Midnight in Your Arms (13 page)

Dead she could handle. It was her vocation.

Sixty years her senior was not really an issue, either, since she had been visiting him in one of his earlier years.

But married was another thing entirely.

She didn’t
want
him to be married. She couldn’t stand the thought of Alaric belonging to another woman. Even if he was unhappily married. Somehow that made it worse, because it could be the reason he so readily accepted her presence in his world. He was desperately lonely. He was not understood. He needed someone.

Just like Laura.

But Laura needed Alaric in particular. She needed him with everything that was in her.

What if Alaric only needed someone—anyone—even her?

Her stomach filling with the molten heat of dread, Laura whirled about to face the opposite wall, in which the females of the family were interred. And she saw that there was only a single occupied compartment. One woman buried alone in a cold catacomb. Alaric’s epigraph said nothing of children. Clearly, he hadn’t any. The Storm line died with him, and with his wife.

Laura walked slowly closer, her knees turning to water. She wanted to read the name. She needed to know the identity of the woman she may have betrayed, in all but the final act.

ELLEN WRIGHT

20 APRIL 1838 – 13 JANUARY 1880

WIFE OF ALARIC STORM III, LAST OF HIS NAME

Reading it, Laura shivered. There was something ominous—nearly spiteful—in the last line of script. It was as though some fearsome lesson had been taught. A price exacted and paid.

Alaric Storm III, Last of His Name.

Laura didn’t like it. She wanted to scratch the terrible words from the stone until her fingernails were broken and bloody. With a cry, she rushed forth, and struck at the place where her beloved had been negated. It wasn’t his tomb that erased him. It was his wife’s.

In her distraction, she didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. She heard only the voice, creaking like the cemetery gate in the Dartmoor wind.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

L
aura spun around, badly startled, her blood roaring in her ears. It was the old woman from the shop who had stared at her so penetratingly, her handsome face crinkled all over like a discarded sheet of paper. Again, she felt the pervading sense of familiarity wash over her as she studied the lady’s face—the thick black brows and beak of a nose. The sharp eyes like polished obsidian that seemed to see straight into her. Where had she seen that face before? And why did she feel like it had changed vastly since the last time she saw it?

“What do you mean, you’ve been waiting for me?” Laura asked, bewildered. “Did you follow me here?”

The woman nodded. “I saw your bicycle leaning against the wall, and I pulled over.” She looked about her, bright eyes taking in every detail, both of the scattered flora decorating the lone tomb and of Laura herself, including her tear-streaked face. “If it was anyone but you, I would have been surprised. Nobody much comes in here anymore. Nobody but the birds, the wind, and me.”

“If it was anyone but me,” Laura repeated faintly. She looked hard at the woman, who had the temerity to grin briefly, a flash of yellowed teeth. She seemed so familiar and yet, where would Laura have seen her before? It wasn’t in the way she looked; it was how she moved, how she spoke, the way her dark brows scrunched together over her eyes that were still clear and sharp, not at all rheumy like those of so many elderly people. She was spry, too, and as she allowed Laura to take a good long look at her, she paced about with sure-footed efficiency.

She ambled over to the opposing wall and peered up at Ellen’s compartment, where the lone inhabitant whiled away the afterlife. Laura sidled cautiously up beside her, keeping the old lady within the periphery of her gaze as she, too, looked upon the epitaph, reading it over again.

The woman sighed heavily. “Ah, it’s a sad business, the lives some people lead.”

“You knew her?” Laura asked, her interest sharpened even further. If the old dame wouldn’t elaborate on the cryptic remarks she had made at the beginning of their interaction, perhaps Laura could coax more out of her in another way, talking of other things. Though the dead woman at whose graveside they stood could hardly be less removed from Laura’s concerns, and the old woman seemed to know it.

“Aye, I did, right enough. She was a pleasant lady, but a foolish one.”

“How so?”

“She married a man what didn’t love her, and never would.”

Laura’s heart sped up, as if riding a bicycle of its own. “That’s sad.”

