by Jadyn Chase
Allison navigated the railway system. We got out on a platform with a sign that read, Dover. It certainly didn’t look like the Dover I knew.
She took us to a quaint little hotel resembling a house. The landlady escorted us upstairs and opened a door on a charming little bedroom. “This’ll be yours,” she said to Allison. She turned to me. “Yours is right across the hall so you’ll never be far from each other.”
She waggled her eyebrows at me as if that was supposed to tell me something. She crossed the corridor and unlocked the other door. When I didn’t follow, she jerked her head toward the other room. It resembled Allison’s in every detail, but I didn’t want to go in there.
The landlady chopped her hand through the air. She spoke with a clear Kentish accent out of my past. “Well, come on!”
I dragged my feet across the hall. She dumped the keys into my palm and headed for the stairs. “Supper’s at seven-thirty and breakfast between seven and nine in the morning. Ring the bell if you need anything.”
She pattered away and left us alone. I glanced into the bedroom. I couldn’t ask for a nicer room after sleeping on Allison’s couch, but something still stopped me from going in there.
I took all this time learning to stick close to Allison and do everything she told me to do. Now I didn’t want to move away from her. Being apart from her didn’t feel safe.
When I looked back over my shoulder, I discovered her smiling at me from her own doorway. “Is everything all right?”
“I…..” I surveyed the room once again.
“I’ll be right here,” she told me. “I’ll be able to hear if anything happens.”
I nodded. She would be right there. She was always right there.
8
Allison
I paid the entry fee and Thomas and I entered Dover Castle. We stuck to the tour group for a while, but when the guide arrived at the communications rooms, I caught Thomas glancing over his shoulder.
He rotated sideways and started to move off. I grabbed his hand and hauled him back. “Stay here,” I whispered.
He stared down at me with huge, glistening eyes and I realized I was standing too close to him. I was holding him by the hand and whispering into his ear like some kind of lover.
“It’s right over there,” he whispered back.
“What is?”
“The passage to the second level.” He nodded behind him. “That’s where I came out when I surprised the other group.”
I turned around and looked, but I didn’t see anything. He adjusted his hand in mine and consolidated his grip. His fingers laced through mine and a rush of warmth poured up my arm. I glanced up at him one more time and that powerful, sparkling shine to his eyes caught me in an undertow.
Just then, the tour guide said something like, “Let’s move on to the hospital ward.”
The tour migrated toward the exit, but I let Thomas draw me toward the rear. The others wandered into the passage. Their voices dwindled farther away. Then, when everyone turned their backs on us, Thomas and I darted back to the same corner.
Once we got there, I let out a sigh of relief. To my amazement, he didn’t let go of my hand. “We have to find the entrance to the second level.”
“Are you sure you came out just there?”
He didn’t appear to realize when he let go of my hand. He walked to the corner and peered around one of the communications relays that was up against the wall. “This is it. Here’s the opening.”
I crossed to where he stood. Sure enough, a section of the wall jutted out. Two banks of relays concealed it so no one could see it if they weren’t looking straight at it. Even then, I had to touch the wall to make sure it was real.
I slipped my hand through the gap. “This is incredible. This could be the biggest historical discovery in decades.”
He wedged his shoulder into the opening. “We must find the other caskets. If my family is here, we must get to them before they wake up.”
Before I could stop him, he pushed his body through the hole and vanished on the other side. I burrowed in after him. In a second, I emerged into a large underground shaft. All the other tunnels in this Castle underwent renovations to turn the place into a monument open to visitors.
This particular passage obviously missed the scheduled treatment. Bare chalk walls ran off to nowhere. None of the reproduction wires or signs indicated where anything was or used to be. None of the World War 2 accouterments gave the impression anyone had been down here in the last seventy years.
Thomas proceeded down the corridor in a dream. I fell behind and let him lead the way. He followed the passage to its end and turned into an unmarked room. He rounded the corner and gasped in shock. “No!”
I rushed to his side. “What is it?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The five other caskets he mentioned all lay broken and scattered across the floor. Wooden trestles leaned against the walls and sat upended in every attitude of confusion and disarray.
I stared at the room in a blank. We were too late. The other members of the Shelton family were long gone.
My heart plummeted into my shoes realizing the horrible truth. They must have woken up already. I hated to think what was happening to them right now.
I stole a peek at Thomas’s face. His skin went ashen grey and he stared at the scene in blank horror. I couldn’t imagine a worse disaster. He stood there so long I started to worry he might have snapped.
I laid my hand on his arm. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
He turned away without a word. I conducted him back to the same room and out. Hardly any time passed since we slipped away, so we rejoined the tour group without being noticed.
Thomas passed the rest of the tour in a stupor. I didn’t try to revive him. At last, when we approached the final stretch of tunnels, he roused himself to look around. “What is all this, Allison? What are all these machines?”
