“Is this where the train comes?” Jane asked.
Fred nodded, before rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbows, a custom in which Jane had only ever witnessed farmers partake. She glanced at his exposed forearms and blushed. The awkwardness remained from earlier; she still could not look him in the eye. He seemed to look over at her himself, then looked away. He bent down to tie his bootlace.
“That’s the third time you’ve tied your bootlace this morning. Is there a problem with your shoe?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, laughing incredulously. “I did not tie my laces three times.”
“You did,” Jane replied. “Once in the kitchen, once on the road here, and now.” He coughed. “Are your laces broken?”
“My shoes are one hundred percent fine, thank you,” he said. Jane eyed him curiously. He truly performed many acts that confused her. She could not tell if his oddness was due to him being a person from the twenty-first century, or whether it was simply his natural state. He took a small orange card from his pocket.
“What is that?” Jane asked him.
“My ticket?” he answered.
“Does one need such a thing to ride the train?”
“You don’t have a ticket?”
Jane shook her head, and Fred led her inside a stone building by the middle of the platform.
“Return to London, please,” Fred said to a man who seemed to sit inside a glass box.
“Sixty-one, please,” the man replied. “Cash or card?”
Jane smiled. “Sixty-one shillings? A little more expensive than the post carriage, which is only twenty, but never mind. I have the amount.” She rummaged through her trouser pocket. She had retrieved seventy shillings from her white muslin dress earlier that morning in case she needed it in London. It would not go far at these prices, but she would have to make do.
The ticket man scowled. “Sixty-one pounds.”
Jane gripped the steel bars that lay across his window. “Sixty-one pounds,” she repeated. “What madness is this?”
“What’s the problem?” Fred asked.
“This man wants sixty-one pounds for his train ride. I could pay the King of England to drag me to London in a golden carriage for sixty-one pounds. With him as the horse. I don’t have such money.”
“No money, no ticket, love,” the man in the glass box said to her.
Jane looked at the floor, mortified.
Fred shook his head. “You seriously don’t have any money?”
“Not that kind of money,” Jane said. She turned to the exit. “I guess I shall walk back to the house.”
Fred grimaced. “Don’t be stupid. Here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out two red banknotes, each marked £50.
“Good God. Are you a sultan, sir? I cannot accept,” she said, eyes wide. One hundred pounds exceeded the allowance given to her over an entire year.
He shook his head. “Pay me back if you like.”
“I don’t know how I could ever repay such a sum.” She felt doubly mortified.
“We’ll worry about it later,” he said. “Train’s almost here.” He passed the notes under the glass window. The man produced an orange card like Fred’s. Fred collected the ticket and the money and handed them both to Jane. “Keep the change.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” she said in a horrified voice.
“Keep it,” he insisted. “You might need it.” He reached into his pocket again. “Here’s an Oyster card, too, in case you want to take the tube. You’ll have to top it up, though.” Jane took the small blue card, which resembled in no way an oyster, nor any sea creature for that matter, and studied it from all angles. She knew not its use but did not want to sound like an imbecile, so she placed the object in her pocket with the banknotes, the coins, and her ticket.
“Thank you, Fred,” said Jane, truly grateful. She felt flummoxed by his generosity. All their past interactions had been filled with aggravation, teasing, and mocking; where had this kindness come from? Why had he given her a hundred pounds of his own money? He must still feel bad about the morning, she figured, and everything else.
They returned to the platform. A great horn boomed, followed by a clacking rhythm of steel hitting steel. Jane turned to face the source of the sound. A giant green oblong moved down the track. Words on its side read Great Western Railway. Jane jumped backward in fright on its approach, convinced no force in the world existed to bring such a thing to a halt. But halt it did, and the doors opened by magic. People streamed from the carriage, thirty or more, all dressed in the odd clothes of the day.
Fred stepped onto the train. Jane followed him inside the carriage. It smelled of cut metal. Rows of seats lined the carriage, as though they stood inside a narrow theater. Jane spotted a free seat and sat down next to a man in a gray coat. Fred shrugged and sat in the row behind her. The enchanted doors closed on their own.
Somewhere below her, metal again screeched on metal and the green leviathan lurched from the station. Jane looked across the man in the gray coat and watched through the window as the landscape moved. The train picked up speed as it reached the edges of the city. Houses and roads and shops transitioned to trees and paddocks; the crumbling stone walls of the Norman invasion still divided the fields as they did in the year 1803, and the seven centuries before that.
As they approached Windsor, they passed a magnificent oak tree. Jane gasped. It was the same tree she had encountered the last time she travelled to London, now likely two hundred feet tall. She wondered of the things it had seen.
Jane knew things worked differently in her own time than in the years that came before it. Serfs, stake burnings, and blackbirds in pies littered the Middle Ages, for example, and a woman had sat on the English throne in earlier times. It bore consideration that the year 2020 also produced a similar degree
