Chapter One: In Which Sam Falls
“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Dahlia got out of the taxi without a suitcase.
I knew we were on the rocks. I’m not that emotionally constipated. But this trip was supposed to fix things. To show Dahl how freeing it could be to hold hands in public, how nice it could be to cuddle as we watched the sun set over the Sagrada Familia, and how romantic it could be to kiss in dark corners of cheap Spanish tapas restos. To give her the chance to get comfortable with being out. More importantly, to being out with me, before she told her mother.
“The fuck?” was all I said, standing outside Pearson International Airport like the victim of a TV prank show. That had to be the reason Dahl only had a purse. Because the alternative was…
She wouldn’t, I thought. But it was more like a prayer. To whom, I don’t know. Virginia Woolf, maybe. Marsha P. Johnston, definitely. Sheela Lambert, of course.
Dahlia wasn’t dressed to travel, either. She wore a cute knit dress with leggings, despite the warm October day, with those strappy shoes I liked. The ones with the impractical heel and the ribbons that crisscrossed over her dusky ankles. The ones I liked to undo with my teeth.
The absolute bitch.
I was dressed for the air-conditioned plane, the most perfect stereotype of a bi girl imaginable—cuffed jeans, wavy bob, button-up collared shirt patterned with oranges and teal feathers, denim jacket with enamel pin-encrusted lapels. I was wearing a soft, purple Basque hat, because Barcelona. I’d bought Dahlia a matching matcha-green one as a surprise.
She’s really doing this to me. Shame prickled hot along my nape.
From her purse, Dahlia withdrew a wrapped gift.
It was book-shaped, wrapped in white-and-pink gingham fabric and held together with a sweet blue ribbon, because Dahlia didn’t believe in single-use papers.
I’d told her I have trouble sleeping on planes. That I usually read. She’d bought me a book. It was terribly thoughtful.
A peace offering. Or a desperate plea to absolve her cowardice.
I wanted neither.
Instead I crossed my arms over my backpack straps and scowled.
“I can’t do it,” she said.
“Clearly. What am I supposed to do about the hotels?”
“I won’t cancel the reservations that are on my card. Just pay me back when you can.”
“Are you kidding me? Dahl, we’re doing this for you.”
She rolled her eyes. “For you, Sam.”
It felt like a punch to the gut. It drove the air out of my body the same way. “I— wha— no… Dhal.”
Dahlia’s dark hair billowed in the stinking breeze of car and airplane exhaust, with notes of rotting coffee and melting gum on the sun-warmed Toronto concrete. If I put my nose against it, I knew her hair would smell of strawberries-and-matcha shampoo.
I wanted to dig my fingers into it, to kiss her, beg her, tell her that it’s not too late. She could get back in the cab, go get her suitcase. I could go inside, pay to switch our tickets to a later flight. We could make it work. It had to work. Or what had two years of sneaking around, lying and hiding, been for?
“I know you’ll be happier if you just—”
“You’ll be happier, you mean!” She stomped her pretty little foot, adorably petulant.
“That’s not fair.”
“This isn’t fair. This is about you dragging me from the closet whether I’m ready or not.”
“Baby—”
Her dark cheeks flushed an ugly mottled red, nothing at all like the sweet blush she got when I laid her back against my pillows and teased my hand up her frilly skirts. “Just because you knew exactly who you were since fourth grade, just because your culture and your family don’t care, doesn’t mean—”
“Dahlia, you know my folks love you too, you can—”
“I’m not going,” Dahlia said, like she’d been rehearsing it in the cab the whole way to the airport, “just so you can live your fantasy of playing house.”
“Hey, fuck you,” I sneered.
“And that’s my cue.” She jiggled the book, where it still hung in the air between us. “You’re going to miss your flight.”
“Yeah,” I snapped back. “Wouldn’t want that. How terrible, to miss going to Barcelona with my girlfriend for her dream vacation.”
“Hey, fuck you,” she riposted, but there was no heat in it. “You’re the one who wanted to drink all the wine.”
“Don’t need you to do that.” I laughed flatly, throwing my arms wide. “Don’t need you to do any of it, do I? Maybe I’ll find some girls there to kiss instead of you. Or boys, I’m not picky.”
“Christ, can’t you have one conversation without it being about how obnoxiously bi you are?”
“Not when there are still people terrified to be out. Oh, wait, hey look.” It was cruel, but I cut a gesture directly at her.
Her face flickered with hurt. The tiniest dart of regret stung me. “Oh, now we’re doing the thing where you have to get the last word. Awesome.”
I clamped my mouth shut, jutting out my chin spitefully.
She waggled the book again.
I did not reach for it.
“Just take the goddamn book, Sam!” It wasn’t the volume at which she yelled, but the tears suddenly spilling over her lashes in rivulets of mascara that shocked me into finally reaching for it.
The second it was in my hands, Dahlia turned on her heel and marched down the curb to the taxi rank. She was gone before I had the chance to call after her.
My phone pinged.
Fishing it from the inner pocket of my jacket, I thumbed it on. Beside the text messages from my mother admonishing me to remember my passport, and my father offering up an amusing fact about the statistical safety of air travel, there was just one from Dahlia: I’m sorry.
