Ballgowns & Butterflies: A Stitch in Time Holiday Novella

by Kelley Armstrong

  I reach the front door, and that, too, is the same, or so it seems until metal glints, and I notice an odd locking contraption above the knob. When I turn the handle, a metal bolt slides back. The doorknob itself has also changed, but after a few tries, it opens with a click.

  I pull the heavy wood door to look out at a front lawn so wild and overgrown it would give Mr. Shaw heart failure. I walk down steps to a laneway that now runs to the stables instead of circling past the house.

  There’s no sign of my horse, but by now, I don’t expect to see him. This is clearly a dream, and I am exploring it out of curiosity. When I wake, it’ll be a delightful story to tell August.

  Should I share it? What if he wonders why I am dreaming of Thorne Manor? My heart thuds. Is this how it will be forever now? I cannot even share my dreams with my husband for fear he’ll read something untoward in them?

  No, we will overcome this obstacle. It may take time, but he will see he has no cause for jealousy.

  I cross the lawn to find a wider road than I remember. At the foot of the hill, High Thornesbury glows with an eerie light, a dome of it cast over the village.

  Entranced, I hike my skirts and make my way down the hill. It is not a short walk. Not an interesting one, either. Everything seems exactly as I recall until I round a corner to find a metal signpost. It seems to be warning of a sharp curve, which makes me laugh. Any fool can see the curve. It’s not as if a horse will come careening around and miss the turn entirely.

  A sheep bleats in the distance, and a cow answers. I smile. That, at least, has not changed. Nor have the brambles along the roadside, already thick with red berries that will turn black and sweet in another month. The air smells of heather, the scent of the moors. There’s something else, an acrid scent I don’t recognize, but the heather is stronger, along with the less pleasant odor of sheep droppings.

  I’m nearly to the bottom of the hill when thunder rumbles. I peer up, but the night sky is clear, moon and stars shining bright. The sound grows closer and becomes like the growl of some wild beast. I stagger backward as lights appear from nowhere, two blindingly bright orbs bearing down on me faster than a horse at full gallop.

  It is, of course, my imagination. A new fancy from my dream. After that initial moment of terror, I fix my feet in place, determined to see what my mind has conjured. I am curious. Yes, that is an odd reaction to a creature barreling toward me, growling and shrieking as it rounds the corner. But I want to see it. I want a tale to tell August and a tale to tell my sister Miranda, one that might inspire a fresh tale from her pen.

  At the last moment, my resolve cracks. This creature—a low-slung carriage-sized shadow—is charging me at demonic speed, its eyes blinding my own, and a tiny voice whispers, “What if it is not a dream?” I throw myself to the side, diving through a tangle of hedge and bramble as the beast screams to a stop.

  Through the thorny vines, I watch as the beast sprouts wings that disgorge two men. The one closer to me is dressed in blue trousers that fit as tight as riding breeches. Over his chest, he wears a shirt without collar or sleeves or buttons or cravat. He looks like a vagrant, unshaven with wild and uncut hair.

  “What?” His shadowy companion throws up his arms. “Are we stopping for hallucinations now?” His voice is thick with the local accent, but it’s not quite right.

  “I saw a girl in the road,” the other says. “A blonde in a blue dress.”

  The first man snickers. “Like the one who shot you down tonight? Had one too many pints, and now you’re seeing her everywhere?”

  “That was a purple dress. This one was blue. A long, old-fashioned dress.”

  His companion gasps. “Oh, my God, you saw her!”

  “Saw who?”

  “The ghost of the moors.” The shadowy figure waves his hands. “Whooo! She’s coming to get you!” The figure starts climbing back into the beast. “Get back in the bloody car, or you’re walking home.”

  The other man returns, and the beast roars off. I watch it go . . . and then I run.

  I race back to Thorne Manor, up the stairs to that strange and empty room, where I wait to wake up.

