Aching for Always

by Gwyn Cready

  He could hear the faint sound of a reply.

  “I’m with him,” she said, and the word passed between them like a secret.

  He didn’t know what Diane said next, but a clearly distressed Joss said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” She turned her back to him, but he could hear nonetheless. “Listen, I need you to cover for me. Can you sneak out without anyone seeing you? If you can, then call Rogan once you’re in your car and say I’m sick and spending the night with you. Oh, Christ, you can’t call him! I have his phone. You’ll have to figure it out. Maybe call the History Center and leave a message. Okay, can you do that?”

  She listened for a moment.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to go directly to the airport tomorrow evening for the trade show, so whatever you choose for my illness, don’t make it so bad that I’d miss that.”

  “Thank you,” she said after another pause. “I owe you—big-time.”

  She pressed the button and slipped the communicator into her pocket. Her silence unnerved him. He could guess what she’d led her friend to believe. An unpleasant lie for a bride to sign her name to. In truth, he was no better than Rogan with that ungentlemanly portrait. Hugh had exposed Joss every bit as cruelly.

  “I’m sorry you had to do that. Does she think . . .?”

  “It doesn’t matter what she thinks,” Joss said coolly. “I’ll tell her the truth when we get back.”

  He doubted Joss would tell her this truth—the truth about what would happen once they reached the time passage.

  When they passed Twelfth Street, Hugh turned to take one last look at the narrow balcony where he and Joss had kissed. The space was dark, awash in the shadows of the night. Then the blond head of a man appeared and looked directly at him.

  Hugh pulled Joss quickly across the street and out of view. He told himself he was imagining it. From that distance in the dark, they couldn’t have been seen. But the sooner they reached the alleyway, the better.

  “Do you see that?” She pointed toward a squat black bridge toward the north.

  “Aye.”

  “That is where Meriwether Lewis pushed off with the boats he’d had made here in Pittsburgh for the expedition.”

  “Intriguing. Men don’t usually push boats off bridges.”

  The quip had served its purpose. The set of her mouth loosened.

  “I meant where the bridge now stands. The boats were called pirogues, I think.”

  “Another fifth-grade report?” He caught her hand and hurried her under the overpass that led to Eleventh Street.

  “Eighth,” she said. “From here he sailed to Saint Louis, where he and Clark began their official journey.”

  “Ah.” Hugh hoped he nodded in what appeared to be an appreciative way, as he had not the least idea what she was talking about. He wondered if Rogan would follow them and if Fiona and Nathaniel had secured the doors of the tailor shop.

  “Lewis and Clark?” she said, as if prompting him to understand. Evidently, his nod had not been appreciative enough.

  “Aye. The expedition. Remarkable.”

  “You have no idea whom I’m talking about.”

  “I do.”

  “Do British schools not cover American history?”

  “Is there such a thing?” He laughed, then caught himself, but it was too late.

  She stopped. An odd mixture of fear and repulsion had come over her face. “Who are Lewis and Clark?”

  He shifted. “I didn’t study them.”

  “George Washington?”

  He clenched his jaw.

  “Benjamin Franklin? Abraham Lincoln? Henry David Thoreau?”

  He didn’t reply. He couldn’t.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Keep moving. I doubt you will credit the truth.”

  “Try me.”

  “In time.” He quickened their pace. They had just passed Tenth when she said in a low voice, “Oh, Christ, it’s Louis.”

  “Joss!” the man called, and Hugh sped up, passing his companion as if the two of them were strangers. He assumed it was a man with whom she worked, and Hugh did not want her to be compromised by being seen with him.

  Joss slowed to talk to the man, and Hugh turned the corner and stopped, keeping her just within his field of vision.

  “She’s inside,” he could hear Louis say. “Do you have a minute to be introduced?”

  “I-I—”

  She met Hugh’s eyes and he released her with a nod. He didn’t like to let her go, even for a moment, but he didn’t want to raise Louis’s suspicions, either. As she slipped into a public house, he jogged to the opposite corner to watch.

