Miriam picked up a bundle of official papers and a pen, and wandered out into the front hall. It’s going to be okay, she told herself. Paulie’s going to mother-hen her. Two days and she’ll know how to cross the road safely, use a flush toilet, and work the washing machine. Two weeks, and if Paulie didn’t kill her, she’d be coming home late from nightclubs with a hangover. If she didn’t just decide that the twenty-first century was too much for her, and hide under the spare bed. Which, as she’d grown up in a world that hadn’t got much past the late medieval, was a distinct possibility. Wouldn’t be a surprise; it’s too much for me at times, Miriam thought, contemplating the stack of forms for declaring the tax status of a limited liability company in Massachusetts with a sinking heart.

That evening, after Paulette and Miriam visited the bank to open a business account and deposit the checks, they holed up around Paulie’s kitchen table. A couple of bottles of red wine and a chicken casserole went a long way toward putting Brill at her ease. She even managed to get over the jittery fear of electricity that Paulie had talked into her in the afternoon to the extent of flipping light switches and fiddling with the heat on the electric stove. “It’s marvelous!” she told Miriam. “No need for coal, it stays just as hot as you want it, and it doesn’t get dirty! What do all the servants do for a living? Do they just laze around all day?”

“Um,” said Paulette. One glance told Miriam that she was suffering a worse dose of culture shock than the young transportee—her shoulders were shaking like jelly. “Like, that’s the drawback, Brill. Where would you have the servants sleep, in a house like this?”

“Why, if there were several in the bedchamber you so kindly loaned—oh. I’m to drudge for my keep?”

“No,” Miriam interrupted before Paulette could wind her up any further. “Brill, ordinary people don’t have servants in their homes here.”

“Ordinary? But surely this isn’t—” Brill’s eyes widened.

Paulette nodded at her. “That’s me, common as muck!” she said brightly. “Listen, the way it works in this household is, if you make a mess, you tidy it up yourself. You saw the dishwasher?” Brill nodded, enthused.

“There are other gadgets. A house this big doesn’t need servants. Tomorrow we’ll go get you some more clothes—” She glanced at Miriam for approval.”—then do next month’s food shopping, and I’ll show you where everything’s kept. Uh, Miriam, this is gonna slow everything up—”