The Day Before Forever (27 page)

EIGHTEEN

HENLEY DISSOLVED BEFORE
my eyes. The trees on either side of me grew out their limbs and rushed to overtake the space in front of me. I was pushed aside as a tree grew where I had been standing just moments before.

I closed my eyes, feeling slightly nauseated as the ground rippled and changed. When I opened them, the world was stable again. But everything was different.

My dress hung limply on my body without the bulky jeans and T-shirt underneath. I looked down at my feet. I had forgotten about shoes.

I still held the clock in my hands. I hadn't thought about what to do with it. I couldn't afford to lose it again. I also didn't want it taken from me. It was probably best to leave it hidden where no one was likely to come looking.

I took the hem of my dress and ripped an inch of it clean off. I tied the makeshift ribbon onto the closest tree branch I could
find and buried the clock under a layer of dirt and fallen leaves at the foot.

I hoped to God it would still be there when I returned.

I took a few steps forward. My bare feet felt tender against the sharp leaves and dirt on the ground. I was in the middle of a dense forest. I could hear voices ahead of me, though I couldn't quite tell what they were saying. The trees grew so thickly that I couldn't see what I was heading toward.

“Hello?” I called.

I realized it would look strange if I looked so clean coming out of the middle of the woods alone.

I took some dirt and rubbed a bit on my face and arms. I caked some mud into my hair. I even took care to dirty up my dress.

I started to count my steps as I blindly thrashed my way through the trees, feeling the twigs and branches scratching my arms and legs. I tried to ignore the pain on the soles of my feet. I needed to keep an accurate count of how many steps I was taking away from the clock so I would have some hope of finding it again.

The voices had stopped and all I could hear was the occasional squawk of birds.

I called again. “Hello?”

I fumbled through the leaves and broke out into a clearing.

It looked like a camp.
The
camp.

There were tents made of leather and white cloth around an open fire in the middle of the clearing. There were also people. Faces were turned toward me in astonishment.

“Um . . . hello,” I said. “I-I'm sorry. I was . . . lost.”

I could see five men gathered around the fire. Some held knives in their laps. Almost all had swords by their sides. They were all looking at me.

I took a step to approach them.

They stood suddenly with their knives and swords, causing me to stop.

“Who are you?” one of them said in English.

He had a mustache that tapered down into a pointy-looking beard. He spoke with a thick accent.

I was so petrified, I couldn't form words.

The men murmured among themselves. The sounds of their changed voices brought several new faces out from the various tents set up around the fire pit. A shaggy yellow dog also came out at the sound of the commotion.

“English.” One of the men spat on the ground.

Since America didn't exist yet, it made sense that they thought I was English. They were also making it very clear what they thought of the English.

A raven-haired woman came out of one of the tents, raising her voice. At first I thought she was shouting at me, but then I realized she was aiming her ire at the men.

I also realized that I didn't know what she was saying. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand what any of the men were saying either. They were speaking Spanish.

The woman walked between the men until she was face to face with me.

“English?” she asked. She too had a thick accent. “No Spanish?”

I shook my head.

“Did you come from England? Who are you?”

That was a good question. It was time to try spinning a story that hopefully wouldn't get me more hated by the men than I was already.

“Yes, I did. I came from England,” I started.

“An English ship?”

“Um, yes.”

“And what was your position there?”

“My position?” It took me a minute to realize what she meant. “I worked in the kitchen.” It was the first thing I could think of that might be needed on a ship. “Like a scullery maid.”

The woman frowned at me. “And how did you get here?”

I thought hard about this. I had known she was going to ask it at some point.

“I didn't have much money, so I bought my way on board by working in the kitchen—”

She interrupted me. “What was an English ship doing in this part of the New World?”

“Colonizing.” Again, it was the first thing I could think of.

“So the English think that they can set up colonies in lands already marked for Spain?”

There was a grumble of dissent from some of the men. I realized that some of the men could understand English, although others could only speak Spanish.

I knew I had to turn this story around.

“They thought they could, but they soon realized differently. The land was too harsh for them. Disease struck . . . Native tribes . . . The English—my people—wanted to return. But too many died or became delirious from illness. So I fled.”

The woman crossed her arms. “You fled . . . alone?”

“Um . . . no?” I said. “Others ran too, but they died. Some might have survived, but I don't know what has become of them.”

There was silence as I finished my story. The woman didn't seem to feel the need to fill it. She just stood there, looking at me, her arms still crossed.

She didn't give any indication of believing my story, but I also thought that she would have said something if she
didn't
believe it.

Finally, when she spoke, it was to the men around us and it was in Spanish, so I couldn't understand a thing. I kept listening for words that sounded like their English counterparts—people had told me Spanish was full of those and was therefore similar to English, but if that was true, I couldn't distinguish anything in the woman's heavy accent.

The men nodded slowly as the woman barked at them. I didn't know if they were agreeing to kill me or have me stay.

“Come with me,” the woman said.

“Me?”

“I
am
speaking your language, aren't I?”

The woman took long strides like the men, her skirts swaying around her ankles. As the men disbanded from the center of the clearing and went back to whatever they had been doing before I appeared, the woman and I went into one of the tents.

