Midnight in Your Arms (21 page)

“So it must mean that it is possible for you to do so, mustn’t it?”

Laura shrugged helplessly. “I had hoped so. But if I stay, how will we live? Everyone thinks I’m mad, and a harlot! No one will have anything to do with you after this.”

Alaric shrugged, unconcerned. “We will go away. Live abroad.”

“Where I will grow my hair out into a more womanly style, put on a corset and a bustle, and live like a submissive little Society matron?” Laura said, shaking her head. “No. I can’t, Alaric. Surely you must see that. I must be free. And if we were to have children, their grandchildren would only be caught up in the same war I barely escaped. I won’t have it. I just won’t.”

Alaric sighed, nodding. He gathered her up against him, and kissed her curls. They were sleek and oiled in a very strange way, and smelled of some kind of hair tonic. “You do have the oddest hair,” he murmured.

She smirked, and nuzzled closer to him. His long hair tickled her face. “So do you.”

“Laura?” he said, after a moment. “What on earth is a bustle?”

“There you are,” an exasperated voice trilled from behind them. Laura and Alaric jumped in alarm, turning about defensively to come face to face with Lizzie.

Alaric sighed in relief. “Lizzie, you startled the bloody hell out of me,” he growled. “You always were terrible for sneaking up on a fellow.”

“And
you
were always doing things you shouldn’t, forcing me to sneak about in an attempt at catching you out.” The woman with the bright, curious eyes inclined her head less than subtly in Laura’s direction. “Case in point.”

Laura flushed, and bit her lip, allowing Alaric to shield her with his arm. Alaric blushed himself, but then drew himself up. “Lizzie, this is Laura. The woman I love. She is … foreign. Laura, this is my baby sister, Lizzie.”

Laura reached out to grasp the other woman’s hand. “I am pleased to meet you,” she said, doing her best to look and sound like she was from somewhere far away—which wasn’t at all difficult.

Lizzie shook her hand enthusiastically, surveying Laura’s person with frank fascination. “Where exactly are you from, my dear? That is quite an … unusual—and daring—frock you’re wearing. I like it!”

Laura laughed, and smoothed her hand over the shining silk. “Thank you,” she said. “I … I was given to understand that it was a … fancy dress ball. This is what I wear when I want to feel like I am someone else, for an evening.” Which was true enough.

“I wish I had your nerve,” Lizzie said admiringly.

“Lizzie,” Alaric said, bringing them all back to the point at hand. “I don’t want you to be alarmed if I have to … go away for a while. Perhaps a long while.”

Laura threw him a penetrating look, but said nothing.

Lizzie gazed back and forth between them. She nodded briskly. “I understand. Or rather, I understand as much as I want and need to.”

Alaric smiled, and pulled her close. Laura backed away to stand at the balcony, alone. Alaric hugged his sister fiercely. “Whatever happens,” he said, “if, for some reason, I can’t come home, I want you to promise me you will look after Father.”

Lizzie blinked, surprised. “Of course I will, Alaric. You needn’t even ask.”

Alaric nodded, reaching out to take his sister’s gloved hand. “I know that, Lizzie. Thank you. You’ve always been a good sister to me. As for Stonecross, it will be Freddy’s, of course. The will remains as it was.”

“He would rather have his uncle,” Lizzie said, emotion finally flooding her voice. She
hated
to cry. She said it spoiled her looks, which were only as much as she could make of them. Eyes red from weeping never helped anyone.

“I know,” he said gently. “But I love Laura. I need to be with her. She is my one chance, Lizzie. Before I met her, I wasn’t living. I was simply existing.”

Lizzie nodded tightly, dabbing her eyes with a gloved finger. She patted Alaric fondly, stood on her toes to kiss him, and then crossed over to where Laura was pretending, with very little success, to be invisible. Lizzie surprised her by pulling her into a fierce embrace. “Be good to him,” she said, “Or I will want to know why. And leave me the name of your
modiste
.”

Laura laughed, and nodded. “I will. On both counts. Though she may not have what you want available for quite some time.”

Lizzie waved her hand as if it was of little consequence. “I have time. The Season doesn’t begin for
ages
.”

