her life? What if, by hiring her as a nursemaid, I sentence her to a life in service, never able to give up the steady paycheck to follow her dreams?”
“And what if, by squashing a bug in Victorian England, you bring about World War Three?” Freya snaps her laptop shut. “Where do you draw the limit, Bronwyn? And at what point is that limit going to interfere with your life, and the lives of your family? Yes, your baby doesn’t need a Victorian nursemaid. But maybe she should have one. Maybe that’s her destiny.”
When I don’t answer, she sighs and says, “You do realize the butterfly effect is pure fiction. An author’s creation.”
“No, it’s not,” says a thickly accented voice from the doorway. “It’s chaos theory.”
I look up. Del is in the doorway, pulling off his boots, with William coming in behind him. Del had been Thorne Manor’s caretaker for years, my aunt hiring him when she stopped coming up to North Yorkshire after her husband died.
My early correspondence with Del referenced his legal name, as he was part of Aunt Judith’s will. That name is Delores Crossley. It’s almost hard to remember that now, arriving and being confused for about five seconds before I figured it out.
Del presents as male and uses male pronouns. As for the specifics, it’s none of my business. He is Del Crossley, caretaker of Thorne Manor, devoted husband of Freya and our friend. He’s also a retired physicist, which was more of a shock than anything else. The man looks like he’s spent his life with grease on his hands and a pipe clenched between his teeth.
Del walks in and pokes around the tea table before selecting a square of cucumber sandwich.
“Chaos theory,” I say. “That’s science, right?”
He snorts. “Yes, Dr. Humanities Professor, it’s one of those science-y things.”
He eyes his chair—with me in it—and I start to rise, but he waves a gnarled hand and lowers himself beside Freya, who leans against him briefly in greeting.
“Is it a physics science-y thing?” I ask as William comes in and silently takes a seat near me.
Del sighs, as if I’m asking him to roll a boulder uphill, not talk about a subject he enjoys as much as William likes talking about horses . . . or Freya about folklore . . . or me about Victorian history. We are passionate about our passions, which is probably why we’ve become such good friends.
In normal conversation, Del’s North Yorkshire accent is porridge thick and liberally salted with local dialect. I think that’s partly a choice and partly camouflage. The average retired physicist—or historian—might want people to remember they have a PhD after their name, but Del would be quite happy if most of his neighbors forgot. He wants to recede into village life for his retirement. Hence the accent. When he launches into lecture mode, though, all that falls away.
“Chaos theory is the study of random or unpredictable behavior within systems,” he says. “When it comes to time travel, many theoretical physicists disagree with the so-called butterfly effect. They believe that it’s ridiculous to think one small action could disrupt a future that has—in the traveler’s time—already taken place. According to them, the universe would heal itself.”
“How?” I say. “Any change I make here must ripple through time.”
“Must it? That makes the universe seem an awfully fragile thing.” He leans back. “The butterfly effect is a Hollywood gimmick, a constraint to place on time-travel stories. Raising the stakes and all that nonsense. But those writers live in a world where time travel doesn’t exist. If it does—which we know—the results cannot be catastrophic.”
William rises and brings the tea pot over to refresh my cup. “That presumes, of course, that time is linear. Or that my world exists in the same timeline as yours.”
“Precisely,” Freya says. “I don’t think it does. It’s like I’ve said before. Time seems to be stitched together at a point where you two can cross. It’s probably also stitched at other points. That would mean multiple layers of time rather than one set timeline.”
And so it goes, launching into a heated discussion of the nature of time travel. I join in a bit, but my mind keeps circling back to what they’ve said about the butterfly effect and chaos theory.
There are no answers here. Oh, I could try to get answers. I’ve already affected William’s own timeline. I can check the archives and see whether anything has changed.