Chapter Two

in which sam languishes

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

The return to consciousness was slow. I wanted out of the darkness, quickly now, and at the same time I wanted to stay in it forever.

Why? Are you feeling guilty? You got out of the water and someone else, some poor bastard— No . Shut up.

The room creaked and bobbed. I found myself staring up at a ceiling of wooden beams and smooth planking. I sucked in an experimental breath, shallow and cautious. It tasted of stale tobacco. Of furniture polish. Of too many men in one place, like the change room of the community hockey rink after the teenaged boys’ practices. My tongue was tender, a cut from my teeth blazing across the middle. My chapped lips stung.

My hair was wet. The rest of me was dry, swaddled naked in cool, slightly scratchy sheets that did not glimmer in the semidarkness like I thought emergency blankets would. These were cloth, roughly the texture of burlap, but with a softer, finer sheet between my skin and the warm outer blanket. The mattress was a sack, vaguely lumpy.

Surely this had to be a hospital. But then why wasn’t I hooked up to a morphine drip? A saline IV? Where was the buzzer to call for a nurse?

None of this was right .

I sat up gently, tugging the sheets high for decency. Only my stud earrings and watch remained on me. It was a cheap analog, supposedly water resistant, but the inside of the face was beaded with condensation. The hands jerked unnervingly, lurching forward then pausing. Functioning, but no longer at the comforting, steady pace of a heartbeat. The strap was salt crusted, fraying a little at the edges, but otherwise intact.

The world under me continued to sway and bob, and I choked back another desperate whimper as it shifted my stiff and burning torso.

Why won’t you stop moving?

The room pitched slightly; I bit off a mewl of pain. My shoulder was wrenched, my throat was tight and the bottom of my ribs ached from the puking, from the pressure of the seat belt, and from the burn of holding my breath so long.

“Miss?” a voice called from the other side of what must be a door. I couldn’t see said door, couldn’t see much farther than my own hands and the low ceiling, but the sound wasn’t coming from inside the room.

“Yeah?” I croaked, mouth sour.

I was parched.

I had nearly drowned and I was thirsty .

Ha.

The other person took my response as an invitation to push into the darkness. Harsh sunlight cut into my eyes. I raised my hand to block it before I could think, and whined again when every muscle above my knees protested. I twisted away, squinting, feeling small and stupid.

“Please, miss, do not move,” the voice said gently. Sharp clip of heeled boots across a wooden floor. The door swung closed, blocking out the light again.

A few clacks of what sounded like metal and stone, and a spark leaped out of the darkness and onto the oil-soaked safety of a lamp wick. For a moment it flared too bright, too orange— recycled oxygen catching fire —before it was shaded by a milky globe of glass dropped into position by nimble fingers. The glow deepened the shadows, insulating us in a haven of liminal warmth. I was able to shut out, just for a second, the memory of what had happened, trapping it in the darkness with the rest of the ignorable world.

The face revealed in the new light was youngish, more or less thirty, and handsome in a sharp-nosed, doughy-chinned way. His dark hair was rakishly tousled. His eyes were remarkably round, deep and brown like a deer’s, and filled with more concern than I could digest just yet.

“How do you feel?” the man said, and dropped carefully onto a chair a respectable distance away. He held the shaded lamp by its base, perching it expertly on one knee.

“Disoriented,” I admitted.

“Your accent—” he said, but cut himself off. What I had mistaken for water in my ears was actually his own British lilt. “Where are you from? Moreover, how on earth did you make it all the way out here?”

I pressed my fingers against my eyelids, pushing my eyeballs back into their sockets until they ached. It distracted me from the pain everywhere else. “Didn’t you see the crash?”

“We’ve quite missed the battle.” His thick eyebrows pulled down into a frowning vee. “I’ll admit that we have arrived too late to join Lord Nelson in giving Napoleon a taste of good British cannon. But just in the nick, it seems, to save a foreigner from a watery grave. Which ship did you fall from?”

“Napoleon? Ship? ” My brain felt too big for my skull, like a sponge that had soaked up too much seawater, in danger of cracking bone and oozing out my skull. “Where are we?”

“Off the coast of Spain, nearing Cape Trafalgar.”

