Time After Time

by Elizabeth Boyce

  Del had managed to move the chair perhaps a foot closer to the table when she heard footsteps and voices outside the room, drawing nearer. She held still, not moving, not breathing, and prayed a silent entreaty that the men she heard would walk past her door without stopping.

  Her heart sank when the footsteps stopped and the voices grew clearer and louder. There were at least two men standing just outside the room.

  “What in the bloody hell could you have been thinking, bringing her here?” one of the men barked. Del heard in his voice the barely contained rage. “My instructions to you were clear: get her to leave town as quickly as possible and promise to never contact my son again. At no point did I tell you to lay hands upon her or bring her anywhere near me or my properties.”

  His son. So it was Camden’s father who was behind her abduction, and she was being held in his shipping office. That simple knowledge had a strange calming effect on Del. The earlier uncertainty had been terrifying.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I — ”

  “I have no use for your inept apologies! It does nothing for me now! Thanks to you and your even more addle-pated savage of a brother, I have a beaten and kidnapped women on my premises.” Del could hear the fury building in the elder Mr. Camden’s voice and any relief she had felt just moments ago turned into shaking fear. “And because you told her I sent you, I’m implicated in all this. What am I to do with her?” The words were ominous, and Del knew that whatever answer he found for that question spelled doom for her.

  “It was an accident, I didn’t know what to do — ”

  The man — Del recognized the voice as the man who had struck her — was cut off in his explanation by a grunt and a thud, and Del guessed he was being slammed into a wall.

  “Enough, Murphy,” Mr. Camden said, the words coming out in a furious growl. “I’ve had enough of your excuses, enough of your incompetence. Not another word from you.”

  There was a moment of silence, a maddening time when Del couldn’t tell what the men were doing and what was coming next. Then the doorknob turned and Del knew she was about to come face to face with her tormentor.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what she expected to walk through the door but it certainly wasn’t the slender, impeccably dressed man who entered the room. From what she knew of Mr. Camden, from what she’d heard from his son and from what he’d done to her, she had thought his sinister character would be more readily apparent. As though one could look in his face and see an unfeeling brutality stare back. She wondered if this was worse, if the man’s unimposing build and bland features lulled one into a false sense of security that made the inevitable attack that much harsher.

  Her attacker — Murphy — trailed behind Mr. Camden. Murphy was the larger man, squarer, more brutish in body and countenance, more immediately intimidating, yet the way he walked behind Mr. Camden, looked at him, responded to him, was deferential to the point of being almost fearful. It unnerved Del yet more.

  Neither man said anything to Del. Mr. Camden walked to her, stopping just inches from the chair where she was bound. She could see now the resemblance the man in front of her held to her beloved Camden. It disconcerted her to see the features of someone she loved beyond reason reflected in the face of someone who so clearly meant her harm.

  Now that he stood directly in front of her, his true nature was more apparent. She was struck by how much two men who looked alike, who shared the same blood, could be so entirely different. The father was all irritated stiffness and carefully controlled ire where the son was kindness and light affability. Her Camden was also restrained, yes, but unnaturally and imperfectly, and his joyfulness was obvious enough when you knew where to look. She saw none of the son’s goodness in his father’s eyes, none of his tenderness or understanding or compassion. The elder Camden’s mien was cold and uncaring, and he seemed to possess all the human feeling of a wax figure. His were the uncomplicated emotions of a savage animal: anger, frustration, ruthlessness. It saddened Del to know that her Camden had once been a small and helpless child in the care of such a man.

  Del tried to be defiant, to catch Mr. Camden’s penetrating gaze and make him look at her, but the longer she was in his presence, the more certain she was at how much vileness was hidden underneath his unassuming exterior. There was a quiet malevolence to him, his anger and short-leashed temper were almost palpable, and it made him seem so much larger and physically threatening than he appeared at first glance.