#
“No rush,” the counter agent said with the kind of saccharine patience that meant the opposite.
“Sorry.” I bent double to dig through my backpack for the beat-up leather travel folder that was a hand-me-down from my mother.
I could have sworn I put it in last. Or maybe I put it in first, so I wouldn’t forget it?
My headphone wires tangled with the velcro strap of my sandals. I didn’t even remember putting my headphones in that pocket. I should have invested in those packing cubes that Dahlia was obsessed with, it would have—stop it. At the very top of the bag was the matcha-green hat I’d picked specifically because it matched Dahl’s favorite scarf.
“Ah-ha!” I crowed, straightening. “It was at the bottom.”
“What joy,” the agent drawled.
Once my boarding pass was in hand, I made a detour to the nearest trash can. Throwing in the hat would have been far more satisfying if it had made a breaking noise. But leaving the felted wool there to soak up the garbage juice from sad, wet coffee cups felt close enough.
#
Ten minutes later, my day got even better when discovered that the metal detector hated the pins on my jacket, that I forgot to take my boarding pass and ID out of the pocket of my coat, and that I somehow ended up leaving my shoes in the scanning tray. I got ten steps away before it occurred to me that I was still in my socks, and I had to dash back for my purple chucks. I sat sheepishly by security to slip them on, then slumped to my gate. I was already exhausted and I hadn’t done anything yet. My ache for Dahl was like a screaming hamster in my brain, not just because my heart hadn’t caught up with what had happened yet, but because of how organized she always was. How organized she always made me.
Yeah, and how much of that is emotional labor you’ve dumped on her? I thought glumly, pretending the gift jammed into the side-pocket of my backpack wasn’t glaring at me.
I didn’t call my parents. If I called my parents, I would start crying in the middle of the airport. I was mortified enough without having strangers staring at me. Or worse, trying to comfort me.
I’ll call them from Barcelona.
Then it will be too late to be talked out of going on the trip. I will be in Spain, and there will be nothing to do but have my stupid little adventure without my stupid little girlfriend.
Ex-girlfriend.
Shit.
I yanked my tablet out of my backpack. Dahlia had never moved into my crappy student bachelor, no matter how many times I had invited her, so there wasn’t any furniture to divvy up. Dahl had never even filled the dresser drawer I’d emptied for her. The strawberry-matcha shampoo in my shower was a duplicate of her favorite which I’d bought. Our lives were already completely separate.
We had talked about getting a place together while we worked a final season at the part-time jobs that had gotten us through school. Me at the cell phone kiosk at the mall, her as an usher at the cinema, figuring out how to twine our lives together as we both searched for the perfect first step into our chosen careers. I hadn’t been planning to job hunt so soon after graduation.
I had no reason to wait now.
My plans for the rest of the autumn—the rest of my life—were shot to hell.
“Shot through the heart,” my stupid traitorous brain sang.
Shut up, stupid traitorous brain, I told it.
Work in Public Policy seemed a good place to wriggle my way into some good old-fashioned Queer Activist organizations down the road, so I distracted myself by filling out tedious, fiddly job application after tedious, fiddly job application. After which I uploaded a resume with the exact same information. Because welcome to the hellscape that is late-stage capitalism.
When the gate agent called for my row to start boarding, I scrambled to collect all my stuff, which had somehow spread onto the chairs on either side of me.
I gave half a thought to leaving Dahl’s gift behind. While I was hurt and feeling terribly petty, I wasn’t that petty. This book was the last thing Dahlia had ever given me. Sentimental future-me I would hate present-me if I purposefully abandoned it.
I waited until I was buckled in and the airplane was taxiing from the jetway before opening the gift. The ribbon slid away smoothly, and I forced myself not to think about how, just yesterday, I would have braided it into Dahl’s hair. The gingham fluttered open. The book was an emerald green, cloth-bound hardback with deeply embossed gold lettering—one of those collector’s editions made to look antique.
The Welshman’s Daughters by Margaret Goodenough.
Dahlia’s favorite.
I could damn near recite the television adaptation, for as often as Dahl comfort-watched it and therefore I, as a kind and giving girlfriend, had watched it with her. (How on earth did her mother still think Dahl was straight when she’d spent her teenage years rewatching that kiss?)
I’m not sure what Dahl’s message with this gift was supposed to be, but it felt pointed all the same.
The flight crew went through the safety demonstration. We took off. Snacks and wine were delivered. I asked for two glasses. The cabin lights dimmed. I turned on the reading light, and flipped open the cover. There was an introduction written by the screenwriter of Dahl’s beloved adaptation.
kiss heard ‘round the world. The kiss that changed the landscape of historical fiction and queer representation. The kiss that, in the way drag queens have adopted Cher for their own, and gay men are Friends of Dorothy, created of its authoress the Patron Saint of Lesbians.
In its context upon publication by Pickering and Sons in 1807, in the years leading up to the Regency Era, the kiss between Mariana and Jane is as platonic as a hand-shake. By the admission of Goodenough’s own pen, the participants in “the kiss” had only been “very firm, very bosom companions.” They had kissed one another on the pretense of practicing for their respective fiancés, soon to be returning home from war with France. It is only in later generations, with later readings, do we see the relationship transform from one of perfectly normal physical intimacy for female friends into something romantic, even sexual.
