The Christmas Eve Daughter - A Time Travel Novel: The Sequel to The Christmas Eve Letter
Page 1
Table of Contents
Copyright
To Our Readers
Quote
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
EPILOGUE
Thank You
THE CHRISTMAS EVE DAUGHTER
A Time Travel Novel
by
ELYSE DOUGLAS
The Sequel to:
The Christmas Eve Letter
Copyright
The Christmas Eve Daughter
Copyright © 2018 by Elyse Douglas
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The copying, reproduction and distribution of this e-book via any means, without permission of the author, is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and refuse to participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s intellectual property rights is greatly appreciated.
To Our Readers
The Christmas Eve Daughter is the sequel to The Christmas Eve Letter. Although this novel can be read as a standalone, it includes references to The Christmas Eve Letter. If you have not had the opportunity to read The Christmas Eve Letter, you might find that reading it enhances the reading of The Christmas Eve Daughter. Click HERE to purchase a copy of The Christmas Eve Letter.
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Quote
You may delay, but time will not.
—Benjamin Franklin
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
—Marcel Proust
The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by
the laws of physics.
—Brian Greene
CHAPTER 1
Eve Sharland and Patrick Gantly stared at each other, their bodies tense, their minds reeling. Standing in the renovated kitchen of their Upper West Side New York City apartment, the chilly silence gathered around them, shutting off ambient sounds: a distant police siren, and the chopping blades of a helicopter passing over. The silence lengthened, became stretched taut, and felt like a threat.
“I don’t believe it, Patrick,” Eve said, once she’d finished reading the article. She knew it was about to rupture their lives—their loving and wonderful lives. She sat on the stool for long minutes staring hard. Finally, her attention returned to the laptop and the article before her. She read sections of it again, feeling a dread, like a cold liquid slowly filling her body.
Finally, she heaved out a sigh, stood up and turned to face a worried Patrick, his arms crossed against his wide chest. The open laptop lay on the counter, its screen seemingly alive, pulsing out an alarm.
An hour earlier, while waiting for Eve to get home from work, Patrick had sat on a kitchen stool sipping a mug of coffee, munching a New York bagel and surfing his own name on the internet. He’d done it often in the past, looking for Gantlys in the U.S., finding some in Chicago, Minnesota, and Canada. Of course, he’d also found Gantlys in New York, but he’d never approached them through email or letter. How would he have explained who he was and where he’d come from? “Hello there,” he might say, “I’m a relative of yours from 1885.”
No, he wasn’t ready for that. Even a year after his arrival in this wondrous 21st-century world from his now alien world of 1885, he was still finding it difficult to adjust. Although he loved modern technology, he also found it intrusive, demanding and, at times, downright bullying. It robbed people of their innate need for peace and privacy.
The restless sounds of the modern-day streets still jarred him, and the casual mode of dress he thought weird and at times vulgar. He constantly struggled with the loose, edgy mainstream language that was batted around ceaselessly, peppered with needless and repetitive profanity. He did not, in any way, consider himself to be a prude. After all, in 1885 he had been a New York City Detective-Sergeant. He’d known violence, death, poverty, and a brutality that people in 2018 would never see or experience. But he found that this modern-day communication-obsessive society was filled with rudeness and disrespect, and the harsh jargon was an insult to his ears.
Eve had helped him make the difficult transition from an 1885 gentleman to a 2018 guy, but it was often a battle for him to let go of his old ways and his more formal style of speech, which that Eve’s friends and parents thought archaic and a little humorous. In many ways, Patrick admired New Yorkers in 1885 for their formalities, courtesies, and mode of dress. They were less vulgar, at least on the surface, and the manners of his time far surpassed the near lack of manners of 2018. To Patrick, it seemed that everyone had a chip on their shoulder, and was ready to lash out at anybody who didn’t agree with their beliefs, no matter what they were.
Sometimes Eve would say “Patrick, you have to live the time you’re in. You can’t be an 1885 man living in 2018. It will pull you apart.”
And she was right. Patrick knew that, and he also knew that he loved Eve with all his being, in any time or place. She was his pulsating heart, his wife and tender lover; his best friend, who had saved his life. Her time travel back to 1885, their meeting then, and their time travel together back to 2017, were the best things that had ever happened to him, and he wouldn’t let anything get in the way of that.
But that afternoon, while Patrick had searched for Gantlys, he’d clicked on a link that landed him on a page he’d never seen before and could have never anticipated. As he nosed closer to the screen, eyes widening, reading the article and studying the grainy black and white photo of the young woman looking back at him, he was shaken to the core. He began to tremble, and sweat beads popped out on his forehead.
It was unbelievable. Impossible. How could it have happened? The more he read, the more he knew it was not impossible. The more he realized, without a doubt, that what the article said was, in fact, the truth. The whole, painful, shocking and devastating truth.
