by Kim Hornsby
“Do you think that’s why Caspian suddenly cut me off from his affection? He knows I descended from his daughter?”
“Possibly. I’m so sorry, Bryndle.” Ganna sounded like her heart was breaking too. “You had to hear this story, especially because your life has inexplicably merged with Captain Cortez in the afterlife. Perhaps you’ve been led to him because your gift is stronger than any other Primrose woman before you. I have to wonder if he’s been waiting for you in that house all these years.”
“He met me once before, when I was a child.” I told Ganna about my dealing with Belinda McMahon and Caspian at Cove House years earlier and how Caspian had chastised my mother for bringing a child to meet a ghost.
“You were too young,” she said. “And so, he waited.”
“But what do you think he wants?” I had lots of ideas, but I wanted to hear what my grandmother had to say.
“I suppose he wants to be reunited with Rachel after all this time.” Her voice was far away, small, full of longing and love lost.
“But I’m not Rachel. I’m Bryndle.” Was it totally horrific to be in love with your great times four grandfather? “Being intimate with a descendant is a no no,” I said. “In most cases going four or five generations back wouldn’t be possible.” I wanted someone to tell me that it was perfectly fine if there were at least five generations’ separation between lovers.
“If he knows, and I’m sure he does, then he’s torn between how much you remind him of Rachel and the fact that he’s related by blood to you.”
I felt nauseous. My breathing came in pants and I was sure I was going to throw up. Suddenly something metal was in my two hands. “Here Bryndle. It’s a gardening pail. You can use this.”
I leaned over and lost my lunch in my grandmother’s gardening pail. A tissue was handed to me and I wiped my mouth instead of worrying about my tears.
Caspian was my grandfather times four.
Chapter 7
My mother knew something was wrong as soon as she returned to Floatville the next morning all aglow from a night with Ron. “Did your wonderful lunch with Ganna turn out poorly?” she said probably smirking as we loaded her car to leave.
All the way to Oregon, my mother droned on and on about how Ron made her dinner, said she had the body of a thirty-year-old, regretted losing touch.
“He didn’t lose touch with you, Mother,” I said. “He dumped you.” My mother was so easily appeased with a few compliments.
“He didn’t dump me. We agreed if he wasn’t over his ex-wife, we couldn’t continue. But now he’s over her.”
“I couldn’t care less,” I said many times, but she continued to talk about how perfect Ron was for her.
“Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed, Missy? Or is your precious Ganna not your idea of the perfect grandmother?”
“No, Ganna was perfectly wonderful and we had a lovely afternoon. Except for the part when she told me my boyfriend was kind of my grandfather and I threw up and had to go lie down in her house and try to not have a panic attack.”
That shut my mother up because when it came to offering sympathy, she had absolutely nothing.
I’d spent a sleepless night trying to tamp down feelings for Caspian and rehearsing my speech for when next I saw him. There’d be no kissing and touching inappropriately, no staring at his lips and wishing he’d lay those things on mine. I was grieving the loss of my true love the whole way to Smuggler’s Cove.
“Did your grandmother drive you home yesterday?” my mother said an hour later, obviously still thinking about Ganna.
“Her neighbor did.” My grandmother owned a 1962 Rolls Royce that Effie, her bridge partner and neighbor loved to drive.
“That leach,” my mother said, obviously not fond of Effie.
By the time we got to Cove House the weather had turned, and it was drizzling. Perfect weather for a place where the love of my life turned out to be off limits. Eve met the car and helped me up the stairs seeing I’d let Hodor out to race around the property. Several hours in a car was a lot of holding it for my sweet boy.
“I need to talk to you,” I whispered to Eve when we got inside the front door.
“Sounds major,” she whispered back. “Wanna make a beeline for your boudoir?”
“Yes, please.” I never understood why I felt a burning need to tell my cousin everything that passed by my brain, but anytime I got information, I couldn’t wait to divulge everything to Eve. Entering my bedroom, I was almost in tears. “I met with Ganna yesterday.”
“And?”
“Caspian is my great, great, great, great grandfather. Yours too.”
“What? How could that be?”
Eve and I settled on the bed and I told her the story of Rachel Primrose, the woman I became when I time traveled.
“It looks like we are descended from Caspian’s lineage,” I said, trying not to sob it out. “I don’t know what’s worse. My boyfriend is a ghost or that he’s my great grandfather.”
“Holy incest, Batman,” Eve exclaimed. “That sucks for you but is OK for the old Rachel in 1850.”
“Sucks to say the least.” I curled myself around Hodor’s warm body on the bed and waited for Eve to tell me that it’s not incest if the object of your affection has been dead for generations.
“But you haven’t… you know… had relations yet, have you? Not in this century.”
“No. Not as Bryndle, but as Rachel I have.” And, if I was being honest with myself, hardly a minute went by in my waking hours that I didn’t think about those ten minutes and want to recreate that moment. “I know it’s wrong to be involved with your great grandfather but what are the rules when there are so many generations between you and your lover?”
“Still icky.” Eve hadn’t even paused on that one.
