Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 9

  “Those sound like things I can handle,” Julie confirmed confidently.

  “Fair enough, since you have the easiest job,” said Billy with a grin and an eye-roll.

  Julie pretended to be insulted, giving an exaggerated “I can’t believe you just said that,” look. In that moment, she looked a lot like the old Julie, in spite of the fact that the face was all wrong.

  “You will want to refrain from making that facial expression around your high-society friends, Diana,” Tim said, with a laugh.

  “Duly noted,” Julie said, allowing her look to soften to a smile.

  “Tim-- Russell-- of course, you have session tomorrow. I hope you have memorized the positions of the important representatives? Do you need to borrow the cheat-sheet? I can’t imagine that you can have memorized the positions of all two-hundred some people who voted on it?” Billy asked.

  “Well, no… But I know how groups of people voted. All Northern Whigs voted against. That’s 45 votes right there. All Southern Democrats but two voted in favor, 57-2. So if I memorize two names, I’ve got almost half the votes. Southern Whigs are a bit trickier, voted in favor by 12-7. Northern Democrats were the difficult part, though. Voted 44-42 in favor. Plus I had to memorize the people who didn’t vote, in case someone tries to convince them to. But I had several days to study. I have it down. It was just like studying for a history test,” said Tim.

  “Ah…” Billy said. “Whatever you say, there, Sage. Anyway, I have an assignment, too. Would you believe--” Billy cut himself off for a moment here, and looked at the door, apparently to make sure that it was closed and nobody was eavesdropping on them. Even though the door was still closed, he lowered his voice to a whisper as he continued. “As owner of this place, I have keys to all the rooms, and three of the guests here are Representatives. I will take the opportunity tomorrow to look through their stuff and see if I can see anything that looks out of place.”

  “Out of place like it might be a mind-control tool from the future?” hissed Julie, keeping the whispered tone that Billy had adopted.

  “Well, yes,” Billy said with a shrug. “I wish Hopkins could have given us a better idea what we were looking for, but as it is, I think this is the best I can do.”

  “Agreed,” said Tim.

  With their plans completed, they chatted for a few minutes, but there was nothing much else needing said, and it was getting late on what had been a long day for all of them. Soon Julie announced that it was about time for her to go back to the MacPhearson estate.

  “I’ll walk you home,” Tim offered, quickly. His motivation was equal parts that he wanted to make sure she got home safe and that he really did like spending time alone with her, even on days when she looked like a 19th century widow. The three quickly agreed that they would meet again the same time and place the next day, then Tim opened the door for Julie.

  Soon, the two of them were walking back toward the MacPhearson home on 2nd Street. It was about half a mile away from Cooper’s Boarding House, and in the opposite direction as his place, but Tim didn’t mind.

  They ran into almost nobody on the road. Without the noise of cars or the light of electronic devices, the city felt more like a huge campground than a national capital.

  They walked from the light of one gas-lamp to another. Julie and Tim discovered that if you looked up at the sky when you were in the dimness between lamps, you could see an inordinate number of stars. Light pollution had hardly begun to come to Washington.

  “It’s almost romantic, isn’t it?” Julie asked, after they had walked about a block together.

  Tim smiled and said, “Almost.” He tried to play it cool, but inside, he was already interpreting what she said in about thirty different ways. Did this mean she was thinking about him romantically? Even after whatever she had been about to say the last time he’d tried to talk to her about whether or not they were a couple?

  “We had better be careful, though,” Julie said. “If people see a man taking home the Widow MacPhearson past ten at night, they might think your intentions are less than pure.”

  “But Sage is married!” Tim protested.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Julie decided. “And nobody is looking at us anyway, I’m sure, at least not close enough to tell who we are.” With that proclamation, she softly slipped her hand into his.

  Tim almost pulled his hand away. Could they be certain they weren’t being observed? But a quick look around showed that there were lights in almost none of the windows they passed by, and most windows were covered by curtains. Tim supposed there was no harm letting Julie hold his hand, even if he was still confused about what it meant.

  “Are you nervous?” Julie asked. “About tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Tim answered without really thinking much. Of course he was nervous. “But excited, too. You know?”

  “Sure,” Julie said. “You are going straight into the fire. The people we are looking for, the ones whose minds the Emperors are controlling, are almost definitely going to be in the room with you tomorrow.”

  “Right, but I am literally going to be an American congressman in 1854. Or, at least, everyone will think I am. Even so, how many people can say that?” Tim asked.

  “Well… I don’t think I know of a lot of people who would want to be able to say that,” Julie countered. Tim looked at her in the torchlight as she laughed.

  Tim remembered something his mother had told him once. She’d said that the more you liked a person, whether you originally liked how they looked or not, you would find them more and more attractive. Tim hadn’t believed her at the time, but he figured he wouldn’t have thought this 19th century woman in the funny dress was attractive at all had he not known he was actually looking at Julie.

