Pirates (6 page)

Phoebe’s appetite proved unhampered by the situation. She reached for a piece of toasted bread, thick and buttery, and took a bite. “I really don’t think I imagined Seattle,” she said, musing aloud rather than talking to Old Woman and chewing as she spoke. She frowned at her companion. “I’ll bet you’re a subconscious archetype. Yes—it’s all very Jungian. You’re some sort of mother-figure—both nurturing and controlling…”

Old Woman rolled her luminous brown eyes. “Such strange talk,” she scolded, but with affection. Then she sighed and sat down in a chair drawn close to the bed. “You be careful what you say outside this room, miss. There be some who would call you witch, hearing such wild talk. And these folks here, they don’t much take to magic and the like.”

Overwhelmed and hungry, Phoebe swallowed the arguments that rose in her throat, along with a sip of strong tea, and said nothing. After that, she consumed an egg and a portion of stewed apples, flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg.

Then, emboldened, Phoebe reiterated her original theory. “ ‘Old Woman.’ Even your name is straight out of a textbook. You symbolize wisdom, I think, and compassion, and—”

“I am flesh and blood, miss, just like you,” said the archetype. “I just myself, that’s all.”

Phoebe shook her head, waggling her fork for emphasis. “No,” she said. “You’re a remarkably detailed projection of my deeper mind, which is obviously troubled. If you were real, you would have a name.”

“I have,” came the quiet reply. “I am called ‘Old Woman’ because I have lived so long. My true name is a secret—to say it aloud is to make a powerful spell.”

Phoebe gave up, for the moment, and was just setting the
tray aside to get out of bed and look for the bathroom when a brisk rap sounded at the door. Before she could say “come in” or “stay out,” Duncan stepped over the threshold, looking even more authentic in the daylight than he had by the glow of oil lamps and candles.

The loose laces at the neck of his shirt and the dark stubble of a beard added to his roguish charm, and Phoebe pondered his role in her personal mythology. Like Old Woman, he was surely an illusion, signifying some facet of her psyche.

Embarrassing though it was, Phoebe finally concluded that Duncan represented the deepest yearnings of her libido. Freud would have a heyday with this, she reflected. But underlying all her tidy, though alarming, psychological speculations was something else: an absolute certainty, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that her sanity was still very much intact.

Her instincts told her that Old Woman really was flesh and blood, just as she appeared to be, and so was Duncan Rourke. He stood at the foot of her bed by then, looking imperious and, though he was clearly trying to hide the fact, every bit as confused as Phoebe herself. He took a small object from the pocket of his breeches and tossed it into her lap.

Her watch.

“A clever application of an old principle,” he said, grudgingly, as if by commenting on a modern gadget he must also give Phoebe the credit for inventing it.

Grateful for this small proof that she hadn’t imagined her other life in the late twentieth century, Phoebe pulled the watch onto her wrist and checked the time—not that the hour mattered. It was, after all, the year that was in question.

“Thanks,” she said. “For a while there, I thought I’d gone crazy. By the way, what year is this?”

Duncan raised one dark eyebrow, silently indicating that he had yet to discard the possibility of lunacy. Old Woman, whose true name could not be uttered because it was magic, stood by, not speaking, protective, and bristling with dignity.

“It is 1780, of course,” said the master of the house. Then, after a lengthy and thunderous silence, he demanded, “Who are you?”

Phoebe, though still reeling from the announcement that more than two hundred years had just fallen off the celestial calendar, recalled Old Woman’s warning about the eighteenth-century attitude toward witches, self-proclaimed or otherwise, and thought carefully before answering. “My name is Phoebe Turlow,” she said. “I believe I’ve told you that already. In fact, I’m thinking of changing it, out of pure boredom. Do I look like an Elisabeth to you, or a Helen?”

A muscle leaped in Duncan’s cheek, and was promptly stilled—by force of will, no doubt. “The truth, madam,” he intoned. “I have had enough of your nonsense.”

“That
is
the truth,” Phoebe insisted, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and standing up. She was not ill, not physically anyway, and talking to Duncan while lying almost prone disquieted her in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. It also gave him the psychological advantage. “I know you’re wondering how I got here,” she went on, trying in vain to smooth her crumpled wench’s costume and at the same time lend herself some shred of credibility. “Well, as it happens, I have no idea.”

