Out of the Blue (A Regency Time Travel Romance) (39 page)

She leaned into his embrace once more,
thankful he had yet to read her a lecture about the foolishness
that had led to her being kidnapped in the first place. But that
was just like Marcus—he didn’t hold a grudge. Which was a good
thing, now that she thought about it, because she had been giving
him a hard time, one way or another, ever since she got to Regency
England.

But now she was going home—back to her own
time. “I’ve got my ring, Marcus,” she said, pulling Peregrine’s
greatcoat more closely around her. “Do you have yours?”

“I do,” he answered as Goodfellow pulled the
horses to a halt just outside one of the main gates. Cassandra
didn’t know which, and couldn’t have cared anyway, for in the near
distance she could see the flambeaux lighting the White Tower.
“Here, my darling, I want you to take these,” he said, pushing a
small cloth bag into her hands.

She held the pouch up to the faint light. It
felt as if it was full of marbles. “What’s in here?”

“A few gems, enough to keep you safe if—”

Cassandra’s blood ran cold. “If, Marcus? You
promised me there weren’t going to be any ‘ifs.’ Do you still think
we might be separated?”

The door to the coach opened and Goodfellow
let down the folding stairs. “No, my love,” Marcus answered,
although his head was turned, so that she could not see his face,
look into his dark eyes, and judge for herself whether or not he
was lying to her. “Now come—we still have to bribe our way past the
guards. Corny—Perry? Are you coming?”

It took forever, or at least it seemed so to
Cassandra, but at last Marcus had persuaded the guards at the
barred gate to allow them through. The hands on her watch read a
quarter to twelve before they had mounted the huge flight of steps
to the White Tower and were standing in the room holding that
memorable Elizabethan chair.

“Hold there! In the name of the King!” The
voice came from somewhere above them, perhaps the chapel that
Cassandra had decided against visiting that fateful day so long
ago—a whole lifetime ago.

“Now what?” Cassandra bleated plaintively.
She knew she had bleated. But she didn’t care. She was tired, and
scared—and pregnant, dammit! She was allowed to bleat!

“Another guard,” Aunt Cornelia whispered,
stepping in front of Marcus. “I’ll handle this. You wait until I
have him distracted, and then slip by him and run as if the devil
himself was after you. Godspeed, my darlings. All my love and
prayers go with you.”

“Corny—” Cassandra began, before her voice
broke. This was it. They really were leaving. “Corny—I love you!”
she vowed earnestly, taking a moment to fling her arms around the
woman’s ramrod-stiff back before Marcus pulled her away.

“Good-bye, Aunt,” Marcus said solemnly,
leaning down to kiss Corny’s thin cheek. “Your name may be Haskins,
but you are the
best
of the Pendeltons.”

“Yes, yes, now go, children—go!”

Marcus grabbed Cassandra’s hand, pulling her
along behind him. Peregrine led the way, holding high a flaming
torch that had been stuck in a holder on the stone wall. They raced
toward the narrow hallway and the winding flight of steps that lay
just a few feet along that hallway, tucked out of sight.

Cassandra’s high heels made it nearly
impossible for her to hurry. She pulled free of Marcus in order to
slip them from her feet.

“Marcus?” she called loudly, the sound of her
voice echoing off the ragstone walls. “Marcus? Where are you?”

“Just ahead of you, my love,” she heard him
call back to her. “Keep coming, Cassandra. I’ll wait for you.”

“Hurry, Cousin Cassie,” Peregrine instructed,
his voice sounding very far away—too far away. “The mist is already
here!”

“Marcus! Don’t wait for me!” she shouted, all
thought for her own safety fading as she realized that Marcus was
in real danger. “Go on! Go on! I’ll catch up!” Her heart pounding,
her arms outstretched so that her palms were scraped by the rough
ragstone walls, she made her way toward the light of Peregrine’s
torch, toward the eerie blue light that she so longed to see.

“There you go, Cousin Cassie,” Peregrine said
at last, his smiling face welcome after her terrifyingly dark
descent of the winding staircase. “Marcus is already there, waiting
for you. He didn’t want to go, but I pushed him in. Good luck—and
I’ll make you proud. I promise!”

