Byron's Child (2 page)

“Thank heaven for pants,” Jodie exclaimed. “Dressing this way all the time would be a real pain in the you-know-what.”

They crossed the courtyard again and Giles unlocked a door into the central part of the stable block. The long room inside was flooded with sunlight from west-facing windows. Polished metal gleamed, and the level hum of well-behaved machinery filled the air. Jodie recognized nothing but a row of blank computer screens.

“There’s nothing much to see,” Giles apologized. “The accelerator is running and the computers are crunching numbers.” He turned on a screen, hit a few keys, and a moving graph glowed blue on silver.

“Just like a hospital scene on TV.”

“On Monday, when my staff come in, it’ll be all ready for us to have a go at guessing what it means. Wait a minute, that’s odd.” His fingers danced over the keyboard; the graph moved backwards and stopped. “I’d better check,” he muttered, and strode over to the impressive, instrument-laden bulk of the accelerator.

Jodie followed him. He peered at a set of dials. Leaning closer to see what he was looking at, she brushed against his shoulder.

The world shuddered and went black.

Chapter Two

Her ears ringing from the boom of the explosion, Jodie cautiously raised her head from Giles’s chest. In the pitch darkness, she had no intention of leaving his remarkably comforting embrace.

“Wow,” she said weakly. “I’ve heard of an electrifying relationship but….”

A brilliant flash of white light dazzled her, followed at once by a crack of thunder. The after-image left on her eyes made no sense.

Giles’s arms tightened around her. “Stables.” He sniffed. “Horses. What the hell?”

Another sheet of lightning. A pause before the thunderclap, which rattled and rumbled its way to uneasy silence. In the silence, the sound of hiccupping sobs.

“Someone’s crying,” Jodie muttered in Giles’s ear. As her vision adjusted, she noticed a pale glimmer to her left, cut off by a shoulder-high partition. She pulled away from Giles and tiptoed towards the light, feeling ahead for obstacles.

“Jodie, come back,” he whispered. “Jodie!” Shuffling sounds suggested that he was coming after her.

An old-fashioned lantern hung from a nail, illuminating a circle of straw-bestrewn flagstones. In the dimness beyond the circle, a weeping girl huddled on a pile of hay.

Something touched Jodie’s back. She froze.

Giles, of course.

“Don’t do that,” she said crossly.

The girl sat up and stared at them, a look of terror on her tear-blotched face. Staring back, not much less terrified, Jodie reached behind her for Giles’s hand and clutched it.

The girl was wearing a green dress with pale orange ribbons, identical to Jodie’s.

Even as she realized the similarity, the fabric of her historic gown disintegrated about her, turning to dust, leaving her standing there in bra, pantyhose and boots, with her tote bag slung over her shoulder.

A large, equine head appeared over the nearest partition and neighed disapprovingly. Jodie nearly jumped out of her skin. She flung herself back into Giles’s arms, the only sane place in this madhouse. At least, that was what she intended. Since he was quick-wittedly whipping off his sweatshirt to cover her near-nakedness, she merely succeeded in making him stagger backwards, while she lost her balance and sat down.

“What the bloody hell?” came his muffled protest from behind her.

Scarcely daring to take her eyes off the girl, who now looked more shocked than frightened, Jodie glanced back. Giles was groping blindly for the hem of his sweatshirt, hopelessly entangled. She scrambled to extricate him. Freed from the garment’s pythonic coils, he pulled it over Jodie’s head, inside out, and she slipped her arms into the sleeves. With one accord they turned back to the girl.

She was gaping in apparent fascination at Jodie’s legs, nylon-clad below the thigh-length sweatshirt. Her gaze switched to Giles’s lean but muscular torso, revealed by his white tank top. Flushing, she closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands.

“Don’t cry.” Jodie hurried forward. “What’s the matter?”

The girl jumped up and backed away until she was stopped by the stable wall.

“What’s going on?” Giles chimed in. “What happened to my lab? Who are you?”

“Emily Faringdale,” she squeaked. When they came no closer she gathered her courage, cleared her throat, and asked, “Who are you? And what are you doing in my brother’s stables?”

“Faringdale? Your brother?” Giles looked stunned.

“I’m Jodie Zaleski and this is Giles...“ Jodie’s voice trailed away. “Emily Faringdale? What’s your brother’s name?”

