I spent the next few hours wrapped in a blanket on the deck of the Lyre.
The horizon resolutely refused to get any closer.
Tease.
The shore – Africa? - on the other hand, was growing smaller and skinnier. We weren't sailing directly away from it. Instead we were skimming along the coast, but eventually the beaches and brakes gave way to the inward slope of the westerly retreating cliffs and we were more or less on the open water.
How long did I sit there? Long enough for my hair to get damp again from the spray, wet tendrils sticking to my forehead.
My own clothing was in a wet ball in Captain Goodenough's cabin, still. I was wearing instead a spare pair of the smallest cabin boy's britches and shirt, indecent enough that the Captain had implored me to stay in the unseen safety of his bunk.
We compromised with a thick blanket pulled tight around my shoulders.
Because I had to be outside. I had to see it. For myself. With my own eyes.
I was narrowly resisting the urge to look for hidden video cameras. Would a reality television show even be this morbidly detailed? There were no planes in the sky. No low-slung tankers in the water. Only me, the vast emptiness of the ocean, and underneath, behind, all around me, a nineteenth century ship with sails and ropes and crows nests, and everything. And a crew, too, all properly attired.
And in the water, scattered in a thousand tiny glimmering islets, the remains of my airplane. Acres of shrapnel and debris, stretching on to the horizon.
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, blankly staring with emotionless bead eyes; half-filled toiletry bottles, a bath-time floating picture book. A stewardess' hat, a cosmetics case, a piece of the wing.
I did not want to look, but I could not tear my eyes away.
Things that meant nothing to anyone but me. I, alone, among these hundreds, had survived. I alone had been pulled from the sea.
I wondered, maybe, if it would have been better if I had drowned. Like the rest of the twenty-first century that was present, so anachronistically here, out of place, superfluous, wrong.
We would all just vanish from history forever, lost to the future because we were laid at the bottom of the sea in the past. Never known. Never found.
The sailors stood beside me and doffed their caps and made no move to pick the dead out of the sea. I guess there was grave dirt enough at the bottom of the ocean for all. Or empty shark stomachs, at least.
Among my peers, the bloated white-faced drowned, were the dead of the battle Captain Goodenough had spoken of. Red and blue uniforms nearly black and indecipherable with the weight of the water, the stain of blood and gunpowder, the char of an on-deck fire. Ship pieces and broken planks, the ghostly billow of a sail still lashed to a bobbing mast. The very last of the battle-dead were giving up the gasses that had kept them afloat, or succumbing to the teeth of the blood-frenzied predators. The rest had already vanished below.
My conveyance, and any proof that I had that I was not when I belonged, would soon go with it.
Two things alone remained to remind me that I was real, and that this had really happened: my wallet and my cell phone. The battery had been frizzed by my plunge in the water, but had it not been, I was sure I wouldn't get any signal anyway. The papers and money – the Euros I had so carefully hoarded – were wet and beyond legible, obsolete. Only my plastic had survived; identification and credit cards I could never use or claim. That I should probably rightfully, like the responsible time travelers from the films I had known as a child, toss into the drink.
I hoarded them instead, the last remaining proofs that I was not mad. That I was not the addled heroine of some Georgian romance. That this wasn't The Tempest, or Northanger Abbey, or The Monk, or The Welshman's Daughters. The last proofs that I was who I thought I was, that I still had my identity, if nothing else.
Both lay under the pillow in the Captain's cabin. I had rescued them from my soaked jeans, and followed the impulse to squirrel them away, protect the last of all I owned. I had no illusion that they were safe from the Captain's curiosity there, but let him contrive what he wanted from them. I didn't care.
Beside me, the sailors tried to catch my eye, to start conversations, but I could not unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth, could not loosen it enough to speak. And at the same time, I also could not bare the thought of drinking anything to make the task easier.
Water and I were quite at odds for the moment, despite how parched I was.
Just a small tiff. A fair-weather break up. Understandably.
