“I haven’t the strength to do the right thing anymore. I don’t even know what the right thing is.”
“This is the right thing.” I tasted his skin.
“This can’t be right.”
“It is, in my century. The century you’re living in now.”
“You haven’t thought it through.”
“I don’t need to think it through.” I nibbled along, trying to keep my wits, trying to find just the right words to convince him. “It’s not the kind of thing you think through. I mean, who reads the full prospectus, line by line, before buying the offering?” I felt him quiver under my lips. “You are who you are. It’s the essence of you that matters to me. The man inside, the man I adore. The rest of it is just details.”
“Details, that I was born over a century ago? Details, that I’ll always be hiding things, keeping secrets, from our closest friends? What if it happens again, without warning? Think of all the ways, Kate, in which this complicates your life.”
I drew back, searching his face. “It was always going to complicate my life, Julian.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said bitterly. “I should have told you before. I should have stayed away from you, before you could be hurt.”
“Impossible. Because it was already too late, from the very first meeting.”
“And in ten years, twenty years, when you’re tired of hiding my secrets?”
I pushed that aside. “I’d never see your past as anything other than a gift, Julian, because it’s what brought you to me. It’s what makes you so particularly you, like no one else in the world.”
“Someone else may find out.”
“We’ll manage.”
“Kate, it’s an impossible burden…”
“Well, I’m not going to let you go on bearing it alone! I’m here now, Julian. You did this. You bound me to you, and what I learned today doesn’t change that at all. So deal with it, okay? Take me upstairs. I need”—tears, for some reason, began to seep around my eyes again—“I need that reality. I need—I can’t explain it—I’m reeling with all this, just barely hanging on, and I need you to take me in your arms and just… please… just unite us…” I seized his hands, knitted my fingers through his, tried to communicate.
“Kate, oh sweetheart, don’t. I can’t resist that, I can’t…”
“Don’t, then. Don’t resist it. I wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t beg, if it were just sex. You know that. You know what I’m asking for.”
His eyes shut tightly. “I know, darling, I want it too, I want it passionately, you can’t conceive…”
I pulled on his hands, trying to draw him up with me.
“No. Wait.” He stopped me, heaving a deep breath. “Even if it were all right, there’s still another thing.”
“Other thing.” I leaned against the sofa back and stared up at the ceiling in despair. “There’s more? What now? Freaking vampires?”
He let out an amused noise. “No, a little more down-to-earth than that.”
“Oh, no,” I groaned. “Please, not the moral scruples. I’m already a ruined woman, Julian. I don’t have any virtue to preserve. Neither do you, technically.”
“Well, there’s that, too,” he said, “but I’ve already conceded that point, weak flesh-made man that I am. No, it’s a more practical concern.”
I waited. He remained silent, staring at his hands, looking awkward. “Well?” I demanded at last.
“Kate,” he said, “I’m no expert on any of this, but I do know that when two people, when a man and a woman…” He broke off, and then tried again. “Kate, have you thought about the possibility…”
I began to giggle. “Julian, you Edwardian, are you trying to ask me about birth control?”
His cheeks flooded with color.
“Julian,” I said, “I’m on the Pill. So just take me upstairs, already. For God’s sake.”
“Kate, I…”
I stood up and held out my hand. “Julian Laurence. Julian Ashford, I mean. Whoever you are. I really don’t care anymore. Come upstairs with me now, or you can just find yourself another girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend.” He shook his head, staring at me intently.
And at last he made his decision: he stood up, bent down and slung me over one shoulder with a single effortless heave. “Fine, then. On your own head be it,” he growled, and carried me into the darkened hallway and up the stairs, two at a time.
Amiens
So,” Julian said, “I’ve treated you to a handsome dinner. I’ve been sporting company, with all your tantalizing revelations. And now I think I’ve quite earned the honor of your confidence. Who, exactly, are you, Kate from America? Can I at least have your last name?”