“Haven’t you been listening to anything the tour guide said? These are mock-ups of the communications equipment used during World War 2. The British government used these tunnels as a base of operations. The Historical Society created all of this so visitors could see what it was like back then.”
He shook his head. “I wonder they bothered. This tour has barely covered half the tunnels. Why won’t they let us into the lower levels?”
Now it was my turn to smile. “The government sealed them off from the public. They used the tunnels for something secret. Now they don’t want anybody going down there. It’s stupid, I know, but governments do stupid things all the time.”
He frowned. “You shouldn’t speak against the Crown like that, Allison.”
I patted his arm. “The Crown today isn’t what it was in your day. England has a Parliamentary form of government. The Crown is just a figurehead and believe me when I say that everyone criticizes the government, including the Ministers of Parliament.” I snorted. “They criticize it more than anyone else.”
We left. He stayed quiet on the way back to town. We got there at about three o’clock in the afternoon. “Do you want to do anything before dinner?” I asked him.
He cast a flinty glare around the town. “I wouldn’t mind going out to the Cliffs. I used to go there when I needed to be alone and think.”
“You can go, but I don’t think you should go alone. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, but I think it’s best for you if we stay together. That probably makes me sound like a mother hen, but I’m just trying to avoid another unpleasant incident.”
“It doesn’t make you sound like a mother hen.” His features brightened and he crooked his arm like a real Victorian gentleman. “Believe me. I appreciate your concern.”
A blatant invitation to touch a strange man would normally make me uncomfortable. After all the ruckus of the last several days, that arm didn’t give me a moment’s pause. I slipped my hand through his elbow, but I resisted the urge to hug him. That w
ould be taking this too far.
We strolled down the street and onto the coast road. We hiked out of town along the road to the White Cliffs National Trust. We passed the visitor center to where the green grass ended at the sheer white precipice.
Thomas glared over his shoulder at the visitor center. “It’s not what it used to be. That’s for certain.”
“That’s what I keep telling you.” I kept my voice low. “I’m afraid you can never go back to the world you knew before.”
He nodded more to himself. “I realize that now. For some reason, I didn’t want to believe it when you told me in Wichita. I supposed I had to see it for myself.”
I gazed over the ocean. “The Cliffs don’t change. They’ll always be the same.”
“Indeed.” He followed my gaze to the distant horizon. “I can be grateful for that.”
“Can you think where your family might be?” I asked. “Can you think of anywhere familiar they would go in times of distress?”
He shook his head. “If I wound up as far afield as Wichita, I can only imagine where they wound up. They could be anywhere.”
I didn’t want to think about that. “Can you think of anything that explains how you ended up in Wichita in the first place? I can’t figure it out.”
He kept shaking his head in deep thought. “I only know I have to find them. I have to find them at all costs.”
I put out my hand to touch him. I wanted to make contact with him across the divide holding us apart. “We’ll find them. We’ll do it together.”
He pressed my knuckles and murmured low. “Thank you, Allison. I couldn’t imagine undertaking this without you.”
I pivoted to the side and we started walking down the Cliffs. For some reason, I didn’t take my hand off his arm and he didn’t lift his off mine. The wind blasted in my face and ripped my hair back. It blew all the tension and anxiety out of my head.
“Let’s think about this. Let’s put the puzzle pieces together and figure out where they went.”
“Very well,” he replied. “Where shall we begin?”
“Well, the broken caskets seem to indicate they woke up in that room the same way you did. They would have to get out of the Castle somehow. How would they do that?”
“I can only assume,” he mused, “that they got out the same way I did, too.”
“They walked out,” I added. “That means they must be on foot somewhere around the local area. I don’t really see them catching a train to Manchester or Leeds.”
He didn’t laugh at the joke. He scowled out to sea for a long time. “Allison, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“What is it?” I joked. “Were you married back in 1840? Is that what’s bothering you?”
He didn’t laugh at that, either. Now he was really starting to scare me. “It’s not that. It’s…..something happened when I left the Castle.”
“I know,” I told him. “The newspapers reported it. You had an incident with the security guards, didn’t you?”
He jerked around and trained those ferocious eyes on me. “You know about that?”
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
He looked away. “I don’t really understand it myself, to be honest.”
“Forget it.” I turned his steps back toward town. “Whatever it is, we’ll find them. They can’t be too far away.”
He didn’t say anything on the way back to town, but too many questions nagged at my mind. If he found his way to Wichita after fleeing the Castle, his family could have gone as far or farther. That didn’t cast too many optimistic hopes on us finding them. They could be in Outer Mongolia for all I knew. They could be in flamin’ Madagascar.
9
Thomas
Allison’s eyes glistened in the shadows. “You know, it’s highly irregular for a woman to be taking a man out to dinner like this. You should be escorting me and paying for everything instead of the other way around.”
