Chapter 2
Pinching was supposed to wake a person from an all too real dream, right? Erva bore down on her forearm, while a flock of maids came into her room to clean and dress her. Bruising herself, she winced, then looked up at her surroundings. They were the same as a second ago—shiny oak floor, huge four-post bed with orange and soft pink floral duvet, butter-colored couches and chairs close to a fireplace, a huge bureau, and a few small wooden tables here and there. Sunshine spilled in from wide-open windows, and nothing about this room was familiar.
She swallowed. Hard. It wasn’t a dream. This was one hell of a time to go crazy. She had classes to teach, papers to grade, her life.
Panicking should have commenced. She should scream again. Or close her eyes really tightly and hope to wake up to her own reality. But...it was him, William, the Hill, the second first earl—supposedly his father had gotten the earldom because he was the illegitimate heir to King George I. Oh, and William was a general. God, the man had more titles than she knew what to do with. She’d spent more time studying him than she’d been in any relationship with a man. She knew every detail, except that he was so handsome in reality, so tall and broad and muscular. Still, it was really him!
She supposed this was what it would be like to have a crush on a rock star and wake up in his house, have him so close she could smell him. God, she still could. Clean, he was so clean, like soap, but also masculine, like a spicy forest. She thought again of how striking he was. His likenesses hadn’t been close to capturing his squared jaw, the cleft in his chin, his slightly flared nose, and his clever blue eyes. And there was something a bit naughty about breeches, wasn’t there? Pants tight enough to make out thigh muscles, yet the crotch covered with...what was that thing called?
Erva was a military historian. Wanting to know what people wore two hundred years ago had been fascinating, but not needed for her career. Almost everything she did know about the fashion was from reading novels. For her studies, however, she learned wars, battles, strategy, tactics, stratagems, and intelligence. This was the dawn of the spy, and William had several. She had so many questions to ask.
But the maids told her to stand in a basin, then the bed sheet was stripped from her, and a flurry of hands scrubbed her body. Mortified, because she’d never liked being naked in front of a group of strangers—who did?—she stood as still as she could, trying to cover her breasts. She managed not to whimper and protest, but this was really weird. In her own time, she wasn’t an aristocrat. Not even close. But it did make her wonder what it was like to be a lady a couple hundred years ago. No privacy apparently.
Wait, she thought as her stomach dropped and fluttered, she was here, a couple hundred years ago.
Erva vaguely remembered the dream, where two beautiful, dark redheads dressed in gold had woken her from a drunken slumber and said that she would be given a glimpse. She could study William to her heart’s content, and come back to write even more about him.
The maids ordered her to leave the basin, dried her off, then began to get her dressed. Yes, she must have just snapped and gone insane. That had to be it, since she couldn’t wake up from the strange thought that two toga-wearing chicks had sent her here. Maybe she should fight off the madness. But she sighed, almost as if resigned to it. She had been so stressed for the last couple years. Dr. Meredith Peabody kept holding onto her dissertation, not letting her graduate. Meanwhile, Erva taught most of Dr. Peabody’s classes and her own. Add to that, a week ago Erva had found an article of Dr. Peabody’s that had been outright plagiarism of her work. Then yesterday the dean had sat in every single one of her classes, and, yep, she was officially in Crazytown.
Erva was only slightly aware of the maids tugging at her. She’d never remember the order of how to get dressed. There were the stockings and petticoats—so many, the giant light blue dress and stomacher, and—geez, no wonder it took major help to get dressed. But her tornado-like thoughts kept returning to General Hill.
On a personal level, she knew next to nothing but the barest of facts about him. However, she knew his tactics. He was surprisingly bold. Aggressive. And calculating. In his altogether too-short life, he’d never lost a battle. Not even the battle he died in.
Erva turned to the elderly maid who had come to her room earlier. “Excuse me, erm, pardon, but what date did you say it was?” For a second she worried that she appeared like an idiot asking again, but she had to know.
Mrs. Jacobs didn’t stop from tying something together at Erva’s waist and told her in a soothing voice. “My lady, ‘tis September 12th in the year of our Lord 1776.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry—”
Mrs. Jacobs waved a hand in the air. “’Tis no bother, my lady. I’ve only traveled the once from Ireland to here, and when I did, I felt I was in a fog. Seemed to do tricks with my memory, it did.”
Try traveling a little over a couple hundred miles and two hundred years, Erva thought, while she held in a fit of giggles. This was lunacy, for sure.
But to hell with it. She was in the house of the one man she knew better than any other. Her ex-husband didn’t even compare to the hours she’d slaved over finding primary documents about General Hill. With a rueful grimace, she wondered for the millionth time if that had been the reason for the divorce. She’d think about that later.
For now, she was insane, and with the man who history had ignored or tried to vilify or, worse, tried to make him out to be a drunkard and incompetent. But she would prove history wrong, even if she were arguing with figments of her imagination. Again she wondered if she should be trying to buck free from her psychosis. Then, she thought about Dr. Peabody stealing her work, the way she lived day in and day out in a drab apartment, overworked, undersexed, underappreciated, with so little to offer her—well, she was willing to swallow the red pill please.
“Am I ready to see him? Er, to have breakfast?”
Mrs. Jacobs stood from straightening the gigantic blue silk skirt that Erva wore.
“Aye, my lady. You’re ready.” The maid bit her bottom lip, keeping a smile to herself, but Erva caught it nonetheless.
It didn’t matter if she appeared like a groupie. She was! This was the one man who could have changed the war for America’s Independence. If he had survived, that is. As it was, the clock was ticking. General William Hill had less than a week to live.