Two Hundred Years
The air trembled with a low hum, steady as a pulse. Light flared between the metal nodes and threw restless shadows against the laboratory walls, and a faint warmth rose from the brass and iron casing, carrying the sharp scent of singed oil. At the heart of the machine a black circle turned slowly, depthless and still, as if all light were drawn into its core. Eliza stood before it with her hands damp against her skirts. Years of her uncle’s work had led to this quiet moment, and now it belonged to her.
Behind her, Professor Eric Greenwood steadied the dials. His fingers were not quite steady against the brass. The hum deepened, filling the room like the roll of distant thunder, and though his jaw held firm, a faint quiver at the corner of his mouth betrayed him. She pretended not to see it. If she looked at it too long, she would lose her nerve, and it had taken her the better part of a year to win this.
She had begged. There was no other word for it, however she had dressed it up in arguments about proof and legacy and the deadline on his grant. The machine was his life’s work, and it was finished, and he had been prepared to let it sit in this basement humming to itself forever rather than risk a living person in it. It was Eliza who had worn him down, one Sunday dinner at a time: it has to be someone, it should be someone who understands the work, it should be someone you trust. She had never said the truest reason aloud, which was that she had grown up inside Jane Austen’s novels the way other children grew up inside tree forts, and that somewhere beyond that black circle the world of assembly rooms and shaded gardens was not a costume drama but a Tuesday.
“Say the signals back to me,” Eric said. “Once more.”
“One press means I’m safe and settled.” She touched the narrow leather band through her skirts, buckled about her thigh just above the knee, where the button lay hidden but close to her hand. “Two presses ask you to open the portal, and I only do that from an empty place, where nobody can see it or stumble through it. Three presses mean danger, and you’ll open it under my feet wherever I stand and hang the consequences.”
“And?”
“And no one comes back with me. Ever. That rule doesn’t bend.”
“It doesn’t bend.” He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses, and for a moment his usual reserve softened into something she saw perhaps twice a year. “The coordinates are set for a park in London. It should be quiet at that hour. Your room is taken at Mrs. Finch’s, off Cheapside, paid a fortnight in advance; the letter of introduction is in your bag, and the coins are honest ones. Don’t let a shopkeeper hold the sovereign up to the light and don’t volunteer your history. Observe. Take notes. Come home.”
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“I have spent eleven years thinking of everything.” He hesitated, then set a hand on her shoulder. His tall frame carried a slight stoop, the mark of decades bent over books and instruments, and threads of grey ran through his brown hair. “Understand the clocks, Eliza, because everything else follows from them. The machine reaches exactly two hundred years back. Not a poetic two hundred years. Two hundred years to the second. While you are there, my clock runs beside yours. If you stay a week, I wait a week.” His hand tightened slightly. “And when you return here, and go back again, the machine can step back into its own wake — ten days of it, no more. Return within ten days and I can set you down at the very moment you left that world, as though you had never gone. Wait longer than that, and the wake has closed behind you; I can only put you down at whatever hour it has become there by then, wherever that has drifted to. There is no cheating that number. I have tried, on the bench, with nothing at stake, and the field does not forgive being asked twice.”
“And if I need longer than ten days? On this side?”
“Then you come home, and you stay home, and you go back within the ten days that remain to you, or you wait for a clean crossing and lose whatever margin you might have banked. That is the whole of the arithmetic, and I will not pretend to you that I have found a way around it, because I have spent longer looking than I care to admit.”
“You’ve told me that eleven times.”
“Then we are one for each year.” He stepped back to the console. “Good luck, Eliza.”
She wanted to say something equal to the moment and found that her mind had gone as blank as the black circle in front of her. So she smiled at him instead, the smile she had used since she was nine years old to tell him she was fine when she wasn’t, and stepped forward.
The air rippled. The sound of the machine grew until it was less a sound than a pressure, and as she crossed the threshold the world twisted into a kaleidoscope of colour and noise. She felt squeezed, as if the air were being wrung out of her lungs; her chest tightened, her stomach churned, and she had just decided she was going to faint when it stopped.
Pitch-black silence. For a heartbeat she hung in nothing at all. Then her feet landed solidly on the ground.
Eliza opened her eyes.
She stood in a park in the late-morning light of another century. The air was crisp and cool and smelled of turned earth and, faintly, of woodsmoke. Trees rustled overhead in shades of green she had only seen in paintings, and a gravel path stretched away through the grass toward a wrought-iron bench, where a couple sat in quiet conversation too distant to overhear. Further off, a boy chased a rolling hoop, his laughter carrying on the breeze. For a moment it seemed to her that the whole world had paused, holding its breath to see what she would make of it.
