Betsy got up then, said a quick goodbye, then without even cleaning away the accumulated dessert on his small person, lifted Ben into her arms and tactfully left them alone.
They sat in a long silence just being together and when she felt the tug of morning and sunlight reaching all the way from the Worthington library and into her dreams, she said. “Goodbye, Warne. I will always love you.”
She’d been gone quite a while when Betsy tiptoed back into the room. “She left,” he said in a broken voice, not looking up at his friend.
Betsy came over to take his hand in hers. “Warne,” she said fiercely, “Zan and I have been talking. We think we know a way . . .we’ll find a way. Even if Violet can’t come to Lavender there has to be a way you can go to her.”
Epilogue
Another spring had come and gone in Great Britain. Roses bloomed in the gardens, sending their sweet scents in the breezes that blew across Worthington in this summer of 1942.
Strangely discontented, Violet stood on the rise above the village, looking down to where the bomb-scarred town-site bloomed to new life like the wild flowers that popped up in its woods and on its meadowlands. The women, children and old men of the community had worked hard to gather whatever they could of materials and construct simple cottages for some of those residents who had lost their homes in the misplaced bombing raid.
Violet had heard that the invaders, lost above had simply dumped their load on the village that posed no possible threat, but perhaps that story was founded only on speculation. Certainly the bombings had been meant to terrorize the public into surrender.
So far they had been unsuccessful and now, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in faraway Hawaii, the Americans had come fully into the war.
The people of Worthington hoped the war would soon be over, but Violet was not so confident, considering that all last year predictions were that it would end by Christmas. Last Christmas.
Now Maudie, half playing and half working with her friends, gathering berries with which to make preserves, came scurrying up to pop a delicious berry into her foster mother’s mouth. Maudie only occasionally still cried at night for her family, but by day she seemed content enough and her pig followed her around like a pet puppy.
The Worthington great house was now home not only for a few stragglers who did not seem to want to go back to the village, but to a girls’ school evacuated from near London to the relative safety of the countryside. Mrs. Rolfe ruled over their small kingdom with efficiency and mild tyranny as though born to the role.
Gardens and fields were spotted with healthy looking plants, promising food for Worthington’s people and domestic animals. Perhaps abundant crops would even help feed the rest of England.
She smiled at Maudie who grew so quickly that she would soon be as tall as Violet, then as the girl shifted her basket of berries to her other arm, they linked hands and began to stroll toward home.
A great hole still existed inside Violet. She knew she should be as content as anyone in these hard times. She was not the only woman at Worthington eating her heart out for a missing lover, husband or son. And some of those she knew well were accustoming themselves to the knowledge that the loved one would never return, but had met his end on some distant battlefield or in the cold, uncrowded sea.
At least she knew that Warne was safe in the small world of long-ago Lavender with his family and friends, even though when she’d last seen him in her dreams he’d looked at her with such longing it had come near to breaking her heart. She sighed, thinking how long it had been since she’d last had such a vision.
She’d lost her only comfort a few months back when the dreams had ceased. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been full of some secret that it seemed he dared not confide to her.
She’d been anxious to go back and demand an explanation, remembering the glances she’d seen between him and Betsy as though they were together in some plot.
But there had been no next time. Her dreams these days were only the kind of everyday ones that everybody had. She had nightmares about the war, nightmares where the bombers roared again in the skies. She dreamed of being a little girl again in the kitchen of the townhouse in London.
She dreamed that Dr. Tyler and Lady Laura, her father and mother, led her to the ruins of the bombed house and showed her the secret time portal and said it was time for her to go back to Lavender. When she’d awakened to find none of it true, she had been sick with disappointment for days.
She even dreamed she was back in Lavender and all her friends were there. She kissed little Emilee, saw Maudie restored to her family, and then ran here and there looking for Warne. But he was strangely absent and when she awakened, she founds tears flooding her face.
Lost in these thoughts, conscious only of the scent and beginning warmth of spring, the feel of Maudie’s hand in hers, the calls of workers in the field, she jumped when Maudie shouted, “There’s someone coming!”
She looked up to the figure of a man approaching and as he drew nearer she saw that this was a young man such as was not seen frequently in the village these days. She paused, disbelief choking at the back of her throat, as she stared at the man in the olive-drab wool uniform of an American soldier walking toward them each step bringing him into clearer view.
The yanks were here now, but this wasn’t just any yank, she thought in a mixture of delight and terror as she took in the solemn face, the eager eyes that watched her.
Maudie was quicker than her and ran toward him, screaming, “Warne! Warne!”
She didn’t care if all the residents of Worthington were watching as she crowded into his arms after Maudie. He touched his mouth to the top of the girl’s head, then met Violet’s mouth in a kiss that seemed to go on and on.
When he pulled back he whispered hoarsely. “I’ve finally made it, Violet. I’ve come home to you.”
The End
About the Author
Barbara Bartholomew became intrigued with the notion of time travel when she was a little girl and listened to her grandfather talk about the possibility that time was itself a separate dimension and discuss Einstein’s theories on the subject. Her first published short story was “Wheel of Fire” in Analog magazine, which saw a traveler venturing into Elizabethan times, and in the 1980s she wrote the time travel trilogy for young adults, The Time Keeper, Child of Tomorrow and When Dreamers Cease to Dream after an editor asked her what she would write if her choices were wide open. Now as an independent writer, she has made the same choice and likes to explore lasting relationships against a backdrop of a constantly changing fantasy world.
Lavender Dreaming: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 5) Page 19
