Just as I began to pine for my Lucian, he arrived at the plantation to visit me. A young man came to the door one day, posing as a peddler, and invited me to see the wares in his wagon. When I ventured down the path, I found Lucian waiting at the wagon, with another youth, and I learned these were his sons, called Shep and Jack.
He sent the boys with the wagon on up to Rosalie to peddle their wares to the Trelawneys. He explained to me that the boys were his sons, his wife passed away. Our hunger for one another was great, and we satisfied it there in the mossy forest bed. He promised he would visit again soon, he swore his undying love for me.
And then the years began to pass. Any parent knows this moment, when the days of the week blur with the activities of the growing child. Cassie was a brilliant young girl, and Hastings engaged a tutor to teach her and to help Ruth with her school.
By this time, my Cassie had grown into a truly stunning young woman, far more beautiful than I. This would have worried me, because my beauty had been nothing but a curse my entire life, drawing terrible men as well as good. I was pleased that despite her beauty, she had but one flaw. An unmistakable birthmark on her cheekbone in the shape of a crescent moon. Indeed, it did seem quite enough to put off some suitors, and for that I was relieved. I knew that a man who would love her true and well would not care about the mark. And my own daughter had been raised with love, with men who loved her, and whose heart had not been so cruelly tortured at such an early age that she knew the difference between love and its poison twin.
Jack, as it turned out, was quite taken with her. She wanted nothing to do with him, however; she found something not quite right about him. I did not see it and thought that the son of a successful merchant like Lucian would be a good match for her.
The Adamses arrived for a visit during this, and all were delighted to see them. Camisha was thrilled to see Cassie growing into a young woman, and I find it noteworthy now to recall how tenderly she treated her. I believed it to be love for me that made her adore Cassie; it was not. Whether Camisha knew it or not, it was love for Cassie’s firstborn. I did not know it then, but it’s so simple now. Camisha had grown up with Rachel and loved her—Rachel had already by then come to that time, while I was yet at Stonefield, her mother growing within me.
Back then I was, as always, concerned with my own problems rather than anyone else’s, and my chief concern was that of my daughter making a good marriage. I was certain young Jack would be a loving husband who would provide comfortably for her.
I asked Godfrey his thoughts, and told him Cassie’s own concerns. Godfrey, knowing how I had treated Thomas, had come to have nothing but contempt for me—but he doted on my daughter as if the mark on her cheek were the true moon, and her eyes the stars. He said he would ponder it. I once knew a young woman, he said, who suffered much as a child, and perhaps we can avoid it with our own dear Cassie.
It was near the end of the Adamses’ visit that I overheard a conversation between them, Godfrey, and a man who came to visit—a merry, white-haired gentleman named Malcolm. I heard a story I thought almost impossible to know—that not only was it possible for people to travel in time, but that Camisha had done so herself, and that our own Millers had indeed traveled in time—to an era when it was much safer for a white man and his black wife and their children.
Although Camisha had known that time travel was possible, she had had no control over the experience herself—only her fervent connection to the time to which she traveled. Had she not requested from Malcolm to remain permanently in this time, she would have soon returned to her own time. But it was apparent that she fell in love with Ashanti and had no desire to return to her old life.
I learned that a time portal existed on Rosalie in the entryway to the brick mansion. It had been left there for those who were meant to travel in time, I understood many years later. But that day, I learned that all one needed to travel through it, with intention, was to stand still long enough to see into the other time. Most people, Malcolm said, were unable to detect time portals because their focus was always elsewhere, never in the moment. Such are the miracles we miss each day.
This fellow also explained that a person could control his own time travel, by way of possessing a talisman from the desired period in time while crossing the portal. I could not conceive of this! According to this madman’s claims, if I had a small relic from the years before Christ walked this earth, I could travel to that time—knowing as I did about the time portal at Rosalie.
At that point, he told them, the person had just twenty-four hours to experience that era and return to the portal with a talisman from their own period—only enough time for the calendar not to move—before they return through the portal. Otherwise, they remain in that time for the rest of their natural lives.
This was all far beyond my ability to understand, and I stored it away, finding it an interesting story. Just when the Adamses kissed us all goodbye, Lucian arrived from a long voyage. I had not seen Lucian’s other son visit since that first night, and was told he was attending university to further his knowledge of keeping books.
It was that night that I, wishing to entertain him with any bit of knowledge I might have, told him what I had learned from the strange conversation between the old man and visitors we had had in the past. I told him that Camisha was a woman of the future, having traveled in time just this way—yet later I would remember that my fatal phrasing made it sound as if she had perhaps traveled to the future—not from the future.
This story, he found strangely compelling—especially when I mentioned her name. He was like a man obsessed. He told me that he loved me, that he would be back, and for me to wait for him. And he left that moment. He did continue to visit, but he was a merchant sea captain and the visits were sporadic. I understood by now that he had no interest in marrying me. I still loved him, still hungered for him, but I realized the foolishness of my actions too late.
