CHAPTER ONE

When Poppy came to on the grounds of Stoundmeal, a giant dog she thought might be a mastiff was growling at her. If she hadn't still been shivering violently from the absolute cold and airlessness of the journey, she would have started shaking now. It was dark, a kind of dark she had seldom experienced outside. She wanted to look at her watch but was afraid to move.

When the dog paused in its growl to take a sniff of the air, she remembered the brisket she still had in her backpack, bought on the way home from the train station. She said hopefully "Good doggie. Want some dinner?"

Even 90 years in the past, dogs probably knew that word, dinner. If she survived this rash leap, she would write a testimonial to Ruby's Bar-B-Q. Well, no, she couldn't do that, not without some Blackwateresque type hunting her down.

She eased her shoulder out of the strap tenatively, repeating "Good dog, GOOD doggie" in a fervent tone. The growling increased but no barking. She thought Lavinia must surely have something like a night watchman. That's if she was in the right place at all. Or even still on earth.

"What kind of moron takes a time travel trip without knowing how it works or where she'll wind up?" she asked herself savagely. Her fingers now penetrated the foil of her take-out package (Did they have foil in 1930? another part of her brain asked) and suddenly the growling stopped. Even in the dim light she saw massive ears go up.

She saved half the order to insure continued cooperation and tossed several slices toward the dog. The teeth briefly revealed by moonlight made her feel faint again. She sat up and pushed the button to light her watch dial. 1:42 a.m., 6 July 2015. She laughed abruptly: Well of course it was, the time cochlea wouldn’t have reset her watch for her.

She stood slowly and the dog watched her intently. "Still hungry?" she asked. She pitched another slice in its direction, which it caught midway, but with a wagging tail. I conquered the hellhound of the past with Central Texas smoked meats her mind composed, before she reminded herself again this was a story she’d never get to tell.

Okay, time to find out where and when she was. And if Lavinia really did spend every Fourth of July holiday at her retreat near Baltimore, like the history books said.

But as soon as she tried to stand, her trepidation about dog was forgotten. Her spine felt disconnected from her braincase, and a blinding headache made her need to lean against a birch to keep from collapsing again. Chills traveled through her, and she fought hard to keep from vomiting. Something’s desperately wrong with me she thought.

She peered into the night with eyes narrowed against throbbing pain. Ten yards away, up a slight slope that at the moment looked Everestian, was a dark cottage. Beyond it, on the hill, was a magnificent edifice that she hoped was Lavinia’s resort hotel, Stoundmeal. But the only achievable goal for her seemed to be the cottage.

She had trouble lifting her feet and keeping her balance. The ground was crunchy underfoot, sounding like light frost, which meant she had not arrived in July. It helped explain some of the numbing cold she was feeling, however – some of it.

The black shadow of a dog did no more growling, although he kept pace with her. It took her minutes to reach the door and fall against it. There was a dim light inside, at the back of some room, and she turned the knob, heaving a breath of relief when the door opened. She closed it behind her in the dog’s face, calling out “Hello?” in a thready voice.

She was in the entry of a brick-floored kitchen, large cupboards and wooden counters surrounding a massive table. On the far side she could see a cast-iron stove and the small lamp which was the only illumination. She staggered to a chair and dropped into it.

The table itself felt warm and the kitchen seemed to be heated, but chills continued to rattle her aching bones. She forced herself back upright and went to the stove. There were no knobs to turn it on. Finally in one chamber she discovered a pile of kindling and crumpled paper underneath a rack of old-fashioned coal. She located matches and struck one to the paper, leaving the door open and holding her hands to the flame.

Her fingers did not become limber, however. Her cold was deeply internal. With foggy vision and cries of pain, she filled the stovetop kettle with water from a single tap and placed it back over where the fight had caught. She set a mug at the end of the table nearest the stove, where she noticed there was a sugar bowl and cream pitcher. The pitcher was empty, but there were oblong cubes of sugar, and she popped two in her mouth. She found a ceramic canister marked Tea and set it on the table before collapsing back into a chair and laying her head on the table.

The whistling kettle roused her some time later. She scooped a handful of tea into the mug and poured boiling water directly on it. The fragrance seemed unusually sharp. She wrapped her hands around the mug, crunching another sugar cube, and decided she didn’t have enough energy left to even shrug out of her pack. All that kept her awake was wanting to feel hot liquid travel down into her core.

She had downed two sips when the door opened and a slender woman in dark silk stepped in, accompanied by the dog. The woman was not as tall as Poppy, but her posture and bearing carried power in it. Her short brown hair was only partly tamed by a wave, and her dark brows climbed high above hazel eyes that glinted as she flicked on an electric light overhead.

Lavinia thought Poppy, but then when she heard the word and saw the woman react, she realized she’d said it out loud.

