by Beth Trissel
“I hear you!” he called back.
“Let’s see you, then.”
A middle-aged man with an ample paunch and diminishing hairline puffed into the room bearing a tray with three tall beaded glasses. Like his wife, Charlotte, he’d donned Williamsburg-style clothes, a white colonial shirt, olive green waistcoat and knee breeches with stockings and black buckled shoes.
His round face bore the same good-natured smile as his wife. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m coming.”
“My knickers are none of your business,” Mrs. Wentworth said, but the reproof didn’t reach all the way to her eyes.
He grinned more broadly. “Now, Nora, you and I go back a long way, to the time when you were a young thing shinnying up the apple tree with your bloomers on display.”
Mrs. Wentworth smiled despite herself. “I never shinnied in my life, Jon Hensley, as you know perfectly well. I see you’re still up to your old tricks.”
“What else?” he chuckled, and passed out the refreshment with a wink at Julia. His pale blue eyes twinkled. “So you’re the new guide, eh? I heard about your tour of the herb garden. You were quite a sensation.”
Julia choked on her lemonade and covered her mouth.
A slight grimace crossed Will’s face. He pressed the tips of his fingers to his forehead as if he had a headache.
His grandmother angled a sidelong look at Julia. “What’s all this about?”
Jon smiled. “Nothing. The visitors adored her. Ask anyone.”
Mrs. Wentworth frowned. “As if I would indulge in such ridiculous interviews. If you are quite finished with your shenanigans now, sir, we shall get down to business.”
Tugging his sparse forelock in imitation of age-old servants, he said, “Aye, yer ladyship. I’ll git on back to the scullery now.”
She held up her hand, bracelets clinking. “Just a moment. You are an essential part of the festivity.”
“In what way? Apart from serving drinks, I mean?”
“The play. You’ll make a fine Polonius.”
“Good Lord.” Jon sat down heavily on a chair. “We’re doing Hamlet?”
Laying his hand on the old woman’s thin shoulder, Will asked, “On Midsummer’s Eve?”
She raised her eyes heavenward, gesturing with her lemonade. “Not the entire play, gentlemen. Selections, of course. We’ll have the costume ball too and that does restrict our time.”
“Yes. It does,” Will emphasized, as if grasping this glimmer of sense. “Don’t you think it might be better to perform the play another evening if we’re having the ball?”
“Dear me, no. It’ll have to be then. And no ifs about the ball. I never go out at night anymore and shan’t again after this grand affair. Besides, everyone who’s anyone will be in attendance. Think of it as a living memorial to me,” she added with an arched look at him.
Will appeared to be struggling with a twitch in his eyelid. “Quite. How exactly do you envision the progression of the evening’s activities?”
She gave his hand a tap. “You sound like a cruise director. It’s simple, really. Guests arrive at 7:00 for dancing and light refreshments lasting until 9:00 when they will be seated, as many as may be, for scenes from Hamlet.”
“To be given where?”
She surveyed her grandson as though he’d missed the obvious. “Why here, in the great hall. Where else? We’ll open the other rooms for onlookers. Really, William. I should have thought you’d have worked that out.”
“Forgive me for lagging behind,” he said, with a slight edge to his voice.
But she didn’t seem to take any notice. “You’ll play Hamlet, as usual. Old Joe has done the dead king before. I’m not sure about the uncle yet, but Miss Morrow will do quite well as Ophelia. Why, she has that mad look about her eyes already––”
Julia gulped.
Will broke in. “We don’t even know if she’s performed Shakespeare, Ma’am.”
Julia started to explain that she hadn’t.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Wentworth insisted. “The girl’s English. They’re natural Shakespearian actors.”
Jon sat with his mouth slightly ajar. “I’m gonna need something stronger than lemonade.”
“Brandy for me.” Will lowered his head in his hands.
Waving her handkerchief at them, his grandmother chided, “Oh, stop moaning over trifles. Turn your minds to scouting out a suitable fellow for the role of Laertes. A man who can fence, mind you.”