“I don’t even know if we can do the deed with him a ghost, although it’s gotten close a few times. Kissing him and running my hands up under his shirt has been possible. How is this happening?” I wailed. “And to top it all off, Ganna has never heard of Primrose women being time travelers. I’d hoped she’d have answers about how it’s OK to lust after your grandfather times four and time traveling is perfectly normal.”
“This is the weirdest conversation,” Eve whispered.
If I’d had sight, I might’ve looked at Eve and we might have laughed. Instead, I buried my face in Hodor’s fur and thought about what to do if and when Caspian showed up again.
“He must know you are descended from his child,” Eve said.
“It would explain why he always cuts us off before anything major happens.”
“Do you think he didn’t know your last name was Primrose until recently?” Eve asked.
I tried to remember if I’d ever said my last name to him.
Eve lay down on the bed, probably staring at the ceiling for answers. “When Caspian shows up again, you two need full disclosure.”
I agreed.
I could hardly wait for Caspian to return but knowing it could be weeks, I had to pull myself together and move on with my life without Caspian as the object of my affections.
The next day, Eve led me down the stairs to the beach, Hodor ahead of us. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to accomplish on the rainy beach, but I knew Caspian often came from this general area when he appeared, and I needed to feel closer to him. He’d said he sometimes woke from absences walking along the rocky beach.
When we came off the trail stairs, we stopped. “I can take it from here,” I said.
“Leaving you solo feels mucho wrong,” Eve said to me, her arm looped in mine.
“I have my phone if I need you.” I also had TapTap to help me find the stairs again if Hodor took off. “Go back to the house.”
She hesitated.
“Do you really want to sit and stare at me while it rains on your head?” We’d worn raincoats with hoods, but Eve hated the rain and I knew she wanted to get back to Jimmy who was making gnocchi for dinner. “Go. I’m fi
ne.”
Eve disengaged her arm from mine. “If you end up traveling, be safe.”
When I thought Eve was headed up the stairs, I started off towards the shore. It was a calm day in the bay and the sound of lapping against the sand was different than usual. I longed to see the ocean, my dog running around. Anything. Caspian.
In the last twenty-four hours I’d been telling myself that at the very least, Caspian gave me sight. What more did I want? Sight opened up my world and being in love would have to wait. Or die. Or never come again for me with anyone else. I needed to be grateful for the moments I had with Caspian because of that.
I sat on the beach near the far end, facing the ocean, I believed, and listened to Hodor off to my right, over by the large boulders at the end of the beach. I wanted to speak out loud but worried that if I wasn’t alone on this beach, if someone wandered by, I’d look strange talking to myself. Even though the only access to this beach was through my property and I was blind and psychic and a time traveler, I worried I’d look stupid if a neighbor wandered near. I felt kind of crazy for even worrying about that but hiding a weird secret as a child had left me with all kinds of insecurities that filtered out even as an adult.
“Caspian,” I ventured, quietly. “I need you to come back to me.” A bird cried from off to my right. Not a crow but possibly a seagull. “I don’t know how to navigate new information. Are we related?”
Saying it out loud made it more real and I thought about how wrong it was to lust after Caspian. That made me want to feel his arms around me, hear him tell me it was going to be fine.
“Who are we to each other, Caspian?” I listened, hoping to hear the sounds of someone walking out of the sea, disturbing the calm ocean, water dripping off his clothes, but none came. I closed my eyes because it was easier than trying to keep them open. “Is it wrong to love you? Because if it is, I’m the wrongest person alive. Help me. I love you.”
My eyes filled with hot tears. Hodor barked at the rocks, probably having found a critter in the cracks. His barks sounded farther away than possible, like he’d fallen down a long tunnel until I couldn’t hear him anymore. I opened my eyes even though it would make no difference to locating Hodor.
I stood on a dark beach.
Then…
It was pitch dark and I could see the barest outline of figures and boats ahead. I was hiding behind one of the boulders, my hands against the cold stone. The waves now crashed against the shore fiercely and I heard shouts from the boats as if they were on a mission and needed to act quickly. I shivered and looked to see I wore a long dress and shawl.
I was back to being Rachel Primrose, Caspian’s lover.
Chapter 8
I felt a warm hand on my shoulder and although I’m not a screamer, I almost let one fly. I reached to extract the hand; as I turned around ready to knee my assailant in the groin, I recognized the ring on his finger. It was the lion ring Caspian had given to me months ago in the present.
His breath was warm on my cheek. “Something is going on out there.” He nodded to the bay.
“What is it?” I said.
“Smuggling,” he said. We watched for a while trying to focus on the action coming closer into the beach. Rowboats pulled up to the shore, men whispered commands, no lanterns to light their way. People inside the rowboats got out and the vessels set off for the ship again for more people. We watched for almost an hour, Caspian holding me against him to keep me warm in the night air.
“See the people?” He pointed and my gaze followed his finger’s direction. I could barely make out a line of people now gathered along the beach.
“Yes. Who are they?”
“They are Chinese women, captive, being smuggled on this moonless night to be sold into slavery in San Francisco.”