Alaric and Laura exchanged amused glances. Lizzie gave them a final wave, blew several kisses, and then left them alone.

Laura snaked her arms about Alaric’s waist, tilting her face back to be kissed. “We may not have much time,” she told him seriously.

“And we may have all the time in the world.”

“Either way, my love, what do you wish to be doing while we wait for the sun to come up?”

Alaric laughed, and smiled wickedly. He held out his hand. Laura took it, and they slipped back into the house and up the servants’ stairs to the bedroom that, in every possible era, was theirs. Their clothes came away, and they fell naked into the bed.

They made love.

They made every kind they could imagine. And they never let go for a single moment.

L
ater, when they had exhausted themselves, Laura lay in Alaric’s arms. “It’s far beyond midnight,” she commented, raking her fingernails over the taut flesh of his abdomen.

“Mmmm,” he murmured appreciatively.

“And I’m still here with you, as I was last night.”

Alaric nodded sleepily. “Yes. I can feel you.”

“But I don’t think I can stay,” she said in a small voice. “Not forever. Look at my hand.” She lifted it up before his face, and the watery light of the gibbous moon shone right through it.

Alaric grabbed it, and kissed it fervently, nipping at the tip of her thumb. “Can you feel that?”

“Yes. But it’s fading,” Laura said sadly. She struggled to sit up, and Alaric did the same. They held hands, sitting cross-legged like naked children depicted in a color plate inside a book of fairy stories. Laura grew paler while he watched helplessly.

“Take me with you,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. “If I take you, your father will be alone. I haven’t even met him yet, but I cannot take his son from him. He needs you, Alaric. Especially now that Ellen will be leaving.”

Alaric didn’t argue. He knew it was true. Though there was Lizzie, she was not precisely the nurturing sort. He had always taken care of everything at home, as he should. She had agreed to bear the burden for Freddy until the lad came of age. Was it too much to ask of her? Uncertainty fluttered inside of him for a moment before biting decisively down.

“And you can’t just leave your family, your estate,” Laura said, as if reading his thoughts. “Your life is here, at Stonecross.”

“I want my life to be with you,” he argued. He felt the way she was sliding away from him in a way that had nothing to do with the physical. If he wasn’t careful, she would slip between his fingers like sand in an hourglass.

“Perhaps next year,” Laura said gently. “After you’ve had time to think, and to arrange things. And I can always appear to you, as I have. Perhaps not with the same solidity, but I can come to you, I know it. And then, next All Hallows, maybe …”

“Anything could happen between now and then,” he said mutinously.

“I wish Tess was here,” Laura said. “She could tell us. She sees all possible futures. It’s her gift.”

“Not yours?”

Laura shook her head. “No. I only see the dead.” And then she lifted her head, her mind whirring. “But Tess said something else, yesterday morning, when she found out I didn’t stay with you. She said,
Just ask me, when the time comes.
”

Alaric’s brow furrowed. “What do you think she meant?”

Laura lifted her hand. She could see Alaric through it, shimmering as if on the other side of a pane of antique glass. “I don’t know, but I think now would be a good time to ask her.”

Alaric leapt up from the bed, and flung his dressing gown at Laura as he hunted about for some clothing of his own. “Put this on,” he said. “Now. I’ll take you to her.”

W
hen they finally found her in her room at the top of the house, after scandalizing several other virtuous young maids by their state of
dishabille
, the young girl who was Tess in Alaric’s time was sitting up stock-straight in her bed, her arms cradled about her flannel-clad knees. She scowled at the pair of them in a way that made her look very much like her future self, the wizened country crone of Laura’s time.

“
There
you are, at last!” she chided, climbing out of bed. “If you wasn’t along in one more minute, I’d of gone and fetched you myself, no matter what you was doing.”

Laura gaped at her, bemused. “How did you know we needed you?” she asked.

“I told myself, of course!” she said, shaking her head irritably, as if it was the stupidest question she had ever heard. “I come over strange, like I was having a fit or something, same as when I saw you in the kitchen last night. It was mighty queer seeing the house like that, all come to pieces. I’d of thought someone would take care of it better, but that’s none of my business.” She gestured to the small desk in the corner, where several sheets of foolscap lay scattered, blotchy with ink and scrawled all over in a childish hand. “I was doing a bit of trance writing, and I got a message from myself from your time.” She nodded at Laura. “And just in time, too. Or I wouldn’t have knowed what you was talking about when you come to see me.”

