Page 24 of The Invisible Hour

Nathaniel laughed, then saw she was serious. “Are you saying we’re enchanted?”

“Would that be such a terrible thing?” Mia asked.

It was true that magic was in nearly everything Nathaniel wrote; ghosts and hauntings, sins and sacrifice had never frightened him. He’d always considered himself a defender of women who had been slandered, especially those said to be witches, so why would he fear one who might be real, with magic at her beck and call? And yet he felt something strange, not fear exactly, something more like longing, the way he felt when he wanted something he didn’t expect he would ever have, the way he’d felt looking out through the window when he was a boy and all the world seemed beyond his grasp.

“Nathaniel, I wish I could tell you more,” Mia said. “But I’m not certain that would be wise.”

“You know me then?” he asked earnestly, for clearly, she knew him by name, which was odd. Surely, had they met before, he would not have forgotten her.

Mia’s face was solemn. “I came from another time only to meet you.”

“Did you?” Nathaniel said, wary and wondering if it might be best to say his goodbyes and leave. Perhaps his uncle had been correct when he told Nathaniel to find himself a proper job and join the family business and forget the nonsense of living inside his own imagination. The world is waiting for you, Robert had always told him. And yet you lock yourself away.

Was it possible that all those years spent dreaming and writing had in fact driven him mad, and now his mind was beyond his control, and he saw what was impossible to see and heard what was impossible to be true? If he wasn’t careful, he might wind up like one of those pathetic creatures down on the wharf, sailors whose rough lives and bouts of drinking and carousing had made them lunatics incapable of doing anything more than wandering the streets, spouting nonsense, and begging for coins, unaware of what was real and what was mere fantasy. Nathaniel’s heart had always gone out to such men, though he had always considered himself to be nothing like them; he had believed himself to be a rational man whose world opened when he began to write. Now he wondered if those worlds were no longer separate, and he had stepped into one of his own imaginings.

The woman still hadn’t let go of that book of hers, holding on to it as if it was a treasure she’d unearthed, which made her even more interesting to Nathaniel and made it less likely that he would turn and leave her there without knowing more. In his opinion, a woman who loved books was the best sort. He had faith in women’s views of the world and their ability to feel compassion when men so often seemed aware only of their own needs. He truly wished that for the next thousand years all government could be in the hands of women, for men had made such a mess of the world, including his own ancestors, men who’d risen to power and fought to keep it, no matter who they might hurt or destroy. Nathaniel wished to be a different sort of man, if such a thing were possible, if who he was and what he would do weren’t already fated to be. He had a large and wounded heart, and his sister Elizabeth always said he was overly emotional, but he wondered, could there be such a thing?

Despite the book the woman carried, and her obvious intelligence, he knew nothing about her. Usually speaking with strangers was uncomfortable for him, but this was not the case today. He felt as if a spell had been cast as they began to walk along together, and he felt transported. She was telling him some nonsense about herself, the colleges she’d gone to, when he knew it was impossible for women to enter universities or teach in one. He enjoyed talking with his sisters, especially the brilliant, combative Elizabeth, but conversing with Mia was like speaking with another man who knew as much of the world as he did, perhaps more, and yet possessed a woman’s sensibilities and the ability to draw upon her emotions. She told him she was a librarian in the greatest public library in the world and seemed startled when he laughed, assuming she was teasing him. He knew of only one public library, up in New Hampshire, all the rest were private and had dues to be paid. As for women librarians, they simply didn’t exist.

“They do where I come from,” Mia told him.

“And where is that?” Nathaniel noticed that this woman didn’t seem to care about her appearance. She ignored the burrs that stuck to the fabric of her skirt and the muddy ground they walked through. She hadn’t bothered to pin up her hair nor did she wear a hat, as his sisters always did, to protect herself from the sun. She was not like any woman he had met before, not like the delicate Beacon Hill ladies he had seen on his trips to the city, or the farm women he’d met in Maine, or the women for hire in the taverns on the rowdy docks, a few of whom he’d gone to for comfort, though afterward he had been burdened by regret for using them for his own pleasure.

“New York,” Mia told him. “That’s where I live.”

“Ah, New York.” He’d been there with his uncles and his sisters and had been amazed by the intensity of the city. If anything could happen there, and surely it did, perhaps there were women librarians as well. “I’ll have to look for your library next time I’m there.”

“You can’t. It was built in 1911,” Mia blurted.

“Nearly eighty years from now,” Nathaniel said

Mia covered her eyes with her hand and looked up at him to see what his reaction might be.

“And how would you know what will come to be?” Nathaniel was caught up in his interest like a fish in a net. He didn’t think he could look away from her now if he tried. This sort of magic happened in books, certainly it occurred in his own stories, but not in real life. He was under a spell; he was certain of it now. He saw details that he would never have normally noticed, as if everything had come into a sharper focus. That there were freckles across her nose and cheeks, that her eyelashes were the darkest brown, that her neck was long, and she wore pearls that glittered blue in the sunlight.

“In my time cities are lit up and you can reach the other side of the world in a matter of hours by flying across the sky.”

“Like a sparrow?” Nathaniel should have been put off by such nonsense; instead he was intrigued. What if time was like water, and you could move through it at your will?

“Nothing like a sparrow,” Mia said with a grin.

“So you haven’t any wings?”

“Not any more than you.”

They had stopped walking, and the sun was beating down, and perhaps that was why Mia’s heart was pounding so. She, too, was under a spell, one she had created, and now it all seemed out of her control. She wasn’t certain what would come next and was unsure of what to say and whether she should commit herself to the truth. And what would the truth do for either of them? And how would it change what was meant to be? She thought of a science class at school, and how she’d read about chaos theory, the notion that if a single butterfly moves its wings, it will affect everything on the other side of the world, changing all that was to happen into something brand new. One step, one bit of truth, and everything might be altered. Standing there in the bright sunlight, Mia wondered if she was that butterfly, and if with a single look, she could ruin his life.

“You’re not an angel, are you?” Nathaniel asked as he studied her.

She could tell that his question was made only half in jest, for he had a serious expression and he frankly wondered if it might be true. He’d often thought he needed rescuing. If someone didn’t save him, he sometimes believed he might lock himself inside his owl’s nest and never come out again. He feared that on one dark night of the soul he might find himself walking out his window to sit on the roof, and that the darkness all around him might call to him in a way that daily life did not. He wondered about the time he had sleepwalked and his uncle pulled him back, if there was something inside him that wanted to dive into the cold water, if he had been drawn to darkness all along, and that it was only when he was at his desk, writing, that he managed to escape his own personal curse.

“What if I were an angel?” Mia asked him.

She had begun to worry about how little she’d thought out what it would mean to come here and how she might affect him and, by doing so, herself. She too was thinking of a dark place, the depths of the Last Look River, the shiny wet stones in her pockets, her wild imaginings that there was no other way to escape the Community, when as it turned out, all she’d had to do was unlock the door of the barn and run as fast as she could.

“If you were, I’d consider myself the most fortunate man to have come upon you,” Nathaniel said. “But I would think so whether you were an angel or a woman.”

They had come to a green pond. Both were broiling hot, and now they looked at one another and with a wordless exchange they realized they both had the same notion.