“Done,” she murmured, the tide of darkness pulling her in.
Cade collected her wet clothes.
“Brooch,” she said urgently, reaching after him. She fell out of the bed. “Brooch.”
Cade lifted her back into bed, and the last things she remembered was him pinning her brooch to her borrowed nightshirt and drawing a blanket over her. Already drifting away, she wondered if it would have been so bad to let him undress her.
• • •
Blurred images of people coming and going, sibilant voices working themselves into her mind, interfered with her rest. At one point, she saw Yates sitting at the foot of her bed drawing. He was clear, unblurred. There was only one of him.
“Why don’t you ever show me your pictures?” she asked him.
“Karigan?” It was not Yates who spoke her name, but Cade.
“Yates never shows me what he is drawing,” she complained.
Cade drew his eyebrows together, perplexed.
Darkness came again, and when next she was aware, someone’s face hovered close to hers, one of the eyes greatly oversized. Karigan shrieked and shrank away.
“Miss Goodgrave,” said Mirriam, dropping her monocle, “is that any way to say hello?”
Mirriam? Karigan squinted. The woman was blurred, but at least Karigan was not seeing in threes.
“It is time for you to snap out of it, young lady,” Mirriam said. “Time is slipping by and the world will not wait for you to wake up.”
LOST IN HISTORY
“It is hard,” Karigan said. “Everything is fuzzy.” But Mirriam’s words about time running out set off a clangor of alarm bells in her mind. Unbidden she saw the captain’s script before her eyes: The longer you linger, the faster we spin apart.
“We shall start easily, one thing at a time,” Mirriam replied. “Try to sit up.”
Karigan did so. Her surroundings did not spin so much as lurch. She gripped the side of the bed, feeling like she was going to spill out of it.
“What happened to me? Have I been sick?”
“Not precisely,” Mirriam replied. “You received a large dose of morphia.”
“How—?” Then Karigan remembered the professor giving her a hug back in the old mill, and the stab of a needle in her arm.
“I believe some poor judgment was involved. How do you feel now?”
“Tired. Like I want to sleep for the rest of my life. Weak. Everything is blurry.”
“Not surprising,” Mirriam replied. “Morphia is a heavy soporific.”
“The professor didn’t want me to . . .” Karigan trailed off, not knowing what Mirriam knew.
“Leave?” Mirriam provided. “It appears he feared the consequences of your abrupt departure.”
That I’d give the opposition away. But, Karigan thought, there was a more basic fear at work—he feared change. He had spent his adult life preserving what was old, and though she had come from the past, he had feared what she could do to his present. Was that it? He feared any change wrought by her return to her own time?
“Where is he?” Karigan demanded. She would straighten him out, and take him to task for the morphia. She felt that she should be angry, very angry, but the medicine had dulled even that.
“Let us see if we can get your feet on the floor,” Mirriam said, pulling the blanket off.
Karigan shivered with the layer of warmth removed, but she obediently swung her legs over the side of the bed, keeping her eyes closed to stave off the terrible swooning sensation when she moved. Closing her eyes was peaceful, and she started drifting, fading.
“Miss Goodgrave!” Mirriam’s tart voice was as good as a slap across the face, and Karigan opened her eyes, her surroundings just as much a blur as before.
“Where am I?” The texture of the floor beneath her feet was of rough wood. She appeared to be in a one room cottage, very small, but tidy.
“This is the home of Jaxon Booth, a friend of Mr. Harlowe’s. I believe you know him by the name of Jax.”
Yes, Karigan thought. The man in the old slave market.
“He is a carpenter this side of the river.”
River. A flash of memory, of being cold and wet and floating, washed over Karigan. “Mirriam, you have to tell me how I got here and what has happened. Nothing makes sense.”
“I am sure it does not. First, try taking a little water, and if that stays down, we shall try some of Mr. Booth’s porridge.”
Mirriam handed Karigan a tall glass of water—not the fine crystal of the professor’s house, but she did not care. She realized she was terribly parched and started drinking it all down.
“Slowly,” Mirriam said. “You don’t want to bring it back up, do you?”
When Karigan finished, desperate as she was to hear what Mirriam had to tell her about how she had gotten here, she was more desperate to use the privy. Mirriam helped her rise.
“Keep steady on your feet, Miss Goodgrave, for I have not the strength to pick you up off the floor and no one else is here to help.”
Karigan staggered like a drunkard, but did not fall. When presented with a door, she reached for the handle but missed the mark and rapped her knuckles on the wall. Mirriam helped guide her hand on the second try. When she had the door open, she stared. Light filtered through a curtained window and fell upon what was essentially a sitting place with a hole and a lid. No porcelain with fancy decoration, no lever to pull to swirl away the unmentionable in a wash of water.