“Roland, Viscount Faringdale. And he is the greatest beast in nature,” she said vehemently, her grievances overcoming her fear.

“What’s he done? Is that why you were crying?” Jodie, too, was distracted from the extraordinary situation.

“He says I must marry Lord Thorncrest. Lord Thorncrest is a friend of Byron,” she added, as if that explained everything.

“Byron the poet?” Jodie clasped her bag, which contained the biography of Lord Byron’s daughter she had bought that morning. “George Gordon, Baron Byron? Who wrote
Childe Harold
?”

Emily nodded, puzzled.

“A friend?”

“Ye gods,” said Giles, “we’ve travelled through time.”

“You can’t be serious,” Jodie said uncertainly. “That only happens in science fiction.”

“How else can you explain this?” His gesture embraced the dimly lit stables, Emily’s uncomprehending face, the smell of horses and the sound of their shifting feet. “Five minutes ago we were in a sunny laboratory. What’s the date?” he asked Emily.

“The twentieth of February.”

“Year?”

Her eyes widened in alarm. “1816.”

“You see?” Turning to Jodie, who could think of nothing whatever to say, he put his hand to his chest and frowned. “Damnation, I haven’t got my calculator.”

“Your calculator!” Jodie felt the beginnings of hysteria. “Here I am stuck in the past with no clothes and all you can worry about is your damned calculator!” She shivered.

“If I can work out what brought us here, perhaps I can reverse the effect,” he pointed out reasonably. “I’ll have to make do with pencil and paper. Can you provide pencil and paper, Miss Faringdale? And something for Jodie to wear, so I can have my pullover back?”

Reminded of their indecent condition, Emily blushed again. Her timid answer was drowned by a renewed rumbling of thunder and the rushing hiss of a sudden downpour.

“I wonder if it was something to do with the lightning,” Giles muttered.

“Please help,” begged Jodie, her teeth chattering.

Emily picked up a shawl she had dropped unnoticed in the straw, and handed it to Jodie. “I do not know who you are, and I cannot understand half the words you use, but I will try to help you,” she said bravely. “Only I daresay Roland will be very angry if I take you over to the house. If we could wait until he leaves tomorrow… but you cannot spend the night here.”

“He’s leaving tomorrow?”

“For two days, to arrange the marriage settlements. Then he will bring Lord Thorncrest back for the formal betrothal.” Emily dashed away a tear.

“You shouldn’t let your brother dictate to you.” Jodie’s feminist blood was rousing. “Sneak us into the house tonight, and I’ll deal with him when he comes back. He sounds like a regular tyrant.”

Giles grinned. “Be careful what you say about my great-to-the-nth-power grandfather.” Both girls stared at him and he shrugged. “Since the title always passed in the direct line, that, after all, is what Roland Faringdale must be.”

~ ~ ~

Wearing his multi-Great-Grandfather’s nightshirt, Giles lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the sliver of moonlight on the ceiling. His mind racing with speculation, he was almost unaware of the discomfort of the sheetless, too-short bed, the musty chill of the nurse’s room.

A floorboard creaked. He turned his head as the door to the night nursery opened. A ghostly figure appeared: Jodie, in his multi-Great-Aunt Emily’s all-enveloping nightdress.

He raised himself on one elbow. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m cold and I can’t sleep.” Her voice was small and frightened. “Can I get in with you?”

Giles moved over to make room. She spread the quilt from her own bed over him, then slipped in beside him.

Catching the glint of a tear on her cheek, he put his arm around her with a silent vow that the gesture was purely for comfort.

She snuggled against him. “Talk to me. Tell me about your lab, how you set it up at Waterstock Manor, what you do there, how it got us into this mess. Where did you go to school?”

“Cambridge, with some post-grad work in America and Germany.” Despite his good intentions, Giles could not prevent his body’s reaction to her closeness. He rolled over on his back again and forced himself to concentrate on his story. “I had quite a few job offers, but as I told you, I didn’t want to leave my home.”

“I don’t blame you. I might have thought it ridiculous before, but after coming back a couple of centuries and finding your ancestors right here in the same place—well, it makes sense.” Jodie sounded interested, more relaxed. “So you decided to set up your own lab. Doesn’t that stuff cost millions?”

