She was encouraged. “You were born in the wrong century, Doc,” she said pleasantly. “They say more medical advances were made in the twentieth century than in all the rest of time put together.”
He was watching her as if he expected her head to spin around on her shoulders.
Elisabeth was enjoying the rare sense of being privy to startling information. “Not only that, but people actually walked on the moon in 1969, and—”
“Walked on the moon?” He shoved back his chair, strode across the room and brought back a dipperful of cold well water. “Drink this very slowly.”
Disappointment swept over Elisabeth when she realized she wasn’t convincing him after all. It was followed by a sense of hopelessness so profound, it threatened to crush her. If she didn’t find some way to influence Jonathan, he and Trista might not survive the fire. And she would never be able to bear knowing they’d died so horribly, because they were real people to her and not just figures in an old lady’s autobiography.
She tasted the water, mostly because she knew he wouldn’t leave her alone until she had, and then turned her head away. “Jonathan, you must listen to me,” she whispered, forgetting the formalities. “Your life depends on it, and so does Trista’s.”
He returned the dipper to the bucket, paying no attention to her words. “You need to lie down.”
“I don’t….”
“If you refuse, I can always give you a dose of laudanum,” Jonathan interrupted.
Elisabeth’s temper flared. “Now just a minute. Nobody is giving me laudanum. The stuff was—is—made from opium, and that’s addictive!”
Jonathan sighed. “I know full well what it’s made of, Miss McCartney. And I wasn’t proposing to make you dependent and sell you into white slavery. It’s just that you’re obviously agitated—”
“I am not agitated!”
His slow, leisurely smile made something shift painfully inside her. “Of course, you’re not,” he said in a patronizing tone.
Now it was Elisabeth who sighed. She’d known Jonathan Fortner, M.D., for a very short time, but one thing she had learned right off was that he could be mule stubborn when he’d set his mind on a certain course of action. Arguing with him was useless. “All right,” she said sweetly, even managing a little yawn. “I guess I would like to rest for a while. But you’ve got to promise not to send for the marshal and have me arrested.”
She saw a flicker of amusement in his charcoal eyes. “You have my word, Elisabeth,” he told her, and she loved the way he said her name. He took her arm and led her toward the back stairs, and she allowed that, thinking how different Dr. Fortner was from Ian, from any man she knew in her own time. There was a courtly strength about him that had evidently been lost to the male population as the decades progressed.
He deposited her in the same room she’d had during her last visit, settling her expertly on the narrow iron bed, slipping off her shoes, covering her with a colorful quilt. His gentle, callused hand smoothed her hair back from her forehead.
“Rest,” he said hoarsely, and then he was gone, closing the door quietly behind him.
Elisabeth tensed, listening for the click of a key in the lock, but it never came. She relaxed, soaking up the atmosphere of this world that apparently ran parallel to her own. Everything was more substantial, somehow, more vivid and richly textured. The ordinary sound of an errant bee buzzing and bumping against the window, the support of the feather-filled mattress beneath her, the poignant blue of the patch of sky visible through the lace curtains at the window—all of it blended together to create an undeniable reality.
She was definitely not dreaming and, strangely, she was in no particular hurry to get back to her own century. There was no one there waiting for her, while here, she had Trista and Jonathan. She would stay a few days, if Jonathan would let her, and perhaps find some way to avert the disaster that lay ahead.
When the door of her room opened, she was only a little startled. Trista peered around the edge, her Jonathan-gray eyes wide with concerned curiosity. “Are you sick?” she asked.
Elisabeth sat up and patted the mattress. “No, but your father thinks I am. Come and sit here.”
Shyly, Trista approached the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, her small, plump hands folded in her lap.
“I’ve heard you practicing your piano lessons,” Elisabeth said, settling back against her pillows and folding her arms.
Trista’s eyes reflected wonder rather than the disbelief Elisabeth had seen in Jonathan’s gaze. “You have?”
