Chapter Text
I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day and through
In that small café
The park across the way
The children's carousel
The chestnut trees, the wishing well
Her clothes were wet.
She was lying on her back on the grass, and her clothes were wet. She put a hand to her stomach and legs and was half-surprised to find everything still attached - she had the strangest memory. It was as though her body had been pulled through the eye of a needle, twisted and stretched and compressed all at once. There had been screaming - but where? It was quiet now, wasn’t it?
She opened her eyes. The sky above her had gone grey. She did not register that it was raining until a fat drop of water fell onto her eye and she sat up at once, wiping it away. The cold was prickling her skin uncomfortably through her cotton skirt. She twisted her skirt around. Grass stains, of course. Lovely. She was lying at the top of a hill. Yes, she remembered coming up the hill. Dimly she saw the grey stones scattered in a loose circle fifty or so feet across. Had she hit her head on one of them? Had someone hit her? She looked dubiously at the nearest stone, the tallest of the group. She’d never been knocked out before. On television, people always saw stars, they didn’t hear screaming.
But she definitely must have lost consciousness, because it had been perfectly nice when she left, and now her clothes were soaked through with rain and her fingers were almost sinking into the mud. Ugh.
She stood up and actually did see stars, but steadied herself.
She glanced up at the sky, but it was far too dreary to guess at the time of day. Her parents would not be happy, though Brianna reflected glumly that if it kept raining like this for the whole walk back, her mother and father might be inclined to feel sorry for her. After they shouted at her for leaving without telling anyone she was going.
She brushed herself off, steeling herself for a twenty-minute walk in wet clothes and squelching shoes. At least the walk back to the hotel would be downhill. The walk up had been a little bit more vigorous than she expected, though it had only taken her perhaps twenty minutes. Brookside Bed & Breakfast was nestled at the bottom of the hill, on the bank of the sedate River Greta, a few minutes from the pubs and shops that comprised the city centre of Keswick.
All of the other tourists were gone. The Italian ice cream van was gone too. She supposed he wouldn’t stay just for one customer, not in this dreary weather.
But wait. The road was gone too. She whirled around, but behind her was the open green fields of the Lake District, and to either side was more of the same. She swore she remembered walking up a road, not a hiking path. Why couldn’t she remember? And who had been screaming?
She briefly considered staying put, but of course, no one knew she was there in the first place. And she didn’t fancy spending her entire morning until they worked it out. She retraced her steps back toward the stones and did a full circle of the perimeter. But there simply wasn’t a road. Had she imagined it? No, there had definitely been asphalt, broken and potholed, but asphalt nonetheless.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Perhaps the fog had disoriented her – her view of the quiet green hills was somewhat foreshorted by the overcast weather, though she could still see the low stone walls cutting across the hills like seams as the land dipped and rose with a gentility not found back home in America. She remembered that tree with the curve in its side near the old ruined cottage. She could see the tiny dots of white fluff here and there.
Everything looked as she left it, and yet it didn’t. It gave her the same strange disorientation as entering a familiar room and finding all of the furniture had been rearranged - nothing was quite as it was meant to be. She retreated away from the viewpoint back to the break in the trees where the road ought to have been. There was definitely still a path, which comforted her for a moment, perhaps she’d simply hit her head so hard that she had forgotten that the road had been unpaved. Was that something that happened to people who hit their heads? Her mother would know.
The sky was still overcast, but she thought it was creeping closer to midday. Her parents would be awake now and tearing apart first the hotel, and then the whole village looking for her. This thought spurred her forward, and she began trotting down the hiking path formerly known as a road.
Even with a dubious head injury, it was easy enough to orient herself. She’d ascended the hill to come here, so she merely needed to follow the path to the base of the hill and then follow the river a few minutes into Keswick. She was relieved to recognise a snarled trunk of an old oak tree some distance from the path and picked up her pace. She didn’t recall there being a farm right at the side of the road like this, nor that big mansion at the top of the next hill, but she couldn’t have been expected to notice everything.
She could see a church spire that must belong to Keswick. Or was it Keswick? She squinted and tried to recall the name of any of the other villages nearby. If it was Keswick, then the half-visible blue patch was Derwentwater. If it wasn’t, well, she didn’t know really. But at least she was going downhill. The Lake District was dotted with small villages, most of them heaving with tourists this time of year. If it wasn’t Keswick, there would be another village soon enough. And at least she was going downhill.
