“Stop being silly,” she told herself. “Open it up and read it.”
15 July 1770 - It was all so strange. At first I thought I was dead, then quite mad. I saw him again, and we spoke for a long time. He knows that something is strange, but not sure what it is, but then again, neither am I! Am I really in another time? And it seems like for good. I walked in the woods for ages but never got sent back home like the first few times. John is so kind and handsome, and a complete gentleman. I would have slept out in the rain if not for him that first night. I’m going to cook him something nice tonight.
21 July 1770 - I find it so odd to write the date. I’ve been into the village and seen the house from the bottom of the hill, but don’t wish to go there. I can hardly believe I’m related to those people I see up there. I must be related to some of them at least. I’m learning how to work in the mill to help John and I met a very sweet woman today. Lady Glen saw the sad state of my dress, which was the only one darling John could find for me, and promised to bring me some things, since we’re the same size. I could hardly tell her we might be distantly related. John is wonderful, but I’d love to have a friend, a woman, to talk to, and don’t want to scare her away with my impossible story.
23 July 1770 - Lady Glen brought me three day dresses and a sewing basket full of scissors and thimbles and things I don’t know the names for. I did that St. Andrews needlepoint kit for mother that one Christmas, but that’s about the extent of my handiwork skills. She sat with me for a bit and told me loads of good gossip about her family. My family, I guess. I wish I could tell her, but have no idea how.
18 August 1770 - John brought me wildflowers and kissed me on the cheek today. I worked so hard all day at the mill, it was all I could do to walk home. He was out hunting (pheasant, scrumptious, but I still can hardly stand to pluck them, though I’m getting handier by the day) and burst in through the door like a big, marvelous woodsman with the bouquet in one hand and the nasty dead bird in the other. I couldn’t stop laughing and he whirled me around, then kissed me. I can not stop thinking about it, which is why I’m writing in the dark, instead of sleeping. I can tell John is asleep by the way he’s breathing, and I know this is brazen and modern and he would never understand, but I want to crawl out of this bed and curl up next to him on his little mattress on the floor. I wish he wasn’t such a gentleman anymore.
27 August 1770 - It’s been more than a month. We have an herb garden outside the front window now. It looks pretty and smells wonderful. Lady Glen brought me a huge lot of cuttings and seeds and showed me how to plant them. She told me all these silly stories about how to mix the herbs to attract wealth or keep sickness from stopping at your door. I asked her how to make a love potion and she laughed and said I didn’t need one! She said it was clear as day that John already loves me, and that I need to just let him know I love him back. I was so nervous after that I could hardly speak or look at him during dinner. He thought I was ill and took my hand, then felt the back of my neck for fever, which made me feel like I was burning up. When he went outside to wash up, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his strong back and muscular arms.
Piper looked up from the diary. Her grandmother fell in love with a handsome Highlander. Well, the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree, did it? She rubbed her eyes, skimming a few pages that were mostly descriptions of daily life and how brave, talented, generous and all around fantastic John was.
While it tugged at her heart, she couldn’t help but wonder why Rose ended up in America at all. It seemed she was perfectly happy back in the eighteenth century, but she and her mother were living proof she’d come back to the present and moved across the pond.
4 September 1770 - I said something so foolish today to Lady Glen. I don’t remember exactly, it took me a moment to realize it, but I mentioned trains. Faster than a locomotive or something idiotic to describe how fast John could ride into the village. Here’s the thing that has my chest in such a knot, though. She seemed to know what I was talking about.
12 September 1770 - It happened! At last! At last. How can I describe how happy I am? How fulfilled. I lay beside him all night, awake, with my hand on his chest to feel the rise and fall, and his warm skin. I didn’t fall asleep until he woke in the morning and kissed me before leaving for the mill. All day long I couldn’t stand still, waiting for him. My hands are shaking to write this, because he’ll be home soon. Any minute and I can have him again.