“I don’t think you like it much,” Elisabeth observed.
The child made a comical face. “I’d rather be outside. But Papa wants me to grow up to be a lady, and a lady plays piano.”
“I see.”
Trista smiled tentatively. “Do you like music?”
“Very much,” Elisabeth answered. “I studied piano when I was about your age, and I can still play a little.”
The eight-year-old’s gapped smile faded to a look of somber resignation. “Miss Calderberry will be here soon to give me my lesson. I’m allowed to leave my room for that, of course.”
“Of course,” Elisabeth agreed seriously.
“Would you care to come down and listen?”
“I’d better not. Something tells me your father wouldn’t want me to be quite so—visible. I’m something of a secret, I think.”
Trista sighed, then nodded and rose to go downstairs and face her music teacher. She had the air of Anne Boleyn proceeding to the Tower. “Your necklace is in the dish on my bureau, just where you left it,” she whispered confidentially, from the doorway. “You won’t leave without saying goodbye, will you?”
Elisabeth felt her throat tighten slightly. “No, sweetheart. I promise I won’t go without seeing you first.”
“Good,” Trista answered. And then she left the room.
After a few minutes, Elisabeth got out of bed and wandered into the hallway. At the front of the house was a large, arched window looking down on the yard, and she couldn’t resist peering around the curtains to watch a slender woman dressed in brown sateen climb delicately down from the seat of a buggy.
Miss Calderberry wore a feathered hat that hid her face from Elisabeth, but when Jonathan approached from the direction of the barn, smiling slightly, delight seemed to radiate from the piano teacher’s countenance. Her trilling voice reached Elisabeth’s ears through the thick, bubbled glass.
“Dr. Fortner! What a pleasure to see you.”
In the next instant, Jonathan’s gaze rose and seemed to lock with Elisabeth’s, and she remembered that she was supposed to be lying down, recovering from her odious malady.
She stepped back from the window, but only because she didn’t want Miss Calderberry to see her and carry a lot of gossip back to the fine folks of Pine River. It wouldn’t do to ruin whatever might be left of the good doctor’s reputation following Vera’s accounts of a naked lady in residence.
When Trista’s discordant efforts at piano playing started to rise through the floorboards, Elisabeth grew restless and began to wander the upstairs, though she carefully avoided Jonathan’s room.
She made sure the necklace was still in Trista’s crystal dish, then peeked into each of the other bedrooms, where she saw brass beds, chamberpots, pitchers and basins resting on lovely hardwood washstands. From there, she proceeded to the attic.
The place gave her a quivery feeling in the pit of her stomach, being a mirror image of its counterpart in her own time. Of course, the contents were different.
She opened a trunk and immediately met with the scent of lavender. Setting aside layers of tissue paper, she found a delicate ivory dress, carefully folded, with ecru-lace trim on the cuffs and the high, round collar.
Normally, Elisabeth would not have done what she did next, but this was, in a way, her house. And besides, all her actions had a dreamlike quality to them, as though they would be only half-remembered in the morning.
She took the dress out of the trunk, held it against her and saw that it would probably fit, then she stripped off her slacks and sweater. Tiny buttons covered in watered silk graced the front of the gown, fastening through little loops of cloth.
When she had finished hooking each one, Elisabeth looked around for a mirror, but there was none in sight. She dipped into the trunk again and found a large, elegantly shaped box, which contained a confection of a hat bursting with silk flowers—all the color of rich cream—and tied beneath the chin with a wide, ivory ribbon.
Elisabeth couldn’t resist adding the hat to her costume.
Holding up her rustling skirts with one hand, she made her way cautiously down the attic steps and along the hallway to her room. She was inside, beaming with pleasure and turning this way and that in front of the standing mirror, when she sensed an ominous presence and turned to see Jonathan in the doorway.
He leaned against the jamb, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to reveal muscle-corded forearms folded across his chest.
