He took in the restored Alex while he awaited an answer. His friend sported no crutch, figurative or otherwise, though he had a pronounced limp. A pistol stuck into his belt, as of old, and his hair was brushed and tied back in a remarkably tidy fashion. His skin was sun-browned.
The question took Alex visibly aback, as it should have done. “Good Lord,” he said finally, “I’d have thought you’d know that. It’s been weeks since you vanished into thin air, like some bloody ghost! Lucas and I have been over every inch of the island, searching for any sign of either you or Phoebe. What the devil has been going on in this place?”
Duncan felt hollow and raw on the inside, and bruised on the outside. Being dragged down a rocky road behind a horse would surely have hurt less than being parted from his wife this way. And he did not look forward to telling the tale.
He took a fiery sip of brandy and collapsed into the chair behind his desk before replying. “You’d better get yourself a drink, my friend, and take a seat. It is a long and tangled story, full of twists and turns.”
Alex stared at Duncan in curious irritation while taking his advice. When he had a cup in his hand and had planted himself on a hassock, he lifted an eyebrow and muttered, “Well, get on with it.”
Duncan did not expect to be believed. Nonetheless, he began with the night of Phoebe’s arrival—Alex himself had been present for that event, so there was a chance that he might accept at least some of the account, incredible as it was—and then described more recent experiences. Starting with his own elevator journey to the future.
Doggedly, Duncan related the important things and had to keep clearing his throat when he described the circumstances of his final separation from Phoebe. By that point, he did not care whether Alex believed him or not.
“Great Scot,” Alex marveled when it had ended, and Duncan sat, broken, his head resting in one hand and his cup empty. “Mice as big as men? Carriages with no need for horses to draw them? Rocket ships capable of reaching the moon? Why, five minutes in the place would drive a normal man mad, from the sounds of it!”
Duncan sighed and then gave his friend a level look. “So you think me mad?”
“I would think any other man mad, who told such a tale,” Alex allowed. “Since I know you to be damnably sane, I can only assume you are telling the truth.” His brows drew together in a deep frown as he considered further ramifications of the situation. “If such a thing can happen, we can claim to understand little or nothing of the world and its ways.” He paused and gazed earnestly at Duncan for a long time before asking, “How will you carry on, without Phoebe?”
“I don’t know,” Duncan replied. He yearned for more brandy, indeed, for enough to render himself insensible, but that was a comfort reserved for other men, who had the leisure for truly exquisite suffering. He scanned the room with an expression of wry accusation, noticing the damaged walls and ceilings. His desk and chair were practically the only things still standing. “What have you and Lucas and the others been doing while I was away?”
Alex’s neck turned crimson and he averted his eyes for a moment, indicating to Duncan that his friend had been occupied with some private matter. Phillippa, for instance. It was at once amazing and heartening, the change in Alex, though Duncan was too distracted to really appreciate the true scope of this resurrection.
“I’ve married your sister, for one thing,” Alex said, meeting Duncan’s eyes.
Duncan knew his smile was wan, perhaps even grim, but his pleasure in the news was genuine. “Congratulations,” he said. “If I’d known the baggage could work so miraculous a transformation as this, I’d have brought her to Paradise long ago.”
Alex’s flush deepened and then slowly subsided. Apparently, all was well with the bride and groom, even though the outside world stood in shambles around them. It was a thought Duncan did not care to pursue too far.
“We have not been idle,” Alex hurried to add. “Lucas and Beedle and the rest of us, I mean. We’ve—er—appropriated Mornault’s ship. She’s a fine craft, and only wanted cleaning up, really. Lucas has seen to getting her fitted out and ready to serve our purposes.”
“Mornault and the others?” Duncan asked. “What have you done with them? Especially, the girl, Simone?”
Alex stood, limped over to the desk and refilled his glass. “Mornault and his men are still in the stockade,” he said, and a faint hesitation, a note of reluctance, made Duncan brace himself for the rest of the story. “The girl is dead,” he finished.
