Aching for Always

by Gwyn Cready

  Hugh felt the black fist of loss like a wallop to his gut. There had been a chance, albeit a small one, that they would land before Brand had made his scurrilous trip to England, a trip that destroyed the lives of so many people. If they had landed before the two hundred and eleventh day of Brand’s thirty-fourth year, Hugh might have had the opportunity to save his brother. Now he would have to settle for killing his brother’s murderer.

  The familiar choking anger rose in his chest, but he kept his face impassive. Vengeance was a bitter pill. “We also need a place to sleep, clothes and money. Since there are rooms upstairs, it looks like we can bed down here.”

  “And I can make clothes,” said Nathaniel.

  Fiona and Hugh turned in surprise.

  “I wasn’t always a ship’s master,” Nathaniel said, uncomfortable at their sudden interest. “I was a sheetmaker’s mate for three years on a ship with a captain with a taste for women. I can make anything—and there’s a drawer full of patterns back there.”

  “I think I speak for Miss McPherson as well when I say, to our very great surprise, we find we are set on that front. Fiona, will you—”

  Her hand emerged from her pocket. It was filled with small gold ingots.

  “Right. According to Belkin, a visit to something referred to as a ‘pawn shop’ will win us the currency of the day we need to continue.”

  “I’ll hit the street. I’m sure one of these nice futurists will help me.”

  If men of the future were anything like the men of 1706, Hugh was certain she’d have no trouble getting all the assistance she could handle. “Er, you may want to consider your skirts. The woman outside seemed to wearing hers as high as her knees.”

  Fiona grabbed a pair of scissors from the jar, made a large horizontal cut in her skirt and chemise, then tore both across with a jerk. Hugh’s eyebrows went up, and even old married Nathaniel, immune to beautiful women for as long as Hugh had known him, watched with interest as Fiona and her shapely calves made their way out the door and into the evening light.

  “I know I’ve asked you this before,” Nathaniel said when the door closed, “but do you really believe her story: that her family’s future was stolen by Brand? I wonder at her motive.”

  Hugh checked the field of vision through the window in the adjoining room. He wondered just how close Brand was, and whether he had any way of knowing they’d arrived. He wished they had more weapons than the three pistols they’d been able to carry. “Did you believe that godforsaken rock would lead us here?”

  “Upon my word, no. But rocks don’t have ways of making men do their bidding.”

  It no longer surprised Hugh that Nathaniel observed more than he let on. “Aye, I believe her. And her motives are clear as day.”

  “Indeed.” Nathaniel gave Hugh a dry look. “If only all motives were equally as penetrable.”

  Hugh ignored this, and they began the necessary process of securing the shop for what might transpire.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I will not make you just one map,” the mapmaker told the old man who had hidden his treasure. “That wouldn’t be safe. You must hide the way to your treasure by dividing the directions among three maps. Three is always safer than one.” The man agreed and said he would come back in a fortnight for the maps. But a fortnight came and went and he did not return, then one year, then two. After a while, the mapmaker forgot about the old man.

  —The Tale of the Beautiful Mapmaker

  Rogan daubed alcohol on the back of Joss’s head.

  “Ouch! I’m telling you, something very strange was happening there.” She was sitting on the toilet in his master bath. The bathroom still looked like it belonged to a bachelor even though she’d been living there for more than a month. There were a lot of changes she wanted to make, but work had been so busy, she just hadn’t had the time. God, he looked good in pajama bottoms.

  “What, exactly? You told me about the sparks.”

  “Did you see them?” Her head was so muzzy, it felt like a freshman-year hangover, but the only alcohol she’d had so far tonight had gone on her scalp.

  “No. Everything looked fine when I left.” He put the top back on the alcohol and reached for the gauze strips.

  “I’m not wearing a bandage.”

