Always

by Jude Deveraux

  When the girls gave Darci a blank look, she let out her pent-up breath. Her daughter and niece had abilities that Darci thought might outstrip hers. They could work together to make objects move, and Darci thought perhaps they could read minds. She could block them from reading her mind, but too often the girls knew things that only mind reading could have told them.

  “Will you tell us a story?”

  “Do you have a favorite?”

  “Tell us a story that no one has ever heard before.”

  “How about if I tell you about two little girls who look just like you and are magic? One is named Hallie and the other is named Isabella.”

  “Is it a true story?”

  “Yes, but it hasn’t happened yet, not for a hundred and sixty-one years.”

  “Do they live on the moon?”

  “No, but men have been to the moon, and people drive automobiles everywhere.”

  Smiling, Darci began to answer questions about what the world would be like in a hundred and sixty-one years, and this took so long that she never got around to telling about Hallie and Isabella. When the girls were yawning, she kissed their foreheads, tucked them in, and said good night. At the door, a sleepy Hitty said, “I wish you’d stay. We don’t like Miss Colby, but you’re nice. I’m going to pray that you stay here and be our mother. Papa says that God answers prayers.”

  Darci could think of nothing to reply to that so she left the room, closing the door behind her. In the hallway, she leaned against the door. Should she stay or leave?

  It was the thought of her daughter and niece that pulled her away from the door. If she stayed these little girls would get a mother and a father, and Darci was sure that, even without any powers, she could help the Victorian world.

  But what about her own daughter and her niece? Neither Hallie nor Isabella would have a mother. Hallie would have no parents at all, and Isabella would have only her father, Darci’s father. And what good would he be? Darci thought. The man would be so miserable that he’d neglect both girls.

  “Are you all right?” Adam asked, smiling down at her.

  When she looked up at him she wanted to slide her arms about his waist, as she’d done to her husband a thousand times. And from the look in his eyes, he’d welcome her touch.

  But as he stepped toward her, she said, “I’m starving.”

  Adam laughed, a laugh that came from inside him. “Don’t tell me that you’re like Diana and can eat more than the gardener.”

  She wanted to laugh with him and tease him back, but she didn’t. “I’m not Diana,” she said softly. “And you’re not my husband. This is not my house and your children aren’t mine.”

  “No, of course not,” Adam said, and stepped back from her, the veil coming down over his eyes again. “Perhaps we should join the others for dinner,” he said. “I have a good cook and she has roasted a joint of meat that could feed half the armed forces.”

  “We’ll see if it’s enough,” Darci said and swished her skirt as she walked ahead of him. I cannot stay, she said to herself. I cannot stay. I cannot stay.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DOWNSTAIRS, DARCI AND ADAM SURPRISED JACK and Lavender entangled in each other on the parlor sofa. From the look of the empty glasses on the table and Lavey’s glazed expression, Jack had been plying her with drink. Darci was embarrassed by the sight of them, but not so Adam.

  “Good, you haven’t eaten yet,” Adam said, ignoring their disarranged clothes and Lavender’s hair, which was cascading messily down about her shoulders. Darci wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but Lavender looked even more beautiful than usual. “Shall we go into the dining room?” Adam asked.

  As Jack helped Lavender to stand, Darci got behind him. “You are truly despicable,” she hissed in his ear. “How could you do that to her?”

  He tossed a roguish smile over his shoulder. “In college I majored in drinking and fornicating.”

  “You can not do this to her. She’s to marry someone else tomorrow.”

  “Nope. I’ve decided for sure that I’m going to stay here.”

  She wanted to say more to him, but he clasped Lavender’s arm close to his body and walked with her toward the dining room. He didn’t seem to be the least bit affected by the alcohol he’d consumed, but Lavender was obviously quite happily drunk.