It was an earthquake that shook down inner towers and crumbled the walls of past and present. It was a catastrophe. What had he done?
While waiting for Eve to arrive home, Patrick had paced the apartment and then taken Georgy Boy, their half-beagle, half-springer spaniel, for a walk in Riverside Park, hopi
ng a change of scenery would help him untangle his gnarled thoughts.
But as soon as Eve had opened the door, she’d noticed his troubled expression. She’d knelt to rub Georgy Boy’s ears, allowing him to lap at her cheek, all the while gathering herself, finally glancing up at Patrick and asking him what had happened. Still shaken, he’d asked her to go into the kitchen and read the article he’d pulled up on the laptop.
She’d done so, hesitating before she eased down onto the kitchen stool, her eyes reluctantly lowering as she began to read. Minutes later, she was still, her face slowly drained of color. The words came alive, and they had a terrible, immediate impact.
The article was an old one. It was an interview of an actress, dancer, and singer who had performed in the first Ziegfeld Follies back in 1907. The article held a secret about Patrick that would utterly change their lives, and Patrick wondered if their marriage would survive it.
The Theatre Magazine, December 27, 1914
Naughty Parts in Naughty Plays
Remembering Maggie Lott Gantly
Some women are born to it, some can achieve it, but it is never acquired by practice or through tireless publicity. It is that ineffable something that cannot be defined by words, cannot be touched and, once held, can never be lost. Of course, I am referring to the innocent magnetism of Maggie Lott Gantly, the original naughty girl. In Miss Gantly’s most famous role as Henrietta in The Silk Lady, she is frivolous, discreet, conventional and very smart, even if she is not always attracted to the right kind of man. This, of course, is what brought New York theatre audiences to the theatre time and time again, if Maggie Lott Gantly’s name was on the marquee.
Maggie Lott Gantly was the quintessential naughty actress, whose real life often mirrored her stage roles. On stage, you marveled at her pretty, diamond-shaped face, those baby doe almond eyes and the luscious brown curls of hair. Miss Gantly could deliver a naughty line that somehow never went beyond her peach-colored, pouty lips. She could stand willowy and tall, with a hip poised, suggesting a naughty invitation, even while speaking a series of naughty lines that sounded like she was reciting a nursery rhyme.
In the role of Eve, in the successful and hilarious Up in Eve’s Room, Miss Gantly lost her garter during a 13th-century ball, and King Edward III of England found it near his fashionable shoe. After he retrieved and examined it with much lusty delight, Eve strolled up to the king, bobbing a bow, staring at the monarch with Biblical innocence, saying, “Your Majesty, pray you return this most cherished article to me. I fear some rascal is out to do me mischief. I am most distressed and in need of exceptional human warmth and comfort. I believe you, your Majesty, to be the most exceptional human man I have ever seen.”
At that, the infatuated and outraged King turned to the gathering, holding high the garter and, in a booming voice, he shouted, “Shamed be he who evil thinks of it. I shall punish the rascal and rescue the lady.”
The audience would shout with laughter at Miss Gantly’s all-so-innocent manner and girlish manipulations.
Men on and off the stage realized that Miss Gantly was a dangerous provocateur when it came to love and lovers. The gossip columns in the newspapers attested to that, but theatre audiences loved her as if she had descended from Mount Olympus, ready to bless each one with her incomparable, mythical essence.
Two nights ago, on December 24, 1914, her twenty-ninth birthday, Maggie Lott Gantly was found dead in her Fifth Avenue St. Regis bedroom.
She was murdered in the vilest and cruelest of ways, stabbed to death repeatedly and viciously by her gentleman companion, Big Jim Clancy, a known New York gambler and saloon owner. He was found at the scene, knife in hand, “weeping like a child.” He readily confessed to the murder saying, “My dearest Maggie, my dearest girl, is all mine now, and no other man shall ever touch her cheek or kiss those lips.”
Some years before, Miss Gantly had fallen on hard times, a result of excessive alcohol consumption, and the taking of narcotics and sleeping capsules. More recently, however, she had seemed to have made a comeback, having overcome her addictions.
Her relationship with Big Jim made all the New York papers, and it was well documented to be a volatile one. People in the theatre world blamed Miss Gantly’s decline on Big Jim and his easy access to alcohol and narcotics.
Miss Gantly had always defended him, claiming he was “true” to her, even though it was widely known that she often played the naughty lady with men of influence and status in this town.
Maggie Lott Gantly was born in lower Manhattan on December 24th, 1885. Her mother, a shop girl at the Arnold Constable & Company located at Broadway at East 19th Street, died from complications a few days after her child’s birth.
