But for me, it all became clear in an instant. Julian had heard my warning before, lived all this before, and it hadn’t done any good. The very act of trying to avoid the time transport would make it inevitable, and anything I might try to say to him, even now, would already be accounted for in that ordained sequence.
All of it—our meeting, our beautiful summer, our marriage, his death—was already going to happen, and I couldn’t do anything about it. The mistakes I’d made were irrevocable, had always been irrevocable.
I’d failed, before I’d even begun.
27.
We took off from Teterboro at twelve minutes past midnight, Dr. Hollander and I.
The NetJets folks hadn’t given me too much trouble. Julian had already activated the account in my name, the very day after he’d bought it for me, with typical self-assurance. A JetCard represented the bottom rung of ownership, so I’d had to pay an enormous extra fee. Well, it sounded enormous to me, but then I’d remembered such an amount was now just a rounding error, and I’d whipped out that black credit card Julian had given me all those months ago. I didn’t mind making this charge.
“You should sleep,” said Hollander, staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Troubled? Resigned?
“I can’t. I can’t sleep until I know he’s safe.”
He didn’t reply. I leaned my head back against the butter-soft leather of the seat and looked at the ceiling, at the long row of dimmed cabin lights. Corporate luxury, the sleek sterile quiet kind, its familiar feel rushing back to me in the beiges and blues of my earlier life.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I said. “You think they’re going to kill him.”
“No,” he said, too swiftly.
“Well, we should consider it, shouldn’t we?” I said dispassionately, raising my head. If I’d learned one thing in the past few years, working at an investment bank, it was how to solve a complex problem. Break it down into manageable chunks. Analyze each one. Then put it all back together and deal with it. “Look, I see maybe three potential scenarios here. First, that Arthur and Geoff just want to talk to him. Maybe talk him out of the marriage. Show him Florence’s grave, whatever. Now, that one’s easy. He can talk his way out of that. He’ll be on the next plane home.”
“Very well. I agree, more or less. And the next?”
“The next is that they don’t plan to kill him, but Arthur snaps. And then everything depends on Geoff. Which way he swings. So, possibility of a bad result.”
“And the third?”
“That they do mean to kill him.”
“I really don’t think that’s likely.”
“But it’s still possible, and it’s the worst potential outcome. So that’s what we need to focus on. I mean, what do we do? How do we stop them?”
“We can’t,” he said. “I haven’t the faintest idea how to fight someone.”
“We can bring the police with us.”
“What, and have them ask questions?” His tone was scathing.
“Well, yeah!” I exploded. “I’d much rather have the whole thing exposed than Julian dead, for God’s sake.”
“It can’t be exposed! It can’t! You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it. How they all came to be here. Why. It’s ridiculous. It’s freaky. And now it’s possibly going to get Julian killed, if I can’t find a way to stop it.”
He shrugged helplessly and set his elbows on the table between us. “I wish I could think of a way,” he said, his voice fragile, strained.
“What if he’s dead already? What if he’s already dead when we get there? What if… oh God!” I straightened in my seat, something dawning on me. “Professor, it’s all my fault, don’t you see? If he’d never met me, never married me…”
It all tumbled down around me. I’d just been dealing with the facts until now, the facts and the possible solutions, not wanting to think too deeply about causes. The what-ifs. The reasons why. Perhaps because I knew I was at the root of it. If Julian had never met me, we’d never have become lovers. Never conceived a baby. Never gotten married. Never sent poor Arthur Hamilton over the edge.
“It’s all my fault,” I said. “And if he dies, it’s because of me.” I put my head down into my hands. “I’ve got to stop it. I can’t live with that. I’ll just die.”
“No, no,” he said, in a gentle voice. “Poor dear. It’s not your fault. You fell in love. You made him happy. It’s not a crime. You can’t help Hamilton’s mental state.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. “I’m pregnant. Did you know that? We’re having a baby. It’s why we got married so suddenly.”
The color leached from his face. “I’d no idea! My God!” He stopped, blinking, turning the idea over in his mind. He spoke in an awed whisper. “Julian Ashford’s child. My God. I never thought…”
“Well, it’s true. We just found out for sure on Saturday.” I looked out the window at the unremitting black of the nighttime sky passing swiftly by, merging with the dark sea below. “He insisted on marrying me right away. He already felt guilty, not having done it already.”
“Yes, well,” Hollander said, rousing himself, “he would.”
“He’d make such a great father, if only he had the chance. Can’t you see it?” I laughed weakly. “Julian Ashford, soccer dad. Coaching Little League or whatever. He’d be good at it. So we’ve got to figure this out, Professor. This baby has to know its father.”
The pain pressed around my brain. How could I live without him? No more Julian in my life? It wasn’t possible; it couldn’t be done. It couldn’t even be imagined.
Hollander regarded me steadily. “Tell me something, Kate. How far would you be willing to go, if Julian were in fact in mortal danger?”
“I’d give my life. I know that sounds corny or whatever, but it’s true. Tell me right now to put a gun to my head and blow my brains out and Julian would somehow be safe, and I know for a fact I’d do it.”