“Good-bye, Cousin,” Cassandra said, barely
able to see him through her tears as Peregrine stood on the last
step, carefully keeping himself away from the blue mist that now
filled the small room. “I’ll never forget you.”

And then she plunged into the mist, blinded
by it, her hands outstretched, searching for the solidness of
Marcus’s body—and found nothing.

C
assandra sat
propped against a half dozen pillows in the middle of the big
tester bed and wiped away the tears that she couldn’t seem to keep
from falling on the yellowed sheets of paper in her lap.

Peregrine had left his letter behind the
picture in the upstairs hallway, just as he had promised. The
letter was quite lengthy, begun in 1812 and added to over the years
until 1853, and it told of many things, many wonderful things, that
had happened since he had returned from the White Tower once she
and Marcus had “done their flit.”

But Peregrine was gone now, as were Aunt
Cornelia, and Rose, and Goodfellow, and even Jacques—although it
seemed strange to walk through the rooms of the Grosvenor Square
mansion and not see them, not hear their voices.

She did have her pictures of them, of course,
the pictures she had picked up only that morning at a small shop
around the corner in Providence Street.

Their lives had been good, at least according
to Peregrine, who had wed Rose a scant year after that fateful May
night. Rose’s main attractions, according to Peregrine, had been
that she seemed to love him, and that she didn’t expect him to
learn to dance. Besides, he loved her too. It had only taken a year
for most members of the usually prickly high-in-the-instep London
Society to learn to love her homey good nature as well, and their
life together had been good.

Jacques, Peregrine had written, had returned
to France after Waterloo and had become the head chef for some
French prince in Paris. Peregrine, or so he said, planned to mourn
the man’s loss until his own dying day.

To Cassandra’s delight, Goodfellow and Aunt
Cornelia had wed, although it had taken Corny nearly five years to
unbend enough to post the bans with the Pendelton family butler.
Aunt Cornelia had mellowed with the years (or at least as much as
that dear lady could mellow), and had stayed on in the Grosvenor
Square mansion even after she was eventually widowed, to
alternately nag and dote on Peregrine and Rose’s only child.

Cassandra already knew that Peregrine’s
son—he’d named the child Marcus Charles Walton—had gone on to found
a dynasty in the railroads, an empire that later expanded to
include the airline industry. Smart man, her “Cousin Perry.” He had
followed her directions to the letter, so that the Walton name, now
carried by more than three dozen proud Englishmen, had become a
real force in the world.

She took up the letter again.

It took a long time before people stopped
speculating as to what happened to you, old friend, but in the end
Aunt Cornelia took care of everything. According to Corny, who
swore she had received a personal letter from you two years after
your disappearance, you married Cassandra in America before the two
of you went off to deepest Africa and discovered a lost
civilization. Made you their king, this lost civilization did, and
Cousin Cassie their queen. It has been forty years, and I still
hear it talked about in the clubs, although the story has grown.
You now are said to have discovered a lost diamond mine, rather
than a lost civilization, and everyone is quite sure that one fine
day one of your descendants will be back, to claim this house and
all your lands. Oh, and by the by, Prinny refused to vacate the
title, saying that he was sure you’d return, although I think it’s
probably that little bag of emeralds you had me drop into his lap
that made him so charitable. I told him you found them in the White
Tower, just as you said for me to do.

Anyway, considering as how I also told
Prinny a couple of things I learned from dearest Cousin Cassie, and
being as how those things came true, our dearest Majesty (may he
rest in peace) allowed for a little fudging of rules, dear Marcus.
Thanks to Prinny—and some fancy footwork by a grateful friend—if
your male descendant (and you know just whom I mean!) was to arrive
in Grosvenor Square anytime before 5 June 1992, wearing a certain
ring (yes, I confess that I bribed your solicitor and had a copy
made, then presented it to the King’s Royal Treasurer), that male
descendent is to be named the Sixth Marquess of Eastbourne. Just
think, Marcus, you have defied all the laws of nature you are so
proud of—you have succeeded yourself!