“Who are you? Why have you broken in?” said Lavinia in a voice whose accent Poppy could not place – except not any American she’d ever heard.

“Poppy Morgen. I didn’t break in, the door was open. I – I’ve made a long dangerous journey and I can’t get warm.” Poppy drank another long gulp of tea.

“How do you know my name?” Lavinia had moved unobtrusively to one side and her right hand now closed around a metal poker with a wicked-looking hook.

Poppy’s mind was misfiring in every direction. She said “I know your granddaughter Bunker, she’s my best friend. I’ve seen photos of you.”

Now Lavinia looked wary as well as angry. Watch she said in an aside to the dog, who had not stopped doing precisely that.

“I don’t have a granddaughter” said Lavinia. “And Bunker is my middle name.”

“Yeah, that’s why Laetitia named her that. Listen, sister, you are so not going to believe me, but I am from the future. I came back 85 years because, well, mostly because I had the Google coordinates for Stoundmeal handy, I knew it was here, and I was in a hurry. I was being chased.” Poppy fumbled for the cochlea at her neck, trying to see the screen and “Return” button. But once her finger was above it, she stopped: If she used it again, she doubted she would survive. She wasn’t sure she was going to live another hour as it was.

“You’re a claiming to be a time traveler? As in Mr. Wells’ phantasmagoria?” said Lavinia, disbelief in her voice. Her knuckles were tight around the poker.

“That book’s been published, then” said Poppy. “I have this item here around my neck, not a machine, but same basic idea. Except for all I know I’m the first moron to use it.” She should have known her father hadn’t tested it, he was simply planning to escape back to whiteboy heaven of the 50s or die trying. A rigor hit her and she rocked forward, moaning in pain.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Lavinia. “Are you contagious?”

But Poppy couldn’t answer for a couple of minutes. By the time the spasm eased, she was drenched in sweat and still no warmer. Lavinia was now sitting, watching her alertly.

“I told you. I took a trip through time, and it’s fucking wrecked my body.” She saw Lavinia recoil at the profanity. “I landed out there on your lawn and somehow got in here. Do not be callin' the squalle, whatever you do, I’ll never get back home if your proto-Nazi sciboyz get their hands on this.” She cradled the cochlea in her palm. She began easing one pack strap off her shoulder, saying “I’ve got some ibuprofen somewhere…”

Lavinia stood up swiftly and raised the poker a few inches. Poppy dropped her pack to the floor and said “Don’t freak out on me, I am in no shape to be a danger to you.”

“How did you get past Iago?” demanded Lavinia.

“Your watchdog is named Iago?” Poppy giggled with another shiver passing through her. “But he that filches my good name…”

Lavinia looked briefly surprised. Poppy said “I’m a reader.”

“On stage? Or of gas meters?” retorted Lavinia. Her eyes had a green glint in them at some moments.

Poppy giggled again. I’m losing it she thought. At that moment she went into convulsions and slumped to the floor with a nasty smack of her forehead against the brick.

When she woke up again, she was in a deeply soft bed whose comfort still did nothing to help the ache she felt at each tendon attachment and vertebra. She moaned repeatedly, and heard a voice say “Binnie? She’s waking up.”

Even the dim light nearby made her eyes sting. She blinked several times before being able to focus up at a woman whose height and build reminded Poppy irresistibly of Xena, except this woman was flaxen where Xena was dark. She was stone-faced, and so was Lavinia as she swam into view beside her.

“I want to know who you really are” said Lavinia, her jaw square. Poppy reached for the cochlea and discovered it was gone from around her neck. With cries of keen pain and frustration, she pushed herself upright. Lavinia took a step back, but not Blondie.

“Where is it?” demanded Poppy. The blonde woman jerked her head to the left and Poppy looked at the bedside table: The cochlea was there in a pool of yellow lamplight. She closed trembling fingers around it and looped it back over her head, gasping at what the motion did to her shoulders. She saw she had on an old-fashioned nightshirt with long sleeves that tied at the wrist.

Before she persuaded her body to suffer the act of lying back again, she spotted her pack across the room, obviously empty. On a wingchair and endtable nearby were arranged all her belongings, sorted as to unclear categories. She pointed and said “I’d like my Blackberri, please.”

“What?” said Lavinia, giving Blondie a look that plainly said delusional.

“That electronic – that maroon square thing with buttons on it.”

Lavinia looked confused, yet did not move.

“It’s called a Blackberri, it’s like a kind of diary. It’s very important to me” said Poppy. “And thanks a lot for asking before you rifled my belongings.”

Blondie said “You break into a private residence with a burglar’s bag, of course we had to see what you’d made away with.”

