Chapter Four

in which sam transforms

. . . found themselves on the seashore; and lingering only, as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea, who ever deserve to look on it at all . . . —Jane Austen, Persuasion

The captain no longer trusted me. I couldn’t blame him, really. From the moment I opened the cabin door the next morning, I had grown a shadow. The boy from yesterday introduced himself as Worsley and herded me back inside. He obviously considered himself terribly responsible and mature to be tasked as my minder. The concern was acceptable. The condescending admonishment not to go below decks again from a kid who was half my age at best was not. Neither was the way he treated me as if I was as delicate as the doctor’s teacup.

Worsley brought with him a tray with more revolting tea and an overly salty stew thickened with ship’s biscuit he called lobscouse. I choked back both under his watchful eye. Only when they were finished did he let me outside.

I winced, shading my eyes and wishing for the sunglasses that were at the bottom of the Atlantic. In the open air, my jeans and jacket were stifling in the increasing heat, which had risen the closer we got to land. But like a knight in my armor, I wasn’t ready to go without.

The ship creaked gently, shifting sideways, and ricocheted softly off of something else. I looked over the rail. We’d docked overnight. The Salacia was now tethered at the end of a long wooden pier alongside half a dozen other similar ships in much worse shape. The one closest to us was charred and raked with holes.

Past the ships spread a picturesque town-slash-fort like any I’d ever seen in film. The land itself was lush. Palms, large leafy ferns, and voracious crawling vines were backed by pastures and rigorously tended lawns. Between us and the carpet of greenery was the port: a bustling affair of wood, yellow-white plaster, and terra-cotta. Wooden docks butted up against walkways frosted with shanties and small buildings for ships’ business. The buildings leaned back against a high, solid wall bristling with squared-off openings and an intimidatingly large number of gleaming black cannons.

A conical mountain, like a miniature Mount Fuji, dominated the skyline. It was rough along the water-facing slope, as if at some point in the past it had been ripped in half by an angry god.

The small crowd around the ship was composed of sun-dark and humidity-damp folks in stripped-down versions of the garb from Dahlia’s historical romances. The clothing had the look of something worn daily: trousers tucked into tall boots, printed fabric, long skirts trailing in the sand, but nothing that I could immediately pin down as modern. A pair of boys kicked a stitched-leather ball down the beach. A spare few of the people closer to the entrance to the town were dressed in their official and ostentatious best. So many feathers .

On the shore, workers hauled in nets and gutted fish, the smell heavy in the air.

“It stinks,” I said. “Paradise shouldn’t stink.”

Worsley chuckled. “Don’t hardly believe those stationed here would agree that this is paradise, miss. Their wives less so.”

Above the shouts of the sailors on the docks I could pick out the sigh of the breeze through vegetation and the soft, plaintive cry of gulls. It sounded like a manufactured soundtrack.

But it wasn’t.

This is real , I thought, the truth settling behind my heart. There’s no other explanation .

Something deep inside me unwound, my skin finally fitting properly. It had just needed a thorough drying out before I could shrug it back on, my realization, and my acceptance, ironing it smooth again.

A brave breeze cut through the sweltering stank, ruffling the sweaty wisps of hair on my forehead. It was deliciously crisp, laden with the scent of cooking food that permeated the world beyond the fort walls. My mouth watered as I tasted olives and bread on the wind, imagining the pungent goat cheese that they must make here, the heavy beer, the bursting red tomatoes. Or no, wait, maybe not tomatoes.

I suppressed a sudden craving for the fruit; would I ever eat a tomato again? What year had tomatoes first been imported to Europe? I waited for a fun fact to jump up from my memories, but none obliged.

“Captain!” Worsley said beside me, distracting me from my attempt to remember long-lost history classes.

“Thank you, Mr. Worsley,” Captain Goodenough’s unmistakable voice said from the quarterdeck. “That will be all.”

The captain was leaning over the railing in what appeared to be his best uniform. The frock coat was an appropriate navy blue, but he must have been boiling . His vest, hose, and breeches were a spotless white, hemmed with gold lace embroidery, buttons, and a single epaulet on his right shoulder. It was not at all the slightly grubby, wrinkled affair that I had seen him in these past few days. He even wore pristine white gloves. Under his arm he held a truly ludicrous hat. It was black, but folded in half like a taco, the pointy side poking out in such a way that it would rather uselessly shade only his nose. His hair was pomaded into a ridiculous bouffant of spikes and whorls.

