Kate Heartfield: Alice Payne Arrives

Kate Heartfied’s Alice Payne Arrives is that wonderful thing, and original time travel story. Alice is the daughter of a distressed British country lord, finished his service in the disastrous American rebellion, and desperately in need if money.

With the help of an automaton created by her brilliant lover, Jane Hodgson, who lives with her in the family manor as her lady’s maid, Alice has become a highwayman, stealing money from men she knows to be rapists and more to stave off her family’s collapse. Someone else is interested in Jane, however. Prudence Zuniga, a time agent of the Farmers, one faction of future humanity engaged in a millennia-long war to mould history in their own image, wants all the tinkering to just stop, and allow humanity to build its own history. To achieve her goal, she needs a clever, scientifically minded, ‘naif’ - someone who will never be missed, and who is likely to agree to take on a strange task in her own time in return for monetary or ideological reward. Zuniga has settled on the unwed, childless servant Jane as that person.

Of course, nothing goes as planned for anyone. And that’s just the beginning of the story.