  He held up his hands. “There’s no arguing with a bride-to-be. Did you see anything else?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I feel like there was a man there who helped me.” What she didn’t want to add was that the man was dressed like Russell Crowe in that old-time sailing movie and that he seemed to have emerged from an invisible dome that swelled and receded like a bullfrog’s throat. Rogan would surely insist she head to the closest hospital for a CAT scan. There was more to that tailor shop than met the eye.

  “A man?” Rogan put the bandages back in the medicine cabinet. She could see the muscles in his jaw flex. “What did he look like?”

  “Dunno, exactly.” She cut her gaze sideways. “He wore a sort of . . . navy thing.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  She’d gotten only the barest of impressions. Tall, broad-shouldered and smelling of sandalwood—sort of like Patrick Dempsey, but with one of those wonderful, rumbly British accents.

  “Joss?”

  “What? No. Nothing of interest.” “Spirit,” he’d said. “I like that.” The memory made her grin.

  “Well, let me know if you see him again, okay?”

  She frowned. “You think he was following me?” That didn’t make any sense.

  “I just don’t want anyone bothering you. So you’ll tell me, right?”

  “Sure.” She shrugged.

  “I think we’ll have to chalk the bump up to a loose brick or something. You’re lucky all you got was a little bang.” His eyes glittered, and he leaned down to kiss her forehead, then look into her eyes. “Big bangs can be so debilitating.”

  He took her hand and led her toward the bedroom.

  “And you’re sure you don’t mind waiting?” she asked as she got into bed.

  “Waiting?” He hopped in beside her and stretched out along her length.

  “You know. Until Tuesday.”

  “Ah, the proverbial wedding night.” He grinned. “I thought I had you convinced this afternoon.”

  “Darn close. Thank God for little boys.”

  He gazed at her, eyes like shimmering blue lakes. There was so much about him that reminded her of the good parts of her father—generosity, sense of humor, ambition. But unlike her father, there was no hint of cruelty. And he didn’t mind her silly waiting game for that final act of intimacy. Waiting had been her mother’s wish for her, or at least that’s what Joss had told herself. Her mother had loved to make up stories and tell them to Joss, and one of Joss’s favorites was about a beautiful mapmaker and her little daughter, which undoubtedly explained why it was her favorite. The little girl is happy until her father disappears and her mother falls ill. As her mother lies dying, she tells the young girl to be wary of the men who will come to court her, that she must save herself for the handsome knight who will offer her all he possesses—his help and his heart. Which is why, Joss knew, she had seen Rogan as some sort of gift from beyond the grave from her mother, and why, despite the odds, she was still technically a virgin at twenty-three.

  But technically was enough. What girl didn’t look forward to a knight? Waiting seemed the least she could do—especially once he’d actually arrived.

  It still felt weird for her to live in his home—hers now, too. But combining households had allowed her to put her condo up for sale, which would bring another influx of cash to Brand O’Malley.

  “I feel like I waited a lifetime to meet you,” he said gently. “Why would a few more days make any difference? In fact”—he drew a long, slow thumb over her breast—“I think we should refrain from doing anything in the next week that would compromise my ability to deliver, well, shall we say Tchaikovsky and the Fourth of July.”

  “‘
Tchaikovsky and the Fourth of July?’ You know, Mr. Reynolds, you’ve excited my anticipation to such an extent that anything short of Mount Saint Helens is going to be a bit of a disappointment.”

  “Then pack your asbestos nightgown. Tuesday’s going to be a cataclysmic night.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hugh looked at the Olympian iron and glass structure that towered over him at the crest of the alley. He’d never seen the likes of it, even in the greatest palaces of the Ottoman Empire. This was surely a place of great magic. Fearing for his ability to stay focused, he turned instead to gaze down the sloping alley and let the morning sun warm his face. Passersby took little notice of him. That was good. It meant the outfit Nathaniel had made fit the times.

