Chapter Six

in which sam arrives

Ah! My poor dear child the truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be. —Jane Austen, Emma

Pain. And a pulling at my throat that I thought was a scream that had gone on too long. Burning in the corners of my eyes where tears had dried into an irritating itch. Too damn hot. I kicked the covers with my legs, trying to get them off, off, but someone kept putting them back on, wrapped up to my ears, tight around my neck, scratchy and constricting.

“. . . lucky the bone isn’t broken . . .”

“. . . some of the knife broke off in the flesh . . .”

“. . . make her sweat it out . . .” someone said, but all I wanted was a goddamn ice pack and a few hours of sleep.

“Fever,” said someone else, and I seized on the voice. I knew it. ’Tis the year 1805, my hand to God.

“People died of fevers in 1805,” I crackled, and it didn’t sound like a sob, it didn’t. I was parched. Didn’t invalids get ice chips? “I had a flu shot.”

“Shot?”

“And Hep A and B, and the new COVID variant! My arms looked like a corkboard. I’m going to Barcelona ,” I said, lips dry and numb. I wanted ChapStick, but even that small convenience was lost. “I’m going to drink Spanish wine and make love to a Spanish woman. I can’t die of a fever!”

“She’s delirious,” the voice that was mine said, apologetically. Familiar. Comforting voice. I wanted it, turned my face toward it, seeking it. “Pay no heed, she does not mean what she says. More tea, I think, Doctor.”

Something hot and wet at my lips. Astringent.

Soothing.

I swirled back down into blackness.

~

I lost the first half of November in the grip of tinctures of opium in gin with what little breakfast I could keep down, and laudanum with dinner. The world throbbed gray around the edges, boarded and measured in bouts of shivering frigidity and sweltering heat. I was lucid in spells, mostly when Begam arrived for my wound’s daily bathing in boiled water and rum. I don’t know how sensible I was when I moaned about antiseptic, iodine, penicillin. But he gave in to my babbling demands to run his steel through the flame, to wash his hands with carbolic soap, to use boiled rags when the wound turned inflamed and he had to cut putrid flesh away. They didn’t stitch it shut, in order to actively monitor the flesh for gangrene, and the smell was so revolting that I heaved every time it was uncovered. Not because of the rot, but because of the—and I am absolutely one thousand percent serious— the moldy Roquefort cheese they packed it with to prevent infection.

Early penicillin, baby. They didn’t know why it worked, only that it did.

It smelled like day-old baby vomit.

Luckily, bandages covered the horrid sight and most of the reek the rest of the time. But it didn’t do my digestion any favors. I lived on a diet of thin tea and milk-soaked ship’s biscuits. I couldn’t keep anything else down.

Fun fact! Tea is a diuretic! my dad’s voice warned me every time I refused water. I had already sworn never to drink water ever again. Even the fact that it was laced with lime juice to prevent scurvy wasn’t enough for my PTSD to distinguish it from the gush of saltwater on my palette.

The back half of November was swallowed by depression.

I’d never been injured or severely traumatized before, but my cousin had been in a car crash when we were both in our teens. She’d been lucky and only shattered her hip, but as the reconstructive surgeries and recovery had kept her bed bound for months, she’d fallen further and further into the grip of what she called “steel wool days.” Days when every thought scratched, every touch was abrasive, and every attempt to cheer her was met with resentment for needing the cheering in the first place.

Post-trauma depression was absolutely a real thing, but knowing so didn’t help me avoid it.

Fenton hovered and fretted, and read to me at night while I lay there and tried not to relive the flash of the knife coming toward me, or remember that someone had tried very hard to kill me and had almost succeeded.

Around the beginning of December I began to spend more time awake than asleep. The wound had closed, extremely slowly, but I hadn’t had the courage to look at it. It hurt enough to make my eyes water whenever I moved my arm, the internal scars pulling and burning. And the smell of my own unwashed hair drove me out of my mind. But the journey northward meant that we could no longer air out the cabin by opening the windows without freezing.

