“Look how small and helpless Lawrence is. Look at all the cords and tubes. You’ve heard about all the struggles JL and Kevin have endured since Lawrence was born. How in the world could Sarah, John, and the other children have handled it, plus adapt to the twenty-first century?”
“Adapting isn’t so hard. Look at how Braham and I adjusted, and Maria and Isabella, Patrick, Gabe, Noah, Daniel, and Emily. John and his family could have managed as well.”
“If we had all come back, Braham would have come too. And his presence would have screwed up everything that’s happened since. He might not have met Charlotte, and I might not have found my father. And it would have turned the Barretts’ lives upside down, all with no guarantee Gabriel would have survived.”
“We should have given him a chance.”
“Lawrence will be in the NICU for several months, and we still don’t know if he’ll have long-term health issues. It wouldn’t have been right to put the Barretts through such agony. If I had it all to do over, now that I know what I know, I’d make the same choice.”
Kit sanitized her hands again and slipped them back inside the incubator to hold Lawrence’s hand. “My decision that night was also based on my belief the ruby brooch wasn’t meant to be a revolving door. I knew so little about the stone then. Later I even thought that once the ruby, sapphire, and emerald were together, a permanent door would open. We now know it’s not true. We need twelve brooches to fill the slots around the door in the cave. Then we won’t need one brooch to come and go. We’ll have the combined power of twelve stones to open the door. And who knows? There could be more than twelve brooches.”
“Do ye think there are?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. And no one knows if the door will open to the past or the future. Who in their right mind would ever want to go through to the other side? Not me.”
“Traveling into the future isn’t so bad. I did it.”
“But you had family here. If we go into the future, we won’t know anyone. We’ve always had the benefit of knowing the history of the time we visited, but this would be a complete unknown. I hope the rest of the brooches don’t show up until I’m long gone or have returned to the nineteenth century.”
“So ye haven’t heard the rumor.” There was something in Cullen’s expression, maybe in his eyes, that shocked her. There was an intensity of purpose as hard as polished steel, shot through with something akin to fear or deep concern.
“I’ve heard several lately. Which one are you referring to?”
“Another brooch is active.”
Kit gasped and jerked her hand. Lawrence twitched in response. She added slight pressure to her touch to settle him. “To quote JL, ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe.’ How do you know?”
“Pete confided in me. Elliott knows, but he doesn’t want to deal with it right now because of Lawrence. Meredith and JL both told Pete to talk to David and plan a rescue. But he hasn’t.”
“Pete told JL? Recently? Like since Lawrence was born? How could he be so insensitive?”
“JL knew something was wrong and kept pressuring him until he confessed. She told him not to wait. She doesn’t want anyone in the family to postpone business or personal matters because of Lawrence. Including going on an adventure to rescue Pete’s old flame.”
“Since I haven’t heard about it, I assume it’s staying a closely guarded secret for now. What do you know about the woman or where she went?”
“Her name is Sophia Orsini. She’s an artist.”
“Oh. I’ve heard of her. She’s incredible. Several art critics have compared her paintings to the Old Masters. I wouldn’t go that far, but she is a brilliant painter.”
Cullen pointed across the pod with his chin. “The woman over there, Lisa something, is a friend of Sophia’s.”
“Who told you that?” She studied the woman. “Oh, never mind, I know. Charlotte tells Braham everything, and Braham tells you everything.”
“Do ye want to hear the rest of the rumor or not?”
“Go ahead.”
“Sophia and Pete eloped the night she graduated from high school. Her parents were so distraught they had the marriage annulled and shipped her off to Italy to live with her grandmother. They haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”
“How sad,” Kit said.
“Sort of like ye returning to the future when ye thought I was dead.”
“That was sad.”
“The rest of the rumor is that Sophia is a Digby.”
Kit gasped. “So we’ll finally find out who he is.”
