The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (59 page)

“Down here,” he said.

These stairs were made of different stone than the grey granite of St Paul’s Chapel – something red and crumbly like brick, but with streaks of pearlescent white flaking into opalene brilliance under Mellon’s elegant feet.

I slipped a little – there was no handrail – and Mellon grabbed me by the elbow to steady me. We exchanged a glance in the low, flickering light, and as he leaned to me my heart started to pound so hard it was almost painful.

“Mireya?”

“What?” I whispered, half-tranced by the shadows on the stairs.

“Don’t forget to breathe. You’re turning blue.”

And he smiled, a kind, warm smile to show me he didn’t mean to belittle or tease. I smiled back, and for a moment, in a delicious flash of sensation, it was like I’d gone backwards to a Mireya who had never suffered.

And then that light, girlish Mireya vanished once again.

“Steady,” Mellon whispered. “The stairs get steeper.”

And so they did. The stairs became blocks of cold brass, slippery and worn through in the middle, strangely scarred and dented by something even colder and harder. The air got colder too, and damp.

But not mouldy. At first I took that apple blossom scent for cider, but when I saw the first flower petals on the stairs, I gasped.

That flower smell came from flowers.
Flowers
.

“How far down have we gone?” I asked.

Mellon shrugged, and I realized with a start that he had a lantern in his hand. A lantern, OK, not a flashlight or even a candle.

“I had this stashed at the top of the staircase,” he said, anticipating my outburst. “Thought it would be handy.”

For the first time, Mellon made me hesitate. I’d trusted him enough to see him alone for weeks now. His reserve and courtesy had reassured me, even as I had avoided all the people except Colleen in my usual circles.

And here we were, far enough away from the world that nobody could hear me scream for help. And Mellon was acting so strangely I hardly recognized him.

My heartbeat raced in my ears, and I felt my pulse pounding in my throat. I wiped my damp palms on the front of my pants, and waited for him to stop.

He did, and raised the lantern high to take a good look at me. “You are afraid.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I’m sorry, Mellon. Yes, I am.”

He nodded in reply, slowly. “Nobody can get at you here. You’re here with me.”

His eyes flashed with electricity, and I forced myself to breathe slowly until my heart could follow my mind and calm down. I had, up until this point, found Mellon unthreatening, a safe male presence in a world of predators. But now, in the weird dappled light of his lantern, Mellon looked fierce and powerful. And protective of me.

I was no old-time damsel in distress. But I was happy to place myself under Mellon’s protection in this strange, subterranean place.

“We’re almost there, Miss Mireya Rodriguez of the Brooklyn Rodriguezes.”

He reached for my hand, bent his head over, and reverently kissed my knuckles, his eyes all the while searching out my own.

And that strange flicker of freedom from the past enticed me again. Somewhere down below a different Mireya waited for me. I didn’t know her yet, but suddenly I wanted to meet her, very much.

Mellon held my hand, the one that he had kissed, and we picked our way down the last dozen or so stairs. The flowers dotting the surface of the stairs became a veritable snowdrift of white, and the last step was completely carpeted in their strange, fragrant petals.

It was unbelievable. I took a deep breath, rubbed my eyes as if I could rub the illusion of it all away like tears.

We stood together in a brick-walled garden, trellised with climbing roses and wisteria and the strange apple-scented white blossoms blowing over the stairs. It was broad daylight. A low, rhythmic chirp sounded from somewhere inside the boxwoods planted all along the perimeter of the garden’s walls.

“Nightingale frogs,” Mellon said, his voice low.

I had never heard of nightingale frogs. Have you? Has anyone heard a song like that, anyone who lives on the surface, ignorant of the world branching away from under their feet?

“It’s beautiful, so beautiful,” was all I dared to say. “Jonathan, thank you so much.”

“My father’s people are the Mellons of Philadelphia,” Mellon said. “My mother’s people, well. . .”

