Yesterday's Sun (19 page)

“I think that’s the one thing that will always remain a mystery. The journal shows how the brass mechanism was engineered, but the timepiece was an instrument to count down the hour, not dictate where the reflection would lead. It’s clear from the notes that it can only be the dial that makes the choice. How it does that, I don’t honestly know, but it does seem to choose a critical point in the traveler’s life.”

“Or death,” added Holly morosely. “Have you brought the journal with you?”

“Don’t worry. It’s in the basket. Once we’ve finished with our picnic, you can have it. I don’t want it anymore.”

“How did you get hold of the journal, anyway?”

“Mr. Andrews, the old gardener at the Hall, came to see me not long after Harry bought the moondial. Though he had never used the dial himself, he had been a close confidante of Edward Hardmonton. I’ll tell you all about it later, but I think you need to read the poem in full first. Ready for the next verse?” insisted Jocelyn.

This path, too, was practically clear, with pretty clusters of lichen around its edges, though not enough to conceal the engraving.

Like a hand upon the water

No imprint shall there be

Like a drop of rain on glass

The choice of path may not be free

Holly stared at the words and tried to make sense of it. A shiver passed through her body as she remembered her footprints in the snow and the dust on the mantelpiece during her last vision and she realized that the first part of this verse fit perfectly with her own experience. She had visited the future but left no imprint. Any impression she made disappeared just like the poem said, like a hand upon the water. The meaning of the second part, however, eluded her, or perhaps she was simply evading it.

“The choice of path isn’t free? What does that mean? Does it mean I have no free choice or does it mean something else? You said there was a price to pay.”

“A little of both, I think. The best way of explaining it is to picture raindrops on a window like the poem says.”

Holly wasn’t convinced that picturing a pane of glass would ease her confusion, but she did as she was told and let Jocelyn guide her through the image developing in her mind.

“Have you ever tried to follow a particular raindrop as it makes its way down the glass?”

Holly nodded in agreement but said nothing. As a child she had spent hours watching the rain trickle tears down her bedroom window.

“As it hits the window,” continued Jocelyn, “you would think it’s setting off on its own journey. But at some point, it will cross the path of another raindrop. You may not be able to see that path and you may think that there’s not even a trace of it there, but then suddenly your raindrop veers in a new direction. It’s following its predecessor, no longer on its own journey but one that has already been laid before it.”

Holly hadn’t realized that she had her eyes closed as she followed an imaginary raindrop on its path down her old bedroom window. When she opened her eyes, Jocelyn was watching, her gaze infused with sadness.

“Life, it seems, demands a certain balance. Even when you think you’re choosing a new path, it can sometimes lead you to the same place.”

“Oh, my God,” gasped Holly. “It means no matter what kind of health checks I have, if I get pregnant with Libby then I can’t avoid dying in childbirth. That’s what you’re trying to tell me, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, Holly. I wish I could say the last verse will give you hope, but I can’t. The moondial’s rules are cruel; there’s no way of softening the blow. Just remember that the dial is giving you a chance to save your life. Try not to lose sight of that. Try to see it as a gift.” Her voice had the hushed tones befitting a funeral parlor.

“A gift? How can this horror that I’m being forced to go through ever be called a gift?” Holly demanded, anger burning the back of her throat.

“If it keeps you safe, and I know it will, then yes, it is a gift. Come on, let’s read the last verse,” Jocelyn said, her tone still soft and unnervingly sympathetic.

The last path was covered in a thick carpet of moss and as Holly scrubbed away the stone’s living shroud, she felt her heart sinking.

If evading death you seek

Then the dial shall keep the score

A life for a life the price to pay

Never one less and not one more

“A life for a life,” Holly repeated. “What does it mean, ‘keep the score’?”

She had asked the question, but Jocelyn wouldn’t answer her. She just looked at Holly and waited for her to interpret the poem for herself.

“My life for Libby’s? I have to erase my beautiful baby’s life for the sake of my own. Please, Jocelyn, please tell me I’m reading it wrong.”

When Jocelyn’s continued silence gave Holly the answer she hadn’t wanted to hear, a crushing weight knocked the wind out of her and she let herself sink to her knees. “Oh, Jocelyn, I don’t think I can bear this anymore!” she cried out. Then she did something that she had never done before in her entire adult life. She let herself cry without restraint. In a matter of moments, she was howling sobs that had been a long time in the making.

