Lavender Dreaming: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 5)

by Barbara Bartholomew

  Warne started to speak, then was silenced when he saw that Violet, looking pale and weary, stood at his side, one hand reaching out as though she would stretch across time for his touch. He knew she was only a creature from a dream, but the joy he felt at the sight of her must have brightened his face because Betsy, who had turned to look at him, said, “She’s here now, isn’t she, Warne?”

  Like an old person Violet had slipped into sleep even as the conversation in the library flowed around her. She only vaguely heard Mrs. Rolfe telling Maudie about rural life in her own long-ago growing up years, “We knew how to work form the time we were small,” she was saying.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  And then Violet sank into sleep and immediate dreams. She was glad, so glad to look over and see Warne standing by her side. She took in the sight of him, his broad shoulders and strong body, the form of an active man who busied himself looking after others. She didn’t even know if he was handsome or not, all she knew was that his face was the dearest in the world to her, his company the best she had ever known.

  Instinctively she reached out to him only to be reminded as always that in these dreams they could not touch, but existed on separate planes.

  It was only when they’d stepped closer to each other that she took in the others in the room. Betsy’s family was gathered. Most of them were at least familiar to her.

  “What’s this about?” she asked Warne, knowing he was the only one who could hear her. Well, with the possible exception of Betsy.

  Sure enough Betsy spoke before Warne could get a word out. “Parts of our land on the edge are chipping away and showing up on the other side of time,” Betsy explained. “You can tell Maudie that we found her family and they’re all safely back in Lavender.”

  She wanted to tell Warne about her own recent experiences in the Worthington Library, but land falling away was a serious subject. “Why would that happen?”

  “Wish we knew,” Warne said, almost as though he wanted to speak before Betsy could.

  She walked away from him to go over and stand behind the sofa where Betsy was seated with the older of her two half-sisters. “Does it have something to do with Dr. Tyler?” she asked so softly that she wasn’t sure that Warne halfway across the room could hear the question targeted at Betsy.

  Betsy’s long lashes lifted as she instinctively looked around as though to see the person she only heard. “Grandpapa Tyler?” she asked. “He’s been gone for a long time, Violet. What could he have to do with this?”

  Warne frowned at her, but she ignored him. “I saw him today in the library with Lady Laura here at Worthington.”

  Betsy looked around. “Violet says she saw Grandpapa Tyler today at someplace called Worthington.”

  “Worthington is a country estate,” Violet explained. “For some reason Lady Laura left it to me, Mrs. Rolfe and Margaret. We were the three who looked after her those last days in London.”

  “Wait a minute!” Warne boomed from close at hand, having crossed the room to stand next to her. “You’re not in London anymore? How will I find you?”

  “Papa would be well over a hundred if he were still alive,” Grandpapa Forrest protested, sounding bewildered.

  “If anybody could manage to still be walking around, it would be doc,” Betsy’s husband, the man with the limp whose name Violet couldn’t recall said and she remembered that he’d come from a time in the 1860s when Dr. Tyler had been making his plans for isolating Lavender and its people in a safer time.

  Then, suddenly, it seemed everyone in the room talked at once so that Violet couldn’t understand any of it and wanted to flee.

  “Shut up!” yelled Zan Alston, who sometimes forgot to be polite. “Let us hear what the English woman has to say.”

  A family of courteous and normally thoughtful people obeyed and the silence was so deep that Violet could hear a hen cackling somewhere outside. She felt almost as though the scene around her was fading and knew that for a sign that she was about to emerge from the dream. She had to tell them the most important things first.

  “They were young,” she said, “late twenties, I’d guess, and it was long ago and they’d been in love with each other and they’d had a child. I believe I was that child and they had some important secret to tell me.”

  Then she heard Maudie’s voice,” Look, Mrs. Rolfe, Violet’s sound asleep and snoring.”

  And then she was awake in the library at Worthington.

  “I never snore,” she insisted sleepily, then yawned.