“Even though you’d destroy his child?”
I hesitated. “But at least he’d have a chance at other children, wouldn’t he?”
“But he wouldn’t want you to, would he?”
“He wouldn’t want me to do it, period. Baby or no baby. But what are we talking about, exactly?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.
He sat in quietude, running his finger in broad circles along the lacquered surface of the table. “One of the great mysteries of this whole affair,” he said, “is, of course, the question of how these men arrived here, in the present time, in the first place.”
“Well, sure. I’d love to know how. Why. I mean, I still just struggle with believing in it to begin with.”
He turned his palms up and stared at them. “I believe I can answer that.”
I straightened in shock, not quite certain I’d heard him correctly. “You can? Seriously? Why didn’t you say something? When did you figure it out?”
“I’ve known, in fact, for some time.”
“For real?” I leaned toward him, curving my fingers around the edge of the table between us. “So what is it? Wormholes or something? Some sort of cosmic event?”
“No.” He looked up at me, his eyes apologetic. “I’m afraid it’s just me.”
The cabin lights seemed to dim, briefly, then recover. I sat in bemused stillness, listening to the faint whine threading through the drone of the engines.
“You,” I said at last.
“Yes. Just me.”
“What do you mean, just you? How can you… do that? Why?” I shook my head, disoriented, feeling as if I were watching the scene from a distance.
“The why is easy enough. Because I’m a historian. Because I study the most fascinating subjects, these extraordinary men caught up in this most tragic of wars. As for the how”—he shrugged—“I can’t say at all for certain. It just… happens.”
“Just happens. Just happens. This isn’t a joke, is it? I mean, how can o
ne human being, like, teleport another to a different time? How would you even know you could? I mean, this is insane! Insane!”
He sat back in his seat. His gaze slipped past me, dark and pensive; his chest rose and fell in an agitated rhythm under the soft brown tweed of his jacket. “It was in 1996,” he said at last. “I’d just published my third book, and was nearly finished with the Ashford biography. A few loose ends to tie up.” He reached over to the catering tray and picked up a ham sandwich, fingering it. “I took rooms in Amiens, which was more or less the center of British activity on the Western Front. From there I explored the territory, often on foot, sometimes hiring a car to take me about. Have you ever visited the battlefields?”
“No. I did see some war graveyards while I was on the Eurostar to London. Just little squares, filled with headstones.”
“The Calais-Paris line,” Hollander said, “runs more or less along the old Western Front for much of its length. At the time of the war, you could walk the trenches all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel. It’s quite well mapped. I used to spend hours with my charts and diagrams, walking along various lines of advance and retreat, seeing how the battle lay on the land, on the actual hills and slopes and valleys.”
“Wow,” I said, when he paused. “So you did that for Julian’s movements?”
“I was fascinated by the last few days of his life. He sent an odd letter home to his mother the evening before he went on that fateful patrol. He refers first to Florence, not in so many words, of course. I hope soon to introduce you to the daughter you’ve always wanted for me, he wrote. And then, I am certain now of God’s own hand in my fate, and I place my faith in His mercy. As though he knew he were about to die that night. Which was uncharacteristic of him, you understand; he always had this jaunty faith in his own ability to survive the war.”
“Did you ask him about it?” I said, just as the airplane hit a bump, making my teeth clatter together.
“Yes, and he agreed with my assessment. But that, of course, came later. At this point, I’d no idea of ever meeting Julian Ashford in the flesh. My God! The absurdity of it. No, but I’d come to know him well. His letters, his poems. I knew his mind, I thought. And so one morning, I set out from Amiens to track his movements on the night in question, to perhaps discover the exact spot where he fell.”
“Did you find it?” My lips felt dry, cracking; I ran my tongue along them, watched Hollander’s deep-lined face.
“I suppose I did. For I stood there, meditating most intently for the longest time, conjuring up his face, trying to picture what that last instant had been like. And then I heard the strangest sound. A long, loud whine. Exactly like you’d suppose an incoming shell to sound. And then the most horrific bang. I cowered, closing my eyes, covering my head. And when I opened them, a man in khaki lay at my feet.”
“Julian.” I let out my breath. “So it was you. You… you brought him here. Into the present with you. My God. My God. You saved him.”
“I was shocked, of course. I thought I was dreaming. I thought perhaps he was dead. But he was breathing, though unconscious, and of course I had to do something. I ran to the nearest farmhouse to call for an ambulance; I asked them for clothing. I told them it was a stranger, some damned fool who’d been doing a reenactment—they get them all the time, these fanatics—and I thought perhaps he’d had a seizure.”
“Did you know it was Julian?”
“I realized it had to be. I knew his face, of course. And he had his tags around his neck, as well. I slipped those off before the ambulance arrived. Once they’d taken him away, I realized the magnitude of what had just happened. I went back to Amiens, made inquiries. There’s a place in Paris where you can get handsome forgeries made. I made up a pack for him, did the best I could.”
“I’m amazed you had the presence of mind.”
“I was in shock. Only later did I have the chance to think it all through. During the crisis, one simply acts.”
