by Rachel Dacus
Chapter 1. Love and Trouble (Bologna, 1665)
Her hand was limp in his, and her eyes had ceased to move under closed lids.
“Elisabetta?”
He couldn’t take a breath until she took one, but her breathing was shallow and slow. George finally inhaled, a lump in his throat. But he couldn’t allow the tears. Not yet. Not while she lived.
A single window above her bed let in a feeble shaft of light, but not much air. The stone walls oppressed him. This backward place. If only he could have transported his beloved to the airy apartment he lived in, four hundred years in the future. She could have recovered there. No one could get well in this backward century.
He had offered to take Elisabetta with him, knowing that she would die of this unknown disease. In his time, they might have been able to cure her, but she’d refused. He wouldn’t force this brilliant young painter to leave everything she’d ever known when that might ruin her and disturb history.
This was all his fault. If George hadn’t allowed his teenage passion for rock and roll to lead him to an even deeper passion for delving into history, he might not be sitting in this stone-walled room in the seventeenth century, keeping vigil at the bedside of the only woman he would ever love.
He could jump right now to ask Dr. Zheng for another remedy, but since this one had gone so wrong, the next cure could be worse. And he couldn’t leave Elisabetta alone now.
George’s timegathering had started with traveling to hear the greatest music of the past, but now Elisabetta’s every breath was more precious than anything to come from Beethoven, the Beatles, or the Moonfaced Triplenium. This moving of air in and out of her lungs was all the melody he’d ever want.
George squeezed her hand, willing her to say some- thing. Until this sudden illness had struck her, Elisabetta had been lively in her expressions, commanding her art staff with confidence. Intelligent and fearless, she was the master of her studio. When they were alone, her voice lowered and softened, telling him how she felt.
Remembering her excitement about the future broke him.
“I’ve just received commissions for ten more portraits from the Mamelini family,” she’d said as they drank wine in her art studio. “Their importance will enhance our repu- tation. We might even get a large church commission.”
After everyone had gone, she allowed him to stay, and she confessed her plans. “The Sirani studio will be more famous than any other in Bologna.”
The air smelled of the industry of art—oil, dust, ground pigments, and the lemon juice used for cleaning. An unforgettable blend.
Elisabetta was proud of running this establishment and training her staff, among them her own sisters. “I want my sisters to develop their talents, even if they marry,” she said. “Painting will give them joy, no matter what befalls them.”
Sitting near her easel, she gestured at the many half-fin- ished portraits. Beautiful and regal, the center of her family, she seemed the master of her life.
“Painting is the greatest happiness,” she said.
At that moment, she was his greatest happiness, but he didn’t say so.
George wrapped these memories around him, a jeweled, silken cloth. The moldy air clogged his lungs, but her breathing still had a rhythm, moving faintly in and out. He tightened his hold on her hand, but she didn’t squeeze back. History had never determined what she had died of. George suspected a human culprit—but it could be no one in her household. She was well loved. Could it have been the Optimalists? This secret society had already killed a woman he cared for, mistaken in their arrow’s aim. Had they come for him or his beloved, and why?
Suddenly, Elisabetta took a big breath. She held it for several long moments. Stiff and alert, he waited. When she released it, he breathed out with her.
“Darling Betta, please stay with me.”
Could he time travel and erase his enemy’s existence? George grew light-headed with symptoms of time
fatigue. If he didn’t get home to 2059, he’d lose the strength to travel. He wiped away the tears with his forearm, wishing he could still savor the recent past, those sweet days with Elisabetta.
Time was the enemy. And timegathering was his genetic curse.
George’s ears were ringing, and he was dizzy. He had to go home. But he longed only for her to take one more breath.
She inhaled, her chest rising. Her hand dropped on the blanket. He waited for the exhale, but her beautiful face and body were still. Her lively spirit had finally set sail.
George let go of his breath and choked on a sob. His vision blurred. Gazing down, he focused on an image of home, his living room, and spoke the mantra to keep himself safe.
