Yesterday's Sun

by Amanda Brooke

  If evading death you seek

  Then the dial shall keep the score

  A life for a life the price to pay

  Never one less and not one more

  “A life for a life,” Holly repeated. “What does it mean, ‘keep the score’?”

  She had asked the question, but Jocelyn wouldn’t answer her. She just looked at Holly and waited for her to interpret the poem for herself.

  “My life for Libby’s? I have to erase my beautiful baby’s life for the sake of my own. Please, Jocelyn, please tell me I’m reading it wrong.”

  When Jocelyn’s continued silence gave Holly the answer she hadn’t wanted to hear, a crushing weight knocked the wind out of her and she let herself sink to her knees. “Oh, Jocelyn, I don’t think I can bear this anymore!” she cried out. Then she did something that she had never done before in her entire adult life. She let herself cry without restraint. In a matter of moments, she was howling sobs that had been a long time in the making.

  Jocelyn laid out the picnic in the rose garden, picking the location because it was out of sight of the moondial circle. The food remained untouched but Jocelyn insisted that Holly drink some tea, which was, as always, sweet and hot.

  Holly had quelled her tears and, despite the shock, she wanted to hear more about the dial. She needed to understand how it had been used in the past. She had to be sure that there were no other options before she gave Libby up completely. “Tell me what happened to you, Jocelyn,” she asked. “You told me how you were going to be driven to suicide, but how did the rules apply to you?”

  Jocelyn played with her teacup, swirling its contents as if she would find a path back to the past. “I think I need to start at the beginning. Is that all right?” Jocelyn asked, her eyes already glistening with unshed tears.

  “Take your time. I’m here for you, too,” offered Holly as she leaned over and squeezed the old lady’s hand.

  “Mr. Andrews didn’t mention time travel the first time he visited me at the gatehouse. He had simply come to hand over the wooden box and the journal … with some reluctance, I’d have to say. I think he was torn between letting the secret of the moondial die with the Hardmontons, and leaving it to its new owner to decide. He warned me to read the journal first and not to resurrect the moondial unless I was prepared to accept the consequences. By the time he returned a few months later, I hadn’t just read the journal but I’d experienced the power of the moondial firsthand.”

  “The dial chose to take you to that point in time when you’d committed suicide.”

  Jocelyn nodded. “I went through the same nightmare you probably did, questioning my own sanity. The journal seemed to confirm everything I’d experienced, but I was more than willing to dismiss it as fantasy. When Mr. Andrews realized I’d seen my future, he helped me accept that what I’d seen could really happen. We took this exact same walk to the Hall and the stone circle, where he helped me interpret the poem exactly as I’ve done with you.”

  “The raindrop on the windowpane,” confirmed Holly.

  “When I realized that the ‘life-for-a-life’ rule meant that someone else would have to die in my place, I simply resigned myself to my fate and for two years, I did nothing.” Jocelyn shrugged her shoulders by way of any further explanation.

  “But then you used the dial again and saw what Harry would do to Paul. That’s why you changed your path. But the life-for-a-life rule?” asked Holly. However, she was already working out the answer as the words came out of her mouth. “Oh, I see. It was Harry. Harry took his own life. That’s why you feel so guilty, isn’t it?”

  “That isn’t the half of it,” confessed Jocelyn. “When you avoid death, the life that will be sacrificed in your stead isn’t necessarily yours to choose. The life taken is always a close family member, not necessarily a blood relative but within the family circle. You can’t just go out and randomly kill a stranger and expect the score to be settled.”

  “You said the moondial’s rules were cruel, but, Jocelyn, cruel doesn’t even begin to describe it!”

  Both women were staring in the direction of the moondial site, unable to meet each other’s haunted gaze. Morning had slipped silently into afternoon and as the determined September sun fought through the gathering clouds there was still just enough warmth left in the day to heat up the gentle breeze. Holly shivered nonetheless.

