33. A New World Awaits You
TEARS FELL ON THE LAID PAPER FASTER THAN ANNABEL COULD blot them away.
It didn’t stop her staying at Jane’s desk well past midnight to finish what she needed to finish, write what she needed to write.
The ending of the novel was different now, the words raw and real.
She wiped her eyes with the knob of her palm, her hand shaking as she penned the final scene when her heroine emerges from Ellesmere and leans against the stone wall to steady herself, jagged sips of air, breast heaving, and sobs racking her body.
When the coachman finally helps her into the carriage, he puts a fatherly hand on her shoulder—which made her miss her own father—but all she could do was rest her hand on his and shake her head.
This time, Annabel wrote, there would be no going back.
She hadn’t known that a writer could break her own heart, but there it was, the last lines of her story in deepest ink the color of night, the truth of who she was and what she wished for.
She stacked the pages and tied them with string, then picked up the pen one last time.
Annabel wrote a letter, barely more than two sentences, signed, sealed, and addressed it to Stella Barron, Barron Literary Agency, New York, New York.
She had little doubt that Aunt Jane would approve, and that this one final act would soon deliver them home.
Annabel paused in front of the longcase clock.
By the light of her candle, she looked up into its good round face, each ticktock like the beating of her own heart.
She was grateful for the time she’d been given here, but this was a rending, bittersweet goodbye and overwhelming grief for the love she would leave behind.
“Y’all right, Miss Annabel?”
Annabel turned to find Mary holding her own candlestick, in her nightclothes and cap.
“Yes, Mary. I think so.”
“James told me you were ’avin’ a bit of a cry on the way ’ome, rather a big one, and was worried.”
“He’s a sweet man, your James. I don’t know how to thank you. Both of you. For the kindness and warmth you’ve shown me and my family.”
“Are ya leavin’, then?” Mary’s face folded into furrows.
Annabel’s lashes were thick with tears. “I can’t be sure. But I think.”
“But what about you and Mr. D—”
Annabel shook her head. “Some things, maybe, weren’t meant to be.”
Mary screwed up her mouth, trying to keep from blubbering herself. “Well, ‘know yer own ’appiness,’ like Mrs. Dashwood says.”
“I’m trying, Mary.” Annabel put her arms all the way around Mary and hugged her tight. “I’m trying.”
When she climbed the steep stairs to her room and stripped down carefully to her chemise, she laid the beautiful ball gown across the settee and let her hand float across its fine gossamer threads one last time.
Annabel looked out at the fulsome moon, now high in the sky.
She wondered if Henry was looking at the same moon just then, if he would ever find a way to forgive her.
She teetered on the edge of regret, not for having come, but for causing him heartache he didn’t deserve.
Her own heartache was well earned. But if she carried on thinking like this, she worried she might weaken and change her mind.
Another part of her knew the act was done and likely the turning had already begun.
Not wanting to be alone, she tiptoed down the hall to Peach Blossom, where she climbed under the covers beside her sister, who stirred and turned to face her.
Annabel told her everything—the meeting with Aunt Jane, the desk, desire, the ball, the waltz, the kiss—weeping all the way, every last tear she had to cry.
Cassie just listened, stroking her hair.
***
Birds warble and carry on at the start of each new day with no regard for what century it is.
Trees grow, flowers bloom. The sun rises and sets, untroubled by the need to name and measure what it cannot hold.
Time, too, has no such anxieties. It doesn’t think of itself as linear, or forward moving, or anything at all.
But because we humans live in the field of time—aware of being born and growing old, of beginnings, middles, and ends—we feel its weight and gravity.
We carve it into minutes and hours, stitch it into calendars, tuck it into pocket watches, strap it to our wrists, thinking one day we might master it.
We call it an arrow, an arc, a loop. But whatever shape we give it, time’s true nature slips our grasp.
And yet, time has tricks up its sleeve: circularity, second chances, fresh starts.
For Annabel, time had turned over, or folded in, or doubled back, or some other sort of temporal acrobatics that would make a clock man weep.
It had delivered her here, back to the room where she began her journey, in a world she’d always known—but she was not the same.