The men were shouted back to their duties, or drifted off when I proved to be an unsociable companion. They all smelt like unwashed hair and unwashed clothes and too long at sea with only other men and hot hands.
I had been preparing for a run of one night stands, but I didn't want it like that. I didn't want it now. Didn't think I'd ever want it ever again.
Weren't survivors supposed to feel a desperate drive to affirm life?
Right now all I wanted was to breathe without each inhale being a small agony.
A low grey fog crept out from the unseen land over the curve of the horizon, and lay over the water like a shroud. The sun set slowly, fading into the shadow mass of land that was Europe to my right – starboard or port? Which is that? – and I kept to my place at the nose of the ship, a morose figurehead, undoubtedly as grey in the face as the weathered maiden who stood sentinel below me, my eyes forward like I could pierce through the fog and find the twenty-first century on the far side of the mist.
Eventually we passed through the field of bodies and wreckage, and the crew stopped muttering prayers at every cadaver that bumped away under the prow. I sat on a large round coil of rope tucked up against the rail.
For some time, perhaps for hours, Captain Goodenough hovered in my general periphery, concerned perhaps of suicidal intentions (no, no, I'd had enough drowning for one day, thank you muchly) and then eventually left me to my vigil.
Yes. Vigil.
That was a good word for it. I pulled the blanket close, unperturbed by the new dampness on its outside, pulling up my legs and crossing them. I made a tent of warmth and denial.
I could not seem to blink.
I could, however, think. A lot.
Mostly about how I seemed to have fallen straight into either a supermarket romance novel, or a crazy science fiction thriller; I wasn't much of a fan of either, but my mind just kept circling back and back to the idea that this had to be fiction, because it was too much liked the movies to be real. It was sort of like watching the footage from some public atrocity and thinking, The things they can do with CGI these days, before realizing that the horror on the screen had really happened - shootings, vans plowing into sidewalks, bombs, airplane crashes. The brain short circuits and tries to yank what you've seen, what you're experiencing, right back into the realm of fiction.
Because people don't really time travel.
And they aren't rescued by Regency naval post-captains. The plot in Georgian romance books always includes the dashing rescue of a heroine who has managed to fall ass over teakettle by a kind and handsome stranger man. My handsome, dashing stranger was Francis Goodenough; not exactly the chiseled, barrel-chested Fabio that chick-lit had promised the tumbled maidens of the world. Goodenough was dimple cheeked, eyes dark and hair a careful rakish messiness that I would call "JBF" on any collar-popping Aber-zombie: 'just been fucked'.
I stifled a laugh against the back of my good hand, because if he was the person the author of this surreal adventure was trying to throw in my path, they had seriously picked the wrong woman.
Alarmed by my laughter, Captain Goodenough bustled back into my line of vision briskly. I wondered who was steering the ship. Wasn't the Captain supposed to steer, or was that a Hollywood convention? I couldn't seem to make my eyes follow him.
"What year is it?" I croaked.
It was the first thing I had said outside of the cabin. He stopped, stared at the side of my head for a drawn out moment, the concern back. I did not look.
"'Tis the year 1805, hand to God," he said, gently, gravely. As if sensing how deliberately serious my inquiry was. "October twenty-first, if we're being particular about it."
I rubbed the side of my head with my good hand. The throbbing in my other hand and ribs had dulled to a low ache. I felt groggy, but didn't want to slip back into unconsciousness. To that floating blackness that was too much like being at the bottom of the ocean. Besides, what if I had a head injury? I was supposed to stay awake.
I flexed the fingers of my right hand – will I ever be able to type again? Hold a pen? Drive? – and the sting of it made me blink, sent adrenaline clear and sharp racing down my veins, and I woke up a bit.
I curled my fingers around the blanket, resisted the urge to pull it up to my chin, up over my mouth to hide the whimper, over my head and close my eyes and make the world just go away.
