Midnight in Your Arms (12 page)

I
t kept happening. Every day, Laura had visions of Alaric. She saw him moving about Stonecross, languid and rumpled, glass or book in hand. She saw him through the windows, standing and staring out to sea. Or if she was walking the grounds, she saw him at the window, gazing out. She could never be sure if he saw her. His gaze was penetrating even when he seemed to be looking at nothing at all.

At night, she felt and saw him more clearly. There had been more than one encounter since the night she first slept in the bed that had once been his. She had even woken up on one occasion with him sleeping next to her, but she couldn’t rouse him. When she tried to shake him by the shoulder he was little more than vapor in her hands, even though he was as clearly delineated against the pillow as he had been that morning Laura had accidentally stumbled into his room. So she curled up beside him and watched him sleep until he drifted away, taking his bedroom with him. She always seemed to appear in his world. He had never so much strayed a fingernail into hers. And he was always more real, more physically present, at night, after the fire banked low in the grate and the sea began to whisper its nothings in her ear.

Finally, after several days of confusing encounters, she’d had to get out of the house in order to think about what was happening without having her mind clouded with stray visions—if that was even what they were.

It has to do with midnight. That must be it. Midnight and the time of year,
she thought as she pumped furiously at the pedals of the bicycle she had found languishing in a garden shed. There was no other even slightly feasible explanation.

With all of the odd activity, it was no wonder she had felt such a burst of energy and a need to expend it as swiftly as possible. The bicycle and the winding country road on which she found herself were excellent cures, though she had briefly considered a dip in the frigid sea before coming to her senses and arranging a slightly less dangerous pastime. And because even she couldn’t live on bully beef forever, Laura had decided to make the trip into town, killing two birds with one rickety stone.

The rugged countryside of Dartmoor hugged the road on both sides, and Laura’s hair blew about as if she had been caught in a maelstrom. The weird outcroppings of the famous Haytor Rocks thrust up from the moorland to pierce the sky like Neolithic pagan structures. It was wild and beautiful, dotted here and there with tenant crofts and the small distinct white mounds that could only be sheep. Laura felt thrilled from tip to toes to be out in the air after the thick miasma of stink and noise that had always enveloped her in London.

Though she hadn’t ridden a bicycle in years, she took right back to it like the proverbial duck to water. She had oiled the chain and pumped up the tires the way Charles had shown her when she was a girl. He had left his own precious bicycle in her care when he went off to war. She still had it, though she never rode it now. She should. It might make her feel closer to her brother to use something he had once cherished.

She didn’t like to think of Charles.

She used to think it was because she was afraid of bringing his ghost back to her, tearing him away from whatever peace he had found. Which was foolish, because she knew it didn’t work that way. Though she was beginning to wonder if she actually knew how it worked after all. And now she realized she had been foolish, banishing Charles’s memory. He was her brother, and her love for him couldn’t hurt her now. Not after so many years. It did him a great disservice, pretending that he never existed. That he didn’t exist now, in some other, better place.

Perhaps Alaric was there with him.

For she couldn’t ignore the fact that when they weren’t together, Alaric was dead, and she hadn’t even been born. Not in his time. Which was as good as being dead herself.

The thought sent a knife through her heart, and twisted it. She didn’t mind the thought of being dead so much as she minded not existing in the same world he inhabited. It seemed wrong, somehow. Terribly obscene. She was meant to know him. She was meant to be with him. It was the one thing she knew with unshakable certainty.

Perhaps Stonecross had drawn her to it in an attempt to set Fate straight, who must have got her facts mixed up and sent their souls to separate places. Perhaps they were being punished for something they had done wrong in another life. Or perhaps it was a test, and they needed to find a way out of the mess they were in. Many Spiritualists believed such things. Laura had never gone in for the faith-based aspect of her lifestyle. She thought so much of it wishful hokum.

And yet … here she was. With no other likely explanation.

