Fallam's Secret

by Denise Giardina

  The man spoke first. “You are Lavinia?” he said.

  She stared at him in surprise. “How do you know my name?”

  “I am a friend of Lydde’s,” he said in an odd, thick accent.

  “Oh. Well, I’m afraid she isn’t here. She left this morning before I got up and I haven’t heard a word from her since. Although I expect her anytime.”

  “No,” the man said. “She won’t be coming back yet. I have come to see you, not her.”

  “Me?” She began to wonder at his accent, which, though odd, was somehow familiar.

  “You are John Soane’s wife?”

  “John who?” Aunt Lavinia was alarmed now.

  “Wait. I misspoke his name because that is how I know him. I mean John Cabell. I don’t mean to upset you. But I think you deserve to know that your husband is alive.”

  “My—my husband.” Aunt Lavinia took a step back. “Who are you? What do you want? Go away! I’ll call the police if you don’t go away.”

  “Please believe me. He is not dead. I don’t know how much he has told you of what is going on, I am only just coming to believe it myself.” He put his hand on the door handle. “If you let me in, I can explain more easily.”

  “I most certainly will not let you in!” Aunt Lavinia said angrily. “You say what you have to say and then leave.”

  The Raven stepped back and held up his hands. “Very well. I won’t trouble you long. I hope you will believe me, though I know it is difficult. John has gone to the past, and Lydde is with him. The man who died was not your husband. His name was John Soane and he came from the past to visit your time. Only he died before he could return and switch places with your husband.”

  “This is not funny!” Aunt Lavinia managed to say, and slammed the oak door.

  She went to the telephone to call 911. But the man had moved to a window and called out, “Wait! Lydde is my friend and so is John. Lydde lost her brothers and sisters in a fire. Didn’t she? You and John raised her. When you returned from your trip, John was different. He talked oddly like I do. Didn’t he? That’s because he lived in the year of our Lord 1657. And that’s where John and Lydde are now.”

  Aunt Lavinia stood frozen inside the door, the phone in her hand, listening to him.

  “How would I know all this if Lydde hadn’t told me?” the man continued, his voice muffled by the window glass. “I love Lydde. I want to marry her. I was hoping to receive your blessing.”

  Cautiously Lavinia set down the phone and moved closer to the window. “Prove you know Lydde,” she said. “Tell me something about her no one would know except a close friend.”

  The man turned his head away, thinking, then said, “When she was a child she often went to the ruins of the burned house with a stick and searched for clues. All she found was an object I don’t understand except it is used to light tobacco. We do have Virginia tobacco in England in my time.”

  Aunt Lavinia felt her throat tighten. The man’s eyes met hers through the window glass.

  “Upstairs on the wall,” he said, “you have a picture of St. Pancras Church, Norchester. I am from Norchester, and Lydde and John are there now.” His voice was lower, more gentle as her face began to collapse with weeping.

  “You’re trying to tell me they’re dead.”

  “No, no. They are as alive as you and I are,” he said. “You’ll see them soon. I promise.”

  She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse, then went to the oak door and opened it. The man came to stand in front of the screen. She looked him up and down.

  “And how did you get so wet?” she said.

  He opened his mouth to lie but found himself telling the embarrassing truth. “A strange conveyance passed me on the road above, like the thing that sits still beside your house.” He gestured cautiously at her car, as though pointing at it might cause it to roar to life. “It passed so quickly it nearly struck me and I am ashamed to say”—he blushed—“I had to wash my breeches.”

  She nodded her head sympathetically. “When you get to our age,” she said, “it doesn’t take much.” She lifted the latch on the screen door. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “I’m starved,” he answered.

  “Won’t you have supper with me? If Lydde isn’t coming home this evening, someone has to help me eat it.”

  She stepped aside and he came into the living room. When she offered her hand, he bowed over it.

  “Oh, my,” she said, “Lydde has found herself a gentleman.”

  THE visitor obviously knew John and Lydde, but Aunt Lavinia remained skeptical about his story of being from the past. She found him a pair of John’s old jeans and threw his pants in the washing machine, pausing first to examine the rough fabric and uneven stitching, obviously done by hand, the row of buttons on the fly that appeared to be carved from some sort of bone. If he was lying about where he came from, he certainly had dressed the part. She decided to test him.

  “Would you turn on the light over the kitchen table?” she said as she ladled the vegetables into a bowl.

  He looked around, bewildered. “I don’t know how,” he said sheepishly.

  She switched on the overhead light and he stared at it.

  “This one does not hurt my eyes so badly as the first one I saw,” he said. “It has some sort of cover, yet it doesn’t catch fire. How does it work?”

  “Electricity. You don’t know what that is?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  She pulled an electric knife from a drawer and plugged it into a wall socket. “You want to carve the roast?”

  Just as he took it from her, she turned it on. He started violently and dropped the knife, which clattered along the counter. She grabbed it up and turned it off.

  “My God!” he exclaimed. “You could kill someone with that!”

  She regarded him a moment. “You’re telling the truth about being from the past,” she said.