Once the repressed Victorian era arrived, people started paying attention to “that kiss.” And in the ensuing decades, while corsets and morals loosened, queer folks of all stripes were shipping off to The Great War. They sent their left-behind lovers “practice kisses” from hospital beds and trenches. Among the Bright Young Things of the twenties and thirties, “pulling practice” became covert slang for necking in places where homosexuality was illegal. Then the academics for the first time, gave credence to a book previously thought of as just cult-classic high-gothic romance schlock.
By the time I took my turn with adapting the novel in 1993, Margaret Goodenough’s legacy had solidified as the writer who had snuck an extremely queer book under the noses of her publishers, and the authoress of the First Sapphic Kiss in British Literature. While perhaps not as influential on the form and prevalence of the modern novel as her contemporary Austen, Goodenough’s oeuvre nonetheless echoes in the work and hearts of thousands of writers who have taken their own turn with a quill since.
And yet, the greatest achievement of Goodenough’s eight novels wasn’t her ability to pack so much emotional resonance into every phrase, or her witty, cutting understanding of the perils and pleasures of Regency era upper-middle class Britain, or even “that kiss.” It’s that, in an age where marriage and motherhood stripped would-be artists of their ability to focus on their craft, Margaret Goodenough somehow managed to carve out the hours and physical space to put pencil to paper.
And so when speaking of Goodenough, we must always remember The Wealthy Widow, who was instrumental in midwifing Goodenough’s work. History knows so little about her, and yet it is to her that the queer community of today owes so much. Without her support, patronage, and (ahem) company, Margaret Goodenough would have likely been forced into a financial arrangement of a marriage, thus robbing herself of the time to write, and the world of her eight beautiful novels.
(“Greening a gown”, the famous phrase from Goodenough’s final, posthumously published novel, for those not in the know, has nothing to do with picnicking. It refers to the kind of stains a woman could achieve while lying back on the verge for a different kind of feast.)
For those of us who desperately wish to believe in them, Goodenough and the Widow’s companionship was a wonderful Happily Ever After. Especially when so much of queer history is filled with tragic endings and separated lovers. Oscar Wilde was romantic, fine, but as a young reader who slid around the Kinsey Scale, his story didn’t fill me with hope for my own chances at finding safe relationships.
It is no wonder, then, that the overriding theme of Goodenough’s canon is this: devotion to one’s own heart, the loyalty of true friendship, the kindness of unwavering determination, and the slow patience of revelation lead to the most satisfying and fulfilling loves. She was a woman who refused to do what society expected of her, who refused marriage in order to keep a pen in her hand, and who’d not only loved where she wanted, but by all accounts, loved well.
Margaret Goodenough was not, by modern standards, what we would consider “out.” The labels we’d use for her today—sapphic, lesbian, queer—weren’t in widespread use, if they even existed within the context of women-loving-women at all. And yet she and her lifelong companion were unashamedly
I snapped the cover closed. When the flight attendant arrived with a garbage bag to collect the split pretzel packets, wine-dotted napkins, and empty plastic cups, I tipped The Welshman’s Daughters in with them.
#
For the first time in my life, I managed to fall asleep on an airplane, and it had everything to do with the two additional glasses of wine and the Gravol I’d popped as soon as dinner had been cleared away. So of course, the minute I began to doze, everything went wrong.
First, the cabin shook. It was a bone-deep rumble.. The drugs and booze tried to drag me back down into slumber. But then it happened again. When I sat up, I wasn’t the only one meerkating.
“Seat-belts!” the flight attendant snarled at some big yikes on legs who was all up in her face a few rows away. “Now!”
Fun fact, my Dad had once told me at dinner. He was a big fan of bar trivia and useless facts, and had a stockpile of them for any situation. Airlines install seatbelts on planes not to protect people while in the air, but to keep corpses attached to their seats so they can identify who’s who in the event of a tragedy.
“This is your c-captain speaking,” the pilot said over the tannoy. Though it was meant to be reassuring, her shivering voice was anything but. I screwed my eyes shut, felt my heart rising against the back of my throat, tasted fear—tangy and coppery, bile-sour. She had been so warm and reassuring when we’d taken off. Now, I could barely understand what she was saying—oh, it was clear enough, but my brain didn’t want to register it.
I caught the words “turbulence” and “unexpected” and “just off Gibraltar.”
For a moment, everything stopped.
The shaking vanished.
The shouting quieted.
There was a soft, gentle woosh, like an anticipatory inhale.
Fun fact, Dad had also once said, that in moments of extreme emergency, humans can experience time in slow motion. It’s a neurological trick our ancestors developed to help in times of disaster.
From the galley up ahead, a streak of intense light flared between the curtains.
It was emerald green.
And gold.
No, yellow.
No, gold, shimmering like glitter and—
Christ, no, just yellow and orange, flames crawling up the curtains toward the cabin ceiling. The fire alarm shrilled, masks dropped from the overheads, and I had just one thought as I scrambled into mine: Thank God Dahl’s not here.