Okay, I must still have been in shock, because I suddenly saw the appeal of a man in uniform. Well, this uniform, at least.

Worsley beamed at his captain’s praise. He bowed so low his nose almost hit his knees before he made himself scarce.

As the captain walked down the stairs to stand beside me, he donned the taco-hat, and I couldn’t hold back a small, underused laugh.

“Ah,” the captain said, replying to my smile with one of his own. “There, perhaps, is the true woman behind the tragedy?”

That was enough to stifle my mirth.

“My apologies. I should not have mentioned it so cavalierly.”

He toyed with the tips of his gloves for a moment, his expression suddenly vulnerable and confused. Oh. He was as thrown off by this whole bizarre occurrence as I was. Only he had better ways to deal with it than trashing the loot piles and wandering the ship like a ghost. My cheeks prickled with shame.

“On board your vessel, Miss Franklin . . . your family?” Sympathy sparkled in those doe-like eyes. He couldn’t even bear to articulate the horror of the question in a full sentence. Of the loss it would have meant for me.

“No,” I croaked around a lump in my throat.

“No one to support you? To miss you?” He probed tentatively, and okay, that was a strange way to ask those questions, not gonna lie. But he meant it from a good place.

“No,” I croaked again.

He breathed a sigh of relief. “Excellent.”

“Excellent that I have no one?” I repeated, confused and edging into hurt.

“I mean, only excellent that I’ve established that. Not that you are without— bother , my apologies,” he said with another little bow. “I’m making a hash of . . . where is your family now, miss?”

Wait, was he trying to find out if I was single ?

Awkward.

“I—” was all I managed to say, the world going tear blurred. “I don’t know. I . . . they’re . . . not here.”

However the captain interpreted this confession, I couldn’t guess. Perhaps he thought I feared them dead? Perhaps he thought we had been separated in such a way that I had no hope of finding them again? Whatever it was, he pulled a handkerchief out of his sleeve and urged me to use it.

“You will be taken care of,” he promised soothingly.

I nodded and wiped at my nose, feeling ungainly and vulgar. And not liking that this man saw me as something that had to be taken care of instead of as a person who could take care of herself. I mean, I couldn’t , not right now. But as soon as I had my feet on dry land and money in my pocket, I could . . . could . . . well, do something.

Although it wasn’t like I could just saunter into town and buy a ticket for a time machine return trip.

The realization made the tears well harder.

There’s no way home .

The thought landed inside me with the weight of the cannonballs piled next to me on the deck. I’d read about a character’s stomach sinking, but for the first time actually felt it —the sudden, vertigo-inducing drag on my guts. I must have wobbled, because the captain’s hand shot out and he steadied me with a gentlemanly grip on my elbow.

I have no idea how to get back. If this is real, I can’t just swim back out to the middle of the ocean and tread water until there’s another thunderstorm, or re-create that green flash, or hail a passing spaceship!

Fun fact, Dad’s voice said. The first novel to feature time travel was written by Jules Verne.

A man who wouldn’t be born for another handful of decades.

And that didn’t even explain why now .

If I had to time travel, why couldn’t it have been somewhere useful? Why hadn’t I gone back and evacuated Pompeii, or killed Hitler, or prevented the sinking of the Titanic ? Why couldn’t I have gone back to the hospital and spoken with my grandfather the night he— I’d been too terrified that it would be the final time to actually go and let it be a good final time. And I regretted it to this day. Why not there?

Time travelers were supposed to change the world for the better, right?

All I’d done was lay in a cabin and delay a ship by two days. How did that help anyone ?

Maybe it was random. Maybe people slipped through cracks in time all over the place, here one minute, gone the next, totally indiscriminate and without design. Maybe unsolved missing persons cases were actually time slips. Maybe Amelia Earhart and Theodosia Burr had been whisked away to, I dunno, the Bronze Age, never to be heard from again.

I was, the swallowed-cannonball feeling told me quite succinctly, fucked .

