Aching for Always

by Gwyn Cready

  “He knew,” said Fiona, “because Phillip Belkin was in another time when it happened, like we are now.” And to Nathaniel’s raised brow she added, “That’s right. When you are out of your born time when events change, you remember the before and the after. Otherwise, like the rest of us, you don’t. Belkin’s the one who convinced me I could do this, who told me where the passage was.”

  “And that brought you directly to Captain Hawksmoor and his ship?”

  Fiona must have sensed something more in his question, for her answer was fast and fierce. “Aye, I found Hugh. My grandfather rots in debtor’s prison, and my father works in the Brand family tin mine, where he’s lost an arm and nearly his life. I think I have a right to be impatient.”

  “I think everyone understands why this is important to you,” Hugh said. “I have a different question. Belkin says your grandfather commissioned a map, in the time when he thought there would be a transfer. Do we know anything about the mapmaker from whom he commissioned it?”

  Realization dawned on Fiona’s face. “Aye. He said my grandfather told him it was a mapmaker in London, off the Strand—the oddest mapmaking shop he’d ever seen.”

  Hugh looked at Nathaniel, and Fiona looked at Hugh.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “Nothing, probably. Brand might have met his bride in the process of trying to figure out how he could stop his forebear from trading the land. I wonder if she knew what he was planning when she fell in love with him.” Hugh felt certain she’d known by the time Hugh had met her. Her discomfort with her husband’s activities had been obvious. “I think we’re forgetting one thing here.”

  “What?”

  “Rogan Reynolds. What does he know?”

  “He was here today,” Nathaniel said.

  Hugh’s head swung around. “What!”

  “Aye, not long after the girl left. He said Joss invited him to see the dress. He asked a number of questions: how long we’d been here, your background as a tailor. And when he left, he walked around the building—twice.”

  “He knows,” Hugh said as a cold certainty snapped through his bones. “He knows we’re here after the map.”

  “Or,” Fiona said with a smile, “he’s afraid you’re charming his woman out of more than her wedding skirt.”

  That was a possibility, of course. Hugh didn’t know what, if anything, Joss had told Reynolds about the goings-on in the shop. Until this instant, he hadn’t been sure if Reynolds had succeeded Brand as protector of the map, and while he still wasn’t absolutely certain—a walk around a building was not proof, after all—he knew from this point forward they would have to take every precaution. For Reynolds, possession of the map meant possession of wealth beyond any honest man’s imagining. Even in its dismal financial state, Brand Industries was a vast empire that, with a little luck and good management, could be rebuilt into a king’s fortune. Men had killed for far less.

  “I think it’s a code.” Fiona was gazing at the map.

  “What?”

  “The dashes in the cartouche. I’ve seen codes that are made up of symbols instead of letters. If the note from Brand says she has hidden ‘it’ and the ‘it’ is the map, then this might be a code indicating where it’s hidden.”

  Hugh looked at the cartouche again. He had to admit, the odd pattern did give the marks the look of a cipher. “What good does it do, though? Maggie Brand is dead. The key to the code might have died with her.”

  “Unless there’s someone who knows how to interpret her codes,” Fiona said.

  Joss. “She told me she knew but little of her mother’s maps.”

  “And I’m sure you haven’t considered the possibility that she’s lying.”

  “She wasn’t.” How was he so sure? Or did he just want to believe?

  Fiona snorted. “Stop protecting her. She’s a Brand. Did she or did she not grow up in great wealth while you grew up without a brother and I grew up penniless?”

  He didn’t answer. The answer was aye, and Fiona knew it.

  “Then she bears the guilt,” Fiona said. “Get her. Bring her back through time with us. She can look at this map and the one in my cabin on the ship. Trust me. She’ll tell us what she knows.”

  “By my word, Fiona, you will not hurt her.”

  Nathaniel said, “She can’t be held accountable for the family into which she was born.”