  “I couldn’t avoid death without risking another member of my family. The moondial demanded a life and my worst fear was that it could be Paul’s life I was risking. That’s why I did nothing for two years, not until I saw what would happen to Paul if I didn’t try to change the future.”

  “Please don’t say you killed Harry,” gasped Holly, half jokingly, but with a fear that there were yet more unpleasant surprises to be revealed among the ruins of the Hall.

  Jocelyn smiled, but as she wrinkled her eyes a tear began its solemn journey down her cheek. “As good as,” she confessed. “I saw what he would do to Paul and I felt a rage growing inside me that perhaps only a mother can feel. I had never fought back against Harry’s abuse. I couldn’t have been more submissive if I’d tried. But when I saw Harry’s cruelty being directed at Paul, destroying him as surely as it had destroyed me, that rage consumed me and I think I would have been capable of murder if it had come to it.”

  Holly did her best to concentrate on Jocelyn’s experiences. Though she was trying hard not to think about how all of this knowledge would dictate her own path, she could feel those familiar insecurities about motherhood returning to haunt her yet again. She thought she had been learning to be a mother, but she wondered if she could even begin to imagine the burning rage that Jocelyn described.

  Jocelyn was trembling as she resurrected the specters of her past and she seemed to have reached the point where she couldn’t go on. Holly desperately needed to hear more to help her understand. “If you didn’t kill him, how did you make sure the life that would be taken was Harry’s?” asked Holly softly.

  “I started fighting back,” whispered Jocelyn, as if she were afraid to wake up the ghosts that seemed to be crowding around them. “Harry had unwittingly given me the skills to undermine him. Of course, unlike me, Harry wasn’t in the least bit submissive, so when I started to stand up to him, his reaction was explosive. The abuse and cruelty he inflicted on me escalated and the physical abuse became more frequent, more intense.”

  “Oh, Jocelyn, I never imagined it had been so bad,” replied Holly, genuinely shocked by the horrors Jocelyn must have faced in the house that was now Holly’s home.

  “I think the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’ certainly applies to me. And through it all, Harry still managed to keep the abuse hidden from Paul. In front of his son it was only veiled threats and warning looks, but he made up for it when Paul wasn’t there. Of course, he was a gentleman, he never hit my face. He made sure the bruises he gave me could be hidden from view, and so my secret shame would have remained just that if I hadn’t realized that I could use it to my advantage. I made certain other people knew. Slowly but surely, Harry’s work dried up as people refused to deal with him. The people in the village became my silent allies and, with the help of my sister, Harry was ostracized. He was close to the breaking point, but then I started to wonder if I’d gone too far, if maybe I would still die but at Harry’s hands instead of my own. It was only the intervention of a dear friend, my knight in shining armor, who tipped the balance back in my favor and really set the path of my future on its new course.”

  “And who was this knight in shining armor?”

  “Someone you already know,” answered Jocelyn cryptically. “He’s still a regular visitor to the gatehouse.”

  “Billy?” gasped Holly.

  Jocelyn nodded. “He was a young man in his prime back then. He had called around to the gatehouse to chase Harry for money that he owed him. It was the middle of the day and Paul was at school, so Harry was making the most of the time we had to ourselv
es by beating me to a pulp. One minute I was cowering in a corner and the next, Billy was there and it was Harry who was nursing bruises and broken ribs at the end of the day.”

  “Well done, Billy.” Holly was smiling with a newfound admiration for her builder.

  “It wasn’t so much the beating that Harry found so hard to take but the humiliation, and I reinforced his shame every chance I got. It broke him, and when he was at his lowest, I knew it was time to leave.”

  “And that’s when the moondial showed you it would lead Harry to suicide?” asked Holly in disbelief. Holly had always known that Jocelyn was much, much stronger than the frail body that ensnared her, but it was still difficult to imagine Jocelyn taking her husband’s cruelty and using it as her own.

