Page 31 of Time for You

Henry’s insides felt like a bucket of eels, twisting and turning as he walked toward the home his father had bought for them the year before his death.

It had been brand new then, but nigh twenty years on, it was more weathered, the wisteria climbing the front heavy and gnarled at the base.

Henry considered letting himself in, but George pointed out that was a sure way to get a coal shovel to the face courtesy of Shepard.

The butler had been a boxer at the warehouses down near the docks before entering the family’s service, and even with his bum shoulder, Henry didn’t fancy being on the receiving end of his attack.

George noticed his hesitation but made no comment, just rang the bell.

The windows were dark, the house quiet, but after several seemingly endless minutes, Henry saw the dim light of Shepard’s lamp floating across the front hall.

“Who is—Mr. Campbell, whatever is wrong?” Shepard asked, his familiar broad frame filling the door. He didn’t even glance at Henry.

“Found something that might belong to you,” George said, and stepped aside. That slight movement allowed the moonlight to fall straight onto Henry, and Shepard nearly dropped his lamp in shock.

“Mr. MacDonald? Is that truly you? We thought you’d drowned,” Shepard said in a voice very unlike his usual stern baritone.

“It’s me, Shepard,” Henry said. “Alive and well.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. Is it—may I come in?”

Training finally overcame Shepard’s shock, and he stepped aside hastily. “Of course, of course. What would you like to eat? Wherever you came from, you must be hungry. I’ll wake Cook, and then—”

“I’d like to see my mother first,” Henry said gently.

“Oh, of course, sir, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Lyd—Mrs. MacDonald will of course want to see you right away. I’ll send for a maid and tell her to wake your mother.”

Henry noticed Shepard’s unusual slip of the tongue but filed it away to ask about later, when everyone was a little less flustered. “My sisters too, if you please. But—don’t tell them why, just tell them not to be worried.”

“Of course, sir, right away, sir,” Shepard said, and hurried away, his dressing gown flapping in a slightly undignified manner.

George grabbed a candle on a nearby table and lit it.

Henry considered how short a time it had been since he’d left, but how accustomed he’d become to modern conveniences—in the twenty-first century, that light would have been provided by flipping a switch, and while it was a colder, more impersonal light, it was far simpler.

They let themselves into the front parlor, where the fire was banked for the evening.

Henry lit the gas lamps on the wall, which had felt like the height of luxury when he had them installed and now felt oddly primitive.

It would take some time for him to adjust to the past—present?

—that much was clear. George busied himself with the fire, which was soon roaring cheerfully.

This far north it was still chilly of an evening, and Henry appreciated the warmth chasing away the damp chill of a June night.

“What’s it like, then? The future?” George asked.

“It’s—different,” Henry started. “They have so much, especially electricity. Everything’s powered by it, and they have carriages that drive themselves. No horses, just an engine, and a wheel that they use to direct it.”

George furrowed his brow. “Sounds fantastical.”

Once again, Daphne’s face flashed before his eyes, and a stab of pain went through his chest. “It is,” he replied with some difficulty.

“What’s wrong—” George started, but then the door swung open and Lydia MacDonald strode in.

“George, I know you’re one of the family, but why on earth are you here at this ungodly—” Lydia stopped, and her jaw dropped as her gaze finally fixed on her oldest child. “No. No. It can’t be,” she whispered in an agonized voice. “We—we lost you.”

“You didn’t, Ma,” Henry said, using a term for her he’d dropped sometime around his father’s death. “I’m here. I’m alive.”

“Oh, Henry,” Lydia said, and burst into uncharacteristic tears.

The last time Henry had seen his mother weep was when he was seventeen, when his uncle had gotten the business deep in debt.

But those had been tears of frustration, not gladness, and Henry wrapped his mother in his arms, reminding himself that this was why he’d returned.

Staying with Daphne would have meant letting his family believe him dead, which would have been unimaginably cruel.

He could give her up, for this. He had, and it was the right thing to do. “Mama, Gwendolyn said we have a visitor, but whoever would call at this time of night?” Maggie asked as she walked in, pausing mid-stride. “Henry?” she asked in a quiet voice.

Anne was close on her heels, and she was the first to come to her senses. “Henry!” she squealed, and ran into his arms, suddenly a precocious eleven-year-old again and not a young woman of nineteen. “I knew you weren’t dead, I knew it,” Anne crowed. “Didn’t I tell you, Mama?”

Lydia wiped her cheeks and sniffled noisily. “You’ll need to forgive me for not believing you, but it just didn’t seem possible.”

“Where were you?” Maggie demanded. “It doesn’t seem like you to just run away, so—kidnapped? By pirates?”

“That was what I said.” Anne pouted.

“No, you said Vikings , which is ridiculous because there haven’t been Vikings in centuries.”

“Girls, girls,” Lydia tried ineffectively.

“No, I said there might be some sort of veil through time, and maybe a Viking slipped through. That’s different.”

“If possible, it’s even more ridiculous when Henry was probably just held for ransom by highwaymen.” Maggie sniffed. “Weren’t you, Henry?”

“Wouldn’t the ransom demand have been sent here?” George interjected.

“Not if he escaped,” Maggie replied.

“I was not kidnapped by Vikings, pirates, or highwaymen,” Henry said before George set off a new round of bickering between his sisters. “But Anne was more accurate than you’d think.”

Lydia sat down, back ramrod straight, on the settee. “Then you should explain. Shall I ring for some tea?”

But Shepard walked in then with a tray of tea and bannocks, as always anticipating his mother’s desires before she even expressed them. “Thank you, Shep,” she said affectionately.

“Aren’t you going to give your brother a hug?” George needled Maggie.

