But this woman in her dream wasn’t looking at Toby like that. While it was true that there wasn’t any genuine happiness in the woman’s eyes, there was concern. It was as though she really cared whether or not Toby was feeling well.
“Mother?” Toby whispered.
She gave a small smile. “You look as though you’ve never seen me before.”
“I’m not sure I have, actually,” Toby said.
The woman laughed—a sound Toby didn’t think she’d ever heard before. Her mother was a very serious person. Taking care of her household, helping her husband with anything he needed, and, above all else, finding her daughter a husband were jobs that consumed her.
“Come along, dear, and get something to eat.”
When she slipped her arm through Toby’s, Toby’s eyes widened in shock. Casual affection was not something that her mother demonstrated. Toby couldn’t help that her eyes began to grow teary.
“Valentina was right. You are a bit off tonight. Come away. Silas will be here soon. He is delivering a coffin. People die at the most inopportune times, don’t they?”
At that callous statement, Toby laughed. This was the mother she knew. “Valentina is the red-haired woman?”
“You know that.”
“Yes, of course I do,” Toby said and remembered hearing that long ago Captain Caleb and Valentina had been lovers.
As they walked toward the doorway, another woman entered the room. “Lavinia, Tabby,” she said in greeting and they nodded to her.
Outside this vivid dream, in the real world, her mother’s name was Lavidia. “Lavidia, Lavinia, Toby, Tabby,” she said aloud.
“No more cider for you, dear,” Lavinia said, patting her daughter’s hand.
They went across the hall to the dining room, where a long table was laden with food. Several people were around it, holding beautiful plates that Toby had seen on display in the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
“Did Captain Caleb bring these back from China?” Toby asked.
“You helped unpack them.” Her mother was looking at the food, picking over it.
It was when Toby reached for a plate that she realized she still had the key to the box in her hand. But then, it made sense that her dream was reconciling the lost key. Maybe if she put the key back in the box it would be there when she woke. Smiling at that idea, she picked up a plate and reached for a piece of fish with mushrooms on it. “So how is Captain Caleb?”
To Toby, it was an innocent question, but her mother turned to her with the angry face Toby had seen all her life. “No sea captains!” she said in a voice that was more a hiss than human.
Toby took a step back. “I didn’t mean anything by my question. Isn’t this his house?”
Lavinia seemed to need a few breaths before she could speak. “Of course it is, but don’t let his riches fool you. You know as well as anyone what it’s like to marry a man of the sea.”
“I guess so,” Toby said as she picked up a little bowl full of what looked to be custard. “I take it Silas has nothing to do with the sea?”
Lavinia looked at her daughter across the table. “What has happened to you tonight? You do not seem to be yourself.”
“I’m just reevaluating my life, that’s all. I want to know what you think of Silas and me. Are we truly in love?”
“Really, Tabitha! You do ask embarrassing questions! I assume you are since you have pledged yourself to him.”
“We’re engaged to be married?”
Lavinia looked hard at her daughter for a long moment. “You’re not thinking of … of him again, are you?”
“No, certainly not!” Toby said. “He’s not in my mind at all.” Whoever “he” is. What a marvelous dreamer I am, she thought. I had no idea I was so imaginative. As far as she could tell, she—as Tabitha—seemed to be in love with one man but engaged to another—whom she might or might not be in love with at all.
It certainly beat her current life! “What year is this?” she asked.
“Tabitha, you are beginning to frighten me.”
“I don’t mean to. I just need some reassurance that I’m doing the right thing in choosing Silas over … him.”
Lavinia squinted her eyes. “That will not be a concern, because you will be married by the time his ship returns. He and that brother of his will not be able to turn your head with their looks and their swagger.”
“And who is his brother?”
She leaned toward her daughter. “Mark my words, Tabitha Weber, but Captain Caleb will be dead before long. He’s too reckless, too full of his own importance. His crewmen tell stories of the chances he takes when he’s on the seas. Someday that will take him down—and when he goes, he’ll take young Garrett with him.”
Toby raised her brows in interest at this rather romantic, swashbuckling story and her mother saw it.
“Do not imagine yourself with him!” Lavinia said and there was desperation in her voice. “We are a house full of sea widows and we need what Silas offers.” Lavinia put her full plate down on the end of the table. “Now see what you have done to me! My heart races. I must lie down.”
As Lavinia rushed past her daughter, Toby said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” Her mother was gone. Toby looked at the other people in the room, who were staring at her with eyes of disapproval. She had no doubt that they knew the whole story behind whatever was upsetting her mother.
Toby put down her plate of food. “I’d better go see about her.” The women looked at her as though to say indeed she should, and Toby left the room.
She felt a pang of guilt for not trying to find her mother and soothe her, but then, what could she say? That she promised that Tabitha would marry Silas and not the rascal from the ship? But since her mother seemed to have set the wedding before the sailor was to return, there was no need to make a vow that she knew nothing about.
