Their fond looks fell at the clanging sound of Roland’s glass hitting the counter. “Mr Darcy, are you a time traveller?”
There was no sense in denying it, but it was strange, frightful even, to admit something that had been hidden for so long. “You cannot tell anyone, Roland.”
“Who would believe it?” Then he laughed, a strange, agitated sound without humour. “And you?” he asked Elizabeth. “You’re not from ancient times, are you?”
Darcy raised an eyebrow at the 1800s being “ancient.”
“No, but I went back by accident,” she said in soothing tones. “On solstices at sunset, a doorway opens in the centre of the Nine Ladies stone circle from two hundred years ago to now. On equinoxes, it’s the reverse. That’s how I met Mr Darcy.”
She gave him a heartfelt glance that told him she had no regrets. As much as Nine Ladies and its power alarmed him, he owed his present happiness to it. He had been especially fortunate in finding a woman like Elizabeth two hundred years out of her time.
Roland turned to him with more alertness. “And you just decided, ‘she’s pretty and electricity sounds awesome, I want to live there instead’?”
“Something like that,” he said drily. That was a gross oversimplification of everything he and Elizabeth had suffered and done to be together, and be together in a time where they could both be happy and whole.
“We should talk to him,” Elizabeth said. “It’s late, and he must have questions. I know from personal experience that reassuring him that hewillget home will do wonders for his peace of mind.”
“Her,” Roland corrected, gulping the rest of the whisky.
That was even stranger. A woman, on the moor, alone, and at night in 1826? It hardly made sense. If anyone ever arrived here out of their time, he had thought it would be a lost shepherd or perhaps an Irish traveller or Romany.
“One of us should talk to her, and the other can stay with Sandra,” Elizabeth said to him. Roland’s cottage was half a mile away. “Would the time traveller be more comfortable withyou because you’re from her time, or with me because I’m a woman?”
Before Darcy could answer that it would be distressing either way, Roland stood and said, “You can both come. She’s here in the house.”
“You did not take her to your house?” That surprised him. He had never wanted a time traveller amongst his family and had told Roland in the unlikely event he “came across anyone” to keep such a visitor away from Pemberley House. Roland was the sort to follow instructions perfectly.
Of course, this was far from a typical night.
“I tried to,” he said, letting the glass drop to the counter with a thud, “but she insisted on coming to Pemberley.”
“How would she even know about the house?” Elizabeth mused.
“Pemberley was one of the largest houses in this area of Derbyshire, aside from Chatsworth,” Darcy answered. “Haddon Hall is closer, but it was not occupied in the nineteenth century. She might have simply known where to go for help.”
Roland went to the door that led back into the house. “Nope, she asked for you by name.”
Darcy had been about to follow him and stopped short. Everyone in the nineteenth century believed he was in the Canadas with Elizabeth and had left Pemberley to his sister Georgiana.
Elizabeth must have thought the same because she said, “That can’t be right.”
Roland shrugged and opened the door. “She insisted on coming to Pemberley House and asked for Fitzwilliam Darcy. Knew your whole name, sir. She would only wait in that room at the back of the house on the ground floor. I tried to get her to sit in the oak parlour or the library, but she said she wouldn’t presume and that’s where guests waited to be received.”
“The room behind guest services?” Elizabeth asked. “We use that for meetings. Why would she choose there?”
Astonishment staggered him. Darcy’s heart raced, and his lungs struggled for air. “That used to be the best drawing room.”
A woman familiar with Pemberley, who knew him by name, and insisted on being received in the drawing room? It was too incredible to be real, and he was both terrified it was true and wanting it to be true more than anything in the world.
Darcy pushed past Roland and ran through the door. He heard Elizabeth call his name, but he darted to the main staircase and took the stairs down two at a time. He clasped the newel post at the bottom and spun to charge in the other direction and threw open the door to the old drawing room. A woman in a high-waisted walking gown was seated by the table, staring curiously at a plastic pen someone had left behind.
She jumped to her feet at the sound of him barging in, her startled expression immediately brightening when she recognised him.
“Georgiana,” he cried, before she threw herself into his arms.
CHAPTER TWO
After she chased her husband down the stairs, it took Elizabeth a long moment to recognise that the woman he hugged was his sister. Bewilderment flooded through her. Not only had her friend Georgiana Darcy grown up, but she was here two hundred years out of her time. Darcy finally let her go, but held a firm grip on her shoulders and looked her up and down.