Jon jerked his head at her and Will lurched upright in his chair. “We’re doing the sword fight?”
Julia simply stared as the dogged woman wore on.
“A best of from Hamlet is a poor show without that final scene. Why, it’s magnificent. You fence quite well, William. How difficult can it be to locate some other person? He doesn’t have to excel. Laertes loses.”
Will threw his hands up. “A blunderer with a sword can do more harm than an expert and you demand real blades.”
“Certainly. None of that theatrical rubbish. Gentlemen used to handle swords all the time and weren’t forever injuring themselves.”
“That was then.”
She ignored him. “I’ll play the Queen, of course.”
“Lady Hamlet dies,” Will said dryly.
“So dramatically. It will be my farewell performance.”
“I thought that was two years ago in Macbeth?”
“An encore, then. My finest hour, like Julius Caesar’s.”
“He also fell,” Will pointed out.
“With such bravery.” She sipped her lemonade, the gleam of reminiscence in her watery blue gaze.
Jon stole from the room with a backward glance at Will as if to say, ‘what else can we do?’
Julia wanted to edge slowly away but didn’t dare.
Seemingly lost in thought, Mrs. Wentworth made no remark on Jon’s absence. “We shall have period costumes appropriate to the history of this house, early nineteenth century when Cole lived. The glory days. Now there was nobility for you, William. A true gentleman wouldn’t argue with his poor grandmother over her dying wish.”
In that moment, Will looked very like the darkly brooding Hamlet. “We’ll do the play, Ma’am, and the ball, just as you wish. But bear in mind that Midsummer’s Eve 1806 is the very night Cole was cut down.”
Dear God. So it was. Julia felt as though a fist had been driven into her stomach.
“The night will be a tribute to Cole, too,” Mrs. Wentworth proclaimed, lifting her nearly empty glass in a sort of toast. “I wish we could have a horse in the hall. It would add such a fine touch to the play.”
“Why stop with one?” Will said in his sarcastic tone.
But Julia scarcely heard him. Lightheadedness assailed her and she gripped the sides of her chair.
Will shifted his exasperated focus from his eccentric relation to her. “Head down between your knees!”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
His grandmother glanced around in marked surprise as he leapt up from his seat and ducked behind her. Gripping the back of Julia’s neck, he gently but firmly pushed her head down toward her lap. “Easy now.”
But it did no good. The heavens were falling and taking her with them. The last words she caught as she swirled into blackness were Mrs. Wentworth’s.
“Heat’s gotten to the poor girl, I don’t doubt. These English aren’t used to our Virginia sun. Best wear a hat in the garden, Miss. You’ll drop out there for sure.”
At first it seemed as if Julia had tumbled down a rabbit hole, then she floated in a timeless fog as though suspended in space. Not a bad place to be, and she sensed she’d been here before. Long before. Was she dreaming of that time, or had she entered some alternate reality?
“Jules...”
The soft summons rippled through her muzzy mind like watered silk. She wasn’t even certain she’d heard the intimate utterance, or just wished it as she had countless times before.
“Jules.”<
br />
Her heart swelled with the flooding hope that her most ardent wish wouldn’t float back to her empty. “Cole.” His name escaped her in a breathless sigh.
“I’m here.”
“Where?” she pleaded, lost in misted suspension.
“Seek me,” he prompted in his velvet voice.
The haze cleared and Julia found herself back in the moonlit garden where she’d last seen Cole, the sweetness of lilies wafting on the mild night air. She searched eagerly for him through silvered shadows like a phantom.
“Above you, my darling.”
She looked up to find Cole gazing down at her from the back of a splendid horse, the thoroughbred in the portrait of him. Tall, majestic, with chocolate-brown eyes and dark mane, the stallion mirrored his master.
“Dearest Jules.” Cole bent in the saddle reaching out white gloved fingers.