I drew myself up. “I realize that, Allison. You don’t have to remind me how highly irregular this whole situation is.”
She blushed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to rub it in.”
I glanced into the restaurant. “Where shall we sit?”
She laid her hand on my arm. She seemed to be doing that a lot more now. “Just wait. The concierge will seat us when our turn comes.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Concierge?”
Before she could say anything, a man in a dinner jacket approached us. “Table for two?”
“Yes, thank you,” Allison replied.
He turned and walked away. I almost accosted the man for his insolence, but Allison propelled me forward. She nudged me to follow him and we entered the room.
Diners occupied every table. They bowed over tiny candles that barely illuminated their features. Everyone spoke in hushed tones while they ate.
The concierge led us to a table in the back. Two sweeping benches surrounded it. They secluded it from the rest of the establishment, which I found lent the position a delightful intimacy I would not have expected in such an establishment. Allison sat down and I took the place opposite her.
“Can I bring you the wine list?” the concierge asked.
Allison glanced at me. When I nodded, she smiled up at the man. “That would be lovely. Thank you.”
He left. When she returned to face me, her countenance radiated such a beatific smile I could hardly bear to look at her. Her cheeks shone rosy and vibrant in the candlelight. I could scarcely bring myself to believe this was the same woman who surprised me in her garden that morning.
She started to say something, but I couldn’t stand her drawing my attention back to my missing family. I had to find a way to cut that off. “I find it impossible to believe you don’t have a husband or even a sweetheart, Allison. It seems criminal that a woman of your obvious talents and beauty should live alone.”
A burst of glory exploded from her face and she lowered her eyelashes in the most enticing way. It made the whole prospect of spending the evening with her so much more entrancing.
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what my life was really like. Most men wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Now I know you’re pulling the wool over my eyes. Any man would be blessed and honored to be in the same room with you.”
She laughed and her eyelashes fluttered. “That may be, but I wouldn’t necessarily be blessed and honored to be in the same room with them.”
I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t make time to spend with men. I’m always working. I always have my head stuck in a book or the computer all the time. Besides, I don’t really know how to relate to men.”
“Poppycock!” I fired back. “You’re relating to me perfectly well.”
She colored again. “You really can’t get away with saying ‘poppycock’ in this day and age, Thomas, not even in England.”
“Well, what on Earth am I supposed to say? I’ve got to say something, haven’t I? I’ve talked to you almost nonstop for the last three days and you haven’t had any difficulty relating to me.”
“You’re different. I don’t really consider you a man.”
My jaw dropped. “You don’t consider me a……! Really, Allison, I didn’t know you could be so cruel.”
“You know what I mean! I don’t consider you a man in that way. I don’t consider you a…. you know, a prospect.”
“I never offered myself as one, my dear,” I sneered. “We aren’t talking about me.”
“You just said I related to you perfectly well, so yes, in fact, we are talking about you.”
I touched my finger to my chin. “Let me see if I’ve got all the facts straight here. You can relate to men just fine as long as there’s no chance of anything…. developing. Is that essentially how it works?”
She cast her gaze to the tablecloth and picked an invisible speck of lint from its surface. “Essentially.”
> “So, if I suddenly became what you would consider a prospect, what would happen? Would you suddenly become unable to speak to me? Would you run screaming from the room? What would happen?”
“Of course not,” she returned. “I just get…you know, I get awkward and bumbling.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Awkward and bumbling.”
“That’s what I said.”
I leaned across the table, but I resisted the urge to kiss her then and there. I certainly wanted to, she looked so inescapably kissable. “My dear, awkward and bumbling is what makes you so attractive. Surely you must realize that.”
“Cut it out.” She pretended to bat that away. “It does not. Men don’t want awkward and bumbling. They want graceful and suave and put-together, and that is definitely not me.”
I slouched back in my chair. She really made me so at ease I could do no wrong. “I don’t know what men you’ve been associating with, my dear Allison, but they most assuredly do not want graceful and suave and put-together. Those women are untouchable and always will be. You might say that men are different now, but you’ll never convince me of that. Men do not change. Women might, but a man’s basic desires remain unchanged throughout time.”
She shook her head, but she never stopped smiling. I never wanted her to stop smiling like that. “You could be right. The men I’ve been associating with don’t want that, either. I guess I’ve never given much thought to what they do want. I don’t give much thought to them at all.”
“And may I enquire what men you do associate with?”
“Oh, you know,” she breezed. “I associate with my colleagues at work. I associate with professors at the university and other researchers. I associate with a lot of librarians.” She laughed again.
I smacked the table harder than I intended. The cutlery clattered. The wine glasses rattled. Several scowled in our direction before I corrected my behavior. “There you go. That proves my point. Are any of them men you’d like to consider prospects?”
