But Not Forever Page 10

  “They’re sending me away to boarding school in Baltimore—on Sunday!”

  Kerry nodded and whistled softly. “Yes. Yes. Of course. There it is. The unholy plan. I knew the madam had been scheming on something. And the mystery of the sudden inventory is now solved.”

  “Maxwell is going to help me get up to Simeon’s tonight. He said he would contact you about the arrangements. How will that happen if you’re in my room working with Bess?”

  “I’ll find a moment to be alone with Maxwell. Put your mind at ease.”

  “I found a pen and a bottle of ink. You can show me how to use them. Can you get me three envelopes and three sheets of paper?”

  “Aye,” said Kerry, pointing. “You will spot them in the writing drawer later today. We must get you dressed now. Bess will return at any moment, and she’s in a state of distress because of the sudden tasking. You must stay out of her way.”

  FROM my vantage point, sitting low in a field of wildflowers and blackberry bushes, I watched Maxwell help Thorn, Jacob, and Miles into the red-and-gold carriage. He climbed up and gently tapped the horses into action. The carriage shades were drawn down to keep the low morning sun from the eyes of the passengers. As it passed, I stood and gave Maxwell a steady gaze. He nodded, bobbing his red-and-gold-checked cap. He hadn’t forgotten about our midnight plan. I heaved a sigh and sat down again.

  A flower caught my attention, and I plucked it from its house of dirt. Orange and fragrant, I twirled it through my fingers and wondered about its botanical name. The rising sun felt warm on my shoulders and I lay back, my body cushioned on the spongy ground. The smell of coffee and cinnamon from Cook’s kitchen found me where I lay. I closed my eyes and thought about my family.

  Lights had glimmered in the tall trees around Uncle Vince’s and Aunt Kate’s quirky Queen Anne Hill house on the night of Evan’s and my fifteenth birthday party. Yellow balloons bounced around in the breeze, and a picnic table on the deck held presents and the birthday cakes Mom had made for us that morning before she and Dad left for the airport, and their long trip home to Cape Town. Carrot cake for Evan and raspberry whipped cream on cinnamon sponge-cake for me. A tradition I could count on.

  And that’s when Rapp showed up out of nowhere.

  And that’s when the trouble started. I had taken one look at him and been struck by love-lightning. And now his ancestor lived here, today, right this minute, in Monte Cristo.

  It was too much.

  Under the collar of my dress, I located Kerry’s chain with my ring hanging from the end. A small rectangle of black onyx held a row of three tiny diamonds planted down the center and sat on a thin platinum band. I swung it around above my head and watched the diamond chips sparkle in the morning sun.

  I had been expecting money for my birthday. As usual. Like Evan got. Like we always got from Grandpa. Lia said he had combed through Grandma’s stuff and chosen the ring himself. He was crushed that I didn’t act excited about his present. But I was still mad at Grandma for dying, leaving Grandpa sad, leaving him to rattle around that big house by himself. I didn’t want her ring, but I took it out on him. I acted like a jerk. And I hated myself for that.

  I wrung the picture of Grandpa’s crestfallen face out of my mind. I would just have to make it up to him when I saw him next. Have a do-over. It would be the motivation to get me home.

  Clear blue sky towered above me, and little red birds twittered and chirped in the gnarled tree twisting down the slope from where I lay. The tiny feathered things hopped from branch to branch singing their song for me, unaware I was a fifteen-year-old freak of nature, not of their world. They might flap away, frightened and in a hurry, if they only knew.

  Vibrations from the ground rattled through my shoulders and back. Galloping horse hooves brought me back to the bright Monte Cristo morning. I sat up and saw a lone rider hurtle up the road. Jumping to my feet, I stuffed the ring back inside my dress.

  A horse came to an abrupt dusty stop and its rider hopped from the saddle. He caught me around the waist, the smell of horses and leather lifting off his shirt. And just like that, Tor Loken had his arms around me.

  “How grand to find you in your flower nest.”

  I knocked his hands away and took a step back. “What are you doing?”

  “You needn’t worry. I saw the red carriage pass by just now. Your mother is away from the house and your father is at work. There is no one spying across the landscape, looking for you in our hiding spot.”