He arrived back in 2059. The light blue walls and white furniture of his apartment surrounded him. He was sitting in a white leather chair at his vintage mahogany desk.
“Window shade,” he whispered. The shade dropped. “Illumination softer.” The lights dimmed.
Silence in the apartment. No sounds except the humming motor in the kitchen. The silver-toned MealBox was ready to combine ingredients and produce a dinner at his voice command. But he had no desire to eat.
“Down light,” he murmured.
A soft spotlight appeared, casting a glow on the pile of books on his desk. Books had lured him into this disaster. Books for his research, books about Elisabetta Sirani of 1700s Bologna, Italy. Books and more books, his work forgotten these past, exhilarating weeks. He had fallen into her century and wanted nothing but to stay there.
If only he’d listened to Brother Bernardo’s warning about getting attached to people in the past. He had been such a fool. He could never stop this swarm of regrets.
These what-ifs would haunt him. If only he’d stayed home. Where was his home, anyway? Not this place. Not this century he’d been born to. He’d been born in the twenty-first century, but he felt most alive in the seventeenth, as the troubadour he’d pretended to be in order to meet Elisabetta.
Exhausted, he made himself get up and go into his bedroom and lie down, trying not to think. But he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t stop remembering Elisabetta.
He trembled, exhausted. Elisabetta lived four hundred years ago, but for him, only moments ago. A pain opened in his chest and slowly spread until every part of him ached.
He could try to take revenge on her killers—if he could find them. It must have been the Optimalists. They had been tracking him for years and had killed someone close to him. Could the geneticist Mira Voltar have done this? Thoughts swirled like smoke from a wildfire.
But would revenge lessen this wound? No. And really, everything was his fault. He might be facing a happy future, the comfortable life of a member of the St. James family. George could be timegathering for research, not love, gleaning moments of history to deliver in lectures and books.
If he hadn’t given Elisabetta Dr. Zheng’s tea, believing he could change the fate of a woman he had no right to love, he wouldn’t be pinned to this bed by loss.
George wondered what would happen if he could go back to 2053, when he was a teenager experimenting with his new-found gift for traveling through time. Perhaps he could change everything.
Chapter 2. Music to Die For (Wembley Stadium, 1970)
In 2053, George sat at the long, polished mahogany dining table in his family home in Utah. His algebra home- work was spread out before him. He was thinking not of numbers but of his antique turntable upstairs, and the insanely great rock music that had spun off the disc he played an hour ago. He’d cranked up the volume, keeping the door shut to keep the sound from escaping into the hallway. If Sanders passed by and heard it, he’d know George wasn’t doing homework.
Despite his precaution, that’s what had occurred. Now he sat here, far from his music, facing his least favorite subject. George was good at many subjects, including history, music, and English, but in high school you don’t get to choose. Today he had to face numbers and get good grades in math, or Sanders would let his parents know. They might rush home from their business travel full of blame and restrictions. He thought longingly of that record, its throbbing rock music, and the band that played it on one spectacular night.
Suddenly, a real-sounding electric guitar shrieked in George’s ear, while drums sank the rhythm into his bones. He was in a crowd at a rock concert, but where? Deafened by the music, he realized it must be Wembley in 1970. The night Curdled, the best rock band that ever existed, had recorded the live album.
Surrounded by swaying bodies, George was pushed forward by the pressure of an immense crowd. A mad mob of ecstatic kids surged, rushing the stage, screaming. The mass of bodies pushed like an ocean wave, so strong he was afraid he’d lose his balance and crash into the pave- ment. A thousand bodies pressed against his, arms up and pulsing. Curdled’s two drummers were killing it, but this swaying crowd could kill him. Would electric music be the last thing he’d ever know, and how had he come here?
A bolt of fear ripped through George, sickening him. He’d made another accidental trip into history. Between the crowd and the stage only he and a few roadies pushed back, forming a human guardrail. He shivered. Sweat, chill, a burning in his ears. He was right in front of a speaker. He’d die while going deaf.