  Hugh paced, looking toward the windows, where he could see Joss, and up the cross street. The quiet of the street was making him nervous. He crossed back and walked toward Tenth. When he got to the corner, he ran into Reynolds.

  “Good evening.” A cold chill ran up Hugh’s spine. He had a knife, but had not thought to bring a pistol.

  “Evening.”

  There was a sheen of perspiration on the man’s face. Hugh had seen it before, on men in their first battles, and he did not like the look of it. He wished he knew whether Reynolds had seen Joss go into the public house.

  The man’s hand went to his coat, and Hugh nearly fell upon him. But Reynolds did nothing more than bury his hand in a patch of green bulging from the pocket.

  “Joss is ill,” Reynolds said.

  “I’m sorry to hear it. The excitement of matrimony mixed with an abundance of food and wine, no doubt.” Hugh smiled with a bonhomie he did not feel. “Will you be at the ceremony?”

  “No, I cannot. I will be out of the country. I shall have to give you my congratulations here.” Hugh extended his hand.

  Reynolds took it hesitantly. “Thank you.”

  “Take care of her. You’re very lucky.”

  The hand returned to its lump of green. Hugh wondered if Reynolds had a pistol hidden there and felt sweat break out on his back. Reynolds appeared to be waiting—for what, Hugh was uncertain, but he hoped Joss did not choose this moment to appear.

  “Good to see you,” Hugh said. “Thank you for an enjoyable evening.”

  Reynolds nodded. Hugh waited until he started walking, then made his way up Tenth, stopping as soon as he rounded the corner. He listened for a beat or two, turned, then watched Rogan until he disappeared at the next street. Then Hugh flew back to the public house, nearly bowling Joss over as she stepped outside.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Quiet. Don’t say a word. Stay in front of me.” He directed her back toward Tenth, up to Liberty and, after he’d taken a look down the street, toward the lower entrance to the alleyway.

  Hugh heard footsteps approaching quickly behind them. “Go to the shop,” he said sharply and slowed as she went ahead. He stole a glance over his shoulder and got only a fleeting glimpse of a man a block away with a green stocking cap over his head.

  Hugh began to jog to catch up with Joss, who was turning into the alley. Hurry.

  He felt a flick, like the sting of a bee, on his shoulder. He burst into a run as searing pain shot down his arm. Another pop, and his feet tangled. He hit the stone walkway.

  Joss turned. “Hugh!”

  He tried to claw himself upward, but it was nearly impossible with only one working arm, and the man was striding purposefully closer.

  “Go!” Hugh croaked, and pulled himself to his feet. “Go!”

  But she ran toward him. She hadn’t connected the man to Hugh’s fall, and with each step she took, Hugh waited for a pistol shot to pierce the easy target of that pale silk.

  He made it to his feet just as she reached him.

  “Oh my God, you’re bleeding!” She wrapped his good arm around her shoulder and gazed around wildly. “Who? Who?”

  “Run,” he said. “We must run.”

  Together they flew toward the narrow path.

  “There!” he cried. �
�Across the way, in the alcove, under the vaulted ceiling!” He felt the vibrations as they drew near, sending currents through his already quaking legs. They ran through the perimeter, and the familiar charge nearly jerked him off his feet. He wondered if she’d be afraid. He wondered if she’d remember. With the ground shaking hard and sparks flying around them, he propelled her toward the shadows. The evening exploded with the power of a broadside, and he pulled her hand against him, his shoulder howling with pain, and held his breath.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Her dark, handsome husband left, and the mapmaker missed him deeply, but in the years that followed she worked on her maps and raised her princess-daughter until she was as beautiful as the mapmaker herself. She taught her daughter to make maps, too, maps as beautiful as the ones she herself made.

  —The Tale of the Beautiful Mapmaker

  THE NORTH ATLANTIC, THREE HUNDRED MILES OFF

  THE COAST OF SCOTLAND, 1706

  Joss heard the thump of a melon in the dark, and winced in pain as her skin tore against wet, cold rock. Hugh’s arms fell limply away from her sides, and he began to buckle.