28 September 1770 - Every day is like a dream. I confided in Lady Glen and she doesn’t think me scandalous. In fact, she said she was going to tell me something very important one day. I would burst from wanting to know what it is, except John keeps me occupied. I should be doing the thousand and one chores that need to be finished before he gets home, but I can’t stop thinking about his hands on my body. I’m blushing, better stop and do my work.
Piper skimmed over the next few pages, blushing as well at her grandmother’s increasingly racy entries. After three months of living in wanton sin, Rose and John finally got married. There was a three page description of how beautiful her gown was, how helpful and dear Lady Glen was, and how drop dead gorgeous John looked standing at the alter.
Piper’s eyelids grew heavy as she flipped through a year of marital bliss. The clock on her bedside table showed it was well past midnight, but she resolved to read a few more entries so she’d be able to give Evie a good report in the morning.
9 October 1771 - I walked out into the forest today. To the exact spot I first woke up here. The dreams are back and they are worse than before. I asked Lady Glen for an herbal mixture to help me sleep, but it hasn’t worked at all.
12 October 1771 - I must admit I may be mad from lack of sleep, but I’ve been dwelling on how I came to be here. With my happiness so complete, I assumed I was lucky or chosen or blessed. But the nightmares that plague me now? Is that the price I must pay? This morning I was so tired I told John I wished we had a car to go into the village. The thought of walking made me want to scream. He thought I said cart and laughed at my laziness.
13 October 1771 - Lady Glen found me asleep in the garden this afternoon. For a moment I thought she was my mother and I wanted to go home. It’s just my condition I suppose that is making me so weary. I’m as big as a house and miserable. When I was tucked up in bed, she brought me some of her nasty tasting herb tea. I’ve been lying about ever since then, waiting for John. The pains come and go, but aren’t unbearable yet.
17 October 1771 - She is the most beautiful baby the world has ever seen. John agrees completely. Lady Glen brought a gift, a lovely silver cup. She looked sad though, and wouldn’t come in the house.
22 October 1771 - Back to work already. A strange thing happened today. I scratched up my hands pulling onions. When I dug around, the earth was littered with sewing needles, dozens of them. It scared me to see them, but surely I must have dropped them, though I can’t remember ever having that many at one time.
23 October 1771 - Desry the sow has died. I thought we might have pork for days, but John thinks she was sick and buried her.
25 October 1771 - My hands shake as I write this. Yesterday when I went out to get water, the sow’s head was lying at the door, crudely hacked and covered in dirt. I screamed so loudly John heard at the mill and came running. It wasn’t there when he left earlier. Someone dug it up and put it there. John gathered some men from the village and they went into the woods to look for whoever might have done it.
26 October - Something must be wrong with me. After all, I traveled here by unknown means, and maybe those means were evil. I was too ill to leave the house all day, too scared. No one came to see me, I didn’t hear a peep outside. When John came home, I wanted to pretend everything was fine, so asked him to hand me my sewing basket. When I pulled away the cloth, all my things were gone, replaced by a dead crow. I screamed and flung the basket away and the sewing things clattered to the floor. I couldn’t tell John what I thought I saw, what I did see.
/>
27 October - I don’t know when I’m awake and when I’m asleep, it’s all a bad dream. I’m afraid I’ll hurt the baby I’m so tired.
30 October - Today I went outside to ready the garden for winter. The cold air felt bracing and I wished Lady Glen would come round to give me advice. A hard wind almost knocked me over and when I turned around she was standing near the edge of the river. I called to her but she just stood there. Maybe she couldn’t hear me, but she had to have seen me waving. I couldn’t go down to her because the baby was asleep inside. No matter how much I waved, she didn’t come up, and I felt stupid after a while and went in.
1 November - John is angry at me for not going outside. But there are dead birds everywhere. There were black feathers under my pillow and in the baby’s cradle. I held them up to show him, and I think he saw them, but the look he gave me, I’m not sure. When he left he slammed the door. Lady Glen came and stood outside the window, but when I looked directly at her, she was gone, so maybe she wasn’t there at all.