Fenton, who had long since removed himself to sleep among his officers, wrinkled his nose through our daily afternoon visit. When I mentioned the desire to be clean, he suggested perhaps I would appreciate a more thorough bath than the previous wipe downs he’d helped with up until now.

“You have a tub?”

“A small one, and enough collected rainwater to offer you a comfortable toilette,” Fenton said. “I’d have offered sooner, but your aversion to water . . .”

“You’ll stay, won’t you? I don’t think I could do it one-handed and I’m afraid that—” I felt stupid and childish for asking, but thought it would be more childish still to suffer in silence. “You’ll make sure my head doesn’t go under?”

Fenton nodded solemnly. “Of course. It’s a shame it’s so frigid out—we could have let you hose off with the lads, if you were feeling sprightly enough.”

“Now who’s being vulgar?” I teased, delighted that he’d made a saucy joke.

His answering smile made it clear that he was equally delighted that I was feeling well enough for my own cheek.

I had missed him. This confident and flirty version of him, I mean.

He’d visited daily, but rarely touched me, either for fear of propriety in front of Begum or of hurting me further. We’d talked but conversation had been stilted, and mostly about either my injury or the men who had tried to kill me out of superstitious revenge for the death of Lord Nelson. He never asked me, but I could tell that my prebonking confession still bothered him. For all we’d danced around the topic when I was high off my face on painkillers, neither of us had the balls to confront the terrifying truth of it head-on.

That there was no explanation for it.

I had told Fenton I was from two hundred years in the future, and he had no idea what to think about that. More than once I had awoken from a drug-fueled nap to find him inspecting one of my ID cards. He never apologized that he’d taken it, but he always returned it to my wallet and tucked it back under my pillow immediately.

“Speaking of vulgar,” he said with a casualness that meant whatever he was about to say was absolutely rehearsed, “what did you mean when you said you were going to Barcelona to make love to a woman?”

I batted my eyelashes at Fenton theatrically. “Why, Captain,” I said huskily, pouting like a starlet. “I taught you what to do with your hand. Where did you think I learned it?”

The sight of a Georgian-era naval captain rolling his eyes like an unimpressed teenager was amazing. Instead of answering right away, he rose to relay the request for the tub to Worsley, who lingered outside the door. When he came back, he had a thoughtful look on his face.

“And this is another thing that you are permitted to do, when you are from? Wear trousers, and style your hair short, and make love to a woman as if you are a man?”

When you are from.

“Yes,” I choked out, startled by his phrasing. Surprise, fear, relief, gratitude churned through me in waves. “Though, you know, I don’t have to pretend to be a dude to do it. I still get to be me. I can be a woman who loves men, and a woman who loves women.”

Fenton had no reply to that, needing the time to digest it.

I tried to give it to him, but couldn’t help asking: “You believe me, then?”

“I—” he began, then hesitated. “I believe that you believe it.”

The tidal wave of emotion solidified into a leaden lump of disappointment.

It’s a start , I consoled myself. I rarely allowed myself to consider what my life might look like after I’d seduced Fenton to the altar, mortified enough by the smug self-congratulations I’d been wallowing in before we’d been attacked. One day he would believe me. I didn’t know how I’d make it happen, but I had a lifetime to figure it out.

The arrival of the tub and a parade of sailors with buckets of steaming water prevented any further conversation. Fenton stood between the door and the bunk to hide me from view in my state, and made good on his promise to help me undress and wash. The tenderness with which he cradled my skull as he poured clean water over my soapy hair made my lungs clench with affection.

I was aware that I had probably imprinted on Fenton like a baby duckling, what with him being heroic and handsome.

Fun fact! It’s called Florence Nightingale effect when a caregiver falls in love with their patient, and de Clérambault’s syndrome when the patient falls in love with their caregiver.

So what if it was just transference? It felt real. And his gentle attention made it clear that I’d picked a good one.