  She grabbed him, but could only manage to ease his slide to the ground. Her heart was pounding, and she didn’t know where she was or what they’d gone through. The ringing in her ears was deafening, and in the inky black beyond the immediate darkness around them she saw stars falling—no, they were sparks—and was stunned to hear the roar of ocean beyond.

  They weren’t in the alley. They weren’t in Pittsburgh.

  She stumbled over him awkwardly, trying to arrange herself so she could get ahold of his arms and drag him with her.

  When she got through the narrow opening into the open air, icicles of spray beat at her relentlessly and the wind howled. She grabbed him and pulled him free of the opening. He made no noise, which terrified her. With his head and shoulders clear of the passage, she could examine his face in the flickering light of the sparks. Blood ran from his forehead into his ears and neck, and a far more alarming patch of crimson covered his chest.

  “Hugh,” she said, shaking him. “Hugh.”

  She ran her hands over his chest and shoulder. She couldn’t see a wound in the dark and didn’t know how he’d been hurt. Another shower of sparks illuminated the ugly dark hole. His skin was clammy, and her fingers went to his neck for a pulse. She felt nothing.

  “Hugh!”

  He made a low, almost inaudible grunt, and a rush of relief washed over her.

  “I think you were shot. What happened?”

  He mumbled something, but the wind’s roar obliterated it. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Joss could see they were on a rock over the sea. She pulled off the coat Hugh had given her and laid it over him.

  The next instant a wave smacked her to the rock. The salt stung her nose. She was terrified of water. Choking, she struggled to her knees and crawled back to Hugh, who was snorting. She was soaked now and freezing, but she found the coat and brought the heavy wool across his chest. The water had cleared the blood from his face, but new rivulets snaked their way across his wet skin.

  “Ship,” he said hoarsely, and groaned again.

  “What?”

  “Ship. Do you see one?”

  She stumbled to her feet. There was nothing but black beyond the dying sparks. She shouted, “Hello!” but her voice was lost in the wind. “Hello!” she shouted again, but received no response. She had the oddest flash of déjà vu, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.

  “No ship,” she said. “Where are we?” But his eyes were closed again, and her heart jumped into her throat. “Hugh? Hugh!”

  His lids flickered open, then closed. “The other side. Try the other side.”

  She was afraid to leave him, afraid he’d be swept away by a wave. How had they gone from an alley in Pittsburgh to a rock in the sea? Her mind raced through a dozen options, but none of them made sense.

  She spotted a metal spike near the base of the cave they’d emerged from. It had a circle at the top, almost like a large iron needle. She pulled it. It held. What its use was, she did not know, but it didn’t matter. It would serve her purpose.

  She reached for his belt.

  After she’d loosened it and pulled it free, she threaded it through the opening in the spike and tightly around his ankle. As an anchor against the waves, it wouldn’t hold forever and probably ought to have been used around his chest instead, but it would do for a moment.

  By “the other side,” she assumed he meant the other side of the peaked cave that loomed over the small patch of rock on which they were situated.

  She made her way across the vibrating rock. On her fourth step the same weird buzz she’d felt in the alley hit her, and the crazy slide show of images began again: Hugh falling, Fiona in her mile-high stilettos, Di with the baby seat on her arm and Rogan—no, not Rogan. It was a man the size and shape of her fiancé, but he wore a stocking cap and gazed at her from the end of the alley.

  “Stop it,” Hugh croaked.

  She jumped. “What?”

  “Keep moving. We need the ship. Try the other side.”

  She flattened herself against the cave’s sloping side and used her foot to feel the way forward. When a wall of water sprayed upward, she jerked and nearly lost her hold. The back edge of the cave was directly over the water. The sight of it terrified her. She could not convince her feet to move. She clung to the freezing rock and felt like crying.

  Then she thought of Hugh, and the blood on his shirt. He needed help—help she couldn’t give.

  With Herculean effort, she turned her head so that she was looking out to sea.

