And yet—not marry Harriett? It meant he could think about other girls. About Anna Sophia Lockwood. Annie. Strat’s heart nearly flew out of his chest.
He was swamped by the scent and touch of her: her hair and lips, her hands and throat. He was possessed by a physical misery he had never dreamed of. It was not joyous to be in love, it was aching and desperate.
I’ll ache when Father finds out, he thought. After he whips me for not getting hold of Harriett’s money, he’ll send me to a factory to work fourteen hours a day. He’ll tell people I’m learning the business. He won’t mention that he won’t be giving me the business after all.
Strat tried to think, but like last night, thinking was a difficult activity.
Suppose he offered Harriett a counter proposal. Suppose he cried out: No, No, No, No, Harriet, you and I are destined for each other, I love you dearly, I cannot let you go to another! He would be making his father happy. He might or might not be making Harriett happy.
But he definitely would not be making himself happy.
He knew what his father would say about happiness. It had nothing to do with anything. Money and promises were what counted, and Harriett had the first and Strat should have given the second.
He had to collect himself, behave properly. He could not ignore Harriett to look longingly back at Annie, nor rip Annie’s clothing off, which was the utterly indecent thought that kept coming into his mind and which he kept having to tromp down.
He floundered, wanting to do the right thing for Harriett, of whom he was very fond, and the right thing for himself, but it was too quick. Harriett had shown poor manners in springing this. People needed to be prepared, and she should have had Aunt Ada tell them privately so they could think of the proper things to say.
Should he offer congratulations? But who could be happy about the prospect of a life with Mr. Rowwells? Besides, the event that was going to happen along with Harriett’s marriage to Mr. Rowwells was his own execution.
Devonny said, “That’s disgusting, Harriett. He’s disgusting. He’s old and disgusting.”
They all giggled hysterically, but Harriett’s giggles turned to tears and she excused herself, holding her big white linen napkin to her face, and ran back into the house and up the great stairs to her room.
“Strat, you pitiful excuse for a man,” said his sister. “You should have told her you love her and you don’t want her to marry Mr. Rowwells. What if she says yes? Then where will you be?”
Strat knew where he would be.
With Annie.
Surely, love this strong was meant to be. Surely no parent would stand in the way. Surely even Strat’s father would understand that this was not ordinary, his love for Miss Lockwood, and it was providence that Mr. Rowwells had stepped in to take care of Harriett.
Oh, the brutal necessity of marriage. Poor poor Harriett! Poor Florinda. Poor those other three wives. Poor Ada, who’d had no marriage. And maybe, just maybe, poor Miss Bartten, who wanted it so badly she was willing to destroy a marriage to get her own.
And me, thought Annie Lockwood, straddling time. What am I destroying? Will I end up with a marriage? All I wanted was a summer romance.
She did not want to think about any of this. For none of this was love and romance: it was power. I have the most power, she thought. It makes me the father, the man in the story.
She refused to have heavy thoughts. It was a perfect morning with a perfect boy. She studied the perfect embroidery on the glossily starched linen napkins.
A servant approached uneasily. “Sir?” he said to Strat.
Annie loved how they called each other Sir and Mister and Miss.
Strat raised his eyebrows.
“The police are here once more, sir, and wish to converse with the young people about last night. Matthew’s unfortunate accident, sir.”
Prickliness settled over Annie, as if in her own time she had read about this, and knew the ending, and the ending was terrible and wrong. She forgot the melodrama of Harriett’s flight.
Was I sent here to change the ending? But if that’s the case, I should remember more clearly, I should know what to do next.
She was afraid of Time now, and what it could do and where it could take you, and the lies it could tell. It was time to face something. Police. Death. Murder. Stairs. Time.
Strat escorted them into the library, Devonny on one arm and Annie on the other.
