Where the Moths Hide: Victorian Time Travel Romantic Suspense (The Stars of Time Trilogy Book 2)

Chapter 1

June 22nd, 1881

Yorkshire, England

At first the sound was a distant whisper, like a soft tickle in her ear, until it slowly became louder, and Eva could make out a melodic hum. Was someone singing? Or was she dreaming of music again? Trapped in an endless tangle of dreary sleep, she could no longer tell reality from her nightmares.

“How much laudanum did you give the poor soul?” a man said.

“Not much more than the average dose. Try and open your eyes, child,” a woman said, her voice a soft murmur in Eva’s ear.

Eva stirred.

Something tugged her right eye open, forcing her pupil to painfully contract from the brightness. Before she could make sense of what she saw, her heavy lid fell shut, and she sank back into unconsciousness.

In her hazy mind, darkness pooled. As she stood alone, a looming sense of peril snapped at her nerves, and she frantically spun in circles in search of an exit.

The flame of a candle caught her eye.

Like a moth she felt drawn to its warming light until drumming footsteps echoed in the room around her. Frozen in fear, she whimpered.

“Something is disturbing the poor girl,” the man said. “Be quick, my peach, and hand me the smelling salts.”

“Shouldn’t we let her wake naturally?” the woman responded.

“That won’t do,” the man grumbled. “Look at her hand. We need to save it from infection, but before that, she must wake so I can assess her injuries.”

As the strangers continued to speak, the stalking shadow in Eva’s mind made itself known. A devil-like creature rushed from the surrounding blackness. The faint light of the candle made its bloodied skin glimmer like a candied apple. His eyes were beads of black as he reached for her with a clawed hand.

She stepped back, but he caught her throat. As he leaned his head closer to hers, his sharpened nails dug into the tendons of her neck. His mouth snapped open to reveal a set of sharpened teeth, between which saliva bubbled. His forked tongue extended from his mouth, snaking its way to her lips, and as it did, the blackness of his eyes transformed into a glimmering sea blue.

She made to scream but the abrupt stench of ammonia silenced her.

Eva’s head shot up.

Pulled awake from her nightmare, she blinked away the haze to stare at the two strangers by her bedside.

To Eva’s right was a middle-aged black woman with large brown eyes framed in delicate wrinkles. To her left, an older white man with a head of wiry grey hair, round glasses and a gentle smile. Both leaned forward, pinning her arms to the bed.

Sobbing, Eva tried to wiggle free.

“There, there, child, all is well,” the woman said, squeezing Eva’s forearm. “My name is Phoebe, and this is my husband, Rich. He’s a doctor.”

Was that an American accent?

Tongue-tied, Eva’s gaze bounced between them. As she tried to recall why she was in a bed surrounded by strangers, her heart pounded like a drum. Mind blank, nothing came.

“Can you tell us what happened?” Rich said.

Eva opened her parched mouth. The words scraped along her throat like barbed wire. “Where … where am I?”

“At the Randall farm,” Phoebe said.

Eva cast a weary glance around the room.

She lay in a large bed beneath a ceiling of dark wooden beams where a gas lamp hung from a hook. To her right, behind Phoebe, was a square window. A tree fluttered against the panes. The low afternoon sun twinkled in flashes of yellow between the green leaves. To her left, next to Rich, was a wooden cart with various medical supplies. On the wall behind him, above a dresser painted yellow, sat a thick cross with a figure of Jesus.

The Randall farm.

“How long were you lost on the moor?” Rich said.

Eva looked at him. Confusion clouded her mind like a swarm of angry bees. It was the kind of confusion that brought on a sick feeling deep within one’s core.

“Lost?” Eva managed to say. “When was I lo—”

A blinding flash of memory came to her mind, forcing her eyes shut.

She was lying in a heap of burnt-red heather with Henry by her side. Holding hands, they stared at the starry sky. Streams of falling stars burned across the midnight darkness. The sensation of teetering on the precipice of two realities gripped her. She had felt death; she was sure of it.