Once the rest of me was scrubbed fresh, he unwrapped the bandages with gentle deliberation and helped me lay my right arm on the rim of the tub for support. When he noticed that I had my eyes screwed shut he said: “It’s not terrible.”

“I can’t—”

“You cannot avoid it forever. Come now.”

He sounded so reasonable admonishing me that I couldn’t help but do as he asked. The wound had healed into a vee-shaped pucker of pitted, angry red skin about two inches south of my armpit, on the underside of my arm. The galaxy of purple-blue-green from the bone-bruise was only now clearing up.

“If the knife had not caught your arm, it very well may have gone straight into your heart,” Fenton said gently, running soapy fingers around the sensitive skin around the scar. I shivered.

“Or your face,” I added. “This is the better outcome. Only time my goddamn bat wings were good for anything.” I forced out a laugh. “I’ll never get angry about too-tight sleeves ever again.”

Fenton disapproved of my gallows humor.

I’ll need help until I’m back on my feet. Yoga will help, I just need to start up again. But it may never heal completely. Adrenaline, clear and sharp, raced down my veins. I’ll need servants. A husband. Maybe for the rest of my life. I need him. I need to make him stay.

“Help me clean my teeth,” I said urgently.

Fenton pulled back, dark eyebrows doing that adorable squiggly thing they did when he couldn’t follow my conversation.

“So I can kiss you,” I explained. “And then, if we go very slow, I can show you what else sleeping with women has taught me.”

Fenton helped me clean my teeth.

~

The wind was bitter by the time we reached Britannia’s famous white cliffs, and ice clung to the rigging like lichen. I watched the whole process from what had become, over the last week, “my spot” at the nose of the ship. I’d taken up residence as a second, silent figurehead, desperate to escape the close fetid air of my sickroom no matter how many wooly socks and sweaters I had to pilfer to do so.

I had stopped scanning for planes or long-slung tankers weeks ago. Now I just stared in the direction of England and wondered what our life would be like once we arrived.

Traversing the Thames took several days, what with the way the other naval vessels were crammed into the channel, and it was New Year’s Day by the time our ship tiptoed into the Royal Navy Dockyard in London.

The other ships docked were similar in design and size, but far worse for the battle they’d suffered through. In that we were lucky.

One vessel was draped with stately swags of black cloth.

“There,” Fenton murmured, indicating the black-festooned ship. He pressed closer to my side than was probably appropriate to keep our conversation private from the sailors scurrying around the deck. His right hand rested lightly on the back of my left one, where no one behind us could see it. His index finger slid along my pinkie every time he wanted to direct my attention to something he pointed out. It felt ridiculously intimate , especially considering what we’d done in that alleyway. “That is the HMS Victory , upon which Lord Nelson was returned to his people. And there, the HMS Pickle , which brought the sad news of his death ahead of his arrival.”

He sounded genuinely sorrowful.

Every man on the ship seemed affected, many stopping to doff their wool caps at the ships. I wondered what kind of miraculous, charismatic man this Nelson had been to inspire such unrivaled loyalty from his sailors, even down to the lowly Worsley. The lad had been openly weeping when Fenton had charged him with a rather large bundle of letters to be delivered to the dockyard’s postmaster.

“I thought you guys did burials at sea,” I asked, confused.

Fenton shifted a bit, slightly uncomfortable as always at my bluntness. “Lord Nelson is a national hero. He deserved to be returned home.”

“Ah,” I said. “But he . . . wouldn’t he have gone bad?”

“His remains were transported in a cask of brandy.”

Good thing the ships weren’t the other way around, or he’d have been pickled on the Pickle , I thought.

I didn’t say it, though. I’d already offended the deceased but greatly loved hero enough for one conversation.

The bobbing that I had become so accustomed to had ceased now that we were in port, and beyond the warehouses on the wharves, the skyline of the London I knew was absent. Big Ben wasn’t there, and I couldn’t quite figure out why that surprised me. Instead, there was a gaping hole where it should have been standing proudly and sticking its metaphorical tongue out at me, chiming out nyah nyah, I exist on every hour.

