by Jo Beverley
High cheekbones, dark blue eyes, the wide brow and beautiful mouth. Unmistakable, down to the last detail. It was the man from her dream. As this strange recognition settled into her bones, he raised his eyes, caught her gaze and his eyes widened as if in fear.
He recognized her from her own dream? In what world did that even make sense?
Chapter 3
Riveted, holding her breath, Alice gave a startled cry when Phillip spoke at her side. “All set?”
Crystal turned to look at her, and Alice ducked her head to hide her expression.
“Steady there,” Phillip said. “I’ll just bring back your change, luv.”
“No, no, that’s fine.”
He shook his head. “Too much, even for an American. I’ll be right back.”
Feeling the heat in her ears, Alice busied herself with a last swallow of tea. She was being ridiculous. A dream didn’t come to life!
“What’s with you?” Crystal asked.
Alice glanced up to see that the man had disappeared. A wash of emotions, agitation and relief and disappointment, rolled through her, and she blotted her damp mouth with a paper napkin she’d somehow shredded. “What do you mean?”
“You’re all flustered.”
“I’m fine.”
Acacia’s group settled at a big round table near the stage and ordered drinks, laughing and chatting only among themselves. The other patrons gave them a wide berth, as the students in class had done, and just as in class, there was an outer circle—hangers-on. The term, mean as it was, came to Alice with particular emphasis.
One of the young men carried a drum to the stage, and a waifish girl with long red hair and an outfit reminiscent of Robin Hood took a seat. “Must be Celtic,” Crystal said. “My brother has a drum like that.”
“And who else would wear those poet’s clothes?”
“Everyone around here. Haven’t you noticed?”
And now that she pointed it out, Alice saw that most of the young people in the room did wear the same kind of flowing sleeves and the like. She shook her head.
“Not a fan of Celtic stuff?” Crystal asked.
“It’s not that.” She looked around herself, at the heavy beams overhead and the fire leaping so merrily in the hearth, and even the heavy wooden platter on which the barkeep had brought her food. The room lacked only torches on the wall to be a completely authentic replication of a pub from centuries before. “It’s just that things feel slightly off, don’t they?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I don’t know, either.”
A few more people wandered in, and Alice reluctantly picked up her change from the table. “I suppose I need to get moving.”
“Oh, stay for a bit. One or two songs. Just to see what they’re like. We’ll split a pint.”
If she went home, there would only be more studying, maybe yet another depressing letter from her ex-boyfriend, whose decision to climb mountains in Nepal had given life to her desire to finally come to England. He didn’t communicate by computer at all, even when he could, considering it a cold method, and letters sometimes took a very long time.
Wasn’t the whole point of coming here to see what kind of life she really wanted?
“All right. Not long, though. I don’t want to walk home in the dark.” She blotted her lips. “I need to powder my nose. Where is the loo?”
Crystal pointed toward a narrow hallway, and Alice made her way to the low-ceilinged passageway and found the ladies’ room. A sense of excitement danced in her throat, and her cheeks in the mirror were flushed. It was daunting to glimpse her ordinary face, the ordinary features, when inside she felt so alight, but it was true: There was nothing at all remarkable about her.
But it was difficult to be in the company of the glorious, perfect beauty clustered in the Lords and Ladies.
Lords and Ladies. She frowned, drying her hands beneath a blower, as a waft of an idea sailed through her mind. The fey were uncommonly beautiful to mortal eyes. What if . . . ?
Ridiculous, even for her wild imagination. Fairies!
Really, her imagination had been going wild all day. There must be something in the water.
She headed back toward the pub, but after a moment she realized she must have turned the wrong direction in the gloomy hallway, for she came to a dead end, a cold brick wall behind which she could hear kitchen voices. It was so dark she had to put her hand out to guide herself back in the right direction. The bricks were cold, faintly damp against her fingers.
Within the space of a breath, she realized she wasn’t alone any longer. She felt the presence only an instant before a large male hand covered her mouth, stifling her urge to cry out.
“I mean you no harm.”
It was the voice from her dream, that unusual accent, the velvety timber, so unusual and fine. She closed her eyes and nodded, feeling his body pressed into hers from behind. His chest, his thighs. He let go of her mouth and allowed his fingers to trail down her arm.
“My heart died three times over in fear when I came in and saw you sitting there.” He twined his fingers around hers lightly. “You must not dance.” His breath, moist and hot, whispered over the bare skin of her nape, and Alice shivered. His fingertips trailed over the bones of her wrist, her knuckles. “Swear it!”
“I swear I will not dance,” Alice whispered.
“ ’Tis nearly dusk, and you must return home before darkness falls. When I sing ‘The Elfin Knight,’ make your departure.”
“All right.”
In the darkness, he edged infinitesimally closer, and his thumb moved in the cradle of her palm, circling upward to her inner wrist. Alice felt every centimeter of her body where it touched him at shoulder blade and buttock and the back of her knee, and felt every centimeter that did not touch him—the weight of her breasts and naked throat and quivering heart.
He bent in, and she felt his lips barely brush the side of her neck. “Do not dance,” he said again, and then he was gone.
