36
The next morning, I awake to an empty bed next to me.
Nothing strange in that. Even when Adam stays the night, he will often get up earlier than me to give himself time to go for a run before work and then take a shower, or sometimes he has to be at the bookshop early to receive a delivery.
So I don’t think too much about getting up alone and getting ready for the day ahead.
As I go downstairs to the kitchen, I’m still thinking about what we discussed last night.
We didn’t say anything more about the possibility of me using the portal to check on Ben.
It didn’t seem necessary to continue discussing it.
I knew Adam’s stance wouldn’t change. In his opinion, it was just too dangerous for me to go back there – and that was the end of it.
But Adam should know me better than that. Once I decide to do something, no one is going to stop me, especially not my boyfriend.
I planned today, if the shop was quiet, to figure out a way I could go back without him knowing. I might have to get Barney onside to help me , I think as I shower and get dressed for work.
Time is getting on when I’m finally ready to leave the house.
I’ll grab a coffee on the way to the shop. Maybe even a couple of Chelsea buns too, to keep Adam sweet. But I’ll take some fruit with me to keep it a bit healthier.
I open up my fridge, meaning to grab a banana and a pear, but I stop dead as I see what’s sitting on the shelf in front of me – a large red apple.
‘How the hell did that get there?’ I say, still staring at the apple. For some reason, I’ve completely gone off apples recently, after both eating and drinking quite a lot of them at the beginning of the year, so now I never buy them.
Maybe Adam put it there, is the only explanation I can think of. But it still seems strange. Adam didn’t have any apples with him when he came back to mine last night. So why would he go out and buy one this morning, then leave it in my fridge.
The apples thing was very odd. It was almost like I couldn’t get enough of them, or products that contained them, for a while, and I began to wonder if maybe I had a vitamin deficiency.
Then, as quick as anything, around the time that Adam and I got together, I went completely the opposite way and now actually feel quite queasy at the thought of eating one.
So much so that Barney had teased me mercifully for a while, with jokes about the Adam-and-Eve effect, forbidden fruit, the Garden of Eden, and suchlike.
But now, as I enter Clockmaker Court with my coffee and buns, all thoughts of apples – good and bad – are forgotten. Because something doesn’t feel right.
Unusually, a few of the shopkeepers are standing outside their shops.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask Luca as I approach the group, consisting of him, Orla, Barney and Harriet.
‘A couple of us had a break-in last night,’ Luca says. ‘Well, I say break-in – no one actually forced entry, but things were taken.’
‘What things?’
‘I had some clothes taken, and Barney some money.’
‘Oh, no!’ I turn to Barney. ‘How much?’
‘It wasn’t my actual takings,’ Barney says. ‘I mean, it wasn’t modern money. It was some of Ben’s old notes that he’d left with me. I haven’t got round to selling them on yet, so they were tucked out the back in a box.’
‘That’s odd. How did they know they were there? And they didn’t take any of your stock or anything else?’
Barney shakes his head. ‘Not that I can see.’
‘The things they took from my shop were a bit odd too,’ Luca says. ‘Nothing particularly valuable, like my jewellery. It was a few bits from my rails.’
‘What sort of bits?’
‘Er, from what I can see, a tweed suit, a matching waistcoat, a white shirt, and a flat cap. I’m sure there must be more, but that’s all I’ve noticed.’
Oh, God. My stomach feels like it’s dropped down to my feet. He hasn’t, has he?
‘What sort of era are the clothes from?’ I ask Luca, as an uneasy feeling begins to settle inside me.
Luca looks confused by my questioning. ‘They’re a mix, really. But put together, I suppose they might look like something a man would wear in the early part of the twentieth century. Not a city gent, but more of a working-class man.’
Of course that’s what he’d choose.
‘Has anyone seen Adam yet this morning?’ I ask hopefully, looking over to his shop.
‘No,’ Orla says. ‘He’s not opened up yet. Why, what’s going on, Eve? You’ve gone awfully pale.’
‘Nothing. Everything is fine. Are you going to call the police about the break-ins?’ I ask Luca and Barney.
Luca shrugs. ‘Can’t really, can we? It wasn’t a break-in – somehow the thief got in without forcing an entry. It was almost like they had keys to open up the shops. They even locked up after they’d left. But the only people who have keys to my shop are you guys.’
