A Stitch in Time

by Kelley Armstrong

  “I do.”

  “It’ll happen. It has to, right? Maybe if I tap my heels three times . . . ?” I try for a smile, but he only frowns, and I realize I’m about a half-century too early for that joke. “I’m sorry. I’ll just . . . I’ll go wait in another room.”

  He steps aside as I pass, giving me a much wider berth than needed.

  When I reach the door, he says, “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  I turn. He has his arms crossed, face once again unreadable.

  “Believe that I can’t find the way back?” I say. “No, clearly, I’ve been lying in wait for two hours, hoping you’ll run in and say you’ve made a terrible mistake, fall at my feet and declare undying love, thank your lucky stars that I didn’t disappear into the ether again.”

  His face hardens. “You don’t need to mock—”

  “Don’t I?” I say, my temper rising as I step toward him. “I came to the stables to apologize. That was all. I made a promise, and I broke it, and I wanted to say I’m sorry. You didn’t need to be cruel, William.”

  “I—”

  “I’m talking now. Yes, this is your house, but since I can’t seem to leave it, I’m going to talk, and if you feel the need to flee”—I step aside and wave—“the door is there.”

  His mouth sets, and he steps back, arms crossing in answer.

  I continue, “You say you believed I was a phantasm. Is it possible I believed—still cannot help believing—the same of you?”

  “Me?” He sounds genuinely indignant. “That is ridiculous.”

  “Is it? I told you things of the future, which must have come to pass. Yet you never offered the same.”

  He sputters. “How would I—?”

  “You could have left me a message. Hidden something for me to find in my time.”

  “How? Pry up a floorboard?”

  “The point is that if you believe I’m not real, then it makes sense that I’d believe the same of you. That I might have”—my voice catches, in spite of myself—“been convinced of it by others.”

  His face darkens. “You told others about me?”

  “My uncle died,” I say. “He was . . .”

  I stop myself before mentioning the circumstances. I’ve already heard William’s opinion of ghosts and those who see them.

  I continue, “In the aftermath, I made the mistake of confessing that I’d had . . . inexplicable experiences. My mother—”

  “Your mother,” he says with a scornful snort. “Of course.”

  “My mother and two . . .” I search for the word appropriate to his time, predating Freud and the birth of psychology. “Two doctors who treat diseases of the mind determined that I’d suffered a breakdown. I spent the rest of my summer in a hospital.”

  “They confined you to a lunatic asylum for telling them about me?” His voice rises, outrage mingling with horror.

  “In my time, it’s not an ‘asylum.’ It’s a hospital where people go to rest and receive treatment. Humane treatment. Medication and therapy—talking, lots of talking.”

  He still doesn’t look convinced. We’re at a time when mental treatments were far from benign and reserved for those so affected they couldn’t function in normal life.

  “You were not mad,” he huffs. “Anyone could see that. Yet you allowed them to convince you that you were?”

  “I allowed them to convince me you weren’t real,” I say. “Which shouldn’t be so shocking, considering you’ve apparently convinced yourself that I’m not real with no outside influence.”

  “How is that the same?” he snaps. “I had to invent some reason why you never returned. You chose not to return. You chose to let others convince you—”

  “I didn’t choose anything. I was fifteen, William. My uncle had just died, horribly and traumatically. My mother rushed to Yorkshire and found me babbling about time travel and a boy who lived in this house two hundred years ago. Naturally, she presumed I’d had a breakdown. The doctors agreed.”

  He shifts, uncomfortable now but still searching for a rebuttal.

  “How do you think that felt? I wasn’t a child, permitted imaginary playmates. I was old enough to know better, and yet somehow I didn’t. In my mind, you were real, though I logically realized you couldn’t be. They shamed me for what I saw. Now, you shame me for allowing that.”

