The Carpenter & the Queen

The Carpenter and the Queen

By Michelle Lashier

Copyright 2014 by Michelle Lashier

All Rights Reserved

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For Mom and Dad

Table of
Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Epilogue

Time-Traveling Twins 1: Quivers and
Quills

About the Author

Acknowledgements

1

Early January 2005, Lindberg, Michigan

Snowflakes with black edges swirled around
wind lines that encircled the castle tower. On a tiny balcony, just
below the conical roof, stood a woman with thin limbs and large
eyes that encompassed half her face. Her long hair, whipped by the
air currents, twisted to the left. About her shoulders she clutched
a thin wrap. Beneath it she wore only a negligee. The tower
stretched to the top of the page. Near the bottom lay a white void.
The woman’s mouth was a thin line curving down in an expression of
despair. She was alone, cold, and unblinking in her black and white
world high in the sky.

“Mom?”

Claire Matthews jumped, causing her marker
to skip and draw a line across the woman’s face. Biting back the
urge to voice her irritation, Claire looked up from her drawing
table at the pajama-clad figure in the doorway.

“What is it, Sammy?”

“I can’t sleep.”

Sam’s voice sounded in throaty notes that
indicated he had been very much asleep until only a few seconds
before. He rubbed his eyes and swayed on his feet.

Claire went to him and crouched down to his
eye level.

“What’s wrong?”

“The wind is making too much noise. It
scared me.”

Claire put her arms around him. “Nothing’s
going to hurt us,” she comforted. “The wind can’t get in.”

“Can I stay up here with you?”

“There’s no place for you to sleep. Let’s
put you back to bed.”

He pulled away and shook his head. “Uh-uh. I
wanna be with you.”

“Sammy . . .”

The boy made a little whining sound, and
Claire sighed. When Claire was a little girl, her own mother would
have marched her straight back to bed. But Claire understood Sam’s
concern. The old house creaked and groaned in ways their apartment
building never had. And the house was so big. Claire felt
disoriented in the space. Although she had hoped this house would
bring her closer to her past, instead it was hurtling her toward
the future at the speed of light. She found no place in her mind or
her new property where she felt any relationship to anything except
the open air . . . and this eight-year-old with the shaggy blond
hair who was already going limp in her arms.

“I’ll get the cot,” Claire said.

She gently pushed Sam against the wall where
he slid down and sat on the floor, his eyes heavy.

She entered the dark hallway and opened the
door to the musty bedroom she was using as a storage room. The army
cot her brother had given her was just inside. Claire pulled it out
and returned to her studio, setting the cot near the wall. She
helped Sam climb onto it then went down the stairs to his room
where she gathered his pillow and favorite blue blanket.

Back in the studio, Sam was barely awake.
Claire put her arm under his head and shoulders to lift him up in
order to slide the pillow underneath. After tucking the blanket
around him, she kissed his cheek.

“Better?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

He snuggled in, curling his knees up toward
his chest, and fell asleep. Claire studied his face intently with
the same concentration and appreciation she used when she studied
art. Certainly the face of her child was more beautiful than
anything else she had ever created. With the peachy complexion and
blond hair Sam inherited from her as a canvas, Sam painted life in
the same broad strokes as his father—attitude, possession, and
vulnerability. One moment Sam dared the world to come after him,
fighting off self-doubt with sparkling eyes and his father’s
mischievous grin. The next, he was a frightened child who needed
his mom. Now, relaxed in sleep, with his mouth slightly open,
Claire could see both herself and Will in their son. Sam was a
lovely boy.

Running her hand through her bobbed hair,
Claire sat down at the table and studied the drawing she had been
working on. It was ruined. The skip lines intersected the mouth
line and cheek in a way that could not be disguised while still
preserving the original facial expression. Claire’s impulse was to
crumple the paper and toss it into the waste basket. Her fingertips
landed on the paper, ready to wrinkle it into a ball, but she
hesitated.

Surely there was some way she could fix it.
She stared at the lines, envisioning what new ones she could draw
to fix the damage. One solution would make the mouth too big.
Another would give the woman a facial scar. Still another would
obscure a quarter of her face with snowflakes. Claire didn’t like
any of the options. She knew she would think of something
eventually, but it wasn’t going to be tonight.

She had chosen this tiny room as her studio
because a series of three windows took up most of the wall. She
liked the light and the view of the back yard and wooded area
beyond. Her slanted drawing table pressed against the windows where
a draft continually chilled her feet. Her desk with the computer
was on the side wall to her right, and Sam’s cot was on the left
wall. She barely had room to move her chair. Claire rolled the
chair back a few inches and reached behind her into the desk drawer
to pull out some invisible tape. She tore off a piece, rolled it
onto the back of her picture, and secured it to the wall. She would
let it hang there until she could decide what to do with it.

Of course, when she pulled it down, the
paint would probably come with it since the new drywall was only
recently painted and hadn’t had time to cure yet. She shrugged. It
was her house now. She could do as she pleased, including ripping
off her own paint.

