by Amanda James
‘What do you mean, well? Am I ill? What happened, John? What happened at the church when I disappeared … how did you explain it to everyone?’ Sarah’s voice shook and she tried to sit up.
John felt his heart sink. She was obviously not out of the woods yet. ‘Hey, relax, lie down, sweetheart,’ he said, placing his hands on her shoulders. The heat of her body through the thin night shirt told him that she probably did still have a fever, and now she was rabbiting about disappearing … still delirious … unless … His dad’s words from earlier gave him a quick kick in the gut. He looked into Sarah’s worried blue eyes almost turquoise in the lamp light, her damp golden hair clinging to her hot cheeks, and he wondered how to broach the possibility that she had been on a time trip without alarming her if she hadn’t. But then she solved that problem for him.
‘John? For goodness sake, say something. How did you explain my disappearance, and how long was I in 1939?’
Bloody hell! His dad had been right then. ‘You were in 1939? What … on a mission?’ The thumping of his heart in his ears threatened to drown out Sarah’s answer as he wondered about the explanation as to why it had happened … the ‘penny dropping’ part of his dad’s story.
‘Well, not exactly, as it turned out.’ Sarah sat up then, ignoring his protests. ‘But I definitely went back in time.’ She shoved her damp hair impatiently from her face and frowned at him. ‘Where else did you think I’d gone when I suddenly disappeared at the altar, John?’
There was no dodging round this one. She’d be shocked, but hey ho. John released a sigh, took her hand and said, ‘You didn’t disappear, sweetheart. You fainted with a fever.’
A few hours later John watched the dawn light tease pale fingers through the curtain and traced his own across Sarah’s cheek, her breath on his bare chest deep and regular in sleep. He shut eyes that felt like someone had been sandpapering them and shifted his position slightly. What a bloody night. He’d only managed a few winks and not for the right reasons. It should have been champagne, celebration and passionate lovemaking, but what it had been was worry, fever, tales of Ratchet and 1939, all finished off with tears from Sarah when she realised they weren’t legally married. Great.
Still, Sarah was definitely less feverish and had calmed down when John had explained that it had happened to some other Stitch in the past according to his dad. He had just shrugged his shoulders when she’d asked him why though. It wasn’t his place to pass on wild theories that might be just a load of bunkum anyway. Besides, she’d had enough shocks for one day. Tomorrow was Sunday. He checked himself, no … it was tomorrow already. They would have a nice day recovering, just the two of them. If Sarah felt up to it, they might even see the basque put in an appearance. Don’t get ahead of yourself, John. She’s just getting over this flu or whatever the hell it is. He smiled to himself and tried to push away the feeling that Sarah’s hot body – in every sense of the word – pressed against him was giving him. As soon as she woke up he’d make her a lovely breakfast and then they’d hare down to the church and sign the marriage certificate. By Tuesday afternoon they would be on a plane to New York.
The thought that some of their plans could be salvaged and the rhythmic sound of Sarah’s breathing began to relax him. Perhaps sleep might come at last. Just as he was slipping into oblivion, Sarah’s snoring grew louder and seemed to echo around the room like thunder. Funny, she never usually snored at that volume. Forcing his weary eyes open again he looked down at her and realised that she was still breathing deeply and sleeping soundly, but she wasn’t snoring. Then who the bloody hell was? The snoring grew louder and louder and seemed to be coming from the built-in wardrobes along the far wall.
With a certain amount of trepidation and a thumping heart, John gently rolled Sarah onto her side and slipped out of bed. Tiptoeing nearer to the wardrobe he hoped that his ears were deceiving him and the noise would turn out to be a rattling floorboard or something. It had been really windy lately and perhaps with the wind coming down the chimney and … yeah right. You have a screw loose if you think that noise is a floorboard, John. There was no mistaking it. A snore was a snore and this one was loud enough to shatter the windows.
Right, a weapon of some description. Some old tramp had probably sneaked in while they were at the church. He had seen a few lately walking the country lanes around the house and his market garden. The chancer must have scampered in here when they came back. John had rarely been out of the room since, so there had been no time for him to make his escape. He swallowed his nerves and took a deep breath. He wouldn’t really need a weapon, would he? The guy was probably harmless. Ah, yes, John, but he might try and attack when he’s rudely awakened.
