The Bride of Time (23 page)

The jeweler’s establishment was next, where Giles purchased Tessa’s wedding ring, a dainty gold band with a circlet of iolite stones surrounding a diamond in the center that mirrored the violet-blue color of her eyes. Coming out of the little shop, a flower vendor approached them, her basket overflowing with little tussie-mussies of violets wrapped in paper lace. The fragrance drifted toward them and Giles halted in his tracks, took one from the woman and pressed it to his nose, inhaling deeply.

“
Violets!
Of course!” he rejoiced. Pressing a coin in the woman’s palm, he handed the nosegay to Tessa. “Your wedding bouquet, m’lady,” he said, sketching a bow. “Since the day we met, I have been trying to place your scent, and here it is at last—violets, and in London in September, of all unlikely things. I’d thought only in Cornwall could one find a violet out of season.”

“ ’Tis where they come from, gov’nor,” the old woman put in. “We has ’em sent up from Cornwall for the Little Season every year.”

“And bless you for it, mother,” Giles said, turning Tessa toward the waiting brougham. “Well, that is one mystery solved at least,” he said through a chuckle. “See how you have bewitched me?”

Tessa smiled, her nose buried in the violets. “How many Giles Longworths are there?” she couldn’t help saying. “You have so many faces, Giles, I hardly know which is the real you.”

He laughed. “You haven’t seen him yet, my love,” he said, hugging her to him. “When all is said and done…when the demons are all destroyed and the ghosts driven back to their graves, you will see him, the real Giles Longworth.” He smiled sadly, tracing the shape of her face with the tip of his forefinger. “Until then, I’m afraid you will just have to settle for this.”

There was no question that Tessa was marrying a man of mystery. Part of that was very exciting, but another part was terrifying. What worried her most was that he seemed to have forgotten what would happen when the moon waxed full and he became a ravaging wolf. Hers was a more practical nature. Tessa wasn’t able to call up the climes of euphoria while the tempest of doom still threatened. Someone had to have a level head. But still, how she loved him in this incarnation of the enigmatic Giles Longworth. How she loved that he could pick her violets in the icy rain, albeit from a raggedy flower vendor, and squander his wealth upon fripperies in the Bond Street shops.

There was nothing to be done about it, and worrying would only make matters worse. Besides, a new worry was about to present itself. They were approaching St. Michael’s through the eerie, rain-swept fog. While the special license allowed them to waive the banns and lift
the restrictions that insisted marriages be performed in the morning hours, the clergy would still frown upon weddings taking place in the late afternoon.

“Steady on,” Giles said, handing her down as Able let them out at the rectory. “They shan’t bite, though I must admit most of the clergy hereabouts do look as if they might at that.”

But that wasn’t what was worrying Tessa. It was that it happened to be St. Michael’s and not any other saint’s namesake looming before them. Could all the St. Michael’s churches be linked to the lay lines as Moraiva said? This church was chosen because of its close proximity to the little gallery on Threadneedle Street. Was it here that she’d run blindly in the fog when it all began, setting her on the course to Longhollow Abbey? It certainly could have been. She had been running in this direction when time played its trick upon her. It certainly could have been right here where she stood now that the landscape changed and the very brougham she’d just vacated came tooling along the lane looking for her. It was certainly on the route she’d taken fleeing the city, and she had seen church spires and steeples along the way. A wave of déjà vu at that thought brought crippling chills that rooted her to the spot, the rain notwithstanding.

Giles quickly raised her fur-trimmed hood and took her elbow, snapping her out of her reverie. “Good God, Tessa,” he said. “You’re getting soaked.”

Clutching the little nosegay of violets as if it were a lifeline tethering her to this time and place—
his
time and place—she followed him into the stately building before them to embrace her future as Mrs. Giles Longworth, the wife of an up-and-coming artist prodigy of the Prince Regent himself.

As Giles predicted, the clergy were none too anxious to perform the ceremony. However, after an almost vulgar
monetary inducement, the ceremony was performed in an adjoining chapel with all the amenities Giles’s could purchase. Then it was on to where Tatum’s Gallery stood in her time so she could show her new husband where, for her, it had all begun.

