Page 60 of A Hellion for the Highland Hawk
Eileen’s striking eyes flitted toward the doors of the Great Hall. “I never really belonged in your time, Nancy. I went there for the first time when I was a young woman, to escape my execution. They called me a witch and nearly burned me for it. They were right, of course, but I wasn’t about to die because I’d learned how to do things they couldn’t dream of.”
She touched a ruby pendant at her throat, the jewel so old and worn that the surface had dulled, the facets worn down.
“I came back now and then to see how me sister Beitris was faring,” she went on. “Then, you and your mother moved into the apartment downstairs, and I knew I needed to stay close.I stayed for a while after they took you away, petitioning for you, but it came to nothing. About three years later, I came back here for good. No more traveling for me, just wandering, helping where I can, and wherever I’m briefly welcome. But I thought of you, sweetheart. I thought of you every day. I was… I was supposed to bring you here, but the message didn’t come through until you’d already been taken by those idiots from social services.”
“What?” Nancy choked out, fighting to imagine what her nine-year-old self would have made of this place.
Eileen dropped her chin to her chest, her thumb still rubbing that ruby. “Your mother sent a note, but sending messages through time isn’t an easy thing. It arrived too late.” She paused, her bony chest rising and falling on a heavy sigh. “But hearing your story, it seems the magic saw fit to make things right. It must have sent you here to find out what happened to your mother.”
“Sending messages through time?” Nancy parroted, squinting her eyes as her head began to hurt. “You mean, my mother was here too?”
Eileen nodded. “I learned she was blessed with the magic, as I call it, not long after she moved into that apartment with you. You were just a baby then, no more than six months old, and your mother was distraught. I heard her crying one night, so loud I couldn’t ignore it. I went down to ask if she was okay, but when I saw her, I knew she wasn’t. I fixed her some tea, settled her down on the sofa, and she told me everything.” She smiled.“She thought I wouldn’t believe her, and I told her that I did, because I’d done it too, just in the opposite direction.
“She’d accidentally gone back in time, where she met your father. He was the man-at-arms for a laird to the south of here, and he shielded her from harm, ensuring she didn’t meet the same fate that I almost did—burned at the stake.” Eileen gave Nancy’s hand a tender squeeze. “They fell in love, they married, and they had you. But then the plague came, and your father urged your mother to return to her time with you, so you wouldn’t fall ill. And if you did, you’d have doctors and hospitals to take care of you.”
Nancy’s legs began to buckle, prompting her to sink down onto the cold flagstones before she collapsed. All her life, her mother had told her that her father loved her very much, but gave no name or information whatsoever, just telling her that he’d died.
He was here, in the past.
“Did the plague get him?” she managed to ask, her throat dry.
Eileen sat down beside her. “No, but he couldn’t travel the way your mother could. There was no way for him to get to you both, and your mother was so afraid of what she might find if she went back that she never tried. Not back then, anyway.”
She paused. “But magic has a way of… fixing things. The morning your mother disappeared, she came back here. An accident. One moment, she was walking home; the next, she was traveling back to her husband. She was upset about what thosebullies called you, and she wished she could see her husband again so he could help her tell you the truth. She was wearing the necklace he’d given her, and… it was enough.”
Trying not to hyperventilate, Nancy cast the old woman a sideways glance, her heart hurting as she saw the sympathy in Eileen’s strange eyes.
“Why didn’t she come back for me?”
Years of familiar anger began to simmer in her belly, laced with the poison of abandonment.
“She couldn’t, sweetheart,” Eileen sighed. “I don’t know why, but sometimes, the magic stops working for people. I could journey back and forth as often as I wanted. Your mum could only do it three times. Twice backward, once forward.”
At that, the bubbling anger faded somewhat, the old witch’s words an antidote to the poison. Yet, there was nothing to ease the sting of sadness that pierced Nancy’s chest as she thought of her mother trying to get back to her but unable to.
“Your father was dying on the day she came back,” Eileen continued. “Not the plague, just a sickness he couldn’t fight. Your mom showed him a picture of you before he passed. She had two weeks with him. Happy weeks, by all accounts. After she buried him, she tried to return, and that’s when she realized that she couldn’t. So, she wrote a note and left it with the laird her husband worked for, with instructions for his descendants, tokeep hold of it until the year 2008, when it was to be sent to me. It came a few days after you were taken.”
Nancy sat in silence for a long while, absorbing everything that she’d heard. It was wild to think that a short time ago, she’d have heard a story like that and thought the person was mad. Instead, it had given her the answers to questions she had been clinging to for eighteen years, filling up holes in her heart that she’d assumed would never be filled.
Every question but one: did that mean her mother was still alive somewhere in this time?
“I saw her a few times after I came back here for good,” Eileen added, as if reading her mind. “She never stopped trying to get back to you. We did everything we could think of, but it was no good. Then, one summer, about six years ago, I went to visit her again… and I learned that she was dead. A bee sting. She still had an Epi-Pen, but the reaction was too intense this time. The medicine wasn’t enough, and with no way to get to a hospital, no way to treat her, there was nothing anyone could do.”
“Oh…” Nancy mumbled, her heart cracking open like an egg, spilling out all the hope she had held onto for years.
After meeting Adeline and Jane, those hopes of finding another missing woman,themissing woman, had soared higher than she probably should have allowed them to. Now, they were all crashing down, barbed with the fact that she had missed her mother by just six years. If she’d just figured out what shewanted to write about sooner, maybe she wouldn’t have been too late.
As for her father, that was a new and devastating blow to learn that he actuallyhadloved her. Loved her enough to sacrifice his time and his life with his family, just to make sure that she survived. Loved her enough to send her into the future with the woman he loved, without knowing if he would ever see either of them again.
“So, she didn’t disappear because she was upset with me,” she murmured, more to herself than to Eileen.
In truth, it was the only silver lining she could find amid all these raw, painful revelations.
Eileen shook her head. “Not at all, sweetheart. The magic answered a wish, and then it kept her here.” She puffed out a breath. “This gift isn’t always kind, Nancy, and it’s unreliable at best. And I daresay that’s why it brought you back here, so you could finally learn the truth, so you could have your wish answered too.”
Nancy didn’t have the energy to ask if the ‘magic’ might keep her here too, the visions of the bride in the tapestry flashing through her mind.
What if it planned to reject her desire to return to her own time, so that destiny would play out as it was meant to, denying her the chance to change anything? Was it sentient enough to twist things like that?