Warm fingers squeezed her left hand.

“Stay awake,” Rich said.

Alive.

“I need you to stay awake for a little longer,” Rich pressed on, shaking her hand with more force. “Open your eyes, miss.”

You’re alive.

With a strained breath, she forced her eyelids open. Her gaze landed on the window. Green leaves, yellow sun and blue sky. They were the colours of new beginnings, of a healing warmth, and of a needed freedom. I’m alive. Digging her fingers into the bedsheets, she tried to sit up, but her body felt as heavy as a boulder. All she wanted was to smell the damp earth, feel the warm sun on her skin and touch the summer wind.

“Miss, you must remain calm. There isn’t a need to sit up just yet,” Rich said.

“But … but…” Eva stammered.

“Are you in any pain?” Rich asked.

“What?” Eva said.

“Do you have pain?”

“P-pain? Why would I—” She looked at her body.

Her dress and undergarments had been removed. Clothed in a thin beige nightgown, her pale and lanky limbs were exposed. Dirt marked her skin, bruises painted her ankles, large scratch-like red wounds coloured her forearms and there was brown blood caked on the bandages wrapped around her right palm.

“I’m fine,” Eva said at once.

“Miss—”

“I’m fine,” she repeated with more harshness. Maybe if she said it once more, it would give the illusion she was not injured, that she had only been having a bad dream.

“You are not fine,” Henry spoke, his voice echoing throughout the room.

The sudden sound of him stole her breath. She swung her head from side to side, but he was nowhere. She wanted to shout profanities, beat him with her fist, shove him against the wall with all her strength and hurt him, but she did not know why.

Fingers snapped before Eva’s nose.

Her gaze locked onto Rich’s grey eyes, round with concern.

“Focus on my voice, miss. It’s important for the assessment that you answer my questions,” he said. “Do you have pain anywhere else?”

Assessment? She looked back at her body. She did not feel pain but the injuries marking her skin told a different story. She was gravely injured. She should be feeling pain. Why could she not feel anything?She trembled so hard, her muscles locked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how it came to this,” Eva said.

Rich’s fluffy grey brows pulled together. “You have no recollection?”

“I don’t know,” Eva said. “I don’t … know.”

“Right,” Rich sighed. “Well, you are safe now, miss.”

Safe.

Hadn’t Henry said the same thing? Hadn’t she believed him with all her stupid heart? Look at where that had got her – beaten and disoriented in a stranger’s bed. She shut her eyes to stop the tears, but it was no use. A dizzy spell swept her up into a chaotic storm of exhaustion. Within seconds, she was crying angry, gulping tears and writhing between the sheets in a heartache she did not understand.

“Phoebe, please ready the medicine,” Rich said. “There is no use in questioning the girl. You’ve given her too much laudanum to form a cohesive thought.”

Dread gripped Eva.

“No”—Eva reached for Rich’s hand—“please, I beg you.”

“Your palm will be a quick procedure. Do not fret; all is well,” Rich said. “What is your name?”

“Eva, but—”

“Eva, what year is it?”

“Twenty eighteen.”

A tense pause stretched for what seemed an eternity.

Eva regarded Rich and then Phoebe. Their expressions told her it was the wrong answer. With a start, she remembered the events of June 17th, 1881, when Henry Asheford had got engaged to another woman and tried to get rid of her with the help of a gang of criminals.

A searing pain ignited in her chest, scorching her insides like wildfire. Fat tears streamed down her burning face.

“Make it stop … please! Make it all stop,” Eva cried out.

“The pain?”

“It hurts; everything hurts,” she said. The memories, most of all.

“Phoebe, the chloroform, please.”

Fear twisted her gut. Chloroform? “No—”

Rich took hold of a cloth from Phoebe.

