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Darcy hadn’t done all that well in history. Not at first. She’d only passed in tenth grade because Emmett Perry had liked the look of her chest and taken pity on her. She’d passed American Civics the same way, thanks to Melanie Little feeling much the same.
It was only when she had to declare a major that she settled on Poli Sci and belatedly came to grips with how much she really did not know about The Past, beyond general pop culture osmosis (mostly binge-watching Downton Abbey and reading a couple dozen romance novels one very memorable and educational summer). Fortunately pop culture was being really forgiving these days when it came to folks who didn’t know their modern European history, what with the resurgence of interest in Captain America and the ensuing Cold War. By the time she was on her way to graduation she was packing a respectable comprehension of 20th century events and a secret stash of Captain America close-up portrait shots, because hello jawline, but that did nothing to explain why they tapped her to go back to the dawn of the 19th and she told them as much.
“They” were SHIELD, of course. Because who else would come up with time travel? They were a little cagey about the origins of the tech, though, and even cagier about why she was the one they were asking to go back.
“Shouldn’t it be an astronaut, or something?” she wondered. “This feels like a job for an astronaut.”
The woman who sat across from her, wearing a forgettable suit and a memorable expression of apprehension, looked at Darcy as though she had slipped into some language uncommon to the pair of them.
“Why should it be an astronaut, Miss Lewis?”
“I don’t know, Brenda, why should it be me?” Darcy fired back, genuinely at sea. “I’m not—I mean, time travel? This isn’t my thing! And you haven’t even told me why you’re asking me!”
“My name is not Brenda.”
“I know it isn’t, but you didn’t tell me what it was, so I had to guess.”
Not-Brenda managed a small smile.
“Stacey.”
“Okay. Would not have guessed you were a Stacey. That’s one up for you.”
“This is not a game, Miss Lewis. There is no score.”
Darcy felt, for far from the first time, the infuriating desire to peel off her own skin and go running from the room that she so often seemed to suffer when trying to drag a straight answer out of somebody who worked for SHIELD. She clutched at her temples and, in the process, what felt like the remaining shreds of her sanity.
“You want me to go to the past.”
“Yes.”
“The—the 1800s.”
“Eighteen fourteen.”
“In England.”
“Kent.”
“Is that in England?”
“Yes.”
“Then just say so!”
“I just did.”
“You are an extremely infuriating person to deal with, Stacey. And I say that as somebody who should know.”
Stacey mustered a smaller smile.
“Miss Lewis, I can appreciate your confusion—”
“Why me, though? If you can appreciate my confusion, why can’t you tell me why you’ve chosen me?”
“It’s not germane to the present topic of—”
“It’s not happening, is what it’s not, Stacey, unless you tell me why, out of an entire building of scientists and soldiers and technicians and I am sure historians too, you tell me exactly why I’m the one you’re asking to go to eighteen-fourteen and do something you still won’t even explain.”
So Stacey told her.
Captain Steven Rogers was, in the summer of 1814, the newest darling of His Majesty’s Regiment. He was, according to all salvaged contemporary accounts of the time, the most coveted guest at all house parties in the district where his troops were garrisoned prior to shipping overseas to join Wellington’s army. He was handsome, courteous and cut a dashing figure in his uniform.
He was also a complete fabrication from start to finish.
“No such person existed,” Stacey explained. “At least, not beyond this time and place, in that summer. We don’t even have any record of his shipping out, much less proof he was at Waterloo. However there is also no record of his death, or censure for desertion. He simply appears in June and vanishes by August, with one other possible—well. Suffice to say we have reason to believe that he is actually our Captain Rogers, who was tasked last week with a particularly sensitive assignment and cannot now be located. Given this manifestation in Kent, we believe he never left the building.”
Captain Rogers, Stacey asserted, had fallen out of time, and due to an unfortunate limitation placed on SHIELD’s technology by virtue of its being so very temperamental, Darcy Lewis was the only available candidate who could be got on short notice to fetch him back.
“Right,” said Darcy. “But, why me?”
Stacey hemmed and hawed, then finally said that the experimental nature of the device severely limited their optimal choice of traveler.
“You are one of very few people on record with documented prior exposure to certain energies not unlike those used in the machine, with no observable ill effects. You are one of even fewer persons with this documented exposure who are within functional distance from the building and, by extension, the machine itself.”
“Oh,” Darcy said. “Well, okay then.”
Stacey blinked rapidly.
“Just . . . just like that?”
Darcy shrugged.
“You may not believe it, Stacey, but I am actually a very reasonable person.”
Darcy met with the SHIELD wardrobe department (because of course they had a wardrobe department, like some kind of theater company) and fitted for a travelling outfit she was assured was to be period-correct in every detail, except for the one button on her jacket that was a concealed signal beacon meant to reopen the portal from the far side. Then, while the undergarments, dress, jacket and bonnet were given the rush order to end all rush orders, she was given a rundown of some particulars that would allow her a better chance of winning the confidence of the household that SHIELD’s research indicated was the last house party Captain Rogers was reported in historical record to attend.
“This all feels like it could come apart at any moment,” she remarked, to nobody in particular, as they fitted her for entry into the bluey-green glowing tube that was apparently powered by some sketchy HYDRA tech and the sheer gumption of a few SHIELD lab technicians who’d gotten bored on their lunch break one day and decided hey, what the hell, let’s design a time machine.
“We’ve corrected all identified flaws in the initial design. It's entirely stable now.”
“Not the tube. I don’t know from engineering. I just mean me. The dress, the story, the . . . all of it.” She reached up for about the twelfth time in the past twenty minutes to tug at her newly-fashioned bodice. “I don’t even feel like the right shape for this thing.”
“And yet,” said the earnest little tech in a gleaming white lab coat, entering the final travel schematic on a bright, glowing pad, “that should not be possible, since it was made for you.”