The plane lurched, driving my seatbelt hard enough against my lower ribs that one of them popped.
The flames reached the bulkhead.
There was the bright blue flare of an oxygen tank bursting open.
That’s when people started screaming.
Another bone-rattling shake. I bit my lip between my teeth and prayed to taste blood. It would be a distraction, at least.
The plane heaved, snapping us up into the air like damp dish rags. The seatbelt dug into my hips.
I just wanted to live, to experience Spain, to let myself mourn Dahl, and celebrate the next chapter of my life. I just wanted to live.
Please. Just let me live.
The plane snapped hard against the sky.
I finally tasted blood.
It wasn’t half the distraction I’d hoped for.
#
Coldness in my mouth. Too salty. I coughed, tried to suck in air, and got seawater instead.
Crashed!
I pawed at my waist, but I wasn’t strapped to my seat, it wasn’t dragging me down. Had I already released myself? Don’t remember. Thankful, anyway. Groped next for the pull-cord of my life vest. Gone. Not wearing it.
No!
I flailed. My fingers brushed dry air, but maybe it was my feet. Maybe it was a trick. Which way was up? I hung suspended in the water, ballooned out my cheeks. I used to do this as a kid; front flip into the community swimming pool, crash through the chlorinated glory of summer-time relief, topsy-turvy, let myself float near the bottom until the oxygen in my lungs bubbled upwards, tell me which way the surface was. A light kick, and I would be in the air.
But it wasn’t working.
Crushing.
I panicked, unable to stay still for fear of wasting precious surface-reaching seconds. I opened my eyes. The salt stung. Shadows loomed around me, and I couldn’t tell in my oxygen-deprived haze if they were pieces of airplane, or fish, or corpses.
I refuse! I thought. Anything but this!
A swirling blot of darkness passed so near to my face that I swatted at it. It was a strange and stupid reflex to give into while slowly dying, but the human body is a bizarre machine. The thing was slick and moving fast. My fingers curled into the cord trailing from it.
Jellyfish! I won’t drown to death, I’ll get stung! How’s that for irony?
But the sharpish tug wasn’t the jolting burn of a sting. It was more painful than that, my whole arm wrenching sideways. My shoulder cracked.
The only thing I could hear was white noise—leftover static from the hissing shriek of tearing metal, or the throbbing call of the bottom of the ocean?
The world blurred. I zipped past the shadows now, up, up to somewhere where the water shaded from still black to churning frothy gray, heaving with whitecaps.
The shadow I held onto resolved into something desperately yellow.
Dark shapes blocked out the sun on the surface. Oval, backlit by crackling flashes of bright green, the shadow of lacework rope swaying in whatever wind was blowing up there in the, air, air, air, air—
That can’t be right.
I spluttered as my fingers, then my hand, then my nose, my cheeks, my face, my whole head broke the surface. I sucked, but there was no space in my lungs around the saltwater, and it burned.
That ship is weird, I thought, and then I was pushed under the waves again. I thrashed, but my legs wouldn’t obey. No, no! Kick, you stupid bitch, kick! Anything but this, c’mon!
I tugged hard on the string of the yellow thing and punched up into the air a second time. I couldn’t breathe but I could scream. The sound was half-lost in thunder, the pound of rain on the surface. I screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
Something beside me, a boat, an oar, a voice: “Overboard! Ahoy!”
A hand on my collar, pulling, and it choked, but my head was above water.
“Back to the ship! Go!”
I was hauled up, still going up, ever up, up, up. My head spun and the horizon slipped sideways to the tune of the clack of a rope ladder against a wooden hull. I came back to the world when my head hit planking.
“Careful, lads!” someone snarled.
I coughed, gagged, coughed. Air! My lungs burned. Cold, fuck, cold. I turned my head and puked; seawater and fear and lousy in-flight wine.
“Here now,” someone said. “Sit up.”
I let out the air I had so hard won in another hacking gag and puked again, vile and slimy. I coughed until I tasted only stomach acid and blood, sucked in great hungry lungfulls in reedy gasps. It was like breathing through a straw.
I was making a high keening sound, bubbling up out of me as surely as any empty life jacket. Somebody hadn’t secured their life-vest properly, had slipped out the bottom, falling down, down, down, and the vest had gone up, up, up, and me, lucky, stupid me, had grabbed it.
Somebody was dead.
And I was not.
We were under shelter of some kind; the rain had stopped pounding on my back. Instead, something warm and dry scrubbed at my hair. The friction caused agonizing, delicious warmth against my scalp. Sensations chased each other down my spine but I couldn’t tell if they were pleasure, or pain, or just feeling.
Alive!
I said it out loud, around the blood, the puke, the acid, the salt, the terror: “I’m alive.”
“You most definitely are,” said a voice by my ear.
I turned into it, hot and breathing, and here. Human. A hand down my back. I folded against a warm chest, and sobbed, and shook. So fucking cold.
Then the darkness rose up, crushing and cold as the bottom of the sea, and I fell head-first again, topsy-turvy, and let fate decide when it was time to bubble back to the surface.