  He studied Del, radiating frustration, and when he reached out to touch her face his grip was hard. Wordlessly, he tilted her head back, angling it beneath the light, and frowned at what he saw. From the pain throbbing in her temple and the stickiness of her hair, Del knew she was bruised and bloodied, and it obviously made Mr. Camden displeased. He checked her wrists, pulling at the ropes to see the wounds beneath, showing no reaction when Del gasped in pain.

  “Bloody hell, Murphy,” Mr. Camden muttered, and Murphy shrank back against the wall. “What do you propose I do now?”

  Behind him, Murphy shrugged helplessly.

  Mr. Camden hadn’t spoken to Del directly or even met her eye since entering the room. It made her feel invisible.

  She wanted to say something, to beg for her release or plead with him not to injure her further, but she held her tongue. Her silence stemmed partly from stunned fear, but also from a foolhardy defiance. As terrified as she was, as desperate as she was to escape her confines, she had never whimpered or begged a man for anything, and she would be damned if she would start now.

  “I cannot let her go, not after what you have done to her,” Mr. Camden said. “I cannot risk her telling anyone what has happened. She must be kept quiet, no matter the cost.” He sounded casual, conversational, as if he were just thinking aloud, and that nonchalance chilled Del to the bone. He spoke of her fate, alluded to the possible violence it beheld, as though he were merely deciding on whether to dine on fish or fowl.

  “I will say nothing,” Del said, her words barely a croak from her dry and constricted throat.

  “You have put me in a most untenable position, Murphy,” Mr. Camden continued, showing not the slightest hint of having heard Del. “In your interminable stupidity and ham-handed incompetence, you have threatened this woman, struck her, and now dragged her to my office, my place of business, where you have bound her to a chair.” Mr. Camden turned from Del and began to stalk toward Murphy, his motions deceivingly slow and unthreatening. Del knew better, and from the look on Murphy’s face, he did too. Mr. Camden meant to do someone harm in retribution for this inconvenience, and Murphy was his target.

  “She’s jus’ a whore,” Murphy said in his defense. “Who’ll listen to anythin’ she says?”

  Mr. Camden’s back was now to Del, but she saw his shoulders stiffen and his hands clench at his sides, and she knew Murphy’s words had only further enraged him. She knew what the elder Camden was thinking, that he hated being reminded of who and what his son had pledged to marry. Del silently pleaded with Murphy to shut up before his words damned her any further.

  “I know what she is,” Mr. Camden bit out. “But she has connections to some powerful men. And my son, if she ever told him — whore or no, she must be silenced.”

  “Mr. Camden, sir, I can take care of it.” Murphy said, and if he was trying to come across as confident and reassuring, he succeeded only in sounding like a nervous, whiny child.

  “And how, exactly, do you propose to ‘take care of it’? I do not care for this — distastefulness. You are forcing me to get my hands dirty in a way I haven’t in years.” Mr. Camden’s composure waivered ever so slightly, and Del could hear some of his rage come through in his words. She wondered what it would look like if he let himself explode. “You have put me in an impossible situation. She cannot stay here. She cannot be let go. What does that leave us?”

  Del’s heart s
lammed into her chest, and if she hadn’t been restrained in a chair, physically prevented from moving, she knew she would have collapsed. There was only one option left open by Mr. Camden, an option he seemed disinclined to voice himself, but one she had no doubt he would see done. Not by his hands, of course, but by his bidding nonetheless.

  Against the wall, Murphy visibly gulped. “I’ll deal with it. Make sure no one sees nothing. Make sure the problem disappears.”

  Tears sprang from her eyes, and Del panted, trying not to become completely hysterical. The men were careful not to look at her and had ceased to even refer to her as a person. She was now a “problem” that needed disposing of, like spoiled cargo to be unceremoniously dumped in the Thames, never to be thought of again. Neither of the men said the word, and she knew they would steadfastly refuse to call her murder for what it was, but all their euphemisms wouldn’t change the fact that she would wind up just as dead.