  “I—”

  “No.” I swipe a hand over my cheek, hot tears scorching it. “You say I chose not to return. Yes, yes, I did. Part of that wasn’t a choice. My aunt stopped spending summers in Yorkshire after my uncle died. My mother certainly wasn’t going to allow me back. But I could have returned when I was an adult. I chose not to. For twenty-three years, I chose not to because this house was all about you, and you were a figment of my imagination. A figment of my shame. And a figment of a wonderful dream I could never recapture. Yes, I stayed away. Because I believed you weren’t real, and you just told me you thought the same of me, yet you have the gall to mock me for not believing in you?”

  “I—”

  “I hope you aren’t real, William. I hope to God I’m asleep and dreaming right now because I don’t see any trace of the boy I fell in love with. That boy might be hurt that I broke my promise—and yes, I know you aren’t hurt, as you’ve made abundantly clear—but that boy would have given me the chance to explain. I’m sorry that I came here. I’m sorry I’m still here. I don’t know why I crossed over or how to get back, but I’m going to go into another room and hope to wake from what I pray is simply a nightmare.”

  As I turn to leave, he grabs my upper arm. “Bronwyn.”

  I stop, but I don’t turn around.

  We stand there, saying nothing. His fingers rub my arm, and his voice lowers.

  “Bronwyn. I’m . . .”

  When he doesn’t finish, I look to see his gaze on his hand, on his fingers stroking my arm. He pulls back, releasing me, and there’s a jolt, a flash of darkness. And then I’m standing alone in my bedroom.

  I stay there, standing, looking around at the dark room. After a moment, I stagger like a sleepwalker to the bed, my mind numb.

  Enigma meows at my feet, and I scoop her up, hugging her close. Then I cry. I cry for everything I’ve lost. For Michael, for my mother, for my aunt and my uncle. And for William, for the boy I knew, real or fantasy.

  I huddle on the bed, clutching a kitten, and I cry until I fall asleep.

  9

  I wake the next morning resolved. That’s the best word to describe my emotional state. All that I’ll allow it to be. Resolved.

  Resolved to forget about William. Resolved to forget about the ghosts. Resolved not to allow either to scare me away from this house.

  Resolved to sew drapes and strip wood and pick wildflowers and harvest berries and maybe even make jam from them. Resolved to not work on my paper because I’ve published enough in the last decade that I’m hardly concerned about missing a year in the publish-or-perish grind of academia. Resolved to spend my summer reading nothing that would ever make its way into a university syllabus and banish the words guilty pleasure from my vocabulary.

  Resolved to let Freya know she has a standing invitation to tea. Resolved to get the convertible running even if that means tinkering with it myself. Resolved to walk for hours each day in the moors, and resolved to not lose a single pound doing it, no matter how many scones that takes. Resolved to blast my nineties classic rock and dance through the house whenever the mood strikes. Resolved to thoroughly spoil Enigma, enjoy her kittenhood, research whatever steps are needed to take her home with me and stop pretending that I might not actually do that.

  I am resolved.

  I begin by bouncing from bed so fast that Enigma squeaks her alarm. A few pats reassure her that all is well, and then I step off the throw rug and hear a board squeak underfoot where a board never squeaked before.

  If you asked me which boards in this house squeaked, I’d have laughed and said, “All of them.” I certainly didn’t pay attention to
which did. Yet I’d apparently cataloged that information in the soundtrack of my life within this room. When I step off the rug, bracing for the chill of the hardwood, the board squeaks under my heel.

  I hesitate. Then I back up, weight into my heel, and feel the wood give.

  The floorboard is loose.

  I want to continue on. I want the resolve to continue on. Yet if I don’t check, it’ll pluck at the back of my mind, disrupting all attempts to enjoy a peaceful day.

  I bend, slide my fingernails into a groove and tug. The board lifts as easily as if it were displaced yesterday. Underneath lies a yellowed piece of folded paper.

  My fingers tremble as I pull out the note. On it are four words, the ink faded with time.

  Bronwyn,

  Your note.

  William.

  I stand and stare down at the note. Stare and stare and stare until the letters swim before my eyes.

  William is real.

