What Was I Thinking? (19 page)

“Thank you.” I looked at her uncertainly. I
really wanted to dig in, but it seemed rude to do with her right there.

“Do you be
wanting
help getting dressed, miss?”

“No, no thank you.” I wasn’t sure how I’d
manage the unfamiliar clothes that were now hanging in the open top of the
wardrobe, but I did want to be alone while I figured it out.

“Yes, miss.” She bobbed her head a little.
“I’ll just be leaving you to yourself, then. Mrs. Roland said to tell you as
she’d be waiting in the morning room when you
was
ready to attend her.”

“Thank you—I’m sorry, we haven’t been
introduced. Are you Betsy?”

“No, Betsy
be
the
parlor maid. I
be
Daisy, miss, the upstairs maid.” The
words were polite enough, but there was something in the inflection that
implied that only a moron would think a parlor maid would make beds.

“Thank you then, Daisy. And do call me Addie.
You don’t have to call me miss.”

“Yes, Miss Addie.” She bobbed again and left.

I shut the door behind her and fell upon the
breakfast. A lot of it was unfamiliar, or at least unfamiliar as breakfast
food. But it was hot, and it was food, and it came with caffeine. I didn’t
leave a molecule behind.

After a struggle to figure out the fastenings
on all the various layers of borrowed clothes, I got it done. Well, sort of. I
gave up on the stays, which laced up the back, and reused the costume copy,
which approximated the shape of stays, but had a modern front closure. I was
going to miss a bra. I didn’t know how the Gibson Girls coped. For today, I
would walk carefully and try not to bounce. I would rinse out my smuggled bra
and modern underpants in the tub as soon as I figured out where I could let
them dry without upsetting anyone. For now, they were neatly folded into my
bottom drawer, right next to my shoulder bag, which was an anachronism wrapped
around anachronisms.

Other than the undergarment issues, the dress
was nice. It was a shirtwaist, with a white pin-tucked top that tucked into the
wide belt of an A-line skirt that ended just above my ankles. The skirt was
emerald green cotton, trimmed with narrow white stripes. There was a light jacket
in the same green fabric as the skirt. It was altogether an enormous
improvement on the costume the evil Campbell Frazier had provided, even if it
was a bit loose here and there.

For one thing, it was comfortable. True, it was
longer and dressier than what I ordinarily wore, and had long sleeves, but the
cotton was light and cool for the August morning, the seams were all finished
so neatly that nothing rubbed, and it fit without pulling or binding anywhere.
I stood in front of the dressing-table mirror, and spun in my stockinged feet.
I looked like a princess, and I felt like one, too.

I sat down, brushed my hair out, and pinned it
up in a loose bun. I put my boots back on, pronounced myself fully dressed, and
went downstairs to find the morning room.

The maid sweeping the stairs put aside her
broom to show me the way to a pretty sitting room on the east end of the house,
with two large windows looking out on the side garden. I had been there once,
as an undergraduate, for a wine and cheese party.

Augusta Roland was working at a writing desk to
one side of the room, and stood up as the maid led me in. “Addie! You’re up at
last! I trust you slept well, my dear?”

“Very well, thank you. I’m sorry I collapsed
last night and didn’t come back downstairs for the tea.”

“Not at all, not at all.
Traveling is exhausting at
best, and I’ve no doubt that the trip you took was exhausting in the extreme.
You found breakfast sufficient?”

I nodded.

“Excellent. Do sit down, then. We’ve much to
talk about.” She looked up and said, “Thank you,
Betsy, that
will be all. We’ll have the door closed, if you please.”

Turning back to me, she said, “I think it best
we have no listeners for discussion of the more unusual aspects of your trip,
do you not agree?”

“Absolutely.
Yes.” I sat on an old-fashioned
sofa in front of the window wall, and wondered what we would be discussing, and
where Bert was.

I was even more surprised when she turned her
back on me. She strode decisively over to the door and yanked it open quite
suddenly, startling Betsy, who was standing just outside. “That will be
all
, Betsy,” she said again, and watched
as Betsy walked away. Only when the maid was out of sight did she close the
door again and return to me.

“Now then,” she said, seating herself on the
sofa and turning toward me cozily, “I am all agog to hear every detail of your
trip and your home, but first I expect we should plan out what we are to say to
others, do you not agree?”

I agreed again, still wondering.

“Bert had hoped to join us, but, as you seemed
so tired this morning, he eventually decided he had best go to call on his
colleagues, rather than wait.”

I flushed. She was being tactful, but
apparently I had overslept by an annoying amount. “I’m truly sorry that I slept
so long. I had no idea…what time is it, by the way?” I hadn’t seen a clock
anywhere.

“It’s just gone eight.”

I blinked.
“Eight a.m.,
August twenty-ninth?”

“Why, yes.” It was her turn to look surprised.
“You surely did not think it was evening, or indeed, another day?”

“No, no, I just thought it must be late, since
Bert gave up on me.”

We looked at each other, both clearly
bewildered and both just as clearly searching for a polite way to ask if the
other had lost her mind.

I made up my mind to speak. I was going to live
here, after all, and Augusta was the only person other than Bert who was ever
likely to know the truth of where I came from. I needed to get along with her,
and we needed to speak frankly, or we wouldn’t understand each other. “In my
time—” I shot a look at the closed door, and rephrased, just in case. “Where I
come from, eight is a fairly early hour for a guest to wake up. The normal work
day starts at anywhere from seven to nine, depending on the company, but if you
don’t have to be at work, most people sleep until at least nine.”

