Twisted Tale of Stormy Gale (6 page)

This went on for a few months until my father got wind of it from his solicitor who had seen me with the children. I was forbidden to go any longer. I had turned seventeen that April and was practically a man by any standard, but as I had no income of my own, I was bound to my parents tightly. His edict didn’t stop me, but I had to be tricky and limit my visits to a couple times a month.

On a warm June evening, not knowing the visit would be my last, I’d gone to bring the young rabble on Fenchurch Street some berry tarts I had secured from the kitchens. As I approached the corner of Fenchurch by way of Upper Thames Street, I heard a voice I recognized down the alleyway. Little Molly. Thinking to alert her of my visit, I headed toward the alley to call to her when another voice, a deep male voice rang out.

“You will have things you never dreamed of, sweets. And I would never hurt you or the boy.”

I peered around the corner, shielding my body behind a large shrubbery, and saw Molly and the little ginger-haired boy, Peter, standing with a well-dressed older man.

Molly’s face was scrunched up in thought, and the man spoke again.

“If we are to go, the time is now,” he said urgently.

She looked up at him, grabbed Peter’s tiny hand in hers and gave one brisk nod. “All right, sir.”

I wanted to run out and yell. What possible reason could this man want to lure these young ones into a deserted alley? Why would he want to take them somewhere else with him? My brain supplied possible answers, none of them good. I couldn’t believe Molly would go with him. Surely she knew better. But maybe his offer was more than she could refuse. Terrified for the children but unsure what to do, I backed away a bit to conceal my face from view. Wherever they were going, they would be coming back my way leaving the alley, and I could remain undetected, then jump out and intercede when they got closer. It could be that the man would just let them alone when he realized there was someone watching.

I was sure I could convince Molly that this was not prudent if I just had a moment to speak with her. And worst-case scenario, if it came down to a fight, the man was large and fit but getting on in years. With the element of surprise maybe I had a chance.

I ducked low behind the bush, waiting. But a minute later, they still had not passed. I took another furtive peek around the corner and stared in disbelief. They stood in the same spot, but the man had donned a pair of strange goggles, with multiple lenses in varying sizes. In his hand he held a timepiece. It was big, with elaborate gears, and he turned a dial on it with care. Linking his arms with the children, he stood remaining very still.

“Close your eyes,” he counseled.

They did. I had no idea what to expect at that moment. Would he dash them in the head with his strange, giant pocket watch? Would he push them to the ground and beat them? Would he laugh at their naïveté and walk away? Whatever my brain had conceived could not compare to what actually happened next.

The air behind them crackled, then wavered, almost like water rippling. A small pinpoint of bright light appeared and flickered. And as I stood frozen, stood doing nothing to stop them, I watched Molly and little Peter, hand in hand with the devil, vanish in a blinding flash.

Gone.

The words blurred and my eyes burned. Fat tears plopped onto the yellowing pages as, for the third time in the last thirteen years—and the second time that day—I cried for real. My heart was breaking into a million pieces.

Devlin, the Loony Duke of Leister, had gone to Bethlehem Hospital because of me.
Bedlam
, they call it. The most infamous sanitarium in history. And
I
had put him there. I had quite literally ruined his life. How lonely he must have felt, how scary it must have been, how abandoned he was. A bolt of fury toward his parents shot through me. Parents who don’t stand by their children are lower than slugs in my book.

Tears still flowing, I turned the page and found a whole section of drawings of me, of Gilly, of Bacon, of the TTM and goggles. They were all painstakingly detailed and fairly accurate, with the exception of Gilly. His eyes looked somehow cruel, indicating that Devlin had a skewed view of him based on his interpretation of the events of that day.

At least an hour passed as I continued leafing through the rest of the journal. There were no more entries from Bethlehem Hospital. The next written entry was dated February 1824, and it was apparent that Devlin had just been released, writing from home. He seemed relieved to some degree, but still very troubled by our disappearance.