The heavy wooden tea tray that he’d brought Sarah’s water jug and glass upstairs on, sat on the floor just next to the wardrobe. John felt more prepared as his fingers closed around the handle and felt the solid weight as he lifted it above his head. Right, let’s see who the devil’s in there.
John hooked his fingers into the groove of the sliding door and pulled hard. The door wheeled smoothly open and then stuck as it met a barrier. The barrier, huddled in the corner with its bony knee against the wardrobe door, stopped snoring opened its eyes which were on a level with John’s naked lower half, travelled up to the raised tea tray in his hand and let out a blood-curdling scream.
John nearly did the same as he scanned the dishevelled creature in front of him. The angular limbs – which at the moment were flailing like a spider cut from its silken thread – the haystack hair, the mole on its top lip … oh, no. His gut did a somersault. It couldn’t be, could it?
‘Ratchet?’ The creature stopped flailing and stared fixedly at his groin with something akin to curiosity and wonder.
John hurriedly covered himself with the tea tray and flushed the colour of beetroot. Damn, how could he have neglected to put on his pants?
A sleepy and mumbled, ‘John, I thought I heard screaming … or was I dreaming,’ came from the bed behind him. Sarah then yawned long and loud. ‘John?’
When he didn’t answer he heard her pad across the floor to stand behind him. She slipped her arms around his shoulders and kissed his neck. ‘John, what are you doing standing looking in the ward—’ She had peeped over his shoulder and he felt her body tense against his. ‘Oh my God. Veronica Ratchet!’
Chapter Five
Veronica Ratchet, large as life, sat on the edge of Sarah and John’s bed, her arms wrapped protectively around her body, rocking to and fro, her eyes round with shock. Sarah collapsed into her rocking chair and followed suit, her brain struggling, but failing, to comprehend the fact that Veronica had somehow left 1939 and had ended up snoring in her wardrobe.
John started to back out of the room, the tea tray covering his modesty. ‘Now, just try to calm yourselves,’ he muttered, scooping up his clothes and looking far from calm himself. ‘Take a few deep breaths and I’ll be back as soon as I have got dressed … okay?’ He shot them a weak smile and closed the bathroom door behind him.
Sarah rolled her eyes. Keep calm? How the hell was she supposed to do that?
Veronica took a few deep breaths and then some more. Her face grew pink and Sarah feared she was about to hyperventilate.
‘Right, that’s enough, Veronica. Just breath normally now.’
‘Normally? How can I?’ she wailed. ‘Not only do I find myself caught up in this time travel nightmare, but I have just been rudely awakened to find a man’s … p-privates, inches from my face!’
If the situation wasn’t so awful, Sarah would have laughed out loud at the horrified expression on Ratchet’s face. A fleeting thought danced across her frazzled mind. Perhaps the poor woman hadn’t seen a man’s privates before. She had to have, surely. She must be at least forty … God, get a grip and calm the woman.
‘I know that must have been a shock, but please try.’ Sarah stopped rocking, it was making her feel seasick. ‘And tell me how the hell you ended up here.’
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‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Veronica moaned. She stopped rocking too and raked her fingers through her haystack. ‘You started to fade away when you were sitting … right there at my kitchen table. And that really scared me. I realised I couldn’t go through with this damned stitching lark, so I lunged out to grab you by the arm to tell you I’d changed my mind, but then I landed with a thud here on your bedroom floor. You were in bed just rousing from sleep and me … I was in this strange house.’ Veronica looked wide-eyed around the room as if she expected the walls to close in.
Sarah sighed. That’s what the heavy feeling in her right arm had been. Bloody Ratchet hitching a ride through time. And the bump John heard, and assumed Sarah had fallen out of bed, was Ratchet landing. ‘Okay, but why did you go to sleep in my damned wardrobe? Not the logical thing to do, was it?’