“Fear not, you are in good hands, child,” Phoebe said, patting Eva’s shoulder. “My husband is a grand surgeon.”

As the cloth came closer to her face, the blood crashed hard against her ears. “No – get that away from me – I don’t want it!” Eva screamed.

She tried to sit up but was overpowered by the hands holding her down. Without the energy to fight, Eva collapsed back onto the bed.

“No”—she shook her head from side to side—“not the chloroform. Please, God, anything but that.”

Phoebe brushed Eva’s hair from her forehead. “How about a song? Went down to the river Jordon…”

The cloth was firmly placed over Eva’s nose and mouth.

Her cries were instantly muffled as her fingers clawed into the soft material of the mattress. At one last-ditch attempt to sit, she briefly caught a glimpse of Henry at the foot of the bed.

Her eyes widened and a whimpering help escaped her lips.

In his brown waistcoat and white shirt, with his dark auburn hair combed to the side, he was a picture of charm. While he played with his pocket watch in hand, his steely eyes bore into her. They were full of cold scrutiny.

“You should have listened when I told you to return to your world.” Henry turned the watch around in his palm. The shattered groove across the watch face glinted in the sun. “But you had to be stubbornly wicked, didn’t you?”

Gagged by the cloth, Eva couldn’t speak. She stared at Henry’s fading figure until all that remained was the blueness of his eyes against a darkening backdrop. Her head flopped against the pillow. The chloroform had hit its mark, sedating her nerves and slowing her breathing. Within seconds she was asleep.

Somewhere in her unconsciousness, Phoebe’s singing was a distant hum. Her soulful, husky voice was soothing, keeping the nightmare from returning. It was as if the stranger understood her pain and, for a fleeting moment, Eva no longer felt alone.

***

The next time consciousness returned to Eva, she was running up a heather-laced hill with a covey of grouse flying overhead. Tears coursed down her cheeks as quickly as the adrenaline in her veins. Her breath was stifled by the fear hooked into her ribs, making it difficult to breath.

Something horrific was chasing her.

As she made a final push up the hill, a clawed hand grabbed her skirts, pulling her back until she tumbled downhill. Her head smacked off a rock. The hills transformed into a darkened room enveloped in a dense, creeping fog with the delicate strum of Canon in D playing in the background.

Sitting against a wall, Eva was bound by her wrists.

An overhead light turned on.

The devil stood beneath it with a smile of a hundred sharpened teeth. Unnaturally large sea-blue eyes the size of quarters stared back.

She let out a scream, waking her from the nightmare.

Next to Eva’s bedside, a little girl around four years of age in a white dress held a doll. She stood timidly in front of the sunny window. Her cascade of strawberry-blonde hair was like a golden-pink halo around her tiny head. She studied Eva with pale-green eyes, brimming with child-like curiosity.

Heart pounding, Eva tried to sit up. Only then did she notice a heavy warmth around her wrists. She looked down to see both hands strapped to the metal bed frame with a knot of black cloth. As she fought against the bindings, a blubbering whimper escaped her lips. When the disorientation settled in, she let out another piercing cry.

With a squeak, the girl dropped her doll, which fell to the floor in a plop of dust. She hurried from the room, screaming for Lewis.

Brisk footsteps echoed outside, and Eva’s stomach lurched.

The door burst open and in came a woman. “Child, you’re finally awake,” she said with a gentle smile on her round face.

Eva stared at her in a daze. Who were these people? Where was she? She peered at her bindings. Why was she strapped to a bed like an animal?

“My name is Phoebe Randall,” the woman said.

Eva looked at the woman. Phoebe Randall. The name was familiar.

Phoebe was middle-aged, with creases surrounding her large brown eyes and laugh lines on either side of her plush lips. Her black hair was styled in a neat bun atop her head. She wore a black buttoned-up blouse tucked into a high-waisted beige skirt that bellowed out at the hips, giving her a grand silhouette.

