by Kim Hornsby
During those garden hours, Caspian and I talked about getting married someday and I’d carefully avoided telling him we never made it that far because he’d be killed. I’d told myself to live in the moment and not think about the future during these stolen hours with Caspian. I heard how he grew up in both the east and in San Francisco (again) and tried to tell him about Rachel’s upbringing without revealing too many lies. I had no idea who this young woman was I was impersonating.
By the time I went to bed on the fourth night, I knew enough to wait for Jane to come get me. Caspian told me that on the first night he summoned me the servants were having a cup of tea before bed and Jane was the last to leave the kitchen. Each night since, she lingered in the kitchen to wait for my boyfriend.
Caspian and I grew more and more in love, and as Bryndle, I came to know him well, something that wasn’t available to me in the present day. As well as memorizing his gorgeous body and what he liked during lovemaking, I learned so much about the man he was and what he believed in. I was head over heels more in love with Caspian by the time my mother asked if I was feeling well enough to attend the opera that night. “Oh, yes, I believe so,” I answered, now knowing I was in the timeline. Caspian and I had one more night together and then he’d leave.
We dressed for the opera and when Major Vandervoort showed up to escort me I wanted to tell him I’d take a raincheck, but I also knew how this night played out. Robert Vandervoort was nice enough, even funny, but he wasn’t Caspian and my lover’s presence was dearly missed as I sat in the theater box with my fiance and parents wondering if a wedding was planned.
When the last note of the opera was sung and we stood to clap, I felt myself leaving Rachel. I headed back to 2019 when I’d been anticipating one more night of intimacy with Caspian. If I returned to the present, would Rachel experience the wonderfulness of Caspian in my place? I didn’t think so. This time with Caspian had been filling in the gaps in Rachel’s relationship with Caspian.
I returned to myself sitting on the beach with a cup of coffee beside me, still hot to my tongue. Although I’d been gone for days in the 1850’s, I hadn’t been gone long enough for my coffee to cool.
When Eve phoned me from the kitchen to see if I wanted bacon and eggs for breakfast, I had a huge grin on my face and news that made my attitude do a full 180 degrees.
Chapter 18
Once inside the house, I had Eve take me straight to her chart in the den where I proceeded to tell her about the time I’d just spent as Rachel Primrose.
She amended the chart as I recounted the five days of Rachel and Caspian’s courtship. “I don’t think he actually knew the real Rachel!” I concluded. “I think it was me he fell in love with.” My heart felt light and I was very close to singing at the top of my lungs.
“Unless Rachel sees him between the week of the opera you just experienced and the Smuggle Night, you might be correct,” Eve said.
Hodor sensed my happy mood and wagged his tail beside me as he licked my hand. I felt the slight breeze from his swishy tail. I could hardly wait to see Caspian again to tell him it was me he loved, not someone named Rachel who lived way back when. “I wonder if Rachel was a virgin and was completely thrown for a loop when she found out she was pregnant.” That was a horrifying thought and I felt immediately sorry for screwing up Rachel’s life.
But as soon as I thought it, a little voice in my head offered something. Was Rachel even pregnant? At what point did she tell him or was it me who let the cat out of the bag? While Eve worked on the chart, I voiced this idea. “There must be another moment with Caspian where she tells him she’s pregnant. I wonder if I will complete this circle and tell him?”
“How do you know she’s pregnant?” Eve asked, her eyebrows up in her forehead.
I thought back to what led me to think Rachel was carrying Caspian’s child. “At the Summer Ball, he says something about the baby. I assumed she’d already told him.”
“The night before, the Smuggling Night, he gave you a note to meet him on the beach, right?”
“Right.”
Eve continued. “Had Rachel already told him about the baby, do you think?”
“I don’t think so because I said something about the baby, and he looked surprised.” Had I jumped the gun because I’d been time traveling out of sequence?
“You did what?” Eve almost yelped.
“I told him I was pregnant.” I racked my brain trying to remember our exact words on the beach. “The Smuggling Night, the second time, when I dropped in earlier and first met him down on the beach, Caspian asked why I was crying. I was happy to see him and had tears. I told him that I was emotional because of the baby. He was shocked I was pregnant.” As my mind processed what I was thinking, my words trailed off.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Eve asked.
I felt frozen in hopeful horror. “If you’re thinking that maybe Rachel wasn’t pregnant that night, then I am thinking what you’re thinking. Maybe I just started a rumor. The next night Caspian would remark on the baby.”
“O.M.G.” Eve’s voice went up at the end like this might be good news.
“Oh, my God, Eve.” I fumbled my way to her, grabbing her shoulders in excitement. “What if Rachel wasn’t pregnant? What if she was never pregnant with Caspian’s baby? That would mean I’m not related to Caspian.”
“We would be descended from Major Robert Vandervoort.”
I started laughing and could hardly stop.