This had happened three times before, and he wasn’t sure how. He’d recently found that looking down while thinking of a place could send him traveling through time. At this moment, he couldn’t remember exactly how, but he didn’t want to die here, stranded in a different decade, with no one knowing where he’d gone.
He concentrated on the dining room, but a sharp sting in his side interrupted him. Looking down, he saw the feather end of a dart sticking out of his shirt. Who had shot him with a dart? He had to get out of here.
Feeling woozy, George’s body remembered for him. He looked down to the left, pictured the dining table and the paper with a math formula at the top. And there he was, seated again at the table. His head still buzzed with an electric guitar’s spangled notes, while rock music from eighty years ago drummed in his brain. The hole in his side, where the dart had punctured him, seeped some blood onto his shirt, but other than that, there was no proof he’d ever gone anywhere.
But Sanders, his stern butler, was standing beside him. He was caught. Sanders must have noticed that he was away.
“What do you think you’re doing, young man?” The permafrost in Sanders’s tone froze into a chip off a glacier. George slumped in his chair. How do I explain fading into the room like a ghost? Maybe Sanders hadn’t noticed.
He snuck an upward look at the butler.
“I was just . . .” he thought fast “. . . doing research for my essay on the fall of the Roman republic.”
“Where, in the pantry? And then you materialized to your chair, is that it?”
As always, sarcasm from Sanders made George sweat.
Droplets coursed down his back and puddled at his waist. The gray-haired, aproned butler had something like clair- voyance about George’s homework, or lack of it.
“I was coming down from my room. I needed a pen.”
“I saw you materialize,” Sanders said. “I know what that means.”
But how could he know? George himself didn’t under- stand what it meant, this sliding around in history.
Sanders gave him such a piercing gaze that George had to look at the floor. The false notes of his excuse echoed and bounced off the crystal chandelier. He was so lame at lying. No one had ever taught him how to lie, least of all Sanders.
His parents had deputized their butler to supervise George during their frequent travels. Harold and Helena St. James had an import business that took them away often. Sanders was a third parent to George, the one adult always present.
That could be a good thing or a bad thing. When George wanted some fun instead of homework or chores, it was unlucky. When he was found out, that was very bad luck.
George bowed his head and gave up. “Sorry. That’s not true.” He tried to think of something better. “I was . . . upstairs.” He squeezed his hands together, as if the pres- sure could help his evasion sound plausible. He looked up to see if it had worked.
Sanders skewered George with his gray-eyed gaze. “And do you often fade in and out of visibility while going upstairs? I saw you appear in your chair.”
George wanted to jump right back to 1970 and ask the band members to help him. He was for sure looking down the barrel of a new restriction.
“If you think I don’t know what you’re doing, think again.” Sanders said. “In my youth, I spent time as a musketeer. I can still do a bit of timegathering.”
What?! Sanders, the family’s butler, traveling in history? George just stared. “You’ve spent time in the fifteenth century?”
“The time of musketeers was the sixteenth century, young man. Know your history before you wander around in it.”
George tried to absorb the image of Sanders as a muske- teer. Wielding a cutlass, rapier, or whatever—muskets?—they used to slice up their foes. The most slicing George had ever watched Sanders do was cutting the thinnest slices of roast beef. Why would a timegatherer who had lived such excite- ment take a job making sandwiches for a young man?
But maybe Sanders could help him. “But how did I do it? How does this timegathering thing happen?”
The butler’s steely stare matched the color of his suit. Sanders took a white cloth from his pocket. He accordi- on-folded it, and then he held it out for George to see.
“The folds are the points in time, and they can be folded close together or spread apart. How much they fold creates the illusion of now and then. But some of us can gather the folds, bringing the distant points closer. But it’s not meant for fooling around. Focus on a place and on your purpose.”
“What kind of purpose should I have?”