  Chapter 11

  The Capitol

  The next day, Tim took a deep breath of anticipation before he entered the Capitol. He’d already gotten a good view of the construction on the building. The Capitol hadn’t grown to its 21st century size, though when this current project was completed, seventeen years after its approval in 1850, it would be much closer. The Capitol didn’t even have its iconic dome yet. There was a dome, but it was green-stained copper, and much shorter than the dome Tim had seen on his 21st century visit to the nation’s capital.

  He went into the building and turned into the House Chamber.

  As he entered the room, Tim got a good idea why they needed extra construction. In spite of the air of spaciousness provided by the high-vaulted ceilings, the chairs and desks were crammed into the chamber. There were hundreds of desks, arranged in semicircles, and precious little other space in the room. Tim knew that the room the House was currently meeting in was what would one day be the National Statuary room, after the new chamber opened in 1857.

  Luckily, one of the bits of information that Hopkins had been able to provide Tim about Sage was where he was supposed to sit in meetings of Congress. He was looking for the seventh seat from the Speaker’s left in the third row. He started counting to try to find the seat before he started going that way. Then, he realized that that was something the real Russell Sage wouldn’t have to do. He looked around quickly to see if anyone had noticed him and was mostly convinced that no one had. Unfortunately, the nerves that hadn’t been much of a problem for Tim last night when he was talking to Julie were with him in full force now.

  Tim decided it might be more natural to get to his row first, then count the seats as he was moving past them. This method turned out not to be without its own complications, as getting to his seat in the crowded room required almost a dozen excuse-me’s, three to one old man who appeared to be nearly deaf. It took the intervention of another, comparatively younger, gentleman to get the older man to move the six inches required to let Tim pass.

  When he finally got to his seat, Tim was already feeling exhausted. He sunk down and placed both elbows on his desk, cradling his head in his hands.

  “Good morning, there, Russell,” sa
id a man who took the seat beside him.

  Tim took one hand away from his head so that he could gaze at the man who had called his new name. Hopkins had shown Tim pictures of about a dozen of the most important Representatives, and Tim had known a couple of the names already. This man was not one Tim recognized. However, he had studied the names Hopkins gave him, so he probably had the name tucked away somewhere. Whoever the man was, he was nearly bald with a crown of white hair.

  “Yes, good morning,” said Tim, treading carefully and hoping he would sound standoffish enough that whoever this was wouldn’t talk to him anymore. The goal was for him to observe, so he didn’t want to talk to any more people than he had to.

  The stranger looked at Tim sympathetically. “Not quite yourself today, are you, Sage?”

  Tim saw no point in denying this, so he said, “I suppose not.”

  The man gave Tim a sympathetic smile and said, “A bit hungover, I daresay?”

  Tim was about to deny this immediately, but he held himself back. It would perhaps account for why he was not quite normal today. So Tim gave a nod and an affirmatory grumble, hoping he was convincing. Tim had never drank alcohol before, so he had no firsthand knowledge of what it would be like to be hungover, but he had seen it an awful lot on television. He hoped he had enough to work with.

  “But that means you were drinking last night, on a Sunday. Drinking on the Lord’s Day. By God, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were a Democrat!” chuckled the stranger.

  Tim gave the sort of weak smile that he assumed someone in his pretended position would. The friendly stranger seemed to buy the act, as he continued chuckling happily.

  “Well, I’m surprised at you, lad. Never seen you come to a session in such a state, but I guess you must have had your reasons,” he said. Then he leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “And perhaps I might venture a guess as to what they were. Was Sally in your company last night?”

  Tim almost asked who on Earth Sally was, when a general hushed murmur came over the hall. Everyone was going to their seats, and apparently the jovial stranger did not sit next to Sage. He excused himself with a rushed “goodbye” and situated himself in a seat on the same side as Tim, but in the first row.

  Tim, since he was already seated, had the luxury of looking around as everyone was rushing to their seats. It was time for the session to begin, and people soon began to process down the aisle of the room, starting with a man holding a long staff with an eagle on the top. Tim searched through the inner-recesses of his mind, where he kept trivia he’d learned about American History from his Civics class. He remembered this ceremonial staff was called the mace.

  Behind the mace came the Speaker of the House, and he was one of the faces that Tim had been able to memorize from the pictures of important Representatives that Hopkins had shown him.

  His name was Linn Boyd. He was a Democrat from Kentucky. The notes that Hopkins had given him had revealed that Boyd, as the Speaker, did not vote on the law the first time it was passed.

  The Speaker of the House is only required to vote on ties and usually only votes more often when it would be politically helpful. Tim could understand why, when the law split both parties and passed by 13 votes, it didn’t qualify.

  Still, he was a Democrat from Kentucky, so it was not a great leap to assume that he would have been in favor of the law, since almost all Southern Democrats wanted to expand slavery, partially just to get more congressmen sympathetic to their point of view elected to these very chambers. Therefore, if he saw anything that would suggest that he was wavering from these principles, Boyd would quickly shoot to the top of Tim’s list of people who might be under the Emperors’ sway.

