be at peace now. This”—gesturing out the window toward my ruined garden plot—“is not what I ever believed it would be like when I finally could perform magic again, and in the meantime I have survived one century and a half of unnatural alienation and boredom and loss.”

I did not know what to say. I could not blame her the bitterness.

“So,” she continued briskly, gesturing now toward her own splendid figure, in tight-waisted sundress and heeled sandals. “I am going to have some enjoyment now, to make up for all those years. But even so”—and here she darkened—“I am only making the best of a bad situation. And I am in that situation because of Melisande Stokes.”

“Whatever it was that happened, I’m sure she meant you no harm,” I said quickly.

“Neither did the first photographer,” said Erszebet, and walked briskly back toward the study.

I feel for her, deeply, but I wonder if she is a reliable participant in this undertaking. Which is worrisome, as she is the only one involved who is irreplaceable.

Diachronicle

DAYS 335–352 (EARLY JULY, YEAR 1)

In which we are London-bound

I DO NOT KNOW IF the Boston Council for Boston was a going concern before I stumbled across that stone foundation on the Watertown Road. But since I’d discovered it, it existed historically. An upstart private company of enterprising Calvinists in the original Boston (in Lincolnshire, England), it was created twenty-five years before the founding of the New World’s Boston and actually had nothing to do with it; its purpose was to bring money back to its founders’ local economy. An odd mixture of socialism, isolationism, and snark, the Boston Council for Boston’s name really meant: “Our Council for Us.”

Research into the Boston Council for Boston quickly revealed that in late September 1601, the company (which was otherwise about to fall apart before it had so much agreed upon an initial investment) got backing from one of its native sons, Edward Greylock, whose father had adroitly married into a family of Continental bankers, and as a result, risen in prominence in Queen Elizabeth’s court—albeit on the outskirts. As of 1601 the son—Sir Edward Greylock—lived primarily in London. Further research into Sir Edward showed him (and his fortune) to have cavorted a good bit with the adventurer George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, founding member of the East India Company, which had been founded only at the end of the previous year.

If Sir Edward could be persuaded to give the East India Company his coin, and not merely his society, then the Boston Council for Boston would never get the funds required to go to America, and thus never build their inconvenient syrup boiler on the road to Watertown. The next DTAP would have to be the city of London, 1601.

This is how we met Gráinne.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JULY 10

Temperature 81F, slight breeze from southwest. Barometer steady.

Container garden on front steps: kale, lettuce have germinated. Tea roses doing well in their new setting. Flame azalea almost passed.

It is decided: Tristan will go to Renaissance London. I find myself relieved to be off the hook now as I can be of no practical help. There have been long days of discussion and theorizing and research to establish a possible witch in that DTAP, but there is no way to know.

In the absence of an individual witch to target, Tristan has proposed he be Sent to a setting that is likely to attract witches. Erszebet followed the development of this plan with some private amusement, it seemed to me. I am not at all certain that she cares whether or not we succeed.

To determine the sort of place witches might be drawn to, it becomes necessary to psychologically profile the average witch. Having only Erszebet and a cursory experience of Goody Fitch as a sample population is hardly sufficient, but the only other source is secondary: Erszebet’s memories of other witches. These memories may say more about Erszebet herself, or her circumstances, than they do about her mother, her mentor, etc. But the general type we arrived at was this:

A witch generally speaks her mind when she can get away with it, doesn’t care much about what men think, and is determined to have agency over her fate, even in a time and place when such a thing was hard to come by (which, Erszebet added, was most of human history). Based on Erszebet herself, and her claims of her mother’s behavior, it is also possible witches enjoyed the influence they had over men by their attractiveness, but this does not seem to be tempered by any fondness for the men whose heads they enjoyed turning.

Sitting in Frank’s study—where I preferred we congregate when the ODEC or office equipment was not specifically required—the four of us, with Erszebet watching, sat musing upon this collection of traits, as the two household cats wound their way around Frank’s legs.

“This isn’t flattering,” said Tristan, “but this also fits the psychological profile of a lot of prostitutes.”

Erszebet laughed.

“No disrespect,” Tristan said.

“It is amusing that it has taken you so many hours to come to this conclusion.”

“You mean you already knew? You could have told us this and saved us a lot of time.”

“Yes,” said Erszebet, pleased.

“Why didn’t you?”

“You put me through my paces to see what I could do, I wanted to see what it was like to be in your position. I have enjoyed it.”

A moment of Tristan silently grinding his teeth. “So you are confirming that we need to look for prostitutes.”

“Not any prostitutes. But it makes sense, yes?” she said. “It is one way to have children without the bother of husbands.”

“I don’t buy that,” said Melisande. “That’s a totally romanticized image of sex workers. They’re generally poor and disenfranchised, and a witch with any savvy at all would never choose such a life, for herself or her children. In the documents I translated, witches were considered powerful and valuable by whoever was in charge. Even if they were seen as dangerous, they were valued.”

“That doesn’t mean they were married,” said Erszebet. “We didn’t need to be married to have power.”

Mel looked doubtful. “So was that the norm for witches? Being, what, a courtesan, or at least someone’s ‘kept woman’?”

Erszebet gave Mel a look. “I am only one witch and have lived in only one society of witches, at one moment in history. You with your translations have a broader knowledge than I do. But such a thing was referred to casually by my mother’s friends. If a witch wanted children, there were always the wealthy men around who can treat you well and support a bastard without wanting to have to publicly acknowledge it.”

A heavy thought came over me. “Did you do that?” I asked. “I mean . . . did you have children?”

Erszebet gave me a look that scorched my liver. “Of course not,” she said after a moment. “I could not bear the thought that I would live to watch them age and wither and die and I would still be here and have to bury them.”

There was a long and uncomfortable pause. Mel looked down, seemed almost to huddle over herself.

Tristan coughed. “So we need to look for . . . courtesans? High-ranking mistresses, that sort of thing.”

“I would say so,” said Erszebet loftily.

“Hang on,” said Mel, looking up. “This DTAP was near the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, right? I don’t know how much autonomy attractive, powerful women would be allowed in courtly circles, I think Elizabeth was increasingly paranoid and jealous as she aged. So maybe common prostitutes after all.”

“No,” said Erszebet. “We would not tolerate being common.”

“Maybe an uncommon prostitute, then, who had her own reasons for staying away from the court,” Mel suggested.

“There were a lot of brothels in Southwark, where the theatres were,” I offered. “I read that in the program notes for Henry IV when Boston Shakespeare did it.”

“What do you think?” Tristan asked Erszebet. “Does Southwark sound right to you?”

She sniffed. “I have never heard of this place. But if it is full of troublesome women then you might be in luck.”

Diachronicle

DAYS 335–352 (CONTD.; EARLY JULY, YEAR 1)

In which Tristan learns a euphemism

THIS PEN WRITES NO FASTER, the eclipse is now just twenty-three days away, and I continue to entertain foolish fond thoughts that somehow I may yet escape 1851 London. I am sure I have already complained in these leaves about the stench, but as summer ripens, so too do its smells. No pension plan is worth this shit, in quite the most literal sense. I must tell this story more quickly and elide some details to get it all down.

I pled travel fatigue, and Tristan honored his word to take the next DTAP. He required a specific place to land in London, September 1601, during the week before the investor, Sir Edward Greylock, agreed to put his money into the Boston Council for Boston. This was an event we were able to date with precision from legal records. Finding a suitable landing place in that DTAP was more of a project.

During the course of our research, we obtained scans of city maps that had been drawn up circa 1600 and printed them out on huge sheets of paper that we taped up all over the walls. There, they accumulated sticky notes, pushpins, and written annotations. It was while studying one of those that Tristan let out an oath much more explicit than we usually heard from him, and jammed his finger into a smudge on a map so hard that it must have hurt. The smudge, magnified and examined, turned out to be the words YE TEAR-SHEETE BREWERY.

As mentioned previously, Tristan had a sentimental regard for Old Tearsheet Best Bitter, the flagship product of Tearsheet Beverage Group Ltd., which claimed to be one of the oldest continuously operating breweries in London. He’d spent a semester abroad in the city, and thought himself sporty for having acquired a taste for something so obscure—not quite a microbrew but neither a household name anywhere. Bottled, it was available at a select few package stores in New England. On tap, it could be had in some pubs that catered to Anglophiles and expats.

Improbable as it might sound, further research bore out that Tearsheet Beverage Group Ltd. really was the survival into modern times of the enterprise labeled on that old map. To Tristan’s delight, TBG Ltd. were proud enough of their heritage, and savvy enough with their marketing, that a section of their website was devoted to the history of their plant in London. In the early seventeenth century, the brewhouse proper had boasted an adjacent public house. It was at most two hundred yards from the Globe Theatre. Though the site did not mention it, the area had famously teemed with brothels.

I went back into the Widener Library stacks. Where I discovered—to no great surprise—that the adjacent pub was too large, with too many upstairs nooks, to have been merely a pub. Given the neighborhood, it probably wasn’t merely an inn either.

“So there it is,” said Tristan, pleased, when I showed him a map I’d scanned at Widener. “That’s my ground zero. What else do we know about it?”

