Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 8
They weren’t bringing much modern gear with them. Of course, nothing with electricity would be any help, since they were traveling to decades before the first electrical outlet. And cell phones would be useless even before they ran out of battery. Besides, they didn’t want anything too obtrusive that would be a dead giveaway that they were from the future if they happened to be found.
Still, Paul and Hopkins had given each of them an electric-pulse gun that could temporarily knock out (but generally not kill) a person. They worked at high distances, up to about thirty feet. They had all been prepped on how to use them, but currently this was the furthest thing from Tim’s mind as his thoughts became ever more frantic.
A backup of some of the information that the four teens had memorized was in a small notebook Billy was carrying in his pocket. He would take it to his inn, where he would have a lot of space that no one would be able to get into.
Paul had come to see the four teens off, and now, with just a few seconds remaining, broke the awkward silence that filled the anticipation-wrought air. “Good luck, guys.”
The teens looked at each other nervously. Finally, Billy broke the silence. “Okay, you all remember the place we’re meeting?”
“Yeah. At your inn at the corner of South Carolina Avenue and East Tenth Street, at Ten PM, tonight,” answered Tim.
“And I will get there if I am able to sneak out of the house. Which I cannot guarantee. But you guys can fill me in whenever and however you get the chance,” Rose reminded them.
“You four are going to want to remember that you need to talk in the 19th century vernacular once you get back there. I know you were doing okay with it when you were practicing, but you can’t let yourself forget,” Paul reminded them.
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Tim, remembering that ‘Yeah’ wasn’t part of their approved vocabulary. It was going to be weird to monitor everything he said before he said it. The other three nodded.
Tim felt antsy, and he could tell the girls did, too. Only Billy seemed not to be nervous, which was weird since he was always freaked out by time-jumping. Still, Tim was beginning to appreciate that Billy was cool under pressure. He wondered if this had something to do with being on the school basketball team.
After a moment, Billy said, “Time to go, then, I think.”
Tim grasped his Dominus and thought about Washington DC in 1854, 4:00 pm on the evening of May 8. It was the capital of a young nation, a capital much smaller than Washington DC was in his own time. The Washington Monument was unfinished, the Lincoln Monument still unimagined. The Capitol was there. The White House was too, although the West Wing hadn’t yet been built. The official name of the building was still the Executive Mansion, and some still called it simply the President’s House.
Tucked away in the corner of this evolving city was a boarding house where Russell Sage lived during his years as a United States Representative.
And suddenly, he was standing in it. It was a rather small room, but lavishly decorated and well-furnished. Tim knew from the biography Hopkins had supplied him that Sage was relatively well-off, owning an interest in a wholesale store. But the stuff in here looked a little nicer than he would have expected. It seemed Sage had treated himself well since he was elected in 1852.
In fact, Tim wasn’t really sure how much of the stuff in the room was Sage’s and how much came with the room. He figured the bed was furnished, probably the dressers… The thing was, Tim was beginning to feel as if, by hopping into Sage’s room, he had jumped into a completely furnished life. It was eerie.
The decorations and furniture were nice, though. The bedspread was a rich red with patterns of golden thread stretching across it, circling like vines across the surface. At the foot of the bed was a large wooden traveling trunk, probably the one Sage had brought with him from New York.
Set into one of the walls was a fireplace, equipped with a bellow and metal rods for tending the fire. There was a pair of dressers in the room, wooden with white marble tops. There was a writing desk, with a wooden chair pushed in underneath it. The chair had a suit jacket on it, just like the one Tim himself was wearing. Apparently, the real Sage must have taken it off at some point during the day. Well, now he had a spare.
The really strange part came when he noticed a mirror on one of the walls. It was round with a golden border, but the strange part was looking at his own reflection in it. He shook himself a bit and immediately thought of Julie shaking herself before the four of them had been disguised. Suddenly, Tim felt very lonely.
But then he took a deep breath. He would be seeing the others again in a few hours. For now, it was time to buck up and do his job. Which, at the moment, was to get himself acclimated with his new surroundings, starting with this room and working his way outwards.
Tim walked over to the writing desk. He found a letter on the table with a return address from Marie-Henrie Sage, Sage’s wife. Tim wondered why it was unopened. It certainly hadn’t come today, since it was a Sunday. But, Tim thought with a shrug, it was his mail now.
They were meant to get better acquainted with the lives of the people they were impersonating. What better way to start? He ripped the envelope open.
The letter was written in a tight, small script, and it was dated April 3rd. Tim began to read.
Dear Russell,
I hope this letter finds you well. I have no doubt that you are preparing for the upcoming and important debate on the infamous Act pertaining to Kansas and Nebraska. We at the church are praying for the Lord to give you strength to use strong words to defend the moral right and stop the spread of slavery in this great nation. I saw a newspaper article explaining that debate will start on Monday, but I know they have delayed debate before. I just hope it can be resolved finally and honorably in a quick fashion.