“I do believe you’ve lost your sea legs,” the captain said, which was a very gentle way of trying to ease me away from my culminating freak-out. He threaded my arm around his kindly. “In which case, may I ask the honor of escorting you ashore, Miss Franklin?”

“Yes.” Get me off this ship. Get me out of this nightmare! “Where are we?”

Captain Goodenough grinned, and a pair of painfully cute dimples appeared. “This is Gibraltar, merely a port of call. We must resupply, trade out some cargo, and gather news of the battle behind us.”

I looked again at the impeccable dress uniform he wore, then down at my ruined sneakers, my peeling belt, my salt-crusted jeans. Under my beret, my hair was a matted tangle.

“I really, uh, don’t think you should be seen with me,” I confessed.

“Nonsense. Nobody can blame you for your outward appearance, not after what has happened. We will soon have you set to rights.”

“But I have no money,” I said weakly. Panic was building behind my tongue and I swallowed hard, but I couldn’t sluice it away.

“You are in the company of an officer of King George’s navy. There will be no trouble.”

“But—!”

“You are lovely, Miss Franklin,” he interrupted gently. “Please, do not deny me the admittedly vain pleasure of stepping onto shore with such a nereid on my arm.”

I frowned. “A what?”

He dimpled again and for some reason I couldn’t stop looking at them. They made him look so much more carefree.

“A woman of the sea, Miss Franklin,” he said, nudging us toward the gangway. “A mermaid.”

We made our way onto the pier, then down the length of it to a set of stone steps leading through the great arching entrance to the town. There, we stopped and turned to take in the whole of the HMS Salacia . This far from the ship, I understood how breathtakingly complicated it really was. And large—there had to be far more to the lower decks than I had managed to search in my agitated flurry. The urge to search came again, the thought that somewhere on board there had to be a camera crew, a modern toilet, a gas generator, something I had missed.

Then I took a deep, fish-guts scented breath, and dismissed it.

I just want to live , I had cried out in my heart, and the universe had answered. Who was I to tempt fate by now being picky about how the miracle had been achieved?

Instead, I forced myself to passively take in the ship. We stood to the side for a long time, watching Goodenough’s men prepare for what he explained was its return to England and the colder climes. The spiderwebbing of ropes were in constant motion (what would ice do to the rigging—surely the ocean spray would crystallize?) hauling around barrels, raising and lowering for sails for repair. Cannons bobbed in and out of portholes. Sailors and officers in their cleanest clothes disembarked, saluted the captain as they passed us, and went into the town to celebrate the victory that their navy had secured.

Some of the nods were aimed at me, with a few mumbled “Miss”es. It took until the third officer gave me a queer look to figure out that they were expecting me to return the acknowledgment. The next time, I tried a head bob, which got me an even stranger look.

Shit, was I supposed to curtsy?

I watched the other women around me, stopping on the sand to smile at acquaintances or suitors, and tried to mimic them. My curtsies were deeply stiff and awkward, but soon the little knee bend came more naturally. I had to keep reminding myself not to pull out the sides of my jacket like a dress. I kept both hands firmly entwined around the captain’s arm as a deterrent, and he didn’t object.

Eventually Captain Goodenough patted my hand and said, “All seems well aboard the Salacia , Miss Franklin. May I treat you to supper?”

“I, uh,” I stuttered, and wondered what I was supposed to say. Was it entirely polite for someone like me to be going alone to dinner with someone like him? I thought about what I knew of the era for about three seconds, and then viciously decided to screw it. He’d asked.

“Sure, works for me,” I said.

The captain’s mouth quirked, as if he couldn’t quite believe my manner of speech was genuine, and led us into town. We passed through a pale stone archway, and past cramped, rough warehouses and shanties. The buildings improved the farther toward the center we went, until we were standing in a beautiful square with a fountain, surrounded by finely decorated row houses clad with cheerful flower boxes.

The scent of baking bread tickled my nose again as Captain Goodenough steered us toward a building whose swinging painted sign proclaimed it a public house and inn.

Oh , I thought. A real bed . With a mattress! Yes, please!

We were almost at the doors, whitewashed and fresh, when he stopped and looked at me critically.

“Perhaps before we sit to dine,” he ventured, “a visit with the landlady would be advisable.”

