Page 35 of Time for You

George sat silently next to him as the train sped through the countryside, uncharacteristically silent. They were drawing near to Manchester, well out of Scotland by now.

“Everything all right?” Henry asked, although his own nerves were jangling.

The plan should work—he’d gotten back to his time using the same basic method—but that didn’t mean it was foolproof.

He could very well end up in the wrong year, or decade, or century, and fixing that would be next to impossible, even with Anne’s map.

Then he would be trapped without Daphne or his family, and he didn’t much fancy that.

Henry was not, at his core, an adventurer.

“I’ll miss you, is all,” George said, gaze firmly on the window. “I know why you’re leaving, and I understand, but it feels like I’m losing another family member.”

“I—”

“Don’t,” George said tightly. “You’re not going to stay, and anyway, I won’t let you. Doesn’t mean I don’t hate it, though.”

“I’ll miss you,” Henry offered, feeling like it wasn’t enough. He too was losing a brother, and the hope of seeing Daphne again didn’t quite quash the wave of sadness that brought on.

But a longer, heartfelt goodbye was not in the cards, as the train began to slow. “There’s no stop here, is there?” Henry asked, peering out.

“No, and we’re not to Manchester yet, either,” George agreed. He stood behind Henry, both of them craning their necks to try and see down to the engine. The countryside surrounding them was still pastoral, not Manchester’s grimly imposing redbrick factories and warehouses.

“Excuse me, sir, but why have we stopped?” George asked a conductor who was making his way down the train, looking harried.

The man sighed heavily. “There’s a tree down on the line. We’ll have to move it before we can start again.”

Henry’s stomach jolted. “No, that can’t—we need to go. I must be in Manchester, soon.”

The conductor shrugged. “We’ll be on our way as soon as that tree is moved, sir. But not before.”

Henry looked at George pleadingly, and his friend nodded. “Then we get off. We’re, what, a half an hour from Manchester by train? There must be a mail coach headed that way. We just have to find it and convince them to go ... fast. Very fast,” George said.

Henry checked his watch. They had an hour and a half until the portal opened, which he’d felt was cutting it too fine in the first place, but his mother had asked him to stay one last night at home, and he hadn’t been willing to deny her that.

But now he was looking at the possibility of never seeing Daphne again, and his heart threatened to break all over again at the thought.

“We’ve no time to waste, then.” Henry grabbed the backpack from the twenty-first century and headed for the train carriage’s door.

The conductor was busy pacifying a middle-aged couple who did not like stopping on journeys, “on account of my wife’s nerves,” and didn’t so much as spare them a glance as Henry and George hopped down off the train into the middle of a field.

George’s boots hit the ground behind him, and Henry immediately turned around. “Which way, do you think?”

George looked around and nodded to his right. “Over there. See that ridge right at the end of the field? Looks to be a lane up there. If someone’s going toward town, we should be able to spot them there.”

Personally, Henry felt like this was a fairly thin plan, but then again, he didn’t have much choice. There was no way the train would make it to Manchester on time, so this was his only remaining hope.

It felt as though reaching the lane took forever, and once they made it, his heart sank further.

It was hardly even a lane, much less a road, and barely more than a dirt track that connected farm fields to one another.

It appeared to be utterly deserted, and now Henry’s fear reached full-blown panic.

“What now?” he insisted, as though George had a magical answer he had been keeping from Henry all this time.

As if a higher power heard him, the faint sound of horse hooves on dry, packed earth and the rattle of wagon wheels answered. A farmer driving a cart rose over a small hill farther down the lane, trundling steadily forward.

Henry didn’t wait for George and broke into a run. “Sir, I have—I need to beg a favor,” Henry called.

The man took in their clothes, rather out of place—if mussed—for a mostly deserted field. “You gentlemen look to be lost,” the farmer observed.

“My friend needs your horse,” George said bluntly. “We’ll pay you.”

The farmer looked puzzled. “But I need her to pull the cart.”

