Just North of Nowhere (29 page)

“Dummy,” she said again. If she went back to her time and place, then returned through one of Burroughs’s later pictures, she would meet another Leonard Winston Spencer-Churchill. That Churchill would not have met her the day before...today. She'd be in another world, one that looked like this, smelled like it, breathed like it, one where extraordinarily similar people did minutely similar things, a world with a young Kaiser in Germany and where a baby Adolph Hitler bawled his eyes out in Austria. She'd enter that world a day later than today, but it would be a world where she'd never walked the earth, where her meeting with Mr. Churchill had never taken place. It would be one in which his morning walk today had been uninterrupted. They would never have spoken, he would never have looked back at her – as he was doing at that moment – and she would be a stranger stopping him as he boarded his train, thinking of the journey to come.

She waved. He did not return the courtesy.

Stay
, she thought,
Just stay. Meet him tomorrow, someone he already knows.
She knew he wouldn't leave till the late afternoon train. She'd slip out, early morning, and catch him on his last day in the States. An old acquaintance.

She shuddered at the thought of another night at the Dancing Queen. If Sir Winston...Mr. Spencer-Churchill...knew she was a guest at the town sporting house, he'd never speak with her!

She sniffed again, drawing in the scent of the town, and something else. The something, no mistake, was she. She and her blouse! Both could use a wash. Maybe she could rinse off somewhere early.

Morning, again, was glorious even in the dark. A wonder of mist made it seem like his horse was wading in the heavens.

Winston didn't mind the small animal he'd hired for the morning ride. That Potter creature had recommended well.

“God, indeed!” he snorted.
Cast an unmarried woman as God, does she!

The horse was quick; an animal with spirit, but without a spirited creature's too-frequent tendency to bolt. Winston hated a bolter. And responsive? Indeed! With work, the beast might have made a decent polo mount.

He had taken a narrow trail south and west through the woods across the stream from the town and headed into the pre-dawn mist that rose from the cold still water of the little river. Uncommonly warm winter, he’d been told. Another of what all had said was an unseasonable spate of January days for these parts.

They moved at a canter. As opposed to the sulfur-rich stench coal stoves imparted to English air, the aroma of New World log-fire and the heavy scent of loam-damp woodlands, mixed most satisfyingly in his nose. The winter trickle of the river as it ran the rocky decline at the edge of town could be heard through the thicket of bare deciduous trees and the still verdant boughs of the seemingly endless American evergreen forest.

By God, this was a beautiful part of the world this upper part of America's Middle West.

The gelding did as bidden. It knew the path, followed the directions urged upon him with knees and the merest flick of the reins, yet it was intelligent enough to make the best way, to find the smooth of the path, to avoid small obstacles. Good mount.

As easy a ride as it was, with each fall of the animal's hooves, Winston felt the old ache in his right shoulder. What was that? Seven years ago, now? Damned confounded thing!

To spite the pain, he nudged the horse into a trot, then an easy gallop. More vehement pain shot down his body. Good, he thought. That'd show him. Slip, would he!

Ruth rose long hours before dawn. She gathered her blouse and skirt, covered herself as best she could with the thin hotel blanket and counterpane.

Down the hall from her room, the public facility was in more or less constant use throughout the night. A steady flow of loud men and laughing women streamed past Ruth’s door. Sometimes, it seemed, both or more than two at once shared the room.

Every time she stepped from the room, she found herself ducking back behind the door.

To heck with it!
Wash my darn self in the river,
she thought and walked boldly forth, ignored the naked run of chippies and lumbermen in the hallway, and slipped out the back door of the hotel and down the outside stairway to the rear of the building. Warm though it was for January, it was plenty cold. A woman her age, wrapped in a thin blanket, carrying her only clothes in a bundle!

The thin sound of the Rolling River, rose from the dark of the thicket. She made her way through the trees to the river bank, squealed quietly as possible at the shock of icy water as it filled her shoes and lapped her ankles, then she made her way downstream quickly. She stopped at a place where a wide sand bar stretched into the river just downstream from the spot where, three years hence, the old hydro electric dam would be built. Now, the water trickled in a winter low from up, deeper in the Driftless.

Won’t be much of a wash
, she thought with another snort and a shiver at the melt-water at her feet,
a quick rinse'll have to do.
All she had was what she wore when she had slipped into the glass plate in the privacy of her little office at the library. Hours of trekking up and down the town, following Churchill for three days and more as he strolled the bluffs and fields had taken their toll on the freshness of her wardrobe.

And herself!
Have to get past finicky if I’m going to live in time!
She said almost aloud.

She tugged the blanket closer to her bare skin – hoping there were no critters in the wool – and knelt to rinse her cotton skirt and blouse.
Pioneer women did it
, she consoled,
so can I!

She had no more than wetted the hem of the garment, when, of a sudden, across the river, came Winston Churchill, on a horse, galloping out of the mist.

Confounded woman again
, Churchill thought, turning the horse aside.
Half-naked in January, washing out of doors. God, indeed!
The mount cleared her by several feet and pounded past her and onto the sand bar.

“A sec!” she shouted. “Just a darn second for goodness, sake!” She put her back to him and slipped into the still-wet skirt, keeping the hotel coverlet wrapped around her.

He turned the horse. “May I enquire...” he began.

“I’m washing my gosh darn clothes,” she snapped, “I didn't bring enough. Okay?”

He glowered.

She turned to face him, the blanket still around her shoulders.

“I am at your service, Ma'am.” He inclined his head in a curt little bow.

“You know, Sir Winston, some people make manners seem like a slap in the face.” She shivered in the chill air.