Duncan felt his stomach roll. “Dead?”
“We couldn’t put her in with Mornault and that lot, of course,” Alex said, and his bleak tone indicated that he was recalling, all too vividly, the details of Simone’s death. “She came here, and slept in her old room, and was given her usual tasks to do. She got a length of rope from somewhere and hanged herself from one of the rafters in the washroom. It was Phillippa who found her.”
Simone—beautiful, troubled Simone, dead at such a young age. The knowledge burned itself into Duncan’s being like a spattering of acid. “My God,” he said and was silent for a while, absorbing and assimilating this fresh sorrow, making it part of him, like so many others before it. “And my mother?” he asked, at length. “How fares that dear and formidable woman?”
“Mistress Rourke is as well as can be expected,” Alex replied, “considering the events of recent weeks. She misses your father, and like the rest of us, she’s been very worried about your and Phoebe’s disappearance. How are you going to explain this to them?”
Duncan sighed. Telling Alex what had happened was one thing, but describing elevators and what he knew of the mysteries of time to the others was more of a challenge than Duncan felt ready to undertake. “One day,” he replied, after some consideration, “I shall, of course, have to tell them the truth. In the meantime, I will simply refuse to say anything. I expect your cooperation in this, Alex.”
Alex looked skeptical—which was nothing, of course, in comparison to the way his family and his officers would react to so outlandish a tale. “I don’t think they’ll accept it,” he said. “However, their relief that you have returned, albeit without your lovely wife, will probably occupy them for a time. What do you want to do now?”
“Die,” Duncan answered, facing a lifetime without Phoebe. God’s blood, but the years ahead looked insufferably dull, as well as lonely beyond his ability to bear. “I don’t suppose Fate will be quite so merciful, though.”
“Probably not,” Alex agreed. “Come—it is time for Lazarus to emerge, trailing his burial clothes, from the tomb. You must show yourself, Duncan, put an end to your share of the distress that’s been plaguing this household, and tell the rest of us what to do next.”
Duncan nodded, dreading the prospect, and hauled himself out of the chair and onto his feet. He spread his hands and made an attempt at a grin.
“Behold,” he said, “as your unlikely Lazarus steps, bedazzled and blinking, into the light.”
Phoebe’s hysteria eventually subsided, leaving a waking stupor in its place. A week passed, and then another, and no trace of Duncan was found anywhere on the island. This did not surprise her, of course, since she knew precisely what had happened to him. She stayed on Paradise Island, living in the same room she and Duncan had shared, waiting and thinking and, often, crying. Sometimes, she sat in the cocktail lounge and talked to Snowball, but that didn’t change the fact that she was alone again, except for her unborn baby. He wasn’t much company yet, of course.
One rainy afternoon, when her money was running low and her mood was even lower, Phoebe stumbled across her copy of Duncan’s biography, lying on a metal table on the screened veranda. Her heart hammered when she recognized the familiar cloth cover.
It was as though the volume had assembled itself out of nothing.
Now, here it was, before her. The end of the story, the answers to the questions she had wondered about. Had Duncan lived a long life, or been caught and hanged by
the British? Had her visit to the past altered history, and would those changes, if any, be reflected in the musty pages of that slim and tattered book?
Phoebe bit her lower lip, gathering the biography against her bosom for a moment.
The rain made a thick sheet of gray beyond the rusted screens, blotting out the view, hiding the exotic flowers and the lush foliage, driving the bright, raucous birds into silent seclusion. Knowing what had happened to Duncan might bring terrible, unending pain, she reasoned. Suppose he had been captured by the British and been executed, or killed in battle?
Phoebe put the book down, even turned her back, meaning to walk away, but in the end she couldn’t.
For better or for worse, she had to find out what became of Duncan.
She slumped into one of the vinyl upholstered patio chairs, picked up Professor Benning’s copy of Duncan Rourke, Pirate or Patriot?, and opened it to the first page. Immediately, the story gripped her, and she was immersed in it. There were things that made her smile, and, at other times, she had to tilt her head back for a few moments and close her eyes against a fresh and stinging rush of tears.