“The very word ‘Tearsheet’ was a slang term for a prostitute,” I said.

He pulled a face. “I had no idea.”

“The place was famous for always having ‘six comely maidens’ working there,” I said, with air quotes, “‘serving the customers ale and aught.’”

“What’s aught?” asked Tristan.

“Whatever you want it to be,” I said. “Their names are not recorded, but as of 1600 we know that one was Irish and two were Scottish. If we’re looking for loose women who would never fit in at Elizabeth’s court, those three fit the bill. Especially the Irish one, she had to travel by sea to get there, and the seas between Ireland and England were full of pirates. And she would have almost certainly been Catholic—so why would she go there unless she had a very good reason?”

Tristan sat at his desk examining the papers. The Tearsheet website had airbrushed the map a bit. In reality, not only was the “pub” next door bigger than the brewery claimed, but it was connected, by an underground tunnel and secret passages on every floor, directly to the brewery itself—thus allowing johns who needed to remain anonymous a way to escape if the brothel were raided by the constables. Too bad none of that was on the website. I think their sales might have improved if they’d shared all the dirt.

Over the next two weeks, Tristan was on a crash course in preparing to pass as a visitor to Elizabethan London. We knew he would never get the accent right, but as with myself in Boston forty years later, this was not an urgent issue: London’s population was exploding, and the city was babbling away in different accents and dialects from all over.

A benefit to choosing this DTAP was that it corresponded with the height of William Shakespeare’s career, and American theatres are simply obsessed with Shakespeare. Therefore Boston, despite its small size, was crawling with fight choreographers who specialized in the swordplay and knife skills common in Shakespeare’s time—or at least in his playhouse. Tristan learned drills he could do on his own and then honed his skills for hours each day in the one still-separate office space in the DODO building. He also practiced bowing, cap-doffing, eating without a fork, and sundry other small niceties, whilst I drilled him on Elizabethan turns of phrase. Our costumer friend helped again with clothing, renting us a variety of different men’s outfits so that Tristan could practice putting them on and off, as we had no way of knowing what clothes he might eventually find himself in. He would be enormous by the standards of the time; the chances of his actually blending in were slim to none.

I enjoyed watching him at his drills even more than I’d enjoyed watching the ferryman row me across the Charles. I truly did not want to enjoy watching him. It seemed incestuous. I thought Tristan was a looker from the moment I’d laid eyes on him, but all of that had been swept to the back of my mind immediately because of the peculiarity of our meeting and then our unceasing work. Except for the small talk of our first meal together, we had barely ever “chatted.” Tristan, as a general rule, does not chat. I knew him so well and trusted him quite literally with my life, and yet I hardly knew him at all.

When he had been the brains of the operation, the guiding hand, the commanding officer, I somehow hadn’t noticed that . . . but now as he was in training, I became the guide, and the dynamic shifted. I became his equal, in some ways his superior, and this in turn made me proprietary. I felt secret jealousy toward the rest of his life—how absurd, as he had no “rest of his life,” and in fairness neither did I anymore. He seemed to have no friends locally, never mentioned his family, and I can’t remember him referring to any memories or relationships. He was an unformed block, from which he was now laboring, literally, to sculpt a Renaissance Man.

Reader, that was an attractive thing to watch.

It felt like failure and betrayal to admit this to myself.

But the truth is, I had a fucking crush on somewhat fancied him. Always had. How ridiculous. Anyone could fancy Tristan Lyons; it took no special qualities. I wished to demonstrate, at least to myself, that I was made of special qualities. So I chose to disregard my sentimentality.

This was hard because: first, he looked pretty hot when he was thrusting that rapier, and second, I was aware he was about to go away to a place far more dangerous than my DTAP had been, and while it was possible he would return immediately, it was also possible he would not return at all. That he would be really, truly, not just Schrödinger’s-cat-like, dead.

Nothing like the possibility of eternal separation to bring out the romantic in a girl.

But I squelched it. Before he went into the ODEC on July 19 with Erszebet, I just clapped him on his shoulder. (Said shoulder was clad only in a T-shirt; recent improvements to the ODEC had included a heating system that made it into a shirtsleeves environment, and we had taken our rack of snowsuits to Goodwill.) I squeezed said shoulder but did not speak any of the words that my mouth suddenly wanted to form. I gave him a peck on the cheek, and watched as he passed through the airlock into the decontamination chamber. He’d already taken the medicines to sterilize his gut, but now scrubbed himself in the disinfectant shower and emerged in a pair of surgical scrubs, the ungainliness of which helped to dampen my romantic stirrings. Through the glass I waved like a younger sister as her brother goes off to summer camp. He nodded while backing into the ODEC, where Erszebet was waiting. He closed the door behind him. Oda-sensei, at the control console, flipped up the cover over the toggle switch, switched it on. The Klaxon clacked, however muffled. We waited.

It felt like years passed.

Finally, Erszebet opened the ODEC door. Oda-sensei powered down the ODEC. I had been hovering anxiously at the door. When he signaled me it was safe, I went inside.

Lying on the floor were Tristan’s scrubs and two white ceramic fillings I hadn’t known about. How ridiculous to confess this, but it saddened me that I had not known about his fillings. The gulf of my ignorance regarding his dental work left me feeling irrationally bereft.

Erszebet grabbed my arm and tugged it to get my attention. I forced my eyes away from the artifacts of Tristan to look at her.

She reached gently for my face and with her thumb and finger caressed the very pursed space between my brows. I hadn’t realized I’d been frowning. “If he doesn’t make it back, you will easily find a better lover,” she said consolingly.

I blushed so intensely it almost made my eyes water. “He’s not my lover,” I said irritably.

Erszebet gave me a knowing grin. “He’s not your lover yet,” she said.

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

A Monday of Mid-Harvest, 1601

Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

Gráinne it is who’s writing this, and ’tis the most astounding news I have to share with Your Grace. I’m after meeting a gentleman by the name of Tristan Lyons. You’ll want to add him to your stable of faithful vassals, and I think he can find his way there with the proper inducements. I’ll be working on him to that end, anyhow.

I was putting in my time at the bawdy-house beside the brewery. I know Your Grace would rather I not, but truly it’s the best way to hide in plain sight, and sometimes it’s great crack. I was servicing—or, to put it another way, being serviced by—a gentleman of Bess’s court, a lumbering heap of a knight and not the brightest candle in the chandelier. He thinks he’s never revealing any secrets, but sure it’s as easy to read him as it is to read the signs on the High Street, so it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. Himself it was who let slip the rumour about the Earl of Essex some months back. As you might recall this allowed Your Grace’s agent to adopt some of His Lordship’s silver that was left tragically unattended during His Lordship’s arrest.

So there we were getting along with business, and I look over his shoulder and what I see there in the corner is a bit of glamour. So I know there’s some magic afoot but it’s not me performing it, and there’s nobody else in the room. And just as it’s occurring to me that another witch must be Sending me something, what is there in the corner suddenly but a large handsome man, buck naked, looking dazed as a newborn, and doesn’t he fall right to his knees and clutch at his head in utter confusion. And then he moans a bit, louder than my dim fella, and my dim fella hears him, stops abruptly in his exertions, and looks over his shoulder.

You don’t want to have to go explaining to a man in the heat of passion why there’s suddenly another naked man in the room. Especially one who’s a better specimen. This new naked fella, he was tall and broad and the healthiest looking lad I’ve seen in ages, even finer than the lads back home. I guessed right off he was probably from the Continent or maybe the Golden Age, you know how them idiot pagans like to mess around—not from around here, anyway, which means he would be needing clothing and some dosh, like they do.

So I thought fast and said to your man who was on top of me, “Hey now, look I’ve got you the voyeur you were importuning me for last week, but it’s going to cost you extra for the privilege, so let’s finish up here and give me the silver for it.” He was too astonished to speak and that gave me a moment to consider the situation.

I had to reckon what the new fellow would be doing here, given he clearly was not Irish. He looked more Saxon, but what did that mean now the Vikings are no more? Was he an enemy or a friend? Did he come here deliberately to me, or maybe a blunder it was? He looked familiar, yet I knew of a certainty I’d never clapped eyes on him before—and as I needn’t belabor to you of all people, milady, this told me that what was occurring here and now was sure to be repeating itself on other Strands. Something was afoot. Some shite-for-brains was actually trying to accomplish something by sending this poor young buck to other times and places. He was still looking bolloxed so I couldn’t ask him yet.

Meanwhile my dim fella had collected his meagre wits enough to protest that he’d never wanted a voyeur. I said, “Oh, come now, I know you too well for you to hide anything from me, you’re falling all over yourself for the opportunity. Finish off and be giving me the money, so.”

He’s out of the humour now, which I don’t mind. Very grudgingly, in a foul mood, he reaches for his belt on the floor and yanks out some extra coin and tosses them to me in a huff. The fellow on the floor has pulled himself together a bit, looks around the wee room and his eyes widen.

“It’s all right, lad,” says I to him. “You’ve played your part well so far.”

“You’d be Gráinne?” he asks, pronouncing it almost right, like he’s been practicing. Which was awkward since I’m never going by that name at the Tearsheet.

