Chapter 1

It’s February. The sky darkens later now, and the days aren’t quite as short as they used to be. We already put away the candles and greenery from our ‘Christmas in the Colonies’ bit and hired a few new employees in anticipation of the field trips schools usually do in the spring.

I’m really looking forward to summertime—each year it gets hotter and hotter. I don’t know how I manage in the cotton breeches and starched shirt I wear at work, but it could be worse. I could be Angela over at the inn, with her bustle and her ten yards of fabric and her tight-ass corset. Or Thad at the capitol building in his ironed breeches and polished shoes and long-tailed coat. Or Jeremy at the smithy’s, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, bent over a hot furnace all day long, hammering out horseshoes and bits of iron for the tourists.

It could be a lotworse.

Me, I’m just a stable boy. Nothing glorious, but back in Colonial America most jobs weren’t. At least I can wear my shirt open, unlaced to the middle of my chest, and I don’t have to worry about mopping the sweat off my back because I’m supposed to sweat while I work. Part of the ambiance, I guess. It makes it real.

I spend my workday carrying crates from one end of the stable to the other, brushing down the three horses we keep on site, and rattling off my spiel about how my master’s steed is the fastest in the thirteen colonies, once owned by Patrick Henry himself, and no, before you ask, it wasn’t the one he rode that fateful night.

For a small tip I can even recite the poem, though I’ve been known to hunker down beside a little girl and whisper it to her for the price of a smile as she watched me with wide eyes. The kids eat that re-enacting shit up. “Listen my children and you shall hear…” They love it.

After the sun goes down, the cobbled streets thin out as the tourists catch the bus back to the hotels. I usually sit on one of the benches in the square until the lamp lighter makes his rounds. Greg is a short fellow with a quick laugh; how he got the lighter position when he can barely reach the candle inside each street lamp beats me. In the gloaming, his footsteps echo off the stones and I’ll watch the lights flare to life one by one as he approaches.

When he gets close enough to where I sit, he’ll always say, “Hey, how you doing, kid?” Like he’s so much older than me. He can’t be forty, if that, and he has to wear a cap to cover the short, spiked hair he’s dyed an un-Colonial shade of blue. The management doesn’t like their re-enactors to be out of character.

They like my hair, long blonde unruly curls I’m itching to cut, but then I’ll be unmarketable. Who shaved all their hair off back then? I mentioned it once and my boss said I’d have to wear a powdered wig if I did. Those things are itchy and heavy and hot. And whoever heard of a stable boy wearing a powdered wig? I’d have to move up to government, so I said no thanks and kept my curls, pulling them back in a tight ponytail while I work but letting them loose the minute I’m off the clock.

* * * *

There’s a slight breeze rustling through the bare-limbed trees like a sigh. The mild winter gives us nice weather during the day, and faint pink buds already bloom on the tips of the branches like dots of icing decorating a cake. At night, the temperature drops but not much, bringing in a thick fog that clings to the buildings as if it rose from the empty cobbled streets themselves. In the stables a few yards away, the horses neigh softly and farther down the street comes Greg’s steady step, even though I can’t see his light yet.

It grows colder now the sun has set. My bones ache from another long day spent tending the horses and cleaning stables. How colonists managed to eke out a living is beyond me. I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have the luxury of a well-lit, heated apartment downtown to return to each night, or weekends away from all this. It’s hard work even if it’s only play-acting.

Slipping off my bench, I stretch out on the damp grass beneath one of the large oaks around the square. The last bus into town leaves a little before midnight, which is hours from now so I have some time to unwind a bit…folding my arms behind my head, I stare up at the sky through the fog-laced branches. The breeze breathes into my open shirt, tickling its way around my chest and hardening my nipples to make me shiver as it cools my sweat. Wisps of clouds scurry across the moon, chasing the stars. When I close my eyes, I imagine it must have felt like this hundreds of years ago—the sounds of the city don’t drift out here, so there’s no noise, no music or traffic or people to disrupt the illusion. I don’t hear anything but the leaves and the horses and Greg’s footsteps, distorted in the foggy night.