Instead, Toby went back to where there was dancing and music, wondering when she would wake up. She truly hoped that she hadn’t suffered a concussion when she fell on the slick floor. This dream was taking so long she was beginning to think she was in a coma.
Not that any of this is real, Toby thought as she looked around at the dancers. There were a few people she’d seen around the island but didn’t know their names. If this was her own dream, made up by her, why was Jared excluded? Victoria/Valentina had never heard of him, but that made no sense.
When the dancers parted, Toby saw a little girl curled up on a window seat on the other side of the room. She was bent over a board with drawing paper on it, and something about her looked familiar.
Toby made her way around the dancers and sat down by the child. “What are you drawing?”
“The windows,” she said.
Toby smiled, for she knew exactly who the child was. In contemporary times, she was Alix Madsen, who was an architect down to her very bone marrow.
“Let me guess,” Toby said. “Your father is Ken. I think that here he’s John Kendricks, and today he married Parthenia, who is Jilly.”
The girl turned to look at Toby as though trying to figure her out. “My sister is Ivy and our mother died.”
“I’m sorry,” Toby said softly. “Do you like your new mother?”
“She made my father give me blocks of wood to build with.”
“High praise indeed!” Toby said and for a moment she watched the dancers. “Do you think Captain Caleb is going to be angry about his house when he returns?”
The girl was bent over her drawing. “He is here now. I saw him. He went up the back stairs.”
“Oh, dear,” Toby said. “Just home after a long sea voyage and his house is full of people. No wonder he’s hiding out. I seem to remember Alix telling me something about Captain Caleb and Valentina meeting in an attic. Maybe I should help things along by suggesting that she take a break up there.” She looked at the child. “I’m sure I know your name, but what is it?”
“Alisa, but everyone calls me Ali.”
“P
erfect,” Toby said. “You wouldn’t know who Silas is and why my mother is so afraid of men of the sea, would you?”
“You live with sea widows. Your mother and sister and the women married to your three brothers all live there with you. All the men went down on ships. My father says they would all starve without you to look after them, as they are a silly bunch of girls.”
Toby would have laughed except for the thought of so much death near Tabby. “I think I’m beginning to understand things. I guess Silas does something here on the island.”
“He owns a big store. Only Mr. Obed Kingsley’s store is bigger.”
Toby was digesting this information—that she’d made up, she reminded herself. All of it was based on bits and pieces of history she’d heard from several sources in the last few weeks.
She leaned toward Ali. “You wouldn’t know of another man whom I like, would you?”
“Everyone knows that. He is Captain Caleb’s brother Garrett, and he wants to marry you, but your mother says no. You have to live at home and make sure the girls work.”
“That doesn’t sound fair,” Toby said and she suddenly had the ridiculous idea that maybe she really was Tabitha and her modern life was a fantasy she’d created to escape “the girls.”
“Ali, I want you to promise me that you’ll keep drawing houses. Get your father to teach you about building, and someday you’ll design homes that people will love living in for centuries to come. Promise?”
“Yes,” the girl said but she looked puzzled. Just like Alix in the twenty-first century, she couldn’t imagine not designing buildings.
When Toby stood up, she heard a faint clatter and realized she’d dropped the key to the lacquered box behind a cushion. She felt behind it but didn’t find the key.
“My father has not finished building the house yet,” Ali said.
Toby told her about the key being to the box in the front parlor and asked the child to tell her father to look for it. Ali nodded.
“I think I might go look at where I live. What’s the name of the house and where is it?”
“At the end, by Main Street. It is called NEVER TO SEA AGAIN. The widows named it.”
“Thank you,” Toby said as she left the room. What a sad name, she thought. They had never seen their men again so they wanted men who never went to sea. She had an idea that the house was the one where she was sleeping, and she wondered if dreams like hers had caused it to be renamed BEYOND TIME.
As Toby made her way through the people and toward the front door, she saw Valentina and suggested that she slip away to the attic for a few moments of peace. As always, there were several young men around her. Valentina said that sounded like an excellent idea.
The clear, cool, salt-laden air outside felt good and Toby breathed deeply of it. There was some movement in the shrubbery outside and she smiled. It looked like some trysts were happening.
She left Kingsley House and took a left. In modern times there were three houses between this one and the house the Montgomery-Taggert family had bought. But now there was just land, and across the road was empty also. Nantucketers were good at moving houses from one place to another, so maybe some were brought in later. Or maybe young Ali would grow up and design houses that would be built on the vacant lots. She liked that idea best.
The narrow lane was full of horses and carriages and people on foot, all of them heading toward the light-filled Kingsley House.
When she got to the end of the lane, to the house where she’d hit her head, she paused, her hand on the gate. Across the road was the much smaller house she was sharing with Graydon—and now the Lanconians. Turning, she looked at it. It was completely dark, with no sign of life, and she wondered who lived there now.
She opened the gate and walked along the side of the big house. She didn’t think she should just throw open the front door.
There was a big tree near the house. It wasn’t there in her century, but its branches hung low, and she walked toward it.
