Page 76 of Time for You
“My friend needs your horse,” George said bluntly. “We’ll pay you.”
The farmer looked puzzled. “But I need her to pull the cart.”
“That much we can see,” George replied. “But—”
“But if I don’t make it to Manchester in the next”—Henry checked his pocket watch and experienced yet another unpleasant stomach lurch—“seventy-five minutes, I’ll never see the woman I love again.”
“Well, now, I don’t know if I see how that’s possible. If she’s in Manchester now, won’t she be in seventy-five minutes?”
“She’s not there,” Henry nearly yelled, keeping leash of his fear at the last minute. “She’s—” He looked to George, utterly unprepared to come up with a plausible lie.
“She’s in London, but his train to London leaves in an hour. And she won’t be there tomorrow, when the next train arrives.”
The farmer nodded slowly. Too slowly, in Henry’s increasingly desperate opinion. “Well, that I can understand. My mare here isn’t a racehorse, though. She’s young, but she’s not—”
“She’ll suffice, I’m sure,” Henry said. “And as he said, we’ll pay you.”
“And I’ll pick her up in Manchester and bring her back this evening,” George added.
The farmer agreed and carefully, painstakingly, climbed down. “Did you need help unhooking her?” he offered.
“It’s quite all right. We can manage,” George said affably.
“Thank you. I owe you one,” Henry said quietly as they got to work. His heart was still racing and his pocket watch was ticking so loudly it felt like a thunderclap, or maybe that was just his heart as well.
“Tough for me to collect, what with you going almost two centuries into the future and all,” George said wryly. He smiled sadly at Henry and tossed him the reins.
Henry was a fair horseman, although bareback had never been quite his forte. But needs must, so Henry pulled his best friend into a tight hug. “Thank you,” he said again. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too, but I won’t if you don’t get going and miss your chance,” George said. He patted Henry on the back and stepped away.
Henry mounted the horse with a quick assist from the fence nearby and tipped his hat in thanks to the farmer.
And then, with one last look, he was off.
Henry’s muscles ached from holding himself on the horse, who was, as the farmer had said, fast but not about to win any races. Still, he found himself in the outskirts of Manchester in good time, although the horse was beginning to flag.
He slowed her to a steady trot as the traffic thickened, and if possible, his nerves got worse. He had to make it to a cemetery on the eastern side of the city, but he hadn’t counted on the streets being clogged with workerson their way home from shifts at the factory. Soon the trot slowed to a walk and he wove between carriages as carefully as he could, urging the horse—clearly not at ease with city traffic—forward.
He had memorized the turns to the cemetery from the train station, but that did not help as much as he would have liked, given that he was now coming from an entirely different direction. He hailed a pedestrian and asked for directions to the cemetery, trying to be polite while his anxiety mounted.
“Saint Mary’s? Not too far from here, no,” the old woman replied. “Just up thataway a little.”
“Which road, ma’am?”
She started a long, discursive explanation of the road (Saint Mary’s Avenue) followed by which direction to turn at the top of the hill (left), along with several completely unrelated asides about her health (poor), her knee (always aching), and her daughter-in-law (ungrateful, and also pregnant). Henry was barely holding a scream back with his teeth when she finished and he could head on, the streams of carriages, hacks, and pedestrians finally thinning as he approached the hill. Henry checked his watch once more, realizing with dawning horror that he had only minutes to spare, and quite a hill for the horse to climb.
“Come on, girl,” he urged, kicking her flanks. “One last run.”
Surprisingly, she obeyed, once more speeding up to a canter. Henry turned at the gate into the cemetery, hopping down from the horse without bothering to hobble her. Either George would find her and pay the farmer for his generosity, or else someone would steal her and George would be out a bit more money, but now was not the time for worrying about that, because up ahead, he saw a twisting, turning shimmer.
Henry broke into a dead sprint, hoping he wouldn’t miss it, not sure how long the veil would even stay open. He threw one look over his shoulder as he approached, to take a last look at his century, and then plunged straight into it.
His stomach dropped, and everything went dark.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Daphne hitched the grocery bag higher on her shoulder, the first few leaves of autumn crunching under her feet. In the year since Henry had left, she and Ellie had regressed to their diets of frozen pizzas and takeout, but Daphne did make an attempt to cook a real meal on one of her days off. Ellie always liked coming back from an exhausting shift in the ER to find something that didn’t just have plastic ripped off, and Daphne was going to do her best to keep that going.
