Chapter Eight #2
“He’s very private. In fact, until I read that book that Iris found, I didn’t know much about his history, either.
I knew there was someone named Violet in his past. He kept the details mostly to himself.
But there was always something percolating under the surface with him.
Something that has kept him from moving on. That something is you, of course.”
“I am not Violet. But sometimes…sometimes for just a moment, I feel her. I remember her.”
“Soul memory is a thing,” Elspeth acknowledged. “I think you’re both unavoidably entwined together in each other’s destinies. I’ll tell you a secret. I felt that way about Sam. Though I couldn’t say why, I just knew he was meant to be mine and I was meant to be his. That’s all there was to it.”
“Well, I’m afraid Connor doesn’t feel that way about me at all. Even if he did, we’re from different worlds now. He has other plans.”
Elspeth sent her a sympathetic look.
“But can I ask you a question?” Emma pressed.
“Of course.”
“You’re…human now, right? Yet you can see me and Connor. But no one else can see us.”
Elspeth laughed again, rocking Anika in the glider.
“I can see how that would be confusing. I must admit, explaining this to a mortal who is in the in-between is a first for me. But yes, I was a Celestial once. But I petitioned the Council to allow me to fall. To be human, but not through rebirth. Because I knew I had to be with Sam and Molly. But you see, when humans and angels interact on Earth, as Sam and I did when I was here on a mingle, they forget us as soon as we return to the Celestial world.”
“But you and Sam—?”
“Yes, that’s complicated, but it all worked out for us. Sam knows my past now. I’ve told him. But still, he’s mortal. He can’t see Connor and certainly not you, as I can. As I always will be able to. At least in this lifetime.”
“So, you’re saying I’ll forget Connor if I wake up from this…accident?”
“It’s hard to say. The in-between has different rules. You’re not exactly human in this form, and your interaction is altogether different. Your memories of this time—if you survive—might survive as well.”
If you survive…
Emma turned to look at Connor, who was poring over the book Elspeth had given him, trying to imagine forgetting all about the times his fingers had curled around hers or the way she’d caught him watching her when he hadn’t thought she’d seen—those gray-blue eyes of his probing her soul.
Or forgetting that ancient ruin in Scotland where he’d taken her.
Or the kiss they’d shared. Impossible to think all of this could be erased from her memory by simply waking, the way a dream might disappear on the tip of one’s tongue or the way clouds vanished into the vast blue without a trace.
But maybe there was hope at least that she would remember him. At the very least, she might be left with that.
“Now,” Elspeth said finally. “I know you’ve come about something else. So let’s talk for a moment about your sister, Lizzy.”
*
Connor sat on the sun-warmed deck, legs folded, with the book in his hands, turning pages he never thought he’d turn, reading words he never imagined he’d hear. Violet’s words.
14 July 1802
My dearest,
Can one love better than I? Can one man be more perfect than mine?
I think ’tis not possible to be happier than I am this very morning!
! Even my parents are unaware of our bonds, for we mean to surprise them.
We shall tell them together this Sunday’s eve, at the gathering at our home for supper.
The promise you gave me at our ruins shall hold me until then! Oh, my heart. You love me!
Connor felt emotion clog his throat. How young she sounded.
How hopeful. Yet Ezra Bean’s commentary that followed demeaned her hopefulness as girlish fantasy.
He went on to describe Violet’s father, Lord Gray, as a desperate man who was surprisingly deep in debt from gambling, games that had included the elite of the town, mentioning several men, including Landon Sykes.
This he hadn’t known. Bean noted that his debts were mysteriously discharged soon after Violet’s subsequent marriage to Sykes.
A chill chased across his skin. Could Violet have known about this?
But what had never made sense to him was that as her husband, Connor himself would have looked after her family. Her father must have known that.
The journal went on:
16 July 1802
What madness is this? How could this happen?
Rowena ruined? I do not believe a word of it.
Father is furious and forbidding me to see her or you.
He will not listen to reason. He will not say why.
Is it the scandal he’s afeared will ruin me, too?
But I am ruined without you. Ruined. Do not go tomorrow.
I beg you—if God hears me—do not meet him in that field.
