“Didn’t look like a bloody nonentity,” Phoebe snapped.
Bran slid past Collum and Phoebe to take my limp hand in his. “Please, listen,” he said. “Gabi can help us. She already has, in fact. She agreed to be my alibi so I could come here to see you. And she has a better chance of finding out where my brother is, since they don’t monitor her every move as they do mine. She could be valuable to what we’re trying to accomplish.”
“So,” I said, “she’s not going, then? She’s not part of this new team of yours?”
Bran’s shoulders rose. Dropped. “Actually, Doña Maria has insisted that she accompany us, though it irks Celia no end.”
I looked away, my thoughts returning to the girl. Her delight at meeting us seemed genuine. Still.
Doug rambled up, holding the last of the boxes. “Mac’s already left. I told him we were right behind him, so we better . . .” He paused, sharp eyes roaming over our faces. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
But as I caught sight of Gabriella’s retreating figure, I mentally tacked a word onto that statement, amending it to Hopefully, nothing.
Chapter 10
“WAIT TILL YOU SEE THE GOWNS,” PHOEBE GUSHED around a mouthful of eggs. “Gah! All that silk. They’re a dream. And hey, maybe no one will try to kill us this time, yeah?”
As I’d discovered on my very first morning in Scotland, my best friend was one of those annoyingly perky morning people. As she yammered on about bustles and petticoats, I nodded at the appropriate times, tried to avoid looking at the congealing mass of baked beans she’d piled on her eggs and toast, and did my best not to think about Bran and his BFF cousin.
After my breakfast of champions—coffee and a bite of toast—we rinsed off our plates and headed for the library. The smell of aged wood and lemon polish, mothballs and damp ash surrounded us as we tromped through the dining room and past sporadic groupings of antique furniture lining the long, interconnecting rooms of Christopher Manor’s first floor.
When I’d first arrived at my aunt’s house—an immense, blocky affair of white Highland stone, built in the mid-seventeen hundreds by one of the sour-faced ancestors whose images lined the main staircase—I admit I’d been intimidated. But I now knew it as a place of warm hearths and cozy nooks. Of knitted afghans and ancestral shields. A place for family. A home.
The view from my second-story bedroom displayed a pastoral scene of sheep and river and valley so lovely it made my heart hurt. Beyond the small village’s ocher roofs, the Highland moor spread out in an explosion of purple heather and yellow gorse.
It was a travel agent’s dream come true.
But no tourist bus had ever disgorged its camera-wielding cargo at Christopher Manor. Butting up against the base of an enormous bald mountain, the house held its secrets close.
As Phoebe and I entered the library, bright beams of morning light slanted in through the tall multipaned windows. I smiled as Moira’s mortal enemy—billions of golden dust motes she battled with singular hatred—swirled up to settle on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and burrow into the crevices of buttery leather chairs. Tiny tea tables were laden with framed photos displaying generations of manor residents. And in the central place of honor, the long oak table where I spent the vast majority of my days, eyeball-deep in research.
Out of habit, I glanced up at the portrait above the marble fireplace. Lord and Lady Hubert Carlyle glared down with the prim, constipated expression common to portraiture of the eighteen hundreds. But I’d always loved the mischievous slant the artist had captured in their young son Jonathan’s hazel eyes.
Jonathan was grown in the next portrait, though you could still see that spark as he gazed down at his stunningly beautiful wife, Julia. Looking at them, you’d never guess at the horrible tragedy that would soon befall the two sweet-faced little girls kneeling at their mother’s feet. As I stared up at the doomed family, something struck me.
“Crap!” I bolted over to a shelf and snatched up the leather-bound journals I’d left there two days earlier. “Why didn’t I think of this last night?”
I plopped down at the table and scanned the gilt-inlaid covers. Setting aside the one for the last quarter of 1894, I opened the diary labeled January−March, 1895.
