Chapter Seventeen
With Bernadette’s permission, Fable used the waitress’s phone to call the social worker’s office.
They were all disappointed to hear Ms.
Halstead was upstate in meetings with HR and would not be back in the office until tomorrow.
No, the receptionist could not give Fable Ms.
Halstead’s cell number, even if it was an emergency.
They would have to wait until tomorrow.
When they told Bernadette about it, she noted that it was especially clever of Fable to search other names her husband would know.
Once he found ‘Thea’ he would recognize Halstead, and as he had said, the W obviously stood for West.
“Your wife is also clever.
You could have found twenty Dorothea Wests and spent more time trying to find the right one.
This way, with just one Thea W.
Halstead, it guarantees that when you find her, you will have found the right woman.”
“Without you,”
Ben turned to Fable with a look that bound her to him for a lifetime and beyond, “we might not have found her.”
“We haven’t found her just yet.”
“Tomorrow,”
he said confidently and smiled at her and then at his father.
“Let’s go find a place to sleep tonight and plan what we need to do and where we need to go tomorrow.”
They promised Bernadette they would see her for dinner and when Ben rose up to pay the bill, Fable rose with him and stood on her toes to whisper in his ear that it was customary to leave a tip.
He gave Bernadette a hundred dollars, and took Fable’s hand to leave.
“Go to Liz’s B grapes, cherries, peaches.
Nothing appealed to him.
Feeling his mother’s gaze on him, he reached for a piece of black bread.
She snatched it from his hand and slathered butter and honey on it, then handed it back to him.
“Benjamin,”
she scolded, “if you don’t eat you won’t be here when she does return.”
He bit into the bread and cast his sister a resigned smirk.
Her Grace Dorothea West was still unhappy with her son’s choice of a wife, but at least she didn’t voice her displeasure at times like this–when he felt as if he was treading on unsteady ground and at any moment it could all fall away.
“I heard you met Lady Charlotte of Nottingham,”
his mother brought up while he chewed.
“That’s true,”
he let her know.
“You threw her out of Colchester.”
He slid his gaze to hers. “Yes.”
“All right,”
she said with a frown.
“I heard Lady Margaret is kind-hearted and beautiful.”
“Mother–”
“Please, Son,”
she whispered, reaching her fingers to his cheek.
“Meet the king’s niece at least and if you decide–”
“I have met her.
I do not want her for a wife.
I already have a wife.”
His mother turned to Prudence.
“Has he met Lady Elizabeth Dra–”
Ben slammed his palm down on the table.
“Enough! Please.
There is no one I wish to meet.
I have met them all already.”
One corner of his mouth rose with a snarl of distaste.
“None of them pleased me.
My plan was not to marry but to rejoin the king’s army and die on the battlefield.”
“Benjamin!”
his mother and sister shouted in unison.
He settled his gaze on his sister.
He was sorry he’d misled her.
He knew she would have fallen apart when he told her.
She didn’t fall apart now.
In fact, she calmly popped a grape into her mouth then slipped her gaze to him.
“You were correct not to tell me.
So…do you feel the same way now?”
“No.”
“Because of her?”
“Yes,”
he confirmed in a low voice.
“Because of her.”
Prudence spread her warm gaze over her parents.
“When she returns, let us welcome her as a sister and a daughter.”
Ben’s father nodded his head and kept his gaze on his shoes.
“Mother?”
his sister surprisingly continued, “Give Ben your blessings.
I know Fable.
She makes him happy.
She brought a light I thought long dead in Benjamin back to life.
She’s quite thoughtful, but goes so far as to invite servants to sit with her and Ben.
Just…be prepared.”
His mother’s eyes opened wider as she echoed two words– “be prepared ?
“She thinks differently than the people of this world,”
Ben’s father intervened.
“You of all people should understand, Thea.
You spent seventeen years learning to think the way she thinks.”
“I only want what’s best for him.
He needs–”
“I need Fable.”
Ben told her.
“Mother, pray for that.”
“She found you, Mother,”
Prudence reminded her.
“No matter what kind of power those witches have, they could not find you.
I think she belongs here.”
Ben had heard and eaten enough.
With a slight bow to his parents he stared for the door.
His sister’s fingers closing around his wrist stopped him.
“Benjamin, Mother and Father want to see Simon’s parents, so he is escorting us to Sudbury two days from now.
You should come.
You need a few days away.”
“You are assuming Fable will not return,”
he said, sounding more hurt than angry.
“No, Brother.
If I assumed that, I would have suggested we leave tomorrow.
I’m praying that she returns by tomorrow.”