Sanders smoothed the cloth out and refolded it as a napkin. He put it in his pocket. “You’re too young to have any purpose except your studies. Your parents were very clear. Although your history and English grades were excellent, your math grade was abysmal. You’re grounded to the property and to this year, 2053, until you make friends with numbers.”
The punishment landed in George’s stomach like a punch. No friends, no fun, no music. Just studying. Good that the family property encompassed miles of western hillside for George to race his horse around or else he’d go batshit crazy.
The butler set down a plate of sandwiches from his tray. With the white cloth, he wiped up a spot from the place mat and gave his instructions: “Keep yourself planted in the present, your nose to the computer screen, and your focus on improving your grades. When the time comes, I will show you proper timegathering.”
“Proper timegathering—is that traveling with white gloves?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, George realized his sarcasm was very misplaced.
Sanders wore a fearsome frown that deeply incised the skin between his straight eyebrows.
“Timegathering isn’t supposed to be for woolgather- ing. You may blow off steam by exercising that horse of yours.” The ice had migrated from Sanders’s voice to his gray eyes. “Am I clear?”
“Yeah. I’ll take Redd out. I’m sorry I was rude.” Apologizing always worked.
“Don’t worry about it. Shows you have temperament,
which can be a good thing, unless you plan to be a butler.” Sanders laughed with George at that image.
George ate the sandwiches and went upstairs to change into jeans for riding. In the bathroom, he inspected the hole in his side made by that dart. It wasn’t deep, and it had stopped bleeding. He dabbed some ointment on it and pulled on a fresh shirt.
Sauntering down the sloping grounds to the stables, George felt the pressing need to escape the house and get into the open space. The western hills, dotted with valley oaks, rippled with golden grasses, a vast restlessness. A cloudy day, with a breeze, perfect for galloping into the wilderness. He loved the freedom to sail out on his horse, free from all the restrictions that came with the need to live up to his family name.
“Hi, Arthur! I’m ready to ride,” he called out as he entered the stable. The soft nickering of horses greeted him even before Arthur, their young Australian groom, emerged from a stall.
“So am I. Math is breaking my head. Who needs quadratic equations in real life, anyway?”
Arthur laughed. He went back into the stall. Grinning and scuffing the hay strewn on the floorboards, he brought out the tackle. A good groom, Arthur kept a thick layer of wood shavings on the floor of the stalls, banked at the corners, to prevent thrush on the horses’ hooves. When George couldn’t ride Redd, Arthur gave the stallion exer- cise, but Arthur and George both knew Redd loved George best.
George mounted and gave Arthur a backward wave as they walked out.
Out of sight of the stable, George nudged Redd’s sides to a gallop, and they flew across the field. Soft wind pummeled his face, and he should have been enjoying the ride, but George instead pondered the mind-boggling fact that he had fallen into another time. Again. Just by think- ing. How was it he could do that, but he couldn’t fall into understanding math?
Sanders a “timegatherer” too? Why had he kept this huge fact from him, if they both had this—what, ability or disability?
George hadn’t meant to travel back in time. He’d been stumped on the math problem and daydreaming about the last song he had played, the thrilling squeal of a guitar’s high note, and then he’d remembered that the band had performed the song at Wembley in 1970, where the live recording had been made.
And fast as a finger snap, he was at the concert.
Why would anyone stick him with a dart—what was that about? Maybe a weird accident in such a packed crowd. He put his fingers to the spot in his side and found it didn’t hurt at all.
Why did life give him such a gift? He was an average teen, and the best thing anyone ever called him was intel- ligent. Teachers said he was careful and quiet. That was because he showed his quiet side to adults, but it wasn’t how he felt. He wanted to be like the band: cool, musical, and magnetic to girls. Girls flocked to Curdled. The looks he had gotten since fourth grade had told him he was different. His light brown skin made the kids think of him that way. Thanks, Grandpa, for the half Polynesian skin tone. If only they knew how different he really was. So he kept quiet and was careful.
The only person who saw great potential in him was his mother. “Honey, you have your own kind of charm,” she said when he complained of not making many friends. “That will work for you when you’re older.”