Brianna fidgeted and was hit by another blow - she had lost her bracelet. It was a thin bangle but finely made with real gold and inlaid with three tiny topaz stones, her birthstone. Her parents had bought it for her as a fourteenth birthday present only six months ago.
It was her first real grown-up jewellery, and she had lost it on the path or at Castlerigg. She considered going back for it, but she was halfway down the hill now, and it really was very cold. She felt a pang of guilt, on top of everything else. She was an awful daughter. Sneaking out like that and now losing such a valuable present.
Her parents really would murder her now, and the best thing she could do was walk as fast as she could. Every moment away would undoubtedly compound their panic and subsequent anger at Brianna. They probably wouldn’t let her out of the house for the entire summer. School had only finished last week, and they’d come here straight away.
Brianna had visions of all of her summer plans — the weekend with Louise’s family at their cabin in Vermont, afternoons spent at the community pool, the camping trip to the Berkshires her father had promised her — disintegrating into a lonely boring summer in which she was confined to her bedroom or forced to help her parents clean out the garage like they’d been threatening to make her do for three years.
The road was beginning to flatten out, and at last Brianna saw a small wooden signpost that read “Keswick.” She was being silly. Perhaps after her parents finished shouting at her for frightening them and apologies were made all around, one of them would drive her back up to the stones to look for the bracelet. She reached a stone bridge and stopped again. This was wrong.
Wrong wrong wrong.
This was Keswick, the sign had said so. She was absolutely sure that was the very stone bridge she’d crossed this morning, but equally sure that there ought to be a big Victorian house with a friendly sign instructing visitors to check in at the back of the property. But instead, it was just an open field with a few small ruined cottages like the ones they’d seen from the car on the drive in. And if it was the same bridge, why was it so much easier to see the river on either side of her? Had the trees…shrunk? It wasn’t just the big Victorian missing, all of the other houses had gone missing too.
She had gone down the wrong road, there was no other explanation. She had circled the edge of the village or something. This was a different bridge, a different part of the river. That was why she couldn’t see the village and why everything looked so distinctly not quite right.
But there was something else bothering her too. She had left at seven and could not have reached the stones much beyond seven-thirty. She was now reasonably sure it was midday. Had she really been knocked unconscious for hours? And if so, how was it that another tourist or even the man with the Italian ice cream van hadn’t come to her aid in the intervening hours? That didn’t make sense at all.
There was a sound on the hiking path, and to her astonishment, a man on a horse, dressed like one of those reenactors at Faneuil Hall, rounded a corner. He goggled at her and she at him, but he didn’t stop. Even after he passed, he turned in his seat to watch her.
She should have been at the village by now, she recognised the way the valley split; she could see the lake now too. As she took her bearings again, she recognised the stone cottage 100 paces in front of her. She knew that cottage. It marked the place where the road into town split with the road that ran along the river, back towards Brookside Inn. But where were all of the other cottages?
This cottage didn’t look right either. The stone fence was the same, and the lichen on the fence was just the same, but the big shabby garden and ivy terrace arch and driveway and skittering glass wind chimes had been replaced by a neatly ploughed field with a few bits of farm equipment.
Brianna evaluated her options.
There were two possibilities. The first was that she had gone the wrong way, and this wasn’t the same cottage or the same path, and her parents were miles away on the other side of one of these rolling hills, gearing up for an explosion. The second was that she had hit her head very badly. Very very badly.
There was only one way to find out. Though the rain had slowed somewhat, her shoes were still sloshing with the weight of water. Brianna took a deep breath and approached the stone cottage, trying to convince herself that the owner would welcome her with a cup of tea and drive her back (though there wasn’t a car in the drive) to the real Keswick.
She knocked.
A dour elderly woman at least a foot shorter than Brianna opened the door. She was dressed, to Brianna’s dismay, in full colonial dress, with a white bonnet that looked like it had been borrowed from one of those stuffy period movies her father liked and her mother loathed.
Brianna belatedly realised that she too was being examined head-to-toe, with the woman’s eyes lingering on her skirt hem.
After an extra beat, Brianna found speech. “Sorry, I’m kinda lost, I was wondering if I could come inside and use your phone?”
“Phone?”
“Yes, I mean—” she pulled her wet blouse uncomfortably. “Could I just come in? I was with my parents on, erm, holiday, and I went for a walk and I must have gotten lost because I can’t find my way back to Keswick and—”
The woman’s expression softened. “Come in and warm yourself a minute,” she said.