“I knew you’d come to me,” said a voice she knew well. He looked like Graydon, and it was as though he was and wasn’t the man she knew.
Before she could speak, a strong arm caught her about the waist and pulled her to him. Toby’s first instinct was to push away, but the night, the air, the stars, and the familiarity of this man prevented her movement.
She couldn’t help herself—or didn’t want to—as she put her face up to his and he kissed her, his lips on hers.
She’d kissed boys in her life, but as she’d told Graydon, she’d never felt anything in those encounters. It wasn’t that way with him. His body against hers, his lips on hers … It was like their souls were melding into one. At that moment she was someone else, probably Tabby, and she knew she loved this man very, very much.
“Did you miss me?” he whispered. His hands were removing the pins from her hair and letting it fall down past her shoulders. “Did you think about me? Remember me?”
“I thought you no longer wanted me,” she said and wasn’t sure whether she was talking about her own life or Tabitha’s.
“You always think that,” he said, laughing.
She could see he was teasing her. She put her hand to his cheek. “Just today I said that I’d never love you.”
“How could you not when I love you so much?” He kissed her palm. “Who is your mother trying to marry you to now?”
“Someone named Silas.”
Smiling, Graydon began kissing her face. “I’m here now and you’ll only marry me.”
“But what about the widows?”
He pulled away to give her a very serious look. “I have been in countries where a man has many wives.” He sighed. “So I will do my duty and take them all. Except your mother. She is too much for any man!”
“You!” Toby said, laughing, and again she caressed his cheek. She could feel the stubble of whiskers and knew he was the man in her first dream. “Did you bring me back a red paisley shawl?”
“I did, but how did you guess?”
“I dreamed of it. I was in the little room upstairs, the library, and I dreamed I was wearing the shawl. And you were kissing my hand.”
“I would like to kiss all of you. Come, lay with me now, and tomorrow we will be married.”
“I don’t think I have a right to do that,” Toby said. “It’s not my body and not my future.”
Graydon pulled back to look at her. “Are you now owned so fully by your mother that you cannot claim even your own body?”
“I meant that Tabitha owns it.”
He didn’t pause in holding her, just kept smiling. “If you are not Tabitha, who are you?”
“Toby. At least that’s the nickname my father gave me. My real name is Carpathia.”
“I like that. Good name for a ship,” he said. “And I love you whatever your name. Will you marry me this day? I will build us a house here on my family’s lane and I will love you forever.”
“Unless you are made a king,” Toby said.
“I do not understand you. When I left we said that we’d marry no matter what objections there were. All your letters to me have said that. I know your mother doubts me, but I will be a good husband.”
“Will you give up the sea for Tabitha?”
Graydon laughed. “I am the sea; the sea is me. It is in my blood, in the veins of all my family.”
“Like Lanconia is in Graydon’s,” Toby said.
“I have heard of that place. Wild and full of men who carry spears. It’s said that in Lanconia even the women fight. It is not somewhere I want to go. And who is this Graydon?”
“What is your name?”
Laughing, he picked her up to twirl her around. “I have missed you every minute I was away. I bought you so many gifts that my brother Caleb laughed at me. He says that loving a woman would unman him and he vows to never do it.”
“Don’t worry, Valentina will fix him.”
“And who is she?”
“She’s—Act
ually, I’d rather you didn’t meet her. She’s too beautiful for any man to resist.”
“I doubt that. I saw some Chinese women who took my breath away. They have tiny feet and—”
“I’d just as soon not hear about them.”
He held her to him. “No one makes me laugh as you do. Marry me now. This minute. I brought you back a lavender diamond.”
She pushed away to look at him. “But that’s what you’re giving to Danna.”
“I know no one of that name. I got it from a trader. He said that a man’s sheep fell down a hole and—”
“Came out with four lavender diamonds attached to its wool,” Toby said. “How did you know that?”
“Toby! Toby! Wake up,” she heard, then turned to him and said, “I think I’m leaving. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back again. Kiss me again.”
“Gladly,” he said.
But his lips never touched hers because she woke up to find herself back in the house that Graydon’s relatives from Maine had bought.
When Toby woke up, she expected to see Graydon hovering over her and looking as forlorn as he had when he’d left the house. But to her surprise it was morning and no one was in the room.
But someone had been there. Her head was on a pillow in a clean case, which was good on the beat-up old cot, and a blanket had been spread over her.
Sitting up, she saw a basket on the floor. Inside was a bottle of water, a nicely wrapped rolled-up sandwich, and some fruit. Beside it was a set of her workout clothes and shoes. And there was an envelope made of the heavy kind of paper that was probably still only used by royalty.
Toby took a bite of the sandwich. Lanconian, she thought, recognizing the herb she’d had the day before. Inside the envelope was a note from Graydon. His handwriting—which she’d seen on his drawings—was odd, with r’s shaped differently from the American way.
Come home and you will be allowed to strike all of us.
We are at your mercy.
Your most humble servant, Graydon Montgomery