There is another reason for us to leave Emily to it. Nicolas is no longer a fugitive, but his captain was a French spy. The authorities may decide to pursue Nicolas again. Clearly, as the son of a French nobleman, he could have been a party to the plot. Either he would hang, or he would be deported to face the righteous wrath of the French revolution. So he must flee to the one place he is safe: the future.

Emily promises to find and care for the mare as well. As I suspected, the horse had wandered to their stables. It’d been Emily herself who’d seen her abused state and insisted on taking her in. Now she will find her again, and if her former owner complains, she will shame him into selling the mare to her.

Mr. Walker takes us in his cart to High Thornesbury, and from there, we slip up to Thorne Manor. We really will need to have a word with the current Lord Thorne—we can hardly expect to be passing in and out of his house regularly without telling him something. For now, he is still gone, and so we make our way to the bedroom where the stitch waits. Then we clasp hands and leap through into—

Into a room I do not recognize. The room of a child.

“This is not your time,” Nicolas says as he looks around.

I walk to the dresser. On it is a lamp with a cord leading into the wall. I pull a chain, and the light ignites, making me gasp as Nicolas gives a start.

“Certainly not,” I say. “We must be in the future.”

“Lady Thorne’s time? The twenty-first century?”

I look around. It is the room of a child much older than toddling Amelia Thorne. There is a baton and a white ball of some sort in a corner, along with a pair of shoes that have wheels on the bottom. Unframed pictures cover the walls. Prints that look like giant colored photographs on shiny thin paper. A man with the same skin tone as Nicolas smiles from one. He grips a baton like the one on the floor. The print reads “Jackie Robinson, 1955 World Series.” Below, it says “Brooklyn Dodgers versus New York Yankees.”

Nicolas comes over and whistles. “Nineteen fifty-five? That is not Lady’s Thorne’s time.”

“It’s not.”

I look around as he examines the print and then walks back to the window, where he’d been standing, looking out. A boy whoops downstairs. A woman chides him to be careful around the baby.

I hurry to Nicolas. “We must go.”

He nods but keeps looking out.

“Nicolas?”

He glances at me. “Do you . . . feel anything? Out there?”

I’ve barely turned toward the window when something tugs at me, hard and insistent. Something outside this house.

I hesitate. The voices grow louder, and a child’s footsteps pound up the stairs.

Nicolas shakes it off. “We must leave. Come.”