The fact was, Alaric had left her his house in his will. That was irrefutable. How could he have done that if he had never known her? It was an endless loop, a Möbius of confusion. When she was a child, Laura had had to make one in school, with a strip of paper and a dab of paste. She had marvelled at the way the seemingly simple loop of foolscap had twisted in on itself. It was her first inkling of infinitude. And now, it was the only thing upon which her mind could anchor itself.

This was happening to her because it had happened to her before, and would happen to her again. It was happening because it could never stop. It might change, certain details might shift and take on a different shape, but the fact that she was here, now, coasting along the road that led from Stonecross to the small village of Cropton and back again, was all it took to convince her that Time was not a straight line. Time was a loop. And it was infinite, so that all moments were the same moment. Going forward was the same as going back.

She couldn’t wait to tell Alaric.

If only she knew when she would see him again.

At midnight. She could see him at midnight. Or at least touch him. Would there be a midnight in their future when the two states could at last be combined—the seeing and the touching? Perhaps at All Hallows, when the veils between realms were thin, so thin some said they disappeared. That was why people dressed up in costume: to fool the ghosts and the ghouls into thinking the living were like them, for that one night of the year.

Laura wondered now how many people she had seen in costume as a girl were in fact travellers from another time. Perhaps the fear and wonder she had seen on some of their faces was more genuine than she had realized.

Cropton came into view around the next bend, and Laura peddled swiftly into the heart of the small village. The High Street comprised a handful of buildings, including two pubs, a greengrocer, and a general store, the latter two of which she could depend upon for her basic needs. Despite her recent spending spree, Laura’s wants had always been basic. She patted her hair down and entered the general store, aware of the peculiar looks her wool trousers, wellies, and Charles’s old raggedy sweater were attracting. She hadn’t any other really warm, practical bicycle-riding clothes, and the wind bit through them as it was. She smiled and nodded, and the people nodded back, friendliness overtaking their initial suspicion.
God bless the English country folk,
she thought.
Fair Britannia’s staunchest protectors.

She bought a pound of tea, bread, sugar, a pint of cream, a rasher of bacon, a pound of butter, and a small wheel of soft cheese—thought for a moment, and added a dozen eggs and a sixpence worth of licorice allsorts. It was all she had room for in her basket, which was, luckily, a rather prodigious size, the sort from which French onion merchants hawked their wares.

Laura paid with a smile and a nod, and was aware of everyone staring at her. She wondered if they paid all strangers the same amount of attention, or if they knew very well who she was, where she lived, and why. She didn’t know how they could, but she was more than aware of the strange mystical powers of country people, who seemed to know every event that happened in their vicinity, whether of great or little importance. No doubt her appearance in the shop would provide fodder for chewing for a week at least. She wished her neatly arranged hair had survived the trip, and that she had had the forethought to adorn her scrubbed face with a swipe of lipstick, at the very least. She was aware that she must be quite a disappointment to her new neighbors, who might be forgiven for expecting someone much more fashionable and glamorous in the person of the village heiress.

One old woman threw her a particularly penetrating look, and she looked vaguely familiar to Laura, who didn’t usually forget a face. She shrugged it off, tossing the lady a smile as she left the shop, the bells jangling after her. She felt the woman’s eyes on her as she walked down the street, but curiosity was a common commodity, and she thought nothing more of it.

After arranging the delivery of her more cumbersome necessaries, and a regular supply of ice for the ancient icebox in the pantry, Laura went on her way. The bicycle, overladen with her supplies, was even more rickety, juddering all over the road, hitting every bump and hollow until Laura felt as though her skeleton was about to rattle right out of her body. She steered as manfully as she could, but by the time she arrived at the picturesque stone church that marked the halfway point to Stonecross Hall, she admitted momentary defeat, and came to a shuddering halt at the gate of the overgrown little cemetery. Careful to balance the capricious contraption against the low wall so that the basket was resting firmly on top of the stones, Laura pushed the rusty gate open. It squawked in protest, but gave way with reasonably good grace. Clearly, no one visited the people interred within very often. And to be fair, it looked like a very old graveyard indeed. Perhaps there was no one left who survived its inhabitants.