8 November - A leather pouch sat on the sill when I awoke this morning. Every morning I look out the window to see if Lady Glen is there, staring and smiling at me. I believe she may have never been real at all, but I can’t ask John. How would that look to ask my husband if he recalled seeing me speaking to a woman at our own table, or walking with her into the village. And where did I get the things she gave me? Unless none of those are real, either. I feel certain the pouch is real, but I don’t know what it holds. I’m too scared to look inside, but I’ve been rolling it around in my hands. Small hard sticks or knobby roots. Maybe it’s something for a tincture. Perhaps I’m to boil the contents and drink it to become well again.
9 November - It had to be a dream. I woke up in the woods. Lady Glen stood over me. She’s tiny, but she loomed over me like a giant, like a banshee. She looked sad I think, or pitying. She told me it was time to go. Time to go. She repeated it until I agreed, to get her to stop her terrible droning. Did I walk home? I’m here again, so maybe it was a dream or maybe I was really there and walked home. Home. I don’t know where that is anymore. I’m going to cry now, quietly so I don’t wake John or the baby. And tomorrow I’ll go.
***
Piper woke up with her neck slumped painfully to the side and the dog licking drool off her cheek. There is no happy place for an occurrence such as this, she thought, pushing Hoover away and rolling her head around to get the kinks out. The diary slid from her lap and landed on the floor. Everything rushed back at her and she dove for the book.
Holy hell. Piper’s head swam and she rubbed her eyes. Rose had a baby in the eighteenth century. And sweet Lady Glen had to have been Daria. Popping up forty years after Lachlan killed her.
“How?” she said, punching the sides of the bed and startling Hoover.
Was Daria that powerful? Piper remembered her chilling look, her admonishment that death couldn’t stop her. Not even petting the dog calmed her down.
At least she knew why Rose scuttled back to her own time, then tried to put an ocean between her and the witch who’d tried to drive her insane. It was no wonder she never spoke of her life in Scotland. She was too afraid.
What happened to the baby back in the eighteenth century? Had John run away with her or had they lived an ordinary life after Rose disappeared?
From all her mother’s accounts, Rose had been distant and secretive, running off to Vegas to remarry as soon as Finley was grown and on her own, with barely a Christmas card until her new husband called to say she’d died of a heart attack. Piper was only two at the time and didn’t remember any of it.
Leaving her first child and the love of her life behind must have badly traumatized her. Rose must have tried to be normal after she came back. She’d remarried when she first came to the states, but Piper’s grandfather died in an accident right before Piper’s mom was born. Rose just had some really crap luck.
Piper flipped carefully through every last page of the diary, but there wasn’t a single word more, not even a smudge.
The bedroom door swung open, nearly causing her already taxed heart to stop completely. “What?” she snapped, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
“You need to see what we found,” Evie said. “Get downstairs.” She pirouetted dramatically out of the room.
Pulling the first things she could get her hands on out of the wardrobe, Piper got dressed and went to meet Evie in the kitchen. She greeted her with a smug smile, sure that whatever Evie thought she had, it could never rival what Piper had learned from the diary.
Sam sat at the table, his head on his folded arms, sound asleep. Magnus kicked at a toy that Evie had rigged to dangle above his bassinet.
“Did you stay up all night?” Piper asked, wondering how long she’d actually slept. It didn’t feel like much, but the clock said ten in the morning, a surprisingly late hour.
“We took turns sleeping,” Evie said absently. “Sam’s just a lightweight and passed out again about half an hour ago.” She stabbed her finger at the original page he’d been called over to translate, then swept her hand over a few others, her face turning bright red with anticipation. “You won’t believe what we found out.”
“Grandma Rose went back in time and had a baby?” Piper asked, not the least bit ashamed to steal her thunder.