“Really!
How
extraordinary!”

We looked at each other for another long
moment, and this time she took the plunge. “I certainly hope you have not found
us rude, my dear.”

“No, no.
Quite the contrary.”
Quite the contrary?
Had I lost my mind? It wouldn’t
help matters if I started speaking like a character in a BBC drama. For one
thing, I might easily mimic the wrong era and two eras were quite enough to
deal with.

I tried again.
“Not at all.
No one disturbed me and no one has been rude in the slightest. I was just
having trouble translating expectations, if you know what I mean.”

She smiled. “I do, rather. It is like speaking
to a visitor from England, is it not? One thinks one is speaking the same
language and endless misunderstandings ensue from that one misapprehension.”

I smiled back, and relaxed just a little. I
hadn’t realized how nervous I had been.

“So,” she went on, “I think it best you and I
try to speak frankly with one another, to clear up any misunderstandings before
they can cause difficulties.”

“Yes.” She was right, but I wasn’t sure what
she was leading up to.

“Bert and I discussed the difficulty last
evening. We were both too intoxicated with the success of his experiment to
retire at a sensible hour, you understand.” She looked at me, obviously
wondering if I did understand.

I did. In fact, I was surprised that my
reaction hadn’t been exactly the same. So I nodded and waited for her to go on.

“We thought best we all agree on a fiction
regarding your origins, as it would be imprudent to tell the simple truth.” She
waited for my nod again. “Our thought, therefore, and certainly this is only a
suggestion, as this concerns you, and you must make the decision, our thought
was that perhaps we would tell everyone that you are a member of a very wealthy
European family, come to stay with me until your wedding.”

“All right,” I said slowly, not quite
understanding. “Obviously it’s helpful to say I’m from far away, but why
Europe, and why wealthy? I don’t know how well I can maintain any sort of foreign
accent, even British, for very long.”

“Ah, you see, though, you do speak differently
from us and any strangeness of speech can be thus put down to foreignness.”

“Okay.” I frowned. “I see your point, but I’m
not sure how it will work. But let’s go on. Why wealthy? I didn’t bring
anything with me that would give that impression.”

“Ah, that was Bert’s idea, and I confess that I
didn’t quite see it at first either. He tells me that there are many, many
inventions in your time that we do not yet have. He suggested that, if you were
unfamiliar with some task, or asked about an object that no one has heard of,
it could be explained away if we said you were so very wealthy that you had
always had servants to take care of such-and-such, and thus did not understand
exactly how one did it oneself.”

“I see.” I did. This could work. “And if I ask
about something that’s not common now, like a cell phone, it could be put down
to me having exotic toys in my faraway and rich home?”

“Exactly!” she said with enthusiasm. “And what
is a cell phone?”

“Do you know about telephones?” I asked,
wondering where, exactly to begin. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be insulting, I
just didn’t know more than a couple hours where—
when
—I was coming to, so I didn’t have time to check exactly when
various inventions were in common use. But I used cell phones as my example
because I know they were invented during my lifetime, though when I was very
young.”

“I see. And I also see that this is going to
fascinating, if we get away with it at all. So, it is of the essence that you
and I speak extremely frankly, and that we both agree not to be offended if the
other explains something that we know quite well.”

“Absolutely.”
I nodded vigorously.

“So then.
In answer to your question, I
do know about telephones and we have one in the kitchen, though Bert tells me
they are much different in your time. Is that what you meant by cell phone?”

“A little bit. We still call the basic
invention a telephone, but from its invention until around 1980—I’m not sure
exactly when, because it’s before I was born—” Augusta blinked, but didn’t
interrupt “—they plugged into the wall. They got a lot of new features and uses
as the years went by, and they changed from something only rich people had, and
that they had only one of, to something that everyone had, and had in several
rooms.”

“Really?
Even the poor?”

“Yes, although the very poor sometimes didn’t
have them. It was rare enough to be mentioned, though. Someone might say ‘the
family was so poor that they had to ask a neighbor to use their phone,’ or ‘the
village was so remote that the only phone was in the town square.’ But I’m not
saying this very well, and we could get bogged down all day on phones alone.”

I looked around for inspiration, and found it.
“I know this house in my time. Bert told you that, right?”

“Yes. He said it worked out just as we planned,
and that you had known it from your time at Washington University.” She smiled
with evident pleasure.

“That’s right. So, now you have one telephone,
and it’s in the kitchen?”

She nodded.

“When I visited here, there was a phone in
every room except the bathrooms. I remember there was one on a small table near
a sofa in this room, when I was here for a party. And when I visited Bert here,
he had a phone on his desk in the third-floor lab.”

“Really?
And that’s a cell phone?
A telephone device in every room?”

I smiled. “No. In fact, that was considered
very old-fashioned compared to cell phones. Let’s see if I can explain. Now,
you have one phone—telephone, I mean—and you have to ask an operator to connect
for you?”

She nodded again.

“Okay. So, within a few decades, it will change
so that people dial for themselves, and the call goes through directly. After a
while, when my mother was a teenager,” I saw a quick look of incomprehension,
and amended it, to be clearer without spending time on translation, “shortly
before my mother was married, telephones got less expensive and more common,
and people began to have them in their bedrooms also. Then, they were in almost
every room in the house. Then, the whole thing turned around because, right
around the time I was born, I understand, they developed a way for the phones
to work without being wired directly to a wall. The base of it—
“ I
looked up, but Augusta seemed to be following without
difficulty. “The base of it had to be wired to the wall, but the handset could
be carried as far as another room and would still work.”