The Time Travelers, Volume 2 (14 page)

Did she have the courage?

If Johnny had never had plans to wed Flossie, the Annellos would not even know her name. She would be a demented woman on their doorstep, making demented claims.

And what if Johnny himself was there, having dinner? Would she stand bedraggled and red-eyed on the stairs while he led the laughter?

But if she went to her own home, she would not be greeted by laughter. She could not begin to imagine what her father would do. She had never worried about this, because she had expected Johnny and all his kin to be at her side.

I have been such a fool, she thought dully.

And yet … and yet …

Surely it had been true love! Surely Johnny had meant to come! Surely when he talked of their lives together, the children they would have, the joy they would share …

But what excuse …?

No, there could be no excuse. She just wanted him to have an excuse.

I must find out. I must face him. I must hear from his lips that this was a joke. How can I go to his family? thought Flossie. But how can I go to mine?

She had halted, and when at last she came to herself, she found her two escorts regarding her sadly. One of them patted her on the back, and the warmth and pressure of his touch brought her again to tears.

How could I have been afraid of them, she thought, when they are afraid for me?

She said to this rough pair, “Could you possibly lend me the fare for the train? I have friends to whom I can go.”

The two men searched their pockets and wallets, uncertainly and with long exchanges between themselves.

They had no money. “I’m sorry,” she said, sick at her lack of manners. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

They shrugged. Between them, counting carefully, they came up with train fare. They put the coins neatly in her palm, and her eyes overflowed. They had given her, quite literally, their last pennies.

For me, thought Flossie, a stranger, they will go without dinner, and perhaps their children, too, will go without dinner.

What beauty there was in the simple kindness of strangers. And she saw that in their ugly clothes, behind their dirty fingernails, they were heroes. Heroes whose names she did not know, and whose address she did not have.

“I promise to pay you back. Write down your addresses for me,” she said.

They were oddly embarrassed. It dawned on her that they could not write. Might not have addresses.

They shook their heads and said not to worry about them. They asked God’s blessing upon her journey. They took her to the right train and told the conductor to look out for her.

The train sped through the darkness, while Flossie Van Stead found light.

Whether or not Johnny loved her, she knew now that there was another direction in life. She, too, could be kind to strangers. She could do what those women starting settlement houses were doing—helping the poor. Flossie and her friends had laughed at such ladies: how ridiculous to spend perfectly good money helping immigrants.

But now she had been lost, penniless and deeply afraid.

I will not be a silly girl anymore, she thought. I will be a woman, and I will honor what these men have done.

On the way home from McDonald’s, Tod’s mother said, “Stop at the library, Tod.” To Devonny she explained, “I read by the armload. The greatest disaster is to run out of library books. We’ll just dash in, dash out.”

“Not true,” said Tod, “it takes her half an hour.
We’ll go in, too, Dev. I need to do a little research myself.”

Devonny had been asked to contribute to the new public library being erected in New York City, but had not. It was such a peculiar idea. A library intended for all New York City? There weren’t enough people who knew how to read. Lower-class people didn’t need books.

Yet one of her father’s colleagues, Mr. Carnegie, was building libraries in every small town in America. The man was amazing in his dedication to books.

When the Lockwoods and Devonny entered the town library, Devonny expected to see a few shelves of darkly bound books by boring writers. She was stunned at the immense space. And on those shelves! Beautiful books! whole floors of books! books for babies and small children and people who gardened and people who traveled! There was a room for studying and a room for journals, and these rooms had the air of a men’s club (although she had never been in one) with comfy big chairs sprawled around for silent thought and uninterrupted reading.

She was even more stunned to find a huge and wonderful music room with a bronze plaque over the door:
GIANNI
ANNELLO
ROOM
.

Flossie’s Johnny? she thought. Her hair prickled. Her skin shivered with gooseflesh.

If I stay here, I will miss my life. I will not know if Flossie married this Gianni, if they had children, if those children honored their father with this plaque. I will not know. I will not see or laugh or dine with Flossie.

If I stay here, terrible things will happen to my mother. Father promised to destroy the letter writer, and I agreed that it should be done. He will relish the task. He will omit no pain or suffering.

Devonny wandered past a section called murder mysteries. Back home, there was nothing she enjoyed more than a good murder story.

It crossed her mind that nobody in her own time knew what had happened to her. Nobody could. Nobody would.

No trace of Devonny would turn up. No body. No ransom would be asked. No news of her marriage to another would arrive.

What if people thought it was murder? What if people said Devonny was on the bottom of the East River, cement weighting her ankles?

Who would be accused of this deed? Whatever weakling stood closest.

Mama
.

Devonny stared around the unfamiliar building, with its incredible number of reading materials, and the astounding number of men, women and children
using them. It was difficult to breathe or think. Mama—accused of murder!

She would be hanged.

Only my return can save Mama, thought Devonny. There is no Strat to save either of us. I must get home. I must cross Time again. It will be too late to pacify Father by marrying Lord Winden. Hugh-David will be long gone; he will be England-bound, correct in his assumptions about America: brutality and ruffians and violence and stupidity and bad manners.

