The Sphere: A Journey In Time by Michelle McBeth Read Free Book Online

with, and loosen his tongue a bit. Guess I'll have to rely on my wits alone."
     
    Even without Connery’s surreal voice transcription I knew it was going to take a fair amount of work to get the journal ready for the planters. It hadn’t been hard to learn the rules of Elizabethan era grammar and verb conjugation based on my status. Even getting the accent down had been a relatively simple thing, but the speech patterns were so different it was hard to come up with sentences on the fly. It had helped that I wasn’t supposed to be a terribly intelligent person or have very involved conversations. The vocabulary I had used was very limited and the more time I spent there listening to other people the easier it came to me. My journal, on the other hand, was very much written in my style of thought and speech patterns. The task wouldn’t be as simple as changing verb forms and replacing some words. Perhaps the rewriting would actually take the whole week.
     
    I pushed myself to finish the rest of the trail run, then walked back to my apartment, eager for a long hot shower, even though I was also looking forward to seeing Noah. "Mail. Respond Noah. Hi Noah! I'm about to hop in the shower in an effort to procrastinate starting my post trip work. Care to help me in that? The procrastination, not the shower. Nothing scheduled today so let me know when you're free. Addy."
     
    By the time I had finished with my shower Noah had responded with a suggestion of lunch. Given my early start to the day, that still left me with a few hours to kill, so I sat down at my desk and pulled up my journal again. I stared at the first entry for a few minutes and wondered if anyone in this place could produce a translator that would convert my text into Elizabethan style English.
     
    Once I got started, creating a more thorough narrative of my time in Stratford was more fun than I thought it would be. Though I didn’t write many descriptions of people in the original journal, I had a firm remembrance of impressions and personality types. It was easy to expand upon the inn keeper’s slave driving attitude and Mary’s innocent mischievousness. Since everyone involved had been dead for a long time already, I didn’t have to worry about accuracy of characters until I got to Shakespeare himself. But even Shakespeare had been written about in such a variety of ways it probably wouldn’t matter how I portrayed him in the end. Though for my own conscience I wanted to represent him as accurately as possible.
     
    I added in a little background about myself as well. I made sure to mention my father and his desire that I became educated to account for the fact that I could read and write in the first place. Mary was the only person I had talked to at length about my life history. No one else cared and most people would have found it inappropriate to have a conversation of that nature with me. Naivety was also simple to impart by just narrating things at face value and focusing on relatively banal parts of my days.
     
    The difficulty came with the actual grammar and speech I used. I found myself frequently double checking words I used to be sure someone of my stature in that time period would have written them. I tried to avoid idioms and metaphors as well.
     
    After three hours I had made a decent dent in the first section of my journal. It spanned my arrival in Stratford to when I was picked to replace the maid who disappeared from Shakespeare’s house. I felt like it sounded sufficiently uneducated. I reread through it once to check for anachronisms and decided that was enough for the morning.
     
    I pulled on a red wrap around tunic and black drawstring pants. As much as I missed the fashion choices of the outside world, I had to admit the clothes they gave us were at least more comfortable than anything I remembered from my prior life. I asked Jim about it once and he rambled off some excuse about remaining inconspicuous and blending in with all