Jane ducked behind them and wiggled out of her dress. “These are men’s clothes.”
“Women can wear trousers now,” Sofia explained, playing along. She turned her head to the sky. A CCTV camera mounted on the building above pointed down at them. Sofia pretended not to see it but turned her shoulders and moved her chin to be filmed from the best angle.
“I’ve worn trousers before, Miss Wentworth,” Jane said. “I played King George in The Horrible History of England, a play I wrote and performed with my siblings.”
“Please call me Sofia.” She didn’t want the general public and Jack hearing her called by her last name. It made her sound aloof. And old.
“How peculiar,” Jane remarked. “The people last night addressed each other by their Christian names also. Do I leave my underclothes on?”
“You call everyone by their first names here,” Sofia said. “Yes, leave them on.” Sofia considered how best to play this. She needed to appear like she was unaware the whole thing was a stunt, while secretly saying philosophical, informative things to reendear her to her husband.
Jane pulled up the trousers and tucked her chemise inside. She covered the lumps with the shirt. “Will this do?” Her face bore a look of complete confusion.
Sofia looked her up and down. Jane’s tiny frame swam underneath layers of flowery beige polyester. Her Regency hairdo remained, with the tiny ringlets surrounding her face. Altogether, she resembled a shrunken clown. “You look smashing,” Sofia said with confidence. She rolled the waistband up on the trousers until they could be rolled no more. Sofia crept forward to the edge of the side passage. She turned her head left and right. The coast was clear for the moment. The so-called police were gone. She motioned for Jane to follow her and they walked out onto the main street.
“So,” Sofia began as they walked down Stall Street, “have you been resurrected, then?” She looked around for the next camera. She couldn’t see any; they must be hidden. She hoped none were in the bushes. Being shot from below was a most unflattering angle.
“I beg your pardon?” said Jane.
“Or perhaps they cloned your DNA from a bonnet?” Sofia snorted. She was trying to help the young actress along, as she may have been rusty with improvisation. But her new companion feigned misunderstanding at this, so Sofia elaborated. “You’re in a different time now. I was just wondering how you got here.”
The woman responded better to this invitation and now stared at Sofia with alarm. “What time is this?” she asked.
Sofia paused and smiled. The time had arrived for the revelation, it seemed. This formed a key moment in the narrative, and Sofia needed to play it well. “What time do you think it is?” she said in a casual voice.
“It is the year eighteen hundred and three,” Jane replied, as if on cue. She delivered the line quite well, with caution and confusion.
Sofia nodded and gave her reply. “Afraid not. It is the year twenty hundred and twenty.”
“Heavens preserve us,” Jane said. She opened her eyes wide and paced around in a circle. Then she closed her eyes and sat on the ground and seemed to faint.
Sofia shook Jane’s shoulder and blew on her face. The woman roused. “The date on the paper. Last night,” she said to Sofia.
“What paper?” said Sofia. She wondered if she should tell the woman to get up. But she was acting rather shaken by the news—understandably—and Sofia was loath to interrupt her process.
Jane explained to Sofia about some piece of paper she was handed the night before.
“The call sheet for rehearsal? That had the date, yes. It is 2020,” Sofia replied.
The Jane Austen impersonator shuddered. Sofia was enjoying the performance now. She had underestimated this actress. Sofia had delivered the reveal with gravitas, and now the actress responded with a convincing display of disbelief and terror. Though it was behind-the-scenes footage, and likely shot on a grainy video camera, Sofia did not mind. An audience suspended their disbelief at any plot point when they saw genuine human feeling, and this tale of a person from two hundred years ago, trapped in the modern day, would move the hardest of hearts.
Chapter Fourteen
Jane leaned over her knees and inhaled. While the only food she’d consumed over the past three days were the biscuits she’d packed for her journey to London, she suddenly felt inclined to deposit that paltry meal across the footpath. She attempted to curtail such a reaction until she was confirmed of the facts. “That’s impossible,” she said to the woman who asked to be called Sofia. The evidence grew harder to ignore that something had happened to the Bath she knew. But still, she clung to hope that the absurd reality the woman had suggested was a mistake. “I don’t believe you,” she tried.
Sofia hailed a passerby, another man in his drawers. “Excuse me, sir. What year is it?” she said to him.
“Do I know you?” said the man. He lifted his eyeglasses. “Are you from Wheel of Fortune?”
Sofia covered her face with her hand. “No. The year, sir?” she insisted.
“It’s twenty twenty,” he replied with a huff and a scowl, as though Jane’s companion had asked a foolish question. He replaced his glasses and walked off.
Sofia turned to Jane. “See?” she said. Jane winced. This offered a less than ideal situation. Sofia retrieved a newspaper from a bin and showed it to Jane. “And see again.” The front page bore a painting of a man making a speech. The painting shared the same lifelike quality of the one that had terrified Jane in the hall the night before. Sofia pointed to the date printed at the top of the page: 2020.
Jane shivered and considered bringing up her meal again. She stared at Sofia. Perhaps Lady Johnstone and her