Duncan muttered a pithy exclamation, then said, “The articles found in your possession, madam, are hardly commonplace.” His blue eyes pierced her, warmed her in places where their gaze should not have reached.

He had found her purse, then, and rifled through it. She was annoyed on the one hand and relieved on the other. No two ways about it: To go through a woman’s handbag was an invasion of privacy. Still, her driver’s license, her credit cards, the wallet photos—all were irrefutable proof, if only to Phoebe herself, that she was still firmly rooted in her own identity. The odd restlessness that possessed her now, however, was nothing she wanted to claim as a part of her personality.

Phoebe drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “I would like my things back, please,” she said.

“Regrettably,” Duncan retorted immediately, though his
expression indicated that he felt no remorse for anything he’d said or done so far, that his authority was unassailable, in this room and far beyond its boundaries, “I cannot grant your request until you’ve answered my questions satisfactorily.”

The excitement Phoebe felt was not voluntary, nor did it seem to have much of anything to do with finding herself in the wrong century, but she kept her composure. “Then we are both defeated,” she replied, “because you don’t believe a word I say. You’ve already made up your mind about me, so why not just go ahead and hang me for a witch and be done with it?”

He glared at her, his eyes glinting with the hard shine of gemstones, while their pure, dark blue color, that of summer seas mirroring the sky, presented, in contrast, a sense of softness and great, fiery depths. “Perhaps you are a sorceress,” he said at last, and Phoebe wished she could tell for sure whether he was serious or not. “Mayhap I should send you to the mainland, with your odd belongings and your babbling, and let a magistrate sort the matter out.”

“You wouldn’t blow your cover that way,” Phoebe challenged, hoping against hope that her guess was right, and he was only bluffing, trying to scare her into confessing a litany of sins he had already ascribed to her. Though he was opinionated, she did not believe Duncan Rourke was superstitious.

Duncan put his hands on his hips and tilted his head to one side. “Blow my cover?” he drawled. “Damn it all to perdition, woman, what
are
you talking about?”

Phoebe sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting that things need to be translated. What I meant was, you won’t send me to the States—er, the colonies—because you don’t want the British to know you’re here.”

He gave a long, measured, and downright lethal sigh. Then, ignoring Old Woman, he clasped Phoebe’s upper arm in a hard but painless grip and shuffled her across the room and out into the hallway. Before a protest could be raised, Duncan had thrust his unwanted houseguest over another threshold and into a chamber that was plainly his own.

He dragged her to the desk, a beautifully carved piece that would probably bring a fortune at an antiques auction in a couple of centuries, and pressed her into the matching chair. Her purse was there, and some of its contents, including Phoebe’s pitiful store of cash, were arrayed on the shining surface.

He thumped the currency, which he’d laid out in a neat fan shape, with one index finger. “Where did you get these notes?” he asked, and this time there was wonder in his voice instead of anger.

Looking at her belongings and then at Duncan, Phoebe realized, in a moment of blinding revelation, that the impossible had happened.

To her.

Somehow, she had indeed found an opening in time, and she had slipped through it.

“I’m afraid to tell you,” she confessed fretfully at long last.

Duncan crouched beside her, looking up into her face, gripping the back of her chair with one hand and the edge of the desk with the other. He drew unseen lightning down from the skies, like a human divining rod, and it crackled through Phoebe.

“Please,” he said.

Phoebe bit her lower lip and raised her eyes to Old Woman for a moment in silent question, and her guardian nodded slowly.

“I came from the future,” Phoebe blurted in a rush of words.

“I don’t understand,” Duncan admitted, brushing her face lightly with the backs of his knuckles, leaving prongs of fire in their wake. At least he hadn’t said,
I don’t believe you
.

“Neither do I,” said Phoebe, barely able to keep from crying. “I was minding my business, in my own time, and suddenly the elevator was gone and I was here and there you were…”

He took one of the bills, a crisp twenty, and held it up. “It
say ’The United States of America’ on this paper. What does it mean?”