“We might. She also has a letter about the brooches written by James MacKlenna in 1625. I haven’t seen it yet, and don’t know the contents. But get this…”
Kit was in no hurry to get this or that. “You sound like the twins.” She fixed her eyes on her husband and waited for the moment of the big reveal.
He held up his hand, palm flat. “Sophia has made five trips back in time.”
“And now she can’t get home. See? What’d I tell you? Her brooch ran out of tickets. She’s stranded, and someone has to make a dangerous trip back to God knows where to get her. There’s probably a war going on. Like World War I or Vietnam or Korea. God knows.”
“Ye sound like JL.”
“She’s a woman after my own heart. But I’ll never be so cynical. Well, except when it comes to believing there are a limited number of rides for each brooch.”
“Then we may never go home,” Cullen said.
“I know you’re only staying because I’m not ready.”
“I’m not ready either,” he said. “If we had to stay permanently, I wouldn’t object. It would be hell to lose Braham again.”
“I miss our children and grandchildren,” she said, “but as we get older the medical benefits become almost as important. Between my brain tumor and your heart attack, I’d be hesitant to leave behind this level of medical care. And I wouldn’t want to leave Emily until she’s settled in a career.”
“The lass has been a true joy, even though we don’t see her often enough.”
Kit looked up at him. “But you text her three or four times a day.”
“I’d text more, but I know she’s busy with class and studying, and I don’t want to be a nuisance.”
“It doesn’t stop you from texting me every thirty minutes when I’m working in my studio.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “At home, yer studio was in the house. Now I have to take the golf cart to the other side of the farm to watch ye paint.”
“To harass me, you mean.”
He grinned. “Ye do have a mighty fine sofa in yer studio.” The heat from his thoughts was palpable, and her cheeks flamed.
“You said the same thing about the desk chair, the carpet, and the worktable.”
Cullen’s eyes twinkled. “They’re all fine as well.”
Kit stroked Lawrence’s finger, thinking back to Gabriel and the decisions they made that night so long ago. “So much has happened recently. The plane crash, JL’s emergency surgery, Lawrence’s struggle, Meredith’s grand reopening at the winery, and now a new brooch. It’s a lot of stress. But I think the Barrett family would have had quadruple the stress if we’d brought them all to the twenty-first century to save Gabriel.” Kit withdrew her hands from the portholes and turned to wrap her arms around her husband’s waist.
“Based on the babies and parents I’ve seen up here, I wouldn’t have wanted to force John and Sarah to go through that. It would have shaken even Sarah’s faith. But it doesn’t relieve the guilt I’ve carried for years,” she said. “Charlotte made the decision to bring us here to save our lives. We made the decision not to bring Gabriel to the future, and he died.”
They both looked down at Lawrence as he slept. “It’s time we let go of the guilt and enjoy this child,” Kit said. “Not as a substitute for the one we lost in ’52—”
“But as a gift,” Cullen said, “who will connect us to those we left behind and ma
y never see again.”
32
The Clermont (1789)—Sophia
The storm in Le Havre continued through the next day and the next. Sophia and Thomas ate out every evening, usually by themselves, while the girls sat in a covered section of the courtyard with Marguerite and Sally and listened to Patsy read her book. Sophia didn’t mention Washington’s offer again.
As dead set as Thomas was against a government position other than the one he currently held, she knew he would eventually accept Washington’s offer. In fact, she looked forward to the moment when his mind would change, or the proverbial light bulb would turn on.
They were delayed in Le Havre for a total of ten days. By the time they were finally able to board Captain Wright’s vessel to sail across the Channel, they had been away from Paris for two weeks and hadn’t even left France. Although they were moving faster than the Allies did following D-Day, it was much too slow for Sophia.
She boarded the ship expecting to reach England in a few hours since the Eurostar from Paris to London made the trip in a little over two hours. The Dover to Calais ferry took ninety minutes. How long would an eighteenth-century sailing ship take?
