Byron's Child (24 page)

“Reckon you’ll be wanting to take them home with you, miss,” she explained.

There was the book that had caused so much trouble, the tote-bag, the bra and pantyhose she had been reduced to in the stables that stormy night… “I can’t go back in my underwear!” she exclaimed in horror.

Emily giggled. “How you shocked me that night. Of course not, you shall wear one of my gowns.”

“Can you spare the one you were wearing when we arrived? The green jumper— pinafore dress? Otherwise I’m going to have some explaining to do when it disappears and another turns up in its place. Oh lord, I’ve just thought—it’s all very well taking all my notes home and using them for my thesis, but if anyone asks my sources I’ll be stumped.”

“Sources?” Emily looked puzzled.

Jodie explained the need for documentation. “If they test the paper and ink,” she went on, “they’ll be the right type but they’ll seem brand new. It’ll look like a forgery.”

“Hide them. Let us tuck them away somewhere where no one will find them, then you can fetch them out and they will be as old as they should be.”

“Genius!” Jodie hugged her. “I only hope Charles appreciates what he’s getting. Where do you suggest?”

“The attics, I should think, though we had best ask Giles where they are least likely to be disturbed.”

As far as Giles knew, the attics would remain unaltered, unvisited except for repairs to the roof and the addition of more junk to that already accumulated. Jodie’s notes, in a metal box to keep out mice, were duly stowed in a distant corner behind a loose board. Jodie and Emily climbed down the stepladder with cobwebs in their hair, to find that Mrs. Briggs had had the boiler heated for the shower-bath.

The conversation at dinner was monopolized by Giles and Harry discussing incomprehensible numbers. Afterwards the two scientists disappeared into the library to do some final figuring.

In the drawing room, Emily sat down to play the pianoforte, and Thorncrest hovered over her with a besotted air. Though Jodie was glad to see his growing affection, she felt excluded, set at a distance by both their closeness and her own coming departure. She shivered. This time tomorrow, would the atoms of her body be scattered across a thousand galaxies? Would her mind confront the incomprehensible realities of a strange dimension?

Perhaps she should stay after all?

Harry put the question to her at breakfast the next morning. “I know Giles told you of the danger,” he said quietly. “I want you to know that if you decide to stay, Cassandra and I will always be happy to offer you a home.”

Jodie had to decide. She looked around the table. There was Emily, her dear face sweet and solemn in the pale light of daybreak; Charles Thorncrest, who had turned out to be a pretty cool guy after all; Harry—he and Cassandra would  welcome her. She thought of Charlotte and Roland, of the loving couple she had watched them becoming. She thought of living through the history she had studied, being a part of it…

And there was Giles, curiously out of place in his grey track suit, intent on Emily’s soft words. Though he had scarcely spoken to Jodie since persuading her to give up the abduction, she could not give up hope of regaining his regard. And even if that proved impossible, like him she had too much calling her home.

If she ceased to exist, she would never know it. If by some chance she and Giles emerged in another time and place, at least he would be with her. He would never abandon her. Together they would go adventuring again; one way or another she would win his love. In the end, if he was there what did it matter where she found herself?

“No,” she said to Harry. “Thank you, but I’m going.”

He pulled out his watch. “Then it’s time we were moving.”

In case of an accident, all the horses had been taken out to pasture. The stables were gloomy and silent without their usual inhabitants. Jodie had grown used to the all-pervasive smell of horses in this society and scarcely noticed it as, final farewells over, she and Giles took their places in the stall where they had arrived.

They stood close to the back wall where the lightning conductors merged before grounding. Harry was outside by the battery with his chronometer, ready to touch wire to wire at the precisely calculated moment. Emily and Thorncrest stood by the stable door, silhouetted against the grey daylight.

Jodie felt sick. “I’m scared to death,” she whispered to Giles.

He took her in his arms and bent his head to kiss her.

“The devil!“ Thorncrest exclaimed. “If that’s what morals will come to…!”

Emily interrupted. “Did we never tell you they are not really brother and sister? They are not even related.”

“In that case,” said the earl promptly, “I consider that they are setting us an excellent example.”

Over Giles’s shoulder, Jodie saw him pull Emily into a  passionate embrace. Giles’s mouth was soft and warm on hers; she closed her eyes, giving herself up to the sensations that raced through her. There was a thunderous crack…

…and October sunshine poured through the wide windows, gleaming on machined metal. A faint hum filled the air, air that was strangely flat without the smell of horses.

Giles pulled away from her, the startled look in his blue eyes reflecting her own disorientation. He ran his fingers through his hair.

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?” he asked uncertainly. “Have I really been kissing you for nearly two centuries?”

“It didn’t feel that long.”

“Oh. Then I’d better do it again.”

Jodie was not about to protest. This time their kiss lasted mere minutes, yet this time Jodie was left breathless.

Was it possible he didn’t despise her after all? She didn’t dare ask.

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?” she repeated his words in a dazed voice. “Two hundred years—we can’t have dreamed the same dream.”

At once he became practical. “Let’s go and look for your papers in the attic.”

Jodie wondered what he was feeling as they crossed the courtyard and went into the house. To him, all this had been familiar all his life. To her, more familiar with Waterstock Manor as it had been two hundred years ago, everything was slightly wrong. She was constantly on the verge of déjà vu, a most unsettling sensation.

She concentrated on the lithe figure leading the way up the stairs—only to find that sight more unsettling still.

Had he forgiven her for her idiotic project?

The attic was dim and dusty, more cluttered than she remembered it. They crouched together under the rafters in the corner. She pulled out the loose board and there was the tin chest, just where she and Emily had put it last night.