One day, some weeks later, a young man visited Rosalie. I did not know him, but Godfrey acted as if he were an old friend. He introduced him to Cassie with great fanfare—I remember his emotion as he told them to always care for one another and always tell the truth.
He was a professor at William & Mary, he told us, and he had come to study important events in our area, to mold the young minds learning there. He would not be there much longer, and when he left, he said, he wanted to take my Cassie with him—as his bride.
Godfrey is not the romantic that I am, and he saw it differently and blessed their marriage. As the oldest man in the family, of course, this was his say, and my daughter was married immediately.
Only then did I learn enough about him to realize that this young man was the same Robert Miller whose parents had traveled in time. I also perceived that there was yet another way to travel in time for a period longer than twenty-four hours, where there is a connection between the person and the time, and their intentional usage of a talisman. Robert was born here; his connection was real, and he spoke of the many maps he had in his possession, any one of which I suspect was his talisman. Even so, he could not remain here indefinitely, and it would destroy me to lose my daughter forever.
During this, Lucian came to visit, and I told him of the events. I told him that Jack would be a much better match.
You see, I would never be able to see Robert as anything more than the son of the servants who had once worked for William and me. One would think I would recall those days when I myself was mere chattel—wouldn’t one? But William had been so good to me, I had forgotten my own humble roots.
Robert invited us all to join him in Williamsburg for a lecture he was giving. By now young Bronson was studying at William & Mary as well, and so we made an outing of it.
Who should be sitting in that lecture than Jack! I grew confused when Robert referred to him as “Mr. Manning,” believing as I did that Lucian’s last name was Caine.
I was quite embarrassed to see Jack’s heartbreak as he watched Rob
ert tending to Cassie. As far as I was concerned, we could not leave quickly enough.
When we returned the next day, Godfrey’s home had been ransacked, particularly Robert’s room. Fortunately, nothing was missing except a small memento belonging to Robert—something he called a Phi Beta Kappa key. Although he was fond of it for its sentimental value to him—it was not his talisman, nor did it interfere with his time-traveling to the period he wished to visit. In fact, its date was 1976, of no import that we understood. Robert had traveled from the 1980s, and it was to that time that he would of course be returning.
I persisted in my stubborn desire for Cassie to marry Jack. While professors were admired well enough, he certainly could not provide my daughter the sort of comfort that the son of a merchant could. Nor could he love Cassie as Jack did, with the pure white passion of a thousand suns.
Perhaps a week passed when Lucian visited me again, and I was quite delighted, since his visits were not normally so close to one another.
However, his visit was not like his usual social calls. My boys are gone, he said. You see, he himself had stolen Robert’s memento as a way to travel back in time. At the last moment—after the boys had gone through the portal but before he himself had—he saw Camisha visiting with Ruth there at the cabins, not far from the ruins. He quickly stepped away from the portal and allowed the opening to close.
He had expected his boys to return the next day—not realizing the degree of latitude and freedom they would have from him in another time. Perhaps they chose to stay, or they might have simply lost the talisman. We’ll never know.
I attempted to comfort him. I would ask Camisha if she had any ideas on how to get them back to this time. I still had no idea how much he loathed Camisha.
His savagery was so painful I could not respond at first. Then I cried out that we would always love each other, that we could perhaps even have a child of our own.
At that, he mocked me, mercilessly. I remember his words as clearly as if it were yesterday.
You fool! Do you not wonder why you have never conceived? Have I once given you any opportunity to be with child? How stupid are you? I am a married man, and my name is James Manning. I sent my sons to kill the nigger, her friend, and Grey Trelawney. Now I learn I’ve sent them on a wild goose chase in time!
And for the first time, truly, I saw him as he really was. I was nothing more to him than that small child once had been to the old man who had abused me, and I with no more sense than that child.
He beat me for what felt like hours, demanding to know where Camisha was. And at that, at last, I realized I could in fact do something noble, for perhaps the first time in my life. He did not know they lived in Boston. He did not know that in 1976 she had yet to be born. And now, his sons were trapped in that time. They could not hurt Camisha there. I had no idea how short-sighted this was.
By the time Cassie and Robert married, I had recovered well enough to attend.
Cassie told me she and Robert would be leaving for distant places, and she was uncertain when they might return. Still, no one had trusted me with the truth, and I surmised on my own that their destination would be another time entirely.
I begged them not to go, and I told them—and Godfrey—what had happened with Manning’s sons. Neither Cassie nor Robert were concerned, since the time frame was entirely different. They were traveling to a period years later, and in later years, cities were so busy with the many inhabitants that people could go a lifetime without ever meeting others who lived in the city.
On the day they planned to leave, we traveled to the Trelawney slave cabins. By then twenty years had passed since their liberation, and they had remarkably improved on their belongings and on themselves. Some were better educated than I, perhaps hungry for education in a way I was not. The cabins had all been improved, with glass windows and wood stoves added for warmth and cooking.
