How long will she live without water?
How long will I?
Stop. Just stop.
I squeeze my eyes shut, and when I push to my feet, I forget to take it slow. Pain rips through me, but by that point, I’m upright, and if I’ve damaged anything, it’s too late. Yes, everything hurts, but everything works, and that’s the important part.
I shine the flashlight around. I’m trapped between the inner and outer wall. I’m also between two upright studs, about eight feet apart. A sliver of space so narrow I can’t turn sideways.
Deep breaths. The pain in my ribs is subsiding, and I can breathe. Good enough.
It doesn’t take long to explore my narrow space. There’s a solid stone wall on the outside, thick beams on each end and the interior wall in front of me. Above is the hole I fell through . . . fifteen feet over my head.
I eye the interior wall. If there’s a chance of breaking through, this is the spot.
I slam my shoulder into it . . . and hiss in pain, the sound echoing through the empty space. I kick with everything I have, but there isn’t room to draw my leg back more than a few inches. I slam my fists into the wall, and I don’t even dent it.
I need a tool, and there’s only one here. My stomach clenches as I pick up a thigh bone, and I stop several times, unable to do it. But then I remember Enigma, trapped in my room. I swing the bone against the wall . . . and it snaps in two, and I stand there, holding the broken pieces, realizing I’ve desecrated Teddy’s remains, and I slump to the floor, hot tears streaming down my face.
I scream, then. I scream because I am not alone. A spirit pushed me into that hole, and it’s here, watching me, gloating, and I curse and scream at them until my throat is raw.
“Show yourself!” I shout for the dozenth time, my voice a raspy whisper.
A cry answers. Not a human one. Enigma hears me shouting and banging and calls back a yowl of fear. Then a bang, as if she’s thrown herself against the door. Another bang, and fresh tears come as I whisper for her not to worry about me. Just be calm. Please be calm.
The yowling stops, and I exhale in relief. Then I square my shoulders.
“Show yourself,” I say. “I know you’re here. You pushed me down that hole.”
The air ripples beside me, and I jump. I shine the flashlight to see nothing but blackness. Then I make out a form. Black on black, only half materialized.
“No,” the word comes soft.
“No?” I look where her eyes should be, behind the shimmering black that shrouds her. “So, you didn’t push me?”
“Never.”
This is not Cordelia. So, who could it be? The answer comes in a heartbeat.
“You have reason to want to harm me, though,” I say.
“I could. Yet I do not.”
I stand tall and say, “I name you Eliza. Lady Elizabeth Stanbury.”
The figure shimmers, and the blackness enshrouding her falls away until I see the young woman from the engagement photograph, slight and fair, dressed in the blue dress she’d worn, fleeing her killer on the moors.
I open my mouth to ask what happened to her. Before I can, she cocks her head, gaze shifting as if listening to something I can’t hear. Then she smiles. “The kitten. Of course. Clever kitten.” She turns to me. “Go to him. Save him.”
She pushes me. Reaches out and gives me a hard shove that topples me backward, staring in disbelief as I slam down onto the ground, pain knifing through me, the flashlight flying from my hand. When I lift my head, everything’s dark.
She tricked me. Damn it—I knew better. Eliza was William’s fiancé. She’d loved him, and she had every reason to hate me, every reason to push me down that hole.
I reach for the flashlight, but only touch down on bone. I rock forward, tears filling my eyes as I howl in rage and despair.
When my voice breaks, I still hear my howl, echoing as if through the entire house. It stretches longer than an echo should. Higher pitched, too. And it’s coming from the other side of the wall.
“Enigma?” I croak.
That isn’t possible. I know I left her locked in my room.
Thunder rolls through the house, and I back against the stone wall.
“Bronwyn?” The thunder becomes running footfalls.
I know that voice. I know my name in that voice, as little sense as it makes to hear it in my world.
“Enigma!” William says. “I cannot hear her with your yowling.” The kitten stops as he says, “Bronwyn!”
