“Leave you here?” He looks around in horror. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s daytime, sir. I will be fine.”
“In the very spot where you were brutally attacked and left for dead? No, look around all you wish. I shall wait.”
I don’t let Gray wait. Oh, I can’t convince him to leave. McCreadie grumbled about Gray’s sister being stubborn. Apparently, it’s a family trait, and when a man of Gray’s size decides to park himself somewhere, he stays parked. I won’t try to cross through time with him watching, so the only way for me to break the impasse is to pretend to skulk about with dramatic pauses for deep contemplation and deeper sighs before declaring I remember nothing.
“We will head back through the market,” he says. “I’ll leave you there to do your shopping.”
“Shopping?”
“Spending some of your quarterly wages.”
“And what would I spend it on?”
He throws up his hands. “Confits? Ribbons? A new bonnet. Whatever you like.”
Candies and pretty bows? Is that truly where he imagines a housemaid’s salary goes? In his defense, maybe he hopes it does. Catriona’s daily needs are covered—food, shelter, uniform, and such—and so he expects wages to be like pocket money.
If Iwerea maid, I know exactly what I’d do with my salary. I’d save it up in hopes that I wouldn’t be scrubbing chamber pots into my twilight years.
While I don’t actually have any wages to spend, I’ll let Gray escort me to the market. Once he leaves me to shop, I’ll sneak back to that alley.
This neighborhood is known as the Grassmarket because it used to be the main market for Edinburgh. It’s now more of a hodgepodge of shops and tenement housing, all of which have seen better days—hell, bettercenturies—but there’s also an open market space with stalls, and there’s where we go.
I expect Gray to deposit me at the edge, but he seems quite content to wander at my side. That is, he’s content to do so until a cart of antique books catches his eyes.
“Is that Paré’s plague treatise?” he murmurs to himself as he wanders off.
“Thank you, sir!” I call after him. “I shall see my own way home this eve!”
Unfortunately, the sound of my voice reminds him of my existence. Gaze still half on that book cart, he takes two long strides my way as he roots in his pocket. When he reaches me, he passes over a coin.
“For your help today, Catriona.”
“I thought we agreed to time off instead?”
“You earned both.” A faint smile. “Spend it on something that makes you happy.”
I don’t even have time to thank him before he’s heading back to those books, leaving me staring at his back and thinking that, of all the fascinating things in this world, he might be the one I’ll most regret not getting to know better.
“I’ll look you up when I get home, Duncan Gray,” I murmur as he bends over the cart of old books. “I expect you did some amazing things.”
I lift my fingers in a wave, even if he can’t see it, and then I hurry from the market.
I have been in the right spot for over an hour, pacing and wandering, and at one point—when the lane is clear—even dropping to the ground, as if I can somehow pass through time that way. I realize that is ridiculous. Just like I realize this entire plan is ridiculous.
I’m trying to pass back through time by returning to the place where I crossed over. My brain says that makes logical sense, but I am well aware that it only makes sense because I’ve seen it in movies and read it in books. To return to your own time, you go back to that spot—that magical bridge between worlds. Or you go there and do something you did the last time and that makes you cross over. Maybe it’s a word or a phrase or an action or an emotion. Do that thing, and it will unlock the door through time.
Which is like saying that if I tap my ruby slippers three times I can go home again. I am basing my entire theory on the imagination of fiction writers. Not scientists, because there is no science. People can’t travel through time. Therefore, writers don’t need to worry about “getting it right.” They make up whatever they want.
To return to your own time, child, you must find the spot where you crossed, during the same alignment of the planets, and then eat one hundred and fifty leaves of thyme, one for each year you must travel.
I knew this was a preposterous plan. Yet it was the only one I had, and what was the alternative? To throw up my hands and resign myself to the life of a housemaid when a walk across town might have been the key to returning? If so many writers used that particular trope, maybe there was a kernel of truth to it. It’s like meeting a vampire while holding a vial of holy water andnotthrowing it at him.
I don’t know what happened to me. I cannot begin to understand it, because the possibility doesn’t exist in any reality I know. I suspect modern theoretical scientists would have ideas, but it’s not a subject I’ve ever needed to research. I am hoping, then, that some author or screenwriter did the research for me and this whole “return to the spot where you passed over” idea is sound.
What I suspect, though, is that what I encountered here was a rip in the fabric of reality. I was strangled in the same spot, on the sameday, at the same moment as a young woman a hundred and fifty years earlier. That caused some crossing of wires in a cosmic sense, and my consciousness—my soul or whatever you care to call it—somehow swapped with that of Catriona Mitchell.