“My father's thinking, entirely. He was wholly devoted to the practice.”

“Well, get over it!” she snapped, “if you ever want to beat Adolph Hitler, Prime Minister!”

They sat on a rock by the river. The day was not bad, not for winter. Bluffton winters could snap pieces from a body and shatter the heart with the cabin fever. She knew from what seemed a hundred years of loneliness, of bustling the streets in a white-out blizzard to open the gol-darned library for no one, no one at all. She knew winter from years of sitting in the library’s steam damp air and watching condensed tears streak the long high windows between the bookshelves, clearing long narrow views of the little white world outside, beyond.

“Sir Winston,” she began – he raised a single eyebrow – “You'll be Prime Minister.”

“I know,” he growled.

“One day, but not soon! You think now you'll achieve it in your own good time. I tell you, it will not be on terms you understand. Not now.”

He glowered.

“Don't give me that look,” she snapped as she would to a schoolboy. About his life to come, she knew what was what and he didn't!
That!
for the wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain and the British Commonwealth of Nations!

“You'll wait nearly forty years from now, young man. And when you do get it, it'll be by default, you'll be the only one left. You're going to have a career of blood, toil, tears and sweat and that is what, Sir Winston!”

She giggled, quoting him to himself. In this world, she, Ruth Potter, had written that line! Good, by God!
Course I'll never know if he ever says it here.
She would have to stay around for the next four decades to find out how today's seeds would sprout.

He was pouting again, his lower lip thrust at her belligerently, his brow furrowed, like a large child’s, like that of a petulant bulldog pup. The difference was, of course, this was a fully formed Anglo-Saxon male warrior child, a pup with teeth and tenacity, and the will to use fang and muscle to every ounce of his strength. He would never give up. Never. Not ever. He would always get what he wanted. It was his genius.

“You're wondering why you're listening to me, Mr. Spencer-Churchill. It's because like every ambitious schoolboy, Winston, you're only happy when people are talking about you. Okay, then, here you are. Let me tell you!”

She began: “In a few days, Victoria will be dead. Dead as the old century. For a little while, Edward will be king. Soon, his nephew, the Kaiser of Germany, will rattle his sabers and, for the most part, they'll not stop rattling until...”

She swallowed. How to phrase the unspeakable? How to tell of the coming of the century of the Great Wars, the fall of Russia, of Germany, humiliated in defeat, brought to her knees and held there by an uneasy 20-year peace of binge and ruin? How to tell of the world-wide crash, the rise of Hitler, the Second War, gas ovens and atom bombs, the world remade in a few strokes of the sword and pen?

She found words, told it all, all she could remember.

“The sabers,” she said at last, “They'll not stop rattling till long after your time as Prime Minister, your time on earth.”

“And then?”

“Then peace,” she lied.

He stared across the river. The mists had cleared.
Here, she realized. Here's the moment I came for.

“All that,” she said decisively, “is
my
timeline. In
this
...the world hasn't been spoiled quite yet. In this one, you've still to make your maiden speech in Parliament. You can stop it all! Here, you haven't been made First Lord of the Admiralty. Trench warfare hasn't been thought of...”

“Trench...?” he said.

“...warfare,” she said and gave it to him: hundreds of thousands of young men, both sides facing each other across a hundred yards of blasted mud and stinking corpse-filled shell holes, tens of thousands, the best minds and bodies of the young century cut down by weaponry not yet invented. She spoke of cold nights when mustard gas rolled across the blasted hell of no-man's-land like an Old Testament plague.

“Hmm,” he said.

“And, there are worse things. Worse things will come.”

“Yes?”

“Horrors, yes. You may stop the horrors – and the worse things.”

He looked at her and cocked his head. For the first time since setting eyes on him, she saw something new in that face. A question sat there. He was asking her a question.

“But?”

“You can change the worse things.”

“How?”

“By first losing. First you must let the Great War end without beating Germany into submission. By not pressing the issue with your own people. By not being so damned right that they humiliate and throw you out of public life until it's too late to stop...to stop Hitler!”

Nothing. Then the question on his face turned to a smile. “You've read Herbert Wells, have you?”

It took her a moment. “H.G. Wells!” She blurted out. “
Time Machine
,
War of the Worlds
,
Things to Come
,” She laughed. “I'm not a time traveler, Winston,” she said.

“
Time Machine
. Yes. That's it!” He laughed.

She explained simply. “Burroughs' photographs…” she began.

“That wet-plate thing of his?” Churchill said, scoffing.

“Yes,” she said, “that device is not just a camera. It takes a picture, but a picture of the world. The whole world. Everything. Each plate is complete. Up in my time, more than a hundred years from now, I have those pictures.”

“
Time Machine
, yes...”

“Those damn pictures let me in,” she shouted. “In to each world. Each is the same, but each goes forward differently. I'm not even certain they exist after I've been here!”

He laughed again, “Wells,” he said. Then a sudden pain passed across his face. He sagged a bit as though he were going to fall into the water by the rock.

Ruth braced him with her arm. “Dislocated right shoulder. You got it falling out of a boat by the Sassoon Dock in Bombay.” She wasn't sure what the Sassoon Dock was. Had only read of Bombay in books. But she knew her man. She was a librarian, by God! “Made a damned fool of yourself and never told anyone. Never. That...” she shoved his right shoulder, “will give you trouble all your life. At times you’ll fall down and roll into a ball with the pain! No one knows of this, now, in this time, but you and...” She looked at him, proudly, “you and I! Face it, Sir Winston: In this little world, I
am
God!”