  “It sounded like a cat purring,” said Maudie. “I miss my cat.”

  She was glad to be able to tell her that she’d heard from Warne and all her family was safe and well, though on questioning she had to admit she didn’t know about the cat.

  “That just can’t be,” Betsy heard her grandfather mutter. “Papa in England and he’s twenty years old.”

  “Or twenty five or nearly thirty,” his son corrected him. “The girl said he was in his twenties. And if he had a daughter, she’d be your half-sister.”

  “None of it makes any sense,” Forrest protested irritably. “That English girl must be out of her mind. In fact, I’m not sure either Betsy or Warne saw her.”

  Betsy had been trying to put things together in her mind. “I didn’t say I saw her, Grandpapa, but I heard her clear as day.”

  “I saw her, sir,” Warne said rather stiffly, obviously offended for his girlfriend. “And I can tell you that Violet is as truthful as they come.”

  Grandpapa looked a bit sheepish. Warne was one of his favorites among city employees and he’d mentored him for years. “I didn’t mean to imply anything else, son.”

  Betsy and Eddie exchanged glances. “What are you thinking, Zan?” Eddie asked her husband who was standing like a frozen statue on the far end of the room.

  Of course being Zan he was so lost in thought he didn’t even hear her. Impatience with their slow progress. Betsy yelled, “Zan, Eddie just asked what you make of all this?”

  Caleb came over to edge into place on the far end of the sofa next to her and Betsy felt ever so slightly reproved. She supposed that back in the time when her husband grew up ladies were expected to be quiet and gracious and not yell at their brothers-in-law. She gave him a sweet smile of near apology, refraining from pointing out that all those other women had not boasted the sometimes frustrating Alexander Alston as a brother-in-law.

  Zan ignored everything except the possibility that his own Eddie had asked him a question. He lived uneasily with the rest of the world, but his wife possessed his heart. “It seems most intriguing,” he said for her benefit alone. “My guess is that Violet, like Betsy, possesses extraordinary time transcending skills. She seems to have briefly visited a time perhaps eighty or more years ago when your grandfather and her Lady Laura were young people. And they seemed to have something important to tell her that affects us here in Lavender.”

  “How can that be?” Betsy turned to stare questioningly of him. “Lavender and this place she called Worthington are so far apart. They have no connection.”

  Eddie, who could be shy and quiet while her sisters were both so much more outgoing that they sometimes crowded out her voice, spoke up. “That’s not entirely true.”

  Comments and questions sounded from throughout the room. Zan frowned, “Shut up,” he said again. “Please.”

  “It’s something I read,” Eddie went on, “in Grandpapa Tyler’s old journal. He talked about visiting at a country estate in England when he was a young man and how that visit changed his whole life.” Her voice trailed away into uncertainty as she added, “but he never said how.”

  Instantly Betsy credited her sister’s memory. Eddie had been named town historian because of her memory of everything she’d ever heard, read or experienced. If Eddie said she remembered her great grandfather writing about a place called Worthington, she was to be trusted. She had read it. It had happened.

  She was lost in thought, trying to
fit in the pieces of this new information as though working a puzzle when Sylvie called her from the stairway. “Betsy,” she said, “Ben fell out of bed and got a little cut on his hand and he cried so hard he woke up Emilee. They’re both screaming for you.”

  A flash of annoyance rushed over her. Obviously nothing much was wrong with the kids, but her young sister just wanted an excuse to get out of babysitting and come downstairs to join the adults.

  “Caleb will see to it,” she said, turning to Eddie. But before she could ask a question, her husband took her by the arm. “We’ll both see to it,” he said firmly.

  Her mouth only slightly open, Betsy allowed herself to be led upstairs, her little sister’s gleeful smile following her all the way.

  Violet ordered dinner served in the library on what was meant to be a card table and afterwards she hoped Mrs. Rolfe and Maudie would decide on an early bedtime. But instead they seemed determined to see who could stay up the longest and she looked around in frustration, determining that she had no chance of continuing her conversation with two people who claimed to be her parents.