“I know.” I rose unsteadily from my seat and went to the catering tray to find a drink. Diet Coke. I needed something fizzy, something to cut through the fog in my brain. Screw the caffeine for now.
“And then, of course, he came to see me in Boston, a year or so later. Having no idea, of course, that it was I who saved him. I’d stayed away until then, of course, though I tried to find out what he was doing. But if I’d approached him, I’d have to tell him I was the one who’d brought him over. And then he might ask…”
“Might ask what?”
“To be sent back.”
“You could do that?”
“I believe so.” He bit his lip. “I know so.”
“And let me guess. You saw how lonely he was, and brought back Geoff to keep him company. And then Arthur Hamilton.”
“Hamilton was quite difficult. I didn’t have the right location for him; it took years of trying. I brought a few others, men I’d admired in the pages of history, who’d been reported missing but their bodies never found. There were a great, great many of those, you know, and I thought, well, why not save them, if I could? A direct hit from a shell doesn’t leave much evidence behind.”
“But how?” I burst out. “How does it work? You just sit there thinking about it, and it happens?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. No, not exactly like that. Certain elements have to be in place, it seems. I have to be standing in precisely the spot where that person existed at the point of crisis, for example. That’s without question.”
“Point of crisis?”
“The point at which that person disappears from the historical record,” he said impatiently. “Secondly, I must have, upon my person, some personal artifact. In Julian’s case, quite without premeditation, I had his last letter home. The family had loaned it to me, in the course of my research. In the case of the others, I had gone out seeking such items, thinking that might be part of the key.”
“And what else? It can’t just be that.”
“Well, I suspect there might be some question of emotional connection. The person must have an emotional connection to the modern period.”
“But what connection could Julian possibly have to 1996?”
“Perhaps because you were alive.”
“But he didn’t even know me!”
“He would know you. If time is really as flexible as this, as circular, then it wouldn’t perhaps matter whether he’d met you or not.”
I sat back, absorbing this. “Have you discussed this with anyone? A physics professor? Because you can’t just go around ripping holes through the freaking space-time continuum, all by yourself. Like you’ve got some voodoo power, like the Force or whatever.”
He went quiet for a long moment. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know what it is. Why I should have it; how I acquired it. Whether I’m the only one. But there it is.”
There it is. So simple, so impossibly intricate: a stone thrown into a shoreless pond, the ripples radiating out into infinity. Infinite consequences; infinite possibilities. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “If I wanted to go back to 1916, and prevent Julian from ever being on that patrol, he might stay where he was? When he was, I mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s an interesting question.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, whether you can change the history of it. We know, don’t we, he did come forward to our time. So is it possible for you to go back and change that? It’s a great risk, to you and him.”
“But if he dies now,” I said, “wouldn’t it be a chance worth taking?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. What are the ethics? Are there ethics? I don’t know. The mere flutter of a hummingbird’s wings…”
“Would you do it for me, though? If we land in Manchester, and find out they’ve killed him, would you do it? Would you send me back?”
He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed patiently. “What would you do there?”
“I’d find him. Try to chan
ge his plans.”
“You realize,” he said, swallowing, “that Julian disappeared near the end of March 1916, and that shortly more than three months later his company went over the top on the first day of the Somme. The captain that day, Julian’s replacement, was killed.”
“But he’d have a chance, wouldn’t he? I could tell him, warn him. I could guide him through the rest of the war.”
“A chance. A merest chance,” he said. “And then, only if it worked. Only if you could, in fact, change history. Or whether some cosmic force would prevent you.”
“It’s worth it,” I said recklessly. “Don’t you see, I can’t do nothing. I can’t just let him die. You saved him once; surely I can do the same. I have to, after all. It’s my fault he’s in danger in the first place.”
Hollander sighed and stared out the window. In the last few minutes, a pale blue glow had spread out over the horizon, as the airplane hurtled toward the approaching dawn. I slipped my wristwatch over my fingers and spun the hands around five times. “It’s nine o’clock, British time,” I said. “They’ll be landing soon. If not already.”
He turned to me. “Very well. If it all goes badly, if they’ve…” His throat worked; he shook his head. “Then I’ll do it. But you must be ready. You’ll appear at Southfield in 1916; you’ll have to find clothes, food, shelter. Make your way to France. You’ll need money.”
I looked at my wrists. “No problem,” I said, taking off the triple gold bangle around my wrist, one of the few of Julian’s jewelry gifts I regularly wore. “And my earrings. They must add up to several ounces, at least. I can change it for local currency when I’m there. Gold’s always gold.”
“What about your necklace?” Hollander nodded at my throat.
“My necklace?” I put my hand to my collar and looked down. “Oh. When did that get there? He must have… when I went upstairs to freshen up for dinner…”
In fact, I’d gone upstairs to vomit. Julian stood there in the bedroom when I came out, looking concerned. “I’m okay,” I’d said. “Just the usual.”
He’d put his arms around me and held me for a minute or two, not saying anything. “I hope you’re not standing there feeling guilty,” I’d whispered into his chest. “I’m the luckiest woman in the world, carrying our baby.”