  “What?”

  He frowned. “Have you forgotten our sworn secret?”

  I exhaled—Tor and Emma. “No, I . . . bumped my head a week ago, and I’m . . . still recovering.” I brushed my hair away to show him the stitches.

  He took my hand and tugged me back. He pressed his lips to my forehead. “Is that better?” My breath caught. He was staring at my mouth. He wanted to kiss me. I pushed closer, my body buzzing as he ran kisses from my cheek to my lips. His skin smelled like sunshine. My heart swelled and landed with an excruciating thud in my throat. He slid his arms around my back, and with his possessive hands he pulled me tight against his body. I’d never been this close to anyone. But my body knew what to do. I raised my arms up around him and pressed my frantic heart close to his. I let him kiss me. Deeply. I let his tongue play with mine. He tasted like honey.

  He thought I was Emma.

  I broke away before I burst, stabs of heat gushing in quick beats through my body, air not quite making it into my lungs.

  When my eyes slid back to him, he devoured my face with his fern-colored eyes. They crinkled along with the sides of his mouth from the enormous smile he rained down on me. I hugged my arms around myself. It was like I had known him forever.

  “The rest of the crew will be here soon. Your father wants the barn project finished by October, before the weather turns. I will see you every day until then, even if it’s through a window.”

  His face, so like the one I had left behind, was etched with love and desire and care for the person standing in front of him. Tor was a friend to Emma, so he was a friend to me. I took my chance, pushing through my shyness, and blurted out my troubles.

  “I have to talk to you about something. The lunch yesterday at the hotel? They’re sending me to a boarding school in Baltimore this Sunday. John . . . my father . . . took me there to tell me. The plan is for me to never come back here. They want me to find a husband and stay forever.”

  Tor paced to his horse and back to me. And then back to his horse and back again. He kicked at a flower. He looked like he was going to explode. “No!”

  “I know. I won’t go. I’ll run away before I get on a train to Baltimore.”

  “I want to marry you now. I can’t wait any longer. This is torment, Emma.”

  Marry? Their romance was more than just a fling. Tor and Emma were secretly engaged.

  A funnel of dirt and thunder churned up the road. A large wagon carted by a team of four horses barreled toward us. Tor caught the reins, before his red horse skittered away. “I must think hard on this, and now the crew has arrived. Your father plans on meeting me here at ten o’clock and he mustn’t see me with you.”

  “Tor, wait. I want you to go with me tonight to see Simeon. Maxwell and I—”

  “Simeon the recluse?”

  “Say you’ll go with me. I’m in a desperate situation. I’ll explain then.”

  Dust from the wagon’s wheels curled around us as it passed in the road. Gravel shot out and fell at our feet. Men’s voices called out to Tor.

  He yelled over the noise. “Yes, of course. I would follow you to the moon if asked.”

  “Talk to Maxwell when he comes back later today. He’s making a plan.”

  “You’re confusing me . . .”

  “Trust me.”

  I glided on air through the brilliant wildflowers toward the house, still with the feel of his mouth on mine. I licked my lips and tasted honey. My first kiss. With a guy from 1895. Who look
ed just like someone I had been wishing, more than anything, would kiss me a week before.

  You couldn’t make this up.

  Suddenly starving and craving something yummy, I headed to the kitchen and Cook’s warm cinnamon rolls. I would sneak one upstairs into Emma’s room and eat it there. Alone, I would think about what just happened, replay it again and again in my mind until it made sense.

  And I didn’t want to see John when he came home. I didn’t want to see him, and I didn’t want to talk to him. He let himself be pushed around by that woman. He had gone along with Thorn’s unholy plan.

  “I’M going with you,” Kerry whispered. “You shan’t travel to Simeon unescorted. I’ll not allow you to spend the night alone with three men.”

  “I’m a very modern girl,” I whispered back. “I can handle myself. Anyway, if you get caught, you’ll lose your job, and how do you think that would make me feel?”

  “You may be a modern girl, but you’ll be riding through an old-fashioned forest with old-fashioned men. And I’ll not lose my job if caught. A thrashing is all it will be. ’Tis my luck—no one in Monte Cristo is good enough to replace me. Even she knows that.”

