John Schettler - Touchstone

“Ladies first,” he said. “We may as well ride. It will be quite warm soon, and who knows how far the town is.”

They climbed into the carriage and the driver, a surly looking peasant in a soiled white tunic, goaded the horse with a thin stick to get it moving. They sat on a plain wood seat, and the carriage cover was little more than a stretch of canvas draped over a trellis of thin cedar.

“What do you make of this?” Maeve was still gawking at the beaded purse, her mind trying to grasp how it could have come into LeGrand’s hands.

“That’s the same purse you took through the Arch?”

“Exactly the same. I had it on my shoulder… but now that you mention it, I can’t recall having it with me when we manifested here. I think it must have slipped off my shoulder when we first arrived—in that house—wherever that was.”

“Very strange…” Nordhausen eyed the purse with a furrowed brow, considering. “Perhaps it shifted to this milieu separately?”

“And LeGrand just happens across it by chance and makes a miracle guess that it must certainly belong to a hapless American couple who would be arriving soon along that very same road.” The tone of her sarcasm quickly dispatched any rational argument the professor had thought to make.

“Yes… a bit sticky, isn’t it? Did you hear that French Captain call us Americans?”

“He did.”

“I thought the same, but I’ll be damned… What’s going on here?”

“Well,” said Maeve, “at the very least I’d say our cover is blown.”

“Could it be our dress? Are you sure this clothing is appropriate?”

“The costume is fine. No, I had the sense that LeGrand expected us. He said as much when he gave me this.” She held up the purse

“Perhaps he was only being coy. I mean, suppose the purse did shift separately, and he happened upon it by chance. He spies us on the road and makes the natural assumption that we dropped it—that you dropped it. Why, if I found such a thing I would certainly assume it to be the possession of a lady. And you’re the only one who matches that description in these parts right now.” He resurrected his first argument, but Maeve just shook her head.

“This is simply too much of a coincidence to have happened by chance, ” she said. “His actions were very telling; very deliberate. He was making subtle implications from the first word out of his mouth. I think he meant exactly what he said, Robert. He expected us here. He was riding out with this carriage to find us and, if that’s the case, then he’s—”

“Not from this milieu?” Nordhausen finished her thought. “Well, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. I go off to Jordan to recover my Ammonite, and look who I run into—an Arab on a courier mission to the twelfth century! It’s clear now that these people are operating throughout the continuum, whoever they are. But how would this LeGrand fellow know we would be here?”

“You forget that if he is another time traveler, they have hundreds of years to research what we do… what we’ve done… what we’re going to do. It’s maddening, but how else to explain this?”

“I think we had best get some answers from LeGrand.”

The way was not far, and they soon found themselves at the outskirts of a dry and dusty looking town. There were a few small farms, brown fields watered by narrow irrigation channels, with clusters of date trees lining the way ahead. The buildings seemed adobe mud for the most part, though farther on they began to encounter a few more substantial stone structures. It was to one of these, a single story inn at the edge of town, that the driver took them. Nordhausen was pleased to see that LeGrand was already waiting for them, his horse tied to a rickety hitching post.

Dismounted he turned out to be a fairly short man, broad in the shoulders, yet with a sturdiness that tended more to brawn than to excess weight. Gray-brown tresses of hair dangled freely from beneath a floppy headpiece, framing his round face and high, ruddy cheeks. As the carriage pulled up he smiled broadly, his eyes alight with a mischievous glint that seemed ignited by his wit. “Greetings, my American friends. I trust your ride was enjoyable. Lovely morning, though I’m afraid it will get very hot this afternoon. Then we’ll have the flies, the French soldiers, and all the rest. But for now, may I offer you a quiet place to shelter from the sun? Perhaps a cup of tea?”

“You are too kind,” said Maeve. “We have a hundred questions, Doctor LeGrand, not the least of which is this purse.”

“Ah, yes, the purse. I thought that would tickle your imagination. Let me see… How did I come by it, and how in blazes would I know it was yours, let alone that you would be here, this very morning, on the road to Alexandria?”

“Precisely,” said Nordhausen, somewhat annoyed with the man’s flippant manner.

“Well, the lady left it behind. You really should be more careful, I suppose. But, seeing as though you are still relatively new to this business, I can understand.”

“Left it behind?” Nordhausen pressed him. “What do you mean? You found it on the road, yes?” He put forward his hypotheses, hoping that LeGrand would confirm his guess and relieve them of their worst fears.

“On the road? Not exactly,” said LeGrand. “If you must know, I found it a year ago, in Alexandria. You see, I had the pleasure of riding in the van with Napoleon’s guard when he entered the city that day. Imagine my surprise when someone took a pot shot at the man from a window overlooking the alley.”

Nordhausen gaped at the remark, looking at Maeve in amazement.

“Yes,” LeGrand pressed on. “No one was hurt, thank goodness. The soldiers were very efficient. They searched every house on the street and found a recently discharged musket. But the assailant—the assailants I should say, had vanished. Witnesses claim they saw a man and a woman at the window when the shot was fired. It was very strange… until I found the purse, of course.”

“I don’t understand,” said Maeve.

“Well it was clearly European in style, beaded in the fashion of 19 thcentury France. By the way, your costuming is very good, my lady. The professor’s wig is a tad small for his face, but I think it lends him an air of credibility, wouldn’t you say?”

Nordhausen resisted the instinct to straighten his wig, folded his arms, and glared at the man. “See here… speak plainly now. Just who are you and how do you know us? How did you know we would be here on this road?”

“Well the purse, of course. It was all written down. Really, Miss Lindford, you should be a bit more cautious. Using a ball point pen to make notations is one thing, but taking the note with you through the Arch is quite another. Tisk, tisk.”

That last remark swept away any notion that this man might be a local. Maeve looked at Robert and the two of them quickly recalibrated their thinking to the proposition that LeGrand was indeed a fellow traveler in time.

“Oh, it was all in your notes,” LeGrand continued. “You penned the target date you were trying to reconnoiter, the premise of your entry, details about the Perla, the missing Americans lost at sea, your idea in assuming their identity—quite clever, really. But then again, I should expect nothing less from the redoubtable Maeve Lindford.” There was a special fire in his eyes as he said that, and Maeve was warmed enough to return a half smile.

“You wrote all that down and brought it with you?” Now it was Nordhausen’s turn to raise eyebrows over abuse of protocol. “I distinctly remember you chiding me: No PDAs, cell phones, wrist watches, Parker Pens and all. Then you go and slip a note like that into your purse?” Maeve merely squinted in his direction, her thoughts and attention focused entirely on LeGrand for the moment, her mind running down a hundred corridors.