Prudence had forgiven Fable everything when she learned that Fable was the reason their father and then their mother were finally reunited and were able to return home.
Ben couldn’t be more relieved that his sister finally stopped badgering him about marriage.
“I need a few days away from mother’s stepping into your footsteps.”
Prudence screwed up her face and whispered.
“Was I that bad?”
He smiled and nodded.
She didn’t hold him back when he turned away and continued out of the dining Hall.
Her recently betrothed stopped him instead.
“Chess?”
Ben tossed him a sedate stare.
“So you can beat me again?”
Sudbury grinned.
“This is the only time I get to do it.
Will you deny me?”
Ben shook his head in mock disgust.
“You take shameful advantage of your closest friend when he is not at his sharpest.”
Sudbury threw his arm around Ben’s shoulder and led him to Ben’s private solar.
But even trying his hardest to beat his friend, Ben’s thoughts were filled with the sound of Fable whispering his name.
#
Fable came awake from a dream of laughing in bed with Ben, leaning in and whispering his name in his ear.
She sat up.
It was the fourteenth day.
Her last day here in 2024 with her father.
She didn’t want to leave him.
Over the last two weeks they had spent a lot of time together.
Her father couldn’t do enough to make her happy, as if he needed to make amends for her past.
He didn’t need to and she let him know it. It made them more comfortable with each other and helped them fit better into each other’s life. With his playful laughter over the smallest thing, his wide, easy smiles, as well as his pouting surrender when he couldn’t beat her at chess, Thoren Ashmore was easy to like.
He was honest to the core, letting her know that he wasn’t altogether innocent of piracy.
He had, after all, popped onto that pirate ship when it was losing to the king’s navy.
He saved the crew and made his way to land–to the garden of Colchester House.
“The first thing I knew I had to do,”
he had told her, “was bury my treasure.
So, that’s what I did.
I had nothing to do with the Wests finding it.”
He found amusement in the tale, and she, being his daughter, after all, had laughed with him.
They’d visited Bernadette and spent more time talking with Old Lizzie, learning about their family.
Thanks to some curse, Fable’s grandparents had to fight a demon.
Thoren was the first child born to the Blagdens and Ashmores.
The first and only male.
“I don’t know what any of it means,”
her father had vowed.
“And I don’t care.
You’re all that matters to me.
Help me find your sister and we can–”
“Dad–”
nothing had changed for Fable.
“I’m going to Ben.
But we don’t have to separate.
I don’t want us to separate.
Come with me.”
He had shaken his head.
“I have to find Magnolia.”
She groaned.
That was yesterday.
Would he or Lizzie give her a hard time about going? She hoped Lizzie would keep her word.
If everything went her way, she would be with Ben today.
She wiped away a bittersweet tear and got out of bed.
She left her room and padded downstairs in her pajamas and slippers.
She headed to the kitchen and was happy to find her father cooking with old Aunt Lizzie.
He looked up from a frying pan where bacon sizzled and popped.
“Good morning, my daughter.”
It was what she had always wanted.
A bed, a warm meal at a family table. A family.
Nothing was mentioned about returning to Ben.
They ate in silence but neither hesitated to share a smile across the table.
While they ate, she eyed her father and thought about how handsome he was.
“What was mother like?”
He smiled remembering her.
“She was a spirited woman with hair like yours and a temper to match.”
Fable remembered the men in her stepmother’s life while she was growing up and the ones who’d lifted their hands to Kittie Ramsey.
“You didn’t mind her spiritedness?”
He shook his head.
“How could I be angry with a flame?”
She gazed at him, wishing for the thousandth time since she met him, what a good father he would have been to that little homeless girl who’d never understood what security was.
“Send me home today.”
Lizzie was the first to open her mouth, but Fable quieted her as a cold blanket covered her.
“Keep your word, Lizzie.
You told Ben you would abide by my wishes if he saved my father.
Keep your end of the bargain.”
“It won’t be me who keeps you here, Child,”
Lizzie told her and cut her glance to Thoren.
Yes.
The powerful male heir of the Ashmore and Blagdens.
Fable looked at him.
“Come with me.”
“I cannot.”
“Swear to me you’ll send me to him today.”
But he shook his head and offered her a repentant look. “No.”
“No?”
He appeared to be choking a bit on his word.
“Fable, please–”
“Come back with me!”
she shouted at him.
“Don’t give me everything and keep from me the only thing I truly want.
Find Magnolia and then come spend time with me.
You can do it.
You don’t need the pocket watch, just as she–”
She pointed to Lizzie standing close by.