  In the distance, the grandfather clock bonged eleven times. Kerry had taken off her apron and carried a long wool coat and my jeans that I had asked her to bring me. She was going to be stubborn. And I was anxious to go.

  “Okay, you win. No problem, Kerry.” I took the jeans out of her hands and drew them up under my dress. They hugged me tight, a familiar feeling of home. I put on Emma’s warmest shoes and wrapped myself in her long wool coat.

  We snuck out the front door and climbed through the meadow. Maxwell and Tor waited behind the new barn construction on the bank of a curvy river. Tor tried to put me on his horse as if I was a lady, but I threw my leg over its back and straddled it. I smiled down from my perch, jeans-covered legs hanging out from under my dress. “Am I still confusing you?”

  He rubbed his palm across my knee and down to my ankle as if confirming what his eyes saw. “What is this you’re wearing? And where did your fear of horses go?” He jumped up snug to my back and put his arms around me.

  Maxwell, with Kerry sitting sidesaddle, led the way through the moonlight. Riding along the edge of the clear-cut meadow, we forged across the shallow river. Our horses threaded carefully through trees and waded into dense timberland. We found ourselves on a narrow horse-width trail heading up a steep incline. The sheer rocky face of the mountain plunged to another, more violent river, below. Wild, thundering water swirled and crashed against boulders and boomed up to us as we hung on above the sharp peaked forest.

  The cliff turned into the top of a mountain. And the top of the mountain turned into clear, thin sky. We rode with the moon and the stars at our side. I breathed in the cold air, white clouds coiling back out, and snuggled closer into Tor’s arms.

  The smell of smoke and a barking dog welcomed us as we entered a valley. A log cabin, lit by moonlight, emerged out of the shadows. It sat in a clearing and backed up to a bend of evergreens. Light flickered in a window.

  Maxwell whistled and called to the dog. “Kani!” He opened the cabin door to the smell of coffee and pungent chunks of fir burning in a stone-faced fireplace. A powerful man with long, white hair coursing over wide shoulders turned to me. His face was as creased and tan as a golden raisin.

  “Sonnet.”

  I walked to him and he held my hands in his. “Thank you for letting me come, Mister de la Croix.”

  A white film lay across his eyes. So I took his big hands and ran them over my face. He stroked his gentle fingers against the lump of stitches on my forehead, and rubbed my hands as if he could hear them speak.

  The crackling firewood and the steady purr of a small black cat warming itself on a rocking chair were the only sounds. He motioned his visitors to sit at a human-sized hobbit table, a polished slice of log for its top, thick, trimmed branches for its legs. A rustic sideboard held tin plates, cups, and pots and pans. Maxwell passed cups around and poured steaming coffee from a kettle hanging from a hook pounded into the wall of the fireplace.

  “Grandfather, four of us have come tonight. Besides Sonnet, Tor and Kerry are here as well,” said Maxwell. He turned to us. “And this is my grandfather, Simeon, Tyee of the Mountain People.”

  Simeon smiled at Maxwell’s voice. “Chief, yes, long ago. Alas, not many people . . .”

  “Why is he calling you ‘Sonnet?’” Tor pulled his eyes from Simeon and stared at me, hurt and confused, as if he were the only one not in on the joke. As if he had an inkling of the trouble ahead.

  “Please just listen, Tor,” I said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. Kerry is the only one here who knows the whole story.”

  I focused on Simeon as if he could see me and spoke about everything that had happened since the day my brother, sister, cousins, friend, and I had entered, through an unlocked door, an abandoned house in Monte Cristo. I told them about the closet, my gashed forehead and two-day delirium, and my “mother’s” mistreatment of me.

  And then I talked about my real life. My diplomat dad and British-born mom. My family’s nomadic existence living around the world and our visits to Seattle every summer. I spoke about my grandfather who loved to cook and sing and make home-brewed root beer. I told them about me, Sonnet McKay, born in the year 2000, lover of books and horses and world civilization. Budding scientist, hopeful journalist, and wicked softball pitcher.

