So the Lady disappeared with her son into the cold waves, and when the Fisherman returned the next day, laden with rich presents, he discovered only their children, who cried piteously and told him how his Lady had put on her strange suit and swum away with a man who came by the sea. And so great was the Fisherman’s grief at these tidings, he never married again, though he ruled as lord of the island and waters he had once plied as a mere fisherman, for he could not bear to see another woman in the bed where he had once known all the joys on earth . . .
THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)
HOY, ORKNEY ISLANDS
September 1323
The King now comes to visit us from time to time, but only my daughter sees and hears him. He watches her play with her little brother and talks to her about the games he used to play as a child. Once he addressed me, though not directly. We sat on the floor of the attic, not long ago, practicing letters while an April gale howled outside the window, and Araminta turned to me and said, “His Majesty wishes to know if you are breeding again.”
“His Majesty?” I asked, incredulous. (This was the first I had heard of him.)
“Yes. That fat fellow right there, in the strange clothes and the gray beard.”
I looked in the direction to which she pointed, and for an instant it seemed to me I could detect a slight shimmer in the air, a faint impression of a pair of familiar blue eyes. Familiar to me, I should say, only from paintings and photographs, for I had never, in my old, twentieth-century life, had the good fortune to meet King Edward in person.
I turned back to Araminta. “You may tell His Majesty that such an intimate subject is none of his business.”
There was a little pause, and Araminta sighed. “He says that it is his business, Mama. He is passionately concerned in your affairs.”
“Then he should ask me directly.”
But he never did.
• • •
Still, we are a happy lot, the four of us. Araminta, as you see, is a terribly precocious child, and her brother Armand is a cheerful little towheaded chap who rarely complains. Of Hunter, there has been no sign, no breath of news, and we have gradually come to presume he has met some unknown fate elsewhere, and to believe his evil influence gone from our lives. Our only true sadness arrived last spring, when Nature dashed our hopes for a third child—for the King, you see, was correct in his speculation—and I am afraid I have only just begun to emerge from the grief of this loss. My husband has been my chief support. The insatiable carnal appetites of our early days may have moderated somewhat, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the course of everyday life, but our mutual affection seems only to feed upon itself. My great joy still lies in waking up each morning to find some part of my body touching his, and to see the inevitable smile warm his dear face when he opens his own eyes to regard me at his side.
Or perhaps my great joy comes a few moments later, when the door to the nursery flies open, and our children scamper in to land between us in the bed.
Silverton is away just now, visiting Lord Magnus at Thurso to hold council on some recent acts of piracy that have plagued our fishing and merchant fleets, and the entire household misses him horribly. When one is accustomed to sunshine, its absence turns everything gloomy. Araminta, who is the shining red apple of her father’s eye and knows it well, has been inconsolable. She shares his height and his nimble mind and his blue eyes, and from the hour of her birth, when she nestled in the crook of his elbow and received her first smile from his overjoyed face, they have been desperately in love with each other. I’m afraid she does not take his absences well. The nurse, having put Armand to bed for his nap, begged me for an hour’s relief, so here I sit at the little table in the attic instead of attending to my own duties as lady of Hoy, while Araminta tosses her doll on the floor and sticks her face in the hollow of her folded arms.
“You must pick up your doll, darling. Lady Helen made it for you with her own hands.” (We speak Norse in public and modern English at home, for I have some slight, superstitious fear that our native language might one day return to our lives.)
Araminta lifts her head and looks at me with her blue eyes and her stubborn face, and I’m half afraid she’ll say cheerfully, as her father might, B Lady Helen. But if the idea occurs to her, she quickly thinks better of it, pressing her cherry lips together to hold the words back.
“Perhaps we can practice your sums?” I ask.
The look on her face tells me what she thinks of this scheme.
“I have an idea,” I say. “Let’s go downstairs to Mama’s room and try on the jewels for Lord Magnus and Lady Helen’s visit at Christmas.”
Generally speaking, Araminta is not given to such pursuits. To be perfectly honest, she’s what we would have called a tomboy, in my own time. But perhaps it’s the rain drumming at the shutters, or the shift of seasons now under way, or the temporary void in her heart that bears the shape of her adored father. She tilts her head as she considers my proposal, given in desperation, and then she slides from her stool and takes my hand.