“Make yourself right at home, Miss McCartney,” he urged in an ill-tempered tone. An entirely different emotion was smoldering in his eyes, however.
Elisabeth had been like a child, playing dressup. Now her pleasure faded and her hands trembled as she reached up to untie the ribbon that held the hat in place. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, mortified, realizing that the clothes had surely belonged to his wife and that seeing someone else wearing them must be painful for him. “I don’t know what came over me….”
Jonathan stepped into the room and closed the door against the distant tinkle of piano keys, probably not wanting their voices to carry to Trista and Miss Calderberry. His eyes were narrowed. “When I first met you, you were wearing my wife’s necklace, and when it disappeared, so did you. Tell me, Elisabeth…do you know Barbara?”
Elisabeth shook her head. “H-how could I, Jonathan? She—I live in another century, remember?”
He arched one dark eyebrow and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his black woolen vest. “Yet, somehow, my wife’s necklace came to be here. Without Barbara. She never let it out of her sight, you know. She claimed it had powers.”
A hard lump formed in Elisabeth’s throat, and she swallowed. If Barbara Fortner had known about the necklace’s special energy and had used it, she could have crossed the threshold into the modern world….
“This is all getting pretty farfetched,” Elisabeth said, squaring her shoulders. “I didn’t know your wife, Jonathan.” She looked down at the lovely dress. “I truly am sorry for presuming on your hospitality this way, though.”
“Keep the dress,” he told her with a dismissive gesture of one hand. “It will raise a lot fewer questions than those trousers of yours.”
Elisabeth felt as though she’d just been given a wonderful gift. “Thank you,” she breathed softly, running her hands down the satiny skirt.
“You’d better hunt up some calico and sateen for everyday,” he finished, moving toward the door. “Naturally, women don’t cook and clean in such fancy getup.”
“Jonathan?” Elisabeth approached him as he waited, his hand on the doorknob. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his now-stubbly cheek, and again she felt a powerful charge of some mystical electricity. “Thank you. But I won’t need special clothes if I go back to my own time.”
He rolled his eyes, but there was a look of tenderness in their depths. “Something tells me you’re going to be here for a while,” he said, and then his gaze moved slowly over Elisabeth, from her face to the incongruous toes of her sneakers and back again. His hands rested lightly on the sides of her waist, and she felt a spiritual jolt as he looked deeply into her eyes, as though to find her soul behind them.
It seemed natural when his lips descended toward hers and brushed lightly against them, soft and warm and moist. A moment later, however, he was kissing her in earnest.
With a whimper, Elisabeth put her arms around his neck and held on, afraid she would sink to the floor. The gentle assault on her senses continued; her mouth was open to his, and even through the dress and the bra beneath, her nipples hardened against the wall of his chest. A sweet, grinding ache twisted in the depths of her femininity, a wild need she had never felt with Ian, and if Jonathan had asked her, she would have surrendered then and there.
Instead, he set her roughly away from him and avoided her eyes. Trista’s labored piano playing filled their ears.
“There’s obviously no point in keeping you locked up in your room,” he said hoarsely. “If you encounter Miss Calderberry, kindly introduce yourself as my wife’s sister.”
With that, he was gone. Elisabeth stood there in the center of her room, her cheeks flaring with color because he’d kissed her as no other man ever had—and because he was ashamed to have her under his roof. She wanted to laugh and cry, both at the same time, but in the end she did neither.
She crept down the back stairway and out the kitchen door and headed in the direction of the stream where she had picnicked by herself almost a hundred years in the future. The scent of apple blossoms filled her spirit as she walked through the recently planted orchard. Birds sang in the treetops, and in the near distance, she could hear the rustling song of the creek.
It occurred to her then that she could be blissfully happy in this era, for all its shortcomings. On some level, she had always yearned for a simpler, though certainly not easier, life and a man like Jonathan.
Elisabeth hurried along, the soft petals billowing around her like fog in a dream, and finally reached the grassy bank.