Brianna stepped inside and felt another jolt. It wasn’t just the woman’s costume, the whole house was stuck in time. An old-fashioned fireplace with an old-fashioned cauldron and an old-fashioned laundry wringer. There were no light switches and no electric lamps, just a candle on the table and a fire in the hearth. The woman motioned for Brianna to sit down and then prodded the fire.
Brianna was starting to form a new hypothesis that she didn’t much like at all.
“Were you attacked, love?” said the woman gently.
“What? No I mean—I don’t think so—I think I might have hit my head.”
The woman shook her head. “A young girl like you alone on the fells this early in the morning, ‘tis not safe. They’ve torn your skirt and all.”
Brianna opened her mouth to correct the woman, the skirt was supposed to be asymmetrical like that, it was brand new, if now muddy and wet. The skirt was well past her knees, and her white blouse went up to her neck, it was hardly scandalously revealing even by old English lady standards.
“There did used to be a few men who patrolled the fells for vagrants and such, on behalf of the King, they said, but they disbanded some years ago. A pity.”
King. Not Queen. King.
Brianna’s heart was pounding. The odd shrunken tree. The man in the strange costume, and now this woman in her odd formal dress. The missing road. It was impossible, wasn’t it? She surreptitiously pinched herself, but nothing whatsoever happened. She remained sitting in a pleasantly warm stone hut across from an ancient woman in a bonnet and corset, in what was increasingly looking more like the 1800s.
The woman had said something. “What? I mean–Pardon?” Her father always wanted her to say pardon. Though this woman didn’t talk like anyone from those period movies her father insisted on watching, unless you counted the servants.
“You said your family were here in Keswick?”
“I–Are we in Keswick?”
The woman smiled kindly. “Yes, love. Though it’s another mile to the village proper.”
“Oh. I mean—I thought they might be but now—I don’t think they are at all.” This was a nightmare. She pinched herself again, squeezing the skin between her nails and not even bothering to hide it from the old lady, but nothing happened.
Maybe she should have continued toward the river or all the way down to the town square, where all of the pubs were. What if her hypothesis was wrong and her parents were just a few more minutes away, currently harassing the landlady for when they had last seen her? But no, there had been the oak tree. And the bridge. She was in Keswick. Just not the right Keswick. Not the one with her parents.
The woman was watching her with increasing sympathy. “Are you alright, dear?”
“I don’t think so, no,” said Brianna. “I think my parents might be–might be gone.” She wanted to cry or scream or run or possibly vomit. Why couldn’t she wake up? Why was she here? Why had she gone to that stupid stone circle?
She’d told her parents she intended to sleep in and to have breakfast without her, but they’d have come for her by now. One of them would have forced the locked door and found her bed empty. What would they think? Would they think to go to Castlerigg? She hadn’t left a note, but it would be just like her mother to remember she’d told Brianna not to go there, and check there first. Her mother was clever like that. Where was her mother now? What was she doing?
“Well, you warm yourself there by the fire and we’ll get you some supper and fresh clothes, there’s a girl,” the woman said, placing a thick wool blanket around Brianna’s shoulders. It was stiff and prickled her bare skin uncomfortably.
The woman busied herself in a small pantry area, pouring water into a copper pot and hanging it over the fire. The smoke from the fire made Brianna’s eyes water, and she was suddenly aware of all of the smells - the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, the smoke permeating her lungs, the fresh wood table, the mouldy damp, and most of all, the smell of wet manure from the unsealed windows. She really did think she might vomit.
“What’s your name, love?”
“Brianna Randall,” she said and was embarrassed to hear her voice crack.
“Well, I’m Mrs. Colburn. It’s good to meet you, love, despite the…circumstances.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” said Brianna meekly.
Mrs. Colburn retrieved a bundle of fabric from a chest in the corner. “Now then, you’ll put this on.”
“I can’t––” Can’t what? If she really was in the 1800s, she couldn’t go around in a cotton skirt and her mother’s white shirt, could she?
“Nonsense, you can’t be wandering around in such bad fettle. Can’t have you dying of ague.”
Brianna didn’t know what fettle or ague meant, but bad seemed an adequate description of her situation, and she took the proffered dress.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, love, men being what they are. The dress was my daughter-in-law’s, she and my son left it behind when they went, it’s no trouble.”
