The Bride of Time (16 page)

They crossed over into Cornwall at dusk. The driver made several stops along the route, including one to take on fresh horses, before continuing on to Bodmin Moor. The terrain there hadn’t changed overmuch. Her beloved rolling patchwork hills seemed just the same, and the moors little vales of heath and desolation, breathtaking in their wild beauty beneath the risen moon. They reached the Abbey before Tessa realized it, and the driver pulled the bus to a halt and opened the door.

“You’re sure you want to stay way out here alone this time of night, miss?” he asked, helping her down. “There’s a proper inn a mile south as the crow flies.”

“Quite sure,” Tessa said.

“Have it your way,” the driver replied. “Ain’t any o’ my business who you’re meetin’ way out here, but if ya change your mind, I’ll be passin’ back this way again in half-an-hour.”

Tessa nodded, and the driver climbed back into the box and cracked his whip, setting the bus in motion. Only then did she turn toward the blackened silhouette of Longhollow Abbey, steeped in deep darkness and whitewashed in fog.

All at once the fog drifted, presenting a clearer view. At the sight of the house now looming before her, Tessa
gasped and stumbled to a halt. No wonder the bus driver was reluctant to leave her there. Before her, all that remained was the blackened shell of what had once been Giles Longworth’s grand mansion. Fire had reduced it to a burned-out shadow of its former self, standing wounded in the misty moonlight.

The wolf ran back and forth over the heath, its plaintive whines giving way to heart-stopping howls as it bounded through the fog. The man trapped inside the beast was desperate, but he scarcely knew why. That was the way of the wolf when it took over. Precious little would be remembered from the time it took possession of its host until it spat him out again, cold and naked on the heath to wonder what or whom he had savaged while the wolf was in control.

Giles never remembered more than fragments of the events that occurred after he shape-shifted into the werewolf. The moon was on the wane. Tomorrow night its altered shape would be visible, and the phenomenon would not occur again until next month, when the moon waxed full again. At least that was how it had been before. All this was new to him. These were things he knew when sanity returned, when he was in his human body again. Now he was the wolf, running mad over heath soggy with the morning dew, waiting for the dawn to free him from the nightmare.

Some inner instinct, some invisible cord that tied him to his humanity led him south through the misty darkness to the Gypsy camp. Moraiva was seated beside the campfire almost as if waiting for him, a folded lap robe beside her.

Slinking closer, the wolf threw back its head and loosed a howl into the darkness before dawn. The moon had passed from view, and clouds had begun to outnumber the stars. The wolf fell on its side, letting out its
high-pitched whine. Transforming back into human form was agonizing at best. Pain overwhelming both man and beast wrenched another howl from the wolf. It stiffened, convulsed, and in a moment of flesh, muscle and bone expansion, surged into the writhing shape of Giles Longworth, its human host.

Moraiva got to her feet stiffly, the lap robe in hand, and went to Giles, gazing down at him where he lay beside the fire. She threw the robe over him and took her seat upon the log again.

“She is…gone,” Giles moaned. “I’ve run the moors until I can run no more. Over and over I have followed the course she took. She disappeared before my very eyes!”

“You remember that then?” the Gypsy asked. “Curious. You all recall…differently. It is the way of the wolf.”

“Do not count me among their number,” Giles spat out through clenched teeth. “I did not ask for this!”

“Neither did they, your lycanthrope brethren,” she replied. “You are cursed—all of you. You are no better or worse than the creature that cursed you, for all your innocence. So many souls…lost…so many among my tribe alone. My heart breaks for you. You are a good man…a fine figure of a man. If I were thirty summers younger…” She waved her hand in dismissal of the thought. “Your clothes are in the wagon,” she said, crooking her finger toward the turquoise-and-yellow-painted vehicle nearest the fire. “I took the liberty.”

Giles scrambled to his feet and staggered toward it, clutching the lap robe about his nakedness. He was exhausted, wanting that bath Foster had offered him what seemed a lifetime ago, and fearful of what might have happened at the Abbey in his absence. But what had him on the brink of madness was Tessa’s disappearance. Praying that Moraiva would be able to shed some light
upon that, he rejoined her beside the fire as the first rays of a fish-gray dawn broke over the horizon.