Chapter Two: In Which Sam Languishes
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
– Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
The return to consciousness was slow. I wanted out of the darkness, quickly, now; and at the same time I wanted to stay in it forever.
Why? Are you feeling guilty? You got out of the water and someone else, some poor bastard—No. Shut up.
The room creaked and bobbed. I found myself staring up at the ceiling of wooden beams and smooth planking. I sucked in an experimental breath, shallow and cautious. It tasted of stale tobacco. Of furniture polish. Of too many men in one place, like the change-room of the community hockey rink after the teenaged boys’ practices. My tongue was tender, a cut from my teeth blazing across the middle. My chapped lips stung.
My hair was wet. The rest of me was dry, swaddled naked in cool, slightly scratchy sheets that did not glimmer in the semi-darkness like I thought emergency blankets would. These were cloth, roughly the texture of burlap, but with a softer, finer sheet between my skin and the warm outer blanket. The mattress was a sack, vaguely lumpy.
Surely this had to be a hospital. But then why wasn’t I hooked up to a morphine drip? A saline IV? Where was the buzzer to call for a nurse?
None of this was right.
I sat up gently, tugging the sheets high for decency. Only my stud earrings and watch remained on me. I was a cheap analog, supposedly water-resistant, but the face was beaded with condensation. The hands jerked unnervingly, lurching forward then pausing. Functioning, but no longer at the comforting, steady pace of a heartbeat. The strap was salt-crusted, fraying a little at the edges, but otherwise intact.
The world under me continued to sway and bob and I choked back another desperate whimper as it shifted my stiff and burning torso.
Why won’t you stop moving?
The room pitched slightly, I bit off a mewl of pain. My throat was tight, and the bottom of my ribs ached from the puking, from the pressure of the seatbelt, and from the burn of holding my breath so long.
“Miss?” a voice called from the other side of what must be a door. I couldn’t see said door, couldn’t see much further than my own hands and the low ceiling, but it wasn’t coming from inside the room.
“Yeah?” I croaked, mouth sour.
I was parched.
I had nearly drowned and I was thirsty.
Ha.
The other person took my response as an invitation to push into the darkness. Harsh sunlight cut into my eyes. I raised my hand to block it before I could think, and whined again when every muscle above my knees protested. I twisted away, squinting, feeling small and stupid.
“Please, Miss, do not move,” the voice said, gentle. Sharp clip of heeled boots across a wooden floor. The door swung closed, blocking out the light again.
A few clacks of what sounded like metal and stone, and a spark leapt out of the darkness and onto the oil-soaked safety of a lamp wick. For a moment it flared too bright, too orange—recycled oxygen catching fire—before it was shaded by a milky globe of glass dropped into positioned by nimble fingers. The glow deepened the shadows, insulating us in a haven of liminal warmth. I was able to shut out, just for a second, the memory of what had happened, trapping it in the darkness with the rest of the ignorable world.
The face revealed in the new light was youngish, more or less thirty, and handsome in a sharp-nosed, doughy-chinned way. His dark hair was rakishly tousled. His eyes were remarkably round, deep and brown like a deer’s, and filled with more concern than I could digest just yet.
“How do you feel?” the man said, and dropped carefully onto a chair a respectable distance away. He held the shaded lamp by its base, perching it expertly on one knee.
“Disoriented,” I admitted.
“Your accent—” he said, but cut himself off. What I had mistaken for water in my ears was actually his own British lilt. “Where are you from? Moreover, how on Earth did you make it all the way out here?”
I pressed my fingers against my eyelids, pushing my eyeballs back into their sockets until they ached. It distracted me from the pain everywhere else. “Didn’t you see the crash?”
“We’ve quite missed the battle.” His thick eyebrows pulled down into a frowning vee. “I’ll admit that we have arrived too late to join Lord Nelson in giving Napoleon a taste of good British cannon. But just in the nick, it seems, to save a foreigner from a watery grave. Which ship did you fall from?”
“Napoleon? Ship?” My brain felt too big for my skull, like a sponge that had soaked up too much sea water, in danger of cracking bone and oozing out my skull. “Where are we?”
“Off the coast of Spain, nearing Cape Trafalgar.”
Fun fact, Dad’s voice in my head says, the Battle of Trafalgar was the first time the British Navy had formed a fleet. It changed the course of the Napoleonic war.
A war that had ended in 1815.
“That can’t be right,” I gasped, sucking hard on the air. Hard enough that I gagged, and choked up some lingering seawater. The man hastily set the lamp on a nearby table and shoved a handkerchief at me. I clapped it over my mouth to catch the bile and disbelief. My lungs burned from the strain, from the confusion, from the fear, from the panic. “That can’t be right.”
“Miss, are you quite well?”
“No! Of course not! This isn’t—” Real, I was going to say, but I could feel it. I could see it, smell it, and taste it. “This isn’t possible.”
The man was obviously concerned about my erratic answer.
He tried a different tack. “By what name shall I address you?”
“Sam. Samantha Franklin.”
“American?”
“Canadian.”
“Captain Fenton Goodenough, at your service.” He dipped his head formally at me and before I could decide if I should dip mine back, he added: “You are aboard my ship, the HMS Salacia.”