Brianna started to pull on the blue wool skirt, but Mrs. Colburn pulled it from her hands and gave her another kindly look, as though Brianna was mentally disturbed. Perhaps she was.
“Underskirt first, love,” she said, helping Brianna into two layers of old-fashioned petticoats before handing her a wool skirt and bodice. Brianna at least managed to fasten the bodice front hooks on her own.
“There you are,” she said.
“Sorry,” said Brianna. “I mean– I think I really might have hit my head. I’m definitely sick—I mean ill.”
“It’s no matter, love, you sit back down and have a bit of tea.”
Worn down by fear and panic, Brianna obeyed. Mrs. Colburn handed her a bit of bread and cheese, indicating that she should toast it using the fire, which she did. It was not so bad.
“Are you from the district, dear?” said the woman gently, after several silent minutes of clinking spoons against bowls.
“I’m from Boston. In America. But my parents are English. We were visiting.”
The woman leaned forward, pity giving way to naked interest. “The colonies? Have you met any red Indians?”
Brianna blushed. “Not in Boston, but I—I guess there are some out west.”
“Fearsome, I’ve heard,” said the woman in a tone of mild wonder. “Though smaller than men, aren’t they?”
“No. I mean—I think they’re about the same. They’re just…people. Definitely men.”
She nodded sagely. “We’ve heard plenty about the colonies here, it seems dangerous. And your family surviving the trials of life there only to—Well, have a bit more soup...”
Brianna couldn’t talk about her parents or Boston anymore. “Do you spend much time in the village, Mrs. Colburn?”
“What’s that? Oh yes, plenty. And on Monday, that’ll be tomorrow, it’s market day. I’ve some bits and bobs to sell. You could come with me if you like, love. We’ll ask after your parents, and I could use a second set of hands. Young Molly used to help but she’s in the service in Lancaster now.”
“I—” she hadn’t considered until now that she would need somewhere to sleep. What was she supposed to do in the 1800s? She knew no one and nothing about where she was. She had no 1800s skills like sheep-shearing and farming. Except maybe camping, and that wasn’t any good to anyone unless needed her to light a Coleman stove or assemble a canvas tent from Macy’s.
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Colburn, thank you. Can I, um, help with anything? Maybe I could wash something for you or something?” Wait, that was a bad idea. She didn’t know how to do that either. What if Mrs. Colburn expected her to wash her own clothes on that old wringer?
“It’s alright, love. You’ve had far too much adventure and need your rest, you look half-dead. Tomorrow we’ll see what can be done.”
Mrs. Colburn insisted that Brianna rest in her bed, which sat in the corner of the same room. Brianna lay uncomfortably under the same scratchy wool blanket, watching Mrs. Colburn stoke the fire and clean up the remains of their lunch.
The gesture was well-meant, but it only left Brianna more time to consider her predicament. What, actually, was she supposed to do? Supposing she really was in the past and this wasn’t a nightmare. She needed food and shelter, and she needed a way to tell her parents where she was. Only what were they going to do, burst into the past and rescue her?
The stones. It had been the stones that did this, and she had to go back to them. They were magical somehow. That was it. If the stones had sent her here, they could send her back. Was that where the screaming had come from?
She had to go back to the stone circle, and quickly. But Mrs. Colburn was never going to let her walk back up that hill, or if she did, Brianna wouldn’t be welcome back. And she needed to stay on Mrs. Colburn’s good side, since so far this old woman was the only thing standing between Brianna and freezing to death. Her parents and the stones would have to wait until tomorrow. But what if whatever it was didn’t work tomorrow? And her parents would be terribly frightened if she were gone a whole day. She had to go back to the stones today.
An idea came to her, and she rose from the bed.
Mrs. Colburn was working in the garden outside and looked mildly surprised to see Brianna up and about.
“Umm, I’m sorry Mrs. Colburn but I’ve just realised that I can’t find my bracelet. I think it fell off near those big stones at the top of the hill. It was a gift and I think I should go back upland look for it now that the rain’s cleared up. That’s alright, isn’t it? I feel fine, I swear...” All of this was said in a great hurry.
Mrs. Colburn set down her old-fashioned clippers and rose to her feet with great deliberation. She crossed her arms and looked Brianna over. “It can’t wait until tomorrow, love?”
“I’m just worried that if we don’t go today, those vagrants you mentioned might steal it or something.”
She nodded doubtfully, though her arms were still crossed. “Wait here. One of the Underwood boys could escort you. They’re good boys.”
