Page 68 of Time for You
“They don’t, but they have a lot of technology that makes up for it. A machine that washes clothes, for instance. And another one that dries them.”
“A machine to dry clothes? Who ever heard of such a ridiculous thing,” Lydia replied. “Is there no sun or wind in the future?”
“It goes much faster,” Henry argued. “Everything there is faster, really. It’s all instantaneous, or so close to being so that it makes no matter.”
“Where did you stay?” asked Maggie, always the taskmaster.
“With—the friends I made. They lived in a sort of tenement building, and for a while I was in an empty flat, and then when the occupant returned, I stayed with some of them.”
“That must have been ghastly, sharing a tenement,” Anne said, making a face.
“It’s actually quite nice. Nothing like the ones you’re thinking of. The future is so different from what we think it will be, as a matter of fact.”
From there his family had fewer questions, or perhaps so many more they couldn’t decide how to articulate them. Like with George, Henry made his decision to stay longer a little fuzzy; rather than deciding he couldn’t say goodbye to a woman, which felt unimaginably selfish after seeing how overjoyed his family was to have him back, he made it sound like there’d been a miscalculation on the time, leading to him missing the window to return. There were a few times he couldn’t avoid mentioning Daphne entirely, and both times Anne’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she stayed silent.
“And then I went to George’s office first, as I was sure he’d still be there, before we came straight here,” Henry finished.
Lydia’s cup was empty and she stood, pulling him up for another hug. “Welcome home,” she whispered. “I never dared hope. When you didn’t return home that day, I thought you’d slipped into the Firth and drowned. You’re a fair swimmer, but not a strong one, and the waves were big that day.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into his mother’s grey hair. “I would have come back that day, if I could.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie.
Lydia stepped back and wiped one more tear from her cheek. “I think this calls for a celebration. Cook shouldn’t be woken at this time of night, but Shep—Shepard can find something more hearty than this in the kitchen for us.”
“I’ll cook,” Henry offered without thinking.
The reaction was immediate. He might as well have fired a cannon into the parlor. Maggie laughed, George scoffed, and his mother huffed, “Well, I never.” Only Anne seemed less than mortally offended by his suggestion. Even though he’d known that it wasn’t common in his time for men—especially men of his status—to cook, he hadn’t considered how alien it would seem to his loved ones.
“You cook?” Lydia sputtered.
“Do men in the future really do that?” Anne asked.
Henry shrugged. “Some do, some don’t, just as some women in the future do, and some don’t.”
“What on earth has happened to society there?” Maggie demanded.
“It sounds ghastly,” George said. “When you said no servants, I assumed there would at least be a cook.”
“You won’t have to do that anymore, darling,” Lydia said. “Shepard can manage to find a few more things for us to eat.”
The reality set in for Henry all at once. A wealthy man doing his own cooking just wasn’t done in the nineteenth century unless he wanted to be called “eccentric.” Henry’s family were still strivers, despite their money, and he would need to follow the rules of society as they existed once again.
He would go back to the import business too, with the endless columns of numbers and lists and bills of lading. Regret coupled with grief for the life he’d left behind rose up inside him, and he wondered if this was what it would always be like now, never feeling at home in his time, always feeling out of place. He’d spent so long in the twenty-first century yearning for the past, and now that he was back, he was yearning for the future.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“What’s in your knapsack?” Anne asked around a mouthful of cold roast chicken, nodding toward the pack he’d left against the wall. George and Maggie were discussing a ship that had been delayed by a storm, while Lydia spoke softly to Shepard in the corner.
The gang had had several conversations about the ethics of sending him back with modern medicine, aswhat about paradoxeswas something most of them seemed gravely concerned with, despite not being able to sufficiently explain the issue to him. However, in the end they’d packed him up with half a dozen different medicines and an old pharmacological textbook, with the caveat that he had to immediately promise to write a will wherein that book would be burned upon his death, to lessen the chance of “breaking the space-time continuum.”
“Medicines, mostly,” he said, and Anne’s eyes lit up.
“What sort? Tonics? Something for pain?”
“A few for pain, but the rest are for infections. There’s a book that explains how to use them, but we have to be careful, as these haven’t been invented or discovered yet.”
Anne furrowed her brow. “Why does that matter?”
Henry sighed. “No one would really explain, but I guess things are supposed to happen in a specific order, and they’re worried that if something happens too early, it could keep other important things from happening.”