  “Of course I am,” he said, slightly offended.

  Aunt Lavinia opened the drawer again and took out a carving knife. “Here,” she said as she handed it to him. “I bet you’ll do a fine job with this one.”

  Then she sat him down at the kitchen table. He ate with obvious relish, taking three helpings of pot roast and wiping his plate clean with a piece of bread. He had started by using his fingers but when he saw Lavinia wielding her fork, he had switched, an embarrassed look on his face, and awkwardly jabbed at his food. Aunt Lavinia was glad she hadn’t attempted the pasta; it would have been too much for him. He was in a state of bewilderment as it was, sitting at the kitchen table and staring around him while Aunt Lavinia explained each appliance and how it worked. It was a bit like being trapped in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, she thought, except her guest was a man of such obvious dignity she wouldn’t have dared laugh at him.

  He told her everything Lydde had told him. He explained that Lydde and he both were younger where he had come from. And he told her again that he was in love.

  “Though I haven’t done anything about it,” he said. “Each time I start to take the final step, I hold back. I was reluctant to believe Lydde’s story at first, I have to admit. Besides that, I don’t want Lydde hurt, not after she’s lost so much.”

  “But if she loses you because you’re afraid of that, she’ll have lost you anyway,” Aunt Lavinia said sensibly.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you. I’m a smuggler and a thief.” Then, fearing she might think him a complete rogue, he told her more about himself and added, “I keep nothing. I’m only trying to help the poor people of Norchester. But there’s a very good chance I’ll be caught and hanged. Is it fair to put Lydde through that?”

  “Oh, dear,” said Aunt Lavinia. “That is a tough one.” She thought a moment. “Does Lydde know the danger you’re in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ve been honest with her. And I’d say it’s up to her. Lydde’s tough and she doesn’t back down. Takes after h
er father that way. She was a loyal child and she didn’t like to see other people picked on.” Aunt Lavinia got up to pour two cups of coffee. He stared at the cup she set before him. “You may not like this,” she said, “but it will be all the rage in England in the eighteenth century.”

  He took a cautious sip and she could tell he didn’t care for it but was too polite to say so. She liked him more and more. Amazing, she thought, how people were still people, even after several hundred years.

  “I can give you one other piece of advice,” she said. “There’s an old story here in the mountains. A long time ago there was a boy who was afraid to go out hunting because a panther had been seen hereabouts. The boy was scared the cat would get him. Finally an old man took him aside and said, ‘Son, you go on out there, because if you’re born to drown, you’ll never hang. So let the big cat jump.’” She reached over and took back his cup. “Now, you don’t have to drink that. And do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  He smiled. “I do,” he said.

  “They say we’re fatalistic here in the mountains, and maybe we are. But I think we cope better. And I can tell you’re tough too. Don’t try to protect Lydde from life. She may have lived a long time in London, but she’s from these hills.”

  He seemed disinclined to help her with the dishes, but she let him know it was expected. So he set about scrubbing the pots with a grudging grace, though he was so awkward about it she could tell he’d never done it before. If he marries Lydde, she thought, that will be the first fight.

  Then she took him on a tour of the house, stopping every place there were pictures of Lydde. She had to explain what photographs were. He looked a long time at a recent one before setting it back down with a smile. “She will age well,” he said, pleased. He lingered especially over a snapshot of Lydde at seventeen, when her hair was so long it covered her breasts and she wore a tank top and short-shorts. Aunt Lavinia removed it from its frame and gave it to him. “You keep that,” she said. She picked up another frame, this one showing Lydde at her college graduation. “I never thought of her as my niece, you know. She was my girl, my daughter. I could never have children of my own—woman problems. But Lydde was mine. If she stays back in the past with you, I won’t see her again, will I?”

  “You will,” he said. “I’ll bring her for a visit.”

  “When?”

  “It shouldn’t be long. Lydde has been there for weeks and yet she only left here this morning, you say. How very strange this all is.”

  “Amen,” Aunt Lavinia agreed.

  Then it was time for him to leave. She offered to take him for a drive. “You really should ride in a car while you’re here, especially since one scared you so bad. I’ll take you across the gorge and back, and then I’ll drop you off at the Mystery Hole. Save you a hike.”

  She drove him down into the gorge, across the bridge, and back up to the overlook on Gauley Mountain. The devastation of what had once been Fallam Mountain spread below them. “Used to be the most lovely view you could want,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “I would like to think people had learned some things over the centuries. But it seems people can still be foolish, only they have more to be foolish with.”

  “Some things don’t change,” Lavinia agreed.

  They went back the way they had come, and stopped at the Mystery Hole. Lavinia turned off the engine and they both got out, the visitor seeming a bit shaky in the legs from even the short jaunt in the car. Then Lavinia said, “Lord almighty!”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the cove across the road. “The house that burned used to be up there, at the head of that cove under the valley fill. Only the valley fill came almost to the road. Now you can just barely see it at the edge of the turn up there.”

  “When I arrived,” he said, “it wasn’t close to the road.”