I bang on the wall. “I’m here. I fell down the hole in the passage.”
“Hold on. I’ll get an ax.”
I say no, just get a rope, and I’ll climb out, but he’s already gone. Then I call again, to tell him where to find an ax in my garage, because that’s where he must be—in my time somehow. He’s already gone, though, and so I sink to the ground, and when I do, a smell rises, one that wasn’t there before.
The smell of death.
I reach out one tentative hand toward the femur I dropped. My hand touches bone, but it isn’t the smooth knob from before.
It’s darker than it was earlier, and when I look up, I see the hole is covered.
William didn’t cross over. I did.
I remember Eliza’s words.
The kitten. Of course. Clever kitten.
Go to him.
Hearing me screaming, Enigma had crossed through the stitch to get William’s help. The problem, of course, was that I was still on my side. Eliza solved that with her shove, literally pushing me through time.
It only takes a few minutes for William to find an ax, and then he makes sure I’m well away as he chops through the wall. As soon as the hole is big enough, he rips it larger, calling, “Bronwyn!” as if I might be gone.
I stagger forward, and then he’s halfway into the wall himself, his arms going around me as I fall against him, sobbing.
35
William and I sit on the floor in his parlor. I huddle against him, his arms locked around me until I can breathe again, think again, move again. When I attempt the last, I gasp in pain.
“The fall,” he whispers.
He kneels beside me, feeling my arms and my chest. He has me breathe as he examines my ribs, and then he tests my limbs. I could tell him they’re all fine, but I want a few minutes to bask in his anxious ministrations.
How long has it been since anyone cared when I hurt myself? Since I could stub my toe or wrench my shoulder and have someone cluck over me, offering painkillers and bandages. It’s such a simple thing, a childish thing, but it’s meaningful in a way I never realized until it was gone, one of the thousand things I lost when Michael died.
So, I accept William’s coddling and his promises of cold compresses and hot tea, and I only draw the line when he insists on bringing the doctor.
“How would you explain me?” I begin.
“I don’t care. I’ll pay the physician enough that he won’t, either.”
I shake my head. “No offense to Victorian medicine, but I’ll visit a doctor in my world. For now, you’ve treated enough horses to diagnose a broken rib or sprained ankle, and I have neither. There’s something more pressing we need to discuss.”
I pause. Then I throw my arms around his neck, hugging him tight, my face buried against his shoulder as I compose myself for what will come next.
Cordelia thinks that William murdered her. Murdered Teddy and Eliza. She came to protect me, warn me against him. Yet here I am, hugging him as if none of that ever happened.
Because she is wrong. Mistaken. My task here is to set Cordelia straight. Lift the burden she’s suffered under for nearly two centuries, believing her brother killed her.
With William silently following, I return to the kitchen, take a lantern from a shelf, and shine it through the hole in the wall. I motion for him to look inside. He does. Then he stands there, perfectly still, as the grandfather clock ticks into the silence. When he withdraws, he staggers, and I steady him.
>
“Teddy,” he whispers. “The clothing. There’s enough . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“He was here the whole time. In the walls of . . .”
He shudders convulsively, and I guide him to a chair. He drops into it with a thump, and then tugs me to him. I ease onto his lap, and his arms go around me as deep, shuddering sighs roll through him.
After a minute, he says, “No one checked there. No one thought . . . They didn’t know about the passage, and I didn’t consider . . . I’d never shown it to him. I was past that age by the time we met. He must have found it, fallen down the hole and broken his neck.”
I give him a moment and then ask gently, “May I ask about the day he disappeared? I’m sorry if I sound like a police constable. I’m trying to figure things out and—”
“You don’t need to explain, Bronwyn. You may ask anything of me.”
“That day, August was over, and you two were planning to ride into the town.”
A flash of confusion, as if wondering how I know, and then a nod, accepting that I do.