***
The windup clock sounded with a brrrnng, more jarring than cheerful this time. Annabel rolled over to switch it off.
“Hello, again,” she said to the clock with a heavy sigh, taking in her dog-eared Austen paperbacks stacked beside it.
She was almost sad to see them. When she rolled onto her back, she knew it was the same old bed with its four creaking posts.
The ceiling was stained, the celestial blue faded; hazy morning sun pushed through the dirt-streaked panes of glass.
When she touched the light cotton of her chemise—it had somehow traveled with her—she snapped her gaze to the settee in hopes of finding the beautiful ball gown, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere at all.
Murmuring voices outside made her peel away the covers to look.
There, out the window, the once-beautiful garden had returned to the overgrown ruin it was when she arrived at Kidlington House.
The leather-faced gardener in his cap leaned on a rake next to a helper with a shovel.
They seemed to be having a head-scratching debate about where they should begin.
Annabel gazed past them, settling on a tangle of prickly rosebushes over the rusted bench, big fresh blooms bursting through.
It was then that the doorbell buzzed and jangled, echoing through the house—yet more proof that she’d done it, sent them back, and forward too.
Annabel closed her eyes, hugged her arms to her body.
It was a new day, she told herself, back to before, but after everything had happened. Where to begin—she wondered too.
She pulled her light sweater from the hook on the door where she’d left it and put it on over her chemise.
At the bottom of the stairs, she found Cassie and Billy staring at the door again, afraid to open it.
Everything they hoped for, or everything they didn’t, was on the other side, and neither had the nerve to look.
Annabel stepped past them, resolved, put her hand on the handle, and pulled.
But the door stuck—of course it did—so she pulled a little harder.
When it swung open, sunlight poured into the foyer, showing every foible, all its falling-down bits, cracks, peeling paint.
Annabel put her hand in front of her face to block enough light to see the delivery man standing in front of her.
A few feet away, a second man stood near a Sotheby’s truck.
Between them, the satinwood writing desk sat in the weedy gravel, waiting to be brought inside.
Annabel inhaled sharply, her hand cupped to her mouth. Of course Jane’s desk would return. It was part of the magic too.
“Says here we’re to redeliver. And a note from Mr. Patterson.” He handed the note to Annabel, who read it out loud.
“‘Returning this desk with my apologies. We couldn’t confirm it as a Hepplewhite. Not a bad imitation, but most likely . . . just a sweet, insignificant piece.’”
Annabel looked back at Cassie with tears in her eyes.
Cassie blinked in sympathy. Even Billy seemed to know what it meant.
He was wearing a silk robe with pockets over a loose nightshirt.
Cassie had thrown a T-shirt over her light muslin gown.
These were the remnants they’d slept in, all that was left of before.
Annabel turned to the man in front of her.
“Please, of course. Come in.” She stepped aside and held the door, waited while they carried the desk inside.
She couldn’t help reaching out to run her hand along its patinaed surface as it went by, then pointed down the foyer.
“It goes just in there, under the window.”
All three watched them carry it past the old clock, along the ribbon of rooms, and into the library where the desk would be returned to its rightful place.
Annabel stopped to stare up at the longcase clock, now stoic and silent.
Cassie stood on one side of her, Billy on the other, paying their own respects.
Apart from their shock and relief, not to mention excitement at the prospect of home, there were other feelings too.
They’d never again hear the lighthearted carrion bells of the quarter hour.
There was no Mary to make them breakfast, no James to take them to town.
No more cardamom buns or caraway seed cake, no turns in the garden, rose oil in the bath, no fine-stitched clothes with matching shoes and bonnets, no kitchen stories of rascals and rakes.
They might even miss the Hepplewhite suite with its lovely sister settees.
But Annabel, they knew, had lost so much more.
Billy put an arm around her shoulder. Cassie clasped her hand.
When Annabel finally looked away, she saw the pitcher of Bunty’s flowers on the console table, just the way they’d left them. And next to those, the black rotary phone.
“I guess we should call a cab.”
***
Hastily packed bags sat on the gravel in front of the leaning portico with its pale purple flowers.
Cassie and Billy waited outside, in their own clothes now: jeans and a cute top for her; for him, baggy jeans, a T-shirt, and his beloved beat-up Vans.