Then the bluey white light had closed around her and shape lost all meaning. She felt her every molecule separate and a silent scream echoed in a throat that no longer existed as every last bit of her was sent hurtling through time and space.
Darcy landed with a thud in an open field, tried to sit up, and promptly reeled back into unconsciousness.
Darcy woke again, this time to a sheep snuffling contentedly at her shoulder.
“Ew. No. Shoo. Sheepy.” She batted at the sheep. It declined to move, so she grabbed a fistful of its wool and used the sturdy, startled little animal to lever herself into a standing position and take stock of the area.
The sun was drooping somewhere off to her left, taking on an orangey tone that suggested it was well past midday. Otherwise she was favored with clear, warmish weather. She was not uncomfortable in her dress and light bolero jacket, except for all the expected reasons, none of which had to do with temperature. The signal beacon was still firmly sewn to her jacket, so that was all right. Her shoes had come off somewhere, though, and her stockings were muddy. She looked around and located one shoe in very near proximity. The other had apparently been lost to the wilds of the field or the vast, unknowable reaches of time.
“Great. Just great. Now I have to get to a party in a house I’ve never seen wearing only one shoe.” She looked down to the sheep that stood devotedly at her side, lipping at the fabric of her skirt. “I’ve watched enough Downton Abbey to know what the Dowager Countess would think of that.”
In the time it took Darcy to limp through the meadow to the roadside, she had formulated a story based in equal parts on her own imagination and the tattered collection of inappropriate reading material she and her cousin Hannah had discovered at the lake house one summer. By the time she swooned artistically in front of a passing farm cart, she’d half convinced herself of her own assumed identity and the story she’d invented to go with it. It was no trouble at all to mutter faint scraps of explanation as she was revived, bundled into the back of the cart and conveyed in jolting discomfort down a country lane to the destination named in her assignment.
She managed to stay inert for most of the journey, but she couldn’t resist propping up on her elbows to watch as they swept up the drive. The house was not as grand as Downton Abbey, but it was definitely of the type. Long and perfectly regimented, gleaming white and timeless in the late afternoon sunlight. As the driver of the cart alit, she rearranged herself on the hay once more and tried to look weak but well-bred: somebody who deserved to gain admittance to the building. She wished she was straining at the seams of her bodice a little less, and took shallower breaths in consequence. By the time she heard footsteps nearing and a murmur of voices changed shape from sound to sense-making, she was panting quite convincingly.
“Whipple, you say? My lady comes from people of that name, it’s true. And she asked particularly to be conveyed here?”
“Near as I could make out, Mr. Graves, she did indeed. I wouldn’t have come bothering in the ordinary way, but seeing as she claimed some acquaintance—”
“Just so. Very well then, Mr. Noakes, you may bear her into the house. Further inquiries must be made, naturally, but it will hardly do to leave her out here in the cart for the duration.”
A pair of arms, cragged with age but still sinewy with muscle regularly used, locked under Darcy’s neck and torso and lifted her from the bed of hay. She was jounced and bumped along until the warmth of the sun left her skin and a shaded chill replaced it. She had made it into the house.
Additional instructions were issued, and some kind of bed was eventually made ready. Still Darcy kept her eyes lidded, and did not dare stir until she was certain Mr. Noakes had taken himself away altogether, robbing her unsuspecting hosts of the handiest means of packing her away again should they determine she was not fit to keep. Only when perfect silence fell on the room did she risk a peek, and find that they had brought her into some kind of room furnished with an ornate vanity and a low, plush settee on which she had been deposited. Curiosity temporarily sated, she closed her eyes again and lay in wait.
When the door to her room opened again and a soft rustle of fabric could be heard, Darcy at last artistically fluttered her eyelashes. She supposed in a time like this, when there was no cinematic standard to adhere to, a girl could take a little artistic licence when it came to coming around from a faint.
The woman watching her was quite ordinary looking, really. She had pleasant, fine features marked with age in a way that a woman of similar wealth in Darcy’s time would probably be treating with injections and discreet partial tucks around the hairline. Her greying hair was gathered in a loose knot at the top of her head, and she wore a lovely greenish thing that fit her like it had been made for her.
Which, Darcy realized, it probably had. Just like her own. Something about discovering this kinship went a long way toward helping Darcy feel like she could pretend to belong, and it was on the strength of this that she proceeded.
“Where . . .” Darcy looked this way and that. “Where am I, please?”
The sound of her voice brought real surprise to the woman’s features, which she quickly smoothed away.
“You are a guest at Highbury. I am Lady Kelderman, but I believe the name you gave my farmer was that of my own people.”
Darcy clung to her fuzzy confusion for a minute longer, since it allowed her to gather her thoughts at her own pace before answering.
“Yes. I . . . my husband’s name was Whipple.”
She was able to drag the correct family tree out into recitation with reasonable conviction. The distant cousin to whom she claimed marriage was safely dead and buried for three years. By the time anybody was able to learn he’d left no wife behind, Darcy fully intended to have retrieved an errant supersoldier and left the premises altogether. As to her accent, she simply claimed Irish birth, and was pleased to see her hostess lose all evident interest.
“And you were robbed, you say?”
“Set upon by bandits,” Darcy agreed unblushingly. She had no idea if it was a credible story for the place and time, but bandits had featured heavily in the novels she and Hannah had hidden in the bunkie to share in the light of their flashlights, and they worked well to explain her lack of coach and luggage now. “I think they were conspiring with the coachman I hired. When they abandoned me in a field, and I determined I was in that part of the world from which my husband’s people came, I thought . . .”
She mustered a nice, blinking little gesture that invited Lady Kelderman to draw her own conclusions, which she mercifully did.
“I see. Well naturally we bid you welcome. I apologize only that I will be a distracted hostess, given the arrangements underway for this weekend. A little fête has been arranged for His Majesty’s regiment, you see. They set out from here the week next, and we thought it a perfect opportunity to bolster their morale.”
Darcy performed surprise and emitted genuine interest.