The place was different and yet the same, and she stood in exactly the spot where she’d spread her blanket to eat lunch and read. The covered bridge towered nearby, but its plank walls were new, and the smell of freshly sawed wood mingled with the aromas of spring grass and the fertile earth.
In order to protect her dress from green smudges, Elisabeth sat on a boulder overlooking the stream instead of on the ground. She removed the hat and set it beside her, then lifted her arms to her hair, winding it into a French knot at the back of her head even though she had no pins to hold it. Her reflection smiled back at her from the crystal-bright waters of the creek, looking delightfully Victorian.
A clatter on the road made her lift her head, her hands still cupped at her nape, and she watched wide-eyed as a large stagecoach, drawn by eight mismatched horses, rattled onto the bridge. The driver touched his hat brim in a friendly way when the coach reappeared, and Elisabeth waved, laughing. It was like playing a part in a movie.
And then the wind picked up suddenly, making the leaves of the birch and willow trees whisper and lifting Elisabeth’s borrowed hat right off the rock. She made a lunge, and both she and the bonnet went straight into the creek.
With a howl of dismay, Elisabeth felt the slippery pebbles on the bottom of the icy stream give way beneath the soles of her sneakers. As the luscious hat floated merrily away, she tumbled forward and landed in the water with a splash.
Jonathan was standing on the bank when she floundered her way back to shore, her lovely dress clinging revealingly to her form, and though he offered his hand, Elisabeth ignored it.
“What are you doing?” she sputtered furiously, her teeth already chattering, her hair hanging in dripping tendrils around her face. “Following me?”
He grinned and shrugged. “I saw you walking this way, and I thought you might be planning to hitch a ride on the afternoon stage. It seems you’ve been swimming instead.”
Elisabeth glared at him and crossed her arms over her breasts. Because of the unexpected dip in the creek, her nipples were plainly visible beneath the fabric. “It isn’t funny,” she retorted, near tears. “This is the prettiest dress I’ve ever had, and now it’s ruined!”
He removed his suitcoat and laid it over her shoulders. “I suppose it is,” he allowed. “But there are other dresses in the world.”
“Not like this one,” Elisabeth said despairingly.
&n
bsp; Jonathan’s arm tightened briefly around her before falling to his side. “That’s what you think,” he countered. “Go through the trunks again. If you don’t find anything you like, I’ll buy you another dress.”
Elisabeth gave him a sidelong look, shivering inside his coat as they walked toward the orchard and the house beyond. No one needed to tell her that nineteenth-century country doctors didn’t make a lot of money; many of Jonathan’s patients probably paid him in chickens and squash from the garden. “Did this dress belong to your wife?” she ventured to ask, already knowing the answer, never guessing how much she would regret the question until it was too late to call it back.
Jonathan’s jawline tightened, then relaxed again. He did not look at her, but at the orchard burgeoning with flowers. “Yes,” he finally replied.
“Doesn’t it bother you to see another woman wearing her things?”
He rubbed his chin, then thrust both hands into the pockets of his plain, practical black trousers. “No,” he answered flatly.
Elisabeth thought of the two graves inside the little fence, back in modern-day Pine River, and her heart ached with genuine grief to think of Jonathan and Trista lying there. At the same time, she wondered why Jonathan’s mate wasn’t buried in the family plot. “Did she die, Jonathan? Your wife?”
They had reached the grove of apple trees, and petals clung to the hem of Elisabeth’s spoiled dress. Jonathan’s hands knotted into fists in his trouser pockets. “As far as Trista and I are concerned,” he replied some moments later, “yes.”
Pressing him took all Elisabeth’s courage, for she could sense the controlled rage inside him. And yet she had to know if she was feeling all these crazy emotions for another woman’s husband. “She left you?”
“Yes.”
“Then, technically, you’re a married man.”
Jonathan’s eyes sliced to Elisabeth’s face and the expression she saw in them brought color pulsing to her cheeks.
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