She wasn’t.
“I hope you consider what you are getting into, Tommy.” Mrs. Andrews expected her children to put family honor ahead of other considerations, and her voice through the phone sounded sterner than usual. “The girl is an American. You know nothing about her family. She has been the instigator of a great deception, however amusing it was. You must make sure that she is a suitable match for you. Don’t let your emotions cloud your thinking.”
She was right, based on the information she had. I wish I could tell them everything. I could show them the “cell phone” and the “calculator.” It would be better if they knew the truth. Yet his thoughts gnawed at the fear his parents would never believe the story. And he had no right to break the trust Sam and Casey had placed in him.
“I understand your concern, Mother,” he said at last. “I realize I need to know her better, but I did spend several months working with her. Even accounting for her deception, I believe she is honest and trustworthy. I know that she is kind and cares for others. I suspect she was well brought up, whoever her parents were.”
“I hope so, dear.” Her tone was warmer. “You have always been a good judge of character and I do trust you to make the right decision. I look forward to meeting the young lady and her guardian.”
“I promise to bring them around for dinner, soon,” he told her, and she left it at that.
Sam had his own misgivings. He’d seen Casey angry, sad, hungry, any number of things. He had never seen her in love. But there was no doubt the girl had gone completely over, and he was worried. Edwardian society had its own rules for things, and for her protection, he felt she had to know those rules.
He broached the subject at dinner the night after Tom had been over. “We’ve never really developed a story about your family, Casey,” he told her. “It’s possible that some people will want to know more information about your upbringing, to determine how you might fit into this society. What will we tell them?”
Casey looked resigned, as if she had known this was coming. “We tell them the truth, Sam. My father was an engineer, my mother was a doctor. We lived in Berkeley, I was an only child. Isn’t that a decent upbringing?”
“It is, Casey, it is. But some people might want details. Names, addresses. References, even. Death certificates. Something.”
Casey sighed. “But Sam, we’ve covered that. We have a story we tell people when they ask for information. Don’t change it now. And anyway, who wants to know, all of a sudden?”
He leaned back in his chair. “No one yet. But you have to understand this, Casey and you won’t like it. You’re falling in love with a man from a powerful family. They’re good people, don’t get me wrong. But they aren’t going to let their son marry a waif from the streets of Belfast. I’m just concerned that this may not turn out well.”
She stared at the table for a minute, and then whispered, “But I’m not a waif from the streets of Belfast.” She looked up at him, her eyes angry. “We were poor for a while and it was a struggle to get by. But we got through it. Do people hold that kind of thing against you, around here?”
“Maybe.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. “They might. I don’t know. But it’s not just that. It’s a class issue. This society is completely stratified, Casey. People very seldom marry outside of their class.”
“But Sam, Americans don’t have a stratified society. Europeans marry Americans, so there has to be a way around it…” she trailed off as Sam laughed at her.
“Don’t be naïve, Casey. Americans may try to say they don’t have a class society, but they do, they really do. Your parents would not be considered gentry unless they had lots and lots of money. Yes, they were educated and would be considered very well off, and you might be able to get away with that. But you and I are most definitely not part of the gentry of this society, and money has nothing to do with it. You’re born into it. I suppose you can only try, but you needed to be aware of this. The Andrews family simply may not approve of Tom being involved with an American girl, especially considering the circumstances.”
She stared sullenly at the table, not answering. Sam took a deep breath and plunged in with his fait accompli.
“Have you considered that in the original timeline, Tom marries someone else?”
Slowly, she raised her head to look at him. “What?”
“There’s another woman in Belfast who’s supposed to become his wife, Casey. I can tell you her name, age, who her family is, how many children they have…”
“No!” She stood, slapping the silverware off the table and against the wall with a great clatter. She glared at Sam. “You’re preaching determinism, again! I don’t care who he married before. He died before! I’m going to stop that; I’ll stop the other, too.” Defiance brought her chin up. “He didn’t know me before, but he knows me now. He’s interested in me, not someone else! And I will do everything I can to keep it that way!”
She left the room and he heard her bedroom door slam, as he dropped his head onto his arms.
“That went well,” he told the silverware.
Tom was coming to dinner on Thursday and as the time approached, Casey’s emotions refused to settle on anything. Having him over the other night, knowing he was seeing her as a woman for the first time, had filled her with an erotic ache. He had actually held her, something completely against the rules. She couldn’t wait to see him again. To be with him now, to eat and talk and laugh with him, was almost more than she could bear. But Sam’s warnings moved like a murmur underneath her joy. It could all come to nothing, for the simple reason that she was an American and not from a wealthy family.
But when Tom arrived, bearing chocolates, Casey didn’t even try to keep her emotions in check. When she opened the door, he smiled and offered the candy, at the same time, glancing down at her dress. Her body throbbed in response to his gaze, but she managed to raise an eyebrow quizzically when his eyes again reached her face. His smiled widened into a teasing grin. “Just checking.”
She laughed. “I probably deserved that. Point to you.”
He laughed with her. “I promise I won’t wear the joke to death. Just until you’ve paid me back for all the teasing the men put me through.”
“That will take a while, I imagine.”
He patted her shoulder, and his next words sent a thrill charging through her. “I hope to spend several years at it.”
After dinner, she and Sam showed Tom their time travel journals and described how they were attempting to keep track of any changes they made in the past. Tom had brought a notebook in which he had recorded their observations about the Titanic. They all agreed to continue with the journals and compare their notes regularly as time went by. They spent a couple of hours writing it all down, including sketches that Sam tried to duplicate from memory. Tom was astonished at the things Sam knew, from being able to sketch a rough draft of a ship that had not yet been designed, to information about a coal fire that burned for two weeks and probably contributed to the quick sinking, by weakening a bulkhead.
As Sam and Casey talked about the building of the ship and the disaster itself, Tom made notes, quickly categorizing their memories by placing a symbol next to each item. He would later add a section to the notebook for each symbol. This is where he would work on the detail. They had an intense debate about whether Tom should take the book to work or leave it with Casey and Sam. Although he acknowledged the danger of having it at work, Tom was adamant that he needed to have it with him. He would keep it locked in a drawer, and not even Ham would have a key.