But she couldn’t wait and, hands trembling, opened her pocketknife and carefully pried off the seal, trying not to break it. It was old and brittle; the candle grease had seeped into the paper over the years, making a shadow around the glob of wax, and it shattered in her hand. She clutched the fragments convulsively and turned the folded paper over.
Brianna Randall Fraser MacKenzie, he’d written on the front. To be kept until called for.
That made her laugh, but the sound came out as a sob, and she dashed the back of her hand across her eyes, desperate to read.
The very first words made her drop the letter as though it were on fire.
November 15, 1739
She snatched it back up. Lest she somehow miss it, he’d underlined 1739.
“How in bloody hell did you—” she said aloud, and clapped a hand over her mouth, where she kept it as she read the rest.
My Dearest Heart,
I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t know. My best idea is that I’ve come in search of Jeremiah and found him—or may have found him—but not the person I thought I was looking for.
I sought help at Lallybroch, where I met Brian Fraser (you would like him, and he, you), and through him—with the assistance of one Captain Jack Randall, of all people—came into possession of a set of RAF identification disks. I recognized the information on them.
We (Buck is still with me) have been searching for Jem since our arrival and have found no sign at all. I won’t give up—of course you know that—but as our inquiries have borne no fruit in the northern clan lands, I feel I must follow the one clue I have and see if I can locate the owner of those tags.
I don’t know what might happen, and I had to leave you some word, however faint the chance that you’ll ever see it.
God bless you and Jem—wherever he is, poor little guy, and I can only hope and pray he’s safe—and my sweet Mandy.
I love you. I’ll love you forever.
R.
She didn’t realize that she was crying, until the tears running down her face tickled her hand.
“Oh, Roger,” she said. “Oh, dear God.”
IN THE LATE evening, with the kids safely asleep and the sound of the Pacific Ocean washing through the open balcony doors, Brianna took out a bound notebook, brand-new, and a Fisher Space Pen (guaranteed to write upside down, underwater, and in conditions of zero gravity), which she thought entirely appropriate to this particular piece of composition.
She sat down under a good light, paused for a moment, then got up and poured a glass of cold white wine, which she set on the table beside her notebook. She’d been composing bits of this in her mind all day and so began with no difficulty.
There was no telling how old the kids might be when—or if—they read it, so she made no effort to simplify things. It wasn’t a simple matter.
A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR TIME TRAVELERS—PART II
Right. Dad’s written down what we think we know about this, in terms of observation of occurrence, physical effects, and morality. This next part could best be described as preliminary hypotheses of cause: how time travel might work. I’d call it the scientific part, but you can’t actually apply the scientific method very far with the scanty data we have available.
Any scientific approach starts with observations, though, and we have enough of those to maybe construct a rough series of hypotheses. Testing those . . .
The idea of testing those made Brianna’s hand shake so badly that she was obliged to set down her pen and breathe slowly for two or three minutes, until the black spots stopped swarming in front of her eyes. Gritting her teeth, she wrote:
Hypothesis 1: That the time passages/vortices/whatever the bloody hell they are/ are caused by or occur at the crossing of ley lines. (Defined here as lines of geomagnetic force, rather the folkloric definition of straight map lines drawn between ancient structures like hill forts, henges, or places of ancient worship, like saints’ pools. Supposition is that folkloric lines may be identical or parallel with geomagnetic lines, but no hard evidence to this effect.)
Evidence in Support of Hypothesis: Some. But to start with, we don’t know whether the standing stones are part of the vortex thingy or just markers set up when ancient people saw other ancient people step on the grass right . . . there . . . and poof!
“Poof,” she muttered to herself, and reached for the glass of wine. She’d planned to drink it as a reward when she’d finished, but at the moment felt more in need of first aid than reward. “I wish it was just poof.” One sip, two, then she set it down, the citric edge of the wine lingering pleasantly on her tongue.
“Where were we? Oh, poof . . .”
Dad was able to connect a lot of the folkloric leys to standing stone circles. It would theoretically be possible to check the geomagnetic polarity of the rock around standing stone circles; that should actually go some way toward supporting Hypothesis 1, but might be a little difficult to execute. That is, you can measure the earth’s magnetic field—Carl Friedrich Gauss figured out how to do it back in 1835 or so—but it isn’t the sort of thing individuals do much.
Governments that do geological surveys have the equipment for it; I know the British Geological Survey’s Eskdalemuir Observatory does, because I saw a write-up on them. And I quote: “Such observatories can measure and forecast magnetic conditions such as magnetic storms that sometimes affect communications, electric power, and other human activities.”
“Other human activities,” she muttered. “Riiight . . .”
The army does this sort of thing, too, she wrote as an afterthought. “Yes, I’ll get the army right on that. . . .”