“That you won the war,” she told him, speaking impatiently because she was still trying to comprehend that she had slipped through a crack in time and found herself in another century. There was no sense in asking herself how it had happen—that was a mystery she might never solve, through she certainly meant to try. All Phoebe could do for the moment and make the best of them.

And try make some sense of the things this man made her feel.

Duncan rose gracefully to his full height, still holding the twenty-dollar bill and gazing at it in quite amazement. “He is a clever man, the printer who made his.” he said, and the wistful note in his voice wrenched at something hidden far back in Phoebe’s heart. “Some Tory trick, without doubt, calculated to mock our efforts to win liberty.”

“You asked for the truth,” Phoebe pointed out. “And just as I predicted, you think Im lying.”

“How can I even imagine otherwise?” he asked, meeting her eyes at last. Sadly. “It is a wild tale you tell. And an impossible one in the bargain.”

“Is it?” Phoebe asked, putting the question to herself as well as to Duncan. She was still trying to deal with matters herself, still speculating, ’wondering, marveling. “We don’t know much about such things, in my century or yours. For all any of us can say for sure, time is merely a state of mind, a matter of perception. Maybe, instead of being sequential, unfolding minute by minute, year by year, century by century, eternity exists as a whole, complete in and of itself.”

“Gibberish,” Duncan said, but she saw, distracted by the many ramifications of her predicament though she was, that he found her theory intriguing, if not entirely likely.

“The question is,” Phoebe muttered, running the tip of her index finger over the raised lettering on one of her credit cards, “what do I do now? Can I do back, or is the way closed forever?” She looked, as she spoke, not at Duncan, who had stepped back, but at Old Woman. “If I guessed
your name,” she asked, whimsical in her state of polite shock, “and dared to say it out loud, would the magic take me home?”

Old Woman laid one hand on Phoebe’s shoulder, warm and heavy and reassuring. “You already be home, child. And you got here by a magic all your own. You’re with us because that’s what you wanted in the deepest pan of your heart.”

Duncan sighed, drew near again, and picked up a small photograph of Eliott, Phoebe’s half brother. “This miniature is remarkable,” he said, a frown of confusion creasing his forehead. “I cannot see the brushstrokes.”

“That’s because there are none,” Phoebe said, quite gently, considering that she was both irritated and scared. And something else that was harder to define. “This is a photograph—sort of a reflection, captured on paper.”

Her handsome host looked up, his eyes narrowed in wariness and suspicion and something Phoebe hoped was the beginning of belief. “And when was—will—this be invented?”

“Sometime in the nineteenth century, I think. There are a great many pictures of the Civil War, which began in 1860, so even though the process was still pretty cumbersome, they’d mastered the fundamentals by then.”

Duncan looked pale and, again, a muscle flexed at the edge of his jaw. “What Civil War is this?” he asked, in a reasonable but otherwise utterly expressionless tone of voice.

“You’re not ready to hear about that just yet,” Phoebe told him. “You’ve got your hands full with the Revolution, and, well, let’s just say that the War Between the States wasn’t one of our country’s finer moments. And then there was Vietnam, but that would
really
depress you—”

“Enough,” Duncan interrupted. “Are you telling me that our nation will go to war against itself?”

Phoebe sighed, wishing, of course, that she hadn’t mentioned that particular period in American history. “Yes,” she said.

“For what cause?”

“It was very complicated, but I suppose it had more to do with slavery than anything else.”

Duncan appeared to be developing a headache of monumental proportions. “Even now,” he mused, “that question makes for bitter division among the staunchest patriots.”

“If you guys had only outlawed it when you drew up the Declaration of Independence, everyone—especially black people—would have been spared a lot of grief. But it isn’t going to happen: The planters from the southern colonies, among others, will maintain that slavery is necessary to economic survival, and, in the long run, they’ll get their way.”

Old Woman interceded quietly. “That’s enough of such talk, child,” she said, laying her hands lightly on Phoebe’s cramped shoulders. The tense muscles relaxed with dizzying suddenness, as if some powerful drug had been injected. “Come away with me now. You got to have some sunshine and fresh air if you want to mend yourself proper.”