But here I was.

And here Big Ben wasn’t.

I felt wild, off kilter, like a soap bubble about to pop.

“And what now, Captain Goodenough?” I asked.

“Now, we buy you a dress for a funeral,” he said earnestly.

“You can’t keep buying things for me.” My modern sensibilities squirmed again. How on earth did Georgian-era women put up with the men having total control over their money and their lives?

Guess I would find out.

“Then you are in possession of coin that I was previously unaware of?” Fenton asked with that familiar raised eyebrow and sly smile.

I shook my head, but even that was redundant. He knew I was broke.

“I do not mind providing for you, Miss Franklin,” he said with a meaningful rumble. “It is a pleasurable duty.” The tips of his ears went red again. They’d been doing that a lot lately.

“I’m glad you said that,” I bandied back. “I was afraid you were going to use a different adjective there. Annoying, uncouth, revolting .”

“You could never be revolting,” he whispered, carefully kissing the back of my hand, lips warm in the chilly winter air. One of his fingers brushed the sensitive underside of my naked wrist.

I shivered. This time it wasn’t from the cold.

There was something gratifying about this slow courtship. It was nothing like letting someone buy you a drink, giving them bedroom eyes, then going back to theirs to screw. Even if we were screwing. This was thoughtful, patient, and considerate. Fenton honestly and truly cared about my comfort, my choices, my conversation. He knew me—as well as anyone could be themselves after such trauma—and he liked me.

Truth was, I liked him too. Good thing, considering I planned to marry him. He looked soft and frankly kind of pretty to be a naval man, but when he was snapping orders around the deck, there was a flash and fire to him that was sexy.

I used his grip on my hand to reel him a bit closer, standing up on my toes to press a kiss to his cheek, which was as much as I dared in public. I really wanted to go for his lips, that pretty bow-shaped pout, but it was too forward.

I might have had no conceivable way home, and my ability to manage on my own was in question, but at least I had a companion other people respected, who was in turn an honorable and gentle man who respected and liked me back.

I could make this work.

As long as I didn’t think hard about what I’d have to give up—independence, autonomy, the taste of a woman on my tongue ever again, any chance of having my own voice or opinion outside of our private lives . . .

“Okay,” I said. “You can take me shopping.”

He frowned, that endearing eyebrow vee reappearing. “O-K?” he repeated. “You say this often; I take it for an affirmative, or a confirmation of wellness, but what does it mean, exactly?”

I laughed, startled by the sudden weirdness of needing to explain something I took for granted as understood.

“Dad says that’s disputed—it’s either Choctaw for ‘it is so,’ or was invented about a decade from now by a bunch of Bostonians to stand in for ‘oll korrect.’ My favorite explanation is”—I circled the thumb and forefinger of my good hand and extended the other three fingers out straight—“O-K, Zero Kills. Military parlance, meaning there were no casualties on our side.”

He repeated the gesture, so tentative and out of place paired with his fussy blue dress frock coat that I laughed again.

“That is the first time you’ve mentioned your father,” Fenton pointed out, which killed my delight stone dead. “Did you much admire him?”

“I did.” I clenched my teeth to keep my chin from trembling. “He was very loving, and handy, and he had the biggest store of stupid useless facts a single human brain could hold—” I snuffled hard.

Fenton offered me his handkerchief and I declined. I still had one of his other ones stuffed in my jeans pocket. He looked at it critically, and then at the rest of my ensemble.

“Perhaps I shall send out for a dress instead,” he said as I dabbed my face dry.

“Har, har,” I said, desperately missing the ability to buy clothes on my phone.

But there was no point in wishing for things I could never have.

~

The first dress that Worsley fetched back from a modiste was so fashionable as to be practically transparent. I wondered how gullible the kid had to be to let himself be talked into something so useless for any kind of activity outside of a sweltering ballroom. I sent it back, insisting that I wasn’t going to be a popsicle just because it was trendy. The second dress was made of black wool, utilitarian and straight cut, with no flounces.