Entries were sporadic from then on, sometimes with several months between them. Many of them chronicled his interviews of the other street children regarding our possible whereabouts and the strange man who had taken us, and his theories over what had happened. One entry mentioned his nickname (although at that time it was “the Loony
Lord
of Leister”), which bothered him more out of guilt for the burden on his family than anything.

Things took a turn when he entered university and started taking a serious interest in science and engineering, even dabbling in alchemy. He began to put it all together then, and through his studies, realized that it was no magic or devilry, but science that he had witnessed. This gave him some relief because it allowed him to hold out hope that we were alive and well.

By his early twenties, Devlin was numb to any judgments of him and had lost patience with his parents’ preoccupation with society and their reputations. By the time they were both killed in a carriage accident when he was twenty-five, their relationship had been strained to say the least. He dutifully mourned their passing, but if their relationship had been one of affection, by the time of their passing it had dulled to one of obligatory respect. He moved on with his life quickly.

After their deaths, he traveled, studying science wherever he went, still on a quest to unlock the mystery of our disappearance. It was around 1832 that he’d become convinced that what he had witnessed was time travel, and all his efforts and entries surrounded that topic. I was glad to see that they indicated his determination to solve the mystery as well as passion and interest in time travel rather than just guilt and despair over Bacon and me.

The very last entry was the day after his card game with Bacon. Apparently, Devlin had no clue that this was the boy he’d been looking for all those years. Bacon had only been six at the time we disappeared. As a man, he looked nothing like the dirty little ragamuffin of Devlin’s memories, aside from maybe the hair, but even that had mellowed to a strawberry blond over the years. All Devlin was hip to at that point was that the TTM looked exactly like the device he had seen in his dreams for the past thirteen years, and that he needed to possess it. Once he had won it, he did try to get some information on the devices’ origins, but Bacon, in a rare display of common sense, told him that he had won it himself only a few nights before.

I closed the book after reading the final page and stood for a moment, still reeling. In all real terms, nothing had changed. I’d promised Gilly that I would never divulge our secret. This was the one thing, the
only
thing, he had ever asked of me, and I wouldn’t let him down. Telling anyone, even someone as worthy as Devlin, was out of the question.

So now what? Suck it up and keep it moving, Stormy, that’s what.
I tried not to think about Dev at all as I did a thorough check of the room, making sure I didn’t leave anything important behind. I checked my bag one more time to make sure I had everything and left the workspace.

As I tiptoed up the stairs and approached the chamber where Devlin slept, I was at once relieved and heartsick to hear him snoring still, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. I wished I could have just woken him up, for even one minute. But I wouldn’t lie to him anymore. And I couldn’t tell him the truth. So there was absolutely nothing to say.

Jesus, what kind of person am I? After all he went through for me.
Could I dare to hope that he would just be satisfied to know that we were alive? That he would be able to move on and find happiness now? Maybe even a wife who would love him for his dogged determination and innate kindness. Or the way he smelled, all warm and manlike. Or the way his dimple flashed and his eyes lit up when he laughed. The tears that seemed to be my constant companion of late returned in a rush and I bit my hand to stifle a pitiful sob.
Get on with it, you twit.

I pulled the key from my bag and stuck it in the lock but didn’t turn it, leaving it sticking from the keyhole. Then I reached into the carpetbag one more time and pulled out the sketch of Gilly, tearing off a corner of the sheet and putting the drawing back in my bag. Grabbing a pencil from a nearby desk drawer, I wrote:

Devlin,

For the first time in thirteen years, I truly wish things were different. But they’re not. And still, I can’t leave without letting you know that Bacon and I have lived a wonderful life, with a gentle, loving man who treated us as his own. And you don’t have to worry about us anymore.

Forever,

Stormy

I folded the note gently and laid it on the floor in front of the door, knowing that once Devlin woke up, he would find the key in the lock and use his ingenuity to free himself. He would find my letter, but not before I had a chance to get away.

Then I grabbed my bag and walked out of the house, leaving Devlin behind.

Again.