“No,” says I, giving him a wink to put him at his ease, and making a glance at the other fella.

Which is where it all went sideways. This new fella is one of those literal-minded sorts so tediously common in this nation, who actually believes what he hears. He’s not looking at me, supposing it were indelicate to gaze upon a naked lady, so he doesn’t collect the wink. “I beg your pardon,” he says, ever so polite, and clambers to his feet, moving well, with an eye on the door.

Increasingly displeased, is my dim fella about this turn of events, the more he thinks about it. He has no scruples about looking at a naked lady he’s bought and paid for, so he takes in the wink and the glance, and even more displeased they make him. He pushes off of me and turns around just in time to see the new fella thoughtlessly getting between him and his baldric, which he’s slung over the peg beside the doorway. Suspended in that, of course, are the scabbards containing his rapier and his dagger. The new fella’s still looking about himself in that way people do after they’ve been Sent somewhere for the first time, it’s all new to him, he doesn’t appreciate that it’s bad practice to come between a knight and his arms—doubly so when the knight’s buck naked and just had a perfectly good fuck interrupted by a nasty surprise. My customer moves, fast, dropping one shoulder and barreling into the new man from behind, catching him in the ribs and giving him a good bash. It wouldn’t have been an equal contest had the new lad been looking him in the face, and on his toes, but as it was the blow staggered him out of the way. While he was pivoting about and getting his balance, my customer made straight for the door and pulled his dagger out of its sheath—the chamber being far too small, you’ll understand, for the rapier to be of any use.

Well, to that point in the proceedings, the new arrival might’ve been in a bit of a daze, but the sight of bare steel in another fella’s hand snapped him out of it in a trice, and suddenly wasn’t he moving with marvelous speed and sureness, as if he engaged in naked dagger fighting several times a day. Rather than stepping back, as an ordinary person might’ve, he moved toward the knight and got in close, stifling his movement even as he was drawing back to stab. Then something happened too quickly for me to follow it, and next thing I know the dagger’s clattering on the floorboards and the Saxon has the knight’s arm all twisted about in some manner of wrestling hold, I reckon. The knight tries to squirm out but the visitor pushes a bit harder, and I can hear something threatening to give way in the shoulder joint. “I yield,” says he who’s clearly got the worst of it. The new lad lets him go, but not before kicking the dagger across the floor, out of reach. I snatched it up so there’d be no more such foolishness, and clasped it to my breast. Rarely have I enjoyed such spectation at the Tearsheet. The new lad was so fine to look at and the other fella was so dull, and I haven’t got out to a bear-baiting or even a play in the longest time. To watch naked men have a go at each other with weapons is better than either. Makes me homesick, so it does.

“I humbly apologize for this misunderstanding,” says the Saxon. I couldn’t recognize the accent. His teeth were gorgeous. “And for my unmannerly arrival.” He said unmannerly as if it weren’t a word used to coming out of his mouth. So I figured he were from a place where manners aren’t important but he’s trying to respect the occasion, and I liked that well enough. Enough to want to keep seeing him naked, anyhow.

So I take the dim fella’s purse, help myself to my newly augmented fee, toss him his clothes, and give him a wink. “Be changing outside now,” I say, and send him off.

That makes it easier to stare at your naked Saxon.

“Gráinne,” he said. “But you don’t go by that name. I understand.”

“You’re not one of them locals,” I observe.

“What gave it away?” he asked. I like a bit of dry humour. I laughed.

“So tell me, then, who are you and what is it brings you here? Who Sent you?”

“Classified,” he said.

“Never heard of him. Perhaps a Cornish name, is it? Protestant or Catholic?”

“’Tisn’t a name,” he said. “It means I cannot tell you. I am under orders not to tell you.”

“Are you? How’s your master expect you to get anything done, then? Once you’ve answered my questions to my satisfaction I’ll give you this extra money the fella left, and get you some clothes, both of which you’ll be needing. We’ve some extra shirts and drawers around for our favorite customers, since things do tend to get nicked here. But you’ll get no help from me until you answer my questions. Right idiot your master is if he thinks it works any other way.”

Clearly the fellow’s never been Sent before; he got a caged-bear look on his face, and I felt for him, but obviously it’s not safe to do anything until I know more. I’m passing as Protestant Irish, it’s my excuse for being in London instead of back home, but Protestant Irish is a hard act to play without giving it the full Puritan extreme and that’s not safe either. I have to watch my back all the time. I needed to know where his sympathies were.

And then he uttered such an idiot claim: “I’m here for a purely economic concern,” he says. “It’s just financial, I’ve got no political or religious affiliation.”

“Is it Protestant money or Catholic money you’re after?” I ask.

“It does not matter,” he says. “Not where I come from.”

“Where in God’s name do you come from?” I ask again. “May I go there with you? Because in the name of Our Lord’s mammy, if I could be someplace where money’s got no religion and religion’s got no money, I’d be a happier woman.”

He sits on the bed beside me, turned a little away so I can’t see his front so well (I did try to peek though). He said he would tell me as much as he could—anything that wasn’t “classified.” And here’s what he told me. I’ll make it as brief as I can, but it was quite the long chat we had about it:

He is from the future, from a land that will become an English-speaking nation some day—but not a part of England! So their accursed language triumphs, but they themselves do not. The fuckers lose most of Ireland as well, turns out. I don’t know how long it will take this to happen, maybe ten years, maybe a hundred. I pressed him for details, especially about Your Grace’s legacy of course, but he said he couldn’t give me any unless I let him get dressed, which I wouldn’t. It was great crack to see how uncomfortable he was being naked.

“Guess you don’t do that much in the future,” I teased him. “Thought that would be a constant across the ages—how bawdy-houses work.”

“I have never been to a bawdy-house before,” he said.

Of course I didn’t believe him, but it wasn’t important, so I pressed on, trying to learn more about this Future where the best-looking fellas speak English but are not, in fact, English. We spent no small sum of time discussing why wearing clothes would make it easier for him to speak. Otherwise, all I could get out of him was that the land that the English are now preparing to settle in the New World breaks away from England to become its own nation, and keeps speaking English but becomes notable for its deep regard of Ireland. This is especially true of the area where he himself had come from directly, which is a province with the queer enough name of Massive Shoe Hits (code, I expect). Anyhow, seems in the future there will be lots of Irish running around over there, but they’ll be speaking English.

“So where’s their loyalty?” I demanded, and he said it’s with themselves. “They get distracted with their new world, they don’t have the energy to stay preoccupied with old grudges. Eventually, I mean. It takes awhile.”

Beyond that the most I could get out of him was that he had come back in time to me, specifically, to seek my assistance. Wasn’t I flattered at that, I confess. “How did you know to find me?” I asked.

“Classified,” he said quickly, and then grimaced and corrected himself: “I can’t tell you. But I know you’re the right one for me to ask for help.”

“All right then. What be in it for me?” I asked. “Given you’ve no money to offer me, and refusing you are to tell me about the future, which is the only reason I’d be interested in you. Except maybe for playing around because you are a beautiful specimen of a man. I’ll wager all your children are beauties.”

“Might we continue this conversation once I’m clothed?” himself asks again, with a bit more urgency now as my words are having their effect and he’s beginning to get big and firm down below.

“Lordy, no,” I say. “I am enjoying this too much. Do you know how rare it is to sit next to a fellow who’s clean and nice-looking and isn’t asking anything of me? It’s enough to make me want to offer myself.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” he says, crossing his legs more than a bit awkwardly.

“Well then tell me why you are here,” I ordered.

“I need to convince a man named Sir Edward Greylock that he should invest his money in the East India Company.”

“Sure, I’ve heard of Sir Edward, we’ve some friends in common, if you take my meaning.”

“Oh, do you know how to find him?”

“I might,” I say, and it’s pretty confident I am about it. Your Grace might remember the wee peccadillo of last year with that German banker fellow and the silk merchant? Sir Edward is the German’s grand-nephew on his ma’s side, and I met him in passing at the funeral, but he was quite drunk so he wouldn’t remember me. However, knowing the family to be Protestant bankers I’ve kept a careful eye on all their spawn. And as Your Grace knows well, I’ve made it my business to win the confidences of some of the wenches working the taverns near Whitehall Palace, and I keep an inventory in my head of their regulars’ habits, same as they themselves do. So I happen to know that Sir Edward Greylock is a regular for late dinner at the Bell, on King Street, right by the stairs. I didn’t tell my Saxon all this, of course. First I had to know more from him. “Is it that you want to ruin Sir Edward, and the East India Company is going to fail?” I asked. “Or is it that you want him to succeed and it’s going to thrive? Answer if you want my help.”

“Neither, really. I just want to distract him from putting his money into another company. I’m trying to avoid something.”

“So it’s another enterprise that you want to see fail,” I said. He nodded once. “Is it Protestant or Catholic, this other one?”

“That’s truly got nothing to do with anything,” he insisted.

“If you know what comes of the East India Company, tell me, since that will be useful to somebody I know, and you’d better make yourself useful if you expect me to give a shite about you.”