  “There was just one more thing I had to do first. The moondial needs a specific event as a catalyst to switch from one vision of the future to another and, for me, it was sitting down and writing Harry a letter, telling him that I was leaving him. I told him how he had failed at everything and the world would be a better place without him, although I think I might not have put it quite so subtly. With the letter written and my bags packed, I used the moondial one last time. It confirmed that everyone I loved would be safe, that it would be Harry and not me who would commit suicide and that it was safe for me to leave.” Jocelyn lifted her head high and looked directly at Holly. “So, going back to your original question, yes, in a way I did kill Harry.”

  “And you never told Paul.”

  “No,” confirmed Jocelyn. “I couldn’t tell him before Harry died in case it changed the future, and afterward, I was wracked with guilt. I couldn’t justify what I had done even to myself, let alone justify it to Paul.”

  “You let Paul believe his father was the innocent party.” Holly shook her head and tried to suppress her anger.

  “When the gatehouse was cleared out, Paul found the letter I’d written to Harry. I was officially divorced by that point so had no rights to the property; everything went to Paul. As soon as he was old enough, he left me and left the village. He joined the army and traveled the world, traveled anywhere that would take him as far away from me as possible.”

  “It must have been hard for both of you, but you’re all right together now?”

  Jocelyn shook her head and a tear trickled down her face. “I tried. For years I tried to get back in touch with him, but he was intent on wiping me out of his life as surely as if I had been the one that had died. Every single letter or card I sent to him was returned unopened. Up until last month, I’d not managed to speak to him for years.”

  “I just assumed you went to visit him regularly. You did stay with him, didn’t you? You were away for a few weeks,” Holly asked, confusion adding to the raft of emotions brewing up inside her.

  “You gave me the jolt I needed to try one last time. I tracked him down through an army friend who’s also from Fincross. I practically took up roost on Paul’s doorstep until he couldn’t ignore me any longer.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t tell him about the moondial, if that’s what you mean. I think that would have been a step too far. But I told him his father had driven me to the point of suicide. I told him that I’d left Harry to protect him, as much as for my own sake.”

  “Did he listen?”

  Jocelyn smiled and the weary lines on her face softened. “He listened enough, I think. We’ve not mended all our fences, but some.”

  Jocelyn smiled as her tears dried, but the ghost of those tears remained and Holly knew the old lady wouldn’t let go of the guilt she had carried with her for thirty years.

  The clouds gathering overhead were leaching the color from the sky and the warm breeze had developed a sharpness. The gloriously overgrown gardens that surrounded them had lost their luster and Holly needed no persuading when Jocelyn suggested they head home.

  “I don’t think this picnic was a very good idea, was it?” sighed Jocelyn. “We’ve both lost our appetites and, I hate to say this, but I think my joints have seized up. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get up off the ground.”

  Holly smiled as she picked herself up and put her arms out to help pull Jocelyn to her feet. “Well, I can’t leave you here and I can’t make it back without you.”

  This was Holly’s way of reaching out for help and Jocelyn found enough determination to make it to her feet and give Holly a hug. “I won’t leave you to face this on your own,” she assured her.

  The journey home was slower and it was also darker. The dappled light that had lit their way to Hardmonton Hall had been replaced by a cold murkiness. Holly’s journey to the ruins had been undertaken with a mixture of fear and hope, but on her return she carried back with her only the fear and a sense of emptiness that had seeped into her body once her tears had been spent.

  “What if there’s an exception to the rule?” she asked Jocelyn as they neared the gatehouse. It was the first time they had spoken on their bleak journey home, other than the occasional expletive from Jocelyn as her hip joints failed her.

  “There’s no bargaining with the moondial,” Jocelyn warned. She stopped and turned to look at Holly. It was hard to tell if the grimace on the old woman’s face was from the pain or from the thought of Holly taking risks with her future.

  “So why use it!” Holly blurted out, not sure if her sudden anger was directed at Jocelyn or the moondial. “Why didn’t you destroy it, or at least the mechanism? Why did you leave it so some poor fool like me would come along and start putting it back together again?”

