Chapter Nine

Carrie returned to the mill after leaving the circus and went straight into Mr Thonrton's office without knocking.

"Miss Preston, I thought you had left for the day." Though his words were pleasant, his tone was cold and hard.

"I had." Now that's he was here, her courage was failing her. "I... I must talk to you, Mr Thornton. I want to tell you the truth about me, where I'm from and how I came to be here and if, after you've heard what I have to say, you would like to ask me to marry you again, I won't say no."

"If?" he asked.

"Yes, 'if'." She swallowed down her panic at the idea that he might reject her. "Is there somewhere private where we can talk? Alone?"

"Will here not do?" he asked, for they were alone in his office.

"Yes, I suppose." She looked up into his eyes which were still cool and unfeeling. "There are some things I have to collect first though. Will you wait for me?"

He glared at her for a moment, seemingly fighting his own judgement, then he turned away.

"Go," he told her, his back to her.

"I won't be long," she assured him, retreating to the door.

Mr Thornton stood at the window, watching as she crossed the courtyard and left through the mill gate.

The idea that he might finally understand her thrilled him but at the same time he still felt the sting of her rejection most keenly. He was tempted to turn her away when she returned, though in his heart he knew that he couldn't. For better or worse, he was a fool in love and little more than a slave to his feelings for her.

III

Carrie borrowed a basket from Dixon then went up to her room, putting her rucksack and handbag into the basket and covering them with a cloth, for such unusual items would surely draw attention if she made no effort to hide them. The family were all in Mrs Hale's room, so she didn't face any awkward questions as she flew out of the house again and rushed back to the mill, eager to get this off her chest once and for all.

She looked to his office as she came into the yard and was surprised to see him still standing at the window. She wondered if he had moved since she left. She tried to smile at him but she was too scared of his rejection. She hastened inside instead.

He didn't turn to her as she entered and Carrie locked the door so they weren't disturbed. She tucked her skirts up and sat down in the middle of the floor. Finally he turned to her, surprised to see her sitting on his floor.

She gestured to the space beside her and for the first time since he was a child, Mr Thornton sat on the floor.

"So, are you finally going to be honest with me?"

"Yes, but there are some things I want to show you first." She got her handbag out of her basket and took her purse out. She pulled the picture of her family out and handed it to him.

"What is this?"

"A photograph of my family."

"Photographs aren't in colour. And their clothes are very strange."

"They are in colour where I'm from and as you can see, it isn't on a glass or copper plate either, just paper. That's my mother," she pointed. "That's my father and my sister and me when I was 12."

"What about your brother?"

"I don't have a brother. I lied."

He handed the picture back to her and Margaret got her college ID and driving license out, both of which had colour pictures of her on them. He looked at them closely then handed then back.

"You wear paint," he said, slightly disdainfully.

"Everyone does where I am from. Even some men." He looked sharply at her and she laughed slightly hysterically. "It's true, I'll show you."

She got her blackberry out and turned it on. She had turned it off almost as soon as she got here to save the battery.

"This is a phone," she explained. "It's a bit like a telegram, but you can speak to the person on the other end. They also do all kinds of other things now, technology has moved on a lot."

She searched through her phone until she found the album cover of one of her favourite bands. She showed him the picture.

"Men in paint!" he said softly.

"They're one of my favourite bands. Musicians," she clarified.

"They play music?"

"And write it. Here," she took the phone back and played a song from the album. She opted for one of the slower singles, I Don't Love You Like I Did Yesterday.

Mr Thornton jumped as the music began and after listening for minute or so, she stopped it.

"You call that music?"

"I do. A lot has changed where I come from."

She next pulled a book out of her rucksack, English Literature in Context and opened it to the copyright page.

"Look at the publication date," she told him.

"2010?"

"It was published one hundred and fifty five years in the future."

"This is absurd."

"Is it?"

She next got her laptop out of the rucksack and turned it on.

"Where I come from we have something called electricity which powers all kinds of fancy machines. This is a computer."

"It looks like a typowriter."

"It can be used as one, among other things." She opened word and began typing, 'Hello, my name is Carrie Preston and I am from the 21st century'. "I write my essay's on this for university. I'm taking a degree in English Literature."

Mr Thornton watched as the words she typed appeared on screen.