I can save Mama from her fate, but I cannot save myself. I will have no explanation for what I did or where I have been. Father will shut me away just as he said he would.

It was a terrible choice.

For if she returned to her own Time, she would not return to the life she had led there, for she had destroyed it. But if she stayed here, and created a new life, in this Time, with these people, her mother would suffer a hideous end.

Gianni’s mother spoke no English, and Flossie no Italian.

Mrs. Annello was short and fat, as gray as a great-grandmother. She pushed Flossie into a chair, taking off the ruined slippers, bathing her feet and preparing
hot-water bottles. Flossie’s decision to be a grown-up dissolved the moment she was treated as a child. She sobbed without stopping, while the Annellos kept saying, “Gianni? Gianni?” Flossie held up her hands in a universal shrug.

Mrs. Annello gave her something even more universal: a welcome. As if she were a daughter … a daughter who was expected.

At last a cousin arrived whose English was perfect. Flossie gripped Mrs. Annello’s hands and told her saga to the cousin. “He just didn’t come,” she finished. “I waited and waited, and cried, and it was dark, and I could not go home, and I had to believe that Johnny meant to come. Then two strangers came over to me. They were badly shaven, their beards in need of trim, their collars filthy. I was so afraid of them, but they said they would take me to a shelter. And then I thought of just coming to you. I had no money for train fare. They pooled their coins, and put me on the right train, and made me promise that just because my lover did not appear, I would not jump off a bridge or hurt myself. They cared about me.”

“We care about you,” said the cousin stoutly, and Flossie wept even harder and said, “But where is Gianni?”

Where indeed?

Tod drifted away from his mother and Devonny to locate the reference librarian. “I need to know how much inflation has taken place since 1898, please,” he said.

The librarian tracked it down speedily. “Multiply by thirty-three,” she said, and moved off to help another patron.

Thirty-three times two million dollars was sixty-six million dollars. That was what Devonny Stratton would have brought to Lord Hugh-David Winden.

Wow, thought Tod. Bet he’s pissed.

At the front desk of the great hotel, a telegram had been received and was awaiting the return of Lord Winden.

SEVEN
 

H
ugh-David did not travel far from the trusted path, and that included the trusted roads of New York or London. He would never have entered a neighborhood in which he would not entertain.

The streetlamps which graced the nice side of town did not exist near the docks. No one had shoveled the horse manure from the roads. Rats and starving dogs competed for garbage. A miasma of damp stinking air settled over the carriage. Groups of men rustled half seen and half sensed in black corners.

They could not find the ship.

Warehouses, huge and sprawling, ran on block after block. Immense stacks of enormous crates blocked the way. Wharf after wharf lay empty, or its space was filled with a garbage scow or a coal tub. Watchmen yelled at them and beggars howled threats.

We are fools, thought Hugh-David. These people live in shacks or in the street, with no money, no food
and no hope. These men I can only half see, they’re wild unfed packs of dogs, and I with the chain of my pocket watch glittering gold in the night.

At last, at last, the ship that belonged to Mr. Van Stead! An ugly graceless heap. Its gangplank was drawn. They had to stand on the edge of the dock, while the filthy water slapped against the pilings, and shout through their cupped hands to get attention. Nobody believed the owner could be here.

They were inspected by the dim light of a kerosene lamp held grudgingly by louse-ridden deckhands.

Looking at the men he had hired, Hugh-David had to wonder if Mr. Van Stead was wise to admit being the owner.

Finally they were permitted on board.

In the yellow failing glow of that lantern, they walked on decks that tilted as if eager to endanger their balance.

It was far into the night before Hugh-David Winden and Elmer Van Stead finally saw Gianni Annello face-to-face.

Into the captain’s cabin—mattress smelling of mildew, clothing bundled into corners without first being washed, a basin for shaving that had not been rinsed out in many months—a young man was brought.

Yes. It was the boy from the stonecutters’ crew. And he had definitely intended to meet Flossie. He
was not wearing the overalls, work shirt and boots of his daily life, but a dark suit, shiny with age, pitifully out of style, perhaps loaned him by a relative from another generation. It was torn now, stained from his imprisonment, but still a suit in which a man might get married.

Hugh-David waited while Mr. Van Stead screamed at Gianni. Mr. Van Stead had a long list of names to call Gianni Annello. He did not get far.

Nobody had expected Gianni to scream back. Gianni Annello leaped upon Elmer Van Stead, grabbing him by the neck. The celluloid collar came off in his hands. Gianni threw it aside and gripped the lapels instead, lifting Mr. Van Stead to his toes. Gianni’s unshaven face was two inches from Mr. Van Stead’s sculptured mustache. Muscles that lifted stone lifted a man without trouble.

It was not Gianni who risked being thrown overboard.

“You stopped me,” said Gianni Annello, “without stopping her? You do not know where Flossie is? It is night, and she is out there alone?”

“It is your fault,” blustered Mr. Van Stead. He had no hope of freeing himself.