She glanced down at herself: a simple cream gown, modest and correct, strange against her skin and yet granting her an unexpected sense of belonging. She smoothed the fabric with trembling hands. Then she reached beneath the folds of her skirt and pressed the button once. Safe. Somewhere, two hundred years away and running on the same clock, her uncle would be lowering himself into his chair.
She took up her small bag and walked toward the edge of the park.
The city met her before she reached the gate. The hum of it grew and grew until it surrounded her: iron tyres ringing on cobbles, drivers shouting to their teams, a costermonger crying his wares over the din. The cobblestones were treacherously uneven after the flat pavements she knew. Women in long skirts strolled arm in arm with parasols tilted against the sun; men in tailored waistcoats and tall hats stood in knots of conversation that broke now and then into laughter; the smell of fresh bread tangled with the earthier smell of horses. It was as if she had stepped directly into the pages of her favourite novels, except that no page had ever been this loud, or smelled of anything at all.
This is real. You are standing inside the past. Do not grin at strangers like a lunatic.
She paused at the edge of the street and let the noise pour over her. Half of her, the half that had been raised on those novels, kept expecting some stern and noble gentleman to materialise out of the crowd as if stepping from Austen’s own pen. Her reason dismissed the fancy. The longing stirred all the same.
Her gaze caught on a dress shop across the street, its sign painted in gold: MISS LACEY’S FASHIONS. The window held gowns of vibrant silk and delicate lace, and before she had properly decided anything her feet were carrying her across, between the carriages.
Inside, the shop was close and warm, full of the murmur of voices and the rustle of fabric, the air thick with lavender and polished wood. Eliza drifted along the rows, her fingers grazing the sleeve of a shimmering blue dress, and for a moment she let herself imagine a ballroom, chandeliers, the dress swirling as she turned. Then reality tempered it. She was here to observe, not to dream; and she did not belong here, not truly.
Her presence had not gone unnoticed. Whispers followed her, and sidelong glances, the judgment in them unmistakable: a young woman alone, unknown, in a plain gown, handling silk. Eliza straightened her back, refusing to let the sting of it show, and stepped out of the shop with her head high. The stares followed her into the street.
A few doors on, a poster on a brick wall caught her eye. Large letters announced a scientific fair, open to the public, to be held in two days’ time. It was the line beneath that stopped her.
Tuesday, the 11th of October, 1825.
And below the date, a bill of names. Most meant nothing to her. One of them she had last seen in the pages of a chemistry textbook, printed under an engraving of a grave, dark-haired man: MR. HARVEY DONOVAN, ON THE CHEMISTRY OF FLAME.
Eliza stood very still in the middle of the pavement while the crowd parted around her. Harvey Donovan. Inventor of the miners’ safety lamp. Two centuries of students had skimmed his name the week before an exam, and his lecture was Tuesday, and apparently one simply walked in.
A group of women passed close behind her, their voices light and animated, and Eliza could not help overhearing.
“I do hope Mr. Donovan’s demonstrations prove as remarkable as they claim,” one said. “They say he can make flame behave like a tame bird. And he is not yet married, you know.”
“You are incorrigible,” her companion laughed behind her fan. “For my part I look forward to Dr. Bellingham. His ideas stray so far from accepted thought that some call him reckless. My brother insists the man is more likely to blow the roof off the hall than to win the Royal Society’s favour.”
“Dangerous or not,” a third replied, “people are speaking of him, and that is no small feat. In London one must either astonish or be forgotten.”
Eliza bit back a laugh. Their excitement had little to do with scientific curiosity and everything to do with the spectacle of it, science as a novelty to be paraded in drawing rooms alongside a new gown or a whispered scandal. But the names stayed with her after the women had rustled on. To her, those names were the whole reason she stood in this time at all: proof of her uncle’s life’s work, and perhaps, though she had told no one, the beginning of her own.
A carriage rattled past and stirred the dust. Eliza drew back against a shopfront, and her hand brushed the hidden band at her thigh, the smooth button beneath the fabric — the single fragile thread that tied her to home. The thought arrived uninvited: she was entirely alone here. One wrong step and she would vanish into history with no one in this century the wiser.
She straightened and looked down the street ahead. The fair would be her first true test. She would keep her eyes open, take her notes, and give no one reason to look at her twice. The world she had dreamed of was no longer confined to books. It surrounded her, demanded her attention, and waited to see what she would do.