When I said “anything but this,” I thought, staring into his earnest face. I was really expecting… uh, anything but this.
#
As my clothes were soaked, Captain Goodenough sent for a spare pair of a cabin boy’s britches and shirt. Apparently my chubby figure in my new attire was lewd enough that the captain had implored me to stay in the safety of his cabin.
But I had to be outside. I had to see it.
We compromised with a thick oilskin slicker over the indecent clothes, and he escorted me to the nose of the ship. I spent the next few hours on the deck of the Salacia. A morose figurehead, I was undoubtedly as gray in the face as the weathered carving of the ship’s namesake goddess, crowned with seaweed and netting, stranding sentinel directly below me. The pounding rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the ocean swelling only occasionally, knocking me into the rails.
This had to be a joke. It had to. I shoved down the desperate urge to cry. But there was enough salt water around me. I wasn’t in the mood to be adding to the world’s supply.
There were no planes or vapor trails in the sky. No low-slung tankers on the horizon. Only me, the gunmetal-gray vastness of the ocean, and underneath, behind, all around me, a nineteenth century ship with crow’s nests and everything. The sodden ropes above me hung like limp spiderwebs. The sails were rolled up. The air reeked of smoke, even through the rain—burning wood and black powder.
The water frothed, jumping up the hull as if to lick what was left of the future off my skin. In the distance, only darkness. Above me, only clouds. No stars. No moon. No floodlights, or city ports, or orange glow on the horizon from light pollution. I searched the rigging again, looking for LED flickers that might give away hidden technology, but even as I did, I knew it was futile.
The night was deep, and unkind.
No one could black out a whole continent’s electrical infrastructure.
“Stop it,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, but all I saw behind them was the red orange blaze, the loose books and phones flying up to crack the plane ceiling, the sky falling away too fast through the window. Then I shouted it, screamed it from the bottom of my stomach, from my bowels, from the sour twisting place all the way down: “Stop it!”
The world went silent. I could not hear the rain. I could not hear the waves. I could only hear the reverberating echo of my voice, rolling back at me from across the ocean, from across the horizon, from across a time that was no longer mine.
And then a soft voice: “Miss Franklin.”
There was no reproach in it, no warning, no fear. Just my name. Concern.
“I’m fine,” I lied to the captain. “Sorry. Ignore me. I’m fine.”
I dragged my attention back to him, to the men around us who shamelessly curved toward us to eavesdrop, even as they continued their tasks.
As far as Dahlia’s historic dramas had taught me, the crew that populated the ship were also impeccably dressed for the era. Some were appallingly young, hauling buckets, wrestling with wooden pegs nearly as tall as they were, coiling rope into neat piles; some were old and grizzled, beards frizzy, unwashed and uncaring, scarred and hard. In between were men of every age hustled from duty to duty, clad in blue-and-white striped trousers, loosely tied scarves, sweat-greyed shirts, their skin weathered dark and rough.
“What year is it?” I croaked.
The captain, who had been keeping me company, stared at me with obvious worry. “’Tis the year 1805, hand to God,” he said gravely, sensing how deliberate my inquiry was. “October twenty-first, if we’re to be particular about it.”
There was a commotion at the rear of the ship, something to do with nets and boats, and hauling things below-decks. Someone shouted for the captain to guide their work. I wondered who was steering the ship. Wasn’t the captain supposed to steer, or was that a Hollywood trope?
“Please, remain here,” the captain said, and hurried off.
I looked down.
In the churning water, scattered like a thousand tiny glimmering islets, were the remains of the airplane. Acres of debris stretched into the mist. No one was lying on it. There were no waving arms. No pleas for rescue. No screams cutting through the rain. Only yellow life vests, empty or buoying up the dead; seat cushions not quite soaked enough to sink away forever; the odd bobbing piece of overhead luggage; a laptop carrier just slipping beneath the waves; a child’s doll with its plastic head filled with air, staring with emotionless painted eyes; half-filled toiletry bottles; a bath-time floating picture book; a ballcap; a cosmetics case; a piece of the wing.
Things that meant nothing to anyone but me. I, alone, among these hundreds, had survived. I alone had been rescued from horrifying death.
Sailors doffed their caps at the rail, muttering quick prayers, but making no move to pick the dead out of the water. I guess there was enough grave dirt at the bottom of the ocean for all. Or empty shark stomachs.
Among my peers, the bloated blank-faced drowned, were the dead of the battle Captain Goodenough had spoken of. Red and blue uniforms alike were blackened with the weight of the water, the stain of blood and gunpowder, the char of fire.. Interspersed with the plane pieces were broken planks, the ghostly billow of a sail still lashed to a bobbing mast, a crust of hull still burning, flames spluttering. The last of the battle-dead began to give up the gasses that had kept them afloat.
And any proof that I was not when I belonged would soon go with them.
Then I saw it, clear as day, in my mind’s eye: my parents, amid other confused and angry mourners, standing on a beach, holding a wreath with my name on the ribbon. I felt it, in a yawning pit behind my stomach: the crush of sudden loss, the lack of closure because there would be no body, the inability to hold cold clay and press a goodbye kiss to a beloved face one last time. I swallowed against the squeeze of my larynx—the ferocious resentment of ambiguous loss, unable to mark or mourn it, denied any good and final moment.
