The fire crackled in the hearth and Jane stared at the clock. The hands read seven o’clock. Jane sighed and, in the absence of a better plan, hoped Sofia would succeed today in finding the means to send her back to 1803. She needed a way to pass the time until then, so she sat in an armchair and opened Fordyce’s Sermons.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jane finished Fordyce’s Sermons for the third time. She had attended to this book previously as an aid to sleep, but now that she had the opportunity to read it in full, she saw it also presented great potential for comedy. The two-volume compendium of lectures on the morality and chastity of young women abounded with sound advice. But after the third reading, she’d exhausted even her capacity for laughter and felt dismayed to discover the hour only reached eleven.
Disobeying Sofia was not her intention. She possessed every desire to do as directed, to make no interaction with the advancements of the twenty-first century, lest she erase herself, her novels, and then the universe, as Sofia had prophesied. She took special care to ignore the candles that turned on from the wall switch and burned brighter than any candle she had seen. She made sure not to marvel at the steel box in the kitchen that froze water and kept the foodstuffs cold. She spent the morning closing her mind off from any sort of admiration, fascination, and calculation about the wonders and advancements of the future time in which she found herself, lest she grow so enamored with the place she might elect to remain, thus ruining everything.
This required no small feat of discipline. The world fascinated Jane. She had taken the grandfather clock apart when she was eight to see how it worked; her mother declared her insolent and destructive. Asking a person who spoke her first word at eight months and taught herself to read at two to not show curiosity at the world around her rivalled the futility of asking a lioness to save the antelope for later.
Besides, what harm could it do? Sofia had declared that any sort of investigation on Jane’s part into the twenty-first century would make her fall in love with it and then change the course of history, but this notion bore further scrutiny. Not every object in their future world posed a danger to Jane’s existence, surely; a simple tour of the house to prevent her from descending into boredom-induced madness could not hurt. Jane promised herself not to observe too much. Once Sofia discovered the key to Jane returning home, she would be back in the year 1803 anyway. Jane nodded to herself, satisfied she committed only a justifiable infraction, and put the sermons down.
She began in the kitchen, which appeared similar to a kitchen in her own time, a place for storing and preparing food, though with many of the objects different and without any house staff. She opened the white box, the one that chilled the foodstuffs without any ice she could see. Cooked meats and vegetables in an assortment of boxes and bottles sat inside. She peered at one bottle. The bottle was made of a clear substance, though not glass. What was this mysterious substance of which every box and bottle seemed comprised, which possessed the transparency of glass but felt much thinner and lighter and smelled faintly of peat moss? She shook her head yet again at these people and their inventions. They had conjured so many devices to save time and to make life easier, yet everyone walked around faster and looking more anguished.
Moving on from the bottle, Jane sighed once more at the abundance of food. She tasted each meat. Spices filled her mouth. One wore garlic around one’s neck to ward off the plague; one did not put it in food. She tested each bottle of sauce—tasting even more spices—and then replaced them. She attempted to heave the white box from its place so she might inspect its posterior to ascertain how it chilled the items, but it gripped the floor with its weight, planted heavy as a tree stump, and she abandoned the endeavor when her back began to ache.
She studied her muslin dress, which lay limp inside the box of soapy water, which had now ceased washing of its own volition. She attempted to retrieve her dress but could not pry open the door. She left it alone for fear of enraging the steel box. Upon opening the drawers and cupboards, she saw they contained knives and saucepans, some different shapes and sizes than she had seen before, others exactly as in her own world. Scissors were the same. She produced water from the fountains in the washroom and depressed the flushing mechanism of the indoor privy. She gasped at the pristine water that filled the white bowl.
She moved on, proceeding down the corridor. She opened the next door with a gasp; she had assumed it led to the dining room, but it escorted her to Fred’s sleeping quarters. She closed the door again and stood in the corridor. She refused to violate his privacy. What lay inside, though? No interest in Fred’s personal belongings gripped her; she desired no discovery of hidden secrets, but she did want to see the general layout of a man’s bedroom. She had never entered a man’s private quarters, not even her brothers’, and saw a literary duty to preserve the accuracy of any descriptions, should she ever write one. No one was expected back until nightfall;