– “doesn’t need to use it.
You’re more powerful than she is.
You’re Lord Thoren Ashmore, only son of–”
“Child,”
Lizzie interrupted, pointing at her.
“Let your father have what he desires for once.
All he asks for is time with you.”
Wonderful, Fable thought scathingly.
Just what she needed.
Guilt.
Her cold stare made the older woman bristle.
“It seems I was right never to trust anyone before or after Ben,”
Fable told her.
She didn’t feel tears burning her eyes until she turned them on her father.
“I’m sorry that the pocket watch exists and that it took you away from me and Magnolia.
But you were gone for so long.
We had to grow up without you–or anyone even remotely like you.
Benjamin West is the first person I remember loving, trusting, and feeling safe with.
Are you truly going to come back to me–thanks to him, no less– and take him from me? Please don’t.”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes.
She was done crying.
“I don’t know what either of you are used to, but I’m not going to cower.”
“Fable,”
her father protested gently.
“I have no intention of asking you to cower.
I didn’t want to be a father who forced his selfish restrictions on his children.
Now that I found you, I certainly won’t do it.
I’ll send you back today.”
Fable and Old Lizzie were quiet while they stared at him.
Fable swallowed and blinked first.
Did he just agree so easily? “You will?”
“Yes.”
He smiled but Fable could see the disappointment behind the veil in his eyes.
She thought about what she could do besides taking hold of him when she was leaving and dragging him back to 1718.
“I won’t have you hating me,”
he murmured with a pout.
He caught her in his arms with a laugh when she threw herself into them.
“Thank you!”
she exclaimed after a kiss to his cheek.
He saved her from fighting whoever she needed to fight with whatever powers she possessed.
She didn’t want to fight.
She wasn’t made for fighting.
“Would you hate me if I told you how your joy feels like a kick in the guts?”
“Of course I wouldn’t hate you for that,”
she assured her father happily.
“He doesn't even know what he’s doing,”
Lizzie pointed out.
“He’s likely to send you somewhere in the thirteenth or nineteenth century.”
She shrugged her seemingly frail shoulders.
“Could be anywhere.”
“Then will you keep your promise and do it?”
Fable asked her.
Lizzie looked away from her nephew and nodded.
“If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want.
I want to go home to Ben.”
“I’ll do it on one condition,”
Lizzie told her.
Before Fable could protest, she held up her hand.
“Today I will send you to your Benjamin West.
The condition is that I will not tell you when you’re going.”
She turned her pale gaze to Fable’s father.
“Treasure each moment together.”
Fable didn’t protest.
She was thankful she was being given the chance to treasure moments with her father.
“Come on!”
she beckoned her father with a wide grin and a tug on his sleeve.
She led him outside and down the street.
She smiled because he didn’t ask her where they were going.
He didn’t care.
Was it possible to love someone you’ve only known for two weeks?
She brought him to a park where children played under the watchful eye of their mother or father.
When she hurried to the swings, unfazed by any disapproving glance that came her way, her father followed.
“I used to hang around parks while my mo–Kittie panhandled,”
she told him.
“I’d always see little girls on the swings with their fathers pushing them.”
Before she said anything else, he went behind her and gave her a push.
They laughed together and Fable hoped she didn’t disappear in that moment.
But, she did, in fact, leave her father although not in her body.
Physically, she remained swinging on the swing.
Only her laughter had stopped.
Her sudden silence brought her father around to the front of her.
He knelt before her and called her name.
Fable held out her hand to the red-haired woman with earth-colored eyes looking back at her.
She smiled at Fable and reached for her.
They shared blood. Magnolia.
Her father called her name, and touched her face.
His heartbeat drew her back.
No! Wait!
Magnolia, where are you? Tell me.
Fable let the sound of her father’s voice pull her back.
The sound of children laughing and calling their friends filled her ears and replaced her sister’s rhythmic breathing in her ears.
What happened? Was this one of her abilities? Spirit telepathy? Could she ‘find’ others or did she know when her sister was because they were twins?
“Dad.”
Before he let her speak, he made certain she felt herself again.
“What happened, daughter?”
“I don’t know but I saw Magnolia.
I know where she is.”
“Tell me,”
her father said.
“She’s in the year–”
She began to disappear.
No! Not yet
Child you cannot tell him where to find her.
Fable felt Lizzie’s voice more than heard it.
“1424,”
Fable said as quickly as she could.
She hadn’t been raised with rules, and she didn’t care about them either.
She would give her father back his daughter.
“Graven Fortress.”
Her father reached out for her, but before another instant passed, he was gone.