Chapter 16
There’s no way I’m falling asleep after what I’ve just witnessed.
I lie in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin and the overhead light fully illuminating the room.
After a few hours without even shutting my eyes, I give up the pretence and look around the room for something to occupy me until sunrise.
I spot the old diary and pull it towards me.
Father knows.
I cannot say how he found out. Perhaps someone did see us, perhaps town chatter reached his ears. I only know for certain that Lucy kept our secret. But it matters not. The damage is done.
He summoned me to his office once again this morning, but this time, his face was thunderous with rage. He demanded to know the truth about my soldier, about my pregnancy, and when I could not deny it, his fury was unbound.
He tore from the room, ordering my soldier be found and brought to him. I begged him to reconsider, fell to my knees, wept, pleaded. He would not hear me. Mother tried to reason with him, but he would not have it.
What happened next, I hardly wish to commit to words.
But my soldier is gone. Dragged before my father by his men. Killed for his apparent insult to our family.
My love, my future, torn from me in an instant.
Father says I must be married at once, before my shame is known to the world. He does not care about my grief, my love, my pain, only that I may bring dishonour to his name.
I am broken. I cannot breathe, cannot think. My love is dead, and I am to be wed to a man I do not want. How can I go on?
My eyes burn from lack of sleep and my heart breaks as I finish reading the diary entry. I can feel my ancestor’s pain pulsing off the page, the way her handwriting turns to a scrawl and the paper is blotched from centuries-old tears.
I’d been hoping to read about her adventure of escaping Sleepy Hollow with her love and live vicariously through her journey. To escape my current nightmare using her love story. But of course, the diary wouldn’t have ended up in the attic here if that had been the case.
Not for the first time, I marvel at the peculiar parallels between us. Two Katrinas linked through time, trapped in this house by a loved one’s death. I wonder how both of our stories will turn out?