“The others travel between the same two distinct times. You are different. You came back to my time for me. To save my life.”
“To save you? Or to meet you? I feel as if the ‘saving’ was incidental, and my true purpose was to assist you in that which you could not accomplish on your own, lacking the Sight. I was there to communicate with Andrés so that you might stop his killers.”
“Perhaps, yet the core of my theory holds. I believe there is a reason we stopped in that other world, if only briefly. Something this ‘stitch’ wanted us to see. Someone it wanted us to help.” He kisses the back of my neck. “Does that sound foolish?”
“Not to me.” I take a deep breath. “What if it was not simply that one thing? What if there is more? An adventure each time we step through? Lifetimes of adventure and—” I stop short. “Now I am the one who sounds foolish.”
“Not to me.” He kisses my neck again. “Would you like to find out, crécerelle? To step through and see what awaits?”
“Yes.”
“Then talk to your sister in the morning.”
It’s morning,and I’m in the office with Portia. My sister stands at the window, having circumvented the stitch with great care. I did not fail to notice how wide a berth she gave it. As she stands at the window, deep in her thoughts, I observe her with a pang of some unnameable sorrow.
When we were growing up, Portia was considered the prettiest of the Hastings sisters. A perfect diamond between two pearls, someone once said, and the phrase has stuck with me ever since. Rosalind’s delicate beauty made men stumble over themselves to protect her, only to learn she did not need their protection, thank you very much. To others, Rosalind was a bit too waifish, too delicate, perhaps a sign of ill health. And then there was me, brimming with health and vitality to an unseemly degree.
Portia falls in the middle, taller than either of us, with a figure between ours, honey-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Today, that beautiful hair hangs in perfect waves, and she wears the most delightfully ornate confection of a dress, with enough lace to decorate three coverlets. This is the real Portia, relaxed and at ease in the privacy of her family. In public, she is altogether different, hair pulled severely back, clothing as dull and plain as a Quaker’s, spectacles perched on her nose—spectacles of plain glass. That is my glorious Portia with her light doused under the heavy basket of constraint because it is the only way she can enjoy even the slightest grudging respect as a “medical woman.”
The weight of those expectations and demands douses my sister’s light in so many ways. She had already been losing that light when Rosalind disappeared, and that only made things so much worse, as Portia insisted on bearing responsibility for me, which I never needed her to do. Then there was what another writer might call “a disappointment in love.” I call it a damnable blessing, the hand of fate revealing her love’s true nature before she was trapped with him forever.
I never minded the young lawyer my sister had fallen in love with. Yes, he was rather dull, and I’d wanted more for Portia, particularly as I was not convinced it was “falling in love” rather than “settling for the first decent man who wooed her.” She had slid into something akin to love and agreed to marry him, and then suddenly she received a letter that he had eloped with another. He’d fallen madly in love on a business trip and hoped she understood.
The worst of it was that Portiadidunderstand. She accepted the public humiliation as if she expected no better—as if she deserved no better.
Now I watch her, in her wonderfully ridiculous confection of a dress, staring out the window, looking just a little bit wistful, a little bit empty.
“You could come with us,” I say.
She startles and turns, blue eyes wide with something like horror. “What?”
I walk over and take her hand. “Come with us. Have an adventure.”
She pulls from my grip. “I couldn’t. I have so much to do.”
She lists off a half-dozen patients waiting for her care in London, and a lecture she is sneaking into, and so many obligations and responsibilities that I want to grab her hand and yank her into the stitch. I want to take her away from all this for a little while. I want the Portia I knew once, endlessly curious and endlessly questing, like Rosalind, like me.
“Someday?” I say.
Portia exhales as if relieved that I will not pursue it. “Yes, someday. I should love to see it someday. In the meantime, Bronwyn will bring me books from the future, and you will run off on glorious adventures with a glorious man.”
“Youdolike Nicolas?”
She rolls her eyes as she hugs me. “I think he is the most perfect man I could imagine for you. I could not be more delighted.” She pulls back, holding me by the forearms. “Do not second-guess, Miranda. Do not doubt yourself or him. If there is cause to doubt, you will feel it in your heart. Do not manufacture it in your mind.”
“I won’t.”
“Then off with you both, on your grand adventure.”
“I will be back. I will always be back.”
She hugs me again, holding me tight. “I know.”
Nicolasand I stand in the office. Portia has already left Thorne Manor, hiring a coach to take her to the train station, rushing back to London and her endless responsibilities.
“We will return soon,” Nicolas says when he catches me glancing at a photo on the desk, one of Rosalind and Edmund with Bronwyn and Amelia.
“And we’ll return to your time, too,” I say, “to visit your family. To let them know you are well.”