by Tamara Allen
Not sure I’d heard right, I gave her a quizzical look. She snorted impatiently. “What sort of creature would I be, to send you searching for any meager lodging when you’re leaving us tomorrow? Certainly after all the good you’ve done,” she added quietly, “the Lord Himself might overlook it, just for the night.”
“I’m more interested in your decision to overlook it.” I moved nearer, to see her face in the lamplight. “Mind if I ask—who was he, Kath?”
“Derry never told you?” There was a wistful hint to the curve of her mouth. “I was just seventeen. A sheltered girl not old enough to know her mind—”
“You knew your heart.”
Gray eyes took me in with gentle if guarded humor. “How would you be so sure of that?”
“Because after all these years, you still love him. Your parents put an end to it?”
“And his parents, as well.” The hurt and regret in her voice was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. Her demeanor did not invite a hug but I slipped my hand around hers and offered a comforting squeeze, one from which she didn’t pull away.
“Let me guess,” I said quietly. “He attended a different church down the road.”
She nodded. “Derry had already hied himself to London and told me to run away with the lad and we might stay with him until we were settled. But our mother was ill and I could not leave.”
“If you had it to do over—”
“I prefer not to think of it. I did what I believed best and you must do the same.” She pulled gingerly from my grasp and patted my arm. “Go along now. There’s someone wanting to say his farewell. I won’t keep him waiting, nor will you.”
I found Ezra tucked in a corner of the window seat, watching the last light fade. He beckoned me over without a word and, smiling mysteriously, handed me something wrapped in brown paper and tied with a bit of string.
“What’s this?”
“Your birthday is not until the twenty-seventh, I know, but….” He slid closer as I tugged the string loose. “It’s something to remember me by. I can’t imagine any harm could come in taking it with you.”
It was a watch and chain like Ezra’s, a handsome piece of work that I would have no opportunity to ever wear back at home. I loved it. As I opened it to look inside, he rambled on, “I know the one you wore about your wrist was broken on the journey here. If this one is damaged on the way back, there will surely be someone who can repair it?”
“Sure….” I cleared my throat, but the ache at the back persisted. He’d had the watch inscribed. My voice was still a little rough as I read it. “To Morgan, all the time in the world. Ezra.” Well, so much for staying dry-eyed. I looked up at him and managed to form something like a grin. “You probably should’ve given it to me in the morning. You’ll never get any sleep now.”
“I didn’t intend to.” He put his arms around me and closed his eyes, resting his head against mine.
“I could do a lot of damage, spending a lifetime in the wrong century,” I said softly. “I could change the future in ways we couldn’t imagine.”
“You’ve changed mine.”
“You changed yours. By the way, I forgot to thank you for saving my ass last night.”
“Thank Annie, Polly, Catherine, and Elizabeth. I would have been patrolling the street-door in vain, if not for them.”
“Yeah? I’d like to thank them. Are they around?”
He shook his head. “I shall pass along your thanks if I see them again.”
“I guess they hustled you upstairs after me at the brothel too?”
“No, that was your Mr. Sullivan, concerned—and rightly so, I think—that Sid might do you harm.”
I was glad I didn’t have to turn in a report to Faulkner on this one. “Saved by ghosts all ’round, huh?”
“You very nearly became one, yourself.”
“If I had, I’d have come around to cheer you up.”
“Dear God. Haunted by Morgan Nash. What a thought.” The banter, light and teasing as it was, didn’t mask the emotion he was trying to keep under wraps.
“Who better to be haunted by? Anyway, you’ll forget all about me in a month or two.”
“Whatever may be said about you, you’re not a man easily forgotten.”
“You will meet someone else.”
I knew he didn’t want to hear that. The idea that he would meet someone else bothered me too, though I wanted him to be happy. He exhaled a warm steady breath against my ear. “I suppose I shall.” There was a spark of good humor in his eyes as he lay back against the pillows and studied my face. “The thing of it is, he won’t be a rather daft FBI agent from the future who happens to be much too handsome and far too full of himself for his own good.”
I grinned. “Well, yeah. Gems like that are few and far between.”
“Just so,” he murmured with an indulgent snort. “Then you must tell me how I will get along without you.”
We should have said good night and gone to sleep. It would have been smarter and maybe even less painful. But tender kisses kindled fiercer ones and not even the bittersweet awareness that this was good-bye kept us from making the most of our last night. Ezra might not have verbalized the full measure of his feelings for me, but he didn’t need to. It scorched my skin under his touch, consumed me until my muscles quivered, bones ached, and all the time I encouraged it, just about begged for it. Ezra’s eyes gleamed without apology, and I knew if there was a time he might ask me to stay, that time was now. But he only settled beside me and pressed a kiss on my shoulder. “You’ll remember me, I think,” he whispered.
I was grateful to him for managing to sound cheerful. “There’s no way I’d forget you, Ez.”