“Oh but what a lovely idea,” she said, fitting her thoughts around what felt like appropriate speech patterns. “To . . . to bolster morale.”
Lady Kelderman responded as well to praise as anybody of any birth in any time period could reasonably be hoped to do. She smiled, a little flustered, and suggested that Mrs. Whipple would not be equal to the task of looking in on them that evening. Mrs. Whipple bravely smiled and said no indeed, it would be too much for her on the whole, but perhaps if there were a quiet moment when she might speak her appreciation to the company, it would not be more than could be borne.
Then Lady Kelderman took her leave and Darcy did collapse in the most genuine fit of exhaustion she’d suffered since her arrival.
“Oh my God,” she mumbled, pressing her hands to her face, “how do people live like this? You could run out of breath over the manners alone.”
Then she rolled over on her side and dropped off into a completely genuine sleep that went uninterrupted until a maid came in with tea, washing implements, and a formal invitation to appear at the ball that evening as her hostess’s guest.
Darcy said, quite honestly, that she could not think of anything she’d like more.
The ballroom was lit with candlelight, and Darcy approved. It was the most forgiving light overall, and as such it handily concealed the fact that her dress had been only sponged clean following her trek across the meadow and subsequent ride in a market cart, and even more hastily paired with a shawl, a pair of shoes a bit too large and bracelets a bit too small, thanks entirely to the generosity of a hostess still laboring under the happy delusion that Darcy was, by marriage, some distant family relation set upon by bandits and robbed of all her worldly goods.
The candlelight, though, did little to hide the smells. People in 1814, Darcy discovered in short order, didn’t bathe nearly as often as all the Dukes and Duchesses falling into bed together in romance novels would lead an impressionable tweenager to believe. Their teeth also weren’t always that great, so she had learned not to smile too much, because her teeth were a source of almost constant wonder in this company and she was running out of ways to not explain that they were chiefly the work of her childhood orthodontist. Not that Dr. Fogelman wouldn’t appreciate the referral, but nobody here was going to live long enough to even see him born, much less get their teeth fixed there, so why borrow trouble?
She clung to the outskirts of the crowd as much as she could, biding her time, eavesdropping easily thanks to the general crush of all people pressed up against each other as though it were the most natural thing in the world to share this much personal space with this many near strangers. She pressed her nose into the hanky her hostess’s maid had splashed liberally with scent, breathed deep the smell of rosewater, and watched the door.
“He’s to be here tonight,” the woman behind her promised a companion. “Lady Kelderman assured me that Captain Rogers was one of the first whose company she sought. Have you met him yet? Oh! But you must. Everybody says—”
Darcy did not have to hear the rest of the conversation to know what everybody said. Even if she hadn’t already stored up a secret collection of pinup and actually met him several times in person, she’d still have known enough to fill in the gaps. Everybody said he was tall, golden and glorious. Manners perfect in any era. Had a way of smiling at you that . . . well. She’d told Jane it should require a licence, carrying a smile like that. Jane had thought she was making a joke, and that was probably all to the good.
Nobody, Darcy was positive, would ever have sent her back here on a rescue mission if they’d known what the sight of that smile could do to her knees.
Thankfully she’d kept this weakness largely under wraps, so here she was! Darcy Lewis, time traveler. Huffing antique scent from a hanky and trying not to pass out in a ballroom. Definitely not one of her yearbook-documented post-graduation goals, but life took weird turns sometimes. A girl had to adapt.
And . . . there he was.
She saw him at the same time as about one third of the room did, so any betrayal of recognition she suffered was easily lost in the hubbub. The crowd turned and looked while trying not to be seen to turn and look, and the effect was . . . well, it was just a shame they were two centuries away from the invention of YouTube. That collective double-take would have gone viral.
It took her a while to work her way across the room. She could hardly cut across the dance floor so she had to nudge her way through the perimeter, and in that time Steve’s attention must have been claimed by a dozen or more people all competing to shake his hand and sate the interest they were pretending not to feel. In that same time, Darcy knew, he would have charmed them all. Not by trying. Just by being. It was what came of being him.
She didn’t let herself think about what his reaction would be when he saw her. Not until she had actually pushed out around the last body blocking their way and staggered to an awkward stop in front of him.
He had come, she saw now, with a much shorter man. Also uniformed, considerably more elderly and plump around the middle. This older man’s eyes rested on her with slightly more than friendly interest, which was Darcy’s cue to reach up and automatically adjust the bodice of the dress she wore. Then she looked over to Steve, and registered . . .
Nothing.
Blankness.
Complete and total lack of familiarity.
Captain Steven Rogers was staring at her as if she was nothing more than a complete stranger.
Darcy so forgot herself, she dropped her hanky.
The lucky thing about some clichés was they really did work in reality. It was where some of them had begun, after all. No fewer than four men within arm’s reach all dove in a gallant attempt to capture the scented handkerchief Darcy had let fall, but it was Captain Rogers who got there first.
“Miss . . .”
“Mrs. Whipple,” she said coolly. “Eustacia Whipple.”
(did a muscle in his cheek twitch? Or had she imagined that?)
“Mrs. Whipple. Allow me.” He presented the handkerchief to her with a solemn bow.
Darcy drew on the entire summer’s memory of every part of those novels where people had kept their clothes on, and mustered what she thought was a pretty decent reply.
“A favor given is a favor earned. Might I have the favor of your name?”
He looked, if possible, more blank than ever. The portly man to his left came immediately to the rescue.
“Mrs. Whipple, may I present Captain Steven Rogers.”
“Captain,” said Darcy, still watching narrowly for any evidence of recognition. But Steve, damn his perfectly regular features, betrayed none. He merely bowed again and inquired, in the blandest tones, as to the status of her engagement for the next dance.
Her flipping what?
All right, so it turned out he was asking her to dance. And he seemed to be doing it in such a way that aroused no suspicion or confusion in the people present, so it must have been an appropriate question, asked in the correct way. Which meant if this was an act, he was much better at it than she was.
