Chapter 5
FIVE
I sat as quietly as I could while the topic of conversation moved on to Nettie’s problems with her niece who had run away with the Cullen lad, but my heart was still racing.
Was the tramp they’d been talking about William?
Could it be? I could hardly sit still. I wanted to jump up, pull Nancy up with me and run out of the café.
But we had to keep up appearances, so I waited.
After we’d finished our tea, Nancy got up, took her fortune telling cards out of her bag and we went back into the tea shop, where she sat down with the well-to-do ladies and started to give them their readings.
I sat at a table on my own with another cup of tea and a bun that Nettie brought over. She gave me a bit of a funny look; I must have looked stressed, though I was trying not to.
First, I had learned that, unless I was very much mistaken, William was here in 1867, and currently sitting in a gaol somewhere in Tintagel.
Second, and just as concerningly, if that was true, then William had followed me through the time portal.
That meant that Edith, his sister, had been forced to marry her abusive suitor, Lord Simon Favisham – and Simon Favisham had become Lord of Trevarron in William’s absence, and due to William and Edith’s brother Charles having a ‘hunting accident’.
My heart twisted for Edith. She had been my friend, and I’d left her alone with a brute.
I hadn’t thought about what would happen to Edith if William wasn’t there to protect her, but of course there would be no way for her to refuse Simon without the support of her brothers.
I felt stupid for not realising that. In 1755, Edith had no power and no agency as a woman.
As the heir to a massive estate and without any family to protect her, she was prey to whatever predators wanted to take what was hers.
Her body. Her freedom. Her property. Her family name.
Simon Favisham had been abusive and cruel.
I shuddered to think what Edith’s life would have been like with him and the fact that she had had children, because here we were, three generations later and Lord Albert Trevarron was her great-grandson.
Edith had not wanted marriage and children; I’d sometimes wondered whether she was interested in sex at all.
Edith loved books, horse-riding and poetry.
I grieved for my friend.
She had wanted to be free. She didn’t get to be.
The whole of history had changed. Or, had it?
Aunt Bill, who had been more of a mother to me than my own mother, had told me more than once about the mysterious disappearance of a long-ago Lord of Trevarron, and I’d come to the conclusion that it had been William.
I just hadn’t realised that the reason he had disappeared from 1755 was because of me, and the time portal.
That thought took some picking apart. Had I changed history, then, or not?
Was Edith fated to marry Simon Favisham and suffer for the rest of her life, or had that been my doing?
Was William fated to disappear at the moment he did – and did that mean that he and I were both fated to be in 1867?
Did that mean that our destiny was always going to be intertwined?
I needed to see William. I could hardly sit still at the table, listening to Nancy read the fortunes of the ladies nearby, and not jump up out of my seat and run out. Knowing that he was so close was torture; it was everything I could do to sit still.
I thought again of my recurring dream. It was always the same.
I stood on a cliff looking out to sea. The black rock outcropping under my feet was a natural dais, high above the waves below. Under me, the cliffs cleaved away steeply; their once jagged edges softened only slightly by thousands of years of the relentless power of water.
The sun was setting, and the wide sky was a confection of glorious pinks and oranges, tinged with gold. The sun itself, a glowing crimson ball, lowered gradually towards the sea. I knew, in the dream, that I had stood there and watched hundreds of other sunsets.
But, then, in the dream, I would realise that I wasn’t alone. There was a man next to me. I could never see his face clearly; his features were always a silhouette against the setting sun.
I knew him in the way that one soul knows another.
I knew him in the way that one soul calls to another across time.
I knew that he had been devoted to me, and I to him, for so long that, though our bodies might have been separate from each other, one couldn’t live without the other.
As I stood there with him, in the dream, on the clifftop, I knew that was where I belonged.
And when I woke from this dream, whenever I had it, I felt the crushing loss of my disconnection from this man.
Now, I knew that the man I had dreamt about for so many years was William De Vere Trevarron.
I knew that the stone dais that we stood on in the dream sat at the edge of Trevarron House, where it overlooked the sea.
I knew that, when William touched me, I was powerless to resist the deep instincts his presence stirred in me.
I had thought I had lost him forever, when I had finally just found him again. And, the knowledge that he was here, somewhere, in this time, and that he was suffering – beaten, bruised and bloody – was awful. I felt responsible. William hadn’t asked for any of this.
It was my fault. All of it. But I could rescue him. I could make it right. I had to.