“I didn’t know you could write, Tess,” Alaric said, before he could stop himself.

“I can’t,” she said, with infinite patience. “Not yet, anyway. But
she
can. The old lady me. And she read what she wrote to me, too, inside my brain, like.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Laura said, in a strangled voice. “Not if we don’t want to wait until next year to have this fascinating conversation. I’m about to fade away completely. It’s taking everything I have just to keep hold.”

Tess nodded brusquely, all business, and held out her hands, one to each of them. “Take hold of me, and squeeze tight,” she said. “The old lady me said I was like a sort of … rudder, steering you where you’ve got to go. On account of me being from both of your times.”

Laura and Alaric exchanged glances, and seized the girl by her scrawny hands, which were surprisingly strong. Laura felt a jolt of power surge through her, and she felt as solid as she ever had, even in her own time.

The room began to flicker between the tidy, spare little nest it was now, and the hollow, frigid cell it was in Laura’s time. It was as if a child was standing in the doorway, flashing the light on and off—only it was
time
that changed, back and forth. And then it seemed as though more time periods joined in, and a series of different rooms flickered through, like a magic lantern show spun out of control. Laura felt a little sick, her hand slipping in the slick sweat on Alaric’s palm. She clasped it tighter, looking into his face, anchoring him to her. She knew it was harder for him than it was for her.

“Hold on,” Tess said calmly, and she herself began to change, from the scrawny waif she was now, to a series of fierce young women, to a middle-aged woman with the same dark brows and beaky nose—until she was the old woman Laura knew well. “Don’t stop here,” she told them. “This is no place for you, either. Laura’s life can’t stay the same—that’s the missing element, I warrant. You must both sacrifice in equal measure the worlds you have known.”

And then, as though she hadn’t been standing there, holding on to them, Tess disappeared altogether. There was nothing where she had been. Not even a shadow, or a faint glimmering. Tess was gone, and Alaric and Laura were standing alone together in the room she had occupied. It was now a simple storage closet with whitewashed walls and a scrubbed wooden floor covered in stacks of cartons and a few sheet-covered oddments of furniture.

“Where are we?” Alaric asked, dazed.

“I think the better question is
when
,” Laura said, gazing around.

“I suppose we had better find out.”

They crept cautiously out into the narrow corridor, and followed their usual route back down to the main floor using the servants’ stairs. The plainly decorated corridors gave no hint as to the possible passage or indeed reversion of time, but Laura and Alaric each opened a few of the rooms along the way, attempting to make an evaluation. Some of the rooms looked very similar to the ones Alaric knew well, but the draperies were different, and the walls papered with patterns he didn’t recognize. Some of the rooms had items in them of which only Laura understood the use, things like radio cabinets and gramophones. She pulled Alaric away, before he became too astonished to move.

There were objects she didn’t recognize, either. Strange rectangles that looked like picture frames, except there were no pictures, only a terrible opaqueness, a blank blackness that she didn’t like. She felt like they were watching her, willing her to fall into the void at their centers. She closed the doors to the rooms that contained them quickly.

The main foyer was unchanged. The marble floor gleamed, and the place where the two sides of the great staircases met and formed an enclave was empty. No marble version of Laura stared down at them. But all around them were the faces of Alaric’s family, serene and reserved in their gilt frames, and perhaps a little friendlier to look upon. Laura felt somehow that they were glad to see her, and even gladder to see their wayward son.

“There are more of them,” Alaric said, awestruck. “Many more.”

He was right. The portraits extended past the one in which Alaric himself resided, his penetrating gaze still managing to send shivers of awareness through Laura’s softest places, though the real man stood beside her, his arm around her holding her close and safe.

“Excuse me,” a voice said, behind him, “I don’t know if you know this, but the house is closed the day after Halloween. Only, we’ve got to clean up the grounds a bit. Firecrackers and jack-o’-lanterns. That sort of thing. You can come back tomorrow, though, during regular hours.”