I dislike closing this letter for the last
time, for it will mean that I have to say my final good-bye to my
dearest friend, but I am old now, and Rose says it is time. We
adjourn to the country this week, so that I may putter about in the
garden, or whatever it is old men do. As Corny said that last
night, “Godspeed,” Marcus and Cousin Cassie. You are the best of
people and the best of friends!

After reading the letter for a third time,
Cassandra refolded it and tucked it in a drawer in the nightstand
and lay back against the pillows, turning the ring on the third
finger of her left hand round and round nervously. It wouldn’t do
to let Marcus see that she was still so emotional.

Her dear, sweet Marcus. How frightened she
had been when she couldn’t find him in the blue mist! But then,
just as she thought she would lose control completely, the mist had
cleared and there he was, smiling at her, his arms spread wide,
saying simply, “Come, my love. It’s time to go home.”

Together they had crept up the stone
staircase and joined a tour group that was just then descending
from the chapel, Marcus’s smile wide as he pointed to the sign
describing the history of the Elizabethan chair. Cassandra walked
up to one woman and began to make an offhand query as to the date,
saying that she always lost track of the days when on vacation,
then exclaimed, “Miss Smithers! I don’t believe it! It’s as if I
never left!”

“Why, yes, my dear, of course it is,” the
librarian from Omaha had answered. “We were only upstairs for a few
minutes. So sorry you missed it. Are you feeling better now?”

“Better? Oh, oh yes, of course. I’m so much
better you just wouldn’t believe it! You will excuse me, won’t you,
Miss Smithers? I’ve,
um,
I’ve met a friend, and he has
invited me to his home.”

And what a home (by Marcus’s quick count, one
of only three original buildings left in the Square) they had come
back to—a perfectly preserved, fully staffed Regency mansion,
except for the fact that it was stocked from cellar to attic with
VCRs, compact disc players, microwave ovens, dimmer switches for
the chandeliers, and a wide-screen television set that Marcus
immediately had moved upstairs into their bedchamber.

As to how she had left Regency England on the
last
day of May and still ended up back in her own time as
if she had never left it, Cassandra had no idea. Marcus, however,
said that he “had a theory,” although he hadn’t gotten to tell it
to her before she silenced him with a kiss.

Cassandra smiled, remembering that she still
had missed the London Book Fair, and would most probably be fired
once she phoned the office in Manhattan—which she would do any day
now. Yep, any day now. Or maybe next week.

But she couldn’t care about her job anymore.
She was through editing other people’s work. She was going to
write. Fiction. Lots of fiction. Really nifty historical romance
fiction. As a matter of fact, she had a great idea for a
time-travel romance!

“Daydreaming again, my love?” Marcus asked,
walking from the dressing room that had been converted to a
bathroom. A snowy white towel was about his hips and he used
another to rub at his shower-wet hair. “I will never tire of that
contraption, you know,” he told her, grinning. And he was right. He
was in the shower so much, Cassandra had teased him that his toes
had become webbed.

“There are lots of things you don’t seem to
tire of, darling. Except to eat, I don’t believe I’ve been out of
this bed in three days. I wouldn’t be surprised if our son ends up
being born here.”

“Our son,” Marcus said, his expression so
proud she would have teased him, except that she was just as proud
as he about their child, the heir to the title Marcus had never had
to relinquish. “Peregrine” might not be a Latin-based name, but she
was going to get it into the list of middle names for the Seventh
Marquess of Eastbourne if she had to wedge it in sideways!

Shrugging into his dressing gown—an exact
replica of the dressing gown he had worn that first night when he’d
come into her room—Marcus sat down beside her on the bed and used
the remote control to switch on the television set. It still
annoyed her that he had mastered the remote in a matter of minutes,
when she still couldn’t program the VCR in her apartment in
Manhattan. But that was Marcus. He could fit in anywhere.

And he would. Although he could content
himself being the marquess, and spend his days jet-setting around
the world, Marcus had already told her that he planned to enroll in
college as soon as they’d gotten his official passport and paid a
visit to her parents—her parents, who phoned daily—her father, to
ask about “this man you plan to marry,” and her mother, whose
conversation centered more on layettes and baby showers.