Julia clasped his hand, and in one swift motion he pulled her up to sit in front of him, her legs to one side of the horse. He held the reins in one hand, circling the other around her waist. The gown she still wore spilled blue muslin over them both. She felt supremely happy, cradled between the stallion’s vibrant strength and Cole’s.
“Manney. His name is Manney, from the mandrake root,” she said slowly, remembering the long lost title. “Fast and deadly, the swiftest horse in the county.”
“In the state,” Cole said. “Let’s ride.”
He nudged Manney in the side and they bounded away as if on wings. The thoroughbred’s long legs flew in a blur through the garden.
“Hold on,” Cole said with a chuckle, and drew her tightly against him.
Reining Manny off the pebbled paths, he urged him over boxwood hedges, soaring into the scented night. Circular herb beds fell away beneath his hooves. Julia inhaled the pungent tang of dill and sage. She loosed a squeal in anticipation––laughing as they sprang over the gate in the sinuous brick wall.
Manney touched down on the springy turf and pounded away through the field of new mown hay. The quintessential fragrance of summer filled her nose while breezes whipped her hair. She was with Cole, like before, on a wild midnight ride, wonderful, exhilarating. Let it go on and on gilded with rapture...
“Jules, this is stolen time,” he said, as if reading her mind.
His husky words cut through her like blackness blotting out the glittery stars. “No. Don’t stop!”
“I must. We went no further than these fields.”
She strove to remember.
He reined in Manney and was still. They breathed together, man, woman, and the rising, falling flanks of the horse.
“We’ve done this before, haven’t we?” she whispered.
“Yes.” Cole’s voice was thick with knowledge. “Our time is taken from what was, like shards of glass pieced together to form a part of the whole.”
Sinking heavily against him, she strained every sense to understand. “I can’t stay, can I?”
“Only for awhile.”
Refusal shouted within her and she choked out her plea, “Please––let me remain with you. If I must perish first, then slay me now. Your sword hangs at your side.”
“Never for you, sweetheart.” Cole closed his arms around her, not to imprison, but to uphold her, and buried his face in her hair. “It is not your life that is forfeit. Mine is already spent, for you.”
Raw dread knifed through her. “Don’t say that.”
She turned and lifted her hand to his cheek, smooth, yet masculine beneath her fingers, his handsomeness excruciating and so throbbingly familiar. “I would die for you. If you cannot do the deed, I will take my own life.”
Tears glistened in his eyes. “Nay. You must live.”
“I don’t know how without you.”
“I am as near as your next breath. Reach deep inside and remember our pact...together always, our hearts as one.”
“Together always,” she squeezed out, closing her arms around his neck, engulfed in emotion too poignant for words.
“I am with you, more than you know,” he said softly. “But watch well. There’s a worm in the lily.”
As before, his warmth dissolved into the misted darkness and left Julia sobbing in the still garden. Alone in the moonlight. “Cole!”
****
Poor sweet Julia. Heedless of his grandmother’s quizzical eye, Will knelt on the floor in the great hall, cradling Julia in his arms. Her pale lips whispered words too faint to hear as she twisted from side to side...so disturbed, as if wrestling with some deep inner grief.
“It’s more than heat afflicting her,” the old woman observed. “A fit, maybe. Should you summon the doctor?”
Will couldn’t tear himself away from Julia long enough to phone and sensed her distress wasn’t a medical one. “She’ll recover in a moment, I should think,” he said, not at all certain. She seemed so lost and infinitely vulnerable. He wanted to help her, hold her, and bring her back to him. “It’s all right, Julia,” he soothed, aware of Grandmother Nora’s arching eyebrows.
Blinking her eyes, she looked up at him dazedly.
“There. She’s coming round,” his intent relation said.
Tears trickled down Julia’s white cheeks and she turned her face against his chest. “Keep me with you,” she said, as if still oblivious of her surroundings.
He wanted nothing more.
“That girl’s terrified of losing her employment. What on earth have you said to her?” his grandmother berated him.