I am well, although I am sometimes lonely. I know you are doing important work, but I do hope that there will not be too many more years when you must split your time between your life in New York with me and your life in Washington DC at Congress. After all, there is plenty of important work to be done here in New York as well as in the capital.
I am spending a good deal of time socializing with the ladies from church. We meet at someone’s house for tea on different afternoons. It feels awfully cosmopolitan and a little too British, but it passes the time and I enjoy the company.
You will be coming home at the end of this session, temporarily, will you not? If you do choose to run again, you will want to do some campaigning, as the next election is coming up this year. Of course, you are still very popular here, but it can never hurt. You know all this, of course, but I am excited to see you.
However, do not let me bore you with the ramblings of one woman when you have the affairs of an entire nation of men to attend to. I will seal this letter with a kiss and eagerly await your next letter to me.
Love,
Your Marie.
Tim absorbed the contents of the letter and frowned. He wished there was something he could do for this less-than-content woman. From the information in the biographical information Hopkins had given him, Tim knew that Marie was destined to die of cancer in 1867. She would die childless, and although Sage would only be a congressman until 1857, he would likely be occupied in some of the important things in New York that Marie had mentioned.
But even as Tim was feeling sorry for this woman, the analytical part of his mind was working. He was thinking about the text as a historical document, looking for bias, underlying assumptions, accuracy, all the things his social studies teacher had told him to examine.
Tim thought it was interesting that Marie seemed really concerned about the morality of slavery. He wondered if she considered herself an abolitionist. He knew there was far more at play in the Civil War and in its causes like the Kansas-Nebraska Act, than just people’s moral attitudes on slavery. Certainly, many Northerners in Congress, especially Northern Democrats, would vote for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They believed that pop
ular sovereignty and not the Federal Government should determine whether slavery was legal in a state.
Of course, Tim knew, as did the Democrats floating this idea, that slavery would have a hard time passing the test of popular sovereignty in many states if the slaves themselves were allowed to vote. Slaves made up more than half of the population in certain Southern states like South Carolina.
Marie Sage’s view of slavery was anything but indicative of that of the nation as a whole. But it was still helpful for Tim to have read the letter. Marie was, in addition to being Sage’s wife, a person residing in the district he represented. Of course, as a woman she would not get the right to vote for many years.
It was good for Tim to remember these diverse views, as he was going to be sitting in the House of Representatives the next day as discussion on the bill began. He had already decided, with the help of Hopkins’ suggestion on the matter, that it would be safest not to make any speeches in the House unless absolutely necessary. However, he was still going to have to react appropriately to others’ speeches over the next few days.
He continued searching around the room. He was a bit amused by the fact that there was a writing quill at his desk. He should probably practice using it, because he’d ever only written with a pen or pencil. But he could do that later. He opened a drawer on the desk and found some money.
Tim was a coin collector, so this bit of bills and change was enough to keep him preoccupied for a little while. The coins were cool, but nothing particularly special. He had seen a lot of coins from this era, even owned a couple. At this time, the US used a series of coins called the Seated Liberty, which had a woman, representing the virtue of liberty, on the coins ranging from the half-dime (not yet called a nickel), to the silver dollar coin. In the drawer were a couple dollar coins, some dimes, half-dimes, and quarters. All these were colored silver, but there were also a handful of copper large-cents. Large-cents were only worth a penny but were larger than a quarter in diameter. It would be a copper shortage later in American history that forced the change to smaller pennies.
But the really cool thing, Tim thought, was the paper money. As Tim had previously known, there was no nationally issued paper money in the 1850s. What there were instead were notes issued from banks authorized by each of the different states. Each of these notes had the name of the bank, the state it was in, and different pictures and designs on it. One thing they had in common was that each bill declared that it was redeemable for its equivalent value in silver from the bank in question.
Russell Sage had a variety of different denominations in notes from different origins. Tim took the stack of notes in his hand and was mesmerized as he shuffled through it. There was a five dollar note from the Bank of Cape Fear, North Carolina; a three dollar note from the Bank of Milford, in Delaware; and a two dollar bill from the bank of Farmington, New Hampshire. Most of the notes, however, were from various banks in New York state, which Tim supposed made sense, since this was where Sage was from and where he would have made most of his money.
He reluctantly put the money away after reminding himself there would be plenty of time to investigate the currency later (he had hardly even looked at the backs of the notes). He checked the pockets of the jacket that was resting on the desk chair. He found the pocket watch he’d used to jump there. He had almost forgotten that it would have had to have been in this room, since it had been his ticket back here. It would come in handy, too, given that he would need to keep track of time not only to keep the appointment with the other teens tonight, but also to make it to all of his congressional obligations on time.
He kind of liked the idea of a pocket watch, too, as opposed to a wristwatch. He’d never really gotten in the habit of wearing one, and on the few occasions that he had tried, he’d felt uncomfortable. The pocket watch, though, would be kind of like his phone back in his own time. Whenever he needed to know the time, he would pull it out, flip it open, then put it back in his pocket. Of course, it wouldn’t have an alarm component, and that was something he would have to solve. He had no reason to think his circadian rhythms would be in tune now that he had just jumped through time from noon in the 23rd century to four pm in the 19th. An alarm clock would probably be the only way he wouldn’t sleep through his first congressional session, and he didn’t want that. He would have to find where Sage kept his.