  I do not wake up. At some point, I sleep, instead, drifting into a fitful dream of hearing my son’s cries and being unable to find him. Then I wake from that to find myself on the floor of that bedroom, in a house that is and is not Thorne Manor.

  I investigate. It is all I can do, short of sobbing in a corner, which would hardly solve anything. The house is empty. Long empty, although furnishings suggest it has not been abandoned. And those furnishings . . . the strangeness of them, like the house itself both familiar and not.

  The kitchen is filled with devices I do not recognize, cannot fathom the purpose of, mingled with ones so familiar I find myself stroking them like talismans that will carry me home. The entire house is like that—things I know and things I do not. Somehow that is worse than if it had been entirely unfamiliar. It’s like seeing a portrait of my parents that does not quite look like them, teasing me with grief and longing and frustration.

  I find water, and I find food, and I ponder my situation for a day and a night before coming to the only conclusion that makes sense. I have passed through time.

  Later, I will laugh at how long it took me to realize what would seem obvious to any modern denizen of the world. Time travel is so deeply embedded in modern storytelling that it is almost cliché. Yet I come from a world that has not yet birthed H. G. Wells and his time machine. I have read both Rip Van Winkle and A Christmas Carol, which lightly touch upon the concept of moving through time, but that is nothing like what I experience.

  And yet I have encountered the concept, in a way, which might be the only thing that keeps me from declaring I’ve gone mad.

  It happened on my honeymoon. August and I were on a ship bound for Italy. It was our second day into the voyage, and we’d only left our stateroom for food. That morning, we were stretched out naked on our bed, the sea breeze drifting through the open porthole. I remarked on how incredible it was that we could travel to Rome in a few days, and I mused on how much faster it might be for our great-grandchildren.

  “You should ask William about that,” August said, cutting an apple and handing me half. “I believe he may have secret knowledge of the future.”

  “It certainly seems like it, with his gift for investing.”

  “Not a gift at all. As I said, secret knowledge.” He slid closer and lowered his lips to my ear, as if we were not alone in our stateroom. “I believe he once knew a girl from the future.”

  I sputtered a laugh. “The future?”

  He rolled onto his back. “The summer we were fifteen, he became incredibly, irritatingly distracted, with scarcely any time at all for me.”

  “No time for you? Or your youthful shenanigans?”

  “Shenanigans? True, I was a bit of a rascal, getting myself into this bind and that.”

  “Bind,” I murmured. “Now that is a word I have never heard used to refer to a lady’s private parts.”

  He choked on a bite of apple, sputtering as he coughed it out. He waggled a finger at me. “I was a very proper young man, Rosie, who saved himself for his marriage bed.”

  That had me laughing hard enough that someone rapped on our door to be sure we were all right. August assured him we were.

  “So William shunned your company,” I said. “That summer you were busy falling into binds, and he did not wish to join you.”

  August shook his head. “I will not rise to your bait, only saying that your opinion of my youth is very wicked. Not inaccurate, but still wicked. So William spurned me, and being mildly jealous—”

  I cleared my throat.

  He gave me a look. “All right. Very jealous. A man must have one flaw, and that is mine.”

  “One flaw?”

  “Others have more. I have but one.” He coughed to cover my laugh. “And so, to resume my tale, I became jealous and resolved to learn the reason for his dist
raction. It was a girl.”

  I gasped. “Truly? A young man distracted by a young woman. What a twist in the tale!”

  He rapped my bare bottom with one finger. “You mock, but William was not me, and I had never seen him display more than mild interest in the fairer sex. Yet there he was, enthralled by a secret love. Even more remarkable was the girl herself, who dressed and spoke in the oddest way.”

  “Because she was”—I gripped his arm, my eyes mock wide—“from the future!”

  “Well, no, at first, I thought she might be French. Or American. Or perhaps some fae creature from his beloved moors. After that summer, William fell into the darkest brood, and I realized the affair had come to an unhappy end, and I resolved not to tease him about his mysterious buxom brunette. Then, years later, when his mother passed and he realized the family coffers were near to empty, he began making the maddest gambles, investing in newfangled ideas that seemed destined to failure.”