  It turned out that the mace-led procession to the Speaker’s chair was one of many pieces of pomp and circumstance before the day’s debate could start. One of the bits of tradition was pledging the flag, which was good, because Tim actually got to stand up and do something at that point. Otherwise, all the traditions were starting to lose Tim’s interest.

  Although he wasn’t hungover like the chuckling stranger had assumed, he’d had a bit of trouble sleeping the night before, both because of nerves and because of the hours he had lost in the jump back to 1854. Besides, it seemed the summer had come early to DC this year, the room wasn’t particularly well-ventilated, and the invention of air-conditioning was still a long way off. With one thing and another, he was having a bit of a hard time even staying awake through all the parts of the day’s introduction.

  Finally, someone introduced the proposal that debate should begin in the full House on House Resolution 236, To Organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

  There was an anxious mumble at this proposition throughout the chamber, and although the motion quickly passed, Tim could tell not everyone was happy about having this discussion.

  Tim, meanwhile, listened as best he could to the murmurings and mutterings of those seated around him, knowing that this, just as much as the speeches, would tell him what he wanted to know about what people were thinking. It would also be a good way to find out the names of people who he didn’t recognize from the pictures. He had discovered pretty quickly that, just like in Tim’s own day, the representatives were more likely to address each other formally in speeches as, “The Gentleman from Kentucky,” and so on, than they were to actually use their colleagues’ names.

  One of the best ways to catch someone’s name, Tim found, was to hear what the page called him when he came to assist him. Every once in a while, a congressman would clap, and the page would come over to find what sort of assistance he needed (it was mostly stuff like asking for quills, paper, or a copy of a document). But the page would, luckily for Tim, call the Representative by his last name.

  Whigs, like Republicans in modern times, sat to the speaker’s left, with Democrats to the right, and throughout the morning Tim heard more and more evidence confirming that he was in the heart of Whig territory, although that didn’t mean that everyone around him was against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

  For instance, the man to Tim’s right, who a page addressed at one point as Mr. Lindley, was a Whig from Missouri, who was in favor of the bill. By the end of the day, Tim knew the names of the eight people sitting nearest to him, and a handful of other people as well. He knew that the name of the white-haired man who thought he had been hungover this morning was James Abercrombie, a Whig from Alabama.

  However, every time someone spoke whose eventual vote Tim knew, they ended up saying exactly the things that they would be expected to say in his own timeline. No one was showing evidence that the Emperors were manipulating them yet. However the final vote was almost two weeks away, May 22 in the original timeline. Whether or not anyone was being manipulated by forces from the future to vote differently, certainly no one was tipping their hand.

  Still, Tim walked away from the chamber feeling like he at least knew enough now that he could walk in tomorrow slightly more confident, greet those around him, and not have to pretend that he was hungover for a second day in a row. This was just as well. People might start to talk.

  He also walked away feeling a little giddy.

  Tim had never understood the way girls his age reacted to going to a concert. The next day in school the girls were always inexplicably blushing in pride and embarrassment saying things like, “Oh my gosh, can you believe we actually saw him?” or “Did you see he reached down from the stage and actually touched my hand?” What Tim had never understood was why actually seeing or touching the person should make so much of a difference. If you liked their music, what did it matter if you were there listening to it in person, or on the cd-player in your car? Even if the issue was that you liked how they looked, why not just stare at a poster for a few hours? It would certainly be cheaper.

  But now, Tim felt that in a weird way, he really understood those girls a lot better now. One of the Representatives in the row in front of him that day was Thomas A Hendricks, who was now
a Representative from Indiana, would be the Vice President for the first 8 months of President Cleveland’s term in 1885. William M. Tweed was there from New York. He wasn’t destined to make much of a splash during this, his single term in the House of Representatives. However, Tim knew that after he got back to New York, he was going to gain such personal power in New York City and New York State that he would be known as “Boss Tweed” in history textbooks throughout the ages that would use him as an example of political machines gone awry. He would later be arrested on charges of corruption and die in prison. Alexander Stephens, a Whig from Georgia, would be the one and only ever Vice President of the Confederate States of America.

  Now Tim understood that maybe none of these were things to be proud of. Corruption and under-the-table politicking had earned Tweed a reputation of infamy lasting a century and a half. As for the other two, John Nance, who was Vice President for Franklin D Roosevelt from 1933-1941, once famously explained that the Vice Presidency “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.” And if that was true of the Vice Presidency of the United States, Tim supposed that being VP of the Confederacy was worth, at best, half of that bucket. Still, Tim had read about these people in history textbooks and had once read a biography of Boss Tweed. He supposed that if he got the chance over the next few days to shake the hand of any one of these men, he would take it, and he would probably be oddly proud to have touched their hand. He might even blush a bit.

  Chapter 12

  A Letter From Rose

  That night, after a stroll in the cool night air through downtown Washington DC, Tim made it once again to the kitchen of Cooper’s boarding house. This time Julie made it there first and was sitting at the table when Billy let him in.