  Fresh guilt weighed down heavily on Jocelyn’s shoulders and she suddenly looked very frail and old. “I don’t know why, Holly. I really don’t. Just like Mr. Andrews, I suppose I didn’t think I had the right to destroy the moondial. I hid the box in one of the walls in Harry’s workshop and I thought it would be safe there. It was certainly the last place Harry would ever look. And I kept the journal with me, remember. I didn’t think anyone would be able to work out how to put the mechanism together on their own.”

  As soon as Holly saw the pain in Jocelyn’s face she immediately regretted her outburst and her anger vanished as quickly as it had arrived. She knew she was being unfair and besides, she couldn’t ignore the fact that the dial would be instrumental in avoiding her death in childbirth. “I’m so sorry, Jocelyn. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re as much a victim of the moondial as I am.” She slipped her arm into Jocelyn’s and started walking once more toward home. “So tell me everything you know about the journal,” she said, easing the conversation away from her ill-conceived accusation.

  “It was written by Edward Hardmonton and it describes in harrowing detail how he resurrected the dial and the decisions he was forced to make. He knew tragedy was coming, but there was still only so much he could do to change future events.”

  “Like a drop of rain on glass, the choice of path may not be free,” Holly recited.

  “You’ve remembered the poem perfectly.”

  “It’s not something I’m likely to forget,” sighed Holly. “It’s the only thing I have to get me through this nightmare.”

  “Not the only thing. I’m here to help you … unless you’re ready to talk to Tom about it?”

  It was Holly’s turn to feel guilty. She was coming to realize that she was going to have to make some life-changing decisions and Tom had a right to be involved. “I need to have everything clear in my own mind first. I will tell him, one day.”

  “Just not today,” suggested Jocelyn.

  “Or tomorrow,” added Holly. “Perhaps not until all of this is over and there are no decisions left to make.”

  The trees started to thin out and Holly sensed Jocelyn’s relief as the gatehouse came into view.

  “I’ll drive you back home,” insisted Holly.

  “I’ve told you before; I won’t give in to these joints,” Jocelyn said with a warning glare.

  “Then at least let me escort you home. No arguing.”
r />   “Who’s arguing?” asked Jocelyn with a pained smile.

  Although Jocelyn was relieved when they stopped in front of the tea shop, she was less eager to say good-bye to Holly. She didn’t want to leave her on her own to dwell on the future. They both knew there was only one path Holly could take if she was going to survive and that meant a future without Libby. Her daughter might not exist in the present time, might never exist at all, but Jocelyn could see the pain of loss in Holly’s eyes.

  “I could always pack a bag and come stay with you until Tom gets back,” Jocelyn offered. She had taken the journal out of her basket, but she seemed reluctant to hand it over.

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry,” Holly assured her, reaching out and taking the journal from Jocelyn’s protective grasp. “I’ve got this to read and then there are lots of other things to keep me busy. The marble for Mrs. Bronson’s sculpture is finally being delivered next week and Billy has promised to come back and finish off the conservatory. Besides, you’re busy, too.”

  “Yes, it’s always busy at harvest time in the village, but I’m sure they could do perfectly well without me.” Jocelyn still wasn’t making a move to go inside the tea shop.

  “Jocelyn, am I going to have to drag you up the stairs to your flat?” warned Holly with a mischievous smile. Even though Jocelyn was the only person that she could talk to about the moondial, Holly desperately needed time on her own.

  When Holly returned home, the gatehouse felt empty and barren. She had assumed that the moondial in its mystical benevolence had shown her the dangers that lay ahead so that she could avoid them, so that she could survive, so that they could all survive.

  She put the journal down on the kitchen table and stared at it. It was bound in dark-brown leather with the monogram E. H. stamped in the top left corner. There was a leather strap tied tightly around it to keep in place ragged bits of paper that had been inserted between its unkempt pages. Holly was tempted to leave it unopened, especially now that Jocelyn had described its contents as harrowing; she had already heard enough harrowing stories for one day. But the journal demanded her attention and she knew she wouldn’t rest until she knew everything.