The author mentioned that Duncan had taken a wife, a mysterious creature thought to have escaped from some prison or asylum, but she had vanished one night, in the aftermath of a battle, and had never been seen or heard from again.
Phoebe ached over those words, sniffled once, and made herself go on reading. The final chapter was upon her within an hour, for it was a short and very concise book, with few embellishments or poetic graces. Sitting up very straight, her heart in her throat and her stomach in a knot, thinking how odd it was to be in such suspense over things that had happened two centuries before, she hoisted her mental skirts and waded into the truth.
The facts were devastating.
Three weeks after capturing Mornault and his motley crew, after their cannon assault on his home, Duncan had taken the lot of them to a place just south of Queen’s Town, all bound and hobbled. He’d used Mornault’s own ship, now christened the Phoebe Anne, in the process, and turned the group over to friends of his, who would in turn deliver them to British authorities.
The mission had been successful—up to that point. Jacques Mornault and his men were eventually tried before an English magistrate—their crimes alone had taken half a printed page to list—and finally faced a firing squad.
Duncan had sailed back to Paradise Island, only to find a detachment of British soldiers, led by one Captain Lawrence, waiting there for him. He was promptly arrested, along with his crew, and so were Lucas and Alex, but only after Lucas was gravely wounded, trying to save his brother.
Tears streaked down Phoebe’s cheeks as the story got worse.
Captain Lawrence, the same man, no doubt, who had served in Queen’s Town and beaten Mr. Billington to a bloody pulp for defending Phoebe in the tavern that day, was determined to make an example of Duncan Rourke. Lawrence had probably heard about the affair with Francesca Sheffield, too, though the writer didn’t cover that element of the story, and felt compelled to take an extra pound of flesh on his comrade’s behalf.
Duncan had been bound to a tree and savagely whipped, but this time there had been no John Rourke to come to the rescue, to cut him free and carry him home and bind up his wounds. Lucas had been incapacitated in the preceding fracas. Alex and the others bound and made to witness the fate that awaited them on the morrow. No, on this second occasion, Duncan had suffered the full measure of his fate, untempered and undiluted by mercy or justice.
He had been left tied to that tree, throughout the night, that he might have an opportunity, in Lawrence’s words, “to contemplate the wages of his sin.” By morning, Duncan was dead.
Phoebe closed the book, groped her way through a screen door and out into the tropical downpour, where she was violently ill. She could not have imagined a crueler or more ironic death for Duncan, and she would have gone back through time and suffered the whole ordeal in his place, had that been possible.
Anything—she would have done anything, to change history.
When her stomach was empty, she stood in the rain, pregnant with the child of a man who had been dead for more than two centuries, heartbroken and sick to the marrow of her bones. She honestly did not know how she would endure the rest of her life with the image of Duncan’s execution vivid in her mind; but for the sake of John Alexander Rourke, her son, she must find a way.
It was Snowball who found her standing there in the courtyard, soaked to the skin, face turned to the torrent, hair plastered to her head and dripping. He took her hand and led her inside to the lounge, where he gave her hot coffee to drink and went off in search of towels and a robe.
Phoebe sat on a stool at the bar, her coffee untouched, staring into the long mirror behind Snowball’s workspace. Instead of her own pitiful reflection, though, she saw Duncan. He was on his knees before the tree that had served as his whipping post, his hands still tied and extended high over his head, his hair matted with blood and sweat, his face abraded by the rough bark. The flesh of his back was shredded.
She watched Duncan die, powerless to help him or to lend even the simplest comfort. Then she gave an involuntary wail of despair and fainted.
Snowball returned to find her on the floor, struggling to raise herself, and made a soblike sound in his throat. “Phoebe,” he said. “Poor little Phoebe.”