“I can’t tell you what happens with the East India Company.”

“Classified, is it?”

“Yes. Classified.”

“Goodo. God ye good day, then,” I said cheerily, stood up from the mattress and headed for the little curtained doorway.

“Where are you going?” he demands, paling a little.

“I’m leaving you with your classifieds,” I said. “I’ll keep my own classifieds until you’re willing to have a fair exchange.”

And I left the room, went down the wee corridor and climbed down the steps to the ground level where the tavern is. I went out back, used the privy, then stepped back into the tavern to see if anyone was in need of me. But it was that time of day when the few men there are mostly there for the drink.

So having left the Saxon alone for about as long as it would take to walk a half mile, I returned to the wee chamber, and as I anticipated he was more willing to negotiate.

He allowed that the East India Company is a good investment for those who can risk it—it takes awhile to come to much, but then it will be around a long while and ’tis a private company with good returns on the investment in time. So, Your Grace, let me know if you’re interested in channeling some funds that way, and I’ll alert your agent here. If it’s good enough for a Fugger, it’s good enough for a Fucker.

Meanwhile, since I wanted him to see he’d get rewarded, and since sadly it seemed we weren’t going to have any kind of adventure while he was naked, I pulled out the extra set of drawers and shirt that were hiding under that very mattress the whole time and tossed them to him.

“I’ll help you find your Sir Edward,” I said, “but first we need to kit you out in more than underwear. Lucky for you it’s me you sought out, as I’m the one best knows how to get togemans for such a large lad.”

Once he had donned the threads I had for him, he relaxed a bit and even introduced himself properly: Tristan Lyons, he claims to be. Can’t make out where he’s really from by the name, any more than by the looks. (French, maybe? In which case likely Catholic, but not likely an ally even so. The French are slippery that way.)

I decided to take him to the Globe, on account of Dick Burbage has a closet full of costumes he did steal from Ned Alleyn. He played a heap of roles in his day, did Ned, so I was hoping we could make Tristan over into whatever would be most expedient for his undertaking.

’Tis a short walk from the Tearsheet to the Globe, mostly along the river, and one I never thought of as remarkable, but you’d think I was asking Tristan to eat a sewer. Practically retching the whole way he was, despite my taking him along the broader lane where gravel is laid down over the clay, and all the sewage lies neatly in the drainage ditches to the side of the streets, not like some alley where the offal sits right in the street once it’s dumped from above. ’Twas only a turd or two we had to sidestep, not counting the horse manure, which isn’t at all offensive, in fact it has a barnyard smell that reminds me of home.

Tristan Lyons had only his underclothes on, of course, but in this part of town that hardly draws attention, no matter he was such a large fella. Crowds were streaming into the Globe’s gates. Trumpets did sound from within, and then I recognized Hal Condell’s voice like an oratorio, which meant they were beginning some fool play. Tristan’s attention turned toward the gate as if he were curious to go in.

“’Tisn’t that way we’re going,” I said.

“That phrase,” he said, looking surprised. “Even I know that phrase. ‘Star-crossed lovers.’ They’re doing Romeo and Juliet in there. The original Romeo and Juliet.”

“No, the original had Saunder Cooke as Juliet,” I said. “That was much better than whoever’s doing it since Saunder grew a beard. Anyhow it’s a shite play, just a stupid court-sponsored rant against the Irish.” I grabbed his arm and began to pull him through the floods of people streaming back into the theatre. We must need get around to the back of the stage where the tiring-house was.

“How is it anti-Irish?” Tristan asked.

“The villain is a Catholic friar,” I pointed out. “He being a meddling busy-body who traffics in poison—he’s the reason it’s a tragedy and not a comedy, and everyone knows Catholic is code for Irish.”

“Aren’t the French Catholic?” asked Tristan. “And the Spanish?”

“The friar’s name is Lawrence,” I countered, as I pulled him along. “So obviously named after St. Labhrás. He was martyred by drinking a poison of his own concocting. The whole play is just a coded insult to the Irish, a demonstration of how amoral we supposedly are. It’s bollocks. You be missing nothing. Especially now that Saunder’s grown a beard.”

“I don’t want to see it, I just never heard that Shakespeare hated the Irish before,” said Tristan, only it was so crowded there that he was shouting just to be heard as all the people pressed past us to get inside.

“Why would anyone in your time give a shite about Will Shakespeare’s politics? But, aye, he does,” I said. “I can quote reams of examples, same as anyone. Worst of all was just the other year, one of them plays about some English king, and there was a terrible drunk Irish character staggering about the stage wailing about how all the Irish are villains and bastards and knaves. And awhile before that he had a play about some other English king who went to conquer Ireland, and he said the Irish live like venom. Venom. That’s poison, so it is. He’s obsessed with the Irish and poison. Trying to convince the masses that one of us is planning to poison the Queen.”

“Are you?” asked Tristan.

“Course not. Not worth the risk. She’ll be dying soon anyhow and ’tisn’t as if she could suddenly produce an heir at her age. There’ll be chaos soon without us meddling.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“It is not fair enough. It would be fair if she’d died years ago. ’Tis always the wrong ones living too long and the wrong ones dying too young.” And then because this touches a subject near to my sensitive heart, of course I pressed on: “Like my Kit Marlowe.”

“Who’s Kit Marlowe?”

I stopped walking, and let the crowd bump past me as I turned to him. “Christopher Marlowe? Are you telling me you’ve never heard of Christopher Marlowe?”

“Christopher Marlowe. Of course I know the name.” He thought a moment. “He was a spy and a writer, but I was not briefed about him in depth because he died years before I needed to arrive here.”

“Briefed? There’s nothing brief about him, except his life, he is only the greatest playwright that ever was, who only wrote the greatest play that ever was.” And because no light of recognition went on in his pretty eyes, I prompted, “It’s Tamburlaine I mean.”

He shrugged. “I do not know it.” I was incredulous and I expressed my incredulity with colorful language. “More famous than Hamlet?” he asked.

I figured he was codding me and almost fell over with the laughter. “Are you taking the piss, Tristan Lyons?” I asked. “Hamlet’s a dull fuck of a story where a fellow stands around lamenting how useless he is even to his own self, and then there’s one pansy swordfight and it’s over. The only good part of that is what he nicked from Kit’s Dido.”

Tristan shrugged again. “I’m not much of a theatre-goer.”

“No theatre, no whoring . . . pray what is it you do for recreation, then?”

But before he could answer, we’d reached the back of the Globe, and they know me in the tiring-house, so I grabbed him by the hand and in we marched.

The tiring-house is a fair way to madness, and it was a big masquerade-ball scene they were gearing up for, with all the supernumeraries donning gorgeous gowns and robes and masks the like of which could have afforded us half Your Grace’s navy for a season. The Prop Man (I never have learned that fella’s name) and his lads were flying around, handing out masks and candles and chalices and bated rapiers and kerchiefs, and I could hear the musicians in the gallery above tuning quietly, while Dick Burbage was bellowing on the boards, pretending to be a horny young man, which he is, except for the young part.

“Here to see Dicky,” I say to the Prop Man. He looks disgruntled, which is his usual state, and he says, “Come back after the show is down.” Then he sees Tristan and his eyes fix on him, because Tristan is big and I realize Prop Man is worried about costuming him—he’s there in nothing but undergarments, so he looks as if he must be expecting a costume (which is true in a way).

“He’s with me,” I say. “Only I need to speak to Dicky about some clothes for him.”

Prop Man frowns, cocks his ear toward the upstage center curtain. “He’s almost off,” he whispers. “And he’s not in scene three.”

Tristan and I try to stay out of the way of all the foot-traffic by pushing ourselves against the wall. It smells foul in there—there’s some silks being worn by boy-actors that stink like they came right from a brothel, and I don’t mean that in a nice way. But we’re only there a few moments when in through the curtain, right from the stage, comes Dick, trussed up like a boy although it’s a bit long in the tooth he is now for the likes of Romeo.

He sees me through the crowd of milling minions and the smile he gives me could light the heavens, he’s that fond of me, and sure why wouldn’t he be? “Gracie,” he calls out to me, for that’s how they say my name here (and yours as well, Your Majesty—in England they do say Grace O’Malley). The Prop Man hushes Dick with irritation, but like always, Dick ignores the Prop Man. “What do you mean finding a bigger man than I?” Burbage says. He pushes his way through the crew of underlings, all of whom disregard him as if he were one of them and not the richest and most renowned actor in all Creation.

He comes to us, looking Tristan Lyons up and down. Tristan Lyons says nothing, just gazes levelly back at him. “You a comedian, fellow?” he asks Tristan, and claps him hard on the shoulder. Then he looks surprised, as if he had just struck a boulder while thinking he’d be striking wool.

“No,” says Tristan. “Soldier.”

And Dick, he backs up a bit, looks respectful. “Who do you fight for, then, lad?” he asks.

“Classified,” I say.

Dick looks impressed.

“If you be Gracie’s friend, then you’re a friend of mine,” he says, without introducing himself (assuming he would not need to, assuming everyone knows him already, sure). “And I’ll help you out howe’er you need it.”