Evie’s eyes widened and she sat down on the bench. “So you know? It was in the diary?”
“Yes. She came back because of Daria.”
“Whoa, what? Daria was in that timeline?” Evie glanced at Sam, but her shocked yelp didn’t wake him.
“That’s why she left,” Piper said. She couldn’t believe she was hungry, for the first time in weeks, and went to the fridge to forage for something until Mellie got home from her nursing classes. “I don’t know what happened to the baby, though.”
She turned around with a jam jar and the butter dish in her hands and the look on Evie’s face made her appetite shrivel. She put everything back and sat down at the table.
“You know?” she asked.
“Yes,” Evie stammered. Her hands shook as she spread out the papers in front of Piper, their translations carefully written out on separate sheets. “The baby was your mother.”
Chapter 7
Lachlan checked his brother’s arm and shook his head, half in disgust, half in defeat. The knife wound was little more than a scratch, but it was alarming that Quinn had been attacked at all.
The Glens were getting impatient in their anger. Ever since the disappearance of the man who spied on them in the woods, the suspicion level had risen tenfold. Quinn wasn’t doing anything to help. He was useless at maintaining a low profile, couldn’t hold his tongue to save his life, and wherever he went, women fell all over him.
“Are ye sure this wasna a jealous husband?” Lachlan asked.
He straightened the bandage and thumped his brother’s arm just above the slice, unable to hold back a smile of satisfaction at Quinn’s wince of pain.
“I dinna think so,” he said, rubbing his arm. “It could be someone I beat at cards. I dinna know.”
He had the audacity to scowl at Lachlan, who wanted more than anything to hit him again, and harder, but he needed to keep a united front for Pietro’s sake.
They were both growing sick of living amongst the Glens, Pietro most of all. A fortnight had passed since the unfortunate encounter in the woods, and since then Pietro had been putting up with threats and one very convenient accident in the stables that might have crippled him if he hadn’t been faster on his feet.
No one seemed very broken up about his near miss, and Lachlan decided it would be best if he stopped working in the stables. He gave him a combination position as a guard and advisor, having him in on meetings and sending him out with messages.
It was sticky work, making it look as if Pietro was distancing himself from Lachlan, letting the Glens know he wasn’t a Ferguson by any stretch of the imagination. He quietly sowed seeds of discord, harvesting tr
ust for himself after he wormed his way into the groups of men who were against Lachlan. He’d outwardly disagreed with Lachlan at the last meeting he was in, giving a preauthorized suggestion for a better way of running things. Lachlan took note of everyone’s reactions, seeing that it was a well received idea, and then shot it down with disdain.
The Glens had grown so used to being ruled by a tyrant, he knew he had to continue on that way until Pietro could take charge and give the people what they wanted. He knew that after the meeting, some would seek Pietro out and pledge their allegiance, and he’d been right. Lachlan pretended ignorance of it all.
It was imperative that the Glens be able to accept Pietro as their laird one day. Lachlan only needed to figure out how to extricate himself from the bloody heathens and get him properly wed to Bella so that day could come.
Right now he had to contend with Pietro agreeing with any Glen who badmouthed him, and he’d recently heard Pietro throwing out insults of his own, a little too zealously for Lachlan’s taste. He supposed he couldn’t blame him, but it still rankled.
He was pulled from his thoughts by Quinn and Pietro arguing, when they had painstakingly planned this clandestine meeting in his chambers. Quinn’s injury had served to get him up there, and Pietro had wound his way up through the passageways, waiting for Lachlan’s guard to help Bella carry a teetering load of fabric down the stairs. Lachlan didn’t think it would work, but it turned out his Glen guard had far more loyalty to Bella, and made him realize the man was there more as an extra pair of spying eyes than protection for him.
They had precious little time to tell each other any news and strategize, and he turned to them with a deadly glare, almost hoping they would continue bickering so he could knock their fool heads together.
Reckoning (Book 4 of Lost Highlander series) Page 6