“That,” I said, “will certainly have to wait for later.” I stepped gingerly around a puddle, left over from the day’s rain, gleaming silver in the moonlight. “You’re not going to believe me. And even if you do, it’s going to wipe that charming smile off your face. You’ll storm off in a huff, or else run screaming to the nearest police station.”
“Look here, Kate. This is altogether too much mystery for a straightforward chap like myself; I shall go barking mad in a moment. Would you simply come out with it? Careful,” he added, offering his arm to help me navigate a rain-filled gutter. “Public works in a shocking state, aren’t they? C’est la guerre, I suppose.”
I felt the scratchy wool of his coat under my hand and leapt over the obstacle. I did not, however, give up his arm afterward; nor did he draw it away.
“Tell me about your husband,” he said.
“My husband.”
“You did say you were a widow, I believe?”
“Yes.” I felt an ache collect at the back of my throat. “You know, I think I’d rather not talk about that, at the moment. If you don’t mind. It’s still very new.”
His voice fell into contrition. “I’m so terribly sorry. How wretchedly dull of me. Forgive me; army life can be so coarsening.”
“Forgiven. It was a natural question. And I will tell you about him, later.” I paused. “I loved him deeply.”
“A very lucky chap, I believe.”
Our feet clacked companionably on the damp cobbles. I looked down and watched the tips of my sturdy shoes disappearing and reappearing next to his larger ones. From around the corner ahead of us, the sound of anxious laughter rippled through the dank evening air, cracking the unnatural wartime stillness: other lives, other histories, all returned to dust by the time I’d been born. I spoke up suddenly. “All right, then, Ashford. You asked for it. Here it is. I’ll just say it. You leave Amiens on Thursday, right?”
“Yes, as I said.”
“You’ll be going back up the line to Albert, and then wait for your turn in the front-line trenches. You’ll have a meeting with Major Haggard, during which you’ll lay plans for a night raid on Saturday, at 0200 hours, on the German front line, in order to gather prisoners for interrogation and intelligence gathering. I can tell you now, if you lead that raid as planned, you won’t return to your trench.”
“Yes, I realize you have an uncanny ability to predict the future, Kate,” he said impatiently, “and I’ll be curious to see if it all turns out as you say, but why? How do you know this, or think you know it?”
“No, wait,” I said, “there’s more. And I have to tell you, so you’ll believe what comes next. Julian, I know how and when this war’s going to end. I know how the next one’s going to start. I know… I know Florence Hamilton will marry a man named Richard Crawford in 1921, and bear him three children, Robin and Arthur and Sophia, and Robin will go on to become an MP for Hatherleigh in the 1950s, before involving himself in a Communist spy scandal a few years after his election.”
He came to a stop, frozen there on the wet cobbles, like a military memorial in some village square. “Good God,” he mumbled.
“Next year,” I continued, “the Bolsheviks will start a revolution in Russia, turning it into a Communist dictatorship, and in
1929 the world stock markets will crash, the first disaster in a decade of financial depression. In 1969, men will land on the moon and walk on its surface.”
“Good God,” he repeated.
“What else? Oh, here’s a good one: Great Britain will elect its first female prime minister in 1979. And your Prince of Wales will inherit the throne in—oh, I don’t know the year—the thirties somewhere, and abdicate soon after in order to marry an American divorcée. I’m sorry, I’m having difficulty being chronological about this. The point is, Julian, I’m about to tell you something extraordinary. Something… something you’ll never believe. But I can prove it. I’ve brought proof. Julian, listen to me: I was born in the year 1983.”
He turned and stared at me, as if I were some kind of ghost.
“I was born in 1983,” I said, “and I can tell you just about anything and everything that’s happened in the world until 2008, when I traveled back here, to you. Only a week ago, in my time. Only a week since I was surfing the Internet, drinking a latte. A nice hot freshly… freshly brewed… latte.” My voice cracked.
“You were born in 1983,” he said, still staring.