“It’s costumery he’s needing,” I say. “Nothing outlandish, mind you. Needs to blend in with some fellas down by Whitehall. I was thinking you had Ned Alleyn’s—”

“I do indeed,” says Dick. And to Tristan, “Honored to be of service to you, sir. I’m back on in a moment so we must be quick, but follow me.” He gestures us to follow him through the whispering mob, to a tiny closet along the inner wall—he being a principal shareholder, he has the privilege of some small privacy. In this closet are some pegs and on them hang clothes custom-made for a man of easily Tristan Lyons’s height. These were some of the costumes of Edward Alleyn, tallest actor of our age and the leading man of the rival company the Admiral’s Men. So tall he is, nobody can fit into his clothes, not even Burbage, who stole them as a prank when Ned retired a few year back.

“Make him a gentleman or a knight or a wealthy merchant,” I suggested, as Dick glanced between the pegs and Tristan.

“All right, I’ve an idea,” he said. He chucks aside some galligaskins and then a pair of French hosen filled with bombast, and Tristan’s looking relieved he won’t be wearing anything so ponce-like. Finally Dick pulls out some longer Venetians, that tie below the knee. They’re made of damask, pluderhosen-style, a dark blue with red showing through at the slashes. He also pulls out some black silk netherstockings to go under them. And then a blue velvet vest. Also a blue worsted doublet with a codpiece attached, but I protest that, on account of the heat of the day. “Haven’t you a mere jerkin?” I ask, and sure enough he has, a red velvet one with gold and ivory buttons, and stiff shoulders sticking out like the stubs of angel wings. “No codpiece with it though,” says Burbage. “Sorry, fellow.” Then a crowned felt hat and a ruff for the neck, and cordwain boots, which are nicer than the workman’s galoshes I’d found for him back at Tearsheet. “You’ll have to dress yourself, I’m back on stage in fifteen lines,” he says when he’s hauled it out and then reclosed the closet. I thanked him and promised him to return the costumes quickly. He kissed my cheek, saluted Tristan, and dashed back out onto the stage, groaning like a man suffering unrequited love, followed by a handful of merry lads with masks and torches and one godawful pipe player.

Tristan had throughout this remained quiet and somewhat stiff, taking it all in. I wonder what his home-time must be like in comparison. I help him to dress, the mad hushed bustle of getting ready for the ball scene all around us. He’s a wee bit shorter and a wee bit broader than Ned Alleyn, but the clothes fit him well enough.

“Who was that man?” he asked when we’re safely outside the bounds of the Globe.

“Among many other fellows, Hamlet,” I say, and I roll my eyes. “And Romeo.” He doesn’t look so very impressed and my regard for him, it rises a bit. Plus he’s easy on the eyes, with the jerkin all laced up and his muscles nearly bulging through it. Ned Alleyn didn’t have those lovely teeth either. So I’m enjoying our little assignment, it’s a grand way to pass the day.

I say it’s to Whitehall we’re heading. He appears to know something of it. We walk out to the Thames, and himself sees that massive long London Bridge to the east, with all its fine buildings, and some two dozen traitors’ heads decaying on the Great Stone Gate, and his eyes pop right open like a caged monkey’s, so I reckon he’s from a place without much architecture to speak of. I can’t wait for him to see Savoy Palace and all them—he might fall right into the Thames! I budge his elbow and point to the west. “This way,” I say. He follows, looking like I did the first time I ever stepped into St. Paul’s. The tide’s starting to turn and the upstream boats are starting to struggle, so I decide we’ll walk to the river-bend and go across there.

I find the walk refreshing, for there’s open air over the Thames which is nicer than the open sewers of Southwark, but the mild dyspeptic look he’s had on his face hardly lessens as he walks along. He must be from some small village in the New World, to have such a hard time with the city air. But then, he gazes upon all the barges and ships and wherries with a keen look that makes me think he might have a nautical background. He’s fascinated by all of them—the dung boats no less than the Queen’s glass barge, and he asks questions that I answer best I can. I try to make some conversation about himself, but he’s not at all forthcoming about himself or the reason for his mission. I don’t push him for it now—that can come in time. Trustingly dependent I’ll make him, then when he is particularly in need of my assistance, I’ll demand cooperation. I’ve done it often enough.

We walk by the Paris Gardens, and you can hear the bears and the dogs and isn’t the crowd loving it. It always gives me a laugh that the Queen will bring herself all the way over here to watch the bear-baiting but has never once stepped into the Globe, for all Will Shakespeare’s trying to kiss her arse with his Irish-hating sentiments.

Less than halfway along our walk, where the Narrow Wall begins on our shore, all the palaces of bishops and nobility become visible on the far bank—Salisbury House, all the Inns of Court, Arundel House, and the rest. I point them out to him (of course I know them all from various dalliances I have contrived on Your Grace’s behalf), but he does not goggle at them as he had at London Bridge. “A little different from my own time,” is all he says.

At this point, the Thames bends to snake south, and soon as I hear a ferryman calling “Westward ho!” I hail him. “We’re taking this wherry,” I explain to Tristan, “for a penny, which will come out of your money that I procured so cleverly for you from the dim fella.” The ferryman fetches us across, brings us to the far side without the tide causing him too much grief. Tristan pays his penny, and then it’s just a street away we are from King Street, in the shadow of Whitehall Palace, and right away is the Bell Tavern. One of three taverns where the minor courtiers like to eat and drink and sometimes do other things. I’m more at home in Southwark, and less conspicuous, but as Your Grace knows, it’s plenty of time I spend here.

It was quiet there for the time of day, as the last of the diners were finishing. A strange stillness after the din and bustle of the streets and the Thames. I nodded to Mary, who works there. She nodded back at me—and her eyes found Tristan, and they opened wider, then she gave me an approving look. I sauntered over to her and said low in her ear, “Sir Edward Greylock? You have said he was a dinnertime regular.”

“Indeed he is, and you’re in luck, he’s just finishing his lamb.” With a jut of the chin she gestured toward a fellow of perhaps thirty years, tall and elegant but with a willowy, pale presentation, sitting alone at a table by the door, the dregs of another diner’s meal across from him. As if a strong wind would bend him over. Curly reddish-brown hair and pink cheeks made him look almost feminine. A pretty man all around, but not impressive. I recognized him from a few times when I was spending the evening with one of his acquaintances. I in turn pointed him out to Tristan.

It is now that Tristan begins to impress himself upon me in a good way. For what does he do but approach Sir Edward and with the most nuanced mixture of respect and swagger, he does bend the knee just a wee bit and lowers his head, doffs his hat and holds it down by his right leg, kisses his left hand and says, “God give you good day, m’lord,” and then as if turned to stone, he awaits to be noticed by Sir Edward.

Sir Edward looks up from his lamb pie and stares at Tristan, perhaps as distracted by his manly physic as Mary was. “Well met, sir,” he said, uncertain of Tristan’s rank from his piecemeal attire.

“I cry you mercy, m’lord,” says Tristan, not at all like a fellow who comes from a time and place without any English nobility oppressing him. “I’m a gentleman soldier from the Isle of Man and I would beg a boon of you.” And when Sir Edward did not appear ready to disregard him, he pressed on, in a steady enough voice: “The world speaks of you as friends with the Earl of Cumberland, and he is a lord I fain would meet, but have no means of introduction.”

“And who might you be, sir?” asked Sir Edward, without malice he said it, studying him.

“I am called Tristan Lyons, and I am a Manx adventurer, recently returned from Java.”

Confusion flashed across Sir Edward’s face. “An adventurer?” he said, and then seemed to choose polite caution by gesturing warmly to the seat across from him. “Pray be seated,” he said. “What would you with the Earl?”

“Faith sir, in Java I befriended some agents of the Earl of Cumberland, and heard from them of some ambitious plans intended by the Earl and his aldermen and knights.”

“Ay, the East India Company,” says Sir Edward.

“Just so, m’lord. My connexions are all abroad and I fear I cannot write to them in time for them to send references of my character before the Earl sends Sir James Lancaster off on his next voyage. I would be deeply in your debt if you would consider brokering an introduction. I can hardly conceive of a better investment to be made with my inheritance.” At this I nearly burst out laughing for he sounded not at all excited, but as if he had been carved from a bit of peat and only half-animated. But then, Your Grace, he continued to speak, and to describe in such details the quality of the Javanese pepper harvest that in faith my own mouth was watering, and I have never even tried the stuff. And since I knew his motives, didn’t I marvel at how well he kept his true intention from this fella, spoke as if he hadn’t one jot of interest in seeing the fella himself invest in the Earl of Cumberland’s schemes.

Sir Edward says he regrets to inform Tristan that Sir James set sail back in April, and Tristan begs his pardon and asks him does he think it might be possible to make an investment anyhow, toward future returns?