The library was Victorian decorating at its darkest and most frightening. The high ceilings were crossed by blackly carved beams. The walls were covered with books, the sort whose leather bindings match. The books sagged and were dusty and the room stank of cigars and pipes. Dried flowers dropped little gray leaves beneath them. Drapes obliterated the windows, and huge paintings with gold frames as swollen as disease hung too high to see. Carpets were piled on carpets, and the pillars that divided the shelves were carved with mouths: open jaws, the jaws of monsters and trolls.
Mr. Stratton’s immense bulk was tightly wrapped in yet another dark suit, with vest and jacket and silk scarf. Mr. Rowwells was his likeness: younger, not so corpulent, but creepily similar. The hag chaperon stood in a corner, as if made for corners.
She was the one Annie most didn’t want to think about. Aunt Ada was wreckage, and yet also power.
The police were apologetic and unsure. Next to Mr. Rowwells and Mr. Stratton, they were thin and pale and badly dressed. Mr. Stratton had done everything in his power to intimidate them, and he had done well, but he had not entirely succeeded. They had returned.
Mr. Rowwells tamped his pipe. A faint scent of apples and autumn came from the tobacco. His face was overweight: drooping jowls and heavy hanging eyelids. How could Harriett want to get near him, let alone get married?
I’m playing games, thought Annie, but this is Harriett’s life.
She tried to figure out how much of this was a game, and how much was real. Swiftly and sickeningly, it went all too real.
“That’s her!” Mr. Rowwells jabbed a thick fat finger at Annie. His fleshy lips pulled back from his teeth and his nicotine-stained fingers spread to grab her. The heavy lids peeled back from bulging eyes. “She’s the one who pushed Matthew!” he shouted. “I saw her!” His eyes were like the stair gargoyles, bloodstained.
The room tilted and fell beneath Annie’s feet.
Elegantly costumed people rotated like dressed mannequins, and the faces locked eyes on her.
What do they see? Do they see the witch that Bridget saw? Will they hang me? How do I explain traveling through time?
“Get her!” shouted Mr. Rowwells.
They advanced like a lynch mob.
Her own long skirt was eager to trip her. It grabbed her ankles so they didn’t have to. She seized the cloth in her hands and whipped around to race out of the library, but Strat hung onto her. She ripped herself free of him. I wasn’t sent to make things right, I was sent to take the blame. I fell through time in order to be punished for a murder I didn’t commit.
Annie flew through the Great Hall, slipping on the black and white squares. Her frenzy was carrying her faster than theirs, or perhaps they did not dream that a lady could conduct herself like this. They were shouting, but not running. Strat was close behind but she made it out the door.
She took a desperate look toward the village, to see if 1995 lay there, with its bridges and turnpikes and cars.
It didn’t.
Being outside won’t save me, she thought. Only time will save me. But I don’t know how I got here, so I don’t know how to go back.
She ran.
Strat ran after her.
“Annie! Miss Lockwood! Stop!”
She ducked through an opening in the stone walls surrounding the garden. If she remembered it right from childhood picnics, there should be a path to the stables.
Strat caught up. He wrapped both arms around her, like a prison.
But it was not simply a path to the stables. It was a path through time. She
had been running the right way.
She could hear the noise of Strat’s century, the cries of the household, the whinny of a horse, but she could also hear her own. Radios and the honk of a horn and the grinding of combustion engines.
Although it had never happened to her before, and possibly never happened to anyone else before, she knew that one step forward and she would be gone.
Strat’s embrace softened. He too wore morning dress, as if for a senior prom: black suit, white shirt, the cut of his trousers and the fall of his hair from his century and not hers. Oh, how she adored him!
I love him. How could I have thought he was a toy? He’s so wonderfully real. I’m the one who isn’t real!
“I love you,” said Strat.
Words half formed and were half there, just as she was now half formed and half there. I want to stay, she tried to tell him, I love you, but I don’t want to be hung for somebody’s murder! Last night, Strat, you even asked if I could get out if I had to. I have to, Strat.
She tried to kiss him, but she possessed no muscles. She was on both sides of time, and on neither.
“Please,” whispered Strat. “Choose me.”
Was that true? Was it her choice? Had she chosen to travel? Or had it been chosen for her?