  Her mind raced. She refused to believe this was her end, that there was nothing she could do. She would think of something. She had to. There had to be some overlooked means of escape or some perfect combination of words that would convince Mr. Camden to release her. Her muscles were tense, though, locked in place from abject fear and the physical pain of being tied to the chair. She couldn’t move, couldn’t make words come out of her paralyzed throat, could scarcely take in enough breath to prevent herself from fainting. She was running out of time and she couldn’t do anything.

  Mr. Camden stared at Murphy for several minutes, until the man squirmed and looked away. “We will leave her here until dark. When everyone is gone and you can move about unnoticed, you will remove her from the premises and make sure no one sees or hears of her again.”

  Murphy nodded, but when he looked about to say something, Mr. Camden cut him off with a raised hand and then gestured him out the door. Demonstrably bumbling but not completely lacking sense, Murphy left the room as quickly as he could without breaking into an obviously cowardly run.

  The elder Camden then walked over to the table, the one Del had hoped contained her salvation, and picked something up before coming to her. Del’s vision went dark around the edges and she grew dangerously lightheaded from the terror. He meant to do it now; he would kill her and have Murphy dump her body later.

  “Please,” she managed to say, the word barely a whisper, and she could say no more.

  But Mr. Camden’s hands didn’t contain any implements of death or torture. Instead, he shoved a dirty rag into her mouth and secured it with a rope tied around her head, ensuring she would be unable to call for help. He knelt down to tie her ankles to her chair, cutting off the slightest chance of escape Murphy’s previous oversight had left her. He stood up, having neither looked her in the eye nor spoken to her directly the entire time he was in her presence, and then left.

  Alone in the dim and dusty room, Del cried.

  The warm, salty tears ran in rivulets down her cheeks, and her sobs, muffled by the rag stuffed in her mouth, caused her to jerk against the ropes, further tearing into her flesh. She had no means of freeing herself, and Camden, not knowing where she was or what dangers she faced, would not be coming to save her.

  She wept for the cruel sadness of it all, the unjustness of meeting her demise right after she had finally figured out the course her life was meant to take.

  She wept for Camden, that she would be torn from him before she ever had a chance to really tell him what he meant to her. She loved him more than anything, and she could only hope that, even after her death, he would know it.

  Memories of Camden flitted through her mind, and her tears flowed harder when she realized how much time she had wasted being stubborn. If only she had let her guard down in the beginning, right after meeting him, when she had seen him for the amazing man he was but had not let herself believe it. They could have had all those months instead of just the last few weeks when she had finally come to her senses. She had been so scared then, of feeling and loving and giving. It was all so wretchedly, comically clear to her now how wrong-headed she had been.

  Her breathing became hitched, irregular. Her sobbing was leaving her gasping for air but the rag in her mouth was preventing her from getting it. Her vision went cloudy and her hands and feet went numb and she knew she was going to lose consciousness.

  The last thing she thought of before the world went dark was Camden’s face as he asked her to marry him, and the last thing she felt before losing all sensation was the stab of pain through her heart as she realized she would never be able to.

  Chapter Ten

  Camden walked along the corridor leading to his office. He was restless, distracted. Working today seemed an impossible task. He wasn’t sure how he would muster up the motivation or interest in cargo manifests and pricing lists when all he could think of was Del. Of how beautiful she had looked this morning, tousled and thoroughly satisfied. Of how impatient he was to be with her again this evening, when he could take her in his arms, feel her soft body melt into his —

  Gah. It was no good to think of her now, not when he was stuck at the shipping company and couldn’t go to her. He was only torturing himself by conjuring up her image, by remembering the feel of her against him, under him, the way she moved and the way she sounded when he —

  Dammit, he was doing it again. His head was filling with thoughts of her and his body was responding physically. He quickly thought of the stack of paperwork waiting for him on his desk. Nothing made the blood cool faster than the thought of slogging through piles of bills of lading and quarterly receipts.