Charm wasn’t exactly what he aimed for, but her melo- dious voice made him want whatever she suggested. When home, she showered George with something you could definitely call charm.
Sanders was a good substitute for his father, but no one could substitute for Mom. She had charm when she sat at the piano, singing, and when she said good night to him. Her voice was always the last thing he heard before sleep- ing. It sailed him into pleasant dreams. He missed those good nights often.
Redd’s smooth rhythm brought George back to the sunny fields. He steered the horse north to the stable.
As he rode, he inhaled the grassland’s warm scents. Why would he want to go anywhere else? Maybe into town to meet his friends. Possibly once more to see Curdled at Wembley. But not in the perilous front row, and not anywhere some nutjob could stick him with a random dart.
That afternoon, George began serving his time, grounded to the property after school. Luckily, Sanders let him do his homework in his room, because he intended to try timegathering again. It would be only a short trip. He’d never be missed.
Again, he was in a crowd singing along with “Rampage,” Curdled’s hit song. This time, he felt safe at the far side of the stage, protected from the audience by a barrier. He couldn’t see well, but he could hear, and the surging crowd couldn’t mow him down.
After the concert, George cranked up his nerve and went backstage.
“Hey, can I help?” he asked a long-haired guy hauling equipment. George picked up a speaker.
“Watch for the cords, mate!” the man said. “This needs to go into the truck first. You can give me a hand. The shit is heavy.”
George put down the speaker and picked up the other end of a large black box.
“That’s an amp,” the guy said. “Handle it carefully.” They carried it to the far side of the stage, down the steps, and loaded it onto a truck.
Then the guy slapped George on the back. “I’ve been working for free here, just to get to hear their music. If you’re good with music for payment, you can help out. Then we’ll all go to the pub.”
And George found himself in rock and roll heaven. The band’s roadies showed him how to tell an amplifier from a speaker, and most of all how to be cool. And he could transport himself to Wembley and back easily now.
After his trips, George was inspired to imitate the band. He grew his hair longer, endured being teased at school as “a hippie,” but felt he was cooler. Borrowing an acoustic guitar from the family library of historical instruments, he downloaded video tutorials and learned to play it. It was the one his mother often played, made of honey-colored maple, with a rosewood fretboard and steel strings.
Most afternoons, he took his songbooks and the videos on his phone to a bench behind the stables under the large oak tree. Sanders couldn’t hear him out there. George picked out the melodies, experimented with chords, and practiced singing. In a baritone range, he could stay on pitch if he concentrated. And when George wanted some- thing, he could concentrate well. Day by day, he improved and could sing higher and deeper, increasing his range. He’d never have a raspy voice like the lead singer of Curdled, so he tried 1960s folk music. Gordon Lightfoot’s songs worked best for his tone and range.
Still too shy to be a “chick magnet,” as the Curdled guys called it, George hoped to grow past his “medium height”—his way of saying he wasn’t short. He could only hope his blue eyes and long nose would one day transform into looking cool, if not handsome.
***
When he started the fall semester, his life took an unexpected turn. In a music class, George met a new instru- ment. It was an oddly shaped thing called a lute that thrummed with a deep, flat echo, like a thumped melon. Tuned to an unusual scale, the melodies lifted his voice up.
George practiced melodies on the lute as he sat on a bench in the shade of the oak tree behind the stables. He visualized the medieval minstrels who roamed around, entertaining in villages and courts, looking for patrons and playing in groups. They were the garage bands of their time, improvising, turning their poetry into songs and their melodies into multipart harmonies.
Samples of surviving minstrel music, with its other- worldly scale, taught him how to sing. Whenever he aimed his voice in this new scale, it strayed lower or higher. But he kept practicing until he could nail the pitch. Hearing his voice echo into the air, he knew he was making progress. If only he could have been a minstrel! Troubadour music revolved around the singer, who composed his melodies and words and accompanied himself. Rock and roll took a backseat. George wasn’t chasing a band anymore. He was the band.