Emily! A pang of sorrow shook Jodie. Emily was long dead. The kiss she had shared with Charles Thorncrest in the stables that grey spring day had long since lost its meaning.

“Shall I open it?” Giles took the box from her memory-stilled hands. “The hinges are a bit rusty. There we are.”

On top of the roll of papers lay three loose sheets, yellow with age, the writing faded. Jodie picked them up with utmost care and hunched backwards to inspect them in the light from a roof vent.

“From Emily! Oh Giles, she wrote this when she was seventy! Charles has just died—I don’t want to think about that yet.” She put the page behind the others. Giles crouched next to her, his arm about her waist, reading over her shoulder. “What’s this one? Ah, that’s better. She’s twenty-five, she and Charles have travelled a great deal but now they are settling down because she is pregnant. And there’s a postscript, six years later. She had a daughter and they christened her Jodie.” Her voice caught in her throat. “She never forgot us.”

“The last line is best: Charles spoils them both to death. What’s the last paper?”

“A family tree. It’s in Emily’s writing but the names at the top are Roland and Charlotte! Charlotte’s pregnancy went okay then. Thank heaven. And look! They called their daughter Judith and their son Giles.”

Giles grinned hugely. “I wager I’m the only person who’s ever had an ancestor named after him!”

“So we started your family tradition. How strange!” Jodie looked at the next page, but it was the one written when Emily was seventy. She wasn’t ready to read it. “That’s all, nothing from Charlotte. She wouldn’t forget us either, but I expect within a month or two she persuaded herself that we really went back to America. I’m going to miss them all horribly.”

“I was afraid for a while that you were going to stay,” said Giles sombrely. “You were so mad at me for stopping you from saving Ada.”

“Mad at you? No I wasn’t.” She concentrated on putting the papers carefully back in the box.

“Then why were you so silent? Why did you avoid me?”

“I was sure you despised me for trying that wicked scheme to kidnap Ada Byron.”

“Not wicked, love, just unwise. How could I despise you when your only thought was for her welfare?”

“You said you were going home and gave me a choice whether to go, too. I thought you’d be glad to get rid of me.”

“I couldn’t have left without you.”

“You couldn’t?” She twisted her neck to look up at him. “What did you call me just now?”

“Love.”

“The English call everyone love.”

“I don’t. Jodie, I….” He was interrupted by the boom of a gong, reverberating through the floorboards. “Damn. That means tea’s ready. Well it can wait, we just ate breakfast.”

Afraid that he was not going to say what she wanted him to say, she scrambled to get out of their corner. “Oh no, it would be shockingly uncivil to keep your mother waiting. Ouch!” She knocked her head on a beam, dislodging the elegant Regency hairstyle. “Come on. I’ll go down the ladder first and you hand me the box. I’ll put it in my bedchamber—oh, I don’t have a bedchamber here. Drat, I can see this is going to be excessively confusing.”

“I’m pretty confused myself,” said Giles, following her, “but if you want a bedchamber I’ll be happy to oblige.”

Jodie decided to ignore the implications of that remark for the moment. They left the box on a hall table and she hurried him down the stairs. Suddenly it was very important not to offend Lady Faringdale.

The sitting room was as comfortable as ever it had been in the days when it was known as the morning parlour. The viscountess, though nothing like Charlotte in appearance, was equally welcoming. The tanned, lined face of the perpetual English gardener bore an expression that at once reminded Jodie of the glint of amusement that so often lurked in the depths of Giles’s blue eyes.

“Mother, this is Jodie Far…Zaleski. She’s a Rhodes scholar from California.”

Jodie curtsied—and flushed in embarrassment. Both the curtsy and the blush were habits she would have to unlearn.

“How do you do,” said Lady Faringdale. “So Giles talked you into trying on that old dress. You look very nice in it, my dear, but what were you thinking of, Giles, to drag the poor girl backwards through a haystack?”

Giles looked at her and grinned. “She is a bit dishevelled, isn’t she? I hadn’t noticed. Oh, hold still a minute, Jodie, there’s a spider in your hair.” He removed the offending arachnid, together with a good part of its web, and deposited them in a nearby wastepaper basket.

Jodie’s face burned. With her eyes fixed on the spider as it climbed out and spun down to the carpet, she said, “I’m so sorry, my lady. I should have tidied myself.” And she had hoped to make a good impression!

“Rubbish, it was entirely Giles’s fault for not telling you the haystack had pulled you about.”

“Not a haystack, Mother; we were in the attics. The gong interrupted a proposal.”

“In the attics! How odd you young people are. Of course, that’s exactly what my parents used to say, but I don’t remember ever being proposed to in an attic. Do sit down, Jodie. What did you answer?”

Jodie’s head whirled as Giles drew her close.

“I didn’t actually manage to pop the question.”

“Then do get it over with, dear, while I pour the tea. Do you take milk and sugar, Jodie?”

Jodie’s knees were weak. She sank onto the nearest sofa. “Black, thank you, my lady. Do you mean it, Giles?”

In approved Regency style, he dropped to one sweatsuited knee before her. “It is the dearest wish of my heart, love. Though we met this morning, I have adored you for centuries. Will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”

Looking into his sky-blue eyes Jodie saw there the respect and passion and tenderness that added up to his love for her. She reached out and pressed the back of her hand to his cheek. He caught it and kissed it.

“Oh Giles, yes please. I’ve loved you for centuries too.”

“Very nice, my dears,” said Lady Faringdale, and passed the tea.

Copyright © 1991 by Carola Dunn

Originally published by Walker Publishing Company

Electronically published in 2002 by Belgrave House

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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.