Yesterday's Sun (22 page)

T
he studio was a hive of frenetic activity and Holly was all but lost in the heat, dust, and deafening noise of hard labor. The piece of marble she had picked for the base of Mrs. Bronson’s sculpture was beautiful, even before she started working on it. It was almost a pity to have to hack away at the multicolored veins that threaded life into the blackest stone. But hack away she did. Three days had passed since Holly had taken that fateful walk to the ruins with Jocelyn. She had started to accept that she must surrender her dreams of holding Libby in her arms, of watching her grow and completing the family that Tom so desperately wanted, that she so desperately wanted. But the pain of the loss, the burden of guilt in making the decision without Tom, the shame of sacrificing her daughter’s life for her own, these were emotions she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to come to terms with.

Dust billowed around her as she cut into the stone with a chainsaw, obscuring her vision. Slowly but surely, the spiral was taking form, becoming a dramatic foundation for the mother and child figures that would emerge above it. Despite her progress, Holly found no joy in her work. She had a job to do; that was all.

Holly felt like the worst kind of hypocrite. There had been no bond with her own mother, no foundation on which to build a future, and now there would be no Libby to build a future for. She had been right to doubt herself all along. She was never going to make a good mother. She was willing to forfeit Libby’s life for her own. Holly had read and reread the poem. She had scrutinized every page of the journal, hoping to uncover a secret that would help her avoid the life-for-a-life rule, but her efforts were futile and she knew it. If there had been any way to avoid the sacrifice that had to be made, then Edward Hardmonton would have found it.

As Holly chipped away great chunks of stone, she toyed with the idea of using the dial again. The moondial might have thrown her life into chaos but it still gave Holly a way in which she could spend time with the child she was sacrificing. Perhaps Jocelyn was right. Perhaps it was a gift and Holly shouldn’t be so quick to turn away from it.

Not every lesson she had learned about the dial’s workings had been a harsh one. Holly now knew that her presence would be strongest under direct moonlight. She remembered leafing through Tom’s papers in the study, with the full moon shining through the window. That had been why she had found it so much easier to move things in that room. Perhaps she could find a way to finally hold Libby. Every nerve in her body cried out just at the thought of cradling her baby in her arms. But then her thoughts turned to Tom. She would have to face his grief, his eyes looking through her again, and she didn’t think she could do that.

There were other fears, too. She couldn’t be sure if the decision she had now made, the decision not to conceive Libby, had already rewritten her future. If that was the case, Holly wasn’t ready to face what the moondial might reveal. She wouldn’t use the dial, not yet. Reluctantly, however, she knew that it still had a part to play in her future. There was still one question that she would need an answer to eventually. If the dial were keeping score, was Holly sacrificing just Libby’s life or her chances of ever being a mother?

The question at the moment was almost irrelevant. She didn’t think she deserved to be a mother and she was tempted to smash up the moondial as surely as she was smashing away at the marble in front of her.

“Ever thought of taking up the building trade?” Billy was standing at the open studio doors and had to shout over the din that Holly was making.

“Is it lunchtime already?” Holly asked. She was used to being dragged away from her work to feed the hungry horde of builders who were putting the final touches on the conservatory.

“Lunchtime? More like home time! It’s three thirty.”

“I’m sorry, Billy. I must have got carried away.”

“We thought as much, but don’t worry. We’ve worked right through and we’ll have an early start, if you don’t mind. It’s a glorious day out there, probably the last of the year. You should get out into the sunshine once in a while.”

“Well, if you hadn’t disappeared for weeks and left me with a half-finished conservatory, I’d have been catching the rays in there,” scolded Holly. Billy had risen significantly in her estimation since Jocelyn’s revelations, but she wasn’t about to let him know that.

“It’ll be worth the wait,” he said with pride.

“So when will you be finished?”

“Another couple of days and we’ll be done. But you haven’t seen the last of me. I’m still finishing the plans for the garden.”

“So Tom is getting you to do the garden!” exclaimed Holly.