Fun fact, Dad’s voice in my head said, the Battle of Trafalgar was the first time the British Navy had formed a fleet. It changed the course of the Napoleonic Wars.

A war that had ended in 1815.

“That can’t be right,” I gasped, sucking hard on the air. Hard enough that I gagged, and choked up some lingering seawater. The man hastily set the lamp on a nearby table and shoved a handkerchief at me. I clapped it over my mouth to catch the bile and disbelief. My lungs burned from the strain, from the confusion, from the fear, from the panic . “That can’t be right .”

“Miss, are you quite well?”

“No! Of course not! This isn’t—” Real , I was going to say, but I could feel it. I could see it, smell it, and taste it. “This isn’t possible.”

The man was obviously concerned about my erratic answer.

He tried a different tack. “By what name shall I address you?”

“Sam. Samantha Franklin.”

“American?”

“Canadian.”

“Captain Fenton Goodenough, at your service.” He dipped his head formally at me and before I could decide if I should dip mine back, he added: “You are aboard my ship, the HMS Salacia .”

When I said “anything but this,” I thought, staring into his earnest face, I was really expecting . . . uh, anything but this.

~

As my clothes were soaked, Captain Goodenough sent for a spare pair of a cabin boy’s britches and a shirt. Apparently, my chubby figure in my new attire was lewd enough that the captain implored me to stay in the safety of his cabin.

But I had to be outside. I had to see it.

We compromised with a thick oilskin slicker over the indecent clothes, and he escorted me to the nose of the ship. I spent the next few hours on the deck of the Salacia . A morose figurehead, I was undoubtedly as gray in the face as the weathered carving of the ship’s namesake goddess, crowned with seaweed and netting, stranding sentinel directly below me. The pounding rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the ocean swelling only occasionally, knocking me into the rails.

This had to be a joke. It had to. I shoved down the desperate urge to cry. But there was enough salt water around me. I wasn’t in the mood to be adding to the world’s supply.

There were no planes or vapor trails in the sky. No low-slung tankers on the horizon. Only me, the gunmetal-gray vastness of the ocean, and underneath, behind, all around me , a nineteenth century ship with crow’s nests and everything. The sodden ropes above me hung like limp spiderwebs. The sails were rolled up. Even through the rain the air reeked of smoke, burning wood, and the acrid firework after-reek of black powder.

The water frothed, jumping up the hull as if to lick what was left of the future off my skin. In the distance, only darkness. Above me, only clouds. No stars. No moon. No floodlights, or city ports, or orange glow on the horizon from light pollution. I searched the rigging again, looking for LED flickers that might give away hidden technology, but even as I did, I knew it was futile.

The night was deep, and unkind.

No one could black out a whole continent’s electrical infrastructure.

“Stop it,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, but all I saw behind them was the red orange blaze, the loose books and phones flying up to crack the plane ceiling, the sky falling away too fast through the window. Then I shouted it, screamed it from the bottom of my stomach, from my bowels, from the sour twisting place all the way down: “Stop it!”

The world went silent. I could not hear the rain. I could not hear the waves. I could only hear the reverberating echo of my voice, rolling back at me from across the ocean, from across the horizon, from across a time that was no longer mine.

And then a soft voice: “Miss Franklin.”

There was no reproach in it, no warning, no fear. Just my name. Concern.

“I’m fine,” I lied to the captain. “Sorry. Ignore me. I’m fine.”

I dragged my attention back to him, to the men around us who shamelessly curved toward us to eavesdrop even as they continued their tasks.

As far as Dahlia’s historic dramas had taught me, the crew that populated the ship were also impeccably dressed for the era. Some were appallingly young, hauling buckets, wrestling with wooden pegs nearly as tall as they were, coiling rope into neat piles; some were old and grizzled, beards frizzy, unwashed and uncaring, scarred and hard. In between, men of every age hustled from duty to duty, clad in blue and white striped trousers, loosely tied scarves, sweat-grayed shirts, their skin weathered dark and rough.

“What year is it?” I croaked.

The captain, who had been keeping me company, stared at me with obvious worry. “’Tis the year 1805, hand to God,” he said gravely, sensing how deliberate my inquiry was. “October twenty-first, if we’re to be particular about it.”