She was tempted to tell him so as he stood at her elbow and waited for the current dance to end, but didn’t quite dare. She did not quite have the nerve to congratulate him on his performance of belonging. Because what if it wasn’t a performance? What if he’d gotten . . . damned if she knew. Some kind of time traveler amnesia. Was that possible? And if it was, what could she do about it? She doubted he’d be amenable to having her bundle him into a market cart and haul him back to the field where she had originated and send her collection signal to SHIELD.
And if Steve Rogers was not amenable to being bundled away, albeit for much more prosaic purposes than some of her fantasies had occasionally designed, she was out of luck.
Fortunately getting him onto the dance floor was entirely his idea, so that was easy enough. The dance itself was hell, all steps and moving and very clearly correct things to do that she was doing all wrong, but he covered for her enough that she was able to scope out the people around her and do her best to mimic them, albeit with a lot less grace and a lot more uncertainty. It wasn’t until the bit that they were palm-to-palm, turning in a slow, measured circle, that she registered how he was looking at her. Not with the reserved geniality of their public interaction, but something almost impossible: dark, angry, burning.
She was almost certainly not supposed to find that stare as hot as she did, right?
Nor was she supposed to enjoy the cold frisson that ran down her spine when he leaned in close, put his mouth beside her ear, and demanded, low and gravelly, “What the hell are you doing here?”
All her breath rushed out of her in a long whoosh of relief.
“Oh good. No market cart necessary.”
This time it was Steve who missed a step, then regarded her in stiff-necked, brow-furrowed confusion. She fought the tide of heat that crept up from her neckline, to no avail.
“Never mind. Forget I said that. Just glad you’re still with us, is all.” She smiled uncertainly up at him, drew back in accordance with the pattern of the dance, then covered her smile with a cough. “Ah. Anyway. As to what the hell, I’m here because of SHIELD. They got a little worried when you disappeared from there in the middle of an assignment, and turned up in all these old society columns and diaries where you definitely didn’t belong.”
Steve sighed.
“Right. Of course. If I’d had any way of leaving word, I would have, but there was no time. He was already in the portal when I found him, I was going to lose him once the coordinates were wiped, so I just . . . went.”
“Who?” Darcy wondered, then, belatedly, found her answer. “Ohh. Your assignment?”
Steve nodded.
“There was a leak. Right out of SHIELD itself. I’m not the usual guy they would tap for covert ops, but with this one there was something that made them think he might be jumping timelines, and they weren’t sure of their limitations in that respect. Not something they have a lot of research on yet, so they thought they’d better have somebody who met certain body metrics and who’d been around. As in, around in time. And I was closing in, only he got to the lab before me and I almost lost him. I saw the machine powering down, figured he’d made the jump, and I jumped too before it could reset the coordinates. Followed him here; to this time, I mean. Not the house. But he’s supposed to be here, tonight, and I think this is where it’s all supposed to go down. The thing he was planning for, and arranging.”
He faltered, considering.
“Or . . . this is where it went down. Already.”
His brow furrowed deeper, then, as he considered the improbability of choosing the correct tense. Darcy found her gaze involuntarily tracing the outline of his face, from the jutted chin all the way up to the deep furrows of his brow.
“You know,” she blurted. “You look so . . . brooding. Like something out of a romance novel. No wonder they completely wanted to believe in you.”
For all that she blushed immediately afterward, like a girl caught confessing her crush in public, it was not an entirely uncalculated statement. She’d wanted to disrupt the tension of his expression, and to her delight, it worked. He looked down at her and the ghost of something that might have once been a smile touched the corner of his mouth.
“You also look . . . very nice,” he said, as a kind of protest to what she had implied by her effusive compliment of him. Although he clearly said it because it was what was expected of him, Darcy still decided to count it in her favor.
“Thanks,” she sighed, and squirmed. “I just don’t think I’m built for this century, you know?”
From the way he stared at her, he did not actually know. She glanced down at her generously-proportioned chest, and tugged at the fabric encasing it.
“These. I spent most of my life avoiding Empire waistlines and now here I am, running around in the actual era that invented them. The effect is disproportionate.”
Now it was his turn to flush. Great. She’d gone and made Captain America look at her chest, and she had made him blush for doing so. She had also apparently inspired him to compliment her, while carefully avoiding all comment about her breasts.
“I think you blend in very well. They would never have sent you if they thought you wouldn’t.”
Darcy gaped. This was infinitely more shocking than commenting on her chest. This was a lie. She did not blend in, and she knew it. But he wanted her to think she was being successful at this, and she appreciated the thought.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it was just the fact that I survived the whoosawhatsit thing Thor took Jane away in. Because apparently you can die travelling in time, and they liked knowing I almost definitely wouldn’t.”
“I like knowing it too,” he offered, and this did come with an actual smile, small but real. “The ‘definitely’ part more than the ‘almost.’”
Yeah, she had not loved the almost either. But here they both were, traipsing around a sweaty, stinky ballroom, and she was still alive. So far. So that had to count as a win.
“Who is this guy, anyway?” she wondered. “The one you’re following.” She wasn’t positive, but the dance seemed to be winding down, and she needed to know not just what had brought Steve here but what was keeping him, too.
“His name is Kirk Anderson and he is supposed to be an archivist at SHIELD. Works maintaining a database linking artifacts of alien or historic importance to their corresponding events, timelines . . . that sort of thing.”
“So what does he want with this point in time?”
“I don’t know,” Steve admitted.
Well didn’t that just fill a girl with confidence.
“You really don’t know at all?”
“We don’t travel in the same circles,” Steve said dryly. “Not there, and definitely not here. He seems to be treated as somebody of significance in this time. He can get access to events and functions in a way that suggests he has been granted a social presence here. I definitely lack the status he enjoys.”
“You wouldn’t know it, to hear them talk about you.”