Well, what a polite way to tell me I looked like utter shit after all. And to think, just moments before he had compared me to a mermaid.

~

The sociable landlady agreed to the captain’s request to “help me along.” A few coins whose denominations I didn’t understand were dropped in her palm, and I was whisked away to a small upstairs bedroom, presumably her own. I was steered into a seat and the jacket was pulled off my shoulders almost before I processed what was happening. I watched it anxiously, loath to be parted with any of my last connections to my real time.

The landlady only plunked it on the foot of the bed, plucked my hat off to join it, then turned to appraise me like a particularly obstinate stain that needed immediate scrubbing. I supposed I was.

She turned me to face the vanity, already gently untangling the tangles at the back of my neck with a wooden comb.

The person staring back at me from the mirror was shocking.

I knew her, but she looked like she’d aged a decade. Her reddish-brown hair was straggly, her lips pale and thin, her cheeks gaunt, her eyes surrounded by what seemed like a thousand new wrinkles.

If this was what mermaids were supposed to look like, it was only after they’d been caught in a fishing net, thrashing and screaming.

Once my hair was manageable again, the landlady gave it a scrub in a shallow wash basin with tepid water and a rough bar of straight-up soap. Then she combed it out with a flowery-scented oil that slid through the knots, and I wondered if this was the precursor to conditioner.

The whole time the landlady clucked about its absurdly short length—only to the bottom of my ears. “I suppose it’s owing to the accident?” she asked, and I agreed vaguely, recognizing that I was probably going to have to lean on that excuse a lot in the coming days, weeks . . . forever .

She did her best to twist my hair up with pins, adding a thin white fabric headband to hold back the layers that weren’t long enough. That done, I was given fresh water and more soap. She encouraged me to strip off and clean up while she went to fetch some clothing. The water was only room temperature but felt frankly amazing .

The landlady must have been allergic to knocking, because she bustled back in on me while I was still standing there in just my bra and undies, the former of which puzzled her greatly. She swapped them for a shift and a short corset-thing that really only went around my tits and did an awful lot more lifting and separating than WonderBra could ever achieve. And apparently for underwear, women of this era wore . . . nothing. I tried not to think too hard about what might happen in the event of a good gust of wind or if someone got their period unexpectedly.

I was persuaded to change my wrinkled shirt and jeans for a simple cream-colored, high-waisted dress with dark beige vertical stripes. I couldn’t help fingering the hem of the sleeves, the small ribbon details around the scooped neckline. The stitches were just irregular enough to have not come from a machine, but so precise that I almost couldn’t tell.

What incredible workmanship.

But I refused to trade in my salt-crusted sneakers for a pair of flimsy ballet flats that felt like they were going to fall off every time I took a step.

“There now, how handsome,” the landlady said, standing behind me to fuss with the lacing at the back while I got an eyeful of myself in the mirror.

I had to admit, I did rock the look. I had boobs for days in the scooped neckline, and my plush tummy and hips had been softened from in-your-face curves into the sweetly plump voluptuousness of a Grecian fertility goddess.

As a last touch, the landlady added just a hint of a red cream from a pot on the vanity to my lips and cheeks that made them rosier.

As she bundled up my clothes in a swath of unfinished cloth, she pointed to a pin on the lapel and exclaimed, “How charming!” It was shaped like a cat curled up for a nap, dappled in the bisexual flag colors—pink, purple, and blue. “What a sweet wee pussy.”

The noise I made while trying to swallow back a sassy retort was the furthest thing from ladylike, and my grin felt a bit manic.

“Here.” I prized it off the denim. “As a thank-you.”

“I’ve been paid,” she demurred, but eyed it covetously.

“Then consider it a gift.” I pushed it into her hand.

She immediately put the pin in pride— ha! —of place in the center of her own ample cleavage, replacing the brooch holding a sheer shawl around her shoulders.

I might have given the pin to Captain Goodenough if I had thought he would have found any value in it, but any jeweler would know the cheap metal for what it was. It wasn’t worth selling to get pocket money. On the décolletage of the landlady, however, it was one of a kind, exotic.

Before I left the room I allowed myself one last glance in the mirror. I looked just like I was about to step onto the set of Pride & Prejudice . I looked like I blended in. Like I belonged .

How terrifying.