I will always choose you! she cried.
But choice was not hers after all. He was going, or she was going, whichever way time spun.
The tunnel of time swallowed her.
“It wasn’t you he was pointing at!” yelled Strat. His words blew from his mouth like wind. “It was the maid! It was Bridget! Just a fight between servants!”
I love you, Strat, she cried, but there was no sound, for she wasn’t there anymore.
Strat threw all her names after her, as if one would surely catch and hold. “Stay, Annie! Anna Sophia! Miss Lockwood!”
A nightmare of history flew through her head and shot past her eyes.
Strat cried out once more, but she could not quite hear him, and the sound turned into quarreling seagulls and there she was, on a bright and beautiful morning, alone on the shabby grounds of a teetering old building soon to be torn down.
CHAPTER 8
Bodies surrounded Bridget, each tightly cased in heavy waistcoats or rigid corsets. Each chest filled with air and fury and took up more space and pressed harder against her. Beyond the flesh and cloth, the jaws of leering gargoyles gaped back. The bodies closed in on her like a living noose. She clung to her apron as if it could protect her life the way it protected her dress. “No,” sobbed Bridget. “I never. It isn’t true! May Jesus, Mary and Joseph—”
“Don’t start with your Catholic noises, miss,” said Mr. Stratton senior. He loomed over her, his great girth in its satiny waistcoat brushing against her white apron.
Bridget’s head pounded. She could not even begin to think about Miss Lockwood and young Mr. Stratton racing out of the house like hound dogs. “But, sir, Mr. Rowwells is not telling the truth. He could not have seen me push Matthew. I did no such thing! Why would I ever?”
“Ah, but I think you would, Bridget,” said Walker Walkley, with his fine mouth and sweet eyes. He had not joined the living noose, but stood like a portrait of himself, casually displayed against the scarlet leather bindings of a long row of books. “When you followed me into my room last night, Bridget, and tried to force your affections upon me, and when I, a gentleman, refused you, did you not spit upon me? Did you not threaten me? Did you not say that if you had a chance, you would shove me down the stairs like Matthew?”
Everybody in the room gasped, a chorus of horror.
“I spit on you,” said Bridget, “because you—”
“A threat, I may point out,” said Walker Walkley smoothly, talking now to the police, so that nobody listened to the end of Bridget’s sentence, “only hours after Matthew was found dead on the stairs.”
Aunt Ada smiled inside her toothless mouth. Her lips folded down like pillowcases. “Wicked, shameless, lying creature,” said Ada. “You killed Matthew!” Ada stepped away from Bridget. As if it were a dance step—perhaps the dance to a hanging—all the ladies and gentlemen stepped back. “To think, Hiram,” said Ada, “that after she killed Matthew, she attended to Miss Devonny!”
“I trusted my daughter in her sleep to a murderer,” said Hiram Stratton. He turned to the police. “Thank you for coming. I was incorrect to try to dissuade you from your duty. I am most grateful for your persistence. Had you not returned for more questions, I should never have realized what kind of person I was harboring on my staff.”
An officer on each side of her gripped her arms above the elbow, tightly, as if she were some sort of animal about to be branded.
“Miss Devonny,” whispered Bridget. “Please. You know I didn’t.” Had not Bridget waited on Miss Devonny all these months? Brushed her hair, tended her in her bath, told her stories of Ireland, listened to Devonny’s stories of stepmothers?
But Miss Devonny did not answer. In fact, she turned her face from Bridget’s, believing that what she did not see, she need not think about. Devonny would take the word of a gentleman before she ever considered the word of a serving girl.
I have no friends, thought Bridget. And Jeb … will he come to the aid of an Irish Catholic accused of murder?
“Take her away,” said Mr. Stratton to the police.
“No!” shrieked Bridget. “Miss Devonny! You know I wouldn’t do any such thing! Don’t let them say things like this about me! It was Mr. Walkley who tried to yank my dress right off!”