  Behind them, Adam took Darci’s arm and led her into the dining room. The room was as quietly and as lavishly rich as the rest of the house. The tablecloth was pristine white linen, and on it were porcelain dishes that Darci’d seen only in museums. There was a huge silver platter with a haunch of roast beef the size of a car engine. Half a dozen bowls were brimming with steaming vegetables, relishes, sauces, and breads. A sideboard held two cakes, three pies, a tart, and a big pudding with a white sauce dripping down the top of it.

  “And you want to leave this,” Jack said under his breath to Darci.

  “They don’t all eat this way,” she answered back.

  Adam held out a chair for Darci, and Jack seated Lavender, but she slipped to one side and he had to push her upright.

  “Should we tie her to the chair?” Darci said under her breath to Jack, but he just grinned.

  Adam sat at the head of the table, Darci on his left, Lavender on his right, and Jack beside the woman he loved.

  “I thought we’d serve ourselves tonight,” Adam said, “so I’ve dismissed all the staff except the nanny, and she’s upstairs. Please pardon the lack of courses and formal service.” He seemed oblivious to the undertones of what was going on around him, but Darci was sure he was aware of everything.

  Jack was looking at Lavender, not interested in Adam Drayton, but Darci was watching him intently. Her Adam was good at disguising what was really on his mind. Due to his good acting, the only way Darci knew when her husband was planning to do something dangerous was when his aura changed colors. Which took her back to the day he disappeared. Why hadn’t his aura changed that day?

  “And what do you have on your mind, old man?” Jack asked, finally seeming to be aware that Adam had something to say.

  “Miss Marshall was telling me some rather interesting things tonight, and I also overheard her telling my daughters about the future.”

  “Did she now?” Jack asked, raising his wineglass to Darci as though to say that she had a big mouth.

  “I’m interested in what caused you two to come back—if you did, that is.”

  Jack looked at Lavender to see if she was listening, but she was smiling at nothing and seeming to hear little. “We did, but I’m not sure how we did. The why is easy. We came back to save my dearest Lavender. She’s to—” He lowered his voice. “There would have been an accident tomorrow, but we’re going to prevent that.”

  “Can you do that?” Adam asked.

  “Yes, we can,” Jack said with conviction.

  “But mightn’t that change things?”

  “Change history?” Darci said before Jack could speak. “That’s been my worry. If we change anything at all, it could affect everything in the future.”

  “Why does everyone assume that to change the future means only bad?” Jack asked. “Every movie has it that if you change history one tiny bit, then the future world will explode. What if to change history were to make it better? What would happen to the world if someone assassinated Hitler?”

  “Hitler?” Adam asked.

  “Mass murderer on an unimaginable scale,” Jack said, his eyes on Darci. “How do we know that if we save Lavender we don’t change the world for the better? Did you know that she wanted to be a doctor? She couldn’t because—”

  “Because she’s a woman,” Darci said, thinking about his words. “What you’re really saying is that if you stay here with her you might be able to change the world for the better.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair, his wineglass in his hand, and looked at her. “You could, too. If both of us stayed, with our combined knowledge, and what I know how to do, we could eliminate
a lot of the true evil in the world.”

  “And what do you know how to do?” Adam asked as he put thick slices of roast beef onto the four plates.

  “Jack’s a spy,” Darci said quickly. “More or less, anyway. He pretends to be friends with people, finds out what illegal things they’re doing, then turns them over to the law.”

  Adam looked at Jack for verification.

  “True,” Jack said, “but not how I’d state it. My problem has been…” He trailed off.

  “Her,” Darci said, looking at Lavender, who was beginning to look like she wanted to go to sleep.

  “Yeah, me,” Lavender said, her eyelids drooping. “Did you know that Jack’s different than he used to be? He won’t even let me call him John anymore. I had decided not to marry him. He was so very boring. I only agreed to marry him because my father was threatening me. I wanted to go to college and become a doctor, but Father said I had to get married. He’s broke, you see. Nobody knows it but he is. So Father made a deal with Jack’s father to marry me off to him. That’s why nobody in town says anything about Jack’s father’s lady love. You see, my father has no money but he has influence in Camwell.”

