Alice Payne Rides

Alice Payne is a highwaywoman in England in the 1780s, and she works with a team that travels through time. Her crew has taken Arthur of Brittany out of the year 1203. That abduction produces the very puzzle that first sent them to that era, so the loop closes on itself.

The trip has a cost. The team brings the smallpox virus back to 1780 without meaning to, and a disease that should stay in the past now threatens the present they live in.

Prudence Zuniga, a major from the future, goes in search of a vaccine. She finds that the rival factions fighting the time war see the outbreak as an opening, a chance to bend the crisis toward their own ends.

Alice and her team have to stop an epidemic from spreading across time and set history back on its course, though only until the next battle in the war. This is a time-travel adventure in novella length. It is the second book in the Alice Payne series and follows Alice Payne Arrives, so it makes most sense to read after that first installment.