“It just goes to show,” said Mr. Stratton, mildly, for Bridget was no longer of consequence, “that no immigrant can be trusted. We shouldn’t have accepted that Statue of Liberty, with that sentimental poem about taking in the huddled masses. They’re nothing but murderers carrying disease.”
Walker Walkley put his arms around Devonny, turning her head gently against his chest, to protect her from the sight.
“Thank goodness my fiancée is not here,” said Mr. Rowwells. “I demand that there be no discussion of this in front of Miss Harriett. She is too delicate to be apprised of the fact that the very maid who attended her is a murderess.”
The police removed Bridget as they might remove a roadblock; she was a thing. No one in the library thought of her again. The question now was far greater than Bridget or Matthew. The question now was money. Harriett’s money.
“Fiancée?” said Mr. Stratton dangerously. “What are you talking about, Rowwells? Where is my son? Ada, pry him away from that crazy girl and get him in here. You are not, Mr. Rowwells, affianced to Harriett Ranleigh.”
Mortar had fallen from the stone pillar that once supported the porte cochere. Rotted shingles had peeled away and paint was long gone from the trim. Every window was boarded and a thick chain sealed the great doors.
The air felt empty, as if Annie were alone in the world. Sounds were faint, as if they had happened earlier, and were only echoes.
She shivered in the damp crawling shade of the Mansion. In the turnaround lay hamburger wrappers, soda cans and an old bent beach chair, its vinyl straps torn and flapping. Annie’s century at its ugliest.
How could a thing so vivid have been only in her mind, nothing but electrical charges gone wild? Could Strat have been just a twitch of her eyelid in sleep?
No, she thought, he was Strat, my Strat, and I have lost him. Forever. If it is 1995, then he is dead. To me and to the world.
She fell kneeling onto the grass and the one syllable of his name seemed to tear out of her throat with enough force to cross time. Strat!
Perhaps the syllable did, but Annie didn’t.
And love. Love couldn’t cross time either. Love was gone. Only loss remained.
She sobbed, but tears have never changed history.
Annie Lockwood got on her bike.
It had not gone a hundred years with her. Nothing had gone a hundred years with her. Because she hadn’t gone a hundred years. Of course it had been a dream; w
hat else could time travel be but a dream?
She felt thick and heavy and stupid.
It was hard to sit on the bike, hard to find the pedals. At the top of the steep drive, she waited for the horses, but of course there was neither horse nor carriage. Against the old stone walls, leaves were mounded in rotting piles, for the gardeners who had swept were long gone.
She tightened her hands on the brakes and went slowly down the Great Hill. No golf course at the bottom, but picnic grounds: a hundred wooden tables spread unevenly over high meadowy grass.
Annie pushed her feet down alternately. It seemed like a very foreign skill, one that she had seen, but never done herself. The same, but oh, so different road she and Strat had followed. When? A hundred years ago? Hours ago? Or not at all?
She rode away from the silence and death of the old Mansion, into the racket and life of the public beach.
Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people were enjoying the Stratton estate on this hot and sunny day in June. Bathing suits and Bermuda shorts, beach towels and suntan lotion, Cokes and bologna sandwiches. Lifeguards and tennis courts and hot dog concessions. Station wagons and BMWs and Jeeps and convertibles.
Her ears were filled by rushing noise, waterfalls in her head, as if she had swum too long underwater.
Where did time go, when you traveled down it?
Was it today or tomorrow? Should she ask? Excuse me, is this the day school ended, or the day after? I need to know if time went on without me or just sat here waiting for me to get back.
Annie Lockwood pedaled on, as exhausted as if she had traveled a hundred years.
“And did you,” said Mr. Stratton, “plight your troth to Mr. Rowwells?”
How yellow he seemed, his teeth tobacco-stained and his face jaundiced. His beard bristled at Harriett, and the tips of his huge mustache sagged into the words he spat at her. He was her guardian, the one who protected her from life, but it was not Harriett’s welfare he cared about; it was his.
The Time Travelers: Volume One Page 9