“That much we can see,” George replied. “But—”

“But if I don’t make it to Manchester in the next”—Henry checked his pocket watch and experienced yet another unpleasant stomach lurch—“seventy-five minutes, I’ll never see the woman I love again.”

“Well, now, I don’t know if I see how that’s possible. If she’s in Manchester now, won’t she be in seventy-five minutes?”

“She’s not there,” Henry nearly yelled, keeping leash of his fear at the last minute. “She’s—” He looked to George, utterly unprepared to come up with a plausible lie.

“She’s in London, but his train to London leaves in an hour. And she won’t be there tomorrow, when the next train arrives.”

The farmer nodded slowly. Too slowly, in Henry’s increasingly desperate opinion. “Well, that I can understand. My mare here isn’t a racehorse, though. She’s young, but she’s not—”

“She’ll suffice, I’m sure,” Henry said. “And as he said, we’ll pay you.”

“And I’ll pick her up in Manchester and bring her back this evening,” George added.

The farmer agreed and carefully, painstakingly, climbed down. “Did you need help unhooking her?” he offered.

“It’s quite all right. We can manage,” George said affably.

“Thank you. I owe you one,” Henry said quietly as they got to work. His heart was still racing and his pocket watch was ticking so loudly it felt like a thunderclap, or maybe that was just his heart as well.

“Tough for me to collect, what with you going almost two centuries into the future and all,” George said wryly. He smiled sadly at Henry and tossed him the reins.

Henry was a fair horseman, although bareback had never been quite his forte. But needs must, so Henry pulled his best friend into a tight hug. “Thank you,” he said again. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too, but I won’t if you don’t get going and miss your chance,” George said. He patted Henry on the back and stepped away.

Henry mounted the horse with a quick assist from the fence nearby and tipped his hat in thanks to the farmer.

And then, with one last look, he was off.

Henry’s muscles ached from holding himself on the horse, who was, as the farmer had said, fast but not about to win any races. Still, he found himself in the outskirts of Manchester in good time, although the horse was beginning to flag.

He slowed her to a steady trot as the traffic thickened, and if possible, his nerves got worse.

He had to make it to a cemetery on the eastern side of the city, but he hadn’t counted on the streets being clogged with workers on their way home from shifts at the factory.

Soon the trot slowed to a walk and he wove between carriages as carefully as he could, urging the horse—clearly not at ease with city traffic—forward.

He had memorized the turns to the cemetery from the train station, but that did not help as much as he would have liked, given that he was now coming from an entirely different direction. He hailed a pedestrian and asked for directions to the cemetery, trying to be polite while his anxiety mounted.

“Saint Mary’s? Not too far from here, no,” the old woman replied. “Just up thataway a little.”

“Which road, ma’am?”

She started a long, discursive explanation of the road (Saint Mary’s Avenue) followed by which direction to turn at the top of the hill (left), along with several completely unrelated asides about her health (poor), her knee (always aching), and her daughter-in-law (ungrateful, and also pregnant).

Henry was barely holding a scream back with his teeth when she finished and he could head on, the streams of carriages, hacks, and pedestrians finally thinning as he approached the hill.

Henry checked his watch once more, realizing with dawning horror that he had only minutes to spare, and quite a hill for the horse to climb.

“Come on, girl,” he urged, kicking her flanks. “One last run.”

Surprisingly, she obeyed, once more speeding up to a canter.

Henry turned at the gate into the cemetery, hopping down from the horse without bothering to hobble her.

Either George would find her and pay the farmer for his generosity, or else someone would steal her and George would be out a bit more money, but now was not the time for worrying about that, because up ahead, he saw a twisting, turning shimmer.

Henry broke into a dead sprint, hoping he wouldn’t miss it, not sure how long the veil would even stay open. He threw one look over his shoulder as he approached, to take a last look at his century, and then plunged straight into it.

His stomach dropped, and everything went dark.