Alice put a hand to her mouth. Every hair on her body stood on end, and even her scalp seemed as if it had been electrified. Shaking, she took several long breaths to compose herself, then headed back down the hall. This time, she managed to find the right room. It was crowded and jovial, and Alice paused for a moment, feeling curiously as if she had been gone for a very long time.
As she began to cross the room, there came a soft rustling of excitement, as if a dozen hands were smoothing a dozen skirts and sleeves, a dozen feet slid across the dusty wooden floor in soft boots. The excitement was not directed at her, Alice saw, but toward the stage. She turned.
And there he was, the man from her dream. A shaft of light cast a high gloss over the crown of his head, edged the sharp cheekbones, threw into relief the bones on the back of his long white hands. Her lungs were airless, as if she were suspended in some other dimension. He picked up a stringed instrument that was unfamiliar to her. A girl gathered her bells, and a piper clambered onstage, burly and short, with the musculature of a discus thrower. The man from her dream—William, she remembered; his name had been William—gave a nod to the other two and they began to play.
Alice helplessly sank down to the booth. It wasn’t as if he just looked like the man in her dream. It was the man in her dream. He wore the same green doublet, the same flowing sleeves that made his shoulders so impressive. And that face, so elegantly, brilliantly carved. She thought of him offering her cheese and mead, the air so charged around him, thought of his voice in her ear a few moments ago, his thumb pressed into the hollow of her palm. As if even her thoughts of him carried enchantment, she felt her skin grow hot.
“Who is he?” Crystal asked. “I have never seen him before tonight.”
Alice shook her head, transfixed. The drummer hauled up his drum and began to patter out a rhythm. The girl raised her bells, and the piper began to blow. William inclined his head at them, then began to pluck his strings with long fingers. His hair caught the
light.
She found she was barely breathing as he leaned forward to the mike.
Even his voice was the same, with a timber and richness that were rare in any case, and his accent so very different from those of the others around him. His voice wove through the pipes and the bells and the strings and the drum in a bawdy, cheerful song that awakened the room.
And yet, he seemed oddly joyless. The others in the band were lively and smiling, even laughing and shouting out at certain points, but William did not. He gave the song a resonance and he even injected the right rhythms, but he lacked their involvement.
William.
As if you could learn a name from a dream! Shaking her head, she took a long draft of ale, hoping to cool her hot throat.
“God, he’s beautiful.” Crystal sighed beside her.
Alice could only nod. With everyone else in the room, she fell under the spell of the music. She recognized many of them, old songs from the Child ballad collections, which she had studied along with the literature surrounding “The Romance of the Rose.” Songs of warning to young women to beware of charming young men; songs of warning to young men to beware of the lure of a sparkling eye; warnings above all to beware of bewitchments and falling in love across classes.
When they began to dance, Alice watched hungrily. The drums pounded right into her ankles, making her tap her toes and fingers. The dancers laughed and swung one another around, and it was utterly magical. She resisted.
A boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, rushed into the pub and made straight for the table of elegants. He bent and whispered in Acacia’s ear. She waved a hand, then stood and followed him out. Alice and Crystal exchanged a shrug, and returned their attention to the music.
William had been singing desultorily, but suddenly he stood straighter, and although she had been sitting there all evening, it seemed that he was looking straight at Alice now. For one long moment, their eyes locked, and Alice swore he had some electrical field around him, one that knocked open every cell in her body to his charge. She felt aglow, as if she would lift a hand and find it shining.
And then he looked beyond her at the windows and his expression changed to one of alarm.
It all happened so quickly, within the span of a stanza of a song, which they finished. William leaned into the microphone and looked toward the bar, as if directing his words toward a pretty girl sipping a glass of wine. “Beware the fey and the fall of night,” he said, his voice silky and dark. “We’ve one more song to sing before we take a little break.”“Come, pretty Nelly, and sit thee down by me
Every rose grows merry wi’ thyme
And I will ask thee questions three
And then thou wilt be a true lover of mine.”
As he sang, his attention was wholly fixed on Alice, and she felt as if her brain were fizzy, lost in some wave of enchantment.
It was Crystal who pulled her out of it, nudging her hard in the ribs. “He’s staring right at you! And so are all of Acacia’s minions. You’re in trouble.”
Alice fell to earth. Leaping to her feet, she grabbed her purse and her books. “I have to go!” she cried. Without even looking over her shoulder she dashed into the street.
The gloaming had fallen, not full dark, only the purple light that obscured details and made the world seem as if she could step between times, dimensions, lives. Along the western horizon still burned a line of bright rose sunlight. If she hurried, she could make it home before dark.
The street was bustling. Everyone was in high spirits, strolling together in groups of two and three, with the odd lone woman carrying groceries home from the market in a string bag. As Alice entered the flow of traffic, their utter normality eased the panic that had overtaken her in the pub, and she tucked her hands deep in her pockets, shaking her head. What had gotten into her?
It was the village itself, she decided. The fog and the manor house . . . The very ancientness and atmosphere lent themselves to all the old stories. Not to mention the fact that she’d spent the entire afternoon immersed in tales of an enchanted rose and a lost chalice and all manner of bewitched creatures. Her imagination was running away with her!