Jonathan’s scrawl filled every page. The entries were meticulous and straightforward, and yet revealed his wry sense of humor. In January, there’d been a wildly unsuccessful, if colorful, voyage to Verona in the late sixteenth century. This, on flimsy evidence they’d uncovered, proved that William Shakespeare had—in fact—visited the Italian city.
They were sorely disappointed to learn that the Bard had likely never been anywhere near that most famous story’s location.
But I quickly flipped past all that to the latter part of February. And there it was, a short, somewhat vague notation.
An interesting visitor arrived today with news of great import. This charming lady knew much of us and more. Though Julia took to her at once, I felt some measure of reluctance, especially when viewing the countenance of her companion. Still, as her proof is sound, we have no reason to doubt her. And so I have booked passage on the RMS Campania. Soon, I take ship to New York, there to visit my very dear friend.
“Balls,” Phoebe groaned, reading over my shoulder. “Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “I guess.”
“Could we not find out from the later journals exactly what happened?”
“No. The rest are stored down in the Dim chamber. They won’t have changed, no matter if there has been a shift. I just happened to leave these up here the other day. Stupid.”
“Nah,” she said, nudging me. “How could you know? And anyway, since time is moving at the same pace there and here now, won’t young Johnny still be on the boat?”
I did a quick calculation of the dates. “Maybe. But he’s probably close by now.”
“Well,” she said, pulling me to my feet. “Nothing for it but to soldier on, is there? Let’s go.”
“You know,” I told Phoebe as we squeezed through the fake broom closet and down a flight of hidden stairs to the manor’s vast cellar, “I can think of one thing that scares me way more than shifts in the timeline.”
Phoebe quirked a pierced, russet eyebrow. “What?”
“Corsets.”
Most people claim if they could travel back in time, they’d take out people like Hitler or John Wilkes Booth.
And sure, I’d join those crusades any day. But my personal list for time-travel assassination includes, in no particular order:
Hungarian aristocrat Countess Elizabeth Báthory (1560−1614). Obsessed with staying young, this “first female vampire” exsanguinated hundreds of peasant girls, then drank and bathed in their blood, all to keep her own skin looking dewy fresh.
Marie Delphine LaLaurie (1775−1849). Notorious for throwing lavish dinner parties in her French Quarter home, the New Orleans socialite secretly carried out macabre medical experiments on the dozens of helpless slaves chained in her attic.
And finally, there was the dude—for surely it was a man—who originally invented the corset. I thought hell surely had a very special room for that guy.
The manor’s dank undercroft lay buried deep inside the granite mountain. Mighty brick pillars marched off into the shadows, bearing the house upon their shoulders. If even one of them crumbled while we were down here . . .
My mouth dried up. Stop it. This place has stood for nearly four hundred years. It’s fine. You’re fine.
I even believed it. In theory.
But no matter how many times I wove through the narrow, deliberately labyrinthine path, no matter how often I passed the towering heaps of dusty, spider-infested clutter, my chest would start to cave in. The historian in me longed to dig, to discover the undoubted treasures buried within the piles of castoffs built up over the centuries.
The claustrophobic in me ran. Every. Time.
&
nbsp; I shoved past Phoebe and bolted down the path. As I burst through the Watch Room door, the positive-air barrier blasted my hair back in a powerful stream that kept out every speck of dirt.
I bent double, heaving for breath.
“Again?” I heard Collum mutter. But he hurried over, voice gentle as he patted my back. “It’s all right, Hope. You got this, lass. Slow down. Count like your mum taught you. In . . . two, three. Out . . . two, three. There you are. Good as new.”
My lungs began to re-inflate. Spots receded from the edge of my vision and I blinked down at the sight of Collum’s sock-covered feet. His grandmother’s order no doubt. No mud-crusted work boots would ever set foot on Moira’s immaculate white-tiled floor.
“You’ve got a hole in the left one.”
The hand on my back stilled. “That so, is it?”
With a final inhale, I straightened to grin up at him. “Pretty big one, too. Your toe’s sticking out.”