Steve swallowed, and Darcy discovered that she was definitely enjoying his varied, subtle expressions of embarrassment.
“I did make a point of . . . standing out,” he admitted. “At parties. It was the only way to be sure I would gain access to as many of them as possible.”
Darcy considered how difficult it had been just to get into this one, and had to allow he might be onto something.
“But why be a soldier? That must have made it more difficult.”
“It was an easy thing to be, though. Because I am. And here, they’re everywhere. Everything is being done to prepare for the battle to come, so they’re mostly worried about people deserting, not sneaking in. I presented myself as a newly-commissioned officer, which gave me an identity, but it means I’m not allowed to leave the regiment very much. We’re occupied with training—” the dance was stopping, now. Definitely stopping. He leaned in as he offered his elbow and spoke more urgently. “But he’s going to be here. Tonight. It’s my chance to find out why he came, and stop him.”
He had to escort her back to the wall. She knew that. To be seen talking with each other having claimed no prior acquaintance meant they couldn’t speak openly. In the crush and muddle of the crowd, she wasn’t sure if she’d learned that from a romance novel, Downton Abbey or if it was just instinctive common sense.
“I do intend to go back to our time,” he said as they walked. “If that’s what you came here to ensure.”
She started to promise him that it was not, then stopped. Considered.
Wasn’t it?
They hadn’t even really made that clear.
She’d assumed, of course, that they wanted her to check on him. Make sure he was all right. Find out why he had fled to this time and place while giving no advance warning. And she’d been vaguely aware that if he had forgotten his reasoning and believed he belonged here, she’d need to find a way to take him home. But the idea that she had been sent to bait him into returning was suddenly there, seizing hold of her, and she didn’t like the way it stuck in her throat.
He didn’t comment on her silence, but she knew he must have marked it. She felt weirdly guilty, like she had knowingly been conspiring against him even though it hadn’t really occurred to her until this moment that she might have been sent to retrieve him against his will.
“I’ll stay,” she heard herself say. “Here, I mean. With you. As long as it takes. I don’t know that I can help you get him, but—” They were almost back to the wall, she was nearly out of time. “—I want to try.”
Then they were there, he was nodding courteously, she made a bow with her upper body and her head the way she saw several of the other ladies doing to the partners parting from them, and she was alone by the wall once more, a promise newly made, watching the roiling crowd with fresh purpose.
The ball was long. Why had none of the books ever hinted at how long these things really were? They were well into the wee hours of the morning, now, and people were dropping like sweaty, smelly mayflies. Drunk men snored softly in one corner while a small party of staggering dancers wrung the last few coherent cords from the drooping musicians. Steve had been dragged away to participate in some card game or other, and the few soldiers who remained were propped upright, stiff and miserable looking in uniform against the wall.
Darcy claimed a low bench along the wall and draped herself across it, intending that she would only pretend to doze off, so nobody would suspect her of eavesdropping and they might have a very important conversation that she could readily overhear. Except apparently time travel was extremely exhausting, because the moment her head came to rest on her arm she was out like a light—or, like a light would have been, if the light had not been supplied by candles now burned very low in their candelabrum, guttering and spitting just like a girl snoring into the crook of her arm after a long two centuries rudely rewound around her.
The music abated while she slept and the last dancers took themselves off to more horizontal amusements. The soldiers dozed fitfully. Somewhere else in the house a card game entered its third and most raucous hour . . . and into the nearly-deserted ballroom crept one man who didn’t belong, and one man who belonged more than any other.
They took a cursory look around them at the few bodies that remained and evidently deemed this as safe a place to converse as any.
“Servants won’t be in until morning,” the shorter offered gruffly. “Better odds than the study, don’t y’know.”
They moved to settle onto a bench not far from Darcy’s, and in so doing, passed very near her nose. She woke with a resentful jerk at the smell of particularly rank odor, as if the person passing had made a point of abstaining from the use of all scented products, and was about to sit up in search of the person who had robbed her of her sleep when the words penetrated:
“. . . look here, are you really sure of this thing?”
“More than any other,” the second man said. Despite sounding slightly congested, he spoke with cool assurance. “But it must be kept here.”
“Glad to oblige, I am sure. When they said you were the man for my little job, I am sure I’d no notion you were all the goods and more besides. Least I can do in return. But look, you have still not explained to me why it has got to be my home.”
There was a silence, as if the other speaker were weighing the advisability of confiding in his host, and then seemed to come to a conclusion.
“Yes, well, it hardly matters now, I suppose. The reason is this: on a particular day in the future a man will gain entry to this home. He will ostensibly be here to visit his cousin, then Lord Kelderman, but in fact he will be an agent of a much greater national power. It is the descendant of that power I serve, and it is in their service that I apply myself to you and ask you to safeguard this asset, which will aid them in achieving their aim, until that time that it can be retrieved. For given the nature of the little covert exercise I performed for you these weeks past, I have reason to believe, Lord Kelderman, that your own interests are more closely aligned with those of the prisoner at Elba than they are those of His Majesty George III. Is it not so?”
Darcy held herself in a posture of perfect sleep through Lord Kelderman’s cautious, quiet assent. She tried to slit her eyes open just a little, in the hope that she might see the object in question, but they were seated completely beyond her line of sight. She could see only the empty seats that had previously held the musicians, and a bit of the table that held an empty punch bowl. They had inconsiderately arranged themselves in such a way that she couldn’t hope to sneak a glimpse of whatever this thing was that had been worth jumping two hundred years in the past to hide.
She suffered an agonizing wait of what seemed like an hour as they shuffled off through a different doorway, then counted painfully to thirty before she allowed herself to roll off the bench and straighten stiffened limbs in a futile attempt to stretch away the consequences of sleeping the very wrong way on something that was very not a bed.
Then she shook out the rumpled, re-ruined skirts of her dress and took to her heels through an unfamiliar house in search of the only familiar face it could offer.