Billy hit his palm against his head in despair and his cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “The cat is well and truly out of the bag. Your husband is going to be so annoyed with me.”

“Well, by rights, he should be home doing the work himself. But I suppose if he’s running around the globe earning lots of money, the least we can do is spend it for him,” sighed Holly.

“When is that man of yours coming home? I keep telling him that he shouldn’t leave you alone for so long. You need looking after, whether you think you do or not.”

“He’s back in a couple of weeks, but not for long. He’s got plans to go jetting off somewhere in South America next.”

Billy shook his head slowly in disapproval. “You’ve never considered going with him on his travels?”

“Don’t think I haven’t been tempted,” Holly replied, and her body wrenched with a renewed sense of guilt. She wriggled her toes in her shoes, seeking the firmness of the floor to anchor her, but all she found was the painful crunch of stone debris underfoot.

She ached for Tom more than ever. Billy was right. She did need looking after and no one could do that better than Tom. But she wanted to spare Tom from the torment she was now going through. Her decision to erase Libby from their future would be a matter for her conscience, not his. She wouldn’t tell him until the new year, when he was home for good and the date had passed when Libby was meant to be conceived.

“Well, if you need company, you know where I am,” Billy said, shaking her from her thoughts. “If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem yourself. You should get out more. It’s not good for a person to lock themselves away.”

“I go to the village, I have Tom’s parents, and then there’s always Jocelyn,” Holly told him. “Besides, I speak to Tom every day.”

“You can be in a crowded room and still be alone,” Billy answered.

“Sage words,” agreed Holly, taken aback slightly by the seriousness of Billy’s warning. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

“And next time you speak to that husband of yours, you tell him his conservatory will be ready for a grand opening when he comes home.”

“Shall I tell him the garden will be fully landscaped, too?”

“Hmm,” replied Billy with a stern look that turned into a smirk. “The less said about that the better.”

Although the tea shop wasn’t bustling with customers at this time of year, Jocelyn was busier than ever. When she wasn’t working her day job, she had more than enough extracurricular activities to keep her occupied. She seemed to be on almost every committee or volunteer group for miles around. With harvest time in full swing, her schedule was so full that she couldn’t get away to visit Holly for their usual Sunday brunch. But she wasn’t about to let Holly off the hook so easily, so she invited her over for brunch at the tea shop instead. Holly suspected that Billy had shared his concerns about her frame of mind with Jocelyn and there was simply no way to turn down her invitation.

The atmosphere in the village felt as crisp and fresh as the late September air, a stark contrast from the dusty atmosphere of her studio, and Holly felt invigorated as she walked to the tea shop. She just wished Tom were home to enjoy it, too.

He was due home in a week and although she knew, thanks to the moondial, that Tom would return home in one piece, she still worried about him. Each time she spoke to him he seemed to be becoming more and more lost. He was passionate about his job and had stepped up to the challenge of reporting on global environmental and political issues, but that hadn’t prepared him for the human tragedy he was witnessing in Haiti. Tom was becoming increasingly frustrated with his own inability to make a difference.

It was clear to Holly that this trip was going to be more than just another assignment. It was changing Tom’s perspective on life and that would no doubt affect his career. Although Holly had glimpsed Tom’s future, she had never really seen beyond his grief to understand what might or might not be happening to him on a professional level. He had obviously taken up the anchorman role, judging from the paperwork she had seen in his study, but she had also seen his scrawled notes on the scripts, their angry tone suggesting it wasn’t a job he enjoyed—and now she was beginning to understand why.

As Holly arrived at the tea shop, she had to put her fears for Tom to one side. He wasn’t the only one causing concern.

“We’re worried about you,” Jocelyn told her.

They were sitting at a table in the tea shop, which was in a rare state of calm, midway between the breakfast mania and the lunchtime rush. Lisa was prepping some food in the back and the only customers in the place had already been fed and watered. The tea shop was filled with the welcoming aromas of freshly baked croissants.

“Would that be you and Billy, by any chance?”

“If someone as socially inept as Billy can sense there’s something wrong, then there’s something to worry about,” Jocelyn replied.