Eve put a call out to Joan Hightower to ask if she’d found out anything on Major Vandervoort, the man with the statue in Portland but Joan wasn’t picking up her phone. We tried to find his name online but information about him was sketchy. He’d married, had a child named Cassandra and the short passage on him gave his cause of death as old age. He’d been decorated as a hero and had helped make Portland’s downtown the hub of industry it later became.
My mother entered the room at this point with news that Vern was coming for dinner and we were to be on our best behavior. I was in too good a mood to suggest otherwise and quickly included my mother in the conversation.
“Caspian might not be our ancestor after all,” I said, my heart feeling two tons lighter than an hour earlier. “Although the Primrose rumor is that Rachel was pregnant by the sea captain, I’m not so sure she was.”
“My mother and her mother always stuck by that stupid old story,” she said.
“Did you call Ganna recently,” I blurted quite out of context.
My mother looked guilty. “I did call her when you were so depressed, but you look much better now, Bryndle.”
“I feel better knowing I wasn’t lusting after my great grandfather,” I said, throwing my arms out wide.
My mother continued. “The Primrose women are known for their theatrics and romanticism and that’s why I never fit in,” my drama queen mother said.
I almost snort laughed but held it in. “Did you know when you first met Caspian twenty years ago that he was the ghost of Rachel’s lover from Primrose folklore?”
“Of course not,” she said indignantly. “I never had any interest in the story and didn’t remember it was a sea captain. Love comes and goes. It’s not like the movies, Missy,” my mother added. “A woman can love many men in her lifetime.”
“As proven by the lifestyle of the current and present Rachel Primrose.” I couldn’t help it. She set me up for a perfect zinger. “Speaking of Vern, what are we having for dinner?” I asked the woman who’d offered to give Jimmy a night off from the kitchen.
“I’m making my famous pot roast,” my mother said, forgetting that the last time she attempted to make pot roast it turned into a ball of charcoal and Jacqueline showed up to wreak havoc.
“That’ll be nice,” I said charitably. “I wondered why Joan Hightower didn’t call us. “Try Joan again, Eve.”
“I’m spending the day with Vern tomorrow,” my mother added. “We’re going to Portland to shop for a boat.
A big boat. A yacht, probably.” My mother said this last part a little too desperately and I wondered if she was going shopping with Vern or making it up. Something seemed fishy and I wondered what was going on.
Joan Hightower called us back that night to say we had all the information she could find on Major Vandervoort, but she’d keep trying to dig something up.
Vern arrived and we sat down at the dining room table to eat burned pot roast which had shown its ugly head once again. We politely ate the ball of tough meat to make my mother feel better and because the thing wasn’t quite the ember it had been once before. I couldn’t ever remember my mother making this recipe correctly and as I gnawed my way through a tiny piece of beef, I wondered why she called this her signature dish.
The next night, while my mother overnighted in Portland with Vern, Eve and I had a peaceful dinner with the guys at the kitchen table without Rachel and her leathery meat, laughing about her inability to cook. At least Jacqueline hadn’t shown up in Eve’s body and set the roast on fire. “We haven’t heard from Jacqueline recently, have we?” I asked.
“Yesterday, I had some gear hanging from the den chandelier,” Carlos said. “I assumed it was Jackie.”
It was a strange state of affairs when a ghost hung stuff from the lights, and we didn’t consider it much. With Jacqueline, we only got concerned with her little tricks if she unhooked the chandelier to fall on our heads.
The next day, I’d gone for a swim in the cove and was just coming from my room after changing into clothes when I heard a big commotion at the front door. We expected my mother and Vern back any minute and I wondered if she’d met people at a boat show and brought everyone to the house for cocktails. Eve did one of her yelps in the hall, followed by a happy “Hello!”
“Buenos tardes, mucho gusto,” Carlos said from the front door.
“Where is she?” I heard Ganna say loudly from the foyer.
“Ganna?” I headed out my bedroom door with TapTap swerving in front, happily singing my way along the hall and down the stairs. “It’s been a hard day’s night and I’ve been swirling like a frog, It’s been a hard day’s night, I should be slipping on a log.”
I reached the bottom and was greeted by Hodor licking my hand, probably telling me we had guests.
“My dear girl,” Ganna said. “Here you are with your white cane.” Her footsteps tapped over to me, so I stopped singing and tapping.
“How?” I hugged her hard. “Look Eve, it’s our Ganna!”
“I know. And her friend Effie.”
The door opened again, and my mother’s voice filled the foyer. “You drive that Rolls way too fast Effie. I thought I was a maniac driver.”
“Look at this!” I said. “A family reunion. Come in everyone and tell me how you all ended up coming through the door at the same time.”
We moved to the salon where my mother took front and center to explain what she and Vern had actually gone to Portland for. It turned out that Ganna had been phoning around at my mother’s urging to try to get the true story of Rachel and Caspian from any Primrose relatives that might know the real story. “I knew I had to find out the real story of this doomed-from-the-start lovers’ tale.”