“It is, young woman,” she said, turning her penetrating gaze sharply back to Laura, who could feel it take hold like minute talons pressing into her. “Nothing sadder in this life. She was married to him”—she nodded toward Alaric’s crypt—“and though she was never very sorry for it, she should have been. There’s nothing worse than marrying a man fatally in love with another.”

Laura’s mouth went dry as she followed the old woman’s gaze. The tomb was like an anvil anchoring her heart, so that it beat only with great, painful effort. The sight of it fascinated her; she didn’t want to tear her eyes away from the place where Alaric’s bones had been milled slowly into dust over many long years. The bones that once animated the dead man she had touched with her own living body.

“Who was he in love with?” she asked, because she couldn’t help herself. She wanted someone—anyone—else to know it, and say it.

“With you, of course,” the old woman said. “And well you know it.”

Laura turned to her, staring wildly. “How do
you
know it? Who are you?”

“Look at me, young woman. Peel the years away from my face with your mind, as if paring an apple. See me the way I was, if you can. And you being what you are, I know you can.”

Laura’s hand crept up to her mouth, and she bit down on the tips of her fingers in a conscious attempt to clear her senses. Was this another apparition, another gift from the deep past? She looked hard at the woman, and a flash came over her: a pair of wide dark eyes, a knitted brow, the strange vibration of fingers brushing through her own. How stupid could she be, she who knew things, who saw what others didn’t? Had she completely lost her gift along with her heart, or had she merely been disregarding it? The thought frightened her, and she willed herself to remain calm, to be the woman she was. She wasn’t ordinary and never could be. There was nothing whatsoever to be frightened about. She set her mouth, and drew her trembling body up. She stood calm and tall, and became herself again. A woman who knew. “Tess,” she said. “The little kitchen maid.”

Tess’s laughter was like the hoarse bark of an old hound. “Very good, my dear. Now clear the cobwebs from your head, and come with me. We’ve a lot to say to each other. I’ve been waiting more than half my life for you to turn up again.
Much
more than half of it, truth be told.”

She scampered back out the way she came, her spindly legs swimming in her battered wellies as Laura followed docilely along. The light was dimming, the sky giving up its negligible light as Tess supervised Laura while she stowed her groceries and crammed her bicycle as best she could into the back of the rickety old jalopy that was Tess’s means of transport. Laura swallowed nervously, and held tight to her seat with both hands as she saw how the wizened woman’s head barely crested the dashboard. Her feet hardly reached the pedals, but she sailed merrily along at breakneck speed, and managed to miss a fair few of the road’s many ruts.

After a while, Laura adjusted to Tess’s unique driving style, and relaxed a little, though she never let go of her seat. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“To my croft. You’ve got nothing worth sitting on at that pile of rubble you’re living in. I might have known you were mad enough to come.”

“I … he … left it to me. The house. I was compelled.”

Tess nodded. “I’ve no doubt of it. Once I saw the fashions starting to get more and more outlandish after the war, I knew you’d soon be on your way, with your cropped hair and lip rouge and bare knees.” She glanced over at Laura’s clothing with an appraising gaze. “Though I never did see you in trousers. I rather fancy trousers myself, though they ain’t proper for visiting a cemetery.”

Laura ignored that remark. “You mean you’ve seen me more than once?”

“Haven’t you seen me? You must have, or else you wouldn’t have known me.”

“Just once,” Laura said. “A few days ago.” Had it only been a few days? The strange scene in the kitchen seemed like a month ago. “I dropped the tray you gave me, after. There was nothing on it but old dishes and dust.”

Tess nodded. “You dropped it on my end, too, disappearing like a candle guttering. A good thing, too, or Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Fischer might have made more of a fuss of your disappearing like that. They seemed to forget you as soon as you’d gone, thought you’d legged it back to your room after I dropped toast and egg on your toes.” She cackled. “All those dishes came straight out of my wages, and I was sore cross with you, I can tell you!”

“I don’t blame you,” Laura said feelingly. “I’m dreadfully sorry.”

Tess said nothing to that, her smile fading slowly as she veered into a little lane that meandered up to a small whitewashed cottage at the edge of the cliff, not very far at all from the gates of Stonecross. Tess pulled up and parked haphazardly, cutting the engine with a splutter of fumes Laura could taste. They sat for a moment in silence, Laura’s hands fidgeting in her lap. She could see into the grounds from where they sat, quiet for a moment.

