Chapter 1 Time cracks open
The heat swallowed her whole.
August in Virginia—not the polite, air-conditioned version Evanora had grown up with, but something denser, wetter, pressing against her skin like a second garment. She blinked, or tried to. Sunlight knifed through the canopy of oak leaves above her, and the ground beneath her back was hard-packed dirt, not the manicured grass of the Bicentennial fairgrounds.
A rooster crowed somewhere too close.
“Miss?”
The voice came from above and to her left. Male. Deep. Not the concerned drawl of a fellow reenactor breaking character to ask if she’d fainted from the heat, but something authentic in a way that made her stomach drop before her mind caught up.
“Miss, can you hear me?”
Evanora turned her head. The movement sent a spike of pain from temple to jaw. She’d hit the ground hard, apparently. Her fingers dug into the dirt—actual historical society had trucked in for the celebration—and she registered the weave of her own sleeve. Linen. Hand-stitched. The dress she’d spent four months researching and sewing for the costume contest.
The man crouching beside her wore a waistcoat. Not a costume-shop waistcoat with machine-finished buttonholes and polyester lining, but the real thing: wool, slightly worn at the elbows, the brass buttons mismatched as though one had been replaced. His shirt was linen, too, and the cravat at his throat had been tied by someone who did it every morning without thinking.
His face made her breath catch.
Tall, even crouched, with shoulders that strained the seams of that waistcoat. Black hair, wavy and a touch too long, tied back with a leather cord. Dark eyes—brown, but nearly black in the shade of the oak—studying her with an intensity that was purely clinical and entirely destabilizing.
“You’ve taken a fall,” he said, and his voice did something to her spine. “Lie still a moment. Do you know where you are?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. The rooster crowed again, and somewhere beyond the oak tree a horse whinnied, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and manure and something green and living that had nothing to do with the twenty-first century.
“I—” Her voice cracked. “The celebration. The Bicentennial. I was—”
The man’s brow furrowed. Those dark eyes sharpened with something that looked uncomfortably like diagnostic concern. “You’ve struck your head. I’m Dr. Ezra Wilson. You’re in Williamsburg. Can you tell me your name?”
Ezra Wilson.
The name hit her like a physical blow. She knew that name. Had read it in primary sources, in the letters of a Continental Army surgeon who’d served at Yorktown, in the property records of a house on Francis Street that still stood today—two hundred years later—as a museum. A house she’d toured three days ago with her Colonial History seminar.
A house with a portrait hanging in the front parlor.