  The aroma of bacon and toast from a nearby public house wafted between the buildings, and for an instant he was transported back to the cottage in Wych Cross twenty-two years ago—well, twenty-two years ago in his own time—with Maggie at the hearth and his brother at the head of the table, laughing and talking. And just as quickly the scene in his head turned to the table a year later, when he’d found the cottage empty and his brother sprawled in a pool of his own blood, dead of a pistol wound. Hugh’s hand went automatically to the chased gold in his pocket, feeling its power like a charge. Hugh would never forget the shock of the discovery, nor the realization, crippling to a child of eleven, that he was totally alone. And the slow white-hot burn began again. For twenty-one years he had carried the poison-laced brew in his heart. For twenty-one years he had laid the path for vengeance, one stone at a time, until he found himself standing here, in this alley. He would not rest until he had destroyed Alfred Brand and everything the man held dear.

  He pulled the timepiece from his pocket and opened it. His blood for yours, read the inscription he’d chosen so carefully. A brother’s promise. He remembered every detail clearly—the smell of coffee in the jeweler’s shop when he opened the door, the weight of the gold from his first prize as a captain in his pocket, the feel of the velvet over which the various choices had been laid and the horrified look on the jeweler’s face as Hugh spelled out the words he wanted engraved there.

  Joss stood cautiously at the top of the narrow road, the hanger holding her wedding skirt in one hand and her cell phone set to video in the other, and peeked down the alley. No sparks. No dome. And the Gulf Tower weather beacon was shining a serene blue. She slipped the cell back in her pocket and stepped off the sidewalk, leaving the throngs of down- and wool-bundled workers on Grant Street to begin her descent. As she crossed William Penn Place, she spotted the door of the tailor shop opening. She paused. A man stepped outside. It was the man from yesterday. She would have recognized the shoulders anywhere. Only today he had ditched the old-time navy clothes and was wearing finely cut pants, a vest and an ocean blue shirt. He turned to look up the street, and she found herself making a 90-degree turn to disappear out of sight on William Penn.

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  But it wasn’t fear, exactly. It was . . . She searched her brain for the root cause, and an image of Carter Fee, her fifth-grade desk partner, popped into her head.

  Omigod, I have a crush on him!

  That was just ridiculous, all evidence of heat on her cheeks to the contrary. She was an engaged woman—practically a married woman. She did not have crushes on men she’d barely met. Heck, she didn’t really have crushes at all. The last one she remembered was Carter, and it had upset her so much she’d punched him in the shoulder anytime he did so much as look at her.

  She peeked around the corner.

  The man stood with his back to her, his head tilted as if checking the wind. He was well dressed, but there was a certain untamed wildness to the dark curls flapping at his collar and the way he held his shoulders open and at the ready, as if he were a marauding Viking ready to charge.

  A blond woman with cheeks like Cameron Diaz and legs to match stepped out and walked to his side. She wore a pair of formfitting navy sailor pants—very on trend—and leaned in when she spoke. He listened intently, and they both swept the alley with careful looks. They seemed an odd pair to be running a tailor shop. Joss couldn’t quite put her finger on why. Perhaps because they were both attractive—not that attractive people didn’t run tailor shops, of course—but attractiveness combined with an air of being hyperalert made Joss think they were doing something illegal or having an affair or both.

  * * *

  The click of Fiona’s heels behind him roused Hugh from his dark reverie.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked, leaning in so close he could smell the scent of her hair. “You’ve been up half the night.”

  “I’ll eat later. We need more on Brand. The company isn’t enough.”

  Brand hadn’t ventured far from his escape hole. After a few careful questions of a local militia man this morning, they were directed to something called the Carnegie Library, where they’d learned Brand Industries was located in the tallest building in the town, the iron and glass one that towered over the head of the alley like a Moorish man-o’-war. Hugh had spent a good part of the morning walking the building’s perimeter and observing what he could.

  “I can take that,” Fiona said. “A nice publican down the street offered me whatever help I needed last night.”