‘Same here,’ Barney says. ‘Clean entry. And the only other people who have keys to my shop are also you lot.’
‘I’ll be right back,’ I tell them. ‘I’ll just go and check my shop in case the same has happened to me.’
I dash over to my shop and unlock the door. Then, unusually, I lock the door behind me before I dump the buns and coffee on the countertop. As I suspected, the grandfather clock has been pulled forward away from the wall; so I am able to easily open the door down to the office.
I head quickly down the stairs, knowing exactly what I’m going to find, but still feeling sick at the thought of it.
The light is already on in the office as I reach the bottom.
I hurry over to the carved wooden doors and I’m about to pull them open when I notice there’s a white envelope on the desk addressed to me.
Next to that is the bundle of keys to all the other shops in Clockmaker Court that I keep hidden in my safe, and, next to those, the brass perpetual calendar we use to make the portal work. It looks like my fears were correct.
‘What have you done?’ I say, picking up the envelope. ‘You … silly idiot!’
Eve is written in Adam’s handwriting on the front of the envelope.
I rip it open and pull out a letter, also in Adam’s handwriting.
Eve,
If you’re reading this, then you know, and I’ve not been able to get back quickly enough without you discovering what I’ve done.
I have of course gone in search of Ben and Dotty for you. I know you’ll be angry, but I couldn’t let you go back to Victorian (sorry, Edwardian!) times alone – which both of us know you would have tried to do, whatever I had to say about it.
You wouldn’t have been safe there on your own, and I simply couldn’t have lived with myself if something had happened to you or if you’d got trapped there like Dotty. So, I’m facing my fears and going through the tunnel myself, and if all goes to plan, I’ll come out the other side in 1904.
I have no intention of staying, so this isn’t a goodbye letter – you can’t get rid of me that easily! I will be back before breakfast, I PROMISE you.
But just in case I don’t see you for a little while, for whatever reason, always know I love you with all my heart, and NOTHING will stop me from returning to Clockmaker Court to be with you.
Adam xx
I stare at the letter, half angry with Adam, half in awe. He’s faced his fears and gone into a possibly dangerous, dark and enclosed space, and he’s done it for me.
‘Oh, Adam. Please be all right,’ I say, looking at the two wooden doors in front of me.
‘Please come back to me.’ With his letter still in my hand, I sit down on one of the office chairs and wait.
Hoping desperately to hear the sound of someone coming back down the tunnel. But there’s nothing – just silence.
After a while, I get up and pace around the office for a bit, stopping occasionally when I think I might have heard something. But again, all I can hear is just an awful, empty silence.
Eventually, after I can pace no longer, I sit again, alone with my thoughts, and they are all about Adam.
When we first met, I thought he was the sort of annoying cocksure man I usually went out of my way to avoid. I told myself I only had to put up with him until the house clearance was complete and then we’d never have to see each other again.
But to my utter bewilderment, Adam grew on me and he got under my skin – in a good way – and now, as I continue to stare at the two wooden doors in front of me, I can hardly bear to think that I might never see him again.
‘What if what happened to Dotty happens to you?’ I mumble to myself.
‘What if you’re stuck there and you can’t get back again? I’d never forgive myself.’
I think back on our time together over the last few months.
As each day passed and we uncovered more about this room and the mysteries of Clockmaker Court, I gradually began to understand there was much more to Adam than he let on.
He, like me, suffered trauma in his life.
The sort of terrible, scarring experiences that change you for ever, but ones that you choose not to talk about too often, because most people don’t and can’t understand. And that brought us so much closer.
But it isn’t just that. Adam is kind and funny, and most importantly, he gets me. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he knows me, sometimes better than I know myself – which is incredibly annoying when we are having a difference of opinion, but at the same time incredibly comforting too.
I wondered, after Jake, if I would ever meet anyone I could feel that strongly about again. But in Adam, I have. I have totally fallen in love with him, I want to be with him and I just know he has to come back through those doors so we can spend the rest of our lives together.
‘Adam Darcy,’ I say in a loud, stern voice, standing up. ‘You’d better come back through those doors in a minute, or … or … I will be coming down that tunnel to find you myself!’
‘Oh, Christ, am I in trouble?’ My heart leaps at his voice. ‘Maybe I should have stayed in the past?’