Then Tristan goes on a bit and begins to speak in tones of wonder and reverence, as if he were merely musing aloud to himself, of Hither India. There is one thing in particular he goes on about, and that’s spices called turmeric and saffron, the both of which create a cheery yellow-orange dye for silks and cottons—fabrics easy to obtain in Hither India. And now it’s Sir Edward I’m watching, as his face becomes a marvel of interest. Suddenly he says he’s a mind to speak to the Earl himself and see about such an investment, and if Tristan will come to see him in two days’ time, he will happily inform him of the possibilities. Tristan falls all over himself with appreciation and gratitude, honors Sir Edward as if Sir Edward were a king and himself a peasant, and then with some assistance from me (whom Sir Edward never once regarded directly), removes himself from the building.

But not before making certain that Sir Edward knew he could find some pleasant behind-the-door diversions at the Tearsheet Brewery in Southwark, for which I am much obliged.

“That was nicely done,” I said, as we walked back toward the riverbank. “Why did you go on about that dye color? Why did that hook him?”

“He is betrothed to a lady of Elizabeth’s bedchamber,” Tristan answered. “We studied portraits of her. She is very taken with that particular color, and it is a difficult color to come by with English or even European dyes. Theirs seems to be a match of affection as well as opportunity, so I guessed that he would know her preferences, and also want to know how to please her. Seems I guessed correctly.”

“Is right you did,” I agreed. “Although not so much affection he doesn’t want the odd discreet diversion. I thank you for that as well.”

“It seemed the least I could do for the time you’ve donated to my cause today.”

We squeezed round a tight corner into a larger street. He might more easily have dropped back and let me go ahead of him. If he had, things might have come out differently. But intent as he was on the conversation, he was desirous of remaining abreast of me, his eyes upon mine. He tried to pass through a space too narrow for the both of us. In doing so he brushed—I don’t say banged into, or jostled, but merely brushed—the shoulder of a tosser in fancy dress and a long face, leaning against a wall sucking on a long-stemmed pipe, and sulking. He probably hadn’t managed to get an audience with old Elizabeth like his ma told him to expect he would. Tristan didn’t even notice; but in the corner of my eye I saw this tosser giving my man a sharp look.

“I would be happy to strike up a working relationship with you, Tristan Lyons, so I would,” I said. “I can imagine all manner of ways we might be of mutual benefit. So if you’re ever in Southwark again, stop in.”

He paused a moment and regarded me. And I regarded him back, as it pleased me to do so. But at the same time I threw a glance back at the tosser in the fancy dress, who had dislodged himself from the wall, and was now giving Tristan a thorough inspection from hat to shoes and back up again.

I took Tristan’s arm firmly and pulled him along.

“What’s troubling you?” he asked, with a glance back over his shoulder.

After we had put a bit more distance between ourselves and that unsavory fop who seemed to have taken such an interest in my companion, I said, “Farthing for your thoughts.” As you’ll have collected, milady, I was after learning whether Tristan knew of Strands and the like.

“Did I seem at all familiar to you, when I first met your eye?” he asked.

So yes. He knew something of it. “Let’s not bandy words,” I said. “Whoever Sent you—whoever you cooked up this plan with—knows perfectly well that it’ll never suffice to do this on one Strand only. Hence all of your preparations. Learning to pronounce my name. Looking at paintings and noticing the colors of dyestuffs and such.”

“It would be idle to deny it,” he said with a nod of his fine chin.

“It’s in many another Strand that I’m even now meeting you again in like manner, walking these streets, having this conversation.”

“As I understand it, yes.”

“You understand it well enough, ’tis plain,” I said, “and it’s little trouble for me to Wend my way to those Strands—or snáithe as we say at home—and meet with you there and then and further enjoy the pleasure of your company.”

“I would like that very much,” he said. “Are there others like you I might work with as well?”

“Don’t get cheeky, lad,” I said. “Let’s see how you can make things worth my while first, and then I’ll decide if I want to cut anyone else in.”

“If you make yourself my ally, it’s quite possible. So think about what I might be able to offer you.”

“Oh, I will,” I assured him. “I already am. Now, if you’ve a good witch to Send you,” I continued, “have her Send you to arrive yesterday.”

“Why?”

“This is Monday. Had you arrived yesterday, everyone would have been at Sunday services. Not that I mind finding you naked in my closet each time you return, but it will be simpler if you arrive when things are quiet.”

“Will you skip Sunday services to meet me?”

“If you want to pay the fine I’d be receiving for failure to appear.” And since he seemed to be considering this, I said, “No, I cannot, lad. I cannot afford to be seen as shirking my religious duties, it’s suspicious enough that I’m Irish and over here, while there’s an armed uprising against the English back at home. But you’re not on the rolls anywhere, so your absence won’t be noted. Come on Sunday and dress yourself, now that you know where I keep the shirts and breeches, and just wait for me.”

We were having this conversation as we came down King Street to the Whitehall Stairs, where I planned to find us a ferryman. There were plenty of wherries out there since the tide was heading out, and traffic’s easier eastward. I slowed my pace as I surveyed the scene.

Then someone barreled into me from behind, knocking me off balance.

I stumble and my shoe gets caught in a tear in my petticoat, and I’m falling to my knees when, faster than I can think, there’s Tristan catching me and helping me to right myself. But in doing so he jostles the rude bastard who’s almost knocked me down. By the time I’ve got my balance and my wits back, that bastard has spun on his heel to confront Tristan. They’re standing arm’s length apart. I recognize him as the tosser who followed us.

This fop—who doesn’t look like much, hardly any manlier than Sir Edward—instantly draws back to a distance, puts his right hand on his rapier and draws it out, no more than the width of two fingers, but enough to send a message. Other people coming and going on the steps give him a wider berth, but otherwise continue their business on and off the wherries.

“Stand off, villain!” says the fella with the rapier, pompous and angry. “What business have you touching me so rudely?”

Tristan catches himself. “Good morrow, my lord, pray excuse my abruptness.”

“Once you have explained yourself, I might.”

Tristan blinks, then says, “’Tis my sister you just knocked to her knees there. I’ll let it be if you will.”

The fellow looks utterly astounded, and then laughs in Tristan’s face. “What, that common whore? That slattern? She’s not your sister, you lying knave. ’Tis she owes me an apology, for being in my way.” He turns to me and commands me: “Apologize!”

“She owes you no apology, sir,” says Tristan, very calm.

“Let it be, Tristan,” I say sharply, and I’m using my best London accent, which Tristan notices with surprise. He’s sharp enough to understand I’ve a reason for it. “Pray pardon me, m’lord,” I say to the fellow. “I did not hear you coming.”

Tristan says nothing. But the set of his mouth shows a kind of annoyance and the tosser with the rapier notices. He draws the rapier a little farther.

“Do you take offense at my behavior toward this whore?” he demands of Tristan.

“He doesn’t,” I say.

“Shut up, whore,” he says. “Tell me yourself, sirrah, assure me you understand this bawd is in the wrong here, and for even thinking of defending her, you are too. Say so and beg apology.”

I recognize the tosser now—he’s been a customer at the Tearsheet of my mate Morag, the Caledonian wench. He’s a terrible mean streak and he loves his violence. It’s not apologizing he wants from Tristan—it’s a fight.

Tristan is still standing there. I sense he’s about to vomit with the rage, although he looks calm enough. “To avoid a disruption of the Queen’s Peace, I will apologize whole-heartedly,” he says, but of course that just feeds the fellow’s ire:

“If that’s why you’re apologizing, I reject it,” he says. “I demand you acknowledge you’re wrong for insulting and challenging a nobleman. And now you’re being insolent as well.” He draws the rapier fully from its sheath. “Will it take a taste of steel for you to find your manners?”

“I have no weapon,” Tristan says, still quiet-like.

The nobleman laughs. “So?” he says.

“Would you strike an unarmed man?”

He laughs again. “That makes it easier to strike him, doesn’t it?” Around us, folk are still hustling by, and by now we’ve missed a few wherries. I want to catch one while the tide is with us, and I certainly don’t want to get ourselves stuck here.

Now the nobleman looks around, as if expecting an admiring crowd.

In truth, almost everyone’s giving us a wide berth. There are only two exceptions. Standing off at a distance, observing matters carefully, is a gentleman with a long, sharp yellow beard, dressed in those sorts of clothes that look dark at first glance but on closer examination are splendid. Closer to hand, three paces behind and to one side of the tosser, is another courtier, old enough to be the fop’s father, dressed as if he’s on his way home from a Dutch funeral.

“But I’m happy to give an advantage to one who so desperately needs it,” continues the tosser. “George,” he says to the old git in the neck-ruff, “lend this varlet that rusty meat cleaver you have hanging from your belt. I’ll take my apology in blood.” Very familiar he is, and cheeky in his description of George’s sidearm, which looks a perfectly respectable weapon to my eye, but George takes no offense; I reckon these two know each other well, and that George is some manner of retainer or vassal.

“You’ll be fined again, Herbert,” says George, who for one so long in the tooth and so weedy in his attire is, I confess, a bit fierce-looking.

“The fine’s a trifle,” Herbert says breezily. “Lend him your sword.”

George tosses his cape back, reaches across his body, and draws the weapon, which turns out to be as old and out-of-date as his clothing: it’s a heavy, single-edged backsword of the old school, such as you’ll see Protestants toting about at home, the better to wave menacingly at Irish folk. He offers it hilt-first over his arm to Tristan, who declines to take it. “I pray you accept my pardon for all offenses uttered,” Tristan says. “I’ve an ailing mother in Southwark and I would fain meet her within the hour.”