Laura gazed at the ancient stone cross that marked an earlier Benedictine settlement. It shone eerily, as if beckoning her from a time far more distant than Alaric’s. It reminded her that Stonecross was more than a house. It was a whole history buried beneath heather and stone. Dartmoor was covered in these striking stone edifices, most of them marking the path for ancient travellers making their way between long-lost monasteries. Laura knew without having to see them all that this was the most beautiful one. It was the one that led her through the mists back home to Stonecross Hall, as it must once have led Alaric.

“He gave me my house, too,” Tess said softly, breaking the silence. “The master did. He always took care of us, right to the end.”

Laura shivered. She didn’t want to talk about Alaric being dead, but she supposed they must. Everything led up to that inevitability, for every living person. For Tess and Laura, too, though Laura’s time was far more distant, God willing. Alaric’s time had already come.

She wanted nothing more than to jump from the shabby little automobile, leap onto her bike, and pedal as fast as she could for Stonecross—for home—where she would open every door in the whole house until she found a room with Alaric in it. Alive. Breathing. Full of the life that was still his, somewhere in time. And even though she couldn’t touch him, she would crawl right into this living warmth and stay there forever. Or until she faded back away.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said hollowly.

The old woman patted her kindly with a gnarled hand. “No more do I, dearie. But it’s happening, all the same. Now come inside with me, and I’ll make us a nice cup of tea and a bite of something. And we’ll do what we can to make sense of things.”

The cottage was snug, full of the fuggy warmth of a peat fire. Tess pressed Laura into an overstuffed and antimacassar-covered armchair in front of the hearth. Laura listened to her bustle about in the small, tidy kitchen, filling the kettle and rattling crockery. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary country croft, with a spinning wheel in the corner, a fat cat blinking balefully from the hearthstone, bundled herbs drying on hooks from the low, smoke-stained rafters. Laura sank back, taking it all in with complacent lassitude.

Until she began to notice a few oddities amidst all the snug English pastoralism. A curious little figure on the mantel in the crude shape of a woman, a sort of pagan deity, with unusual runes scratched onto its belly. Some arcane-seeming books on a shelf, with titles that were anything but mundane, including a full thirteen-volume set of
The Golden Bough
. And then there was the battered and well-thumbed deck of tarot cards scattered on the small kitchen table on which Tess had set out the tea things. She didn’t think she would have to look hard to find a spirit board and planchette, or perhaps a scrying bowl—the requisite tools of any serious seer.

“Tea’s ready,” Tess said, throwing Laura a sharp look as she noticed her focused scrutiny. “Ah, well, doesn’t it take one to know one?”

Laura looked at her, and nodded. “I knew you were … something. Like me. When you looked at me so strangely before I disappeared. Had you seen me before?”

Tess shrugged. “Not like that. But … I had felt something. A presence that didn’t belong. At first, I thought you was a ghost.”

“Am I not, in a way? Not now, but when I … appear. There.”

“It may seem that way, to those who don’t know of such things. There are more things in heaven and on earth, my dear. And you are one of those things. I’ve always been curious: how did the master take it, the first time he seen you? I couldn’t be sure you’d met him yet, but when I saw your bicycle at the graveyard, I knew you must have.”

“Yes, he’s seen me. Several times. And … he takes it surprisingly well. He thinks I’m some kind of fabrication of his own mind.”

“Mayhap that’s all we ever are, even to those we love most,” Tess mused, pouring the strong black brew into a pair of mismatched teacups. Laura drank deep, grateful for its steadying potency. There wasn’t much a cup of good, strong tea couldn’t fix—except perhaps for a pair of lovers born in separate times. Even tea couldn’t help that.

Tess looked at her levelly. “Can you touch each other yet?”

Laura reddened. “No. Not really. Except once, when I was in a trance, and he was … thinking of me. But Alaric wasn’t physically present. I could feel him, but he wasn’t there. And on his side, I was more like a fantasy than anything he could really touch.” She reached out and pressed the old woman’s mottled arm. “How do you know anything about this?”