  “Yet they succeeded, and thus he filled the family coffers to overflowing. And somehow that is proof that this girl was from the future . . . ?”

  “She gave him information on the future. On inventions yet to come.”

  “So William Thorne fell madly in love with a girl from the future, who broke his heart but shared secret knowledge of her advanced culture.” I peered at him. “Are you sure she wasn’t French?”

  He laughed and pulled me to him for a kiss. And that was the end of the conversation as we resumed our honeymoon and promptly forgot everything else.

  I still do not leap on August’s speculations as the obvious answer. Yet there is another aspect to the tale that forces me to consider it.

  August hadn’t merely raised the possibility of traveling through time as a hypothetical fancy. He’d been talking about William Thorne, who’d met a strange girl at Thorne Manor, a girl with odd dress and odd speech, whom William kept hidden, a girl August believed came through time.

  A girl who came through time at Thorne Manor. Where I opened a box and tumbled into the dusty and abandoned bedroom of a girl.

  It is then that I remember the kitten. I return to the bedroom and, in the light of day, clearly see tiny feline tracks on the dusty floor. Tracks that lead to the foot of the bed and disappear.

  A kitten from the future, who somehow passed through time and found herself trapped in a box that doesn’t exist in her world. She cries for help, and I come running, only to pass through time in the other direction.

  That is both perfectly sensible and perfectly ridiculous. Yet if time travel exists perhaps it is like yeast, an inexplicable but proven chemical reaction. Add yeast to the right ingredients, mix in the right environment, and you can make dough magically rise. Add a portal to a house, mix in the right circumstances, and you can blink through time.

  Someone in the distant past discovered that yeast makes dough rise. For centuries before that, people ate unleavened bread. Was it not possible that I had made a discovery of my own? One made before me by a girl who met a boy from another time, loved him and then disappeared back to her own realm?

  The solution then is obvious. Recreate the circumstances and return to my husband and child.

  I plant myself in that spot, matching my dust-cleared footprints exactly. And there I stand through four hourly chimes of the clock below.

  I had arrived shortly before the grandfather clock struck three in the morning. Perhaps timing is the key then. That night, I stand on that spot from one until five. I repeat this every night for a week. Then I think perhaps the moon matters, and I wait for it to be in the same portion of the cycle and try again.

  I wear the same dress. I position myself as if opening an invisible box. I arrange my features in some semblance of surprise, as if seeing a kitten. Nothing works.

  For six weeks, I try to get home. When I need food, I forage or raid village gardens at night. Days and weeks come and go, and I stay. I stay in an empty house, crying myself to sleep, dreaming of my husband and child, becoming a mere ghost of myself.

  I stay, and the kitten does not return, and when six weeks have passed, I begin to understand what that means.

  I am here, and I am not going back.

  That leaves me two choices. Fade away with wanting, drifting into madness as I haunt this empty house. Or make a life for myself here. Make a life while never giving up hope, while never stopping my efforts to return to my family.

  I stay until the second change of the moon brings me no closer to home. Then I dry my tears and walk out of Thorne Manor.

  A Twist of Fate: Chapter 3

  I might not be the writer in the family, but I could pen an entire novel on my first year in the twenty-first century. It would be an adventure, a mystery, a tragedy and a farce, and at times, a tale of horror.

  In a terrible way, it is my parents’ untimely passing that allows me to survive in this new world. We may have had little money, but our parents made sure their daughters wanted for nothing. Our mother educated us. Our father hired tutors when we had the extra funds. I was given free rein in the kitchen, even when I ruined a small fortune in ingredients, testing new recipes.

  We were spoiled in other ways, too. Relatives breathed a sigh of relief when I neared marriageable age. Here, clearly, lay the solution to my parents’ financial woes. I might be an odd girl, but smitten young men already penned odes to my fragile beauty. I could be married off soon and married off well to a wealthy bridegroom who would extend his generosity to my sisters and help them make equally good matches.