Steve Rogers was not an easily ruffled man. The whole super soldier serum, Red Skull, impromptu cryogenic storage, fighting-off-aliens shtick tends to knock most of your capacity for shock down to a pretty negligible level, and as such he was painfully conscious of the bizarre reality which found him less surprised to have traveled two hundred years back in actual linear time than he had been to find that Darcy Lewis had promptly done the same.
That she had accosted him at a house party and danced with him and both discussed and illustratively clutched at her breasts as though she saw them as some kind of burden instead of a very tempting asset had nearly sent him into overload—speaking, of course, strictly in terms of reeling from the unexpected, and definitely, absolutely not from arousal at all.
Still, he was finding it difficult to focus on his card game. And he was usually pretty good at this sort of thing, too, since the men around him all got ragingly drunk in short order, and he couldn’t even manage to get a buzz on. But the cards made little sense tonight and everything inside him was galloping along at an unusual speed.
It was, he thought, probably how it felt to be drunk. If you could get drunk. Except the source of his intoxication and befuddlement was not contained within his glass, and draining that same glass did absolutely nothing to clear his head, nor dull the bewildering sensation of having his own focus completely stripped away by the advent of . . . well, if not the person he least expected to see, definitely one of the top ten.
When it came to people he did not expect to see, his mother would have been more of a shock, certainly. One of his teachers from back in Brooklyn, maybe, or the guy who cleaned the floors in his apartment building. Yeah, if he thought about it, there were a few people he’d have been more surprised to see than Darcy Lewis, but not that many, and in terms of people SHIELD could actually have sent after him, she was definitely the top—
“Damnation, Rogers, are you so deep in your cups? I have asked you three times and not yet had an answer. Have you a hand to play?”
A friendly hand was giving him a shake, drawing his focus back to the table. He looked around in blank astonishment to find the game had advanced well beyond any level he recalled playing to. The men who were accustomed to his steady, even-handed playing were regarding him with pleased astonishment, and he was conscious of the world having, somehow, inverted.
“Forgive me, gentlemen,” he muttered, thrusting back his chair with stumbling speed. “I cede my portion to the victor. A . . . previous engagement has greater claim on my time.”
“Previous engagement?” hooted one of the drunkest men at the table. “Oho! Is that the name her mother calls her?”
Steve, already out the door, did not bother to reply, but the appreciative laughter that filled the room did chase a small smile onto his face as he made his retreat.
Darcy, he found himself thinking, would have appreciated that joke. He resolved to share it with her when he found her again.
Darcy stood in the middle of the front hallway and struggled to picture the blueprints. They had shown her blueprints, among other things, during her whirlwind debriefing on the subject of the family whose house had been the location of the last public mention of Captain Steven Rogers. And now that she had stumbled onto some event that was equal parts card party, drinking game and impromptu cabaret chorus risen to serenade whatever startled woman walked in on them in search of her friend, she knew that somewhere in this house, looking for her or his more sinister quarry, was a man who actually knew less about the house than she did. Which did not inspire confidence in his odds of success, because Darcy was really struggling to remember anything relevant at all.
The Kelderman household was not an ancient one. It was not an unending one, either—by the time SHIELD would send her back, the last of the Keldermans would have been dead nearly forty years. But their home did still stand, and its floorplans, somewhat modified and modernized in later years, were a matter of public record. Now if only Darcy would make them a matter of present memory, she’d be all set.
The men Steve was looking for were unlikely to want to be anywhere they might be disturbed. Servants were awake, technically, even at this hour, stumbling sleepily around the house in a futile quest to clean while half asleep on their feet. The major public areas would not be done until morning, though, and any room where somebody wanted to sleep undisturbed . . . or any room that attached to it . . .
Like a distant bell, Stacey’s voice penetrated the sleep-fogged upper reaches of Darcy’s memory.
“. . . and the dressing room formerly belonging to the Lady Kelderman was remodeled as a bathroom in the 1950s, exposing a particularly clever hidden storage chamber. It is just large enough to conceal a small person, if you were in desperate need of a hiding place. At the time to which you are travelling you will find it in its original state.”
Well.
Good a place to look as any, really.
She started for the stairs without a second thought of who or what might be lying in wait at the top.
The card party had actually been twice interrupted since Steve left it, though Darcy could have had no way of knowing as she had not thought to ask, and the men present were not in any fit state to even clearly recall, much less consider relevant, the earlier intrusion. Between Steve’s departure and her arrival, a total of twelve more cups were emptied, three highly inappropriate songs were sung (one an original composition that brought much accolade on its blushing composer) and two men walked into the room.
“Dear me,” said Lord Kelderman, “Captain Rogers no longer with you? I was only just speaking of him to my, erm, guest, here, and he professed a great desire to meet the man.”
The affable, drunken smiles that settled on the referenced guest slid off him without any discernible effect.
“Oh to be sure he was here,” said one of the heavier-weight drinking contenders, “but he went off, don’t y’know. Had to see a ride about a horse.” He paused, checking his own phrasing for error, and seeming to find it wanting in some respect. “Er. Girl about a horse.” But no, he frowned, that was not much better. At last his expression cleared. He’d got it. “Had to give a girl a ride!”
Then he slumped over in pleased encore of the chorus of one of their bawdiest earlier performances, and did not notice the startled expression that flashed across the face of Lord Kelderman’s guest.
“Did he only say as much to excuse himself from the party?” said the man, snuffling heavily and then raising a handkerchief of his own as if attempting to filter out the miasma of alcohol and cologne that permeated the chamber. “Or are you, in fact, aware of such a woman?”
This was asking a little too much of the card players' clarity of cognition, but Lord Kelderman was, thankfully, able to supply some context.
“He danced with somebody tonight,” he offered. “New gal. Wife’s cousin or something. Supplied with plenty of natural, er,” he gestured vaguely, “charm.”
“The very one!” agreed one of the card players emphatically. “Never seen Steve-o finish a dance like that. Usually he trots ‘em off quick back to their mamas, but this one was talking his ear off, and demmed if he didn’t seem inclined to let her.”