Still, once she left the main road to walk across the meadow, she shivered. Shadows crept out from the hedgerows, and cold, damp air swirled around her feet. Somewhere out of sight, a cow mooed. A white cat sat on a fence, bigger than he should be, his gold eyes slanted and focused on her.
Alice walked briskly, keeping her eyes on the bright ribbon of light that edged the horizon. On one side of the path grew a dense bank of trees, walnuts and oaks tangled with rhododendrons. On the other was the fallow field and that lonely tree, sharply outlined against the horizon. In her heightened state, it seemed there were shadows moving around its base, and—so quickly she couldn’t be quite sure she’d truly seen it—a thin spill of soft green light.
Despite her nervousness, Alice halted. Peering into the gloom, squinting as if it would clear away some detail obscuring the truth, she tried to separate the gloaming from the shifting velvet darkness.
A noise in the trees startled her, and Alice spun around. An animal slipped out of sight. She started walking again. Time enough to figure out the mysteries of this field, if indeed there was anything but her imagination at work.
And it was hard at work, making it seem as if there were someone following her. Resolutely she kept walking, trying to step quietly and hold her breath. Was that the jangle of a dog’s collar? A primeval shiver shook her spine.
The last band of daylight suddenly disappeared and the gloaming fell dark around her in a living grasp. Panic, pure and unreasoning, swelled through her chest, and Alice started to run, a sense of danger tugging the hairs on the back of her neck, clawing at her spine.
In her haste, she stumbled over a root and fell, slamming the heels of her hands and one knee into the earth. The snuffling breath of some creature wuffed across her ear, and Alice cried out, leaping to her feet. Claws captured her upper arm. She turned and slammed a fist toward whatever it was, connecting to a furred nose or neck. It made a furious noise and let her go.
Stay away, said something or someone or her wildly out-of-control imagination.
Alice ran, stumbling, careening, and then—
There was nothing. Only the quiet of nightfall in the air and the chuckling of a stream—the moat!—and a lone insect singing mournfully over the change of the season.
She slowed, her ragged breath coming more easily, and carefully picked her way down the path another hundred feet to the gate and the bridge and her own garden, where a rose burned yellow like a torch against the night.
Safe, she thought, opening her back door. Her hands were shaking.
Chapter 4
In her tiny kitchen, Alice washed her hands and examined the damage. One skinned knee, two muddy palms and a long, undeniably ugly scratch that beaded with blood. “That,” she said to the empty room, “was not my imagination.”
After making a pot of restorative tea, Alice sat down with her notes. What a day! Something was going on here; that much was true. Not only what had happened tonight, but from the encounter in the garden last night, to the hostile group in the classroom, to the strange—and thrilling—encounter in the pub, it felt as if something were in opposition to her, that she had somehow upset the balance of things by her arrival.
In the back of her mind, her younger sister, Kate, snorted. Ego, much?
As if her sister were really there, Alice flushed. It was crazy to imagine that she could have any influence on the inhabitants of such an ancient village.
And yet, she had not imagined the creature in the field. Perhaps it was just a wild animal of some kind—though she had no idea what kind of wild creatures still lived in southern England. Dogs did not have claws like that, and it had been much too large for a cat. Crazy. As crazy as dreaming of a man and then seeing him in real life.
A sense of panicky nerves rose in her chest again.
Oh, come on now,
don’t be a ninny, the sensible part of her brain said. Assemble the facts.
Taking a sip of tea, she took out a pen and piece of paper. Facts. There had been a big fog in the garden. She tripped and fell. Someone had helped her, but then she didn’t see him after that. That evening she fell asleep and dreamed of a beautiful troubadour who came in through her window—
No. Facts were not what she needed here. The facts would not give her any answers. Instead she wrote, What do I think is happening here?
I think, she wrote with her black pen, that there are fairies in this town.
As soon as she wrote it, she felt like a fool and crumpled the paper into a tight little ball. All the reading about the Grail had gone to her head. What she needed was a nice hot bath, a hot toddy and a round of ordinary television.
It would all make more sense in the morning.
In her dream, Alice saw herself asleep in a pale blue rectangle of moonlight falling through the mullioned window. Wavery lines cast by the panes crisscrossed her cheek and shoulder, her hands clasped neatly by her face. Odd, but she thought she looked lovely with her dark hair spilling over the white linens, in the simple cotton nightgown. Virginal and unawakened.
The window opened quietly and William came inside, again carrying mead and bread and a bag he settled upon the wooden desk. Darkness hid his movements for a few moments; then light flared up from the hearth from the fire he’d built into leaping, friendly light. Still she slept, oblivious.
He lit candles, on the table and by the window. As her observa tional self, Alice noticed his long legs, his hair caught back in a leather thong like some medieval prince, his tenderness when he bent over her sleeping form. Gently, he touched her hair—a gesture Alice both felt and observed. When her sleeping self turned, however, she was only in her body, looking up at him, feeling the sleepiness. “Hello,” she said, again unafraid. “What are you doing here?”