There was a commotion at the rear of the ship, something to do with nets and boats, and hauling things belowdecks. Someone shouted for the captain to guide their work. I wondered who was steering the ship. Wasn’t the captain supposed to steer, or was that a Hollywood trope?

“Please, remain here,” the captain said, and hurried off.

I looked down.

In the churning water, scattered like a thousand tiny glimmering islets, were the remains of the airplane. Acres of debris stretched into the mist. No one was lying on it. There were no waving arms. No pleas for rescue. No screams cutting through the rain. Only yellow life vests, empty or buoying up the dead; seat cushions not quite soaked enough to sink away forever; the odd bobbing piece of overhead luggage; a laptop carrier just slipping beneath the waves; a child’s doll with its plastic head filled with air, staring with emotionless painted eyes; half-filled toiletry bottles; a bath-time floating picture book; a ball cap; a cosmetics case; a piece of the wing.

Things that meant nothing to anyone but me. I, alone, among these hundreds, had survived. I alone had been rescued from horrifying death.

Sailors doffed their caps at the rail, muttering quick prayers but making no move to pick the dead out of the water. I guess there was enough grave dirt at the bottom of the ocean for all. Or empty shark stomachs.

Among my peers, the bloated blank-faced drowned, were the dead of the battle Captain Goodenough had spoken of. Red and blue uniforms alike were blackened with the weight of the water, the stain of blood and gunpowder, the char of fire. Interspersed with the plane pieces were broken planks, the ghostly billow of a sail still lashed to a bobbing mast, a crust of hull still burning, flames spluttering. The last of the battle dead began to give up the gasses that had kept them afloat.

And any proof that I was not when I belonged would soon go with them.

Then I saw it, clear as day, in my mind’s eye: my parents, amid other confused and angry mourners, standing on a beach, holding a wreath with my name on the ribbon. I felt it, in a yawning pit behind my stomach: the crush of sudden loss, the lack of closure because there would be no body, the inability to hold cold clay and press a good-bye kiss to a beloved face one last time. I swallowed against the squeeze of my larynx—the ferocious resentment of ambiguous loss, unable to mark or mourn it, denied any good and final moment.

Just life, presence, and warmth.

Then none .

And nothing but heartbreak to fill the ragged, bleeding gap left behind.

A few sailors tried to start conversations with me but I couldn’t unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth enough to speak. And at the same time, I also couldn’t bear the thought of drinking anything to make the task easier.

Water and I were quite at odds for the moment.

Just a small tiff. A fair-weather breakup. Understandable.

They each drifted off when I proved to be unsociable. They smelled like unwashed hair and unwashed clothes and too long at sea with only other men and hot hands, anyway. I had been gearing up for a run of revenge one-night stands, but I didn’t want it now. Didn’t think I’d ever want it ever again.

Weren’t survivors of traumatic accidents supposed to feel a desperate drive to affirm life?

Right now all I wanted was to exist without each inhale being a small agony.

Why me?

Why me ?

Why only me ?

Would it have been better if I had drowned? Was I meant to have drowned? Had fate, or destiny, or whoever was responsible for airplanes that just blipped out of existence, spared me? Or had it been a mistake? The parts of the twenty-first century that were here—so anachronistically here , out of place, superfluous, wrong —would sink. They would vanish from history forever, lost to the future because they were at the bottom of the sea in the past.

And I should be with them.

Shouldn’t I?

I wasn’t honestly believing this, was I? No.

And yet, there were no lights on the coast.

If there was a meaning, a reason for my survival, I didn’t know what it was. I was about as religious as any other queer who’d spent her small-town upbringing being told that people loved me as a sinner but hated my sins; that is to say, not at all. If God—whichever one of them—had saved me for a purpose, they’d forgotten the bit where they were supposed to strike me with divine inspiration and explain why .

I kept circling back to the idea that this had to be fiction. It was too much like the movies to be real. Like watching the footage from a public atrocity and thinking The things they can do with CGI these days , before realizing that the horror on the screen was really happening: shootings, vans plowing into sidewalks, buildings bombed, airplane crashes . The brain short-circuits and tries to yank what you’re experiencing into familiar territory, and therefore right back into the realm of fiction.