  “Like hell she can’t,” Fiona said. “And, Hugh, I think you’d better ask yourself if you’re willing to do what you came here to do.” She left, slamming the door behind her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Joss moved quickly across Smallman Street to the History Center, cursing. Not just because she was late for the party. Not just because she’d nearly twisted her ankle in the high heels she was wearing. But because Hugh had foiled her company’s security, stolen her mother’s map, and, worst of all, had caught Joss taking what she’d thought had been anonymous revenge on him via the security cam. No, scratch that. The worst part had been the faintest suggestion of a twinkle in his eye that seemed to imply the revenge had been more reward than punishment.

  Grrr.

  She had no idea if or when she’d see him again. He’d left the offices as unexpectedly as he’d arrived. And now she’d have to explain to Rogan why she wouldn’t be wearing the new gown she’d just told him about that morning.

  Another thing niggled at her from the map room. She’d told Hugh she’d been surprised to find one of her mother’s maps there. But that was a lie. She’d seen her mother’s maps there before. What was strange, however, was that one remarkably similar to the one Hugh had taken, a map of Manchester that usually hung framed on the wall in the map room, was missing.

  Ah, well, perhaps Building Services had moved it temporarily when the room was repainted. She’d follow up with them tomorrow.

  She slipped through the door of the History Center and called, “Reynolds Party!” to the guard as she ran toward the elevator.

  When she entered the party room, Rogan spotted her instantly and gave her a warm wave. He was standing with three well-dressed older ladies. One was his grandmother, Joss knew, and the other two must be his great-aunts. He was the dutiful young relative, bending to hear them. When Rogan’s mother joined the circle, Rogan bowed out. He intercepted Joss at the long bar, where she was ordering an extra large Cabernet, and gave her a kiss.

  “You look great,” he said. “How was the fitting?”

  “Disappointing. They can’t finish the dress in time.”

  “Oh no. Will I still get to see it?”

  Joss downed a generous swig of wine and avoided the question. “Did your mom notice I was late? Am I in trouble?”

  “You are not. I have been the convivial host, chatting up the out-of-towners and prepping them for my bride’s arrival. Come,” he said. “Let me show you off.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The mapmaker gave her dark, handsome husband the three maps she’d made for the old man, but she did not tell her husband where the gold was. Instead she told him a riddle. “The maps are the same. Three to one. Follow the path of the maps. Words can hide so much.”

  —The Tale of the Beautiful Mapmaker

  “Why would Reynolds come here?” Hugh asked Nathaniel, the sound of Fiona slamming the door still ringing in his ears.

  “I don’t know. ’Tis possible the girl invited him to the fitting, you know.”

  Hugh chewed the inside of his mouth. If she had, it would mean she hadn’t wanted to be alone with Hugh, and he was loath to admit that bothered him. He had been so certain there had been a spark between them.

  “I am astonished the girl is Brand’s daughter,” Nathaniel said gently. “Is she, then, the girl you saved?”

  Hugh thought of that terror-filled night and how he’d feared for the half-drowned child in his arms when they were fished out of the sea, more dead than alive. “Aye.”

  “Does she know?”

  “No. I don’t wa
nt her to know.”

  “You haven’t told her her mother cared for you? That she made a home for your brother, Joss and you for over a year?”

  “How does one tell a woman of the twenty-first century that her mother fell in love with one’s eighteenth-century brother and that her blackguard father would have chosen to abandon her on an islet in the North Atlantic rather than leave his wife behind? How does one even begin a conversation like that?”

  “’Tis her right to know, Monk.”

  Hugh remembered those first few days after the rescue. His brother Bart—Granite to his crew—had moved Maggie Brand and her daughter to the captain’s cabin while he, Bart, joined Hugh in the general crew’s quarters. Hugh wasn’t sure when the plan was formulated, but by the time they were a day’s sail from Portsmouth, he knew Maggie and Josephine would be coming to live with them in his brother’s small house in Fareham. But when they pulled into the harbor, there among the faces on the dock was Alfred Brand’s. How he had returned to the past, Hugh did not know. It could not have been through the passage that ended at that rocky islet, for there he would have surely perished.