“If she ails enough, you can meet her in heaven in half that time,” says Herbert. “Take the sword.”

Tristan remains where he is.

Herbert, without warning, slashes at Tristan’s face. He’d have taken Tristan’s nose off if Tristan’s reflexes were not so fast. But like a dragonfly avoiding a bird, my Saxon has ducked the blow, grabbed the hilt of the offered backsword, and swung it around to face his attacker. Old George, no fool, steps back to give them room. A passing washerwoman utters a little shout of fear and scurries off, and suddenly I notice nobody else is on the steps now but the four of us, and sure I’m sweating in the hazy September sun much more than I was moments ago.

The fight was fierce but very short. Wherever Tristan comes from, they must use swords because it’s confident, strong and graceful he seemed to me. But I think whatever their swords are, they can’t be rapiers. He looked like he was dancing, like he’d learned steps he could perform very well, but Herbert—although far less elegant and less muscle on him—was so accustomed to the weapon that using it was like walking or eating for him.

Their fight moved them down a couple steps and then back up, and nobody watched overtly as they might back home, here in the city people mostly hurried away up on the road, or if they were on the river, they kept rowing toward the Westminster stairs or the nearest sandbank to disembark. Herbert was wielding his slender blade like an Italian fence-master, darting in from this angle and that, and it was all Tristan could do to set his thrusts aside with herky-jerky movements of the backsword. It looked ponderous even in his strong hands.

Suddenly, I didn’t see how, the backsword went flying out of Tristan’s hand and Herbert had him flat back against the stairs—his sword actually pinning Tristan against the stone by virtue of having pierced through the shirt, vest, and jerkin just at the side of Tristan’s neck, and then Herbert stabbed it into the crevice between the rise and tread of the stone steps. Tristan was stuck. It seemed a fancy move from a fellow not likely capable of fancy moves.

“To fall for such an easy and old-fashioned technique,” said Herbert, making a tch-tch-tch’ing sound. “A stupid error—and a fatal one.”

But then a gloved hand came down, gently but firmly, upon Herbert’s wrist. An extraordinarily fine glove it was, made of white kid, with intricate embroidery.

Herbert hadn’t seen this coming. Nor had I. Both of us looked up into the face of the gentleman I had noticed a minute ago—the finely dressed chap with the sharp yellow beard. “Who are you, sirrah, and how dare you?” Herbert demanded, and tried to wrench free of the other’s grip. But the white kid glove held firm.

“I am the gentleman’s second,” said the man with the sharp yellow beard. He had an accent—’twas ze he said instead of the, like a German. He glanced over at George, then returned his eyes to Herbert’s face. Or perhaps I should say eye, for he was wearing a tall hat with a broad brim, gorgeously plumed, and in the best style of all the young blades, he’d pulled it down low to one side, concealing his left eye. “You have your second,” the German continued, flicking that eye momentarily at George, “and so ze honorable tradition is zat your opponent in ze duel should have one also. Is it not so?”

“It is so,” Herbert admitted, “but you do not even know this varlet.”

The German shrugged, giving me cause to admire the exquisite silk lining of his cape. “Zis in no way alters ze honorable tradition. As you will know. Being a man of honor.” And the German now turned his head to look about at the crowd of onlookers that had gathered during the pause in swordplay. The scarlet plume in his hat wafted first this way, then that. Herbert looked up to see that there were now many witnesses. Some of whom were gentlemen—capable of giving testimony and of being believed by a judge.

The German’s intervention had worked; Herbert’s humours had cooled. He looked down at Tristan. “Go ask the wet-nurse how to escape next time. But first give me apologies. Varlet.”

The German released Herbert’s wrist, spun away, and walked off into the crowd.

“I apologize,” said Tristan stiffly, from his awkward supine position.

“For what wrongs precisely, sirrah?”

Tristan took a moment as if trying to remember what his sins were. “For daring to show such insolence to one of my betters.”

“Apology accepted.” He withdrew his sword, stood upright, and casually sheathed his blade. “If it happens again, ’twill be your throat I pierce and not the clothes around it,” he said, then gestured to George (who had retrieved his backsword and was inspecting it for damage). They walked down the steps, took the next wherry, and sailed off downstream.

Tristan got to his feet before I could move to offer him a hand. He shook his head slightly, looking spooked. “Well there’s a lesson in that,” muttered he to himself. “Learning from a fight choreographer has its limits.” He gave me a reassuring smile. “It’s been a very fruitful day.”

And to make a quick end of it, Your Grace, back we went along the Thames, and back to the brewery, and then I Sent him back to where he came from, which is farther into the future than I had dreamed, hundreds of years it sounds like. I’ve kept Ned Alleyn’s stolen costume for his next visit.

So that is the tale of Tristan Lyons, whom I’ll surely see on many another snáithe as I Wend my way thence.

And in conclusion, let me tell Your Majesty that nobody in London seems at all aware that the Spanish are about to land at Kinsale; that Penelope Devereux, sister to the traitor Essex, has been divorced by her husband Lord Rich for having an affair (and bastard children) with Mountjoy, known to yourself also as Charles Blount, known to yourself also as “Lord Deputy of Ireland.” They have but one son, Mountjoy Blount, and himself is four years old, but I do intend to put a curse on him that all of his children will be still-born or idiots, and so that line will end.

And now I shall close with great love and regard to Your Majesty, as I am off to enjoy my one personal indulgence: the honey-love of a full night spent in the arms of my sweetheart. My life is naught but secrets that I either keep or destroy on your behalf; sure it does my soul good to have one small nugget of mine own.

Whether I be near or far, may I hear only good things of you, My Lady Gráinne! Yours ever, Gráinne in London

Diachronicle

DAY 352

In which we fail better

I SET UP A VIGIL in the office, determining not to leave until Tristan had returned. What if our research about the witch Gráinne had been wrong? What if she was sloppy with her details, and returned him to the wrong time or place? So in a sense, it made no sense at all to wait, and yet I could focus on nothing else. I continued to collate our databases, determined not to leave the building despite the lovely summer weather—weather not unlike what is outside right now, given in both cases it is July in a temperate climate. The whole day passed. Erszebet took it upon herself to buy a used bicycle with what she called “pin money” given her by Tristan for sundry expenses, and she began to map out a bike route she would take to Walden Pond the next day if Tristan had not returned. She seemed to be hoping he’d be gone awhile. Frank and Rebecca, who had left the office shortly after Tristan had been Sent to the DTAP, called to invite us to dinner. This struck me as bizarrely normal when we were living under not-at-all-normal circumstances, so I declined, but Erszebet, overhearing the call, insisted I call them back so that she could go on her own.

A buzz from the control panel let us know that the ODEC door was opening. Erszebet’s face fell slightly. “He’s back,” she said, as if he’d returned just to ruin her social calendar. “Now we’ll have to take him to dinner as well.”

“Don’t you want to hear what happened?” I asked. I went to the glass wall and looked to the ODEC, then, realizing Tristan would be naked, stopped myself. There was now an intercom system that we could use to communicate through the wall. I flipped it on. “Tristan?” I called. “Are you all right?”

“Give me a moment,” he called back out, in a hazy voice. “Actually give me five moments.”

“Look at you, smiling like a girl,” said Erszebet, grudgingly amused. “It is disappointing to me you don’t raise your standards.”

“Don’t you want to know how it went?” I demanded.

She shrugged her trademark disdainful shrug. “It does not matter how it went, it is only the first time, he will have to go back and do it again. It will be days before there is anything interesting to hear about.”

“I’m calling Oda-sensei,” I said, feeling uncharacteristically peevish toward her. Quite suddenly I had a lot of energy and no clear sense of how to channel it. I sent them a text; Rebecca answered and said that they would, naturally, come at once.

We all convened in an office near the ODEC that we had converted into a briefing and debriefing room. It was equipped with gear for recording audio and video, though we had not yet got in the habit of using it. Tristan smelled of the disinfectant shower he’d just stepped out of. He’d changed back into his jeans and T-shirt and thrown his damp towel around his neck like a shawl. He looked fine, although he was slightly distracted as his tongue worked the small gap in his back teeth due to the missing fillings. I’d handed those back to him upon his return. They now sat before him on the table, giving him something to fidget with. He looked like he could use a beer, and so I got him one.

“I have good news and bad news,” he began, after whetting his whistle with a swallow of Old Tearsheet. “The good news—the most important news—is that I believe Sir Edward will change his mind about his investment. I believe he will opt for the East India Company over the Boston Council.”

“On one Strand,” said Erszebet.

“Yes,” said Tristan. “I realize I need to do it a few more times, although it might be worth Mel’s time to go back to 1640 Cambridge just to see if there’s a difference.”

“There won’t be,” said Erszebet. “It does not work that way, you’ve already witnessed that. Why would you subject her to that unpleasant effort?”

“I think it’s worth checking,” Tristan repeated. “To see how much can be accomplished in a single go.”

There was a loaded pause and then Erszebet said flatly, “Well then, you’ll have to Send her yourself. I will not do it.”