Chapter Six

I had purposefully gotten a room close to Leister’s estate so that if a break-in and getaway was necessary, Bacon would be close by and we could make tracks fast. But as I walked the two miles back to the inn, I discovered that covering the relatively short distance still left me way too much time to think.

I stopped and almost turned back at least a dozen times, only to continue walking because there was no point in going back. It would only delay the inevitable.

I cared about Devlin a lot. That much was true. And to be honest, even that much was tough for me to swallow because I can count on two fingers how many people I’ve allowed myself to get close to in the last twenty years. Sure, he was gorgeous and funny and sexy and smart and great in bed. But more than that, he was a good man with a shiny, pure soul. If I could find a man like that in the twenty-first century, I’d chain
him
to
my
bed. But I couldn’t tell him about the TTM and I couldn’t tell him about time travel, or anything else for that matter. So he couldn’t come with me, and I couldn’t stay in 1800s. Not just because of air-conditioning and tartar-control toothpaste, but also because I needed to take care of Bacon. We made a pact a long time ago that we would never go back to stay, and I could never leave him, so that was that. Not that Bacon was the problem, really. Even if there was no Bacon, and I could stay, Devlin wasn’t the type of guy to let it go.

“Hey Dev, listen, about all that stuff? The stuff that landed you in the loony bin for six months and ruined your life forever and destroyed your family? Just forget it. I am going to stay here with you and just plead the fifth about what went down that day, where I’ve been and what that machine is. You cool with that?”

I almost cracked a smile, thinking about what his reaction would be to that. The urge was fleeting as I reminded myself that I would never see his reaction to that or anything else, ever again. My stomach pitched at that, and I would have given anything to click my heels and be home a moment later where I could sleep until the pain of it all passed.

Despite my waffling, I made pretty good time. I arrived back at the inn about a half an hour later, freezing my ass off—since I had no drawers on.

I looked like a disheveled gypsy mess. There was no way the proprietress would recognize me as the same lady who had checked in. To avoid any hassles, I sneaked around to the side door, maximum stealth engaged, and sidled through the hallway to our room. I unlocked the door and slipped into the room. Bacon was standing in the corner near the window.

I shut the door behind me and rounded on him, the despair a living, writhing thing inside me. It was determined to manifest itself in some horrible way and found a suitable target in my brother.

“Well, Bacon,” I began in a voice dripping with acid, “I just want to thank you again for setting this hideous mess into motion with your careless—ooof!” The air was forced from my lungs in a rush as he threw his arms around me, lifting me off my feet and squeezing so hard I thought was going to end up a human bobblehead doll.

“Dammit, Storm, you scared the ever-loving shit out of me. I thought you were dead or something. One hour,
one more hour
and I was leaving for Leister’s to get you. What the hell happened? I was so afraid for you,” he said softly, voice breaking, dopey green eyes swimming with unshed tears.

Aww jeez
. My mouth was still open in preparation for verbal castration, but I closed it with a snap.
And for my next act, ladies and gentlemen, seal pup clubbing.

Dammit. I wasn’t even allowed to throw a decent hissy fit. With a sigh, I holstered my word pistols, packed away my puppy-kicking boots and pasted on a reassuring smile.

“I’m okay, I’m fine.” Breaking away from his iron grip, I held out my arms and executed a turn so he could see that I was in one piece, at least on the outside. “But we have to go. Right now.” I brushed by him and started gathering the few things we had brought with us, shoving them into my bag.

I briefly debated changing into my proper lady garb again to make the walk through town toward the beach in the event that Devlin asked after us and described me, but didn’t want to waste another minute. Even if he woke shortly after I left, it would take him some time to escape. Odds were that we would be long gone by the time he was out and about asking questions. Even so, he was wicked smart and my instincts were telling me that above all else, we needed to get out of town as quickly as possible. Plus we still had to get out to the beach, assemble my TTM and locate the wormhole. We needed as much of a head start as we could get.

“Right, so you got it, then?” Bacon asked hopefully.

“Of course I got it.”

“Thanks, Sis.”

He sounded pathetically grateful and I gave him a quick grin. “No problem.”