“I know, I know. I felt the same way, when I… when the same thing happened to me. When someone told me about this.” I seized his hands in mine and took a step nearer, close enough to feel the sweet wine-laced warmth of his breath on my face, to bind him to me before he fell apart. “But please, Julian,” I whispered, “try to push past the how of it. The impossibility of it. Just take the leap, try to understand…”
“But that’s marvelous!” he burst out, squeezing my hands. “Bloody marvelous! My God! Like the chap in the book! So you’re from the future? It’s really possible?”
My mouth opened and closed. I felt a single raindrop strike my hairline, at just that instant, with memorable conviction. “You believe me? Just like that?”
“It makes perfect sense. You’re so completely different, so utterly original. Of course. I should have seen it! Second sight, indeed.” He laughed. “Tell me everything. Tell me… tell me about Mars. Have you been to Mars?”
I took him in: the extravagant mad grin, the eyes wide and glittering in the faint light of a nearby window. “Are you insane? You’re not, like, freaked out?”
“Well, it’s extraordinary, of course. But I should have thought they’d find a way, a hundred years from now…” He shook his head. “Have you told anyone else? Where else have you been? Or when else, I suppose!” He laughed again. “How absolutely jolly well marvelous!”
I couldn’t help it; I began to laugh with him. “Julian Ashford,” I gasped, between giggles, “you never cease to amaze me. Here I was, expecting this great dramatic scene, with you running off screaming and me begging and pleading… hours of explanation, of trying to prove it to you…”
I found myself talking into his chest; he’d thrown his arms about me in sheer exuberance and began swinging me in reckless circles around him.
“Tell me everything, everything! I’ve so many questions, I don’t know where to start. Do you have your machine with you somewhere? Might I see it?”
“I must say,” I remarked, trying to extricate myself before I suffocated, “you’re taking it much better than I did. I was throwing up at this point.”
He drew back and peered at me. “Really, you’ve the most exceptionally weak digestion. Is that common in the future?”
“Well,” I said dryly, “let’s just say you have that effect on me. Look, can we go somewhere and talk? I think it’s starting to rain again.”
“Sweet Kate.” He smiled, squeezed my hands, kissed each one. “Divine miraculous Kate, I’d like that more than anything in the world.”
We raced back, hand in hand, through the mounting drizzle, to the tall narrow house on rue des Augustins. As Julian fumbled with the latchkey, I thought I saw a dark-coated figure hovering by the street lamp; but then the door thrust open and Julian urged me inside, and the image disappeared.
14.
I knew, even before I became conscious of my own name, that I lay alone in the bed.
“Julian,” I said soundlessly, a breath of air, but no reply came.
I struggled upward. The shades had been drawn down, but I could see from the rampant light spilling around the edges that the morning was already far along. He’d let me sleep in. I turned my head to the clock on the nightstand. My brain felt drowsy, drugged; it took me several seconds to decipher the meaning of the numbers and hands. Ten forty-five? That was late, wasn’t it? Where was Julian?
Julian. I flopped back into the pillows and closed my eyes. The whole of last night began tumbling through my brain, a waterfall of impressions. The thoroughness of it. His hands and lips on my body, everywhere, wondering and worshipful and urgent; mine on his. The soft glow of his skin in the lamplight. Whispers, laughter, cries of delight; my name on his breath, spoken like a benediction. The unbearable sensation of joining, as though I had finally become whole after a lifetime of emptiness.
Julian, my lover now: gentle, fierce, ardent. Where was he?
I forced my legs to swing downward toward the floor. My muscles felt pulverized. I looked at my nakedness in wonder; had it all really happened? To this humble body? I rose upward and walked, unsteadily, to the bathroom, where a few gutted candles still remained from a midnight picnic in the bathtub. Julian must have cleared the rest of it away this morning.
When I returned, I saw the note on the pillow next to mine. Yours, it said simply, in Julian’s beautiful scrawl, a line drawn underneath for emphasis. A single word, expressing everything.