  Tor sat, stunned, as if he had just been hit over the head with the blackened frying pan that sat on Simeon’s sideboard. He had listened, he had frowned, his face sliding through the first three stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining. He looked to be descending into the fourth. Depression. And the fifth, acceptance, wasn’t even on the horizon. He shook his head, belief not in the realm of possibility.

  “You say your name is Sonnet McKay? You live in Africa and you are from the year 2015? These things you describe, you ask me to believe? This is lunacy, Emma. You have been acting differently of late, yes, but this is utter madness. Your words are frightening, intolerable.”

  “The reason she has been acting differently is because she is different,” said Kerry. “This girl sitting here in front of us is Sonnet, Tor. Ponder it, if you must, and then believe her—she is not Emma. But if Sonnet can find her way back to her time, it seems possible that Emma will return to us.”

  “It be the truth, boy. Your Emma will be back when Sonnet leaves this time and place,” said Simeon.

  “How will that happen, Simeon? And when? What can I do? I’m so confused. I’m feeling frantic about my situation now that I know they want to put me on a train to Baltimore. I don’t understand much of anything. But I know I need to stay in Monte Cristo. I can feel it. If I leave, I won’t go back. Ever.”

  Simeon nodded. “You listen to that voice inside you, Sonnet. If it is whispering to stay in Monte Cristo, then stay you must.”

  He tapped the table with his fingers and stood to reach for a piece of crystal on the fireplace mantle, clear white streaked in bands of purple, radiant from the dancing fire. He sat again, turning it in his hands. “I found this high in these mountains when I was just a lad of eight—many, many years ago, when not a soul lived in these parts but native people. I hiked with my mother that day. My rootless father had left us alone by then, never to return.”

  He sighed, running somewhere far beyond us with his thoughts. Somewhere years and years ago. After a minute, he joined us again.

  “I took this rock before me and saw tales that spoke of unseen dreams. Even now with these blind eyes, I set it into these old hands, and my mind foretells of living. Of dying. Of life to be in the future and life once lived in the past. The understanding is not under my control. What is told to me resonates from the mountains and the water and the sky. It was meant to be that I found it. Over seventy years ago, by now.”

  He raised his head to me. “I saw you seven nights ago, Sonnet. I saw your fa
ir, freckled face, your fiery hair, and your green-and-gold eyes. I saw the magical storm you came by, and I see a magical storm you must leave by. The same storm. Hear me now. You and Emma must not be together in the same place. As you leave, she must come. As she comes, you must leave. This is the law of the spirits, of the great universe, and time-and-time.”

  He paused, running across the translucent object with his thumbs. “I now see that you have come for a purpose. A purpose that will show itself in the future. A purpose that will affect lives. I have seen this tonight.”

  “I thought this was just a huge mistake me being here. A terrible, awful accident.”

  “There are no mistakes,” said Maxwell.

  His grandfather nodded toward Maxwell’s voice. “There are no mistakes—my grandson speaks the truth. I cannot see when you return, or where you go in Monte Cristo to find your way home. I cannot see the reason for your visit to our time. But I know now there is a reason and you must leave by the same storm that brought you to us. I am sorry, child. You want more than I can give you. But even the hot Chinook wind knows not which way it will blow, and there is no need to push the mighty river—it flows by itself. You must find the truth of these words in your heart and believe. Believe you will find your path home when the time comes.”

  I wanted him to give me something more. Something real I could hang on to.

  Simeon smiled and nodded, as if he heard my thoughts. “Faith does not make things easy, Sonnet. Faith makes things possible.”

  Out the window, the dark night sky had a sliver of brightness on its edge. The dying logs sizzled, and the black cat reared and stretched and jumped from the chair. Simeon’s chin dropped to his chest, and his old eyes closed, his long white hair hanging down to his waist. Maxwell unwound the icy crystal from his gnarled fingers and placed it back on the mantle. He held his grandfather’s long arms and gently steered him to bed.

  Tor stood and took my hand. He led me out to his horse and put his hands together to give me a leg up. I flung myself over the horse’s back, straddling it, jeans-clad legs hitched in tight against its warm sides. Tor climbed up behind me and put his arms around my waist, holding me close. He put his chin on my shoulder and murmured into my hair. “I promise I’ll believe the words I have heard tonight. Just not this night. I need time.”