Just life, presence, and warmth.
Then none.
And nothing but heartbreak to fill the ragged, bleeding gap left behind.
A few sailors tried to start conversations with me, but I couldn’t unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth enough to speak. And at the same time, I also couldn’t bear the thought of drinking anything to make the task easier.
Water and I were quite at odds for the moment.
Just a small tiff. A fair-weather break up. Understandable.
They each drifted off when I proved to be unsociable. They smelt like unwashed hair and unwashed clothes and too long at sea with only other men and hot hands, anyway. I had been gearing up for a run of revenge one-night stands, but I didn’t want it now. Didn’t think I’d ever want it ever again.
Weren’t survivors of traumatic accidents supposed to feel a desperate drive to affirm life?
Right now all I wanted was to exist without each inhale being a small agony.
Why me?
Why me?
Why only me?
Would it have been better if I had drowned? Was I meant to have drowned? Had fate, or destiny, or whoever is responsible for airplanes that just blip out of existence, spared me? Or had it been a mistake? The parts of the twenty-first century that were here—so anachronistically here, out of place, superfluous, wrong—would sink. It would vanish from history forever, lost to the future because it was at the bottom of the sea in the past.
And I should be with it.
Shouldn’t I?
I wasn’t honestly believing this, was I? No. And yet… there were no lights on the coast.
If there was a meaning, a reason for my survival, I didn’t know what it was. I was about as religious as any other queer who’d spent her small-town upbringing being told that people loved me as a sinner, but hated my sins; that is to say, not at all. If God—whichever one of them—had saved me for a purpose, they’d forgotten the bit where they were supposed to strike me with divine inspiration and explain why.
I kept circling back to the idea that this had to be fiction. It was too much like the movies to be real. Like watching the footage from a public atrocity and thinking The things they can do with CGI these days, before realizing that the horror on the screen was really happening: shootings, vans plowing into sidewalks, buildings bombed, airplane crashes. The brain short circuits and tries to yank what you’re experiencing into familiar territory, and therefore right back into the realm of fiction.
People don’t really survive mid-ocean plane crashes.
They don’t time travel.
And they aren’t rescued by pre-Regency Era naval captains.
And yet, the ship I stood on was real.
My hero was the shortish, doughy-faced Fenton Goodenough. Not exactly the chiseled Fabio that bodice rippers had promised the tumbled maidens of the world. If the captain was the person the author of this surreal adventure was trying to throw in my path, they had seriously picked the wrong heroine.
How long did I stand there, gawping in disbelief? Long enough for my hair to soak through again, wet tendrils sticking to my forehead. Long enough that my bare feet began to hurt against the planking. Long enough that the water trickled into my cocoon of warmth and denial, rolling down my spine.
A low fog crouched over the water like a shroud. The sun set faded into the smudgy strip of land that was Europe to my right—starboard or port?
Though the sails were furled, the ship still drifted in the currents. Eventually we passed through the field of bodies and wreckage, and the crew stopped muttering prayers for every cadaver that bumped away under the prow.
#
I woke to the sound of the night watch’s hour call: Three in the morning. All is well.
Everything would be well if he’d stop shouting every hour on the hour and waking me the fuck up. I slept fitfully after that, drowning in nightmares, both literally and in the terrible dreams themselves.
I greeted the sunrise irate.
The denial of the night before had transformed into fury at witnessing the mass graveyard that I’d been pulled from. I was angry at the sailors for fishing me out of the drink, too. Angry for surviving. Angry at the uncomfortable bed the captain had given up for me. Angry at whatever that green-and-gold flash had been in the galley, angry at Dahlia for abandoning me to go through this alone, angry that it was even happening. I was scared, and confused, and my ribs ached worse after sleeping on a sack of straw. And worst of all, my fury had nowhere to go.
The little pool of darkness that had kept the real world at bay the night before had dissipated in the morning light filtering through the dirty glass of the captain’s cabin. I was still wearing the borrowed breeches and shirt, and I was angry about that, too. Angry that it’d taken so long for me to fall asleep last night without the familiar distraction of doom-scrolling.
I wanted my own clothes. I wanted my button-up, my jeans, my phone… My phone.
If it still worked, if the water-resistant case had kept it safe, if there was enough battery left, I could put this whole ridiculous fantasy to rest and rejoin the real world.
I scrambled for my denim jacket, which had been hung over a valet stand in the corner of the cabin, hoping hard enough that it came out as a desperate sob that everything was still zipped into my pocket.
Yes!
My phone and wallet were exactly where I had left them.
But the casing of the phone was cracked, bloated with water and corroding battery acid.
Useless.
Goddamnit!
In my black billfold, the Euros I had so carefully hoarded were damp, still legible but now as obsolete as my identification and banking cards. Which I should probably, like the responsible time travelers from stories did, toss into the drink. I hoarded them instead, the last remaining proof that I was not mad. That I was not the addled heroine of The Tempest, or Northanger Abbey, or The Welshman’s Daughters.
That I was who I thought I was.