“And if I come along in some other form in your own time, will you know me? Suppose I am Reese—”
“You’re not Reese,” I said emphatically, then wondered why I was so sure. “Anyway, I don’t think I really want to think about it. Unless you can arrange to show up as Ezra Glacenbie.”
“I’m afraid Ezra is restricted to this particular lifetime.” He rested his cheek on my shoulder and closed his eyes. “Byron was right. Farewells should be sudden, when they will be forever.”
The knot that formed in my throat kept me from replying. Not that I had anything especially wise or comforting to say. I wished I had. I wished a lot of things. I wanted to wish that I hadn’t ever come here to begin with. But never meeting Ezra at all, that felt like a circumstance far worse than knowing him and giving him up.
His hand found mine and interlaced our fingers. “Hence, and be happy,” he murmured. “Good night, Agent Nash.”
We’d pushed the morning as far away as we could. As the hands on my new watch moved steadily toward three, I listened to the familiar stomp of Dr. Gilbride returning from his late shift. I heard him speak briefly to Derry, probably discussing the fact I was leaving tomorrow, and then he went on up. Footsteps that must have been Derry’s paused for a long moment at our door, then shuffled on. The house fell quiet and the sound of Ezra’s even breathing was all I could hear. It was a sound I’d fallen asleep to for days—and two weeks from now, I probably wouldn’t even remember it. Life would return to normal in the noisy, fast-paced, steel and concrete mecca I knew best. Ezra and the quieter, more intimate world he inhabited would be a vivid dream that would fade as the days passed.
When I woke, I thought at first I was alone. Then I saw Ezra sitting beside me and I knew by his fleeting smile as he got up and put on his coat that he’d been watching me sleep, making a memory when he ought to be letting them go. We had a quiet breakfast together, everyone else gone to work, including Hannah, who was upstairs somewhere, lugging around her pail of coal. I had a feeling she was avoiding me. At least Kathleen wasn’t. She greeted us with a brisk good morning as she came into the kitchen with a basketful of washed sheets. I realized she was going outside to hang them up and I offered to help.
“Good heavens. It’s as well you’re leaving before I fi
nd myself dependent on a boarder willing to lend a pair of hands.”
The look she gave Ezra made me laugh, and Ezra flush to his collar. “I do beg your pardon, Kathleen. Of course I will help you put up the wash, if you like,” he said contritely, then kicked me under the table.
As I nursed my shin, Kathleen looked us over dubiously. “I suppose I may entrust the two of you to the task. The lines and pegs are in the bag. Remember to hang the sheets short side to the wind, if you please.”
We strung the lines in a sunny corner of the garden and, hampered by a brisk wind, I showed Ezra how to smooth the sheets and hang them. He found the whole process amusing, judging by his grin as I struggled with Kathleen’s primitive pegs. Windblown and laughing, he stole one last kiss behind a wall of white linen, then headed for the house before either of us could get maudlin about it. I went upstairs to make sure I had everything I’d arrived with; and ended up lingering a few minutes in Ezra’s room, just looking around. So much had happened in the space of two weeks, it felt like I’d lived here far longer.
“Ready to go?”
He was making this as easy for me as he could. My eyes burned and I took a quick swipe at them before I turned to him and nodded. If he noticed any telltale moisture in my eyes, he didn’t say anything. I figured we would take the bus to the Theosophical Society, but Ezra hailed a cab—to give us a little more time alone, I knew, when he slipped his hand into mine. Corinna was ever her buxomy, cheerful self as she greeted us in the foyer of the Society’s offices, cradling a large, leather-bound book in her arms. I felt relief and regret. I was leaving behind some real friends—but I was going home.
Corinna hefted our prize higher on her hip as she came toward us. “Well, my dears, you’re quite fortunate Charles had your book in his possession.”
“Fortunate, indeed,” Ezra said, as if he were genuinely pleased Charles had been successful. “I’m grateful to you for your complicity. It was rather a lot to ask—”
“Ah, but you are to give us a lecture, do not forget.” She paused at the commotion coming from the hallway. “Good heavens, who can be—”
She promptly got her answer when an agitated guy, all arms and legs in a too-small black suit, burst through the door and just about lit into Ezra on the spot. “You! I should have known it was you.” Corinna got a baleful look for that transgression, but it was mild compared to the boiling wrath Charles—I assumed it was Charles—poured over Ezra. “You take me to task for my occult collection and then go about borrowing the selfsame volumes!” He pulled the book out of Corinna’s hands and clasped it to his chest. “Maybe no one else in this tight little club will stand up to you, but I shall.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Ezra said. “I only wanted to borrow the thing for a day or two. I do not mean to venture into the occult. Intentionally, anyway,” he added with a rueful smile for me.
“I know just what you intend,” Charles said. “You’ve had your fun making me out the villain, and now you’ll insist that dabbling in magicks is a fit pursuit for gentlemen after all, so you might poke about in it as you like.”