His voice trailed away, and I knew better than to ask. Instead, I tilted my head back and looked far overhead, saw diaphanous clouds racing across the sky, a tiny, perfect moon hanging upside down.

It felt like coming home.

I bumped into Colleen a week later at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where I waited with my tea for Jonathan to appear. She almost passed me by, her chocolate croissant in hand, but then she did a double take and almost dropped her breakfast on the ground.

“Mireya?” Her voice was no more than an incredulous squeak.

I laughed, a deep belly laugh that felt almost as good as sex. “That’s me. At least the last time I checked.”

“Oh, girl, you look – beautiful.”

“Different, you were going to say.” Colleen didn’t pity me now, oh no. I think I frightened her a little bit, now.

“Where have you been? You don’t answer your phone, I knocked on your door only about eleventy billion times . . .” Her voice trembled, even though a smile stayed imperfectly pasted on her face.

I emerged from my bemused haze long enough to really see her. “Oh no, you were worried.” I reached up and hugged her around the neck, gave her a peck on the cheek. “You are a good friend to me, sweetie. And an old soul.”

She pulled back and her eyes narrowed. “You sound like you’re saying goodbye. Or like you are zoned out of your ever-loving mind. That Mellon guy isn’t some kind of dealer – is he?”

“No way. Just my boss, and he’ll be here in a minute if you want to meet him and make sure he’s OK.”

She took an absent-minded bite of croissant and backed away, looking thoroughly spooked. “I have class in ten minutes. Sorry.” She ate the rest of the croissant in two or three bites, swallowed her meal, and evidently made up her mind to speak. “I’m not sure what’s going on with you. All I can say is be careful. Remember your limitations.”

Her little speech made me laugh again, sadly this time. “Maybe I should be worrying about you. You always told me to trash my illusions and reach for the stars . . .”

“Maybe I’m just saying the same thing a different way.” And with a final wave of her fingers, Colleen left for class.

Mellon appeared not five minutes after Colleen’s parting words of wisdom. “OK, Mellon,” I said, glad to leave her worries behind and ready for business. “What have you got for me?”

His smile, as usual, hid a world of secrets. “A philosophy paper.”

I glanced down at the handwritten paper he held out for me. The paper’s title: “The Walled Garden”.

The words brought me up short and I looked up from the crabbed, scrabbly handwriting overflowing the crinkly lined paper. “I thought . . .”

“Don’t worry. It’s a hypothetical garden.”

I smiled back. “I’ll take that to mean that our secret is safe. So in that case, I have something for you. Something amazing!”

The dancing cool light in his eyes went dark, and he sank down in the chair next to mine. “You went back there, didn’t you? Without me.”

“I couldn’t resist.”

“You went alone.” Something new shone in his face, and I read it immediately and with great pleasure – it was admiration, mixed with a flicker of fear.

Mellon: afraid. My pleasure shaded into amazement. I cleared my throat and straightened the pink lace scarf arranged around my neck. “Yes, alone. I’ve been in worse places alone, believe me.”

He nodded. “You brought something back.”

“Yes! Good student, you know your teacher well. But you’ll never guess what. A map. A . . . map!”

He drew his chair closer to mine, leaned in and whispered, “A map? Of what? And wherever did you find it?”

“I didn’t find it, I made it. And it’s a map of the world beyond the garden wall.”

He drew back with a cry of pain, leaned in and grabbed my shoulders. He gave me a little shake, caught himself doing it, and then almost crushed me in a fierce, all-enveloping hug.

Now there was a reaction I’d never have expected to inspire out of Jonathan Mellon. And here’s the strangest thing: I welcomed that hug. Lost myself in it, in fact. And lost and safe in his arms, I considered what a freaking miracle that sense of safety represented.

“You jumped over the wall!” he murmured against the top of my head. I could feel him swallowing hard. “I can’t believe I didn’t lose you.”