When a black cab turned up the drive, they waved their arms, whooping and calling, then gave each other a spontaneous, heartfelt hug.
Annabel stood in the open door watching them hold onto each other. They’d all come so far together.
She turned back one more time to say her goodbyes to the crumbling old country pile and the stuff of her dreams.
“A-bel?”
She turned to Billy striding toward her, pulling a letter from his back pocket. He looked distressed.
“I never sent it, to Fanny. It was in my robe. I finished it late last night.” He looked down at the letter in his hand. “And it just feels wrong to leave without saying anything.”
“Oh, Billy. I’m so sorry.”
He held it up. “What if I put it on the desk? Do you think she’d get it? If I really, really wanted her to?”
Annabel lifted it gently from his hand. “I’ll do it.”
***
The writing desk looked beautiful under the window, glowing in the diffuse late morning light.
But it was a sad sort of beauty, reminding Annabel of all she’d have to let go.
She walked tentatively to it, surprised to find a letter already sitting on top.
She set Billy’s letter down and picked up the other.
It was addressed to Miss A. Blake, Kidlington House. She knew the hand.
“Henry . . .” she whispered to herself.
“Annabel?”
She turned to find him standing not ten feet from her, real as can be, in a white shirt, simple summer waistcoat, coat, breeches. He was holding his hat in his hand, as astonished as she was. He didn’t know where they were, exactly, but at least he’d found her.
He took a step toward her. “I could ill bear the thought of parting from you.” He pointed to the letter in her hand. “I wrote you, to say as much. And came to Kidlington, in hopes I could give it to you in person . . .”
He looked around the room as if he’d lost his bearings. “But I found only Mary, who was quite beside herself. She said you’d talked about leaving, but all your things were still here, and she hoped you’d just gone out for a morning walk. But it seemed to her you’d . . . vanished.”
He took in Annabel’s summer shift and ballet flats, her long loose hair. “Yet here you are.”
“Here I am, Henry,” she said. “This is me.”
He rubbed a finger across his forehead. “I asked Mary to show me to your writing desk.” He pointed to it.
“That desk, I think, right there. It was here, in this room, I’m sure it was here .
. .” He looked around again, confounded by the room’s shabbiness—the old couch, dirty windows, the motley, multicolored books stuffed every which way in the shelves. “Uncanny, really.”
“It was here,” said Annabel.
“And that is the same desk, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
He nodded, then shook his head. “When I found you weren’t here .
. . I didn’t know where you were, but felt sure you’d be back .
. . I decided my only hope, if I couldn’t give it to you in person, was to leave the letter there .
. . on your desk . . . for I thought . .
. that is where a writer might find it.”
Annabel’s eyes pooled with shiny tears, his letter shivering in her hand.
“It was wrong, Annabel, to ask you to be true to me by being untrue to yourself.”
“Oh, Henry . . .” She pressed the letter to her chest but was too choked with tears to say more.
“You see, I do wish to be a modern man. But perhaps I haven’t understood what modern means . . . What’s possible.”
“How could you?”
He looked around the room again, so different and yet the same. “Where are we, Annabel?” he asked bravely.
“At Kidlington. But in my world.” She opened her arms. “The modern world.”
He let out a short, nervous laugh. “I don’t quite understand. How did I get here?”
She took a step toward him. “By the strength of your own desire, Henry.”
He looked at her, somehow understanding or, if not understanding, willing to believe her, believe in her. He stepped closer still.
“My desire for you, Annabel.”
Her voice trembled. “Then we’re not so ill met, are we?”
He shook his head, his own eyes bright with tears. “Nor ill paired.”
Henry was close enough to reach for her waist and pull her close.
He looked down into her eyes, glimmering with happy tears; she looked up into his, all smolder, no storm.
Then he kissed her the way she’d kissed him last night, but with less frantic intensity, and no sadness at all.
Annabel pressed her lips to his with equal feeling, with all that she was, and wished to be.
The kiss was slow and fervid and lush; it shattered past and future to reassemble them in the magnificent now—time bending, finally, for love.
It was, by every measure, a kiss good enough for any century.