“Well now you know I have nothing of yours except some tea in my belly. Seems like any stealing going on is the two of you keeping me from my stuff” said Poppy.

Lavinia said quietly “Let me look at it again, Ada” and Blondie went to pick up the Blackberri. Poppy felt her momentary surge of adrenaline melt away, and she swayed as she said “Oh, so you are Ada? Bunker said your name was in a couple of her mother’s letters.”

She saw from the corner of her eye that Lavinia still had the poker. And Iago was at the door. Ada handed the Blackberri to Lavinia, who turned it over in her hands and then pried at the back, one-handed.

“You’ll break it, dimwit, hand it over” said Poppy, noticing how much her outstretched hand was shaking. After a long calculating look, Lavinia placed the Blackberri in Poppy’s palm. Ada had picked up something that Poppy thought might be a cricket bat. Or laundry flail.

Poppy said “It runs on a very small and powerful internal battery. I turn it on here” – as the screen lit, Lavinia stepped back again and the poker came up. “And now I will show you the proof you need. This is Bunker and me about five years ago. She was born in 1968, your granddaughter. Her mother was Laetitia Lowell, I can find her – “

But Lavinia had sucked in air past her teeth and leaned over to look at the photo of Bunker wearing a leather jacket and 501’s. She reached for the device, then stopped herself. “Is it all right?”

“Yeah, won’t bite” said Poppy, handing it back. Ada returned to Lavinia’s side and they stared at the photo.

“It’s a con” said Ada. “They found some man with a resemblance – “

“Bunker is not a man and she’d be pissed at you of all people pulling that essentialist crap on her” said Poppy. “She loves women, yes, but that does not make her male.” One small part of her brain kept saying Shut up, shut up, but she had less inhibition than ever in a markedly impulsive lifetime.

“Okay, see that tab on the screen – the shape like an arrow pointing to the right? Push that with your fingertip” said Poppy. Lavinia searched her eyes again before obeying. This time Ada gave a sound of astonishment, as the display changed to a portrait of Lavinia holding Laetitia a month after she had been born and adopted.

“How did it do that?” Lavinia said. “And where did you steal this photograph?”

“I didn’t steal it, Bunks downloaded it for me. I mean, she gave it to me. And it’s electronic, a common technology of the future. All right, hang onto your panties and push the screen again, check out the next photo.”

Lavinia gaped and whispered “No.” It was Laetitia as a young mother holding Bunker, with Bunks’ dad. Ada said “I still say it’s flim-flam.” But Lavinia pointed and said “She’s wearing my pendant. There’s none other like it.” They both turned and looked at Poppy with similar expressions of fear.

“That was in 1969. So, 39 years from now. And then in 2015, I make a damfool decision to hop on back to Stoundmeal.”

Ada corrected her pronunciation of Stoundmeal automatically. Lavinia said “Your math is faulty. I don’t believe – what do you want from us?”

“I just wanted to try it out and I needed a place to go pronto, because these guys in suits were on my ass, and I had the photos plus a map of Stoundmeal then and now open in a file because I had told Bunks I’d help clean up the images, and the cochlea for reasons which make no sense to me was demanding coordinates that matched Google Earth numbers…” She could tell they thought she had lapsed into gibberish again. She edited on the fly. “I thought I could get here and I wanted to see you all, especially Bunker’s mom, even if she’s still a baby.”

“Tish isn’t a baby, she’s four years old” said Lavinia. “And Rogue is six.”

“Oh, shit” said Poppy. “Shit, shit, shit. That means I’m three years off, not just a few months. Which means when I go back – well, it could mean anything, not much of it good.” Her headache swept back in a full crescendo, and she put her hand over her eyes with a moan.

“Lie down again” said Ada. “I can give you a powder or some laudanum.”

“No, no powders” said Poppy. “In my pack, there’s a Goretex bag with a bottle of pills. Get me two of those and some water.”

“Is it safe?” Ada said quietly to Lavinia as she poked through Poppy's belongings.

“It’s her body, I think we have to trust her” said Lavinia. She had not taken her eyes off the Blackberri. As Ada poured a glass of water fron a pitcher, Lavinia asked Poppy “Do you have any photographs of Rogue? I mean, as a man? Or me when I’m older?”

For once, Poppy’s censor was operational. “I’m afraid not” she said, demonstrating to Ada how to open a childproof cap.

“Why are you carrying a bar of gold with you?” asked Lavinia. “And what kind of fabric is this?” She held up Poppy’s Patagonia vest. But Ada said “Binnie, she needs to sleep again, her skin is burning hot.”

“Don’t call a doctor or the authorities” begged Poppy. “You’ll unleash a world of tsurris. If I die, just bury me and destroy the cochlea.” She felt a cool hand on her forehead and slid back into unconsciousness.