According to an interview with Maggie in 1905, she stated that she was delivered at home by her Aunt Augusta, who was a midwife, who then took Maggie to live with her aunt and husband in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
In that same interview, Miss Gantly insinuated that as she grew to be a young woman, advances of an unseemly nature were made in the home by her stepfather. Maggie Gantly left that home at 16 and never returned.
She began to sing and dance in vaudeville theatres in Brooklyn and New York until finally being discovered by Cornelius Luther and then by Florence Ziegfeld. She appeared in the first Ziegfeld Follies Premier on the roof of Jardin de Paris in 1907, and her fame quickly spread from there.
It was reported that Mr. Ziegfeld was quite smitten with Miss Gantly, calling her ‘a bright spark in an often dark world.’
In a 1909 interview, Miss Gantly was asked if she knew the identity of her father. She was reflective and emotional as she spoke about him. “He was a Detective Sergeant in the police department. He was the personal bodyguard of Albert Harringshaw, you know, and he was shot in the line of duty defending Mr. Harringshaw at his famous ball in 1885. The papers reported that my father died from his wound and was called a hero. There were even songs written about him. I sang one of those songs in my vaudeville act in 1900. It was entitled Duty to Rich and Poor.”
Miss Gantly continued speaking fondly of her father. “I am not angry with my father, even though he refused to see my mother when she was carrying me. According to my aunt, one of the policemen in the precinct ordered my mother to leave when she attempted to leave a note for Patrick. He ripped it up. He said that the child was not Patrick Gantly’s and that she should never try to contact him again.
I believe my father would have eventually acknowledged and loved me, had he lived. He seemed like a good man. I don’t know why he didn’t want to see my mother. Well, that happens in life, doesn’t it? Whenever I enquired about him, other detectives said he was a man of character, well respected and liked. They said he was an honest man.”
Then Miss Gantly smiled, proudly. “I took his middle name, you know. Lott. Yes, his full name was Patrick Lott Gantly.”
Then Miss Gantly smiled, a little sadly. “I think he would have been proud of me. I’m sure he’s looking down from heaven right now, the proudest father of them all.”
There will be a private service held today at St. Paul’s Chapel. Maggie Lott Gantly will attain her final rest at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Eve’s eyes slowly lifted from the laptop article. She stared uneasily, feeling a rising nausea. Patrick was downcast, his eyes searching the walls. The couple remained silent, breathing in and breathing out, as if hoping the air could provide some answers.
CHAPTER 2
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a daughter?”
“I didn’t know, Eve. I swear I didn’t.”
“How could you not know?”
“Because I didn’t.”
“You must have slept with the woman.”
Patrick turned away, a hand massaging his forehead. He had a headache.
“Yes, Eve, I had relations with Pauline.”
“You mean sex?”
“Yes…if you want to put it so crudely.”
“Why didn’t you tel
l me? After all we’ve been through together, Patrick, why?”
“Because it was only one time—it was before I met you…and a gentleman in 1885 did not speak of such things.”
“Well, they certainly speak of them in 2018.”
He arched an eyebrow, lowering his cool eyes on her. “Have you told me about all your previous relationships with men, Eve? Not that I want to know.”
Eve looked down and away. “No… I haven’t. Okay, point taken.”
“I was lonely. Pauline reminded me of my wife… Her voice, her walk, I don’t know, there was just something about her that was reminiscent of Emma. After Emma and my child died, I was very depressed. I slept little and I seemed to be walking in a fog for weeks and months.”
“Where did you meet Pauline?”
Patrick shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, looking down at the floor. When he spoke, his voice was nearly at a whisper.
“Pauline and I met quite by accident at a street vendor’s cart. It was a fellow I knew, John Weaver. He sold raw oysters. I’m sure you remember those carts”
“Yes, I remember them. I was scared to death to eat from them.”
“John had good oysters, and I often got a tin of stew for lunch.”
“We’re dancing around this, Patrick. Let’s just get on with it.”
“So, I met Pauline there, ordering oysters. We talked, casually. One thing led to another and we decided to meet the next day for dinner. Afterward, we walked for a time and then…well.”
He shook his head and turned away embarrassed.
“Okay, whatever. It’s fine, Patrick. I don’t need to know everything. I just wish you had told me.”
“I was ashamed. It was a night of weakness on my part. It was a night of weakness for both of us. She’d lost her husband from a fall in a construction accident only a few months before. We had those spousal deaths in common. We tried to comfort each other. It should not have happened, but it did. We were both lonely and …”
Patrick lifted a hand and then dropped it. After a heavy silence, Patrick leaned back against the refrigerator and stared down at the floor. “It all seems like a dream now. Like I dreamed it long ago. Like I watched it on that huge TV that dominates our living room.”