Most of the downstairs rooms were
wallpapered in atrocious cabbage-flower designs that had been
popular back in . . . well, she wasn’t sure they had ever been
popular. Claire did not considered herself an interior designer,
but anything she could do to the old place was better than leaving
it as it was. She would get new siding come summer with the money
Luther left her. New windows, too. Until then, she could focus on
the inside, making it the house it always had the potential to be.
All it needed was someone to care about it and happy people to live
inside of it. No one had cared for the house in thirty years. From
what she knew of the house’s more recent history, no one had been
happy here for at least that long, if not longer. By accepting the
house when it was offered her, Claire had promised to care for it.
But as for happiness—that would have to take care of itself.

Maybe it was time to paint again.

The thought surprised her. She hadn’t picked
up an art brush in four years. All her drawings since then were
black and white in the
ligne
claire
style. She only
colored her graphic design work now, but since that was on the
computer, it didn’t count. Maybe it was time for color—on the walls
first. Then, who knew? Perhaps she could bring out the brushes
again. She would wait for a picture to present itself in her mind.
Right now, she had nothing, and she knew forcing an image would
never work.

She closed her eyes and listened to the
sounds around her.

The wind moaned as it circled around the
front of the house.

Sam’s slow, steady breathing filled the
room. In. Out. In. Out.

She saw it. Smiling, she uncapped her marker
and drew two circles, one a few inches higher on the page than the
other. Then the marker created two bulky bodies, two air-tank
backpacks, two faces—Sam’s and hers—astronauts holding hands,
floating in the universal expanse with a monochromatic planet in
the distance, looking warm, friendly, and unattainable.

2

Chicago, Illinois

Paul Sawyer, engulfed in the overstuffed
sofa, closed his eyes and dozed. His sisters, Nora and Beth,
chattered indistinctly in the kitchen, their soprano voices
punctuated by the clanging of pots and thumping of cabinet doors.
This nap was the first time Paul had had to himself in the last
three days. He lay on his back, his feet stretched over the arm of
the couch. His right leg ached a little, and intermittent with his
dreamy sensations of floating, he knew another snow storm was
coming. The change in barometric pressure always caused him some
degree of discomfort.

He never lay down like this at home. Sleep
was something he needed very little of since he started living
alone. With so little stimulation, his energy stores lasted late
into the evening. But now, surrounded by children and four other
adults, Paul felt more exhausted than he had in months. Drifting
into a dream, he saw a misty game board populated with chess pieces
aligned into the end game strategy he had been searching for all
his life. Pure genius. The final, strategic stroke to achieve a
long-sought victory.

“Uncle Paul?”

He opened his eyes to see his seven-year-old
niece Emma holding a chess board over his head.

“Are you awake?”

Emma’s brown pigtails hung down as she bent
over Paul, her dark eyes squinting in concentration.

“Yeah.”

“Will you play chess with us?”

The two younger girls stood a few feet back.
Aubrey, Emma’s younger sister, was doing her pathetic puppy dog
impression. Their cousin Marissa, the youngest at age four, stood
with her arms crossed and her face very serious.

“Weren’t you watching a video?”

“That’s boring. We want to play with
you.”

Of course they did.

Paul had often wished he got warm fuzzy
feelings around his nieces. He loved them, certainly, but he could
never submerse himself into the roles required of him. His nieces
wanted a fun uncle, someone willing to play the crazy games their
parents didn’t have the energy for. But Paul wasn’t interested in
becoming a human jungle gym or a favorite babysitter. Any child of
his (and the possibility of having his own diminished every day)
would have to possess some of Paul’s own reticence. Having been a
cautious child himself, Paul understood the slow courtship of a
vulnerable soul much more than he ever would the way his nieces
threw themselves at him whole heartedly. The only thing Paul did
understand about his nieces was that the more reluctant he was to
play with them, the more they wanted him to. The easiest course of
action was to give in right away and do what they wanted.

“I’ll play a game,” Paul said, “at the
table.”

“On the floor,” Marissa insisted. “The
carpet feels good.”

Conceding, he swung his legs over the side
and dropped to the floor, crawling on his hands and left knee to
the spot in the center of the room where Marissa had already
plopped down.

“Who am I playing against?”

“All three of us.” Emma exchanged a
conspiratorial glance with her sister and cousin.

“That hardly seems fair.”

“We’re just kids, Uncle Paul.” Emma’s nose
pointed up in an air or superiority. “We’ve got to even the
odds.”

Paul held back a smile. Emma was already too
precocious for him to encourage her with a reaction.

Aubrey opened the bag containing the plastic
Stauntons and dumped them on the carpet. Paul separated the white
pieces and set them up on the opposite side of the board for the
girls.

“I’m assuming you’ll want to go first,” he
said.

“The youngest player always goes first,”
Marissa declared.

Paul placed the queen’s knight and bishop,
then a pawn.

“Do we need to go over how the pieces move?”
he asked. He didn’t wait for a response before he continued.
“What’s this piece right here?”