  She tried to ignore the waves crashing at her feet and the noise of the wind, and scanned the place where the dark haze met light, which she assumed was the horizon. She heard something above the roar. Was it Hugh? Was he calling out for her? She strained to catch the sound, but whatever it was disappeared.

  A flash of white appeared on the water, then disappeared. She tried to keep her eyes on the spot. Was it a ship? It appeared again, paired with another.

  “Here!” she yelled. “Here!”

  The patches grew larger. It was coming closer. It was a ship!

  “We’re here!” she screamed, but there was no return call. And the sails, though still moving, had stopped growing larger. The ship had turned. She could see the masts clearly now, though she couldn’t imagine how a masted ship stayed upright on these waves. She was going to lose them.

  “Here!”

  What could she do? She had no matches, no wood—no way to build a fire. If she only had a lighter. Then it struck her.

  She shoved her hand in her pocket, hoping the water hadn’t shorted them out.

  She pulled out her phone and Rogan’s. She tried his first. It was dead. She threw it out to sea.

  Please, please, please.

  She pressed the button on hers. A light flickered and went out. She tried again. Nothing. She tried again. It turned on!

  She moved the slider carefully with her thumb and delicately paged through her apps to find what she was looking for: a flashlight. She flicked it on, picked strobe and held it out to sea.

  The light blinked its quick, urgent glow. “Help!” she cried. “We’re here!”

  She braced herself against the rock and waved the phone. She knew it was small, but maybe if she made broad strokes with her arm . . .

  “Ahoy!” came a distant voice.

  “Ahoy!” she shouted. “Ahoy!”

  “Stay there! We’re coming.”

  She edged back, an inch at a time, and when she had the rock firm under her feet again, she ran to Hugh. “They’re coming!” she cried.

  He didn’t move.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Joss had insisted Hugh be transported first, and now she stood shivering in the cold, despite the blanket around her shoulders, watching the sailors attach his litter to the rigged pulley line. Cold and dizzy, she was dreading her own moment of tran
sport and unnerved by the trousers and tailcoats the officers wore. She was deeply concerned about Hugh.

  “Will he be all right?”

  A lieutenant named Roark, a portly man with closely cut red hair who had followed the first sailor over to the island, gave her a steely look and said in an English accent very much like Hugh’s, “I shouldn’t worry too much. The ship’s surgeon is a fine one. Trained in Paris.” Despite Roark’s words, however, there was a look of concern on his face.

  “Where are we, exactly?” she asked.

  It seemed a simple enough question—and far simpler than the next she would ask—but it was as if a veil had dropped over the lieutenant’s ruddy face.

  “The North Atlantic, m’um.”

  She was at sea, hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh. It was more than hard to fathom; it was impossible. “And w-when?”

  He paused. “November eleventh.”

  “In what year?”

  He shouted to the men who were unintentionally rocking Hugh’s litter as they adjusted the pulley. “Damn you! ’Tis not a crate of cabbages you’re transporting there, for the love of Hades.” Then he gave her a careful look. “For that I’m afraid you’ll have to wait to ask the captain.”

  The year’s a secret? What was this?

  “Then would you mind,” she said, “telling me where I could find him.”

  Did she detect a smile on his face? “That, too, will have to wait. Come, let us get you safely lodged in your quarters.”

  There was an undercurrent in the words “safely lodged” that made her distinctly uneasy.

  “I have a phone, you know,” she said, indignant, and held it up.

  Which was a mistake, for Roark lifted it from her hand. “That, I’m afraid, will have to be confiscated.” He slipped it into his pocket.

  While she alternately fumed and shivered, the rigged litter delivered Hugh to the ship and returned, not as a litter, but as a seat fashioned out of woven ropes. Still irritated, she refused Roark’s offer of a hand as she threaded her legs into it. Closing her eyes, she tried to beat back her growing panic. If she let it, the fear would paralyze her. She gasped as the seat lifted into the air, swinging wildly in the wind. She wished Hugh was there to reassure her, then kicked herself for worrying about herself when she should have been worrying about him.