  After all, ghosts or time-walkers or whatever they were could hardly expose themselves to all three of them. Their message was for her, not for Mrs. Rolfe or Maudie.

  Her thoughts trailed along a slippery thread.

  Not Maudie. She was an accidental stranger here.

  But Mrs. Rolfe? She’d been around almost as long as Lady Laura . . .

  Violet stirred uneasily in her chair. “I heard somewhere that your mother was nanny to Lady Laura,” she said abruptly.

  Mrs. Rolfe looked up from the story she’d been telling Maudie. “That’s the right of it,” she said. “Looked after her brother too. That would be young Lord Linton, he that would have inherited everything if he hadn’t died so young.” She shook her head. “A tragedy it was and I thought none of them, not the mother or father or the young lady would survive the loss. They just about thought that boy walked on water, they did.”

  “Lord Linton?” Violet asked, frowning. “I never heard him mentioned.”

  “His sister wouldn’t hear his name spoken. Said it made her too sad, especially after the old folks passed on. She was left much alone after that and would never look seriously at another suitor, not after the one her father disapproved. Not that she couldn’t flirt with the best of them,” she added as an afterthought.

  The talk was sliding right in the direction she wanted better even than if she’d deliberately led the conversation. Then her frown deepened at the suspicion that Mrs. Rolfe might be taking her that way on purpose.

  “What happened to this Lord Linton?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Thrown by a wild horse. Broke his neck.” Mrs. Rolfe shook her head. “So sad. They were all heartbroken as he was the hope of the household. It was after that Laura got mixed up with that good looking foreigner who was not in her class, not at all.” This last was said with such indignation that Violet found it to be suspect. For her generation, Mrs. Rolfe didn’t set much on class, but always said who you were was more important than who you were born.

  “I can hardly imagine Lady Laura young and in love,” Violet said and it was true even though she’d sat here in this very room and listened to her sparring with her former lover. She had seemed more angry than starry-eyed.

  Mrs. Rolfe nodded wisely. “Girls like her, proud and independent, when they fall, they fall hard. Mind,” she cautioned, glancing at the wide-eyed Maudie, “I wouldn’t be saying any of this if my lady was alive to hear. But I reckoned there was always something she had to tell you and she just waited too long.”

  So this was it. Mrs. Rolfe, a long-time servant of the house, had known the secret all along. “Tell me what?” she asked.

  Wrinkles on the old face dug in more deeply. “There was talk that Lady Laura got in trouble with that stranger, that she had a baby that was hid away, and the old Lord he run that stranger off and told his daughter he’d shoot him if he ever saw him again.”

  A baby. Violet’s heart warmed at the thought that she had been that almost forgotten baby from long ago. She’d had parents of her own, even if they hadn’t kept her. She was part of a family.

  “The whispering said if the child had been a boy, the old lord would have found a way to keep it by saying it was his own born to his lady. But when it was a girl, he sent it away to be raised by others in humble circumstances.”

  Violet couldn’t wait any longer. “And that baby was me?”

  Mrs. Rolfe chuckled with genuine merriment. “Gracious girl, how could that be? Lady Laura’s poor little girl was born long ago. It must be, oh at least seventy or eighty years ago when she and that foreign young man met and fell in love.”

  Violet stared at her. “Then what do you mean when you talk about a secret Lady Laura wanted to tell?”

  “I’ve thought about that ever since she died and especially since she left Worthington to the three of us, you, me and Margaret. I’m thinking you’re her granddaughter.” She paused, seeming to count decades on her fingers. “Or maybe great-granddaughter or even more than that. As she got older, she must have repented and gone a-looking, meaning to make it up to you. After all a granddaughter, no matter how many times removed, is closer than a cousin. And she included me and Margaret in the arrangement ‘cause she knew you’d need somebody to look after you.”