Ever the grump, Maggie glared at him and marched over to give Henry a surprisingly gentle hug. “Welcome back, brother,” she murmured, and he squeezed her tight before letting go.

Lydia poured them all tea and everyone settled down, the only sounds the rustle of the ladies’ wrappers and the soft clink of teacups to saucers. “So, wherever you have been these past five months, it must have been somewhere very far away, for you to not have been able to send word.”

Henry met his mother’s shrewd gaze and nodded. “It was. I was in America.”

“America has the post, if I recall correctly,” Maggie pointed out.

“I was in America, but not in 1885. I was in the future. The twenty-first century, to be exact.”

Anne’s eyes widened as big as dinner plates. “A time veil?”

“We called it a portal, but in brief, yes.”

“We?” Maggie asked. “Who’s we ?”

“I made some friends there,” Henry said, feeling worse each time he denied Daphne her rightful place in his heart. “They took me in, kept me safe.”

Maggie and Lydia exchanged a look. “How do you know that’s, er, where you went?” Maggie asked.

“I haven’t gone mad, I promise.”

“He’s got proof,” George said. “I believe him.”

Maggie looked skeptical, but Lydia’s shoulders eased slightly. “I’ll show you when I’m done,” Henry said. “But I need to explain first.”

“I want to know about the time veil. What was it like? Is it still open? Can I go?” Anne asked.

Henry smothered a grin at her eagerness. More than any of them, Anne would be well suited to the future. “It’s like stepping into an abyss—you fall, but only for a moment, and then you’re somewhere else. Some-when else, actually.”

“Why did you choose to go through it?” Maggie asked.

“I didn’t. I thought it was smoke or haze, not a rip in time.”

“And then?” Anne asked.

“I thought I’d fallen and hit my head. I did fall, actually—a woman on a bicycle rode straight into me and knocked me over.”

A woman felt like a paltry way to refer to the only woman he’d love for the rest of his life, but he had already committed to the omission.

“A woman? On a bicycle?” Anne asked excitedly.

“A woman doctor,” Henry said, and Anne sat up straight.

“A doctor? She was admitted to a medical school as a student, not just an observer?”

“A doctor in every sense of the word,” Henry said, unable to keep the pride out of his voice. “In the future, a lot of women are. There’s a lot of things like that: most women work; they don’t stay home. Not just poor women, but wealthy women, too.”

Lydia raised her eyebrows. “They must have a lot of servants to run their houses.”

“They don’t, but they have a lot of technology that makes up for it. A machine that washes clothes, for instance. And another one that dries them.”

“A machine to dry clothes? Who ever heard of such a ridiculous thing,” Lydia replied. “Is there no sun or wind in the future?”

“It goes much faster,” Henry argued. “Everything there is faster, really. It’s all instantaneous, or so close to being so that it makes no matter.”

“Where did you stay?” asked Maggie, always the taskmaster.

“With—the friends I made. They lived in a sort of tenement building, and for a while I was in an empty flat, and then when the occupant returned, I stayed with some of them.”

“That must have been ghastly, sharing a tenement,” Anne said, making a face.

“It’s actually quite nice. Nothing like the ones you’re thinking of. The future is so different from what we think it will be, as a matter of fact.”

From there his family had fewer questions, or perhaps so many more they couldn’t decide how to articulate them.

Like with George, Henry made his decision to stay longer a little fuzzy; rather than deciding he couldn’t say goodbye to a woman, which felt unimaginably selfish after seeing how overjoyed his family was to have him back, he made it sound like there’d been a miscalculation on the time, leading to him missing the window to return.

There were a few times he couldn’t avoid mentioning Daphne entirely, and both times Anne’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she stayed silent.

“And then I went to George’s office first, as I was sure he’d still be there, before we came straight here,” Henry finished.

Lydia’s cup was empty and she stood, pulling him up for another hug. “Welcome home,” she whispered. “I never dared hope. When you didn’t return home that day, I thought you’d slipped into the Firth and drowned. You’re a fair swimmer, but not a strong one, and the waves were big that day.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured into his mother’s grey hair. “I would have come back that day, if I could.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie.

Lydia stepped back and wiped one more tear from her cheek. “I think this calls for a celebration. Cook shouldn’t be woken at this time of night, but Shep—Shepard can find something more hearty than this in the kitchen for us.”

“I’ll cook,” Henry offered without thinking.

The reaction was immediate. He might as well have fired a cannon into the parlor.

Maggie laughed, George scoffed, and his mother huffed, “Well, I never.” Only Anne seemed less than mortally offended by his suggestion.

Even though he’d known that it wasn’t common in his time for men—especially men of his status—to cook, he hadn’t considered how alien it would seem to his loved ones.

“You cook?” Lydia sputtered.

“Do men in the future really do that?” Anne asked.

Henry shrugged. “Some do, some don’t, just as some women in the future do, and some don’t.”

“What on earth has happened to society there?” Maggie demanded.

“It sounds ghastly,” George said. “When you said no servants, I assumed there would at least be a cook.”

“You won’t have to do that anymore, darling,” Lydia said. “Shepard can manage to find a few more things for us to eat.”

The reality set in for Henry all at once. A wealthy man doing his own cooking just wasn’t done in the nineteenth century unless he wanted to be called “eccentric.” Henry’s family were still strivers, despite their money, and he would need to follow the rules of society as they existed once again.

He would go back to the import business too, with the endless columns of numbers and lists and bills of lading.

Regret coupled with grief for the life he’d left behind rose up inside him, and he wondered if this was what it would always be like now, never feeling at home in his time, always feeling out of place.

He’d spent so long in the twenty-first century yearning for the past, and now that he was back, he was yearning for the future.