I swallowed a groan, along with the temptation to take the book from him and hustle Ezra off to the museum. But Charles was excited enough to put up a fight—or worse, go running for the police. Ezra didn’t look as worried as I felt, and I wondered if he had a way around this that I hadn’t thought of.
“Charles, I give you my word I’ll do no such thing.”
Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that; because it wouldn’t have worked in my own time. Ezra’s was another matter. Charles still looked suspicious, but there was a considering gleam in his eye. “A start,” he allowed.
Ezra sighed. “What else, then?”
“You’ll let it be known that you consider my work respectable. And you’ll admit to me and everyone else that you’ve been unfair to state otherwise. If you intend to begin lecturing again, you’ll apologize to me publicly and you’ll defend me and my work to anyone who still thinks ill of me. If you’re going to poke your nose about, Glacenbie, then I’ll use your reputation to my advantage.”
“Charles,” Corinna murmured in disbelief.
Ezra seemed amused, but uneasy too. “You see more in my reputation than I do. And I never said your work was not respectable. Just merely dangerous.”
“Be that as it may,” Charles said with an impatient jerk of his head. “I also want that book you won at the auction in August.”
Ezra’s faint smile faded. “Anything else? A pound of flesh, perhaps?”
“That will do for now. What do you say?”
Musing on the ever-growing possibility of laying this guy out with one well-placed right to the jaw, I dropped my attention to the book in his arms as something about it nagged at my mind. I had the weird feeling I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t have unless….
I grabbed Ezra and turned him away from Charles and toward me. “Remember that book you described for me at the library?”
He stared at me blankly. “What? I don’t—”
“In the museum library. You couldn’t recall the title, but you described the book. Can you remember what you said?”
His brows drew together. “I said the cover was green, dark green, and the cloth torn at the front corner…” His attention shot to the volume in Charles’ hands, then up at Charles as that altogether rare anger surfaced. “Right out from under our noses—”
“Whoa, Ezra, slow down.” I hated to stop him just when he was getting started, and God knew Charles deserved it, but there was a better way. “You wouldn’t happen to know a fellow by the name of Whitby, would you, Charles?”
Corinna perked up. “Adam Whitby?” she inquired, and Charles blanched. The book crushed to his chest, he looked around with furtive anxiety.
“I’ve bought books from Whitby,” he blurted out, when it was clear he couldn’t get away without some kind of explanation. “What of it?”
I tried not to smile at the defensive tone. “You bought the books and of course you didn’t know that Whitby was stealing them from the museum.”
Corinna gasped a very unladylike word in German and hastily put a hand over her mouth. With a little more effort, I maintained my Fed face. “I suppose you’ve documented your purchases?”
He ran fingers through the greased hair that had fallen into his eyes, making a prickly mess of it. Shifting the book in a looser grip, he shrugged his thin shoulders. “I did not think it necessary.”
Though it was better left to the police to sort out, I didn’t want the book ending up in their custody. “Didn’t think it was necessary, huh? You think Inspector Saffery will believe that any more than we do?”
“Call in the police if you want,” Charles muttered. “You’ll prove nothing against me. Here, take the damned book.” Suddenly it was in Ezra’s hands, and Charles was making a hasty exit from the office. He got as far as the door before I nabbed his coattails and, putting him nose to the glass, cuffed his wrists behind him. I asked Corinna to find a policeman, and as soon as she’d gone, shared a relieved grin with Ezra. “How fast can you copy?”
It took him a few minutes to find the spell he’d used to pull me back, and several more minutes to figure out how to reverse it to send me home. It would have taken even longer with Charles’ whining and haranguing, but the sight of my Glock shut him up and let Ezra transcribe in peace. Ez was still scratching Latin rapidly on a scrap of paper when Corinna came back with a constable whom she had apparently apprised of the situation. I slipped the cuffs off Charles and let the constable snap on his own pair. Ezra looked worried as he joined me outside the office. “I hope I shall be able to read my own writing.”
“I hope so, too. Breaking into the police station to get the book back isn’t such a hot alternative.”
We made it to the museum with time to spare. No one had arrived for our lunch meeting and we found Henry hard at work. He was pleased to learn we had recovered the stolen book and even seemed mildly regretful at t
he prospect of my departure. He rattled on about it as we followed him back to the storage room. Ezra, I noticed, hadn’t said a word since we’d hooked up with Henry; not even to tell Henry to behave himself whenever a snide remark slipped past. I couldn’t blame him. I wasn’t much in a frame of mind for conversation, myself.
When Derry arrived, and then Kathleen with Hannah in tow, we went for a somber lunch at a nearby noisy restaurant. Our trek back to the museum was even more solemn, with only Derry keeping up a steady flow of chitchat to try to lighten the mood. The moment had come and I was more nervous than excited by the idea of being hurtled through time again, even though it meant going home.
“We shall have to make this quick,” Henry said as we slipped into the storage room. “I think Mr. Brooke would quite give us the sack if he came upon us casting spells in the middle of the workday.”