Behind Phoebe’s skirts, two small children appeared.

Phoebe patted the girl’s head. “And this is Ceci and her brother, Lewis.” Phoebe gestured to the older boy with a tousle of mousy-brown curls. “My adopted children.”

Eva looked at the children.

Shy and bit fearful, whatever glimmer of curiosity that had held the girl’s regard had been replaced with uncertainty. Her brother, Lewis, stared back with unbridled interest.

“Don’t be shy, children. Say good morning to Eva,” Phoebe said.

“But Eva is scared,” Ceci said with a childish lisp.

“B-because you gave her a f-fright, you silly girl,” Lewis said.

“I’m not silly!”

“I t-told you not to bother her.”

“Children, stop quarrelling. That isn’t how we behave before a guest,” Phoebe said.

“Guest?” Eva said, her throat as dry as sand.

“I t-told you she wouldn’t r-remember,” Lewis said. “She’s too s-sick.”

“Why doesn’t she remember, Ma?” Ceci asked, pulling at Phoebe’s skirts.

“Because, children, although Eva has been healing with us for a week, it sometimes takes a few days for memory to return after a serious injury,” Phoebe said as if the words had been rehearsed and spoken a dozen times before. “Eva, I hope you are not too confused by the ordeal. My husband and I have been caring for you ever since little Lewis found you in the valley.”

Eva’s thoughts fell over each other in a tumble of confusion. She had been with them for a week? Another glance at the family brought back some things. Yes, she remembered Phoebe’s soulful voice, singing and praying around the household. What about Ceci? Hadn’t she played with that doll at the foot of her bed? And Lewis, the boy with a stutter, who watched out for his sister and occasionally scolded her when she became too loud. Despite the hazy memories, instinct told her to fight, to rip off her bindings and make a run for it, but she remained frozen in place.

“Why am I tied to the bed?” Eva said.

A deepening frown marked Phoebe’s face as she approached Eva’s bedside. “You were scratching your wounds at night.”

“My wounds?”

“Your palm, mostly.”

Eva peered at her right hand.

A long, deep wound across the palm had been stitched together with thick black sutures. It was itchy but at least the skin looked pink and healthy.

She had no recollection of how she got this injury. Once more, panic took hold. Tears threatened to burst out.

“Why can I barely remember anything?” Eva said.

“You were in a great deal of pain and slept most of the time,” Phoebe said, unbinding Eva’s wrists.

“But I must have … woken or-or at least said things. Didn’t I?”

“To eat and bathe, yes,” Phoebe said. “But you mostly asked for laudanum.”

“What?” Eva gasped. “Laudanum … no, no, that can’t be.”

“Yes, child, every day. That drug is strong enough to knock out a horse. It’s no wonder you hardly remembered your ordeal; you slept blissfully unaware for days.”

Eva rested her gaze on the injury across her palm. Her ears felt hot. Nothing Phoebe was saying made sense. She would never take laudanum, that much was sure. Slowly, she looked up and examined the room.

“We had no space in the house for you, so my son and husband converted our garden shed into a recovery room,” Phoebe said.

The shed was a small closet-sized space that smelled like dust and dirt. The bed, where she lay, was in the furthest corner on the right. At the foot of the metal-framed bed was a small dresser beneath a square window that overlooked the garden. To her left, a rocking chair with a quilt. On the bedside table was a clear bottle of reddish-brown liquid and a set of blue pearl earrings in a tiny white ceramic bowl.

For a beat, Eva’s breath wavered.

Those pearls were the same colour as Henry’s eyes when the light hit them exactly right. He gave them to her early in their relationship. Once a gesture of a budding romance, they had become a reminder of the last moment she saw Henry at Asheford Hall before he fled to London and married Fanny Davenport. Back then, his eyes had been two pools of crystal blue, filled with deceit and lies. Before she could fully push that thought from her mind, more memories rushed in, a tsunami of torment engulfing her whole.

