Eleanor had learned to tell the time by the dripping.
There was a crack somewhere in the ceiling of her cell — her chamber, they called it, because she was still a queen and they were still performing the rituals of her rank even as they prepared to cut her head off — and through that crack came a thin, irregular seep of water.
She had counted the drops in the early hours before sleep, the way she used to count sheep as a child. It did not help her sleep. It gave her something to do with her mind so it would not go to the places it wanted to go.
She thought about Samuel. She thought about her flat in Piccadilly, the stack of unread academic journals on her kitchen table, the half-finished mug of coffee she had left on her desk the night this all began.
She thought about the dig site, the way the afternoon light fell gold across the dry earth, and how she had knelt in that earth and brushed away the dust from a small round object that had looked like a pocket watch.
She pressed her palms flat against the cold stone wall and breathed.
"You're still here," she said aloud to no one. "Okay. You're still here. Think."
The device was still in her possession — she had hidden it beneath a loose stone in the corner of the chamber, wrapped in a piece of linen torn from her chemise. She did not know how to operate it.
The symbols on the dial were not any writing system she had ever encountered in five years of archaeology, and she had encountered quite a few. She had been afraid to press anything, afraid that she might send herself further into the past, somewhere with no plumbing at all.
The bolt on the door clunked back.
Eleanor came upright fast, years of fieldwork giving her the instinct to be on her feet before she had fully processed the sound. She smoothed her skirts — Anne Boleyn's skirts, dark velvet, worn now at the hem — and composed her face into the expression she had been practicing: calm, dignified, unafraid.
It was not a guard.
It was a girl of perhaps fourteen, thin and wide-eyed, carrying a wooden tray with a bowl of something and a piece of bread. She set the tray on the small table by the window and turned to go.
"Wait," Eleanor said. "What's your name?"
The girl hesitated. "Meg, my lady."
"Meg." Eleanor crossed the room slowly, not wanting to startle her. "Did anyone give you anything to bring to me? Ask of me perhaps ?"
Meg's expression shifted — a flicker of something, quickly suppressed. Then she reached into the pocket of her apron and produced a small square of folded parchment. She set it on the table beside the tray, dropped a curtsy so shallow it was barely a nod, and left. The bolt slid home.
Eleanor crossed to the table in three strides. She broke the plain wax seal and unfolded the parchment.
She read it twice.
"Alice," she breathed. "You absolute bloody genius."
The message was elliptical, but Eleanor parsed it instantly. The coffee reference was unmistakable — it was the last thing they had done together, complained over bad instant coffee in Samuel's break room.
Alice was here. Alice was at the court. The white bird — Jane Seymour's family badge was an ostrich. Alice was in the body of Jane Seymour. *Do not press anything. Wait.*
Eleanor sat down on the edge of the cot and put her head in her hands, not from despair but from something that felt dangerously close to relief, which she could not afford.
She lifted her head. Through the narrow window, the sky over the Thames was grey and high and cold. Somewhere out there, in a palace that was probably visible from this very window, Alice Alderman was wearing silk and holding hands with Henry VIII and trying to save her life.
"Alright, then," Eleanor said to the grey sky. She reached under the loose stone, unwrapped the device, and studied it again. "Let's see what you're made of."
This time she did not press anything. Instead she looked — really looked — at the symbols, the way she looked at artifacts on a dig site. Systematically. Starting at the edge and working inward.
The symbols were grouped, she noticed now. Four clusters of three, arranged around a central dial. Twelve symbols total, and each cluster was slightly different in texture from the others — worn differently, as if some had been touched more often than others.
She thought about what Alice's letter said. *Do not press anything.*
She thought about what she knew about devices designed for use under pressure. The fail-safes were always in the most obvious place. The most-touched symbol would be the one most instinctively reached for.
She did not press it. She memorized which one it was.
She was still studying the device when the door opened again, and this time it was Sir William Kingston, and his face told her that the fortnight had just gotten shorter.
"Lady Anne," he said, and his voice was not unkind, which was somehow worse. "His Majesty has set a date. Five days hence."
Eleanor looked at him steadily. "I see," she said.
Kingston looked back at her, and something passed across his face — not guilt, exactly, but the expression of a man who has done too many of these particular conversations and has not yet found a way to stop them from costing him something. "Is there anything you require?"
"A priest," Eleanor said. "And better bread." She paused. "And paper, if it can be arranged. I would like to write some letters."
Kingston nodded. He turned to go.
"Sir William." He stopped. Eleanor kept her voice even, conversational, the way she used to talk to skittish excavation workers who needed to trust her before they would tell her where the good site was. "Do you believe I am guilty?"
Kingston was silent for a very long time. Then he said, without turning around: "It is not for me to believe or disbelieve, my lady. It is for me to see that the king's justice is carried out."
"That," Eleanor said, "is the most honest answer I have received since I arrived here."
He left. The bolt slid home. Five days.
* * *
In his laboratory in present-day London, Samuel Hartman was looking at a countdown on his monitor that nobody else in the room could see, because he had built it himself and hidden it inside the interface of the temporal tracking program.
Historically, Anne Boleyn had been executed on the nineteenth of May, 1536. The tracking program told him that the temporal signature he had identified as Eleanor was still active, still in the Tower of London, still alive.
The tracking program also told him that a second temporal signature — Alice's — had appeared at Whitehall Palace three days ago.
He stood up from his monitor and walked to the window of the lab and looked out at the skyline of a city that had no idea any of this was happening. The Thames was down there somewhere, under all the glass and concrete. The same river that Eleanor could see from her window in 1536.
"Five days," he said quietly.
Dr. Miles appeared at his shoulder. "We've been running the recall calibration again. The signal is stable. If we send the recall pulse on the right frequency at the right moment, both devices should respond."
"Should," Samuel said.
"Should," Miles confirmed. "Time travel doesn't do certainties, Dr. Hartman."
Samuel turned back to the room.
The team was tired — they had been running twenty-hour shifts for the past week, fuelled by instant coffee and the specific adrenaline of doing something that had never been done before.
He looked at their faces and felt a complicated mixture of pride and terror.
"Then we make sure the conditions are exactly right," he said. "Start the calibration sequence. I want it running continuously. The moment I see the window, I'm sending the recall."
Miles nodded and moved back to his console.
Samuel sat back down at his monitor and opened the hidden countdown. He watched the numbers change, small and relentless, and did not look away.