  Hugh made a private cough and returned his gaze to the sky.

  “At least we know where the passage is,” she said, “and that it can be traveled safely.”

  “Where one of the passages is,” he corrected. “There’s more than one.” The men who had returned from the past via that small cave on the islet had not traveled to the past the same way. Of course, Fiona would not be aware of that.

  “I suppose you’re right. We only know of two travelers, Phillip Belkin and Alfred Brand—well, five now if you count you, me and Nathaniel—but there must be more. And they couldn’t have all come by way of the islet.”

  Hugh knew there was at least one more traveler, a man named Collingswood. There would have been a seventh as well, a man named Spears, if he hadn’t been shot and killed. But he held his tongue.

  “Where would Brand keep the map?”

  Hugh had been pondering that himself. And despite what he’d told Nathaniel, he did try to maintain a careful level of skepticism when it came to Fiona. He believed her story, backed by the man called Phillip Belkin, that not only had her family’s fortunes been reversed by Brand’s theft of the map but history itself had been rewritten because of it. Nonetheless, there was a blind passion to her quest that made him uneasy, and he knew only too well how dangerous blind passion could be.

  He looked around to see if anyone was watching, then bent his head. “A locked room is my guess,” he said in a lowered voice. “The building is secured by an officer of some sort, though it seems he serves as a mere checkpoint. Brand Industries is located on floors thirty-six through fifty-eight.” He shook his head, amazed at his own words. Fifty-eight floors! Who could imagine such a marvel? “There are additional guards up there. That’s the place we need to search.”

  “Perhaps he destroyed the map,” she said. “Wouldn’t that have been wise?”

  “It’s possible, but I’m hoping Brand is worried enough about what would happen to the reversal he’d created in our time by taking the map to leave well enough alone. The last thing he would want is to undo all his hard work.”

  “So you think Brand knows of another passage?”

  “Aye.” He turned to Nathaniel, who was making his way toward them, bleary-eyed, biting a stray thread out of the length of yellow silk in his hands he called a “tie.” “He must. If he traveled from his time here to our time through the time passageway that ends on the islet, he would have died of exposure or thirst. Why, there couldn’t be above a handful of ships a year that pass it.”

  “So there’s another passage here, the one that allowed Brand to travel to 1682?” Nathaniel said.

  “Aye. Remember, Brand first landed in 1682. He found and courted his wif
e. They had a child. He stole the map, which changed everything from the year 1684 on. Then he returned to his own time and discovered everything had changed there as well.”

  “Aye. He’d made himself a rich man.” Fiona spat.

  “And it took you more than twenty years, until 1706, to figure out what he’d done, with the help of Belkin.”

  Nathaniel nodded. “And that’s when she hired you?”

  “Aye,” Hugh said. “So we have to assume that there is another passageway. It may not be here. It may be in some other town. But the fact Brand lived here both before and after traveling back in time suggests the other passage might be nearby as well.”

  “Did he stumble on it, do you think, or did he run into a traveler from whom the secret was prized, as Fiona did?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Actually, he found exactly the same man Fiona did—Phillip Belkin. At least, that’s what Belkin told us. This was when Brand was in England after he acquired the map. He told Belkin he couldn’t go back to Pittsburgh the same way he came. Why? We don’t know, though Belkin’s guess was that the passageway Brand used to get to the past was too dangerous to attempt a return trip. Belkin says Brand was hunting for another way back to his own time. Belkin told him about the islet. Brand hired a captain with a ship, and you know the rest. How Brand first got to England from Pittsburgh, though, is uncertain. We’ll probably never know for sure.” He held up a hand as Nathaniel looped the tie around his neck. “I can do this.”

  “It’s not like a stock,” Nathaniel said. “More like a noose, at least according to the directions I found with the pattern. There,” he said, tightening the silk at Hugh’s neck. “You are wearing something called a ‘half-Windsor knot.’”