The rain had slackened to a misty drizzle again, and the fog had become so thick Able had to slow the coach for fear of blundering into oncoming traffic they could hear but not see. Then it came into view, Tatum’s Gallery; but not. Now, in 1811, the gilded shingle flapping above the door in the wind read:

Gallery framing, Edwin Tatum Proprietor, Framer
for the Crown

Giles tapped the carriage roof with his walking stick, and Able pulled the horses to the curb, climbed down and set the steps. Tessa’s heart was pounding when her husband handed her down to the wet cobblestones and led her toward the little recessed door of the establishment. Her husband! The last time she’d approached this portal, she was fleeing the police, wanting one more look at “The Bride of Time” before fleeing the city. On that occasion she was hatless, having lost her bonnet in flight, and wearing threadbare black bombazine and a worn pelerine. Now, she was wrapped in a cloud of robin’s-egg-blue muslin, with a pelisse of rich royal blue trimmed in sumptuous chinchilla, and a gold, diamond and iolite wedding ring upon her hand.

An elderly gentleman, Edwin Tatum himself, greeted them. His sleeves were rolled back, and his apron was decorated liberally with sawdust. The layout of the shop was nearly the same, though a dimly lit storage area off to the left would become the gallery proper in 1903. Tessa strayed there, while Giles introduced himself
as the artist who had painted the Prince Regent’s latest acquisition.

How different it smelled. The oil paint smell issuing from canvases waiting to be framed was present under the surface, but a stronger aroma of resin and varnish and seasoned wood permeated the air. Tessa shut her eyes and inhaled deeply.

“We haven’t much time,” Giles murmured, slipping his arm around her.

Tessa gave a lurch and melted against him. “You startled me!” she gushed.

“Is this where you saw ‘the Bride’?” he asked.

Tessa nodded. “Yes,” she said, sweeping her arm wide. “There was an alcove right here, where all of your paintings were displayed…or perhaps I should say all of your paintings
will be
displayed.” She strolled deeper in. “And here there was a loo, a water closet, with a little window that I climbed through to escape the bobbies.”

“Bobbies?” Giles queried.

“That’s what they call the police who patrol the London streets in 1903,” she explained.

The words were scarcely out when loud shouts in the street turned them both around. Able’s gravel-voiced bark pierced the quiet amplified by the fog.

“Git back here, ya little blighter! Stop! Git back here, I say!”

Tessa’s eyes flashed toward the shop window in time to see a small, lithe shape streak past the window, Able limping after in pursuit. She gasped as recognition struck and her knees suddenly felt as if they’d gone to water.

“Oh, my God, Giles!” she shrilled. “It’s Master Monty!”

As if launched from a catapult, Tessa ran from the shop, Giles on her heels. She raced past the slack-jawed
proprietor, past the coachman, who had stumbled to a halt soothing his leg, leaning against the horse his bluster had spooked. She was quicker on her feet than either of them. Ignoring their shouts behind, she kept on running, keeping the boy’s shape in sight through the thickening fog, which was nearly impenetrable with the eye the farther she ran toward the fringes of Cheapside.

It never occurred to her that she was heading straight for Poole House until it was too late. The lighthearted titter of a child’s laughter funneled back at her out of the fog, then the boy disappeared altogether in the milky thick of it.

A familiar spiked iron fence came into view. A whistle sounded, loud and shrill at close range, and she careened headlong into an unsuspecting bobby looming up out of the misty darkness.

Chapter Eighteen

“The little blighter was hidin’ in the boot!” Able grumbled, still soothing his leg. “I heard a noise. When I opened the back, the little devil jumped out and landed hard on me foot with both o’ his. Then he kicked me a good one in me shinbone—same spot that cob you sold to the Gypsies kicked me last month—and took off like a pistol shot. I’m sorry, sir, I couldn’t catch him. He was too quick for me.”

Giles dove into the coach. “Get back into that box, man, and drive this thing!” he charged. “We will never catch them afoot now!”

The coachman hopped up top and seized the ribbons, snapping them hard, and the horses pranced off in the direction Tessa had taken. Giles opened the window and poked his head out into the foggy afternoon glare, but there was no sign of either Tessa or Monty. The street was practically deserted, and though he called at the top of his voice, there was no reply.

