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Stone buildings with peaked roofs and narrow chimneys. Cobblestone streets. A horse-drawn carriage passing below, the driver in a long coat and top hat. Women in long skirts, their hair pinned up beneath hats. Men in waistcoats and pocket watches glinting in the weak sunlight.

The gas lamps were wrong. Not wrong as in broken—wrong as in early. The Welsbach mantle wasn't widely adopted until 1892, which meant. . . God. I wasn't just in the past. I was in a very specific past.

Not a car in sight. Not a streetlight. Not a single piece of the world I knew.

Only the watch on my wrist—my last anchor to a time that might not exist anymore.

“Oh god,” I whispered, my breath fogging the glass. “Oh god, this isn't happening.”

But it was happening. Somehow, impossibly, I wasn't in my Oxford anymore. The buildings looked similar enough, the layout familiar—but this was an Oxford from over a century ago.

The necklace. It had to be the necklace. Gran had tried to tell me something last night, but I'd been too focused on my research to understand.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway outside.

I dropped the curtain and spun toward the door, my heart hammering. Footsteps, growing closer. Heavy, deliberate.

The door handle turned.

I looked around frantically for something—anything—I could use as a weapon. The porcelain pitcher on the washstand was the closest option. I grabbed it, the weight of it solid and reassuring in my hands and pressed myself against the wall beside the door.

The door opened slowly.

A woman entered, older, perhaps in her fifties, wearing a black dress with a white apron. A housekeeper, my brain supplied automatically. She carried a tray with a teapot and cup, her movements efficient and practiced.

She saw the empty bed and stopped. “Oh! Miss, you shouldn't be⁠—”

Then she saw me, pitcher raised, back against the wall, and her eyes went wide.

“Please don't be alarmed,” she said quickly, setting the tray down on a side table. “You're safe here. Mr. Hawthorne brought you in—you'd been injured.”

“Where am I?” My voice came out rougher than I intended. “What is this place?”

“Mr. Hawthorne's residence, miss. In Oxford. You've been unconscious for several hours. We were quite worried.”

The word tasted wrong. Dressed in the same letters, but nothing else fit. “Oxford,” I repeated. Because this wasn’t Oxford. Not the one I knew. Not the one with coffee shops and university students, not the one where I'd lived and worked.

“What year is it?”

The question seemed to confuse her. “I beg your pardon?”

“What year?” I repeated, my grip tightening on the pitcher. “Please. I need to know what year this is.”

She exchanged a glance with someone in the hallway. Then, carefully, as if speaking to someone fevered: “It's 1892, miss. October.”

The pitcher nearly slipped from my hands.

1892. Over a century before I was born. Before my parents. Before Gran. Before everything I'd ever known existed.

“I think you'd better sit down, miss,” the housekeeper said gently. “You've had quite a shock, and that wound on your head⁠—“

“I need to leave.” The words tumbled out. “I have to get back.”

“Back where, miss?”

Home. To my time. To my world. But I didn't know how. Didn't know if it was even possible.

A figure appeared in the doorway, and my breath caught.