Veronica shot her a look that could have felled a bull elephant, her eyes beading to black. ‘Logical, she says. How in the name of all that is holy do you behave logically in these situations?’ She snorted. ‘I pulled myself up from the floor but then a man – who I later realised was your husband – ran up here a few minutes later calling your name. I was so scared I hid in the wardrobe!’
‘Okay, calm down, I realise this must be very strange for you—’
‘Strange … my God, that doesn’t even begin to describe what I am … what I am … bloody feeling! See, I have been driven to curse and I never do that.’ A flush of shame crept up her neck.
‘Hey, sometimes a curse is the only way forward. It stops your head exploding.’ Sarah tried a bright smile and then realised by Ratchet’s saucer eyes and open mouth that she thought she was serious. ‘That was a joke. We don’t have people with exploding heads in the twenty-first century … well, not as far as I know.’
‘Twenty-first …’ Veronica’s hand fluttered to her mouth and she fell silent.
‘Yes, but don’t think about that for the moment or your head might …’ Sarah began and then giggled nervously. ‘Sorry. So you were in the wardrobe, John came in, I woke up and then what, you went to sleep?’
‘Not right away. I heard you talking about going back in time and what happened to your wedding and everything. I stuck my fingers in my ears, just squeezed my eyes shut and told myself this was some awful nightmare. I suppose the shock of it all sent me to sleep.’
Sarah thought that was probably it. Veronica’s brain must have shut down as a defence mechanism. Poor woman must have been in a terrible state. And Sarah right at this minute wasn’t far behind. How on earth was Veronica able to travel to the future? As far as Sarah knew Stitches only went to the past. Perhaps John would know. And thinking of John … he had been in the bathroom an awful long time.
On cue in he came. He was dressed and looking less alarmed. Sarah noticed he avoided eye contact, though in fact he was wearing his special evasive Needler face, or ENF as she called it. She remembered this face very well from the early days in their relationship when she’d tried to prise more information out of him about the way time travel and the stitching and needling worked. The powers that be were very secretive and only shared a certain amount of information at a time.
‘So, what do you think has happened, John? Why has everything gone haywire?’
John’s emerald green eyes danced over Veronica’s hair and he murmured, ‘Eh, what do you mean, everything gone haystack?’
Veronica patted her hair and blushed.
‘I said haywire.’
John rubbed his knuckles over his dark stubble and sat down on the other side of the bed apparently lost in thought. Presently he sighed and said, ‘Not entirely sure but I had an email to my phone just now in the bathroom. Seems like Veronica held on to you for grim death, so she arrived back here with you.’
‘The Spindly Ones sent you an email to tell us something that we already knew?’ Sarah felt her temper turn up from flickering flame to blowtorch mode. John was deffo hiding something. ‘They must have said more than that!’
John nodded and held up both of his hands. ‘Okay, no need to get angry. They said we had to try to stay calm … and that this kind of thing has happened once or twice before. They suggested that if Veronica just sits quietly for a few hours and goes to sleep she will find herself back at home in no time,’ John finished, flashing her a too bright smile and a manic stare.
‘Okay, what exactly is “this kind of thing”? As far as I know Stitches only go back in time, not forward.’ Sarah noted that Veronica was beginning to hyperventilate again. ‘Veronica, just stay calm, we’ll get to the bottom of this email in a minute if John just tells the truth.’ She looked pointedly at her husband.
Veronica shook her head and gave a shuddering sigh. ‘What is this email thing? I don’t know what you are both talking about. I just want to go home like John said.’
Of course she didn’t know what a bloody email was. Sarah glanced at her poor bewildered face and her heart went out to her. ‘Sorry, Veronica. It is like a jazzed up version of a telegram which is sent to a phone or a compu—’ Sarah rolled her eyes internally. ‘The Spindly Ones communicate to us, well to John, by it.’ She could see that her words were making no sense and why would they? ‘But never mind all that, I am sure you will be home very shortly.’
‘I am telling the truth.’ John pouted his sensuous lips and knitted his dark eyebrows together making Sarah want to kiss him, despite the situation. Why did he always have to look so damned sexy?
‘But not all of it. What actually happened today … yesterday or whenever it was?’