  A sensible plan. But if my parents had been sensible people, their daughters would not have been dowryless. My parents were not fools. Nor were they spendthrifts. They were something even less acceptable in society. They were romantics.

  My father was the second son of a baronet, whose only chance at a gentleman’s life had been to make either a good marriage or a good career. Instead, he became a physician and married his mentor’s daughter. While he was an excellent doctor, he shared his wife’s charitable heart and—like her father—insisted on charging patients according to what they could afford. We were far from penniless, but my sisters and I were often the only girls at a party wearing last year’s fashions. Worse, we weren’t the least bit ashamed of it.

  My parents married for love and found wedded bliss, and so that would be my dowry: the freedom to marry the man of my choice. And I had been in absolutely no rush to do so.

  Had they lived until I wed, I’d have gone straight from their home to my husband’s, never needing to worry about the myriad concerns that come with independent life. If I’d been that girl, I doubt I’d have survived my first year in the twenty-first century. Instead, I’d lost them when I was nineteen, alone and unwed, with two younger sisters to care for.

  Even with that experience, in this new world, I am like a baby taking her first steps, putting each foot down with care and deliberation, constantly assessing and analyzing her environment. Oh, I suppose there are babies who fearlessly rush into ambulation, accepting the bumps and bruises as an intrinsic part of the process; I was not that child, and I am not that adult. I consider, consider and then consider some more.

  That first year is an excruciatingly slow process of learning about my new world. I raid gardens for months while I determine the best and safest way to gain employment. I live in sheds for months more until I have the money and knowledge to rent a room. Others would move faster, but my careful deliberation allows an easy transition. I do not make mistakes that mark me an outsider. Mistakes that might have landed me in a psychiatric ward.

  I assimilate. That is the word used for newcomers to a land, and that is what I do. Slow and careful assimilation, all the while telling myself it is temporary.

  I return to Thorne Manor every month, matching the moon cycle. With each failure, I fortify my defenses against despair until the day I arrive to find the house occupied. Seeing that, something in me breaks. The change is not unexpected—I noticed a caretaker had been preparing the ho
use in the last month. It is not even an unmovable obstacle—the new owner doesn’t change the locks, and I had a key copied from one found in a kitchen drawer. Yet as the house moves into her new phase of life, it draws back the shroud on a mirror I’ve kept carefully covered, refusing to acknowledge the reality reflected there. The reality that I am not moving forward in my own life. That two years have passed, and I am no closer to home than I was that first night.

  That mirror also shows a woman two years older. A mother with a son who will now be three years old. A wife with a husband who . . .

  I’ve tried so hard not to finish that sentence. Not to wonder what August thinks happened to me. I tell myself that perhaps time is frozen in their world, and when I return, it will still be that same night. My years away will have been an adventure during which I grew and learned so much. I will return no longer the young bride, cowed and confused by August’s jealousy, but a twenty-first-century woman with the skills and the confidence to correct the problem. To save my marriage without losing myself in the process.

  A glorious fantasy. The reality? The reality is that my gut tells me time has not stopped in that world. My infant son is a young boy now and almost certainly has no memory of me. My husband will have thought I ran away, abandoned him, his worst fears come true.

  I’ve refused to face these things because they loose a wild, gnashing, all-consuming terror inside me. I’ve been forgotten by my son, reviled and hated by my husband, and there is naught I can do about it.

  Has August moved on? Found a new wife for himself and a mother for Edmund? The thought ignites outrage. His wife is alive. Edmund’s mother is alive. Yet when I consider it in the cold dark of night, I must face an equally cold and dark truth. I almost hope August has moved on. For his sake. For Edmund’s.

  I do not want them to mourn me forever. I do not want that place in their life vacant forever. If I cannot return home, I want August to have found a woman who makes him happier than I did, a woman who can silence his demons, a woman who will love my son as her own.