  In his reverie, he didn’t notice the other man in the hallway until he had brushed past him.

  Camden frowned. It was Murphy, one of his father’s stevedores, and he had looked extremely unhappy.

  Camden wondered if there was trouble. The stevedores usually kept to the docks and were almost never seen in the offices. If his father needed to communicate with one of them, he sent Camden or another employee to them rather than summoning them to building. The elder Mr. Camden didn’t like having the austerity of his office sullied by the presence of the common laborer, as if their dirt and sweat and — commonness would cause his carefully created façade of wealthy respectability to come crumbling down around him and he would be exposed for the what he was: a desperate social climber of humble origins far closer to the stevedores than the blue-blooded aristocrats he aspired to become one of.

  Camden stopped and turned around, intending to ask Murphy what his business was, but the man had already disappeared around a corner. Camden heard the creak of a door shutting behind him and he turned back in the direction he had been walking. His father was coming out of one of the records rooms, locking it with one of the myriad of keys he kept on him at all times.

  “Ah, Rhys,” his father said, looking startled to see him. He dropped the key in his pocket before walking quickly toward his son. Placing a hand on his shoulder, he steered his son back down the hall in the direction Murphy had gone. Camden allowed himself to be led. “I’ve been looking for you. Wanted to talk to you about a possible new account.”

  “Is that why Murphy was here?”

  “What?”

  If Camden hadn’t known his father so well, if he hadn’t become accustomed to reading the slightest expression changes and shifts in voice or stance or language, he may have missed the almost imperceptible reaction to his question. But he did catch it, how his father’s eyes had widened just a touch, how he had given a small twitch, like he was going to abruptly stop walking but then caught himself and carried on. It had become a survival tactic for Camden, to notice the tiniest of details in his father’s behavior as a way to gauge his mood and determine the level of danger he faced.

  “Oh, Murphy. Yes,” his father continued. “I was questioning him on whether he thought an addition of an account this large would necessitate hiring more steve
dores.”

  “It must be quite the sizable account,” Camden said.

  “Indeed.”

  Camden tried to surreptitiously study his father as they walked side-by-side down the corridor. He wondered why the issue of a new account would cause his father to seem so guarded, so distracted, and he tried to find clues in the man’s demeanor. Glancing at his father, however, showed him no insights. His father appeared to be his usual self: impatient, confident, with an ever-present aura of slight aggression and casual meanness. Camden could sense no more hesitation or surprise, and he thought perhaps he had imagined it all. It was Camden, not his father, who was feeling irritated and cagey, and he must have projected his own restlessness onto the older man.

  He let out a frustrated breath. He hated having to be away from Del. His longing for her, his impatience for their nuptials, and his uncertainty regarding his father’s approval of them was driving him mad and he knew it would only get worse as the day wore on, lonely and tedious and seemingly never-ending. It was distracting him, making him see trouble at the office and strangeness in his father when there wasn’t any.

  They reached his father’s office, a large, Spartan room, impeccably organized. It was dimly lit even though there were six large windows extending from nearly ceiling to floor. The elder Camden kept them shuttered at all times, as if convinced the sunshine would destroy his machine-like productivity and drive for success. Heaven forbid he let any light into his life, either metaphorically or literally. He instead relied on a single gas lamp resting on his desk.

  There were books, ledgers, and papers everywhere, but unlike in Camden’s office, where they occurred in haphazard heaps strewn across every horizontal surface, here they were coded, stacked and lined up in neatly organized piles on his huge desk. There were no pictures, no portraits of relatives or painted tableaux of calming pastoral domesticity. Nothing that would personalize the office, enliven it, or hint at a life outside it. The entire room was like a physical representation of the man who kept it: willfully restrained, relentless organized, devoid of ostentation or anything resembling softness or comfort.