“That’ll be a sign,” agreed another player with a drunken man’s approximation of sober wisdom. “Minute a man wantsa letta lady talk . . . talkis . . . hair off, he’s done for.”
These philosophical ruminations continued even as Lord Kelderman and his guest departed the room. They paused in the hallway, and the guest probed urgently,
“Your wife’s cousin, you say? No connection to the war office or anything like that, is there? I will admit I was not discreet in completing my assignment for you, so if there is any chance we have attracted outside attention, I will need to know it now, before the object is concealed in a place that persons of intention might yet uncover.”
“Well,” Kelderman frowned, “I don’t rightly know. Only met the woman today, in fact. Run off the road by bandits. My lady was most put out about it. Wanted the magistrate summoned. As though he has nothing better to do than make personal calls at such an hour.”
“So she is unknown to you, in fact.”
“Well. Yes. But, after all, family is—”
“I believe, my Lord, it would be advantageous if we were to accelerate our program considerably. I cannot see my way clear to lingering in this place as long as Captain Rogers remains at large. And as to his female compatriot . . .” Genuine bewilderment overtook the man’s features at this point. “I cannot guess as to her identity at this time. But as to her purpose there can be little doubt. Fortunately,” patted his waistcoat pocket significantly, “I am a man with a capacity to adapt.”
If Lord Kelderman failed to understand his meaning, he was too proud to show it. They hurried down the corridor, toward the stairs.
Darcy reached the dressing chamber after Lord Kelderman, which was unfortunate. Even more unfortunate was that she only discovered her mistake after she had opened the door, walked inside and witnessed two men kneeling at an open recess in the wall, in which they were just in the act of placing a small, wrapped bundle.
Her first instinct was to back immediately out the door again, and it was a sound choice, but backing up in a skirt and borrowed shoes is actually no simple action and she snagged her heel in the bottom of her skirt, sending her bumping into the doorframe. This gave both men time to spin, sight her, and adapt to the arrival with what she probably should have called really admirable speed, if only it hadn’t ended with the taller man producing an entirely modern, automatic handgun from the pocket of his coat.
“That,” she informed him shakily, but with all the conviction of the SHIELD wardrobe department at her back, “is the kind of inaccurate detail that can really make you stand out in a time like this.”
“Do I know you?” he wondered. The question was sincere, she could tell. It was the same one she wanted to ask him.
“Um,” she said, “I feel like maybe I signed a petition you were circulating? And we met in the cafeteria once or twice? Kurt, right?”
“Kirk.”
“Right! Sorry. Steve did tell me, but this has been just . . . the worst night. I mean, no offence, or anything, but this party is just not good enough to last as long as it has. I should still have remembered your name though. But I’m hardly ever at the office, really, and it’s usually just to visit Jane or—”
“Dr. Foster,” he said, making his own leap. “You’re her assistant.”
It was almost adorable the way they kept calling her that, even thought she was definitely fully graduated and usually just dropped by to visit, these days.
“Right,” she said, because arguing semantics with the guy holding a gun on you seemed like a really dumb way to go, “the assistant.”
“So . . . why . . .” he looked around, considering. He arrived at entirely the wrong conclusion, though, which was incredibly unfortunate.
“He brought you here.”
“Steve? Oh, God, no. He had no idea—”
“You followed him, then. Why?”
She was too tired to tell him anything but the truth.
“They sent me after him.”
Like most plain truth, a man who lacked integrity struggled to believe it.
“Why would they do that? Send you?”
“Gee, Kirk, I don't know. Maybe it had something to do with how awesome I look in an Empire waistline.”
This sarcasm he did not even dignify with his attention. He persisted in his own line of questioning.
“Was it because of Captain Rogers? Your connection to him? Are the two of you . . .” He gestured at her chest, then, which despite having obliquely referred to it herself moments earlier, she had to admit she really did not appreciate.
“No!”
“But it doesn’t make sense. Why else would you be here?”
“Maybe I’m just really interested in the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars,” she suggested. “I mean, it sounds like you were sticking your nose into things around here. I heard you both in the ballroom you know; running errands for Lord Kelderman? Something to do with Elba? I might have spent my undergrad playing a lot of historical catch up, but I definitely know who the prisoner at Elba is.”
This line caused Lord Kelderman acute, visible discomfort. Kirk merely grimaced.
“Playing a hand in contemporary politics was a small price to pay to safeguard the future of more important things. Now come over here,” he ordered, beckoning with his free hand. She did not leap to obey, which prompted him to level the gun at something just a hair north of her chest.
“Now.”
She advanced with extreme reluctance. This was not great. This was the opposite of great. This was getting entirely in the way of everything Steve had come to do, it was using his sense of responsibility against him, and making her into a really awful side role in a drama she had really started to think of as her own. But his extreme reluctance to believe she could be there on purpose settled that idea for her entirely. As far as this guy was concerned, it was Captain America’s story, and she was just some girl who’d walked into it.
The same way he walked into the room at that very moment, filling the doorway, staring in at the scene in front of him, just as Darcy came within arm’s reach of Kirk and her own arm was seized.
He spun her around a little clumsily, and the gun wavered between pointing at Steve and at her.
“You should have stayed in your own time, Captain Rogers,” Kirk warned.
“Which time is that?” Steve wondered. But Darcy couldn’t help but notice the way he was staring at her, and it hurt. Hurt that she had to be somebody who made him look like that, like he was imagining everything he still had left to lose.
Then it struck her, belatedly, that he was looking at her like that—like she was somebody he didn’t want to lose—and everything inside her stomach turned around to settle right-side-up again.
Oh.
Oh.
Kirk was talking. There were instructions. There was an ultimatum, it had something to do with her, she wasn’t really focusing at this point, because time travel, and tired, and people smelled so bad, and . . . there. The detail that had been sliding around at the back of her mind since she walked into the room finally slid into place.