“Of course not. I have the world’s best sense of direction. And if I know how to do anything, it’s to come back no matter what.”

I gently disentangled myself from Mellon’s embrace, took out the folded-up square of paper I kept in the back pocket of my jeans. Unlike him, I took pains to keep my work neat, and the graph paper had a sketched pathway and careful notes covering both sides.

I leaned in and waved the paper. “Look, the walled garden is in the centre.”

I took in the sight of his quick, neat features as he pored over my drawings. While he was distracted, I stole a close-up view of my strange and beautiful new friend’s face. And in that moment, tracing the line of his lips and his jaw with my gaze, I realized I could love this man.

It was crazy, classic-Mireya-crazy. But it also made a certain immutable sense. Because I had never known a man like Mellon, one who quietly moved mountains and revealed worlds without saying a word. One who realized that words are jewels, that if you can work magic, there’s no need to brag about it.

He poked me gently in the shoulder. “You’re daydreaming again. Go ahead.”

I smiled up at him, and he wrapped an arm protectively around my shoulder and rubbed at his jaw with his other hand. I watched him take the map and study it, and a slow realization came to a rolling boil in my mind:

He didn’t know about any of this
. All he knew personally was the garden itself – he had never gone over the top. And that knowledge put the fear into me for the first time.

Why hadn’t Mellon gone exploring down below the way I had?

He poked me in the shoulder again. “So what did you find?”

Mellon: impatient. I’d discovered a world of wonders in my friend, as well as in the subterranean world he’d opened to me. “Well, once you climb the trellis and go over, across the brass stairs, there’s a cinder path, lined with cactus and these strange purple vines with flowers.”

He nodded for me to go on, an odd expression on his face. I took a sip of my now-tepid tea, and leaned against his warm, strong arm. “About fifty feet down – the pathway slopes down – the way forks. I decided to pick right every time, and the path branched about five times.”

I indicated each fork in the path with my pinkie, touching his finger as we traced my recorded footfalls together on the page.

“And then . . .” I hesitated. What I was about to say was amazing, unbelievable, and breathtaking – but I could never unsay it. I savoured the silence before words.

Mellon nodded for me to go on. He was ready.

“I came to a door.”

He leaned forwards even more. “To another garden.”

“Yes.”

He wrinkled his forehead, nibbled at his lower lip. “And you jumped the wall and climbed the stairs.”

“Yes, Mellon! It was so amazing.”

“And what did you discover at the top of the stairs?” His voice sounded dry and precise, like a lawyer doing a routine courtroom cross-examination in a boring town somewhere far, far away from where we lived.

“It was a speakeasy. I came up through the wine cellar, and all these guys in zoot suits sat in a row along the bar. It had a huge polished bar, even bigger than the West End. And there were – showgirls there, too. Wearing flapper dresses and strappy shoes.”

“Astonishing. And what else?”

“The barkeeper knew me, Mellon! He nodded and smiled. Offered me a ‘whiskey neat, on the house, girlie’!”

Mellon’s face went alabaster, like somebody had turned him into a decorative figurine. “You didn’t take it. Tell me you didn’t drink it!”

I leaned up against the whole side of his lean, warm body and looked up into his face, so close I could have kissed him. But I resisted. I didn’t want to steal our first kiss, not in the middle of his panic. “If I did drink it, Mellon, would I have made it back?”

He hugged me again, and I felt a tremor in his fingers, very slight, where his fingertips pressed against my bare arms. “Promise me you won’t do that again. Jump the wall, all alone.”

“But it was amazing, Mellon. I’m a history major . . . you can just imagine what that was like!”

“No, promise me. As a boy, I swore to my grandfather never to venture past the garden walls. I never imagined you would just go ahead yourself, without telling me first. Mireya, you astonish me.”

I drew back, caressed his cheek until his eyes went from wild to merely troubled. “Mellon, I was free. I met myself down in that pathway, you know? I have to go back. I have to. But I want you to come with me.”