  I can come up with alternative explanations, but they all strain credibility at least as much as “A man left this note for me a hundred and seventy years ago because I stepped through time and asked him to.”

  William exists.

  My fingers slide over the paper, so old it threatens to crackle under my fingers, and as I do, I back onto the bed, and I exhale in what starts as a sigh only to crystallize into a deep, shuddering sob, relief and grief, too. The crashing wave of relief that comes with acknowledging that my mind never betrayed me.

  I’ve spent years chiding myself for my shame. A mental collapse is nothing to be ashamed of. The problem is that, deep down, I could never accept the diagnosis, and that is what shamed me most. My denials made me feel weak, lacking the strength to accept my breakdown and hold my head high.

  Now I know why. Because I didn’t suffer a mental break at fifteen. I didn’t imagine a ghost. I’ve seen several here since, with Enigma’s reaction proving they are real.

  Now I have proof that William is real, too, and I don’t know how to handle that. I should be elated, jumping back into his room to talk to him, finally talk to him. Yet I look at the note again, and I don’t fail to notice the brevity.

  I asked for proof. He gave me proof . . . and nothing more. There’s no invitation to visit here. No hint that such an intrusion would even be tolerated.

  Resolve. It can mean a determination to carry out a plan. It can also mean an ending. William has given me closure, nothing more. An answer thrown into the universe and then a door firmly shut. But perhaps, knowing how this ends—with me alone in this house at least a hundred years after his death—that abrupt conclusion is for the best.

  I may have spoken in anger, but there was truth in my words, too. He’s not the boy I knew. I’m not the girl he knew, either. Better that we settle our outstanding business even in a less than satisfactory way. Then we can both move on.

  Which is what I must do. All that I can do if I’m to respect his wishes and stay away.

  I gather wild strawberries. I make fresh jam for my scones, and I enjoy breakfast in the sitting room with a novel in my hand and a kitten on my lap. After breakfast, I walk the moors, and in the light of day, the ghosts from the night before seem impossible phantasms. Even if they aren’t, the sun confines them to their place, and I tramp through the heather and eat a picnic lunch by a burbling stream and feel not a prickle on my neck.

  I spend the afternoon helping Del and Ronnie with the car, and the engine actually turns over. Ronnie swears he’ll have her running tomorrow; Del says he’ll be lucky to get her going this month. The answer likely lies in the middle, which is enough for me.

  Freya has gone off to the city, but she’ll be by for tea tomorrow. So I have my afternoon snack with Enigma. Then the kitten wanders off, and I spend the next hour searching for a tiny feline I can hear but can’t see. I find her in the old dumbwaiter, the curious kitten having squeezed through the unlatched hatch door, whereupon I lock her in my room and bicycle into town to buy a latch. A package of latches, actually. I recall what William said about her being a little adventurer, always getting stuck someplace. Apparently, she’d behaved so far because she was learning her new surroundings. Now that she’s comfortable, she’s resorted to type.

  Does that make me think of William? Of course, it does. I won’t for one second pretend I don’t wish this had gone differently, that I don’t yearn for a scenario where I could pop back to his time as I used to, talk to him as I used to. But he’s made his feelings on the matter very clear, and I must honor them.

  I install the latches and eat a late dinner, complete with two glasses of wine, which sounds so much more extravagant if I don’t admit that for me, a “glass” is about three ounces. There have been too many evenings in the last decade where alcohol—and alcohol-induced oblivion—seemed like a fine idea, so I’m very careful with my intake.

  When Enigma squeaks, I look up with a start, my gaze going to the spot where I’d last seen her, curled on my legs. She’s not there.

  The sound comes again, from upstairs, and I follow it into the master bedroom where it seems to be coming from the other side of the balcony door.

  The door that has been locked for twenty-three years.

  I dash forward, certain Enigma has somehow found her way onto the parapet. Then she peeks from under the dresser and bats something across the floor. As it skitters over the wood, I think, bug, and whatever it is does indeed glitter like an iridescent beetle shell. It’s a moonstone cufflink. Uncle Stan’s, from a set I’d once bought him for Christmas.