“We were riding to Whitby,” he says. “August’s family was staying with us for a few days, and we’d planned a trip to town. Knowing August was here, Teddy had his father, Lord Wakefield, drop him by. We couldn’t possibly take him all the way to Whitby, and I was annoyed at Teddy for inserting himself into my weekend with August. I was . . . sharper than I should have been.”
“August tried to smooth things over.”
“As usual. Poor August. He’s spent his life mediating between me and the world. Yes, August told me I’d been overly sharp. Then he went to console Teddy and explain the situation in a gentler manner.”
“He suggested Teddy play with Cordelia.”
William nods. “Harold said Cordie was in her room. He sent Teddy up, but the boy evidently no longer wished to play with a girl two years his junior. Cordelia said he never knocked on her door. We thought he’d come back down and gone into the moors. That’s what he wanted us to do when I snapped at him. His coat was gone, so we presumed . . .” He swallows. “He must have found the passage instead.”
I walk to the wall, step through and shine the lantern around. William stands at the entrance while I finish my examination.
“The hole is covered,” I say, lifting the lantern overhead. “If Teddy opened it and tumbled in, it would still be open.”
“It was closed the last time I was in there, though that was before Teddy disappeared.” He frowns in thought. “I believe I was about ten. I spooked Cordie by scratching on the walls, and she was so frightened, I never did it again. The hole was definitely covered.”
“It’s still covered now,” I say. “It broke in my timeline. Also, you found his coat by the bog, right? That isn’t possible if he fell through and died.”
“You think someone . . . ?”
William sways, looking ill. Then he straightens, pushes into the tight gap and bends before the bones. I pass him the lantern. He examines the boy’s body with deft, sure hands, and I remember the fifteen-year-old boy who’d pored over medical books, both equine and human, half practicality and half personal interest. In another time period, when a lord’s role was not so clearly defined, he’d have become a doctor or, more likely, a veterinarian. He never had that chance, but he knows what he’s doing now.
After he’s done examining the remains, he backs out of the wall. “With the tissue gone, it’s impossible to tell what killed him. It seems to have been the fall, though. He landed on his face, striking his forehead and breaking his neck. Yet it seems, given the boards over the hole, that the fall wasn’t accidental. Someone pushed him and then planted his coat in the moors.”
“He was murdered.” I pause. “Like someone else who apparently was lost in the moors.” I look up at him. “Tell me about Eliza.”
A spasm crosses his face, and I reach to grip his forearm. “I know the story, but I need to hear it from you, William. I’m sorry.” I take a deep breath. “So Eliza went into the moors . . .”
A moment’s hesitation. Then he lowers himself onto a chair near the stove. “Yes, she went into the moors with Cordelia. They became separated, and we launched a search. We did not find her. At the time, I thought she’d fled an unwelcome marriage. I was not the most ardent of suitors. To be blunt, it was like mating a stallion with a mare. A business arrangement. I tried to be kind to Eliza, but I had no interest in wooing her. She . . .”
He glances my way. “I wanted what I had with you—someone who could be not only my marital partner, but a true partner, a friend and a lover. Eliza was not you. There would be no friendship between us. Nor, to be indelicate, did I fancy her as a lover. I would do my duty and father children, but I expected I’d slake my appetites elsewhere as discreetly as possible. I realize that shows me in the worst possible light, my only excuse being that I was young and a selfish cad.”
“You believed that Eliza realized you would never love her, so she snuck off through the moors? Caught a train to some new life?”
“I hear the incredulity in your voice, Bronwyn, but I seem to recall we share an affinity for popular novels where such things happen with alarming frequency. I do not know what happened to Eliza, but yes, I have long realized she never left the moors. That she perished.”
“Like Teddy.”
He flinches and nods, his gaze down.
“And your sister? Did she disappear into the moors, too?”
His head jerks up, brows creasing. “Cordelia? No. My sister left.”
“Tell me more about that. Specifics, please.”