Collum “Everything in Life Is So Serious” MacPherson tried to glare, but I saw his lips twitch. “That’s the thanks I get, then? I help you and you ridicule my clothing?”
“Just your sock,” Phoebe put in helpfully. “But if you like, I can think up plenty about that clatty old flannel shirt you wear every other day.”
“This I get from someone whose hair’s the color of a bloody dino—”
“Enough!” Moira’s single clap echoed off the tile walls. “If you’re going to act like bairns, then I’ll treat you as such. Collum.” She held out an imperious hand. “Give me that sock. I’ll darn it for ye while the girls are changing.”
“Gram,” he started to protest, but Moira marched over to him, glaring up from her four-foot-eleven-inch height.
“You may be a foot taller and outweigh me again by half—”
“Don’t know about that,” Phoebe whispered.
Moira wheeled, smirking as she patted her admittedly ample rump. “I wouldn’t be talking out o’ turn, girl-o,” she said. “Just so ye know, I was as spritely as yourself when I was a lass.”
Phoebe’s eyes widened as she gave her grandmother’s round figure a quick once-over. She raced to the mirror, twisting to see her backside.
“Oh, gads.” My friend shook her head sadly. “You’re right, Gram. It’s going to be enormous.”
“More to love,” Doug—wisely never turning from his spot at the computer terminal—called out.
Slipping inside one of the wide, curtained changing booths to strip down to gym shorts and tee, I listened to the playful bickering.
This, I thought. This is family. Real family.
Oh, my parents loved me. I never doubted it. But our house had been more academic than homey. My world revolved around study and learning. There had never been much . . . any . . . room in my mother’s ironclad schedule for play.
As I stepped out and over to the triple dressing mirror, Moira’s gaze met mine in the glass. The dear laugh lines radiating from her eyes deepened as we exchanged a grin. She’d seen it in me from the start, I think. My loneliness. The desperation to belong. I had to look away, my throat going suddenly tight. Not with claustrophobia, this time. But with the overwhelming realization that I was finally home.
Chapter 11
AS WITH THE CAPABLE WAY SHE DID EVERYTHING, Moira attacked the issue of preparing our historically accurate costumes.
“All right, lamb,” she said, after lacing up the despised whalebone and canvas contraption. “Hold tight to the pole and suck in.”
Gripping the metallic pole installed for just this purpose, I felt the corset curve my spine and rearrange my organs as Moira yanked ruthlessly on the laces.
“Can’t . . . breathe . . .” I wheezed. “Lungs . . . in . . . throat . . .”
“Now, now,” Moira replied, neatly tying off the torture device. “That just means it fits proper. All the women of this era had the hourglass figure. Ye’d stick out like a banged thumb without it.” She gave me a satisfied pat on the shoulder. “Aw, ye’ll be fine, lamb. Women wore corsets for centuries and very few died of it.”
“Only a few, huh?” I rasped. “That’s comforting. Killed by corset. Yeah, that would be my luck.”
“Your turn, darlin’ girl.” Moira had an unmistakable glint in her eye as she crooked a finger at Phoebe. “Let’s just see how small we can get that wee waist of yours, aye?”
“Um, Gram.” Phoebe paled. “I—I’m right sorry about—”
“Shh,” Moira said. “Come on, now. You’re wasting daylight.”
Unable to sit in the horrible garment, I watched Doug and Collum study the enormous computer screen that filled the entire back wall. A dozen computers calculated the complicated and ever-shifting spider web of green and red. While hundreds of feet below us, the ley lines the display represented buzzed and hummed with their own strange power.
Though I wanted to burn the corset, I knew they were a necessary evil for us to pass as nineteenth-century ladies. All the Viators’ costumes were era-appropriate, down to the last thread.
I should know. Since arriving home from the Highland games, Aunt Lucinda had ordered me to bone up on all things related to the late-Victorian world of 1895 New York.
“Hey, Hope,” Phoebe said. “Why again—do they call it—the Gilded Age?” Puffs of air punctuated her speech as Moira yanked ever harder on the strings.