The carriage struck a rut, and Giles ground out a string of expletives as he hit his head on the window frame. “Watch where you’re going, man!” he charged Able, who came back with an inaudible reply, drowned out by the clopping of the horses’ hooves and the groaning of the
brougham’s taxed suspension. Gripping the edge of the seat for support as the carriage listed into another hole in the cobblestone lane, Giles’s hand grazed something soft and cool to the touch on the seat beside him. He groaned as his fingers closed around the violet nosegay he’d bought for Tessa. “Faster, man! Faster!” he shouted.

“Make up yer mind!” the coachman barked, snapping the whip over the horse’s heads. “I ain’t no Corinthian, and this ain’t no gig. You’ve already busted one carriage this month. We can ill afford another gone ta ruin.”

“Do you think I give a care about the carriage?” Giles seethed, brandishing his walking stick out the window like a Bedlamite. “I have to find her!”

“How far do ya think she’ll git?” Able asked him. “She’ll come back when her legs git tired, with or without the boy, and good riddance, if ya ask me, if she comes back alone! We should turn ’round and wait by that framin’ shop. That’s where she’ll be lookin’ for us.”

Giles threw down his walking stick. Flinging his beaver hat across the carriage, he pounded the seat with white-knuckled fists and raked his hair back ruthlessly with both his hands, as if he meant to keep his brain from bursting through his skull. Able didn’t understand. He didn’t know. And Giles couldn’t even tell him. The poor man would never believe it.

All Giles could think of was that she could have blundered onto one of the lay lines, corridors through time that he had thus far been denied. Moraiva had said once accessed, future admittance to the subterranean passageways became easier. Had she gone somewhere in time where he could not follow? Had he lost her? He was about to run mad at that prospect.

And then there was the church—St. Michael’s Church. Why hadn’t he taken her to St. Magnus for the ceremony, or St. Mary le Bow, as they were both equidistant to their destination? What had he done? He
didn’t even know, and Moraiva, the only one he could confide in, the only one who could help him, was keeping vigil back in Cornwall in case the boy returned; they’d believed he’d accessed one of the corridors when all the while the cunning little devil was hiding right under their noses.

Giles let out a deranged laugh and called Tessa’s name out the window at the top of his voice again.

“She couldn’t have come this far afoot, sir!” Able responded. “We need ta go back, I tell ya. She must have turned off somewhere. She could be back there at the framin’ shop waitin’ for us right now.”

Oh, how Giles prayed Able was right, but he didn’t believe it. “Turn ’round then, damn it, man,” he shouted, “and let us see.”

She wasn’t at the frame shop; nor had she been. Giles waited there while Able tooled about the lanes and avenues of Cheapside until dark cancelled the search and the framer turned him out to lock up for the night, but there was no sign of Tessa or the boy.

There was no use going to Bow Street. There was nothing the Runners could do to fetch her back from the year 1903. They would lock him up for a madman. He’d almost forgotten his commitment to the Prince Regent. Praying that if Tessa did find her way back to his time she would go to Carlton House looking for him, he instructed the coachman to take him back to the coaching inn to collect their belongings. He would keep his commitment to the prince, meanwhile sending Able back to cruise the length and breadth of Threadneedle Street. There was nothing else he could do.

“Hold her, I say,” a woman’s shrill voice cried. “She’s the one who stole my brooch!”

Tessa’s heart sank. It was Miranda Poole. She had come rushing down the steps and through the ornamental
wrought iron gate the minute the bobby’s whistle sounded.

“Here now, madam, stand back!” the bobby charged, turning to Tessa. “What’s your name, miss?”

“She’s Tessa LaPrelle,” Miranda Poole put in, “my former scullery maid. She stole my pearl brooch and ran off before we could have her locked up right proper.”

“All right, madam, settle down!” the bobby warned her, turning back to Tessa. “Is that your name, miss?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you see?” Miranda Poole interrupted. “I told you! I demand you arrest her at once!”

“Do you have this woman’s brooch?” the bobby asked Tessa.

“No, I do not, and I never did,” Tessa defended. “She found it in my room after one of the other servants put it there to implicate me.”

“Oh, I see, so ya got your bauble back then,” the constable said to Miranda Poole.