• • •
The jewels were presented to me by Lord Magnus, when Silverton was officially invested as the Earl of Orkney’s vassal and lord of Hoy, and I as his lady. This occurred perhaps three months after the ordeal on the beach, as Magnus had assumed the titles and lands of his dead father, the earl, and I was nearing my confinement with Araminta and gross with child. I remember feeling generally unimpressed, both with the jewels, which were weighty, and the ceremony itself, which required me to stand upon my aching ankles for rather longer than I would have chosen. After Araminta was born, however, and Silverton added to my collection with a gift of his own, I looked upon the baubles with more affection.
I keep them in a locked chest in my private closet, which was added some years ago to our apartments, on the other side of the bedchamber from the nursery. This is not the chest we brought from our hut in the village, nor is it the chest that occupied the room when I first arrived, which I long ago sent down into the storerooms with its ominous cargo and try not to think about.
No, this chest is more sturdy, weighted at the bottom to make it harder to move, and locked with a key I keep at my wrist. I open the lid now and lift the carved wooden boxes from within, and even Araminta can’t hold back a little sigh at their splendor. She tries on the gold circlet, set with pearls, and the emerald ring, both of which are far too large for her. She reaches for the sapphire ring, and I tell her it’s the ring Daddy gave me when she was born.
“Why?” she asks, admiring the way it glitters on her finger.
“Because he wanted to thank me for bearing him a precious daughter. Because it’s the color of the sea, which he loves, and also your eyes, which he loves even more.”
She looks up at me. “He loves your eyes, too.”
“Yes. He loves us all very much, darling, and he hates to be away, and he’ll be back in two more days, if the winds hold fair.”
Araminta nods and turns her attention back to the chest. I adjust the circlet on her head so it won’t press the tender skin of her brow, while she rummages about, disturbing the neat folds of velvet that comprise my ceremonial robes.
“Mama,” she says, “what’s this?”
I look over her arm into the chest, and I notice something I have not perceived before: a small black ribbon wedged in the bottom corner.
A tiny frisson of unease ripples across my skin.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I expect it’s nothing—”
But Araminta is her father’s child, full of brave, heedless curiosity, and she promptly takes hold of that ribbon and pulls it, causing the wooden board at the bottom of the chest to rise from its place.
“Oh, look!” she exclaims. “It’s a dress!”
• • •
There’s no possible way to explain to Araminta how I came by the items of clothing she pulls from the false bottom of my jewel chest, one by one. I tell her they’re like my ceremonial robes, a sort of dress-up for adults, and she begs me to put them on so she can see them properly. I refuse and suggest it’s time for dinner.
Araminta knows better than this. Dinner begins at noon, and while the sun might hide behind the clouds at present, she is a native Orcadian, and knows at all times where it lies in the sky. Noon is still some way off. Plenty of time for Mama to try on her dress. Please, Mama.
I stare down at the handfuls of navy wool in my lap, and a waft of sea breeze seems to find my nose. A memory of roses.
But apart from the faint sensation of unease that claimed me when Araminta first made her discovery, I feel no vibration in the air, no familiar electricity. I haven’t known these things since that long-ago day on the beach, in the cave where we pulled Helen back from the portal’s brink. I have almost forgotten those sensations existed. That desire to return to my own century—our century—which fell away and turned into fear after my union with Silverton, has faded into nothing, fed by nothing. Even the grief of missing my dear friend Max—the restless tug of unfinished business and unsolved mysteries—have eased their claims on my heart, over the course of these seven blissful years. I have gotten on with life in Hoy, bearing our children, running the household of a medieval castle, loving my husband with every fiber of my heart. For the past seven years, I have so anchored myself to this world, I scarcely feel those tremors for the other one. I have largely forgotten Magnusson’s words, and the legend seeped into the stones of this castle. There are times when I reach into my leather pouch and my fingers discover the smooth, heavy, pointed shape of the bullet I still keep there, and I cannot instantly recall how I came by it.
So I lift up the hem of the blue dress and admire the fineness of the modern weave, and I think to myself, Why not? It’s part of her heritage, after all. One day I shall have to explain it all to her. How her father and I came to live on this strange shore, and why we speak a language unknown to its inhabitants.
What possible harm could it do, after all this time?
“Very well,” I say. “But you’ll have to help me with the buttons.”