“I have to find her,” he said, taking the tin cup of strong, black coffee in Moraiva’s outstretched hand. “I was right behind her…and she vanished before my eyes.”

“Were you man or wolf?”

“I…I don’t remember, Moraiva. I was trying to unhitch the horse from the chaise after the leather suspension straps gave way and pitched Tessa into the bracken. I could feel the change coming on. The horse was in a frenzy. He never behaved like that before—”

“He feared the wolf in you. Such is not uncommon. Horses and dogs will act that way, sensing the wolf.”

“I remember tearing at my clothes, then begging her to run. But I ran after her…I couldn’t help myself. Then she just…disappeared. All the while I searched, I was certain I’d find her dead, and that I had killed her. Where could she be, Moraiva?”

“She has gone back where she came from,” the Gypsy said, “back to her own time.”

Giles froze, the coffee cup suspended in his hand. “What do you mean?” he murmured.

“She is not of your hour, Giles Longworth. She is from the future. She traveled here through time and space by way of the time corridors that link the churches.”

“That is preposterous!”

“Yes, but true.”

“How do you know this?”

They Gypsy hesitated. “I saw it in her palm,” she said. “But that is not all. I know because I have done it.”

“You have traveled through time,” Giles said in disbelief.

The old Gypsy smiled, though no trace reached her eyes, and nodded. “Did you not notice something…different about her?” she asked.

Giles raked his hair back from a sweaty brow. His mind reeled back to the night he’d found her in his carriage in the drive. He remembered her strange frock and hairstyle, and that she’d arrived in the dead of night with no luggage. But…how?

The old Gypsy nodded at his expression. “You know it to be true, don’t you?” she asked.

The sky was lightening, and others were milling about the camp. Giles would not have them hear this conversation. Being a superstitious lot, they would break camp and flee; he was fortunate that they hadn’t seen him transform from wolf to man earlier. He needed the old Gypsy now. She may well be the only link he had to Tessa. He had to have her back, and if there was any hope that Moraiva could help him do that, he had to avail himself without risking the suspicion of the others.

Moraiva had promised to come to Longhollow Abbey. He helped her hitch up an old dilapidated wagon, and together they set out across the moor just as an eerie pink haze swallowed the fish-gray dawn, looking more like blood as the sun rose higher.

“A storm will come,” the Gypsy said, nodding toward the horizon. “When the dawn turns to blood, before it breaks again there will be a flaw. It is Nature’s warning.”

She was hedging. This Giles would not allow. “You
knew
,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

The old Gypsy shrugged. “I saw fear in her eyes,” she said. “She did not want you to know, at least not that way. Besides, would you have believed me?”

Giles gave it thought. “Probably not,” he conceded. “I do not even know if I believe you now. But the fact remains that she disappeared in front of my very eyes, and she is nowhere to be found. I need to have her back, Moraiva. She is the only model to assist me with the painting I’m creating that has sparked the Prince Regent’s interest. I
need
her!”

Moraiva erupted in a toothless laugh. “You need her, Giles Longworth, but not to model for you. You need that pretty packet of flesh to warm your bed.”

“I can get that from any harlot at the Thistle and Thorn Inn,” Giles countered.

The old Gypsy’s smug smile contradicted him.

“Ahhh,” Giles growled. “Have it your way, just tell me how to go where she has gone.”

“The guardians of the corridors are Otherworldly beings,” she said. “They let in whom they please and when. It is not a highway to be traveled by the masses, Giles Longworth. It is a privilege granted by those unseen powers to whomever they will.”

“Is there no way to bribe them, then, your ‘keepers of the corridors’? All men have a price.”

“Not these,” she said. “For they are not men but spirits, and they let pass whom they will.”

“How?” Giles pronounced. “Tell me how, and I will act on my own.”

“There are invisible passageways…subterranean highways, if you will, called spirit roads, corridors, and gateways that exist beneath the surface of the Earth—one of the great mysteries of the universe. It is along these corridors that the spirits of the dead traverse, and the fey and all manner of Otherworldly creatures roam. The phenomena are called lay lines. All scholars know of them, but none know how to navigate them like we Gypsies do.”