Twenty-six miserable hours. And she’d never been so sick.
The choppy, bumpy water defied belief. When the GIs crossed the Channel on D-Day, the soldiers threw up in their helmets. Although she vomited in a chamber pot, not a helmet, she knew exactly how they felt…or would feel in 1944.
Marguerite tried to care for her, but the poor thing ended up sicker than Sophia, if that was possible. “If the water is like this when we sail to America, I’ll die,” Marguerite groaned as she hung her head over the chamber pot.
Sophia handed her maid a wet cloth. “It won’t be like this. The Channel has a reputation for being an unpredictably rough journey.”
The unfortunate weather didn’t even end when they reached the Customs House at Cowes, a small town on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. No one was surprised when weather delayed them again. While they waited, Sophia and the girls went sightseeing around the island, where they peeked into the deep well at Carisbrooke Castle and stared out the window in the ruins where the imprisoned Charles I tried to escape through the bars, getting embarrassingly stuck between his chest and shoulders.
After ten days the weather cleared, and they finally set sail for America on the Clermont, a fully-rigged ship. They were the only passengers on what looked like a tall-ship replica of The Bounty, a wooden ship used in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which Sophia had watched three times on Netflix.
The ship had two large, identical staterooms below the quarterdeck, one port side, the other starboard. Thomas claimed the one port side. Patsy, Polly, Sally, Sophia, and Marguerite shared the other, and James would sleep on a hammock with the ship’s crew. When it came to women, there was nothing fair about life in the eighteenth century. Thomas should have been a gentleman and given up his room, but hey…he was who he was, and where else could he sleep? The girls double-bunked, made do with what they had, and spent as little time as possible in the cabin.
They all agreed with Trumbull’s assessment of the ship, though. It was a floating version of the Hôtel de Langeac—sans the appropriate number of bedrooms—with a very nice quarterdeck for exercising and viewing the Atlantic. Frankly, Sophia preferred to view the ocean from thirty-five thousand feet.
The first five days on board the Clermont were as miserable as the Channel crossing. Sophia apologized profusely to Marguerite and promised smoother sailing ahead.
The weather cleared and, with the benefit of favorable winds and fine autumn weather, Captain Colley decided to lay a straighter course than the more circuitous route originally planned. And finally the skies during the day were blue and warm, and the evenings full of stars.
One morning she carried her easel on deck to try out the bracing system Thomas created to keep the easel from moving. The breeze was cool, and the brine reached deep inside the wrinkles of her brain, laying its fingertips on certain memories of Pete at the Jersey Shore. The last month of her senior year in high school they had spent every weekend at the beach, enjoying the sun and surf while planning their elopement. It had all been perfectly planned, perfectly executed…and perfectly disastrous.
She set her face into the wind, hoping the sea spray would wash away painful memories, but even a gale-force wind would find the task impossible. He was always with her, even though she knew it was unlikely she’d ever see him again.
She locked the easel in place. The movement of the ship made painting impossible, but she could sketch the underdrawing for a painting of Thomas, who happened to be standing on the quarterdeck, the sleeves of his white shirt rippling in the wind, his hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon, his large hands gripping the helm’s handles, a sly smile on his face.
His profoundly sexual nature was visible in his eyes, around his mouth, and in the way he gripped the handles with his long fingers. This was a painting she could recreate without any notes, without any sketches. Just like the one of him standing in the vineyard holding a handful of soil. What was it about his hands, with their dusting of thick, auburn hair, that she found so enticing? They were gentle when he touched her face, expressive when he talked, easy when he held his horse’s reins, strong when he pressed her against him, and graceful when they were quiet and still. Houdon should have sculpted not only his bust, but his hands as well.
Captain Colley, tall and spindly, watched over her shoulder while she worked. The curling tips of his sun-bleached hair hung loose at his nape, and squint lines at the corners of his eyes could only be earned by a lifetime spent at sea.
“I’d like to purchase the painting,” he said.