“Nothing. She’s just sensitive.” Will wasn’t about to divulge any of the mystery surrounding Julia to his grandmother. She’d never understand. Hell––he didn’t understand. Only sensed, and senses could not be explained to Nora Wentworth.
“The English can be rather odd,” she nodded, then brightened. “I declare Miss Morrow makes a better Ophelia all the time. Keep an eye on the poor thing and bring her along to brunch tomorrow. That’ll cheer her up.”
“Brunch?” Not another of those tedious rites.
“Yes. Sunday brunch at the Marmalade Inn. Ten o’clock sharp. The Patterson’s will be there with Nelly.”
“Nobody is called Nelly these days except bovines.”
A frown creased his grandmother’s already heavily wrinkled brow. “How can you compare that gracious young lady to a cow? Call her Nelle, if you prefer.”
He wrinkled his nose. “I prefer Miss Patterson from an aloof distance.”
“And I’d prefer some hope of an heir beyond you. I don’t care if you’re as queer as a Maypole in December you can darn well father the next Wentworth. I’m not insisting on a litter, though two offspring would be better.”
Giving her a withering look, he shot back, “For whom?”
“For everyone involved, sir. See that girl is put straight to bed. She’s as white as a ghost. Jon will fetch my driver.”
A hoarse cry tore from Julia. “Cole!”
The all too familiar name wrenched Will in the gut. That damnable cousin had been at it again. Would she never think solely of him?
His grandmother started in her seat. “What in the world was that about?”
“You were just speaking of ghosts, Ma’am.”
The next tour group had gathered outside the hall doors at the back of the long room and people were fast growing impatient. Charlotte cracked the white paneled door and stuck her head through to shoot Will a mute appeal.
“Give us one minute.”
“And send Millicent through,” his grandmother added, referring to her driver/nurse.
Will scooped up Julia, still too shaken to stand unaided and not entirely lucid. “It’s all right,” he said.
Her mouth trembled. “No. It’s not. Cole said.”
Grandmother Nora swept her stare over the young woman. “That girl needs to have her head examined. She oughtn’t to have left home in the first place.”
Julia fixed her liquid gaze on the imperial matriarch. “But Mrs. Wentworth, I am home.”
She clucked dis
approvingly. “I realize the British are drawn to clairvoyants and mysticism but really.”
Something about Julia’s irresistible appeal must have struck a sympathetic cord in the stern matriarch. She shrugged as if making allowances. “Lord knows you need looking after, child. It’s like taking in a stray,” she muttered. “Brunch tomorrow, William, and see the girl’s properly outfitted in twentieth century attire. Nothing like the fifties for true style. Millicent!”
A plain little woman dressed in a white uniform and white sneakers, gray hair done up in a bun, darted in. With a fleeting smile at Will and concerned glance at Julia, she took Grandmother Nora’s free arm and helped the old girl to her feet, only to be rapped on the wrist for her pains.
His grandmother leaned on her cane. “I can manage without your fawning, Millicent. Just get the door.”
With a final shake of her head, the Queen Mother limped from the great hall at the side of her harried attendant and left through the ornate front entrance. “Ten o’ clock, sir!” she called over her shoulder.
As if Will could forget. What on earth was he to do about Julia? “We’ll be there, Ma’am! And may God help us,” he added under his breath.
Chapter Eight
“Lie here and rest.” Will lowered Julia onto his bed as if she were the most precious burden in the world. And she was. The air conditioner had overly cooled the room and he tucked his absurd pink comforter up to her chin to stop her from shaking.
Eyeing him through the glaze of tears, she said, “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No. Of course not,” he lied, less and less certain what to think, let alone do.
Will only knew he wanted this extraordinary being more than anything, now and forever. He was willing to oppose his grandmother and forfeit his inheritance if he must, though he didn’t know what would happen to him or Julia if the old lady tossed him out and sent her packing. Regardless, he would do anything, fight like the very devil to win Julia. But how in hell was he to go up against a spirit? And why did his long dead ancestor have such an almighty hold on her? Cole seemed stronger in death than Will in vivid life.
