“You asked me two questions. Who am I, and what am I doing here.”
When I speak, he goes still, head tilted, face slackening. He blinks, those light eyes vanishing for a second.
“Speak again,” he says.
“Is that an order, m’lord?”
“Yes, it is, girl.”
“Well, not having been a girl for many years, I decline to comply.” I pause. “Though I suppose I just did, didn’t I?”
“Who are you?” he asks, his voice lower now, tense, as if fearing the answer.
“Just a woman who was enjoying a very fine dream before the cat yowled. Please stop yelling at me. You were so much more appealing half-asleep.”
He stares at me. Just stares. I’m about to speak again when he lunges and grabs me by the arm. I’m still in bed, kneeling, and his sudden yank topples me before I can object. Next thing I know, I’m on my feet, being dragged into a patch of moonlight. My nightshirt tears, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Fingers roughly grip my chin and wrest my face upward.
Then he stops. Goes completely still again and breathes, “Bronwyn.”
I look up into a face as familiar as his smell and his voice. I know them by heart, and yet do not know them at all. A broad face, hard edged and beard shadowed, with a knife-cut line between thick brows. A face that I remember as soft edges and smooth cheeks. Yet under that hard maturity, I see the boy I knew. I see his sky-blue eyes. I see the curve of his jaw. I see the dark hair curling over a wide forehead. I look at the man and instead gaze upon a boy I haven’t seen in twenty-three years.
“William,” I whisper, and he releases me, recoiling.
I fall backward, thumping to the floor, and when I look up, the man is gone.
3
I sit on my bedroom floor, blinking. A cat mews, and I jump, but it’s only the kitten, crawling onto my lap, as if wondering how I got on the floor.
Good question, kitten.
Obviously, I’d fallen out of bed after dreaming I’d been yanked from it by . . .
William.
Twenty-three years ago, I fled this house, screaming about a ghost. One episode, however, was not enough to land me in a psychiatric ward. That came when, in my grief and shock, I began babbling about other people I’d seen in Thorne Manor. About a boy who shared my room hundreds of years ago. A boy who’d been my friend . . . and then more than a friend.
William Thorne.
I don’t remember the first time we met. For me, William has always been as much a part of this house as the grandfather clock. My earliest memory of Thorne Manor is of being in a room that is mine and yet not mine. In William’s bedroom, the two of us, little more than toddlers, playing marbles as if we’ve known each other forever. In that memory, I sense that I’ve already been there many times, seen him many times, played this game many times.
I’d been too young to think anything odd about that. William was my friend at Auntie Judith’s summer house. If I closed my eyes and thought about him in my bedroom, I would open them to find myself in his room.
When we got older, we roamed farther afield. To the stables, to the hay barn, to the moors, to the attic, and the secret passage and every corner of this house. We avoided his family and staff. I was William’s secret, and he was mine.
Then came my parents’ divorce, and it was ten years before I returned. At fifteen I came back, and I had only to think of him while in my bedroom, and I stepped through, and there he was, my age again and as awkwardly sweet as any fifteen-year-old girl could want.
I fell in love that summer, and it was the most perfect first romance imaginable. We walked hand in hand through the moors. We kissed under a canopy of stars. We talked, endlessly talked, and wanted nothing more than to be together even if I was curled up in the stable with a book while he groomed his horses.
As for how I traveled back to William’s time, we didn’t need an explanation. The answer was obvious. He was real, and I was real, and therefore, what happened must be equally real—real magic. A shared room, a shared life. A reasonable explanation for a fifteen-year-old girl, madly in love with a boy who lived two centuries before her.
The truth was much harsher. After my uncle died and I babbled my confession about William, the doctors explained that stress had twisted memories of an imaginary childhood friend into vivid hallucinations of a teenage boy.
My father is a historian, and I caught the bug from him, and so, the doctors explained, I imagined a Thorne boy who once lived in my Thorne Manor bedroom. An imaginary playmate for an only child who spent her summers in an isolated country house. At fifteen, I’d been reuniting with Dad against my mother’s wishes. The stress of that proved too much, and my mind conjured William anew, shaping him into the friend and the first love I desperately needed.
Tonight, I visited William again to find him a grown man, still my own age. Yet this was clearly a dream, and somehow that makes it worse, the flame of loss igniting another, never quite snuffed out. Michael is eight years dead. And William Thorne never lived at all.
It’s a long time before I fall back to sleep, and when I do, my pillow is soaked with tears for a husband I lost and a boy I never truly had.
I wake the next morning in a far better mood. There is a kitten curled up at my side, as if drawn there by my silent crying, and it’s hard to laze in bed with a tiny creature who needs you to fix her breakfast.
Midmorning, I tuck the kitten into my newly kitten-proof room. Then I pop into the detached garage—formerly the stables—in case Del was exaggerating about the condition of the car. When I tug off the tarp, dust motes fly, and a few mice scatter, but the chrome and cherry-red paint still gleams.
Uncle Stan’s baby, Aunt Judith had called it. At the time, I hadn’t seen the appeal of such an old car. Now, I realize my mistake. It’s an Austin-Healey convertible. I have no idea what year or model, but she’s a beauty, and my fingers itch to wrap around the leather-bound steering wheel. That, however, is where Del was telling the truth. While the keys are in the ignition, the motor doesn’t turn. I’m no mechanic, but my dad taught me enough to confirm the problem isn’t a dead battery or empty gas tank. Still, I fold the tarp aside and leave the garage door open to air the car out.
Tucked behind the convertible, I find two ancient bicycles. I take Aunt Judith’s, with its huge front basket. A few drops of oil on the chain, a bit of air in the tires, a backpack for extra storage, and I’m off to town.
At around a thousand people, High Thornesbury is just big enough that I can blend in with the June holiday crowds. I’ll socialize when I’m less jet-lagged and better able to put names to faces twenty-three years older than I last saw them.
After a visit to the hardware shop and the grocer, my backpack is full, but my bicycle basket holds only a small bag of kibble and a bottle of red wine, cushioned by a pair of thick woolen socks. Then I smell fresh bread wafting from the tiny village bakery, and since I have extra room . . .
By the time I leave town, my bicycle basket is full to overflowing. I blame Mrs. Del’s scones. Sure, one might think that since I already have a box of them at the house, I shouldn’t need more, but having some only makes me worry about the morning when I’ll have none. Also, as lovely as tinned biscuits are, they’re no match for fresh shortbread. Or gingersnaps. Or butter buns.