  Maudie stirred excitedly in her seat. “That’s like the stories Betsy tells. Does that mean you’re the lost princess, Violet?

  Violet considered herself, still skinny, poorly dressed and limping slightly. “Not exactly, Maudie. I’m still only Violet.”

  “But you live in a palace,” the child insisted.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  That palace became more of a burden as the days passed. At night Violet dreamed of Warne and was reassured by his promises that he would find a way for them to be together. A friendship that had always been special was changed now. They were grownup and in love and wanted more than words. She longed to be in his arms and feel the touch of his kiss against her lips.

  Instead of thought of him being the instant joy it once had been, it was now temptation and frustration as mind and body burned.

  But by day she hardly had time to consciously think of him. She was too busy working at those dratted figures, gradually figuring out that while Worthington had not been self-supporting in the old days, having drawn on the riches of other family properties to keep going, survival was still possible.

  Along with Mrs. Rolfe and a fifteen-year-old daughter of the butler who was now away at war, she began to see the possibilities. Much of the house needed to be shut down, its furniture covered and its rooms closed away. They no longer had the staff to keep such a huge endeavor going, but in a way that was a blessing because they couldn’t afford to feed, house and pay even small wages to such a large staff.

  Most of those workers had gone off now to do their part in the war and Mrs. Rolfe determined that those who survived and wished to return afterwards, if there was an afterwards, should have paying work of some kind when they returned.

  The farms were the key. Worthington possessed a good many acres of farm land and the ability to produce much needed food stuffs. But here was where the shortage of staff really hurt. The strong young men and their fathers who had done much of the hard work of farming were gone, leaving behind their sisters, mothers and grandparents to do their best. Surprisingly their best was better than could have been expected as women brought up in the country discovered they’d learned more than they thought and benefited from the wisdom of old men long thought to be past active labor. So with the help of a couple of land girls, sent to serve their country in this way during the absence of the men, they planted feed and vegetables, raised pigs and chickens, and kept the people of Worthington fed while still managing to send their share of produce out to their countrymen.

  This was their way of fighting the war and Violet, limp and tired, spent her afternoons helping o
ut on the nearest farm after having struggled with financials in the morning.

  This afternoon she watched while Maudie fed the smallest in a recent litter of piglets, a determined little female who had managed to barely hang on while her bigger brothers and sisters sucked in the lion’s share of the milk the sow provided.

  Tagged as a runt by Maudie, who was experienced with pigs, she’d been allowed to provide extra milk from a bottle in order to keep the piglet alive.

  Violet figured the squirmy, squealing little creature faced a future as a pet rather than bacon, no matter how badly England needed food.

  Since Maudie seemed to have matters well in hand and in a happier mood now that she was in more familiar territory, Violet went on to the hard work of hoeing weeds out of the cabbage patch.

  Farm work would never be a favorite occupation for Violet, but everyone had to pitch in to get things done. She began to believe, however, that being a kitchen maid might not have been the hardest work available in her childhood.

  She decided she’d never been so hot or tired when evening fell and, Maudie in tow, headed back to the house. Her hands burned with blisters and her back ached and she felt guilty to be going back to a meal someone else had prepared when the women who made the farms home for their children would manage both farm and home.

  She washed hastily in the kitchen, conscious that she was letting down generations of Smythe-Hatton women who had rarely visited the kitchen and who had groomed themselves carefully in ‘dress’ clothing for a dinner where they most often entertained others of equal social rank.

  Even Mrs. Rolfe had given up on the notion of the three of them eating in the dining room. Nobody had time to truck the food into the other room and now they sat at table with the butler’s helpful daughter and her mother who was cook, and the two eleven-year-old boys who tried to keep up the kitchen garden.

  Girls came in from the village during the day to do what work was needed to barely keep up the house and the spreading lawns and flower gardens had been left to go wild because what labor was available must go into crops that provided food for people and domestic animals.