This had to be a joke. It had to. I shoved down the desperate urge to cry. There was enough salt water around me, in drooping mist in my hair, on the backs of my hands where the mobile fingers clutched the edge of the blanket.
I wasn't going to add to the world's supply.
I sat and stared until I could not stare any longer. My chin nodded and dropped to my chest, eyes slipping shut with cool relief, wetter in the corners than I would care to admit. I nodded where I sat, fingers going lax, ankles uncrossing heavily. An arm under my head, my cheek pillowed on the railing, bobbing, bobbing.
And never still.
* * *
In the morning, I woke to find myself back in the lumpy bunk. The little pool of darkness that had kept the real world at bay the night before had dissipated in the morning light filtered through the dirty glass of what proved to be the Captain's cabin. I was alone, still bundled in the old-fashioned clothes, and took the opportunity to figure out how deep this... this fantasy, this fiction went. Surely all the books on their shelves, the clothes in the cupboard, the maps, the ledger, something would betray that... but no, perusing the charts and books and logs just confirmed that it was late October 1805, and we were heading back to England at the tail end of a limping trail of the survivors of the Battle of Trafalgar. Or what would eventually come to be called the Battle of Trafalgar.
The sound of the doorknob turning sent me scrambling back for the bunk as fast as my bruised torso and broken fingers allowed. It opened on Captain Goodenough holding a wooden tray, with the kind of self-deprecating smile that made it clear that he knew that fetching breakfast was below his station. Wordlessly, I accepted a cup of tea still swirling with a generous daub of milk and a meager ration of a ship's biscuit with Captain Goodenough's apology. It was all the ship had. He promised me that they would stop in port soon and pick up some fresh vegetables and fruit, but I was actually happy for the ship's biscuit, and that it was so small. I hadn't eaten since the crappy in flight Salisbury steak. That had ended up on the deck of the HMS Lyre and sprinkled liberally throughout the Atlantic. I didn't really feel like putting anything else back into my stomach just yet. At least, nothing substantial. And I hated milky tea.
"I will, ah, leave you to dress then, Miss Franklin," he said once it was clear that I wasn't about to make conversation, and bowed himself out.
I waited until he was out of the room and then set both aside.
My clothing, spread carefully along the backs of chairs, had dried enough to wear again. The seams and pockets of my jeans were still damp and uncomfortable, stiff with salt, but I felt better in my own clothing. But my tee shirt was thin, and it didn't do anything to keep out the chill of the wind that billowed the sails and cut in the chinks around the window frames, so I shrugged back into the cabin boy's jacket.
Leaving the tea to go cold on the Captain's desk, and feeling guilty because I could guess at what a commodity the leaves and dairy were at sea in the nineteenth century, I resumed flipping through his log book. Captain Goodenough wrote in a looping, steady hand that put my own handwriting to shame. I came from an era of computer keyboards, where penmanship is rarely a cultivated art. It was the dates on the top of the pages that fascinated me more than the account of chasing the Spanish and French fleets to the West Indies and back. There wasn't any bitterness in Goodenough's report of coming late to the battle. I only knew he was disappointed that his chance at glory was frustrated by the little twist of his lips as he had told me about coming late.
I sat back in his chair, listening to his voice above my head, calling to the men under his command. The tea cup stared back at me. Feeling guilty and revolted and extremely parched, I gulped the now-cold tea in one bolt. Terrible, but my tongue felt looser, and my headache throbbed a bit lower. The cut stung. I was clearly dehydrated, yet...
I was pretty sure that I would never drink water again.
In their splits, my fingers twinged, and I wondered if there was a doctor on board... or, no, did they call them surgeons? I wanted aspirin, morphine, codeine, something. Did they have painkillers in the nineteenth century? Wasn't aspirin supposed to be made out of willow bark? Did they have willow bark tea?
I had to raise my good hand to my face to muffle the frantic, hysterical laughter. It still slipped between my fingers. But it came on every once and a while and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It scared me.