At that moment, Tim noticed the window and also realized he was sweating. The window was closed, and for a moment, Tim considered going over to try and figure out how to open it. But as he made his way to the window, he saw the buildings across the street and suddenly remembered that he was in 19th-century Washington DC. He’d been to DC a few times with is family and once on a school field trip. But the nation’s capital in 1854 was a different prospect, and all of a sudden, this boarding house room felt a bit too small for his taste. It was time for a little walk.
Chapter 10
Cooper’s Kitchen
They decided to meet at ten pm instead of during daylight for discretion. They figured the boarders at Billy’s house would have retired for the evening, or Billy could convince them to do so if they were up late.
By the time Tim arrived at the boarding house, it was dark enough that he was worried about whether the girls would be safe. The streets did have gas-lights, but there weren’t as many of them as Tim would have liked. Although he got to the house okay, he was disguised as a nearly forty-year-old man and not a girl or a woman.
When Tim knocked on the door, the man who opened the door looked so much like he belonged in the house and the time period that Tim almost forgot the guy looking at him with Charles Cooper’s face was actually Billy.
Tim knew that the girls could take care of themselves, since they each had a gadget from Hopkins that should do the trick if nothing else did. But using it would blow their cover and wasn’t even guaranteed to get them out of trouble.
His fears were compounded when, by 10:05, Julie had arrived, but Rose hadn’t.
“We knew she might not be able to sneak out of the house,” Julie reminded Tim, as she entered the kitchen and immediately saw the worried look on Tim’s adopted face.
“I still don’t like it,” Tim said, irritably.
“Hold up a second,” Billy said. “I didn’t even get to introduce the house. This is my boarding house, Charles Cooper’s Boarding House. Which makes this Cooper’s kitchen.”
“That is very nice,” Julie registered. “But we need to remember how to talk properly. What if someone were to hear us?”
“I imagine that if someone were to hear us talking about what we plan to talk about, our dialect is going to be the least of their concerns,” Billy said, in a hushed tone. “But I suppose there’s no reason to let someone who just hears us in passing think we talk strange. So I understand what you mean.”
“Besides, it will be good practice. After all, Sage must pass as a member of polished society tomorrow in the House of Representatives,” Julie reminded him. She seemed to emulate the upper-class intonation that Tim would have imagined a wealthy widow like her assumed personality to have.
“Do either of you two need something to eat?” Billy asked. “I have a full kitchen here. Even though I employ someone to cook during the day, I figure I can probably figure out how to get you two something edible if you’re hungry.”
“I’m all right,” Tim decided. “It turns out I pay for dinner and breakfast at the boarding house, although I guess I will have to find something else tomorrow for lunch. I seem to have plenty of money on hand, though.”
“I have a full kitchen as well,” Julie said. “I will need to figure out where to shop in the next couple of days, but for now I am quite all right to make do myself, though I am a little bit scared about how they kept their meat. Still, I think I remember the lessons Hopkins gave me on how people back then-- or back now-- cook, so I should be okay.”
“I notice that you are wearing a different dress than before,” Billy observed.
“I can imagine,” Billy said, but mouthed, “No I can’t” at Tim.
Tim smiled, and said, “Can you remind me of your background story? I spent so much time trying to memorize my own, I was unable even to look at yours.”
“Not a problem,” said Julie. “In fact, it will do me good to practice again. Diana MacPhearson was the daughter of a Senator. She married Stephen MacPhearson, who was a wealthy entrepreneur here in DC. He had a hand in investing in a number of buildings around here, and had a knack for striking a deal just when it was most profitable to him. Washington’s nowhere as big as it will get, but it’s been growing. From 1840 to 1850, the population increased from about 34,000 to 51,000, and Diana’s-- or, well… let’s say my-- late husband had put a lot of investment into growing the city’s infrastructure and building the city up. Anyway, he died last year, at forty-- he was ten years older than me -- and left me his fortune. Now, I live in a nice house and have connections with many of the important men around town.”
“Lucky for us, then,” Billy registered.
“Right. But you don’t have enough information about these people to take advantage of those connections, do you?” Tim asked.
“Well… not yet. But I did manage to find Diana’s diary. If I have any luck at all, I ought to be able to glean something from there,” explained Julie.
“Well, that is convenient. And a bit creepy,” decided Tim.
Julie shrugged. “I am wearing her face, I might as well know what she thinks.”
“So, you know what you can do tomorrow to help out the cause,” Billy said. “Would you mind also checking in with Rose somehow? I assume you are at least on speaking terms with Justice Curtis? At worst, you can ask how his daughter is doing, just to make sure nothing strange happened to her. At best, maybe you can see her in person for a little bit and let her know what we’ve talked about tonight.”