“You are refusing an order?”

“I reject the notion you can give me orders,” said Erszebet. “I am simply refusing to do something foolish.”

“Erszebet,” said Frank Oda, ever the conciliatory force. “You signed papers agreeing to cooperate, do you remember that, in Washington?”

“I will cooperate,” said Erszebet. “When it is in the interest of the mission. This is just in the interest of Tristan Lyons throwing his weight around, and I did not sign anything saying I would do that.”

“He’s your superior officer,” I tried tentatively, realizing it was a mistake even as the words came out of my mouth, for she burst out laughing and said, “Him? He’s not my superior anything.” She sobered. “I will Send Tristan back to London in September of 1601, to the Tearsheet Brewery. I will do that as many times as it takes, my guess is four times at least, and only then will we send Melisande back to Cambridge to see if it has worked yet.”

Tristan took a moment to look silently long-suffering, although in truth I think he did this just to humor her desire to discomfit him. “Fine,” he said at last. “That brings me to the lessons learned. I had an opportunity to test my weapons skills, and I’m a little shell-shocked by how poorly prepared I was. Oh, grappling and knife disarms work as well in that age as today. Swordfighting is a different matter altogether.” He delivered this news in his usual clipped and businesslike Tristan manner, but then paused, staring off into space, as if reviewing some action in his mind’s eye.

Frank Oda and I exchanged a look.

“You saw a real swordfight?” Oda-sensei asked, fascinated.

Tristan seemed not to hear the question. He had slightly extended his right arm, fingers curled as if gripping the hilt of a sword, and was moving it this way and that. Meeting my eye, he pulled the towel off of his neck, revealing a long, superficial cut.

“You were in a real swordfight!?” I exclaimed.

This seemed to snap him out of it. He let his hand drop to the table, where he went back to fidgeting with the disembodied fillings. “They have more than one kind of sword,” he announced. “It’s not all just rapiers. There’s an older style too. Bigger, heavier. Kind of like nowadays you might see an older person driving a big old Buick sedan while the younger generation is tooling around in little hybrids. I need to get good at fighting with a Buick. I need a combat historian who can drill me on the nuances of that era. My opponent did something very subtle that I wasn’t expecting.”

“Should I ask Darren to come back in?”

Darren was the fight choreographer from Boston Shakespeare. We had sworn him to secrecy and hired him to teach Tristan what he knew.

“Darren’s wrong for it,” Tristan said. “He’s spot-on with the historical detail, I’ll give him that. But the whole point of stage fighting is that it’s supposed to look as flashy as possible, while being totally safe. And I am here to tell you that real swordfighting is pretty non-flashy and pretty fucking dangerous.”

“I know who to ask,” said Rebecca. She had turned herself into a resourceful Girl Friday, given she had never actually approved of any of this. There wasn’t much we would put past her. Even so, we all turned to see if she was serious. “In the park down the street,” she explained, “in the evenings, when the weather’s good, there’s a group of historical swordfighters who meet to practice.”

“LARPers?” Tristan asked, clearly skeptical. Seeing that no one besides him knew what a LARPer was, he continued, “Guys who fight with foam weapons?”

“Not foam,” Rebecca said. “It is steel on steel, I can hear the din of it from my garden. They should be meeting this evening. I’ll go there and make inquiries as soon as you’re done debriefing us.”

“Great. If we can find one willing to sign the NDA, I want to book him all day tomorrow and the next day, maybe even three days in a row. I need to get back to the Tearsheet as quickly as possible, and I definitely have to be on my game.” His eye fell on the beer bottle in front of him, with its ye olde lettering and its ye olde artist’s conception of the original Tearsheet Brewery. He devoted a few moments to examining this, as if comparing it to the real one he had departed only a few minutes ago.

Then he turned to Erszebet. “Here’s the other thing. When I go back, I need to go back to a different day, the day before I was last there. How will that affect the Strands?”

She shrugged, but this time thoughtfully, not disdainfully. “It depends,” she said. “Nothing is ever certain. If you will not be traveling for a few days, I will spend that time with my számológép and try to determine this. The more different moments you visit, the more Strands there are to contend with, and it is an exponential increase in complications. I will tell you something: in the history of magic it is a general trend that all new rulers wish to use our time-transporting skills to their advantage, but the more seasoned they become, the more they understand the complications, and the less they wish to lean upon it.”

“We’re not in the history of magic,” Tristan replied evenly. “We’re outside of it. That’s sort of the point.”

“Thank you for . . . doing whatever it is you’re going to be doing with your, mmm, számológép,” I said.

“What exactly are you going to be doing with it?” asked Frank Oda.

“I already told you, you cannot touch it,” she said shortly.

“And I won’t,” said Oda-sensei, ever affable. “But I would so very much like to watch as you do the work. I have been playing with an artifact of Rebecca’s ancestress that reminds me of your számológép. Perhaps I could ask questions and you could explain it to me.” A smile. “I would be so extremely grateful to be a beginner at the feet of such an expert.”

“That’s flattery,” said Erszebet, looking pleased about it.

“It is the truth,” said Oda-sensei. “Sometimes the truth is flattering.”

She considered him a moment, and then smiled. It was rare she smiled, and it only further emphasized her beauty. “Very well,” she said. “We start tomorrow.”

And thus began Oda-sensei’s initiation into diachronic calculations.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JULY 22

Temperature 82F. High clouds, mild breeze. Barometer rising.

All herbs faring nicely. Butterfly weed beginning to bloom. Anise hyssop approaching four feet, very healthy. Scarlet elder: flowers past, berries not yet ripe. Vegetables: kale and lettuce in containers coming nicely (lettuce harvestable as baby greens), but I fear I planted the onions too late in the season.

Generally less time and energy for gardening, to be honest. I am distracted by the distant clinking and clanking of blunt steel weapons in the park down the street, where Tristan has been learning the art of the backsword from one Mortimer Shore, a local historical fencing enthusiast whom I have recruited.

Have been watching Frank and Erszebet converse, as she attempts to describe to him what her számológép does for her. For all my years of editing his papers and carrying my weight at those awkward faculty parties (in which fundamentally non-social creatures—physicists—were expected to behave like social creatures), I cannot follow most of their discussion. This is not actually due to the calculus or physics, given that Erszebet has absolutely no training in either field. It is rather that I find it exhausting to try to be essentially bilingual, which Frank is so willing to be. She speaks in her eccentric lingo and he finds ways to respond to her with very simply layman’s physics—“When you say XYZ, is that another way of saying ABC?” And she thinks, and sighs, and says she supposes so, if somebody is too thick to simply understand XYZ.

After several hours of discussion, Frank thanked her, brought home his notes, and sat down with my shaggy family heirloom to experiment with what he’d learned. He has not yet shared any of his discoveries with me—not because he is keeping it a secret, but because he most enjoys bringing me in to his work when he’s accomplished something. I believe he means to construct a számológép/quipu/shaggy-family-artifact-like object that he can use whether or not Erszebet is of a mind to cooperate with Tristan. (Although since she is the only one who can actually make time travel happen, there is no practical benefit to having a quipu unless she is cooperating. There I go being a pragmatist, which is not how Frank is wired.)

The only other item of note—besides Tristan re-training himself for period combat, which I hope he is never foolhardy enough to use—is that our two young leaders, especially Tristan, seem to be growing tense about how long this is taking. I have spent fifty years married to a man who is delightedly preoccupied with the journey, and now suddenly we are working with those who care only for the destination.

This does not, in truth, seem to match their personalities, certainly not Mel’s. It clearly originates from higher up the “food chain,” the cast of characters we met around that conference table in the Trapezoid. General Frink must be ultimately responsible; but it is Lester Holgate, Frink’s eager-beaver civilian toady, who seems to be on the other end of most of the phone calls and email threads.

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

A Sunday of Mid-Harvest, 1601

Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

It’s mostly Tristan Lyons I’m writing of today, Your Grace, as precious few other developments there’ve been but plenty involving him. He must be in alliance with a proper witch, and depending on who and where she is, she could be useful for Your Grace.

In order for me to string this together into a proper tale I’ve had to Wend my way to all of the snáithe—the Strands—in which he has appeared to carry out the same set of deeds. As you and I understand, Your Grace, they all happened at once, as choristers in the church nave sing the same tune at the same time; but I cannot write many stories down in such a manner and so I’ll relate them one after the other, like beads on a rosary.

He has been Sent to several Strands, always on the Sunday, and always with the same task: to convince Sir Edward Greylock to move his financial interests to the East India Company, and away from some queer little joint-stock company called the Boston Council. He wants this as the cause of an effect forty years distant and all the way across the sea. He is not very forthcoming in his plans, except to assure me they have no bearing on Your Grace. I have not yet begun to pry him for important information, as I believe the longer I let him get accustomed to my cooperation, the easier will it be to twist him round my finger when it’s time. So I will continue to knit myself into his affections. I’ve offered him the occasional chance for making the beast with two backs, but he never takes me up on it. It’s a shame since he’s cleaner and better-smelling than any other fellow in the neighborhood (except my sweetheart).