  Jack and Darci looked at each other in astonishment. Had Lavender’s drunken revelation just told them why she’d killed herself? Maybe she’d told John Marshall she didn’t want to marry him, and her father told her he was going to do something awful to her. Lock her up? Send her away? Men in the 1840s had absolute power over the women in their lives.

  “But I like this Jack,” Lavender said, smiling. “He’s a different man in the same body. I’m the only one who knows he’s different. The other one, the one I was supposed to have loved all my life, he wasn’t very nice.”

  Darci leaned back in her chair and smiled at Jack. “There’s our answer.”

  “And if I leave the day after tomorrow, she’ll find herself married to a man who ‘isn’t very nice.’ Is that what you want for her?”

  “That’s not our business,” Darci said. “We must go back.”

  “And how do you go back?” Adam interrupted.

  Smiling happily, Jack said, “We have no idea.”

  “How did you get here?”

  Darci gave Jack a look of disgust. “He opened a box that he shouldn’t have opened and suddenly we were here. But when we got here, we had the box but no key.” At that, she pulled the little silver box from her pocket and put it on the table.

  Putting down his fork, Adam picked up the box and looked at it. “You’ve tried other keys?”

  “Not here, but we did when we were—”

  “In your own time,” he finished for her.

  “Yes,” Darci said. “When we were in our own time.” She looked at Jack. “When we were in the time we belonged in.”

  “Where did the key come from?” Adam asked as he set the box back on the table.

  “I found it years before I found the box,” she said. “It was hidden, and I happened to find it. Actually, I’m sure I was directed to find it, and I had it a long time before I could use it. When I found the box—”

  “In my father’s secret room,” Jack said.

  “Yes, his father had the box and I had the key, so which denotes ownership?”

  “The one who knows how to use what’s inside the box,” Adam said quickly. “So you put the key in the box and you ended up here?”

  “You sound as though you believe this impossible story,” Jack said.

  “I really don’t care whether it’s true or not. Tell me, Mr. Marshall, have you ever loved anyone?”

  “If you’d asked me that last week I would have said yes, but I would have been lying. Not knowingly lying, but I was. Years ago I thought I was in love with a young woman who was killed in a car wreck, but then I met Lavender. I haven’t even known her twenty-four hours but I know that I love her. I know that I’d die for her. I’d risk anything for her.”

  “Yes, that’s the kind of love I mean,” Adam said, then looked at Darci in question.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I know that kind of love. A love forever.”

  “Forever,” Adam said. “That’s the very word I want. That’s the way I loved my wife. Like you, Jack, I knew within minutes of meeting her that she was the only woman I’d ever love like that. But she was taken from me. She was young, healthy, happy, but she died. I don’t know why. One minute she was alive and the next she was dead. What does your modern medicine say to that?”

  “It happens in our time, too,” Darci said, “but in our time many things can be detected before they happen. She could have had a blocked artery, which is easily found and easily fixed.”

  Adam was looking down at his food. “In the three years since she died, I’ve done everything I know to bring her back in any form possible. I’ve paid every charlatan within five hundred miles of here to conduct séances and raise spirits. I’ve hired people who write what the spirits say. I’ve seen a dozen women go into trances and speak in strange voices. I’ve seen tables lift, heard the clank of chains, and I’ve seen misty images that I was told were ghosts. But you know what?” He looked up at them. “They were all fakes. Every one of them.”

  He took a drink of his wine. “At first I was outraged at being duped, but after the first year I came to know so much about their tricks that I could have run a metaphysical house. I no longer got angry. I just pulled the cords that held the so-called ghosts, and I kicked out the posts that made the tables lift, then I left.”