I didn’t trust anyone not to go snooping, so I tucked both phone and wallet under the mattress, between the wall and the frame. My button-down was dry, but stiff with salt, and the seams and pockets of both my jeans and jacket were still wet enough to be uncomfortable. The purple basque hat, which I cannot believe had stayed on my head through all of that, was a wrinkled mess. Resigned to staying in the old-fashioned clothes for now, I pulled on my socks and Converses.
Wake up, I screamed at myself. Wake up. People don’t actually time travel. Come on, put some effort into it, Sam! Wake up!
The world crashed heavily to the side, swirled, and for a second I felt the crushing pressure of the bottom of the sea again, freezing and black. My ears rang. Water poured up my nose, down my throat, invading my lungs, cold and sharp and—
I sucked in a desperate breath of air, shouted “No!” The world stopped swirling abruptly, and I was rooted on the solid floor so quickly that I nearly fell over.
Awake.
Here.
Not falling from a burning plane.
Not in the middle of drowning all over again.
Here.
Shit.
Shit.
Right. So. What now?
I was alone. Which meant I had the opportunity to figure out how deep this fantasy went. That I hadn’t been flung into the past, because it’s not possible. Surely not all of the books could be real, or complete. The clothes in the cupboard, the maps, the ledger, something had to betray that everything around me was just an elaborate fiction.
Captains had logbooks, right? I decided to start there. Perched primly on one corner of the desk blotter was a book covered in maroon leather. The log was filled with even, no-fuss handwriting made up of precise nib strokes. The most recent entry read:
October 22nd,
Fifth Bell – Morning – Fair, growing humid, light breeze.
Sails furled as we continue to navigate the detritus of the battle and, according to our new passenger, that of her crashed craft. No other survivors recovered.
And on the page before that:
October 21, 1805
Fourth Bell – Morning – Clear skies, indolent breeze
British fleet spotted. Salacia still too far out to read colors. Wind not obliging. Our extended call at Antigua has all but guaranteed that unless the action is very extended indeed, we may not make it in time to support Nelson.
Eighth Bell – Afternoon – Slow swell. Gale likely.
Cannon fire echoes back to us across the water. Victory has run up “prepare for battle” and “England expects every man shall do his duty.” Salacia still too far away to lend support. How I yearn to be there.
First Bell – Afternoon – Thunderstorm
Freak weather has sucked the wind from our sails. We make no further headway. Sky is black above us, clouds arcing with queer green lightning. Some of the sailors have taken to sheltering belowdecks, in fear of what they are calling fairy lights. I am too heartsore with the knowledge that we will miss the battle to offer reprimand.
Sixth Bell – Afternoon – Squall
Gunfire in the distance ceased. Ships burn. Weather makes it difficult to make out whose.
Another ship has been late to the fight. Being on deck, I witnessed with my own eyes a great flash of green lightning leap between the thunderous clouds, and did pray to G-d that it would not strike the mast. The curve of the water and the clouds can play tricks on even the most experienced seaman’s eyes, and the great explosion of fire (as if a whole ammunitions room had gone up all at once) could not possibly have happened in the air, though it appeared to fall from the sky directly above us. I can only assume that the force of the blast threw the hull of the ship into the air, to splash down around us. Thankfully none were injured among my crew as they dove for safety. From the wreckage, I cannot begin to guess what form the craft must have taken when it was together. Lookout affirms no other vessels were spotted on our approach to the fleet. Only one survivor—young woman who claims to be from the Canada colonies. Samantha Franklin. Understandably distraught by the loss of her vessel. Ship’s surgeon looked her over as she slept, no injuries save severe bruising around waist, likely from some sort of harness.
And, in the margins of that entry, in spiky, irritated pencil scratches: Too late, may G-d damn it.
I tried and failed not to feel utterly violated that some dude had “looked over” me without my consent while I was unconscious. Then again, I can’t imagine I’d have been a very good patient last night if they’d tried to haul me in from the rain for a strip search.
“This is too perfect,” I muttered, leaning back in the captain’s chair.
But even flipping back through the book, there was no deviation from the calm, steady reporting. No lorem ipsum to take up space on the page, no repeated entries or gobbledygook to just make it appear to be an entry to a film camera. These were real entries, and they were each unique.
The captain even appeared to be using a cypher to record a secondary set of information, dot and hash marks beside some of the entries in red ink. The red was dark, too, not the vibrant shade I would expect from a modern pen.
Dammit!
And just like that, I was simmering with fury again.
This was just too stupid to accept at face value.
There had to be something! Maybe the maps. I knew shit-all about maps, but every one I unrolled from the bin beside the desk seemed period-accurate. Books, next: there was a shelf with a dowel across the midpoint, to keep the books from tumbling. But each volume, each title page, each publisher’s mark was spot-on. Thankful that twice-weekly yoga classes had left me limber enough to do so, I scrambled up the bedframe to cling to the joists and search for cables, or modern building materials, or something.
Each failed investigation pissed me off further.
Regrettably, I was in a perfectly executed Downward Dog, pulling at the bottom of the bookshelf to see if it had a false back, when the cabin door swung open.
“My word!” the captain spluttered from the threshold.
Want to know what happens next? Get your own copy here and read the rest!