Inside was a hammock hung across two of the tent's wooden poles. Besides the white hammock, there were wooden chests pushed into the corners, but that was about it. The chests had papers spread over them; they looked like hand-drawn maps
with
X
s marked on them, but I wasn't close enough to see what they were identifying.

The woman saw my gaze, and quickly put the maps away in one of the chests. She turned back to me and indicated for me to sit on the hammock.

I hesitated, as it didn't seem to be sturdy enough to take my weight.

“Go on,” she said. “It's stronger than it looks.”

I obeyed, gingerly sitting down.

“Wait here,” she said, disappearing from the tent.

When she came back she carried with her a basin of water, a folded linen sheet, and a smaller rag. She also brought leather shoes. She dipped the rag into the water and started washing my feet.

At first I pulled away—I didn't know what she was doing—but she grabbed my ankle to hold me still.

“This will hurt a little bit, but the pain will be nothing compared to what you might feel later if these cuts aren't cleaned,” she said, kneeling on the dirt in front of me.

From my spot on the hammock, I got a good look at her. There was something familiar about her. She looked like everyone's older sister.

Her hair, coiled out of the way at the nape of her neck, which I had formerly thought of as pure black, had a reddish tint to it where the light hit it. She had a sharp nose, but that was offset by her heavier stature and plump, sure hands that worked steadily. Her cheeks and hands had a ruddy glow to them that showed through her olive skin, as if she had worked at scrubbing herself clean. Though her linen dress was brown and caked with dirt
around the hem, I couldn't see any dirt under her fingernails.

“W-why are you doing this? Helping me, I mean.”

It was probably not the question I should have been asking. These people hadn't killed me yet; I should have been thankful.

“Some of the men believe you're an English spy,” she said, not answering my question directly. “I told them that the English are at least smart enough to not send a bumbling young girl to spy on us.”

I gritted my teeth as she dabbed the wet rag along the scratches and cuts on the bottom of my feet.

“So you believe me?”

“I'll help you stay here if that's what you want.” She licked her thin lips in concentration.

Her answer was puzzling.

“You speak English very well,” I said, trying a different tactic to try to know and understand her better.

“I also speak French and Italian.” She got up off her knees to attend to the cuts on my arms.

“How did you learn all those languages?”

“My parents valued education,” she said. “They believed it would find me a better match.”

It took me a moment to understand she meant marriage. “And are you married?”

“You ask too many questions for someone who is not on the side with the power.” But she smiled as she turned away. “I'm unmarried. What married man would let his wife go on voyages to the New World alone?”

“Voyages? As in multiple?”

She tilted her head at me, seemingly amused by all my
questions. “Just two. This being the second. Turn your head to the left.”

I did as I was told, and the woman took the damp rag to my face. My right cheek stung under her touch.

She saw me wince. “It doesn't look as deep as it feels. Merely a scratch.”

I hadn't even noticed a tree branch catching me across the face.

“And what are those voyages for? Colonization?”

“For Spain. The first was when we found these lands. This voyage is to . . . chart the lands. Of course, there were a fair number of voyages between my two that I was not a part of. Some of them involved colonization for their Royal Majesties.”

“And—”

The woman suddenly doubled over, clutching her side. I sprang out of the hammock, just about to call for help, when she said, “Don't call anyone. Don't say anything. It'll pass.”

I stood over her, helpless. I placed a hand on her shoulder when she groaned in pain. I felt like doing anything more would be overstepping our relationship.

Minutes went by, and the woman finally drew herself up into a standing position.

“Are you all right? Are you sure you don't need to see someone about that?”

“They just happen. No more questions,” she said. “The time for interrogation is over.” She pointed at the shoes she had brought me, indicating that I should put them on.

Save for a few beads of sweat on her forehead, the woman looked as if she hadn't been in agony only a few minutes before.

I knew she wouldn't answer any questions about her pain, so I asked a different one.

“Just one more,” I said. “I'm Rebecca. What might I call you?”

“Juana.” She smiled and her features momentarily softened, before she grabbed the basin and the rag and left the tent.

Juana.
It was a name I knew well from the stories that Miss Hatfield had told me of the origins of the Fountain of Youth. There were two Juanas in the stories.

One—Juana Jimenez—had gone in search of the Fountain of Youth because she had mistakenly believed it would make her younger. She got Ponce de León to trust her just so he might one day take her to the Fountain of Youth. When the day came, she spent hours floating in the lake, but of course nothing happened because she didn't drink the water. Ponce de León supposedly found her body hours later.

Her body was said to have had a sickly pallor. She had claw marks on her face, as though she'd either scratched herself with her own fingernails or been involved in some sort of struggle. Her cheeks were supposedly bloodied and her expression was one of utter horror. No one really knew how she had died. Some speculated that she had gone mad and taken her own life, while others swore that there was something sinister in the forest itself.

But before Juana Jimenez was Juana Ruíz. She had been the first European woman to set foot in the New World. Supposedly she had also been with Ponce de León the day he discovered the fountain. This was the Juana who wrote that letter . . . and also the Juana who could be the killer.

Without knowing what it was, she drank the water, alongside
Ponce de León. Eight years later, when Ponce de León was putting together another expedition to Florida, he was complimented on how he looked like he hadn't aged a day since his first journey. Meanwhile, Juana Ruíz seemed to have disappeared.