“Mark Twain actually coined the phrase,” I told them, as the black and white text marched across my vision. “He and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a book called The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, first published in 1873. It was a series of allegorical tales about the terrible social problems of the time that were covered over by a thin veneer of gold.”
I recited Twain’s words without conscious thought. “‘The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.’”
I went on for a while, trailing off only when I noticed them all looking at me. From one blink to the next, a memory—cold as a shard of lethal ice—stabbed into me.
“You.”
My paternal grandmother, Beatrice “Mother Bea” Walton, feared . . . or worshiped . . . by everyone in our tiny town, had pointed a manicured finger down at the skittish six-year-old me, as I knelt on her living room floor.
Confused by her acrid tone, I tried to smile.
Around my new cousins and me, the carpet was littered with the detritus of a Christmas morning frenzy. Shiny, crumpled paper. Ripped cardboard. Twinkling lights. Christmas music played from hidden speakers, mixed with the comforting murmur of adults around the dining table. Cinnamon cider and roasting turkey wafted from the kitchen of Mother Bea’s stately house. I’d been so excited to attend my very first Christmas with my new American family, I’d barely been able to sleep.
It should have been glorious. But then my twelve-year-old cousin, RJ, had unwrapped a book on dinosaurs. When he’d scoffed and tossed it aside, I’d picked it up to thumb through. A girl cousin had snatched it away, calling me a baby and claiming I’d rip the pages. To prove her wrong, I began to recite every word I’d read in the short hardcover.
They called me a liar. Said I memorized it beforehand to impress them. RJ’s face reddened with fury as he tried to follow along, one finger running across the pages. Standing, he’d shrieked at me and in a tantrum, tossed the book into the nearby fireplace.
Mother Bea had witnessed the whole event. She snatched me up by the arm, fury in her expression as she spat the words. “Oddities like you should not exist in God’s world. I told your father, but would he listen? No. But I say you have no business being among decent Christian folk.” She shook me until my head snapped back. “Go outside until I call you. I won’t have you ruining Christmas for any more of these precious children.”
The memory slunk back where I’d hidden it. Head bowed, I listened to the heavy silence from the room around me and I felt my skin shrink. My shoulders tried to curl in, but the ac
cursed corset held them erect.
“That,” Phoebe said, “was bloody amazing, Hope!”
My head shot up as she started clapping. Moira beamed at me. “You’re a treasure, girl, and no mistake.”
Doug, standing near the door now, called out, “Hey, I’ve got to run upstairs for a bit. But when I get back, will you tell us about the expansion of the railroads? I’ve always been fascinated by the American West.”
I locked eyes with Collum. He nodded. “We’ll need all that and more where we’re going,” he said. “Keep up the good work, aye?”
A warm flush rolled through me as I cast off that six-year-old’s shame. I didn’t have to hide my abilities anymore. These people genuinely cared about me. They valued me. They . . . they needed me.
After Moira deftly fastened the endless buttons that roved up the back of the tailored wool traveling gown, I hustled to the mirror. Phoebe scooched in to stand beside me.
Weeks of Moira’s sumptuous cooking had filled in most of the hollow spaces in my own figure, areas carved off during the eight months I’d mourned my “dead” mother. I no longer looked quite as ghoulish as when I’d arrived, and I realized I kind of liked the new curves.
Phoebe flounced off to plop down in the chair left empty by Doug. I watched Moira in the mirror as, pins in her mouth, she fussed with my hem. Above the plump cheeks, her small gray eyes looked unusually worried.
“What’s wrong, Moira?”
She glanced up, her eyes meeting mine in the glass. “I don’t like it,” she muttered after a few seconds. “Feels off to me. Like something . . .”
Lips pinched, she shook her head. Hating the stricken look on her face, I tried to joke.
“Personally I’d bet on my spleen. Of course, it could be my liver. Either way, one of them will definitely explode if we don’t loosen these laces. Maybe—”
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