Until that point I’d been so wrapped up in my own feelings that I hadn’t considered whether I would tell him what happened, or about Dev and the asylum. On one hand, he wasn’t a child and he deserved to know. On the other, he would feel just as guilty about it as me, and what purpose would that serve?

For the gazillionth time since his death, I wished Gilly were there to give me some advice.

Sick to death of my own self-pity and determined to shake off the melancholy, I stopped quibbling, took the bull by the horns and gave it to Bacon straight.

“Here’s the situation,” I began, closing my carpetbag, and trying to keep my voice light. I told him almost everything but left out the sex part—because who wants to hear that about their big sister?—and any mention of how I left things with Devlin.

He stared at me, trying to gauge whether I was serious or not, for a long moment.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, he does look like him, now that you mention it. Man, he was so nice to us, ’member?”

Sigh.
I ’membered.

I tried to push the big lug toward the door, but he dug in his heels.

“So is he okay now?” He sounded so forlorn I wanted to cut my tongue out for telling him. I couldn’t for the life of me recall why I thought it was a good idea. I guess maybe misery really does love company. For someone who detests lying to someone they love, I prepared to make a hypocrite of myself and geared up for a doozy, because I knew Bacon wouldn’t let it go.

“He’s okay. When I left, he was sleeping like a baby. And I asked him earlier if he wanted to come with us, but he’s a really busy guy, so he said no. Now that he knows we’re okay, he’s going to live happily ever after. Probably get married and have twin boys named Mackenzie and Jack, buy them ponies and so on. It’s going to be great,” I announced cheerfully, grabbing one of his big mitts in mine and pulling him toward the door. He narrowed his eyes in suspicion, but lucky for me, he allowed himself to be led away and soon we were on the street hoofing our way to the beach.

It was only about a ten-minute walk and I set a grueling pace, mostly due to the circumstances, but also to keep Bacon out of breath so he would stop asking me questions: did I think Devlin was going to be okay? Could we could come back and visit him sometime? Loads of questions, none of which I wanted to answer, because the answers were just too sad. I was totally disgusted with myself, but no matter how I turned it, I didn’t see any possible way to make this a happy ending.

We approached the beach, and the brackish smell of the water assailed me just as the breeze kicked it up a notch. I scanned the area quickly and had Bacon do the same. It was deserted, as would be expected in October, and we moved to the copse of trees we had come from only the day before.

Lord, has it really only been one day?
So much had happened and I was so wrung out, it seemed like a month or more.

Once we found our landmark tree, I set down my bag, calling to Bacon over the whipping winds. “Get out the APGs, and I’ll put together my TTM. Dev was messing with yours and I don’t want to take any chances with it.”

He nodded and pulled the goggles out of the bag. I reached in and grabbed various pieces, losing myself in the intricate task of rebuilding the TTM.

“Uh, hey, Storm?” Bacon called a few minutes later.

“I’m almost done, just a couple more minutes. Did you find the wormhole yet?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I don’t see one.”

I put the half-assembled TTM down and held out a hand for the APGs, donning them quickly. As I moved through the various loops and lenses, I noted that my perception stayed the same no matter which lens I selected. I went through all seven once, then again. No striations, no change in color, no ripples in the atmosphere. Nothing. It was almost like the lenses were just plain glass. I closed my eyes briefly as realization dawned.
Dammit, Devlin
.

I should have known that he would take some precautions. Replacing the lenses with glass would be the safest thing to do on the off chance I somehow got to them.

Okay, so this was a minor setback. I had a legendary eye for wormholes and, as I knew we were in the general location, it was only a matter of time until I spotted it.

“Glass,” I shouted to Bacon, pointed to the lenses. “It’s okay, I don’t need them. See if you can find it while I finish.” I had added the last just to keep him busy. If Hogwarts had a wormhole-spotting class, Bacon would have failed miserably.

I bent to pick up the time-travel device so I could complete the assembly, but was halted by another unpleasant epiphany. If Dev had taken the time to sabotage the goggles, why would he carry all the pieces to the TTM in his pocket for me to find? I knew, just as surely as I knew all of my names, he wouldn’t.

