“Jane Wells! Where are you?”

I covered my ears with my hands. The old crone's screeching was enough to make me want to rip them from my head. Mildred Elliot's squalling voice grated on my nerves like nails against a blackboard. I’d told her so on more than one frustrated occasion. It had little impact on the old woman, other than reinforcing her viewpoint that I was a bit “odd in the head.” Mildred hadn't a clue what a blackboard was. They weren't invented yet. That came years later, around the turn of the nineteenth century, when a headmaster in Scotland named James Pilans got it into his head to frame a piece of slate for the school's use. The screeching old crone I was fervently dodging happened to be located in England in the year seventeen-forty-five.

I didn’t belong in that time or place. I was a covert transient from the twenty-first century. I’d traveled back in time for one purpose only. To change the future for the one I loved.