  She grabbed his arm. “You tell John. When you get back, you tell John the valley fill has retreated. It’s in a different place. Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  Then she loosed her grip on his arm and patted it instead. “And you tell that Lydde if she doesn’t marry you, her Aunt Lavinia thinks she’s a darned fool.”

  He smiled, and bowed over her hand once more. “I will. And I hope we will meet again, Lavinia Cabell.”

  Then he disappeared inside the Mystery Hole.

  Chapter 14

  The Hanging

  THE NEXT NIGHT Uncle John was roused from sleep by the tinkling of the emergency bell in his room. Some poor soul was standing outside the back gate in need of aid. He rubbed his eyes, dressed, and threw on his wool overcoat, for the nights were now cold. Outside, he opened the gate, and at first saw no one. Then a masked figure emerged from the shadows and slipped inside the garden.

  “The Raven requires you,” said the masked man. “There has been an accident.”

  “What sort of accident? What should I expect?”

  “We were bringing in a shipment at Dalkey Cove. A man has gone over a ledge.”

  “Very well. Wait while I dress.”

  HE had never before been to Dalkey Cove and was relieved it was not far, only two miles or so to the southwest. There he found, to his surprise, only the Raven and the Crow. The Crow walked over to Uncle John. “It is no good,” he said. “The man fell too far. He is dead.”

  Uncle John bowed his head a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  The Raven still stood some way apart, staring out to sea.

  “He is upset,” said the Crow. “It is the first time he has lost a man.”

  “What happened?”

  “We thought to meet a ship at a new place, to give ourselves more choices in future, but we were not quite so familiar with this terrain. The man slipped there and fell over the edge. We all removed our shirts and made a rope, and the man’s brother went down after him. But there was nothing to do except bring up his body. The brother took away the body and the Raven has sent the others on with the cargo. He waits only to apologize to you, because you were called out without need.”

  At that the Raven seemed to rouse himself and walked over to them. “You,” he said to the man who had brought the doctor on his horse. “Go on home. And you,” he said to the Crow, “go ahead as well. I will escort Mr. Soane back to Norchester.”

  “But—” the Crow began to protest.

  “Go!” the Raven said angrily, and waved his arm.

  The two men reluctantly mounted their horses and rode away through the gorse, leaving Uncle John to stand shivering in his coat beside the Raven.

  “How will a man’s unexpected death be explained to Noah Fallam?” Uncle John asked.

  The Raven shrugged. “The widow will tell how he lost his balance while storing hay and fell from the loft of his barn.”

  They stood for a while and watched their breath turn white in the cold air.

  “I had decided,” said Uncle John, “to tell you, next time I saw you, what a scoundrel you are. But I suppose now is not the time.”

  “You have spoken to Lydde,” the Raven replied. “And I have spoken to Lavinia.”

  Uncle John stared at him.

  “Lydde told me enough about how to go to your time that I was able to do it last night,” the Raven continued. “I had to know for certain she was telling the truth. I wanted to trust her, but I had to know I was not bewitched.”

  Uncle John pushed his hat back from his forehead. “Now you know,” he said.

  “Yes. And you should be thrashed for leaving your wife to think you dead.”

  “You should be thrashed for drawing Lydde into all this danger. And for trying to seduce her when you scarcely know her.”

  The two men faced off as though they might indeed come to blows. Then the Raven said, “I did something foolish tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I took off my shirt to add it to our makeshift rope. I forgot that I have a distinctive birthmark on my shoulder and in this moonlight I�
��m sure it was seen. If any of my men prove turncoat, I shall be easily identified.”

  “All the more reason not to involve Lydde.”

  The Raven seemed to slump, his posture conveying despair more clearly than any facial expression could.

  “Is it? Lavinia said otherwise. She said it must be Lydde’s decision.”

  “She would,” Uncle John said. Then he relented, despite his own misgivings. “Why did you tell me about the birthmark? Now I’m one more potential betrayer.”

  “Yes. And if Lydde sees me without my mask, she shall be another. But I cannot bear to continue living a life of such isolation. You are Lydde’s family.” He shrugged and left the rest unspoken.

  Uncle John put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

  “The man who died,” said the Raven, “left five children. Tonight’s take was small, only a few cases of Flemish lace. The proceeds shall go to his widow.” After a moment he added, “The men who rule us are more concerned with the purity of their faith than with the well-being of the people. There is already starvation in Somerset and Devon. It will be a difficult winter. That means I have more to do and a long lonely road ahead. Without Lydde, that is.”

  He offered his horse to Uncle John and walked alongside. After a time Uncle John dismounted and walked with him. “How is Lavinia?” he asked.

  “She is well. An admirable woman. She misses you greatly, but I convinced her you are still alive. I had supper with her. Roast beef.”

  “Ah. Lavinia does a great roast.”

  The Raven reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a square of paper. “She gave me this.”

  Uncle John studied the photo of Lydde in the moonlight, handed it back. “Amazing,” he said.

  The Raven told him how the valley fill over Montefalco had moved. He was surprised at how excited Uncle John became. “I have to go back and see that. I should measure the distance.”