He called an ambulance, over Phoebe’s protests, and she was taken to the hospital. Ironically, they put her in the same bed Duncan had occupied during his visit to the twentieth century.
She opened her eyes the next morning to find Sharon, the nurse who resembled Simone, standing beside her bed.
“You looking to lose that baby, Mrs. Rourke?” the other woman asked, her voice at once stern and kindly. “Because that’s what’s going to happen if you don’t get yourself calmed down somehow.”
Phoebe had already lost her husband, the only man she had ever loved or ever would, and the loss of their child would be the final blow. “Good advice,” she admitted. “If only I knew how to act on it. Maybe I need a shrink.”
Sharon frowned and drew up a chair. “What happened to that good-looking man of yours?”
Explaining was futile—any attempt would probably get her airlifted to some loony ward on the mainland. “He’s gone,” she replied. Those two words said everything, and nothing at all. Duncan was more than gone—he’d been a hero, in all senses of the word, and the fates had rewarded him with a horrible death.
The nurse sighed. “Guess it’s just you and Baby, then. Lots of women in that predicament these days. Me, for instance.”
Phoebe welcomed any distraction from her own miserable situation. Besides, she was genuinely interested. “You’re a single parent?”
Sharon smiled. “I’ve got two boys—Leander and Martin. Things get pretty tough sometimes, but we always seem to make it through.” Her expression turned somber in the space of a moment. “Their daddy was killed in the Persian Gulf.”
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe murmured. She wondered if Sharon’s husband had suffered, as Duncan had, or if his death had been quick and merciful. Of course, she wasn’t about to ask.
“Yeah,” Sharon said with a wistful smile. “I’m sorry, too. My Ben was a good man. But you can only do so much crying and hurting and carrying on, you know? Then you just gotta stop it and get yourself moving again. The sooner you do that, Mrs. Rourke, the better off you and that little baby are going to be.”
Phoebe nodded. “I know you’re right,” she said, as fresh tears burned in her eyes. “And I’m trying.”
Sharon rose from her chair, came to Phoebe’s bedside, and patted her hand. “You just rest, okay? Just close your eyes and try to think serene thoughts …”
It was in that moment that Old Woman’s name came back to her, and she recalled the power it was supposed to have. She felt the first tremulous, fragile hope, and began to repeat the word, silently, in the sorest part of her heart.
Phoebe was released the following morning, into the jaws of a raging tropical storm, and Snowball took her back to the hotel in his jeep, the rain thundering so loudly on the vehicle’s canvas roof that they didn’t try to talk. She was preoccupied anyway—she’d been gaining strength and determination steadily since she’d remembered Old Woman’s true name.
Once they’d reached their destination, Phoebe went to her room, and Snowball returned to his job. He’d been a good friend, though their association had been short, and she would always be grateful for his kindness.
All day, the storm went on, bending palm trees almost double in the wind, causing the T-shirted staff to fasten all the shutters and close all the doors. The electricity was shut off, just in case, and supplies of canned food and bottled water were taken to the cellars, along with blankets, pillows, and a first aid kit.
Phoebe was agitated; it seemed she’d absorbed the energy of the angry elements. Her mind was racing with plans and possibilities, and with every breath she repeated the secret, one-word litany that had been Old Woman’s gift to her.
By nightfall, the storm was at its height, ripping shingles from the roof and rattling the hotel on its foundations. Phoebe, two other guests, and the staff descended to the cellars, carrying lanterns and books and portable radios, talking nervously among themselves.
Phoebe knew, had told herself over and over, that even if she managed to get back to Duncan, she might not reach him in time to keep him from sailing into the hands of the British. She had learned only too well that time did not pass at the same rate in both places—she might get there before Duncan was captured and killed, but she might also find his grave, high on the hillside, beside his father’s.
“Don’t you want to come and sit with us, dear?” asked Mrs. Zillman, one of the guests, a friendly old woman with blue-rinsed hair. She and her husband, Malcolm, had bought a condo during a previous trip to Paradise Island and were back to take legal possession of the place.
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