She fiddled with her sleeves. Demure. Nervous.
Steve was looking at her in open confusion—it made her chest hitch, that he knew something was off and that he knew it because of how she was acting—but she found what she was looking for. Drew the hanky out. Crumpled it in her fist—come on, Kirk, embrace the cliché—and there! He was pulling her back against him, finishing the threat, the gun was definitely moving from her head now to aim at Steve but that was okay because Darcy’s hand that held the rosewater hanky was up and over his nose and Kirk was sneezing.
Convulsively.
Almost hysterically.
The gun fired, because of course it did, he was sneezing, but Steve was already across the room and a single blow from his fist knocked the man to the ground.
The sneezing stopped.
Darcy turned on Steve, flung herself at him, bubbling over with pride at having remembered.
“Kirk!” she enthused. “Kirk, remember? He was in charge of the scent-free campaign, the petition he kept asking everybody in the building to sign to alter the office policies about personal scent usage because . . . well . . .” she fluttered the hanky. “He’s super allergic to perfume.”
Steve looked from the hanky to Darcy, then laughed. His arms were around her waist, he was twirling her, and okay, this was definitely better than any book she’d ever read.
Because he was big and solid and real, and she didn’t care if he never put her down.
It was a HYDRA artifact that Lord Kelderman was obliged to retrieve from its hiding place and turn over, in exchange for a promise that only Kirk's name needed to be attached to the sabotage effected on behalf of France. Darcy found it galling to even let the terrified man imagine he would get away with it, but she had seen the family tree. She knew exactly how long he had left to live, and she let that give her some comfort as they wrapped up the artifact and took it away with them.
The trip home was completed in stages, the signal beacon sent four separate times. The first for retrieval of the artifact, the second for retrieval of Kirk, and the final two, after a suitable interlude, for retrieval of Steve and Darcy. Because the return target was the same each time they all arrived within moments of each other, and it took all afternoon to sort them out.
After arriving back at SHIELD, Steve and Darcy made their report as completely as they were willing and able to do, and eventually staggered from the debrief in the wee hours of the morning as bone weary as though they had been executing the steps of an old country dance and reel all night.
“Did that seem strange to you?” Steve wondered. Darcy, who had tucked her head under his arm as they walked, pondered the question.
“What, that we stopped some British HYDRA agent in the early 1900s from getting his hands on a stashed piece of tech that could have changed the outcome of World War I and they didn’t even say thank you?” She shrugged. “Sounds like SHIELD to me.”
“No, the—I mean how long it took. And the way they kept asking if there was anything else we needed to disclose to them that might impact the integrity of the operation. That didn’t strike you as odd?”
“Look,” Darcy sighed, “from the moment a guy in a suit showed up in New Mexico to deal with the fact that my boss had a god dropped on her head, nothing these people have done has ever seemed weird. Because when it’s all weird, none of it’s weird, you know?”
Steve did not look as though he exactly followed her line of logic, but he seemed pretty willing to let himself be drawn into it.
“Right,” he said. “Of course. And as to the rest . . .” he looked sideways at her now, and was rewarded with a slow, secretive smile. “There’s no way they could know,” he decided. “Right?”
“Right.” She snuggled closer, ignoring the bump and jostle as they walked, accepting it as a small price to pay for being so close; feeling so safe. “It was before the invention of the video camera. How could they possibly find out?”
In the annals of history, the relatively minuscule chapter devoted to one Captain Steven Rogers boasts the duration of a summer only. He appeared in June and July on the roster of the Forty-Second Regiment, fluttered the pages of diaries belonging to some two or three dozen ladies (and a few gentlemen) of all ages who summered in that district, and the society notes of a handful of local circulars.
These records had all been requisitioned by SHIELD the moment they were deemed relevant to the disappearance of Captain America in pursuit of a suspected double agent, and were promptly turned over to their team of in-house historians for thorough analysis. All records were checked against each other to ensure the most coherent formation of a timeline possible, with the understanding that any detail, no matter how slight, could easily impact the success of the planned retrieval mission.
Every instance was to be accounted for, and every instance was.
Only one further mention of note was made beyond the main body of evidence, and that one nearly a week following the last, so it was understandable that even the most dedicated historian might question its relevance to the body of evidence. Captain Steven Rogers should have sailed for France with his regiment, so what could he still be doing in Kent?
Two signatures appeared in a southern Kentish town, dated the same night. They were archived in the register of a respectable lodging-house, denoting the presence for one night of Capt. and Mrs. Steven Rogers. Also of historic note in the same register was the signature that crowded directly beneath this one, that of a Miss Darcy Lewis.
This was read as being a likely transcription error for Mr. D'arcy Lewis. As to the possibility that this might have indeed been a young woman called Darcy Lewis, it was, the SHIELD historians agreed, highly unlikely that in such a time and place there could have existed a lady thusly styled. Nevertheless they turned it over to their supervisor as required by contract, with an apologetic footnote appended for the likely irrelevance of the subject matter to the retrieval mission at hand.
“No need to apologize,” Stacey had assured them, studying the relevant document with far more interest than its contents had been officially deemed to warrant. “No need at all.”
The moment they left her office, she reached for the phone and suggested a very unexpected candidate for the retrieval of Captain Steven Rogers. It said a great deal for her record of service that they only once asked if she was kidding.
“They completed the report?” Stacey’s supervisor wanted to know. The day was not the longest he had ever put in, but it was definitely one of them. He was scrolling hurriedly through the final pages on the tablet Stacey had handed him, a telltale sign of his urgent quest for the signature line. He would not want to hear any reason to stop looking for it.
“Yes, sir. Very forthcoming.”
“Good, good.” He found the line. “No surprise there, of course.” He applied his thumb to the screen, and watched it hum blue and clear as it read his print. “I mean, he is Captain America. Not the sort to keep secrets.”
She took the tablet back, tapped the button to file the sealed log, and left the room without making a reply.