John stood up and went to the window and turned his back giving both women a nice view of his firm bum and long legs in his tight blue jeans and the contours of his muscular back visible through the thin white T-shirt. ‘It is called Cross Stitch, apparently. Two or more Stitches get thrown together, sometimes because one of them needs to pass the time, sometimes … well, nobody really knows.’
Not this old chestnut again, Sarah thought. Back to, we don’t know, or it is not known. She looked at Veronica’s disgruntled expression and thought about how she’d behaved back in 1939. Cross Stitch was an apt description for her.
‘Well, in the end, Veronica didn’t pass the time, did she? She decided she’d go through with it.’ Sarah gave Veronica a withering look. ‘Well, at first anyway. And have you ever known Stitches travelling to the future?’
John turned around and shrugged. ‘Not me personally, but I have heard of it.’ He looked at the floor to avoid Sarah’s eye. ‘Look, like I said, it was a mix-up. A Cross Stitch and what happens now is that Veronica goes back in the wardrobe, goes to sleep and then she should wake up back in her own time.’
‘What, just like that?’
‘Yep. That’s what the email said.’
‘Why do I have to go in the wardrobe to sleep?’ Veronica asked pouting, but unlike John not looking in the least bit sexy. ‘I want to go home as soon as I can, but I need to stretch my legs a bit … I don’t really feel tired at the moment—’
‘That’s exactly why we want you in the wardrobe. If you go wandering around the house seeing what we have here in the present it might weird you out.’
‘Weird me out … what do you mean?’
‘It might scare you, or make you uneasy,’ Sarah said. ‘You have had a shock and if you see some of the gadgets we have in the present day it will make you even worse.’
John nodded and slid the wardrobe door open. ‘And then we can all get on with our lives. You can go back to the war, we can get back to our wedding celebrations, sign the register, go on honeymoon …’
Veronica heaved a heavy sigh but showed no sign of moving to the wardrobe. Sarah glared at John. Why did he have to juxtapose their lives like that? He could be so insensitive sometimes. Going back to the war … hmm, bet Veronica could hardly wait. Still, she couldn’t deny that her heart had started to thump with excitement at the thought of resuming their celebrations. The wedding had been pretty grim so far after all
. A thought occurred to her then. ‘But what about 1879? Who is going to take that mission?’
‘Done and dusted apparently,’ John said, pushing the wardrobe open to its fullest extent and gesturing at Veronica to climb in.
‘So the job was done by someone else?’
‘Yup. Now we really must get you home, Veronica.’ John had his no nonsense voice on but Veronica just folded her arms and looked at the floor.
Sarah jumped up, grabbed a pillow and blanket and made the space as comfy as possible. She held out her hand to Veronica and felt her heart strings twang. Poor cow probably was worried about where she’d end up with everything going haystack. Like John when faced with Veronica’s hair, haystack seemed the appropriate word. ‘You’ll be fine, love. Soon have you home if you can drift off.’
‘Hmm. Like I said … I do want to go home … just hope I have a home soon. You both know what happens in the war. We obviously won or you would be talking German, but what happens to me? Do I survive … or … or what?’
John took her gently by the elbow and guided her to the wardrobe. ‘We don’t know, but chances are very good that you did. Now stop worrying and try to sleep. We mustn’t say any more. The powers that be don’t like it.’
Veronica reluctantly stepped inside and lay down. Sarah put the blanket over her and held her hand. ‘Well, I can’t say I have enjoyed meeting you because the whole experience has ruined my wedding, but that wasn’t your fault.’ She glanced up at John. ‘Seems it was just one of those things and that nobody knows why it happened, eh?’
He nodded, coloured up and looked away.
He knows something for sure. ‘But I do wish you well and I am sure everything will be fine.’ Sarah wasn’t sure at all, but what else could she say?
Veronica, her face pale and drawn bit her bottom lip and nodded. ‘Yes, best foot forward an’ all. I will be fine I expect. Thank you for being so kind when I ruined your wedding … and goodbye.’ Veronica withdrew her hand and settled her head down in the pillow.