“But if you cannot see them…”

“The ancients of the Orient built their temples and holy sites upon these lines that crosshatch the earth. Here in England, they seem to be threaded through a string of churches. I find them where St. Michael’s churches are built.”

“If such is true, both Tessa and I were traveling one
of these corridors. How is it that she was accepted and I was shunned? I was right behind her!”

The Gypsy shrugged. “I told you, they do not open to everyone. That you were rejected could well be your condition, or her favor, in that they sought to protect her from you in pursuit. I do not know. They may reject you today and accept you tomorrow. There is no way of telling for certain, and you will drive yourself mad if you try to solve that mystery.”

“And you have done this?”

She nodded proudly. “Sometimes, when weather is too brutal here in winter, or in the spring, when flaws ravage this coast, and in times of persecution, we Gypsies cross over until all is safe again. Sometimes we go forward in time, and sometimes we go into the past. Have you never wondered where we go when we leave these moors you so graciously allow us to winter upon?”

Truthfully, Giles had not, but he wouldn’t confess that. This was far too important to risk vexing her. “But…do the people where you go not find you…peculiar?”

“How? Gypsies have existed upon the earth since time out of mind. Our attire does not change overmuch from century to century. How are we peculiar?”

Swaying along with the rickety old wagon, they had nearly reached the Abbey. Behind, the blood-red morning sky had given birth to the sun. Giles found it hard to believe that from such a glorious sunrise a storm would come of such devastating proportions as Molavia described, but a cold wind had already risen. Was it a harbinger of an innocent storm, or an ill omen? Giles didn’t dwell upon those thoughts. Somehow, he had to find Tessa. That was all that mattered at the moment.

The wagon wheels had scarcely stopped rolling in the drive when Avery the butler burst through the door.
“Oh, sir!” he cried. “We thought you a goner! When the horse came back without you or the chaise, we feared the worst! I am so relieved to see you safe and sound, sir!”

Giles was so addled it had never occurred to him that the staff would be worried. What had Tessa done to him? He must be bewitched. With everything that was happening, all he could think of was the petal softness of her lips beneath his own, the honey sweetness of her on his tongue as he tasted her deeply; he could taste her still. He could almost feel her nipples puckering between his lips as he laved the tawny buds until they hardened against his tongue. Recalling the soft touch of her gentle hand upon his aroused sex brought it to life again, and he groaned. He had to have her back, no matter the cost.

“Where is Foster?” he asked the butler.

“Why, he and Able are out searching for all of you,” said Avery, clearly taken aback.

“All of us?” Giles queried.

“Yes, sir,” said the butler, “you and Miss LaPrelle, and Master Monty.”

“What of Master Monty? Speak up, man!”

“H-he ran off right after dark last night, sir,” Avery said warily. “We couldn’t hold him, sir. There was nothing we could do.”

“Was anyone…hurt? The child has taken to biting. Was anyone…bitten?”

“No, sir, but the boy tripped poor Foster up and gave him a nasty spill.”

Like an ocean wave crashes to the strand and then ebbs away, so did hot blood surge to Giles’s temples and recede, draining strength and color with it. Had the boy found Moraiva’s corridor as well? He had to find Tessa now, before it was too late.

“Moraiva, will you stay?” he asked the Gypsy. “I mean to join the search for Master Monty so that you can examine him.”

“I will stay,” she said, “but you will not find the child…until he wants to be found.”

Chapter Thirteen

Tessa trudged over the moor in the darkness. The closer she came to Longhollow Abbey, the more borne down she became. She would not find Giles here now. It was not his time. But was it hers? She couldn’t be certain of anything, except that somewhere in time, Longhollow Abbey had suffered a great devastation. The once-proud mansion was but a ghost of its former self, the intricate construction of the chimney system now overgrown and rooted to the ground by creeping tendrils of woodbine and ivy.

If only she’d inquired of the year. All she could surmise from the situation, from the attire of the passengers on the horse-drawn bus, of their speech, their colloquialisms, was that she’d crossed back close to her time. In any event, she wasn’t about to chance going back to London.