Laura rather liked graveyards. They were peaceful places. Once the dead were in the ground and their bodies were at rest, all the bother and indecency of death was neatly done away with. Though their souls were not always so peaceful. Which was where Laura came in. She liked to sit in a graveyard on occasion, to remind herself what death should be like. Quiet. Restful. Final. It was what she hoped for herself, when her time came to that inevitable stopping point. She didn’t fear death; she only feared unwillingly living a tedious afterlife.

Wending her way through the monuments, which leaned this way and that, stalwart against the sky as though mimicking their more impressive neighbors, the Haytor Stones, Laura was unaware that she was looking for anything in particular.

Or anyone.

That was what she told herself, at any rate. But she had begun, reflexively, to gather up some of the prettier weeds and more tenacious late-blooming wildflowers that grew along the shelter of the cemetery wall, until she held a bedraggled, but somehow wild and lovely, bouquet in her hands. Her eyes scanned the tombstones, only registering the barest details before discarding them.

And then she found it. In fact, she nearly brained herself running into it.

The mausoleum was large and imposing, with an austere grandeur that mirrored the ancestral home of the people who now dwelt forever within its vaults. Laura stood trembling before it, her little bouquet clenched in her fist, her head bowed as she avoided for a few long moments the name inscribed in perfectly carved letters on the stone: STORM.

Alaric’s family. The family in whose home she was now living, though she had no blood right. Her hands fell limply to her side, one of them still clinging to her pitiful collection of weeds as she entered the crypt.

It was huge. Monolithic. Multi-chambered like a vast and complicated heart that cherished only the dead. The stone was plainly carved; no ostentation, just good, firm, clean lines. The interior was surprisingly light and airy, the remains filed away in compartments according to rank. Lesser sons, wives, and daughters of the family Storm on one side, with all of their extended issue opposite. Laura couldn’t begin to count them. Fathers and first sons were interred in separate crypts down the center, covered in heavy lids that bore their elaborate epitaphs, unlike their less hallowed relatives, whose compartments bore little more than their names, the dates of their births and deaths, and to which Storm they had been married or born.

Laura walked along the vaults, trailing her hand over each of the Storm patriarchs in turn. There were two Alarics, the First and Second of their name, at the edge of the fifth chamber. And then, in the sixth, standing completely alone, with no son by his side, was the last crypt.

Laura’s breath came in jerky gasps, and her eyes blurred with tears as she approached. She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see him that way. But she knew she must. She knew she needed to see her quest through to the inevitable end. She caressed the smooth marble with her hand, unconsciously scattering the posy she had collected over the surface of the simple epitaph:

ALARIC STORM III

BELOVED SON, HONORED HUSBAND

VETERAN OF THE CRIMEA

31 OCTOBER 1835 – 16 MAY 1891

Sobbing, Laura laid her cheek on the chilled stone, her hot tears trickling over the contours of her face in a way they never had for her brother. When Charles had been killed, she went entirely numb. She’d never wept for him the way she wept now for this man she barely knew. And yet, she did know him. She had known no one better. There was something between them that was wordless and vast as the time that separated them. And leaning against his tomb, knowing that his bones rested beneath her hot, wet cheek was more than she could bear.

After she’d had a good long cry, Laura forced herself to stand upright again. She frowned, reading the inscription more carefully than she had at first, inscribing each word on her memory.

Especially those that read
Honored Husband
.

Whose
honored husband was he?

Just before they had been interrupted by whichever servant cared for him in the morning, she had asked Alaric if he had a lady. He had hesitated. Laura had no idea if he would have answered her, or if he would have used some sort of evasion maneuver to steer the conversation away from the topic at hand. Had he married by the time Laura knew him? She was consorting with a man sixty-odd years her senior who had been dead nearly ten years by the time she was born. Was she consorting with a
married
dead man at that?