I continued, determined to finish the task and find out what was missing so I could evaluate just how dire the situation was.

A couple of minutes later, I found out. The temporal displacement module was missing. It was nothing but a tiny sensor and a needle that moved to and fro. In fact, it didn’t really alter the functionality of the machine at all. But what it
did
do was allow us to gauge when to stop. Without it, accuracy, even to within a decade, was impossible.

Prognosis: pretty fucking dire. Sticking around to fix it by dismantling Bacon’s TTM and swapping parts out would take at least an hour. Not to mention that no time-travel devices were exactly alike, so there would need to be additional adjustments. At the end of the day, without the proper tools, we still could be off by as much as a year.

No, we needed to get out of Lordship ASAP. We’d have to just go where it took us and hope for the best. Wherever or
when
ever we ended up, we could take our time and fix it properly. This trip had been doomed from the start and I was finally resigned to that fact that its conclusion was going to be no picnic either.

I looked up to see Bacon squinting at various points in the air, closing one eye, then the other, occasionally swiping at the air like a bear trying to knock a beehive out of a tree.

“Got anything?” I asked him, managing with some effort to keep all the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Not yet.”

“All right, then, you set the TTM and I’ll look for the wormhole.”

As I began the hunt, trying to keep my eyes unfocused in hopes of spotting a ripple, I heard a sound. It just barely penetrated the rush of the wind and the crash of the waves. I stopped and strained to hear more clearly and was rewarded with the sound of a baying bloodhound. My heart stuttered and I froze in sheer terror as the sound got closer.
Please, no.

A moment later, a lean brown dog came around the bend and entered our little thicket, jowls flapping as it howled and barked. A sharp whistle sounded, and the hound went silent.

Not twenty feet away, Devlin of Leister rounded the corner looking loonier than ever, wild-eyed, with my torn underwear clutched in his hand. His mouth a tight line, his jaw tense.

There had always been some small part of me that took comfort in the fact that I had endured so much pain in my life, almost like it might make me somewhat immune to more. Part, “Okay, I’ve had my share of misery, so in the interest of Even Steven-ness, the rest of my life should be easy, right?” Combined with a dash of, “And if not, fine. After what I’ve seen and been through, there isn’t much you can do to me that could be worse, so whatever.” But as I stood staring at Devlin, that part of me shriveled up and died. Apparently, fate was intent on making this a teaching moment. The lessons? You never become immune to new pain, you don’t get credit for old pain and it ain’t up to you to decide when you’ve had your share of it.

Devlin’s eyes stood out in stark relief against his face, so pale and so full of sadness and bitterness, it took all I had not to look away.

The hound trembled with excitement as Devlin reached to pat him, murmuring words of praise as he continued to skewer me with his stare.

“Hello, Dorothy.” He inclined his head in a stiff nod, “Bacon,” he said, his voice thawing slightly. “Good to see you again.”

“Hey, Master Dev,” Bacon said, his eyes alight with unrepressed happiness. Dev returned his smile halfheartedly as he surreptitiously stuffed my underwear into his pocket.

“Stormy said you were sleeping but I hoped I’d get to see you before we left. This is great, like a reunion, right?” Bacon asked, sensing something was amiss as his eyes flitted from me to Devlin and back.

“Yes, just like that. I had hoped I would see you before you left as well. Where are you headed?” he asked Bacon in a deceptively casual tone.

“Don’t,” I pleaded.

“Don’t what, Dorothy? Don’t try to get the answers I have spent my whole life trying to find? Don’t try to stop this from happening again?” he asked, his voice raw with hurt and edged with desperation. “You don’t want to be with me. You’ve made that abundantly clear. But dammit, don’t rob me of the answers I deserve.”

“They aren’t my answers to give,” I said, begging with my eyes for his understanding.

“What’s happening, Stormy? I thought you told him. I thought he didn’t want to come.” Bacon asked.