"It can do a lot of other things too," she said. "I can store music on here, I have some ebooks stored on here, which are novels in a format that can be read off this screen rather than in a printed book. I can store my photo's on here." She opened up the file labelled personal pics so that she could see the thumbnails, then opened a picture of her with her sister. "There's also something where I come from called moving pictures or video." She opened another file and played one of her music video's, watching as Mr Thornton got closer to the screen while the video played.

"What are they doing?"

"Dancing."

"Doesn't look like any kind of dancing I've ever seen."

"It's street dancing."

She closed the window.

"You see, I come from the future. My aunt granted me my hearts desire and somehow I ended up here and the reason I said that you are destined to be with someone else is because your future is my past. I've read about who you're supposed to marry."

Mr Thornton didn't answer her for a moment. Her toys were very clever but he had something more pressing on his mind at the moment.

"What's that," he asked, pointing to a thumbnail in her picture album. "Can you make it bigger like you did with the other one?"

Carrie opened the picture, though she dreaded his reaction to it. Mark was standing behind her, his arms around her waist and kissing her cheek over her shoulder. Carrie was laughing.

"That's me last Halloween. It's customary where I come from to dress up as someone else on Halloween, I went as a sexy nurse."

"And that man with his arms around you?"

"He's dressed as Carry Grant."

"And who is he?"

"Mark. He was... my boyfriend."

Mr Thornton's features turned positively fierce.

"Things are very different where I come from. People are free to show their affection to each other in public and fashions have changed drastically. It... it's not better or worse, just different."

"I have never seen a nurse look like that."

"No, well like I said, things are very different. Short skirts like that will become popular in the 1960's."

"You look very happy."

"I was having a good time. Celebrations and parties are much more jovial things where I come from, very informal."

"Is that man why you refused me?"

"What? God no! I was going to break up with him but then my aunt died and the next thing I knew, I was here so I didn't have a chance, but we were over, I promise you."

She cupped his face in her hands and turned him to look at her.

"I love you, not him."

She leaned forward and kissed him but he took hold of her shoulders and pushed her away, hard. She fell onto her back and looked up at him as though she was seeing him for the first time.

"You expect me to have anything to do with a woman who behaves like that?" he asked, pointing to the laptop screen. "Cavorting, practically naked in public? You disgust me."

Carrie felt as though she had been punched in the solar plexus and physically couldn't catch her breath for a moment. She had heard of a broken heart but she had never believed that the pain could be this acute.

She stumbled to her feet, feeling disoriented and out of sorts, and ran for the door. She pulled on it for a few moments, frustrated that it wouldn't open, then she remembered that she had locked it. She got it open and ran, her tears blinding her so that she was unable to navigate around people and was forced to push them out of the way.

She ran all the way home, making a right spectacle of herself, and once home she ran up to her bedroom, threw herself down on the bed and sobbed until she was too tired to cry any more.

III

Mr Thornton watched her go, his heart also breaking but unable to forgive her, mainly for loving another man. He leaned over the laptop and, though it took him a while to learn to use the mouse pad, he remembered how she had closed the previous photograph and closed this one. He opened the next one. Carrie and Mark were dancing in this one, her arms around his shoulders.

He went from picture to picture. Each photograph of her and Mark was like a knife in his heart. She wasn't with Mark in all of them, in some she was alone, in some she was with other people and some she wasn't in at all. Some of the people wore hardly any clothes, they were almost naked.

Such a wanton display of immorality.

Then the photographs changed. Carrie was sitting on a blanket on hillside, dressed in blue trousers and a knitted top. She seemed to be having a picnic with another girl. Her hair was lose and blowing in the wind. In the next picture she was running towards the camera against a backdrop of mountains, her face alight with pleasure. He had never seen her look so happy before. The pictures changed once again, this time to a dinner party. In the next she was with a group of friends. In the next she was sitting at a piano on stage. He wondered if she could play.

Then there came a cluster of pictures that seemed to be from another country since the buildings and plants were so unusual. Some pictures were just of buildings while others had Carrie and one or two other women in them. In many pictures they carried large bags on their backs and in them all they were wearing trousers. The people in the background looked Asian.

The country obviously changed again as the other people in the photographs now had black skin, so perhaps she was in Africa or the Caribbean. The next one was very shocking, for it appeared that Carrie was helping to paint a house.

In the next she was a year or so younger, sitting atop a horse, but sitting astride it, not side saddle. She was smiling, a rosette was pinned to her horse's bridle. In the next she was again astride a horse, but wearing clothes much like his, including a top hat.