He sighs, running a hand through his hair as he settles back. “Yet another story that shines an unflattering light on me, I’m afraid. Cordelia and I argued. A terrible row during which I told her to leave. She said she didn’t have any money. I emptied my safe—a small fortune—slammed it down in front of her and rode off into the moors. She took the money along with her things.”
“And someone saw her depart?”
“Half the village spotted our coach speeding away. Harold took her to the rail station himself.”
I pause. Then I steel myself and say, “Do you remember when I asked whether you thought I was a ghost? Your reaction suggested—very strongly—that you don’t believe in them.”
“I don’t. Tales for so-called spiritualists who bilk the grieving with ridiculous table tapping. August and I have argued on this point. He’s quite enraptured by the idea of spiritualism, but I have no patience with it. The dead are buried and . . .”
He slows as his gaze turns to me. I don’t speak. I can’t. I’m holding myself too tight, fingers digging into my knees, every muscle tensed.
He knows what’s coming. I see it in his face, dawning realization that this is no idle change of subject.
“I see ghosts,” I say flatly. “No table-tapping. No ectoplasm or spirit slates. I’ve studied Victorian spiritualism, and you are correct. Fakery, all of it. Preying on the grief stricken. But I have seen ghosts in this house. That’s why my mother took me away and had me committed. It wasn’t about you. I encountered a ghost, and my uncle came to my aid, and”—I swallow—“he died falling from the balcony.”
William reaches for my hands. As he grips them, they tremble.
“Since I’ve been back . . .” I inhale. “There is a boy. He’s about eight or nine. I never see his face, but he has dark hair with a cowlick, and he’s dressed in knickerbockers.”
Color drains from William’s face.
“That’s Teddy, isn’t it?” I say.
He nods.
I glance at the hole in the wall. Then I pull a stool over to sit before him. “Did August know about the passage?”
William’s gaze narrows, and I brace myself for what’s to come. I’m about to accuse his best friend of murder. Multiple murders.
I’d been so convinced Harold was the killer. But August fits better.
August.
My stomach twists just thinking ab
out it. The man I met is charming and affable, and I genuinely like him. Yet I can’t help but remember how cold he went when talking about Rosalind. I remember, too, what William said about him loving her too much. Obsessive love, jealous love, convinced his wife was unfaithful, unwilling to share Rosalind even with the career she obviously loved. A man determined to convince the world that his wife didn’t die, that she merely ran away.
Their marriage disintegrating, August decided to rid himself of his wife, and for him, the answer was murder because he’d done it before. Done it and gotten away with it.
Years earlier, William had sent Cordelia away. Where would she go? To her fiancé. To August. Not for shelter, but to break off their engagement before she began a new life with her small fortune, the chance for a strong-willed young woman to be independent. August’s ego and jealousy couldn’t handle that, and he realized how easy it would be to kill her when William already expected her gone. Then August recruited Harold to bury her in the moors.
And Eliza? I remember her touching August’s arm. Flirting with him right in front of his fiancé. William said Eliza had a crush on August. Had it been more than a crush? August certainly had a reputation for that. They have an affair, and Eliza threatens to expose it if he doesn’t marry her. But marrying her would destroy both his reputation and his friendship with William, so he killed her.
As for Teddy, August seemed so gentle and kind with the boy, and I’d love to think that was his true face, but this would be another manifestation of his jealousy. He was jealous of William’s attention, resenting the boy who threatened their time together, perhaps telling Harold he’d take Teddy up to see Cordelia and then showing him the passage instead.
Now, when I ask whether August knew about the passage, William’s expression says he knows exactly what I’m thinking, and he’s fighting not to snap back in anger at my outrageous insinuation.
“I could say that you are mistaken,” he begins. “That I know August, and he is the last man who would do such a thing. But that is not a defense, so I will argue instead with logic. Yes, August knew about the passage, but when Teddy disappeared, he was with me. After he spoke to Teddy, we departed for Whitby posthaste. We didn’t even learn of Teddy’s disappearance until we returned that evening.”
A Stitch in Time Page 27
