She glares. Which is adorable, really. Freya is barely over five feet tall, plump and white haired, and about as menacing as a Persian kitten.
“Would you like to talk about the festival?” I say.
“Would you like to tell William you’re too tired for all this holiday running about?”
“After the ball. I really do want to go to that. Until then, if I can just sit here, with nice cuppa and a biscuit or two to sustain me . . .”
She rolls her eyes but walks to the table and pours me a tea as I start telling her about the festival.
“That is remarkable,” she says twenty minutes later, sitting in her own chair, madly typing my observations into her laptop.
“You’ve never heard of it?” I say.
“I have heard of a local tradition involving pardons, but I was never able to track down details. It seems I was looking in the wrong direction. Pardons are primarily Roman Catholic in nature, mostly associated with Easter and Michaelmas. There’s very little Catholic influence here, though, which is why I wasn’t getting anywhere. What you’re talking about more likely holds traces of Saturnalia.”
She chuckles at my expression. “Yes, you’d best not tell the vicar that their beloved festival is rooted in paganism.”
“Aren’t most, though?” I say as I glance around her living room.
While there’s a small tree in the corner, her own decorations suggest a celebration of Yule and the solstice more than Christmas, though they also bring to mind the Victorian decorations William put up, strengthening the commonalities between the two.
The emphasis is on nature, with evergreen boughs and holly, dried citrus slices, mistletoe balls and pine cones. And, of course, candles. So many candles, as if to summon the sun indoors as the days grow ever shorter.
“Saturnalia then?” I prompt. “Roman holiday held in December and one of the precursors to the non-Christian aspects of Christmas.”
She smiles. “Correct. Saturnalia celebrated freedom, among other things. Masters would serve dinner to their servants and slaves, who were free for that brief period of time. According to some historians, there was also a practice of pardoning criminals during that time. Your local penitent festival could have its roots there. There are also potential origins closer to home. In the middle ages, the York minster hosted a winter mistletoe service that pardoned wrongdoers. It clearly rose from pagan practices.” She taps her keys, making more notes. “I’ll take a closer look at the York mistletoe service and see whether the practice spread to any other villages in the area.”
We chat a bit more about the High Thornesbury festival and its possible antecedents. Then I pull my feet under me. “I also had . . . Well, I have a situation I need to discuss with you.”
I tell her about Mary.
“And you’re hesitating to hire her?” Freya says. “For fear of what exactly? That you might interfere with her destiny to die broken down in a field by the age of thirty?”
I give her a look.
“Well?” she says.
“It won’t come to that, obviously. If I don’t hire her, we’ll find another—less intrusive—way to help. But it’s a symptom of an issue I need to deal with. What if, in the correct timeline, she went to Whitby, met the farmer’s son, fell in love, and lived both happily and comfortably for the rest of her life? What if, by hiring her as a nursemaid, I sentence her to a life in service, never able to give up the steady paycheck to follow her dreams?”
“And what if, by squashing a bug in Victorian England, you bring about World War Three?” Freya snaps her laptop shut. “Where do you draw the limit, Bronwyn? And at what point is that limit going to interfere with your life, and the lives of your family? Yes, your baby doesn’t need a Victorian nursemaid. But maybe she should have one. Maybe that’s her destiny.”
When I don’t answer, she sighs and says, “You do realize the butterfly effect is pure fiction. An author’s creation.”
“No, it’s not,” says a thickly accented voice from the doorway. “It’s chaos theory.”
I look up. Del is in the doorway, pulling off his boots, with William coming in behind him. Del had been Thorne Manor’s caretaker for years, my aunt hiring him when she stopped coming up to North Yorkshire after her husband died.
My early correspondence with Del referenced his legal name, as he was part of Aunt Judith’s will. That name is Delores Crossley. It’s almost hard to remember that now, arriving and being confused for about five seconds before I figured it out.
Del presents as male and uses male pronouns. As for the specifics, it’s none of my business. He is Del Crossley, caretaker of Thorne Manor, devoted husband of Freya and our friend. He’s also a retired physicist, which was more of a shock than anything else. The man looks like he’s spent his life with grease on his hands and a pipe clenched between his teeth.
Del walks in and pokes around the tea table before selecting a square of cucumber sandwich.
“Chaos theory,” I say. “That’s science, right?”
He snorts. “Yes, Dr. Humanities Professor, it’s one of those science-y things.”
He eyes his chair—with me in it—and I start to rise, but he waves a gnarled hand and lowers himself beside Freya, who leans against him briefly in greeting.
“Is it a physics science-y thing?” I ask as William comes in and silently takes a seat near me.
Del sighs, as if I’m asking him to roll a boulder uphill, not talk about a subject he enjoys as much as William likes talking about horses . . . or Freya about folklore . . . or me about Victorian history. We are passionate about our passions, which is probably why we’ve become such good friends.
In normal conversation, Del’s North Yorkshire accent is porridge thick and liberally salted with local dialect. I think that’s partly a choice and partly camouflage. The average retired physicist—or historian—might want people to remember they have a PhD after their name, but Del would be quite happy if most of his neighbors forgot. He wants to recede into village life for his retirement. Hence the accent. When he launches into lecture mode, though, all that falls away.
“Chaos theory is the study of random or unpredictable behavior within systems,” he says. “When it comes to time travel, many theoretical physicists disagree with the so-called butterfly effect. They believe that it’s ridiculous to think one small action could disrupt a future that has—in the traveler’s time—already taken place. According to them, the universe would heal itself.”
“How?” I say. “Any change I make here must ripple through time.”
“Must it? That makes the universe seem an awfully fragile thing.” He leans back. “The butterfly effect is a Hollywood gimmick, a constraint to place on time-travel stories. Raising the stakes and all that nonsense. But those writers live in a world where time travel doesn’t exist. If it does—which we know—the results cannot be catastrophic.”
William rises and brings the tea pot over to refresh my cup. “That presumes, of course, that time is linear. Or that my world exists in the same timeline as yours.”
“Precisely,” Freya says. “I don’t think it does. It’s like I’ve said before. Time seems to be stitched together at a point where you two can cross. It’s probably also stitched at other points. That would mean multiple layers of time rather than one set timeline.”