People don’t really survive midocean plane crashes.

They don’t time travel.

And they aren’t rescued by pre–Regency era naval captains.

And yet, the ship I stood on was real.

My hero was the shortish, doughy-faced Fenton Goodenough. Not exactly the chiseled Fabio that bodice rippers had promised the tumbled maidens of the world. If the captain was the person the author of this surreal adventure was trying to throw in my path, they had seriously picked the wrong heroine.

How long did I stand there, gawping in disbelief? Long enough for my hair to soak through again, wet tendrils sticking to my forehead. Long enough that my bare feet began to hurt against the planking. Long enough that the water trickled into my cocoon of warmth and denial, rolling down my spine.

A low fog crouched over the water like a shroud. The sunset faded into the smudgy strip of land that was Europe to my right— starboard or port?

Though the sails were furled, the ship still drifted in the currents. Eventually we passed through the field of bodies and wreckage, and the crew stopped muttering prayers for every cadaver that bumped away under the prow.

~

I woke to the sound of the night watch’s hour call: “Three in the morning. All is well.”

Everything would be well if he’d stop shouting every hour on the hour and waking me the fuck up. I slept fitfully after that, drowning in nightmares, both literally and in the terrible dreams themselves.

I greeted the sunrise irate.

The denial of the night before had transformed into fury at witnessing the mass graveyard that I’d been pulled from. I was angry at the sailors for fishing me out of the drink too. Angry for surviving. Angry at the uncomfortable bed the captain had given up for me. Angry at whatever that green and gold flash had been in the kitchenette, angry at Dahlia for abandoning me to go through this alone, angry that it was even happening. I was scared and confused, and my ribs ached worse after sleeping on a sack of straw. And worst of all, my fury had nowhere to go.

The little pool of darkness that had kept the real world at bay the night before dissipated in the morning light, filtered through the dirty glass of the captain’s cabin. I was still wearing the borrowed breeches and shirt, and I was angry about that too. Angry that it’d taken so long for me to fall asleep last night without the familiar distraction of doomscrolling.

I wanted my own clothes. I wanted my button-down, my jeans, my phone . . . my phone .

If it still worked, if the water-resistant case had kept it safe, if there was enough battery left, I could put this whole ridiculous fantasy to rest and rejoin the real world.

I scrambled for my denim jacket, which had been hung over a valet stand in the corner of the cabin, hoping hard enough that it came out as a desperate sob that everything was still zipped into my pocket.

Yes!

My phone and wallet were exactly where I had left them.

But the casing of the phone was cracked, bloated with water and corroding battery acid.

Useless.

Goddamnit!

In my black billfold, the Euros I had so carefully hoarded were damp, still legible but now as obsolete as my identification and banking cards. Which I should probably, like the responsible time travelers from stories did, toss into the drink. I hoarded them instead, the last remaining proof that I was not mad. That I was not the addled heroine of The Tempest , or Northanger Abbey , or The Welshman’s Daughters .

That I was who I thought I was.

I didn’t trust anyone not to go snooping, so I tucked both phone and wallet under the mattress, between the wall and the frame. My button-down was dry but stiff with salt, and the seams and pockets of both my jeans and my jacket were still wet enough to be uncomfortable. The purple Basque hat, which I could not believe had stayed on my head through all of that, was a wrinkled mess. Resigned to staying in the old-fashioned clothes for now, I pulled on my socks and Converse.

Wake up , I screamed at myself. Wake up. People don’t actually time travel. Come on, put some effort into it, Sam! Wake up!

The world crashed heavily to the side, swirled, and for a second I felt the crushing pressure of the bottom of the sea again, freezing and black. My ears rang. Water poured up my nose, down my throat, invading my lungs, cold and sharp and—

I sucked in a desperate breath of air, shouted, “No!” The world stopped swirling abruptly, and I was rooted on the solid floor so quickly that I nearly fell over.

Awake.

Here.

Not falling from a burning plane.

Not in the middle of drowning all over again.

Here .

Shit.

Shit .

Right. So. What now?