  My gaze goes from the dusty cufflink to that locked balcony door, and a shiver turns to uncontrollable trembling. Enigma chirps in alarm. I pick her up, and pet her and sit on the bed as I stare at that door and do the one thing I’ve avoided since I returned to Thorne Manor: remember why I left twenty-three years ago. The exact circumstances surrounding my departure.

  That night, I’d fallen asleep on the sofa downstairs. Aunt Judith was staying with a sick friend, and I drifted off while reading, so Uncle Stan decided to leave me there.

  I woke to . . .

  I’m no longer certain what I woke to. In the hospital later, one young doctor experimented with hypnotism, and it seemed to have the reverse effect—instead of helping me untangle the chaos of that night, it snarled my memory even more.

  I saw a woman. I know that only because I’ve been told that I said that. When I try to conjure her face, I’m not sure whether I’m actually remembering or creating the memory out of piecemeal bits related by others. I know that I woke to a woman standing over me, and I knew she was a ghost.

  Screaming for Uncle Stan, I raced to the stairs. Then I remembered my friends making fun of a horror movie because a girl fled a killer by running upstairs when the front door was right there. So I stopped.

  I wish to God I hadn’t. That I hadn’t, even in my terror, feared looking foolish. But I was fifteen, and there was no greater sin than being a silly, weak girl. So I ran out the front door.

  Hearing me, Uncle Stan ran onto the parapet over the front door, the one I was forbidden to use because it was old and crumbling. Aunt Judith had long wanted that door sealed shut, but Uncle Stan had a chair out there where he liked to read his morning paper.

  He shouted for me as I raced across the lawn. I wheeled to see him . . . and the ghost stepping out behind him. I shouted at him to turn around, and he did and . . .

  I’ll never know whether he actually saw her. As he spun, his foot snagged that damned chair. He stumbled, and he fell against the railing, and a horrible crack rang out as the railing broke and then—

  I can tell myself I don’t remember the rest. Of course, I do. If I could surrender one part of that night, this is the part I’d forget. I’ll keep the memory of the horror that sent me tearing from the house. Just let me forget what happened next. Please let me forget.

  I remember every second of it. Seeing my uncle fall. Hearing his yelp of surprise and then the thud of his body hitting the ground. Runn
ing over, screaming, to see him staring up, empty-eyed, his neck snapped.

  I remember the rest, too. Kneeling in the night-damp grass and screaming until my voice was raw, until someone walking her dog in the village actually heard me. The villagers came, and they found me beside my uncle’s body, ranting about a ghost.

  Now I’m at Thorne Manor again and seeing ghosts again. I’m choosing to stay here, knowing the woman in black is probably the one who terrified me the last time. This might be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and yet, even knowing that, even knowing William is done with me, I choose to stay.

  I’m blessed that night with dreamless sleep. A ghost-free, dream-free night. I wake, roll from bed, step off the rug . . . and the board creaks.

  Remembering William’s note, I hesitate, my toes rocking the board. Then I lift it before I can tell myself there’s no need, that I’ve already retrieved his missive.

  I tug up the board to see that folded piece of yellowed paper again.

  I then open my nightstand drawer and confirm yesterday’s note is exactly where I put it.

  I reach down into the floor and unfold the note. It isn’t the same one. It’s longer, for one thing. I skim the perfect script.

  Bronwyn,

  I would like to apologize for my behavior the night before last. I spoke in haste and in anger. I understand why you could not return.

  William

  I read the note twice, searching for a weather vane to tell me which way his mood blows. Does he regret that we didn’t have more time to talk? Or is he simply realizing he was rude and correcting that while hoping I don’t misinterpret it as an invitation to visit.

  I fold the note abruptly, my fingernails creasing the edge with a zip of annoyance at myself for needing more. William apologized. That’s enough. It must be.

  I have another fulfilling day, the perfect combination of industry and sloth. Freya visits for tea. Naturally, she asks about my resident spooks.