  In the blink of an eye everything changed. Bart had the four of them smuggled off the ship to a distant inn. He resigned his commission, had his agent sell his house, and found them a small cottage in a village at the edge of Ashdown Forest, where Bart had found work as a clerk in a mill. Despite the loss of everything familiar, the four of them settled down into the most joy-filled, carefree time of Hugh’s young life, a time that ended all too soon with the discovery of Bart’s bloodied body in the cottage and the disappearance of Maggie and little Jo from his life.

  His blood for yours.

  “Tell me, Nathaniel, who would want to know the destruction one’s father has wrought?”

  Nathaniel sucked on his pipe thoughtfully. Hugh could feel his gaze. “And in the end,” Nathaniel said, “you discovered Brand didn’t kill them after all.”

  That had been Hugh’s worst fear, that after Brand had murdered Bart, he did the same to Maggie and little Jo. The not knowing had been torture, for Hugh’s young mind had imagined scenes of such horror that many nights he could not sleep at all. And now, twenty years later, to have found the mother gone and the daughter engaged to the man likely to have been invested with Brand’s dying secrets—it was almost too much to bear.

  “No, he didn’t,” Hugh said with a sigh, “though I doubt he’ll find his way into heaven because of it.”

  “Interesting, I think, that Joss found you after all this time, and that you were drawn to her.”

  Now that Hugh knew, he couldn’t help but pick up the echoes of Maggie in her face—that sapphire gaze, those queenly cheekbones, the faint flush of peony on the skin—though he could see the unforgiving profile of Alfred Brand there as well. How could he have missed it? And now he had dragged her into this dangerous adventure. He didn’t know what Reynolds knew or suspected. If Joss was a coconspirator with Reynolds, Hugh had potentially endangered the mission he and Fiona shared. If Joss was not a coconspirator, Hugh was afraid—deeply afraid—he had implicated Joss in Reynolds’s mind. He knew men would go to great lengths to protect the secrets maps revealed. In the time of that great sailor, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella had set a penalty of death for anyone foolish enough to be found with a copy of their kingdom’s most valuable treasure, the map that held the secrets of the New World. He prayed Joss had not told Reynolds of the visit she and Hugh had made to the map room. It was far safer if Reynolds believed Hugh was a suitor.

  “I have to find her,” Hugh said. “I have to warn her.”

  “And what of the map?”

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Hugh said, voice rising.

  “But she may, Hugh.” Nathaniel held up his hands. “She may. ’Twas her mother’s map. And her father was a very powerful man.”

  Hugh slumped. “You’re right. ’Tis the oddest thing, Nathaniel. I had no idea Maggie was a mapmaker. She never touched paper or pen the year I spent with her.”

  “She was in love. Talk to Joss. She may hold the secret to the map’s location.”

  Hugh shook his head firmly. “No. I just can’t believe she would share in Alfred Brand’s secret.”

  “’Tis not beyond the realm of possibility, you know, that your affection for the girl as well as for her mother is blinding you to the possibility.”

  “Are you arguing Fiona’s case now?”

  “This touches more people than Fiona. I suspect there are enough lives that have been ruined by Brand’s venal act in the last three hundred years to fill the City of London.”

  “I care nothing for that. I need to avenge my brother.”

  “You cannot bring him back, Hugh. But you can do what he would have done. Bring the girl to the ship. Let her look at Fiona’s map.”

  Hugh tried, but he could see no other way. “She will not go willingly.”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “No.”

  “Dammit, if I bring her to the ship, it will be under my protection. I will not allow her to be hurt.”