A chill ran up my back to my neck and I wanted to run out onto the beach and free the women, say something stupid like I was going to call my lawyer immediately and have their asses in prison for abduction, then remembered where I was. It was over a hundred years ago, when women had few rights, immigrant woman had even fewer and this type of thing happened.
“What can we do, Caspian?” I imagined he was as outraged as I was.
“Nothing tonight.”
Were guns invented yet? I wanted to walk up to those men, point my gun at their feet and shoot at every last man on the beach that was involved with this travesty. “Can’t we help them?”
“I’m afraid not. We’d be killed before we could do anything.”
We watched, stuck at the far end of the beach until this horrible activity ended.
“Another ship, anchored around the bend, is sending boats to get the women,” Caspian said.
It was then I noticed the ship in the bay was moving, leaving quietly, heading out to open ocean.
“Why are they leaving?”
“To make room for the ship that will take the slaves to San Francisco.” Caspian’s words were clipped, almost emotionless.
We watched the ship leave and moments later, a second ship rowed into the bay and anchored. It looked similar but smaller.
“Where is your ship?” I asked.
“It will be here from Portland tomorrow. I came by coach today to see you. Listen.”
The men on shore spoke and I watched the people in line. The moon was coming up and I imagined the smugglers had to hurry if they wanted to remain undetected. From the little light of the rising moon, I could see the women were tied together in groups of about ten and sent to various boats that pulled up to the shore. No one struggled, but then, what good would it do for them to rail against the ropes or make a run for the trail to the cliff?
I was incensed, horrified at what I saw and felt about as useless as a nipple on a man.
“Are they going to San Francisco tonight?” I whispered, hoping the answer wouldn’t be my worst fear.
“Yes, but they won’t arrive for two days. With the California Gold Rush, the need for prostitutes as well as cheap labor…”
“I wish we could report this.”
“I’m endeavoring to expose Stevens and put a stop to this, my love. I’ve been in San Francisco gathering evidence, but no one cares in that lawless town.” His hand squeezed my shoulder. “When we sailed from Portland months ago for San Francisco, we overtook one of Stevens’ ships and took the slaves. I’ve contacted the authorities in Portland to investigate Stevens and expect them here in the next few days.”
“I wish they were here now to see this.”
He pulled me closer to him. “Sweet Rachel. The world is much more sinister than you know.”
I was tempted to tell him I wasn’t sweet, sheltered Rachel but couldn’t blow my cover. I wanted to ask more about when he followed the ship and freed the slaves, but I’d just dropped into this storyline and didn’t know the backstory or conversations that had taken place between Caspian and Rachel about this trafficking of humans.
“It will be over soon. then Stevens will go to jail for a long time.”
“If Jacqueline saw this…”
“She’d laugh. My wife is the most heartless person I’ve ever known. That’s why she stabbed me. I told you that she was trying to prevent me from opposing Stevens’ smuggling operations.”
I nodded because I was supposed to remember this. “What can we do?”
“Tonight, my love, we can only verify that Stevens is a criminal of the highest level and vow to expose the cad.” He took my hand in his and kissed it. “I don’t want you putting yourself in jeopardy.” His hand went to my waist and I wondered if he could tell I wasn’t Rachel, or pregnant.
“I love you,” I said, because I could. Because the man standing in front of me was not of my family if I was Rachel. He was completely mine, not related to Rachel. And because he looked like some god of love and lust on that beach in the dark.
“I love you as well, my darling girl,” he said.
I tried to not bristle at the term girl, which I usually find condescending w
hen you’re old enough to run a business and command a household, even blind.
A shout sounded on the beach. Stevens had arrived.
“Make haste,” Stevens shouted.
Just then, the clouds moved, and the moon shone fully on the beach to reveal the line of women trudging along, loading into the boats. If I ever found myself in this scene again, I hoped I had a sniper rifle for the men pushing those women like cattle into the boats. I’d shoot every one of them in the leg.
Caspian pulled me behind the rock farther. “Our tryst on the beach has been overtaken by the comings and goings of Stevens Shipping.” Caspian put his warm hands around my tummy from behind and I felt a chill of intense attraction ripple through my body.
My eyes opened and everything in front of my face was dark. “Caspian?” I said.
Hodor barked nearby, then I heard the swooping of a bird coming in for a landing. I sat on the beach’s cold rocks in the drizzle of the day, presumably in 2019. “Hodor,” I called, then whistled for Hodor. Soon, I heard my dog panting as he approached.
I grabbed at Hodor’s fur and held on as I got to my feet. “Where’s TapTap?” I said. My wonderful service dog moved and soon I felt the cane against my legs. I reached down to grab my cane from Hodor’s mouth. “Good boy,” I said.
I flicked open the cane and made arcs around me to see if I was over by the rocks, like in my time travel. I was not. The surf broke off to my right and I believed I was near to where I’d been when I landed on the beach in 1850.
Let’s go home, Hodor.” I grabbed his harness and clipped him into his work clothes. Off to my left, I heard the caw of a crow, or a raven, not something unusual for this beach. But as we started walking up the rocky beach toward the path that would switchback me to the top of the cliff, the bird took off, his wings making a slight flapping noise as he passed me.