“I’ll tell this part,” Ganna interrupted.
My mother would have none of it. She continued. “So, Mom and I met in Portland with an historian who knew a lot about Major Vandervoort and his life.”
“Cassandra was born eight months after Rachel and Robert married. We are not descended from Captain Cortez,” Ganna blurted, touching my arm.
“How do we know it wasn’t Caspian’s baby?” I asked.
“He’d been gone over eleven months. Unless that woman carried her child abnormally long, the baby would not have been his,” my mother added. Rachel delivered a few weeks early, but a woman cannot be pregnant for ten and a half months. Forty-two weeks maybe but not forty-eight weeks.” Ganna sounded triumphant.
“How did the rumor get started in the Primrose family that the baby was Caspian’s if the real Rachel never knew him?” Effie asked.
Eve explained our new theory that all of Caspian’s dealings with Rachel were actually with Bryndle as Rachel. “At least we think he never actually had a private conversation with Rachel.”
“That might explain this next part. According to the historian, Rachel was a little strange after Caspian was declared missing. She claimed she never knew him, and her mother was quite concerned. So much so, that they sped up the marriage to Vandervoort,” Ganna said. “The historian we spoke to mentioned that she had a history of headaches and often lost her memory. There was a letter from Vandervoort to his wife, making mention of her recent condition. Apparently, everyone believed that once she had the baby, everything would go back to normal.”
“My bad,” I said. “I screwed up Rachel’s normal life, it seems.”
Just when I thought I’d heard the best news possible, Ganna’s cell phone rang to deliver more good news. News to cement our new theory about Cassandra.
“That was my great niece Liza-Elizabeth,” Ganna said. “Everyone knows I’m investigating our ancestors and she wanted to tell me that she recently did one of those DNA kits to find her ancestry and there was no mention of Spanish blood whatsoever.”
My heart did a happy flip.
“There was mention of Dutch heritage and as we now know, Vandervoort’s maternal grandmother was from Holland.”
“Bryn, did you hear that?” Eve said, but her voice was too distant to pay attention to. I was leaving again.
Vern’s booming voice was very far away as he exclaimed, “I think she’s having a seizure. Maybe we should…”
I found myself walking the cliff, early morning. Cove House looked new like in the 1850’s but I wasn’t dressed as Rachel. I wore jeans and a favorite blue sweater, the same outfit I’d been wearing when Ganna arrived. I looked around for clues to what was happening.
Caspian mounted the trail’s stairs and stepped onto the grass. I wondered if he could see me. And if so, would he wonder why Rachel was dressed in men’s clothing?
He smiled and started towards me. “Have I been gone long, my love?”
Caspian knew me. As Bryndle. This was my Caspian. I stepped into his embrace and wrapped my arms around him. “We aren’t related, Caspian. I’m not your descendant.” I pulled away to look at his face. “And I don’t think you ever met the real Rachel. It was only ever me you knew. Only ever me you fell in love with. I met you in the garden every night back then.”
His eyes narrowed as his finger traced along the side of my face. “That would explain why you seemed so much like Rachel.”
His kiss was a reunion of lips that had missed each other terribly until he pulled away, his face full of questions. “How do you know all this?”
“It’s a long story that involves me traveling back to every time you met with Rachel. We filled in all the holes in Eve’s chart and it was only ever me you met with.”
“This isn’t your century is it?” We glanced to the house. The balcony where I’d taken air as Rachel during the summer ball, was still attached to the main part of the house.
“I’m not sure where we are. Where in time we are. One minute I was in the salon talking to my mother and Eve, and now I’m outside.”
“At least we know each other.” His chuckle set my mind at ease.
This man was the Caspian I knew in the present. The one who’d put up the wall thinking I was his descendent. “Are you sad to think Rachel never had your baby?” I asked.
“No. I never knew Rachel, isn’t that correct? I only ever knew Bryndle Tallulah Primrose and the fact it was always you is the best news I’ve heard since I became a ghost.”
We kissed again his hands holding my face, his lips tender and searching. “Let’s investigate, shall we?” he eventually said.
When we moved towards the house, Caspian’s expression changed. “This is how it looked when Stevens went to prison.”
“How
do you know that?”
“I’ve been rattling around as a ghost on this property for a long time, my love.”
“But why am I here, dressed as me? That doesn’t make sense.”
He stopped and fixed me with a thoughtful stare. “Do you think you’re a ghost too?”
“Now that would be strange,” I said, as we came to the door and entered the kitchen.
“Stranger than anything else that’s happened between us in the last months, My Dearest?”
I looked up at Caspian’s face, a face that had become dearer to me than anything I could recall and realized that if I had to choose between being with Caspian in any time period and not being with Caspian, I would choose the former.
I hoped I never had to choose.
“Not stranger, but still intriguing,” I said as I followed Caspian into the kitchen. It wasn’t until we stood inside, I realized we hadn’t opened the door.
THE END
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