I scared me.
This... was ... it should have been too much, but I was... what? Numb? Cold? I still felt like I couldn't get warm enough. Maybe I should have drunk the tea when it was still hot. Was I in shock? I had no way of knowing. No penlight to flash into my own eyes, no mirror to watch my pupils in, no heart pressure monitor or ... or whatever it was that was an indicator of shock.
Shock.
Yes. Maybe.
I had just survived a plane crash.
Alone.
Alone, and in, according to Captain Goodenough's journal, 1805.
A sudden thought occurred to me, sharpish and bright. It cut through the haze of numbness that had settled veils over my brain, letting in a small keyhole of light, an arcing epiphany. It filled me with a powerful, painful yearning. A longing. For... something.
An answer. For that missing puzzle piece.
And then it clicked into place.
What if... what if this was some reality show? What if they were filming a movie, or these were really just very in character re-creationists? What if this was all real, but not reality?
The thought had me back on my feet. I looked up, around, in every corner; searched for hidden cameras, for microphones, for wires. I got up on the chair, my shoes still squelching slightly, and felt around the crannies and crevasses of the ceiling with my good hand, along the beams and in the joints. I stood on his desk, moved carefully to the map table, across the bed frame, over chairs and on top of cabinets. Fingers sweeping, searching, frantic find something - something fake, something plastic or rubber, anything.
Nothing.
No. I needed those answers. I needed the puzzle piece to fit! I would jam it in sideways if I need to. But I only found cobwebs and splinters.
I jumped down, wrapped the jacket tighter around myself, cinching it closed with my own peeling, waterlogged belt, and went out onto the deck. The Captain was standing by the wheel, murmuring in a low voice to someone. Already I knew the timbre of the grave but lilting tone, had memorized the way it resonated in my marrow, haunted my nightmares. I heard it over and over again in my head, all the time, a constant; 'Tis the year 1805. Hand to God.
The answer was not in his voice, either.
I walked over to the rail directly to my left, settled my palm against the smooth, worn lacquer. The men were working , doing 'sailorly' things, and either ignored me or were so discreet in their regard that I didn't feel their eyes on me. I suppose I looked a sight: strange shoes, canvas encased legs, and a brown jacket too big for me, swirling around my knees as I walked, the shoulder seams almost to my elbows, the cuffs rolled up into an ungainly tube of material.
I put one foot in front of the other, heel just touching toe, and then switched. Forward I went, hand still on the rail, eyes on the water, on the joints, on the crow's nest, in the rigging. Cable, that's I wanted to see; a piece of brushed steel, a black mesh cover, a wireless aerial, a battery pack with a flashing bulb.
I must have looked completely ridiculous. At any other time I would have felt a fool.
Right now I felt...
I didn't feel. Still numb. Shock? Shock.
But I yearned. It filled my belly with fire. Good for distracting me from the thirst I had no intention of quenching.
The sailors stepped back as I passed, watching my measured steps, and then returned to their work once I was out of the way. No one said a thing. The whole ship was unnaturally quiet and by the time I had reached the nose, I knew they had to be watching me. Knew and didn't care. Knew they were indulging the wild, addled stranger they'd pulled from the sea. I circled around the other side of the deck, step by step by step, eyes roving, up sideways, around.
I went around the stairs that led up to the narrow pathway between the sea and the Captain's little private penthouse, around the back. I watched the ship cut a wake into the water, a trail. Back there, I thought. Somewhere back there, but it's gone now, the breadcrumb path. This isn't what I'm looking for. I walked behind the cabin, around the other side to where I started.
Nothing.
Nothing in the water, we were too far away and it was too far gone. Nothing on the deck.
No. No, that wasn't good enough. There had to be something, some clue, some piece of my reality, some proof. And I had to fucking find it.
*
*
*
If you are enjoying this story, please remember to vote for this chapter, and leave a comment. Thank you!