“I’m rather well-off,” he said apologetically. “Of course, I couldn’t have afforded it on my own. I found a small college in America that had been given a huge endowment strictly for buying research equipment, though they had no buildings to house it. I was happy to provide suitable buildings, and for tax reasons I offered to work for nothing.”

“I bet they jumped at it. You said that was an accelerator we were standing by? I thought they were miles long.”

“Some of them are. Mine just spits out electrons. Have you heard of tunneling?”

“Only the kind they did under the English Channel.”

“I don’t want to get too technical, but it’s a phenomenon where electrons disappear on one side of a barrier and reappear on the other. We’re trying to find out just where they go in between. A colleague of mine, an American woman at a lab near London, came up with a theory that they travel through time. I didn’t take it very seriously, though the maths looked good, but it seems she may be right.”

“It does, doesn’t it? So your electrons decided to take a  hop to 1816 and brought us with them?”

“Something like that. I’m sure the lightning had something to do with it. It packs a hell of a high voltage. If only I had my calculator!”

“It’s going to take a long time figuring it out by hand, isn’t it?” said Jodie flatly. “We’ll be here for a while, then. What about paradoxes? What if we change things so that the world we go back to, if we do, is different?”

Giles frowned at the ceiling. “I don’t think there’s much danger, if we’re careful. Dr. Brown, the woman I told you about, had some law she called the Conservation of Reality. She claimed that any changes will tend to die away, like ripples on a pond. I think it only works for small deviations, but we should be okay as long as we don’t do something drastic. Killing Roland, for instance, would surely be a paradox no mathematical law could deal with.”

“I guess that would make you pop out of existence, like my dress did. I wouldn’t want that to happen. Apart from you being my ticket home, I kind of like you.” With those words Jodie turned her back to him, fortunately for his resolution. “I think I can sleep now. Good night, Giles.”

“Good night, Jodie,” he answered softly.

He lay for some time, staring into the darkness, thinking about the pretty, plucky girl at his side. Not by so much as a hint had she blamed him for their predicament. Nonetheless, he was responsible for her, and he would get her home if it was humanly possible.

As her breathing slowed in sleep, his mind once again filled with theories and numbers. If only he had his calculator!

~ ~ ~

When Jodie woke the next day, Giles was already up. The world seemed brighter in the morning, just as Mom had always told her. After all, she had been given a chance any historian would die for: to see her own period in person.

Eager to begin, Jodie hopped out of bed and went into the day nursery. In daylight the room was shabby, dusty, doubtless waiting to be refurbished for the next generation of Faringdales. Giles, dressed in his tracksuit, was at the battered table, scrawling his calculations on the paper Emily had brought last night. He seemed to have mastered the quill pen.

“Good morning, my lord.” There was no response. “Giles, I said good morning!”

He looked up in surprise. “Sorry. I get a bit wrapped up in my numbers. Good morning. You sound pretty chipper today.”

“It finally sank in what a fantastic opportunity this is for research. How long can we stay?”

Emily had not provided slippers. The wood floor chilled Jodie’s bare feet. Forgetting her nightgown’s floor-length skirts she pattered towards the table to sit down. She caught her foot in the hem and stumbled into Giles’s lap.

At that moment Emily opened the door and stared at them in shock. Daylight revealed her as a slim, pretty girl of nineteen or thereabouts, with medium-brown hair in ringlets and large, soft brown eyes. Beside her was a shorter, slightly plump girl, a year or two older, with fair, curly hair and a look of even greater shock in her blue eyes.

“Oh!” said Emily, and turned scarlet. “Oh dear.”

Jodie felt her cheeks reddening, as if in sympathy. “I tripped,” she explained, wriggling out of Giles’s arms. “I’m not used to long dresses. At home I mostly wear pants or shorts.”

“Pants?” Emily retreated a step as Giles politely stood.

“Trousers. Breeches.” Jodie turned to Emily’s dismayed companion. “Sorry about that. You must be Lady Faringdale. Hi, I’m Jodie Zaleski and this is… Emily told you?”

“Giles Faringdale?” she said hesitantly. “There is a family resemblance. But I cannot believe that you came from the future! Emily must have misunderstood.”

“Indeed I did not. It is no stranger than Voltaire’s tale of Micromégas, the traveller from Sirius. You remember, Charlotte, we read it together.”

“Emily!” Her sister-in-law sounded appalled.