  He looked from Jack to Darci. “Through all of this I’ve had to hear over and over how one person after another has seen my beloved wife in the house that was once ours. Even my daughters were seeing her. They weren’t afraid of her, after all, she was their mother, but the nannies I hired were terrified. None of them would stay more than a month. In the end, I had to move from the house and leave the place where I’d known such happiness.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “But for all her appearances, my wife has never shown herself to me. I go to that house every day, sometimes three times a day. All I want is a chance to tell her how much I love her. You see…”

  He looked at a painting on the wall for a moment, then back at Jack and Darci. Lavender seemed to be dozing in her seat, not quite aware of what was going on around her. “You see,” Adam continued, “I wasn’t a very good husband. I worked all the time and I was gone a lot. I think I wanted to prove to my relatives that I was as good at business as my father was. I felt guilty at inheriting so much, so to prove myself, I decided to double what he left me. I did that within five years after he died. It then seemed important to me to triple and quadruple what he left me. After I met and married Diana, I told myself and her that I was working for her—not for me, but for her. She used to tell me that money didn’t matter to her, that she’d be content to live in a farmhouse with me and our daughters. I knew it was true but I couldn’t seem to stop working. I…”

  He refilled his wineglass and drank half of it in a gulp. “I didn’t know what I had until it was gone. Since Diana died, I haven’t worked a day. I’ve spent my time with my daughters and in trying to bring back my wife for one moment so I can tell her…so I can tell her…”

  “That you love her and that you’re sorry for not realizing how important she was,” Darci said.

  “Yes,” Adam said, looking at her. “Is that what you want to do with your husband?”

  “No,” Darci said seriously. “I want to rip his clothes off and jump on his big, beautiful body.”

  For a moment Adam looked shocked, then he began to laugh and Jack joined him. “To the other Adam,” Adam said, raising his glass. The three of them clinked glasses; Lavender tried to join in, but her glass missed theirs. When she tried to drink, she found the glass was empty. “Oh, all gone. More please.”

  “You give her more and I’ll—” Darci began, glaring at Jack.

  “What? Give me a headache? Paralyze me? You can’t do that now, little sister, but then, you never could do
that to me, could you?”

  “Could she really do those things?” Adam asked.

  “Not to me, but then Lavey was protecting me, weren’t you, dear?”

  “Always, my Jack,” Lavender said, smiling at him in an idiotic way.

  “I think you should put her to bed,” Darci said sternly. “Alone. You hear me? I’m afraid of what you’ll mess up if you touch her.”

  “You still think we’re going to leave here?” Jack asked. “Look at the facts. In our century, my girlfriend had been killed and your husband was missing and probably dead. We had nothing there, but here—”

  “No!” Darci said. “Adam isn’t dead. I know that. Knew that, anyway. He was—”

  “What?” Adam asked, with interest. “Where was your husband?”

  “I don’t know,” Darci said, frustrated. “I felt as though some entity was keeping me from him, but I couldn’t find out who. I know I was to find twelve magic objects and—”

  “What?” Adam asked. “Magic objects? What do they do?”

  “Don’t get her started,” Jack said, yawning. “We’ll be here all night.”

  “I have nothing else to do,” Adam said softly, looking at Darci.

  “As far as I can tell, each object performs a specific function. I have a ball, not here but at home in my time, that heals people. I can use it by myself and it works on some things, but not on everything. It won’t heal cancer, for instance. I can’t make a person in a wheelchair able to walk, but I can make wounds heal faster and cleaner. I helped clear up the infection of a man who’d had a hand reattached.”

  “A hand reattached?” Adam said, incredulous. He picked up the little silver box again and turned it about in his hands. “Your medicine must be marvelous. Do you think your little ball could repair a vessel in a person’s heart?”

  “It has, yes,” Darci said softly.

  “And this box has enabled you to travel through time, has it not?”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze at her was intense. “If you could find the key to this box, do you think that you might be able to leave here, then return at another time? Perhaps with that ball that heals?”