In the next she was in a field, feeding a chestnut horse and a black pony carrots, her clothes were shabby and her boots filthy but she looked so happy. Next she was grooming the horse, then seemingly mucking the stall out. That was no job for a lady! In the next photograph she was riding bareback with only a bridle on the horse. In the next she was jumping, mid competition judging from the amount of people watching, and her smile was broad once again.

There were also a few pictures where she was wearing what looked like blue pyjamas with a green belt, but she seemed to be fighting in two of the pictures. In the third she was bowing to someone else.

In very few of the pictures was she painted and in none was she as painted as in the Halloween photograph. Perhaps she wasn't such a lose woman after all and painting one's face was something of a tradition on Halloween. After all, hadn't her... Nope, he couldn't bring himself to even think the word. After all, hadn't 'that man' with her in the photograph also been painted?

He had run out of pictures so he closed the window only to see the file that she had played the moving pictures from. He opened another file and watched, fascinated as the people moved and spoke.

The women were all dressed in more form fitting clothes and trousers and the rules of society didn't seem to be kept to at all. Two were speaking about a crime with a lady. A man had been slain and the language they were using was quite vulgar to use in front of a woman. The men, however, seemed to be taking their orders from her, she was their boss.

The boss woman had another man with her but he seemed to be her friend rather than her employee, yet he still did what she said. They went to see some military people and he was shocked to note than some of the military people were women! Dressed in exactly the same uniforms as the men!

Then there was a gun fight and the friend-man cowered while his female companion withdrew a small gun and began shooting, protecting the man!

If this was where Carrie came from he could see that things were indeed very different. Suddenly the screen went blank. He shook the machine but it remained blank. He had obviously broken her magic toy.

He leaned away from the laptop, surprised to realise he had gotten so close to it, but he didn't get up off the floor. Instead he began going through the other items in her basket.

She had some other photographs in her purse (which was unlike any purse he had ever seen before) one of her with her horses and one of her father.

There were lots of printed scraps of paper detailing prices and the dates on all of these pieces of paper were 2011. She also had a number of strange coins, squares of something like card with bank names and long numbers on them and probably thirty or forty thousand pounds in diamonds! A diamond ring, pendant, broach and earrings. Stones of this size just weren't seen outside of the aristocracy.

He looked at the coins which declared themselves to be 1, 2, 5, 20, 50 pence and 1 and 2 pound coins. Each coin was dated sometime between 1987 and 2009.

Next he took out the paper money, which was much smaller than the notes he was used to. He counted them up and she had nearly one hundred pounds in her purse! Of course it probably wasn't legal tender.

He looked through the rest of her handbag and found a date book, though it was labelled 'diary', for the year 2011. In the front was a folded timetable for classes at the University of London and she had slipped some letters in there as well. Though he knew better, he looked through them.

One was a hand written letter from her father, post marked Spain. The next was a letter from something called the National Health Service, what ever that was, telling her she had to attend a pap smear test for cervical cancer. He wondered why anyone would test for cancer, for surely the growth itself was enough evidence that you had the disease. He wondered if Carrie did have this cervical cancer but forced that thought out of his mind, because the idea of losing her was too painful to contemplate.

But you've already lost her, a small voice in his head reminded him. He pushed that thought aside also.

Next he pulled out a box from her handbag that said 'Mates Variety. Natural, ultra thin, endurance and strawberry.' He was still none the wiser to what the box contained so he turned it over and read the back. 'Mates Variety offers you a great selection of our best selling condoms' what the hell is a condom, he thought. 'Natural for ultimate comfort, Ultra Thin for sheer pleasure, Endurance for longer lasting love making and Strawberry for a fruity feeling!'

He read that last line again, just to be sure but there was no mistaking the meaning of 'for longer lasting love making' and suddenly felt rather ill. She must have bought these for Mark. She and that horrible boy had...

He threw the packed away as though it has burned him. He couldn't believe that she would sleep with a man before marriage. There had been signs that she was forward, he supposed, when she winked at him, then hugged him, and one time she had kissed his cheek. And of course she hadn't thought ill of him when he had kissed her but sex? No, he couldn't believe her capable of falling that low as to have relations out side of marriage. He reached out for the box, which said there should be 12 inside, yet he counted only 10.