In fact, Robert knew and remembered some of the slaves who had been brought here by Grey Trelawney. I don’t know how he knew them, but he did. And then they moved to what I knew to be the time portal—and although it hurt me to know my own daughter would be happily rid of me, I was willing to let her go.
Remember, Robert said, Hold on and never let go.
Until the last second, I was resolute—and then I could not bear it. As they walked through the portal with whatever talisman Robert had brought with him, I lunged to grab hold of their joined arms. But rather than pulling them backward or breaking their progress forward at all, I followed them into their new time, the exact moment Robert had originally left.
When I awakened, we were all back in Williamsburg—but in the year 1986. Robert had always been a well-respected history professor there, working on a project about the importance of education. And in the course of that project, he had been desperately hungry to know Thomas Jefferson, to endow him with the ideas that had informed the revolution, and to witness the conception of the new nation with the tyranny of the Stamp Act.
I soon met a man my own age who was as true as the day was long—Spencer Lewis, an older, retired widower who fell madly in love with me. We married, and I learned that my daughter no longer trusted me, so we lived at Spencer’s home and I tried not to plague my daughter and her husband. My life was as comfortable as I had once hoped—and utterly empty, although I did learn to love Spencer.
Robert and Cassie lived in a small historic home in Williamsburg, where their first daughter was born, beautiful Rachel, and then my own beloved Merrilea. Fortunately, once Rachel was born, my daughter and her husband were happy to have me know their children.
Spencer doted on the girls as if he were their own grandfather—and that was the name they gave him. I was always Nan, of course.
And then Robert planned a long overdue sabbatical, during which he planned to write a book about the timeless quality of freedom and the fundamental philosophies that made the American revolution possible, and their importance in the founding of free nations throughout the world. The writing went exceptionally well, and they soon learned my Cassie was expecting their third child.
By the time of the sabbatical, they had learned that old Stonefield was for sale again. They were dismayed at the changes that had occurred in the past centuries, and they hired a contractor, who reversed these changes, restoring the old stone home to her former glory—or at least something close to it.
Then, I received word that my Cassie’s little Juliana was born, and Spencer and I made plans to visit, to help out. But before we could, Spencer had a heart attack and tests were run, determining that surgery was required.
And later that week, Spencer died during that operation. I was prostrate with grief, and it took a week before I could pull myself together enough to come to Stonefield. Even as I prepared to leave, I received a phone call from the police in Richmond. They urged me to come as soon as possible, that my daughter’s family had been attacked, and my granddaughters were missing.
They neglected to mention that Cassie and Robert had both been killed in the attack. However, the nature of the attack was so brutal that it made the national news, and I heard on my way to Stonefield.
By the time I reached the house, the crime scene investigators were finished, but I was shocked to realize that the house still held all the evidence that hadn’t been removed. I was left to clean that up myself. I could have hired a company to do it, but I was distraught and embraced it as penance. My poor, innocent daughter and her brilliant young husband—and where were my granddaughters?
I began trying to look, myself. In the alleyway behind Stonefield, I found two tiny, heart-shaped miniatures—one of Rachel, and one of Merrilea. I remembered the Christmas gift that Robert had given Cassie the previous year, but this was the first time I had seen the miniatures they eventually had painted.
I called the detective and he rushed out and retrieved the evidence, then returned it to me after Forensics had attempted to find any fingerprints. Only a child’s fingerprints were there,
and I knew the girls had to have dropped them accidentally.
While visiting the police department to meet with the detective running the investigation, I met another kind man—or so he seemed—my own age. He calmed and reassured me and fell in love with me. For my part, I knew I would never love another man, but I was entirely without hope, without desire to reason. And when he arrived at Stonefield with his belongings, I did not stop him from moving in.
That man was Jim Bainbridge. His friends called him Jimmy. He was charming and vain, but he seemed kind.
Then came the day when fate softened its abject judgment against me: my granddaughters were found. My grief was softened, and I went outside in my daughter’s automobile to claim the girls from the police station.
And in my driveway, I saw a black limousine pulling in behind me. At first I thought I was quite insane; the man who stepped out looked exactly like the eldest son of Lucian—that is, James Manning.
You’re Shep Manning, I said. You killed my daughter.
He corrected my misconception. Both he and his brother had been afraid of their father and had feared him finding them in time. To help avoid this, he had dropped their old last name and adopted his middle name as their last name. Their first names were the same, his own being Maxwell.
He assured me he had no interest in harming anyone, that in fact he had recently lost his wife and his own daughter—a lie, of course, as I deserved. He told me he was in a position to make my life easier. He offered me the kind of cash that I’d never known, enough for me to comfortably raise Merrilea and Juliana.
I refused, bade him goodbye, and moved to get into my car.
He grabbed me and spun me around.
Let me say it plainly. While I do not wish to harm you, I will, should you be foolish enough to decline again. My lunatic brother Jack killed your daughter and her husband, and his tendency to go off his meds might suddenly resurface. In any case, you and all three of your grandchildren will most certainly die.
Immortal (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Book 2) Page 38