The next morning, my stays and chemise from my blood-ruined Gibraltar dress were put to use, and the ensemble was finished with sturdy black thigh-high socks held up by honest-to-god ribbon garters. Fenton offered to buy me new boots, but I stuck to my purple Chucks. They weren’t as waterproof as leather, but with no heel I didn’t have to worry about breaking an ankle on the winter-slick streets. My chest and arms were encased in a cranberry-colored wool jacket called a spencer. It ended just under my boobs, leaving my poor bottom with only a few layers of skirt to fend off the deep English winter. Why were these people so opposed to underwear? My hands were shoved as far as they would go into a rabbit-fur muff, dyed cranberry to match my ridiculous little coat, a sling made from the leftover material from my Gibraltar dress folded neatly inside it in case I decided I needed it later. My Basque hat rounded out the ensemble. As we made our way through the frigid cobblestone streets, I wished that I’d also had the foresight to wear my jeans under the dress.

Loath as I was to spend Fenton’s money, I also wished most that the crowd wasn’t so huge that we could have hired a cab. But the multitudes of people we waded through were just too prohibitive to allow any vehicle through.

I had seen the pictures of “The Queue,” of the two hundred and fifty thousand people who’d waited in line to pay their respects to the late queen, Elizabeth II. Though there had to be fewer people crammed into the street outside of Greenwich Hospital to walk past Lord Nelson’s casket, it sure didn’t feel like it. I thought it was a bit morbid, to come all this way just to stare at a half-shriveled corpse. But then I didn’t have the sort of connection with the man, nor the battle he had just won for them, as the people in this queue did.

The British have always admired their heroes, and preferred them dead best of all. I’d heard that in a song once, two hundred years from now.

It was still early when we arrived—the quick breakfast we’d taken on the ship was barely settled in my stomach—and the doors of the hospital were still closed. Guards in red tunics were glancing at each other and then at the growing number of lookie-loos nervously. All it would take to turn the crowd was a few impatient idiots or a handful of troublemakers. Luckily, a grim air of solemnity hovered ominously over the sea of black wool and silk flowers. Nobody seemed to have the jumping fury required for a riot.

Captain Goodenough, by privilege of his blue coat, was allowed to push to the front. I kept my hand wrapped around his elbow, letting him drag me along through the slush and mud. I did my best to keep my hem out of the mess, but it must have been splattered six inches up by the time we made it to where several more naval men with even grander epaulets, sashes, feathers, and medals stood grim faced, bracketed by tearful wives and children.

As we passed by them, Fenton shook the hands of his equals, bowed formally to his betters, saluted his superiors, and kissed the hands or cheeks of those women he knew well enough. He introduced me to no one, and though everyone’s eyes followed with naked curiosity, I, too, said nothing. I was already beginning to learn the importance of keeping my mouth shut—I’d paid the price for my flapping jaw in Gibraltar.

The tight collar of my jacket felt near to choking me. Or maybe it was the way I kept biting my tongue. But I didn’t fidget. See? What a good wife I’d be.

When we settled into place in the front ranks, I sighed in relief. I expected Fenton to make some soothing remark or stoop close to whisper into my ear. Instead he just looked straight ahead, his mouth a somber line. He behaved as if he didn’t know me at all, as if I was but some stranger on his arm that he’d been obliged to escort, and not what we were.

More.

Was he mad at me? Was it because I hadn’t wanted to be dressed as fashionably as the shivering, blue-lipped women around me? Or was I supposed to have introduced myself to his colleagues?

Shit.

Shit .

Something inside me twisted hard, my guts seizing. I was doing a good job at this, right? This whole “convincing Fenton that he should keep me around” thing. Right?

Should I make conversation? Was it my turn to fill the uncomfortable silence? Or should I follow his lead and keep my yap buttoned? I was halfway to deciding to make some stupid comment about the weather when another gentleman shoved his way forward and hailed us with a booming, too jovial: “Fen! Fen Goodenough!”