I was alone. Which meant I had the opportunity to figure out how deep this fantasy went. That I hadn’t been flung into the past, because it was not possible. Surely not all of the books could be real, or complete. The clothes in the cupboard, the maps, the ledger, something had to betray that everything around me was just an elaborate prank.

Captains had logbooks, right? I decided to start there. Perched primly on one corner of the desk blotter was a book covered in maroon leather. The log was filled with even, no-fuss handwriting made up of precise nib strokes. The most recent entry read:

22 October 1805

Fifth Bell — Morning — Fair, growing humid, light breeze.

Sails furled as we continue to navigate the detritus of the battle and, according to our new passenger, that of her crashed craft. No other survivors recovered.

And on the page before that:

21 October 1805

Fourth Bell — Morning — Clear skies, indolent breeze.

British fleet spotted. Salacia still too far out to read colors. Wind not obliging. Our protracted call at Antigua has all but guaranteed that unless the action is very extended indeed, we may not make it in time to support Nelson.

Eighth Bell —Forenoon — Slow swell. Gale likely.

Cannon fire echoes back to us across the water. Victory has run up “prepare for battle” and “England expects every man shall do his duty.” Salacia still too far away to lend support. How I yearn to be there.

First Bell — Afternoon— Thunderstorm.

Freak weather has sucked the wind from our sails.

We make no further headway. Sky is black above us, clouds arcing with queer green lightning. Some of the sailors have taken to sheltering belowdecks, in fear of what they are calling fairy lights. I am too heartsore with the knowledge that we will miss the battle to offer reprimand.

Sixth Bell — Afternoon — Squall.

Gunfire in the distance ceased. Ships burn. Weather makes it difficult to make out whose.

Another ship has been late to the fight. Being on deck, I witnessed with my own eyes a great flash of green lightning leap between the thunderous clouds, and did pray to G-d that it would not strike the mast. The curve of the water and the clouds can play tricks on even the most experienced seaman’s eyes, and the great explosion of fire (as if a whole ammunitions room had gone up all at once) could not possibly have happened in the air, though it appeared to fall from the sky directly above us. I can only assume that the force of the blast threw the hull of the ship upwards, to splash down around us. Thankfully none were injured among my crew as they dove for safety. From the wreckage, I cannot begin to guess what form the craft must have taken when it was together. Lookout affirms no other vessels were spotted on our approach to the fleet. Only one survivor—young woman who claims to be from the Canada colonies. Samantha Franklin. Understandably distraught by the loss of her vessel. Ship’s surgeon looked her over as she slept, no injuries save severe bruising around waist, likely from some sort of harness.

And, in the margins of that entry, in spiky, irritated pencil scratches:

Too late, may G-d damn it.

I tried and failed not to feel utterly violated that some dude had “looked me over” without my consent while I was unconscious. Then again, I couldn’t imagine I’d have been a very good patient last night if they’d tried to haul me in from the rain for a strip search.

“This is too perfect,” I muttered, leaning back in the captain’s chair.

But even flipping back through the book, there was no deviation from the calm, steady reporting. No lorem ipsum to take up space on the page, no repeated entries or gobbledygook to just make it appear to be an entry to a film camera. These were real entries, some with hilariously awful doodles of fish and birds, and they were each unique.

The captain even appeared to be using a cipher to record a secondary set of information, dot and hash marks beside some of the entries in red ink. The red was dark, too, not the vibrant shade I would expect from a modern pen.

Damn it!

And just like that, I was simmering with fury again.

This was just too stupid to accept at face value.

There had to be something! Maybe the maps. I knew dick all about maps, but every one I unrolled from the bin beside the desk seemed period accurate. Books next: there was a shelf with a dowel across the midpoint to keep them from tumbling. But each volume, each title page, each publisher’s mark was spot-on. Thankful that twice-weekly yoga classes had left me limber enough to do so, I scrambled up the bed frame to cling to the joists and search for cables, or modern building materials, or something .

Each failed investigation pissed me off further.

Regrettably, I was in a perfectly executed Downward Dog, pulling at the bottom of the bookshelf to see if it had a false back, when the cabin door swung open.

“My word!” the captain spluttered from the threshold.