Henry’s engagement.

The kidnapping and her fight for life.

Wandering around the moorland, lost, afraid and hopeless.

Her vision blurred with tears. “God, no,” she exhaled, tightening her fingers around the scratchy woollen blanket. “Where am I, exactly?”

“Near Castleton in Yorkshire,” Phoebe said.

The name told her nothing.

An anxiety gripped her to get up, wash, brush her teeth and get dressed. She had the urge to be somewhere, without knowing where somewhere was. With great effort, she pulled the bedsheet off her legs. Her arms weighed the same as a bag of rocks, and her legs…

“My legs—” Eva’s voice caught in her throat when she saw her ankles were bandaged in a thick wrapping of beige cloth.

“They are not broken, only sprained,” Phoebe said quickly.

“I don’t understand.”

“We suspect you injured them while walking through the valley. The place is dangerous, full of rocks and pits.”

“I injured them?”

“Yes, child, both ankles.”

That was not possible.

Phoebe’s lips kept moving, but Eva no longer heard her words. Desperate to understand her dire situation, she promptly lifted her legs, which fell like rigid stumps over the edge of the bed.

Pain jolted her ankle bones.

There were protests from Phoebe, even gentle hands upon her shoulders, urging Eva to remain seated, but the need to prove her independence was too strong.

As she stood, a fresh slew of pain sliced through the ligaments in her feet. With an anguished cry, she fell back onto the bed.

“This isn’t happening,” she whimpered. “Oh God … oh God…”

Her body slumped into itself in a fit of sobs. Illogical thoughts bombarded her with dagger-like precision. Would she ever walk again? Would she ever be well enough to take care of herself or walk out of this farm, let alone run free in the lands she once travelled? Or was she destined to be a prisoner within her broken body, shut inside her head to forever relive the fears that accompanied her waking moments and the nightmares that plagued her every night?

Not too long ago, she had been an independent twenty-four-year-old. Her life in the twenty-first century revolved around things she took for granted: healthcare, ordering takeout, calling for a taxi to drive to the hospital. They were all things she would have done if she had two twisted ankles in 2018. But in 1881? She was trapped on some random farm in Yorkshire, a place she knew nothing about, with a rural family who were strangers.

How did it come to this?

She knew how. Henry Asheford had betrayed her. He did this to you. That thought alone brought a fresh stab of pain to her heart, setting fire to her nerves, forcing lava through her veins. She was feverish with rage. She had fallen a long way from her previous existence. Now, she was what she hated most – a pitiful, useless thing. And it was all his fault.

Something soft was placed in her lap.

Pulled from her silent rage, Eva peered at the doll across her thighs.

Made of brown cloth and stuffed with wool, the doll had a white bonnet, blue buttons for eyes and a patterned white dress.

“When I’m sad, Rosie helps me. You can have her until you are all better,” Ceci said.

“B-but you need Rosie,” Lewis said.

Ceci faced her brother with fists upon her hips. “I don’t. I’m four now.”

Phoebe chuckled. “All right, children, enough bickering. How about we let Eva rest and we can finish lunch? Eva, if you require anything, just holler. I’m right around the corner.”

Gathering the children with gentle hands behind their heads, Phoebe herded them out of the room. As soon as the door shut, the room was deadly quiet.

Eva looked at the doll in her hands. Rosie had been Henry’s mother’s nickname. A shiver tickled the back of her spine at the coincidence. Rosie must be a common name in this century. But, then again, the doll had blue button eyes. Did Henry’s mother have blue eyes too? Whatever the case may be, Rosie the doll was another reminder of the bastard who had betrayed her.

She sat motionless for a long time. Inside her, the need for justice unfurled into something dangerous. She had a newfound sense of purpose. She could not give into pitiful defeat as a cripple on a farm. She would get better. She would learn to walk again, and when she did, she would hunt down Henry Asheford and rip him to shreds.