“Well, we both know exactly what it is I have to worry about.” Holly was picking at a few crumbs around the Danish pastry Jocelyn was trying to force-feed her.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do in the next few months?” It was Jocelyn’s turn to look worried.

“I have to avoid conceiving Libby. I know that and it’s not going to be difficult. I have contraception injections every three months and my next one would be in November. The plan I agreed to with Tom was to stop the injections and start making babies at the end of this year. Now, thanks to the moondial, I have to keep that appointment, don’t I?”

“The moondial gives you a window that looks out onto your future, but it’s you that has to make the life-changing decisions,” Jocelyn told Holly. “It’s a big responsibility. I know that, and I’m here when you need me, but I can’t make those decisions for you. I won’t make them for you, not when your own life is at stake.”

Holly knew that Jocelyn was the only person who could really understand the torture she was going through. For Holly, the options were somewhat easier to put into effect than it had been for Jocelyn, but the burden of the decision weighed just as heavily. “Did you have to manage on your own? Was the gardener the only person who knew?”

“Even Mr. Andrews didn’t know everything; I was too ashamed to tell him exactly what I had seen. For a long time I kept the secret of my future to myself, but eventually I told my sister Beatrice. She helped and influenced where she could but it was still down to me to navigate my own way into the future. The burden was mine and mine alone.”

“I understand, and I wouldn’t let you take any of my burden either. You don’t want someone’s life on your conscience,” Holly concluded, but then blushed when she realized how thoughtless the comment was under the circumstances.

“I don’t want anyone else’s death on my conscience. One is enough.”

“I’ve spent the last week or so trying to find a way to wriggle out of this deal with the moondial. Don’t look so worried,” Holly added, seeing the look of alarm growing on Jocelyn’s face. “I know I can’t try to hold on to Libby without risking someone else’s life. I wouldn’t only be risking my life. I know I could just as easily be risking Tom’s.”

“That’s why I won’t tell you what to do. I’m so sorry, Holly. You have to make your own choices and live with the consequences. But don’t go playing games with the dial and don’t let your guard down. Please, Holly, not when you’re playing with people’s lives.”

“I wish I’d never uncovered the cursed thing.”

“If it gets to save your life, then it’s a gift not a curse, but be careful. Don’t forget about the choice of path not being free. Remember that raindrop on the window,” she warned.

“You think it’s going to take more than simply making an appointment at the doctor’s to avoid conceiving Libby?” Holly’s frown matched Jocelyn’s.

“Sometimes you change the circumstances around events, but then they still happen. Remember what happened at Hardmonton Hall? Edward went to great lengths to protect the Hall from a fire, but all it did was change the cause of it.”

“You’re not putting my mind at rest, Joss!” laughed Holly, but the laugh was hollow and laced with fear.

Jocelyn sighed in quiet submission to the will of the moondial. “I just believe that there’s a universal balance, and I know without a doubt that changing the future isn’t easy. If the moondial has taught me anything, it’s taught me that there’s less chaos in the world than we might think. People spend so much time wondering whether they should turn left or right. They don’t realize that they’ll end up in the same place anyway.”

“But the future can be changed,” countered Holly, a familiar sense of panic rising in her chest.

“Yes, and that’s why there’s a price to be paid.”

“I’m scared, Jocelyn,” confessed Holly. “I’m scared that I have to spend the rest of my life paying the price. I’m scared the moondial intends to take away not just Libby but any other child I may have. What kind of life am I going to lead if I can’t ever have children? Will Tom still love me?”

“I may have met him only once, but that man will always love you. I’m sure of it,” replied Jocelyn firmly.

Before Holly had a chance to dwell on her fears, the bell hanging above the door of the tea shop tinkled, announcing the arrival of new customers. Lisa was at the far end of the small kitchen, still busily chopping vegetables.

“Duty calls,” Jocelyn said with a sigh as she pulled herself to her feet. Wincing in pain, she added, “I think I’m still recovering from that walk of ours. I really shouldn’t put myself through these long shifts anymore.”