“You may have it. But tell Mr. Jefferson you commissioned it, and this is what you asked for. He likes composed, ordered portraits. He believes free-flowing paintings of him are unflattering.”
The captain’s eyes moved from the painting to Thomas. “There’s nothing unflattering about a man standing at the helm of a ship. I’ll tell him the painting will hang in my house, so no one else will see it.”
“Then he’ll wonder why you want it.”
Captain Colley’s mouth twitched. “Mr. Jefferson is a most unusual man. He knows as much about the sea as a sailor, and as much about the ocean tides as the moon.”
“He also knows as much about wine as any vintner in France, so I’m not surprised.” She glanced at Thomas again. His black-booted feet were well balanced on the deck, and his black waistcoat and wide black belt gave him the look of a swashbuckler that she found intensely erotic.
“Where do you live?” Sophia asked, to escape her thoughts of Thomas.
The captain gazed out over the sea with a tender expression on his weatherworn face, as if he was longing to be in two places at once, unsure of where his home truly was.
“I’m from Norfolk, but I built a house in Amagansett on the South Shore of Long Island. When I’m not sailing, it’s where I live now.”
Memories of staying at her high school friends’ summer homes in Amagansett tickled her, and she smiled. She and her best friend, Lisa, were the only ones in their crowd who didn’t have a summer home on Long Island. Good God, she hadn’t seen Lisa in years. How was it possible? When she got home, she’d call her. If—
The thought of not going home again cut another jagged, painful wound in her heart. How many would she have by the time this adventure ended?
If she was stuck here permanently, would she continue to believe every day held the possibility of the brooch coming alive again, or would she give up hope? She closed her fist around a piece of blue chalk, knowing deep in her gut that she’d never give up, then bit back her worries and began to sketch the sky. Both clouds and sky had some of the softest edges she found in nature, and she loved painting them, but only sketching was possible on a swaying ship.
“Are you going home after you drop us off in Norfolk?” A little gus
t of salt wind came off the ocean, and she grabbed and held on to the canvas.
“I’m going to Charleston first, then New York. Is there a reason you asked?”
She lowered her hand and looked up at him again. “My plan is to go to New York, but I won’t be ready to leave for two to three weeks.”
“Do you have family there?”
“Not any longer. No relatives at all.” Her grandmother had died hoping Sophia would reconcile with her parents, but they died tragically before she contacted them. Death had robbed her of the chance.
No, wait, that wasn’t true at all. Reconciliation had been sucked into the vortex of her unresolved anger, where it still swirled round and round and round.
“Will the painting be finished by the time you go to New York?”
“What?” She shook away the guilt and thought about the captain’s question. “Finished? The painting? Well, it could be.”
“Then I’ll stop on my way back from Charleston. If you’d like to sail on the Clermont again, I could take you to New York.”
“Marvelous,” she said. “Then next time I’ll paint you at the helm.” Sailors, she had discovered, were a stoic lot. They didn’t emote. Painting the captain would be a challenge.
He grasped her free hand and held it longer than necessary. Instead of releasing it after a moment, his grip tightened, not uncomfortably, just snug. His hand was callused and warm, much larger than she thought, the skin so rough it seemed to scratch her skin.
“I believe we’ve reached an agreement, Miss Orsini.” He finally let go of her hand.
She glanced in Thomas’s direction. His eyes were narrowed into the sun. His skin was darker now, a smooth golden tan from spending days entirely on the deck of the ship.
“Would you mind keeping this between us?” she asked.
“Certainly.” He turned to go, scratching the side of his face, but stopped. “Miss Orsini, I might be able to assist you further. I have a sister-in-law in New York City who’s a recent widow and has a house near the harbor, but she’ll be forced to sell it if she doesn’t take in boarders. There’s room to accommodate you and a studio, and I think you would get on well together. I could write on your behalf, if there’s interest.”
The Pearl Brooch Page 41