Brianna didn’t particularly want an audience, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative. Maybe she’d go down in local history as the girl who stole a dress and disappeared in front of the townspeople of Keswick.
She fidgeted anxiously in Mrs. Colburn’s garden. The rain had cleared now, the midday grey having given way to a streaky blue. She could see a modest collection of rooflines in the distance. That was the village. All of it. Any last vestiges of hope that this was perhaps an elaborate prank had gone now.
At last, Mrs. Colburn returned with a boy and a girl. “Davy and Kitty will take you up to Castlerigg, but don’t dawdle you two, the weather will turn again before long.”
Davy and Kitty turned out to be siblings, Kitty was about her age and Davy a few years older. Mrs. Colburn had evidently told them she was from Boston, as they peppered her with questions about the colonies, what sort of animals they had, whether they had places like this in the colonies, and most of all, endless questions about Red Indians, all of them silly and most of them rather impolite. So far, people in the Keswick were obsessed with Native Americans and had some very backwards ideas about them. Brianna didn’t know any Native Americans personally, but was fairly sure that they were nice, normal people who were only trying to protect themselves from settlers and all of that. But Brianna managed to feel grateful that they were talking to her at all, and tried to respond with as much graciousness and as many details as she could. Careful questioning did produce one helpful tidbit - she was not in the 1800s at all, but 1761. 202 years.
Her stomach was rolling. As though she had needed more proof, careful observation on the trip back to the stones confirmed it. Those little abandoned houses weren’t abandoned at all, there was smoke coming from two of them. Even the sheep looked different. They were sad and starved-looking.
They came up the final turn into that damned clearing. There on the hill were the stones, as unassuming as anything. Simply stones. “D’ye want help looking?” asked Davy politely.
“Umm, sure, could you check the bushes there and I’ll check the clearing?”
She paced the stones, pretending to scan the grass. “It’s not over here!” she shouted to Davy and Kitty, who burrowed industriously into the bushes.
Most of the stones were short and stubby, shorter than she was, but she positioned herself behind one of the only ones taller than she was. But no matter how much she pressed into it, there was simply nothing. She took a running start, but this only resulted in a bruised shoulder. She kicked one of the smaller ones, but still there was nothing. They might as well have been, well, stone.
Thoroughly dejected and feeling increasingly trapped, she slumped against the big stone. Maybe she should just sleep here. Forget Mrs. Colburn. She’d starve or freeze to death waiting for the stones to let her back in again. It was better than being alone in a century and a country she absolutely didn’t belong in, answering questions about Indians for the rest of her life. Women couldn’t even have jobs, could they? No, that wasn’t right, there were maids and farm women, she thought. But neither of those jobs sounded very appealing to her.
After another moment of self-pity, Brianna dragged herself to her feet. She called over to Davy and Kitty, telling them it was hopeless and there was no need to keep looking. Kitty prattled on about unimportant things and she forced herself not to cry.
But she didn’t think it was as effective as she thought, because Kitty and Davy gave her very careful looks when they departed. Mrs. Colburn said nothing, but touched her on the shoulder in a motherly sort of way.
As the night grew dark — very dark, Brianna noticed — Mrs. Colburn fed her another modest meal of meat broth and vegetables, and set up a blanket and straw pallet for her close to the waning fire, muttering about her catching a chill.
Brianna lay in the dark, feeling hopelessly alone. She began to cry. It started as a tiny sob, but there was no big soft mattress and pillow to muffle her cries, and then she thought about how she would get salt water and snot all over Mrs. Colburn’s pallet and her borrowed dress, but that only made her cry harder, so hard that it made her head hurt. She was sure Mrs. Colburn could hear her, her own bed was no more than fifteen feet from Brianna’s pallet, but she politely pretended not to.
When the tears had subsided, she tried to make herself fall asleep, counting sheep (big fat ones like they had in the 20th century, not these poor starving things on the road) and saying her prayers and doing her times tables and everything she could think of. But she wanted her bed and her mattress and her stripped pink-and-orange wallpaper.
She tried to imagine she could hear the sound of the TV on low downstairs. Sometimes when her mother was in medical school and even after, she’d hear her studying, the glossy textbook pages turning and her mother murmuring indistinguishable Latin words under her breath. Or she’d hear the clink of her parents’ drinks as they sat in front of the television watching a late-night show. Sometimes she’d hear them hissing at each other, and she tried not to listen to that. But she would have given anything to hear it now.