“You are my forever.” He blurs suddenly, voice tunneling as if he speaks into a cone. Then it grows distant. “Forever.” It’s a breath. A hiss of steam.
I fight to hold on to the dream. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m desperate to understand.
A tightness in my chest. A great sucking sensation, and I fight it. Squeeze my eyes against the dawning reality.
The man holds out one hand—waving goodbye or trying to hold on to me.
You nasty little ingrate!A voice echoes from some distant world.
The paradise swells and narrows with a powerful sucking feeling, then with a final jolt I’m blinking in the muffled stillness of Lady St. Laurent’s house, a stiff couch beneath me. Tight corset. Slippers that pinch. Muscles stiff with tension. My mind is racing, as if waiting for a blow from some unseen danger.
It’s too quiet. Too empty here.
I squint at the grandfather clock—half past eight in the morning. I jolt awake. I’m leaving today, by nine.
Yet…I must not leave.I cannot remember why, but I cannot—must not—leave.
The voice that interrupted my dream echoes through the house. “How can you be sodisgusting?”
I scramble to sit upright, still fully clothed in the guest suite where I was meant to spend my wedding night. I escaped the festivities last night for a lie-down when my head felt it was splitting open, and here I remained the entire night,apparently. Without AJ. He maintained his promise concerning our marriage, it seems, and kept to himself.
But where has he gone?
Shaking out my skirts, I hurry up the stairs to my tiny sanctuary with the brass bed to pack, but the dream weights my movements. My heart still simmers. Yet it’s time to live in the present. I’ve made an irreversible choice.
I pause, standing over my open trunk and swaying with tiredness. No ring. I wore no ring. My head buzzes. If he wanted me, whoever he is…he’d have come for me.
But as I dress I cantastethe sea on the air. And my toes know the feel of sand. Of rock shards and seashells beneath my feet. Some part of it has to be real. But which part?
My fingers touch a small box in the dresser drawer.This part.I shake it and onto my lap falls the item I dreaded finding. Holding my breath I lift it by the chain, looking deep into the turritella agate, satiny black threaded with gold, and a haunting song shimmers in my mind.
Farewell to you, my own true love,
I’m bound for the land of the free,
And I’ll return to you some day,
If I can, to my own true love…
It swells in my head, weaving through the blocked memories, threatening to loosen them. It swells and swells.
I drop it. It was a dream. Only a dream. I’ve seen this necklace before, and my imagination must have pulled it into my dream. I am not losing my mind. I am perfectly sane.
“Out of my sight!”
The grating voice echoes again. It’s Sabine, and there’s only one person alive she ever speaks to that way.
A quarter of an hour left until nine. A thudding between my ears makes me wish to bury my face in a pillow. Instead, I kneadmy temples and head to the nursery, where Cecil is now alone. He flings himself at my legs.
I kneel. “It won’t be this way forever. Soon I’ll…”
A faint aroma catches my senses.
Oh no.
Bed linens are piled in the corner—he’s wet them again.
He outgrew these incidents long ago, but since the passing of Lady St. Laurent, they have begun again. Especially when his aunt Sabine stays over.
