He wore the locket that held her picture hidden beneath the collar of his shirt, and he carried volume three of Hume’sHistory of England everywhere he went. He kept hoping the book would crumble to dust in his hands, or he would open it to find it no longer contained the engraving of the fainting Elizabeth Barton, or he would wake with memories of a childhood in which he was welcomed home from school by a mother’s warmth instead of an aunt’s thinly-veiled dislike. Surely some attempt would work, and he would emerge into a happily-ever-after that had always been.

He did not know what on earth had possessed her to cap her time-traveling career by posing as a prophetess in Henry VIII’s court. Even for the reckless, impetuous, adventurous girl he had come to know from the pages of her journal, it seemed an unnecessary, not to say a suicidal, risk. Yet she had done exactly that: Hume’sHistory of England confirmed William’s letter.

Elizabeth Barton, variously known as the Holy Maid of Kent and the Mad Maid of Kent, had claimed to be born in 1506, but nothing could be substantiated about her early life. She might have suddenly appeared, full-grown, at the age of nineteen—which was, Maxwell had cause to know, exactly what she had indeed done. She took a job as a servant girl in Thomas Cobb’s household and was working there when she fell seriously ill on Easter Sunday of 1525 and began to speak in rhyming prophecies. St. Sepulchre’s in Canterbury had opened its doors to her, and thereafter Sister Elizabeth rubbed shoulders with some of the most influential men of the day—Wosley, More, even Cramner. Cramner said she had, by the power of the Holy Ghost, told him of many things done and said in other places—places where she could never have gone herself, places from which she could have received no word.

Of course she had.

At first Sister Elizabeth confined her prophecies to general warnings against sin and vice, but when King Henry declared his intention to have his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled in order to marry Anne Boleyn, she suddenly became specific. Elizabeth Barton spoke openly against His Majesty, gathered about her a group of important supporters, and went so far as to force herself into the King’s presence. She publicly warned him that if he divorced Katherine and married Anne, he would no longer be king of the realm, would reign a mere seven months after his second marriage, and would die a villain’s death.

Ofcourse she had.

Given the personality revealed in her journal, given William’s clue that she had died by the hand of Henry VIII, Maxwell could have picked her out of Hume’sHistory even if she hadn’t called herself by her real name.

What he could not infer from the pages they had left behind waswhy. William had not explicitly said in his letter. Elizabeth’s last journal entry said only something cryptic about “one last journey, to rescue a friend in need”—though she had scribbled rather than carefully written the words, and the word “friend” might have been “fool.”

William’s last entry definitely used the word “fool.” In a deliberate parody of his wife’s phrasing, he had written, “One last journey, to rescue two fools in need.” Elizabeth and who else? No one else in Hume’sHistory immediately leapt to Maxwell’s eye as a time traveler.

Confronting a king rarely ends well for the person who forces herself into His Majesty’s presence, and it had not ended well for Elizabeth Barton. She and her supporters had been arrested on charges of treason. The “Mad Maid of Kent” confessed, probably under torture, that she was a “poor wench without learning” who had invented all of her “visions,” and she and all her supporters except Thomas More were sentenced to death. Elizabeth Barton’s head was struck off, parboiled, and impaled upon a pole of London Bridge—the only woman in British history to be accorded such an honor.

And William Carrington had spent the next forty years trying to rewrite the timeline and bring her home.

It’s too late for me, he had written in the letter than Maxwell kept tucked into the journals he also carried everywhere.I am about to die as an old man in 1819. There’s nothing you can do for me. All I’m asking you to do is rescue her.

But Maxwell, who after all had studied logic in some of the most privileged classrooms in the Empire, was able to work out that rescuing Elizabeth, if it could be done early enough, would have the side effect of preventing William ever starting his doomed quest. It wasnot too late for William. It was not too late for either of them. For any of the three of them. It was never too late if one had a timepiece. Sitting on the floor of Georgie’s guest room, frantically flipping the pages of his father’s journal until golden candlelight faded into dawning day, Maxwell had seemed to see the universe smoothing itself into an orderly pattern. For the first time in his life, he had known what to do. For the first time in his life, something other than a moment’s pleasure compelled him forward. When he reached the last page, he had snapped the journal shut, risen from the floor, brushed his tumbled hair from his eyes in a gesture that looked, in the mirror, like a knight pulling down the visor of his helm, and set off to right this wrong.

He was not certain now how many years ago that had been. It was still November of 1848—it was eternally November of 1848—but Maxwell was aging in leaps and