Arthur, protect him. There is something wrong with all this.
Connor scowled. Might as well have spit in the wind, for all the good that prayer did.
17 July 1802
I cannot breathe! The sun is breaking. What horror might come at first light?
I am locked in my room to prevent me from coming to you.
I’d climb out the window, but my father has perched himself below to keep me here.
A prisoner! I hate him today, God forgive me.
But if anything befalls you, my love, I swear, my father will never know my forgiveness.
And we all know what happened next, he thought.
Connor skimmed down the page and a handful of paragraphs Bean had written pragmatically about Connor’s death and how Arthur had surprisingly refused to honor his late brother’s promise to marry Violet.
To take her as a bride in his stead. It would have been the honorable thing to do, but then, Arthur hadn’t owned an honorable bone in his body.
It was, instead, Landon Sykes she would marry, an unexpected windfall for the family in dire need of one. There was a copy of the banns, read in the parish kirk three Sundays in a row, to announce their engagement.
Oh, that he could have been there in the parish to object to that unholy union.
28 July 1802
I cannot see ahead. I cannot. If Father forces me to do this thing, I’ll surely die of fury. For I ken now what Landon Sykes and your brother did. What they both did to you. May they rot in hell.
Connor went hot then cold by turns. Guilt washed over him.
He’d been wrong. Dead wrong that she’d been a part of it.
Now, remembering that treachery, how he’d blamed her for marrying Sykes, he could see that he’d been blinded to it before.
Somehow, she’d put the pieces together about their plot.
Reading her words felt as if she’d reached across the centuries to speak to him.
All this time, he’d been wrong. Horribly, unjustifiably wrong.
It wouldn’t have taken Arthur long to take his place as heir after Connor’s death.
Or to revel in his newfound rank. Had he even feigned grief for his brother?
Ezra Bean called Violet’s comments “hysteria” and a typical example of a willful daughter resisting her duty. A man of his times, Bean gave no credit to a woman’s choice. But who was Connor to cast aspersions? He had been no better.
12 August 1802
’Tis done. Against my will. Better that piece of lead should have found my breast instead of yours that day, my love.
But my life is over all the same. My father has sold me to your murderer for the price of a dowry and a promise of a generous yearly stipend.
I bit the bastard and drew blood when he tried to kiss me.
I will kill him if he touches me. I swear it.
Connor read several more entries of her misery, her threats on Sykes’s life. But then all entries stopped for almost two years, when Bean noted the next two entries were from a new journal altogether.
16 May 1804
It infuriates him that I never say his name.
But it makes me oddly happy to see him so.
No use in explaining why he lives grand and my soul dies, slowly, day by day.
Ye must know why. I long hoped he would end me.
But he got me with child instead. Now when he comes to me at night, I close my eyes tight and think of ye.
If I didn’t, I would spend the rest of my days in cell away from my wee bairns.
Or hanged, more like, for his death. If it wasn’t for my son, Joseph, and my daughter, Eliza, I’d welcome my own death. I promise you that.
23 November 1805
Where are you, my love? I look up at the night sky and imagine you seeing those same stars from above.
I miss your hands on mine. Your mouth on mine.
I miss the kindness in your eyes. I must hide this diary, for I am with child again.
He will hurt me if he finds this book, but I canna risk this child.
His child. I should hate it, but I will not.
I am not a real woman except for them. Only a smudge of ash on the wall of my room.
A shadow. But the children make me remember you and what we could’ve been.
And every day, I pretend they are yours.
He put the book down, staring into the water at the minnows swimming there amongst the clouds dancing across the water.
He could not bear to read more. Couldn’t bear all the bitterness he’d held onto for so many years, when she’d suffered so at the hands of the man who’d killed him.
How could he have imagined she’d gone willingly to Sykes?
Or borne him children with an open heart?
Connor’s own heart twisted. The fault wasn’t in her but in him.
He’d been but a shell of the man he’d once been. Half here and half there.
The fragrance of the crisp water, the sky, sharply blue against the green trees, it all reminded him of things he’d forgot, the simple pleasures of the mortal world, suddenly free from the shadow of his bitterness.