  “I know you’ll do what needs to be done.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Joss’s feet had just reached what she called the Elmer point of the evening: that is, the point where one’s feet throb like Elmer Fudd’s thumb after he accidentally hits it with a hammer. She decided she would slip over to the coatroom to kick off her shoes and extracted herself politely from the never-ending stream of Uncle Jared’s jokes, leaving only frail, old Great-Aunt Cathy, who smiled despite Joss’s near certainty she couldn’t understand what her nephew was saying. Joss was almost to the door when Di grabbed her.

  “Hey, we’ve barely gotten to talk. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “God, let me get out of these shoes first. They are killing me.”

  “But, oh, what a way to go. I love the leopard print. And are those roses on top? I haven’t been able to wear shoes with a heel in five years.”

  “To be honest, they’re a lot better when I’m lying down than standing up.”

  “Speaking of that,” Di said, leaning in closer, “how’s our friend, the tailor? Did you go back?”

  “Yes. Don’t ask.”

  “Well, if your cheeks right now are any indication, something interesting happened.”

  “Oh, something interesting happened, all right, but not what you’d imagine.”

  Di grinned. “I don’t know. I can imagine a lot.”

  “He wanted a map.”

  “What? That’s not the sort of boundaries I thought you’d be playing with. Maybe I need to buy you two drinks.”

  “Sounds heavenly. Let me get out of these shoes and I’ll meet you. Hope nobody minds my bare feet.”

  “I’m hitting the ladies’ room for I think the ninth time tonight. My table’s over there in the corner, the one with the bucket of ice for my feet.”

  “Classy.”

  “Say, I’ve got a pair of those little roll-up ballet flats in my coat pocket if you’re interested. Nights like this, my feet usually blow up to the size of Volkswagen Bugs. But tonight, for some reason, they’re ’61 Caddies, so even the flats are of no use to me now.”

  Joss looked down to see fuzzy flip-flops peeking out from the bottom of her friend’s pants. “You’re the bomb. See you in a flash.”

  Joss found Di’s coat and snagged the flats. Then she slipped her feet out of their sleek torture chambers. Letting out a deeply satisfying vulgarity, she straightened, rubbed her back and found Hugh standing beside her.

  “Oh my God! What are you doing here? Is there an indignity left I haven’t suffered today?”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Oh, now you’d like to talk to me.” She slipped the soft black suede on. “Do I have to give you my Social Security number? Or tell you how much I weigh? Will you be uploading the video of you charming me out of my clothes to HowIScamWomen.com?”

  “At least I used charm.”

&nb
sp; She repeated the earlier vulgarity, adding a robust “you” at the end, and turned on her now comfortable heel.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She let out a long huff and stopped.

  “It’s about the dress.”

  Not the dress again. She was starting to hate the hold the dress had on her. It was wrapped up in one big ego-building, ego-busting tangle, like a string of dusty Christmas lights when you didn’t know if they’d light up or electrocute you.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s done. I’d like you to come back to the shop. I’d still like to have my hour with you.”

  She shook her head like a dog with water in his ears. “Are you effing kidding me? You want me to come to your shop—now, after you deliberately deceived me, after you stole my key and broke into my office, after you took my mother’s map—when I know you’re not really a tailor?”

  “What I’d like to do,” he said, “is put you into that dress, kiss you once and drink to the sad fact that after tonight we will never see each other again.”

  Despite everything, she felt her knees start to wobble. She’d never known a man to be quite so honest. Besides, there was just something about the colors in those eyes—

  “Honest”? Is that what you just said? Jesus, do you hear yourself? This guy couldn’t be honest if you put a gun to his head.

  “The only place I’m going to be in an hour is in bed with my fiancé.”

  The muscles in his face contracted. “As you wish. Is Reynolds in there?” He inclined his head toward the crowd.

  “Of course he is.”

  “Might you honor me with an introduction?”

  “Sure. Right after I publish my secret diary on Facebook.”

  “I take it that’s a no.”

  “I think you’d better leave.”

  “I’m not leaving until you say you’ll come with me.”

  “Then I hope you enjoy talking to the coats.”