I looked around for a robe of some kind, but saw nothing. My clothes still lay scattered disreputably about the floor, so I pulled one of the sheets free from the disarray on the bed and wrapped it around me, under my arms.
I thought I knew where to find him, and went down the stairs to the library to find I was right: there he sat at the desk, laptop open, Bluetooth in his ear, speaking in a low, decisive voice. He felt the whisper of my entry and looked up.
I smiled shyly.
He held out his arm and I went to him, holding up the sheet with one hand. “Geoff, I’ve got to go,” he said, into the headset. “I’ll call back later.”
“Much later,” I said in his other ear.
He pushed back his chair and tossed the Bluetooth on the desk and eased me into his lap. “There you are, my love. I was afraid you’d sleep all day.” He nuzzled a kiss into my neck. “How do you feel?”
“Mmm. Like I’ve been run through a laundry wringer,” I said, “but otherwise heavenly.”
“A laundry wringer?” He chuckled beneath me. “Aren’t those a bit before your time?”
“You’re sounding smug this morning, for a man who hardly slept at all.”
“Ah, well, that’s precisely why I’m smug, darling. That, and I’ve got the most beautiful woman in the world wrapped in a bedsheet in my arms.” He bent his head and kissed my swollen lips tenderly. “Although I believe I was promised all-night sex, and you were quite finished by three o’clock; is that really fair?”
“We could try again tonight.”
“At least you delivered handily on the mind-bending part,” he continued, sliding downward from my mouth to my throat. “I’m still trying to gather my wits.”
“No regrets, then?”
He laughed against my skin and raised his head. “Do you have to ask?” His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth. “Passionate Kate,” he murmured.
“I missed you, when I woke up.” I covered his thumb with my hand and kissed it. “Did you have to leave?”
He shrugged in the general direction of the laptop. “Things are busy. We’ve been trying to unwind a few positions.”
“Can’t Geoff manage it?”
“It’s my fund. I can’t just abandon things at the moment.”
“What will you do when it’s all finished up?”
“Since you brought it up,” he said, “I was thinking of takin
g an extended honeymoon.”
“Oh.” I tucked my forehead into the side of his neck.
His hand began to describe little spirals into the bare skin of my back. “Where would you like to go, my love? Anywhere in the world. Shameless luxury, adoring husband. An offer you can’t refuse. So long, of course, as you haven’t any ambitions to be a viscountess one day; I’m afraid all that belongs to my cousin Humphrey’s miserable heirs now.” He tweaked my nose with his other hand. “Lady Chesterton.”
“Julian, are you proposing to me?”
“I’m an honorable chap, Kate. Having thoroughly debauched you last night, from your eyelashes down to your delectable toes, I thought it was the least I could do. Better late than never, as you Americans say.”
“And this is it? No traditional setup? I’m kind of disappointed.” I was still blushing too madly to look him in the face; I started drawing tiny hearts into the hollow of his throat, to distract myself.
“Well, in all candor, sweetheart, I haven’t bought the ring yet. And I thought you’d try to fob me off in a direct approach; the ambush strategy seems to be far more effective with you.”
I made a face. “My parents would freak, you know.”
“And here I had the vanity to consider myself a reasonably eligible match.”
“It’s not that. Mom’s already in love with you.” I let my hand slip down and fingered the edge of the sheet. “It’s just I think they were hoping I would have some sort of career first.” I sighed. “I sure showed them, didn’t I?”
His thumb trickled along the length of my upper arm and back again. “Have you told them yet? About your job?” he asked, more seriously.
“I e-mailed them.” I glanced at the desktop computer, sitting behind his laptop, and frowned. I’d wanted to forget all my real-world troubles for a little longer. “I wonder if they’ve read it yet.” I looked back at Julian. “And don’t think you can just rescue me from the wreckage, Prince Charming, and sweep me away to your fairy castle.”
“Why not? Why bother with that bloody old firm? Or the markets at all? We’ll find something else to do. A world awaits us. Perfect freedom.”