Jocelyn laid out the picnic in the rose garden, picking the location because it was out of sight of the moondial circle. The food remained untouched but Jocelyn insisted that Holly drink some tea, which was, as always, sweet and hot.

Holly had quelled her tears and, despite the shock, she wanted to hear more about the dial. She needed to understand how it had been used in the past. She had to be sure that there were no other options before she gave Libby up completely. “Tell me what happened to you, Jocelyn,” she asked. “You told me how you were going to be driven to suicide, but how did the rules apply to you?”

Jocelyn played with her teacup, swirling its contents as if she would find a path back to the past. “I think I need to start at the beginning. Is that all right?” Jocelyn asked, her eyes already glistening with unshed tears.

“Take your time. I’m here for you, too,” offered Holly as she leaned over and squeezed the old lady’s hand.

“Mr. Andrews didn’t mention time travel the first time he visited me at the gatehouse. He had simply come to hand over the wooden box and the journal … with some reluctance, I’d have to say. I think he was torn between letting the secret of the moondial die with the Hardmontons, and leaving it to its new owner to decide. He warned me to read the journal first and not to resurrect the moondial unless I was prepared to accept the consequences. By the time he returned a few months later, I hadn’t just read the journal but I’d experienced the power of the moondial firsthand.”

“The dial chose to take you to that point in time when you’d committed suicide.”

Jocelyn nodded. “I went through the same nightmare you probably did, questioning my own sanity. The journal seemed to confirm everything I’d experienced, but I was more than willing to dismiss it as fantasy. When Mr. Andrews realized I’d seen my future, he helped me accept that what I’d seen could really happen. We took this exact same walk to the Hall and the stone circle, where he helped me interpret the poem exactly as I’ve done with you.”

“The raindrop on the windowpane,” confirmed Holly.

“When I realized that the ‘life-for-a-life’ rule meant that someone else would have to die in my place, I simply resigned myself to my fate and for two years, I did nothing.” Jocelyn shrugged her shoulders by way of any further explanation.

“But then you used the dial again and saw what Harry would do to Paul. That’s why you changed your path. But the life-for-a-life rule?” asked Holly. However, she was already working out the answer as the words came out of her mouth. “Oh, I see. It was Harry. Harry took his own life. That’s why you feel so guilty, isn’t it?”

“That isn’t the half of it,” confessed Jocelyn. “When you avoid death, the life that will be sacrificed in your stead isn’t necessarily yours to choose. The life taken is always a close family member, not necessarily a blood relative but within the family circle. You can’t just go out and randomly kill a stranger and expect the score to be settled.”

“You said the moondial’s rules were cruel, but, Jocelyn, cruel doesn’t even begin to describe it!”

Both women were staring in the direction of the moondial site, unable to meet each other’s haunted gaze. Morning had slipped silently into afternoon and as the determined September sun fought through the gathering clouds there was still just enough warmth left in the day to heat up the gentle breeze. Holly shivered nonetheless.

“I couldn’t avoid death without risking another member of my family. The moondial demanded a life and my worst fear was that it could be Paul’s life I was risking. That’s why I did nothing for two years, not until I saw what would happen to Paul if I didn’t try to change the future.”

“Please don’t say you killed Harry,” gasped Holly, half jokingly, but with a fear that there were yet more unpleasant surprises to be revealed among the ruins of the Hall.

Jocelyn smiled, but as she wrinkled her eyes a tear began its solemn journey down her cheek. “As good as,” she confessed. “I saw what he would do to Paul and I felt a rage growing inside me that perhaps only a mother can feel. I had never fought back against Harry’s abuse. I couldn’t have been more submissive if I’d tried. But when I saw Harry’s cruelty being directed at Paul, destroying him as surely as it had destroyed me, that rage consumed me and I think I would have been capable of murder if it had come to it.”

Holly did her best to concentrate on Jocelyn’s experiences. Though she was trying hard not to think about how all of this knowledge would dictate her own path, she could feel those familiar insecurities about motherhood returning to haunt her yet again. She thought she had been learning to be a mother, but she wondered if she could even begin to imagine the burning rage that Jocelyn described.

Jocelyn was trembling as she resurrected the specters of her past and she seemed to have reached the point where she couldn’t go on. Holly desperately needed to hear more to help her understand. “If you didn’t kill him, how did you make sure the life that would be taken was Harry’s?” asked Holly softly.

“I started fighting back,” whispered Jocelyn, as if she were afraid to wake up the ghosts that seemed to be crowding around them. “Harry had unwittingly given me the skills to undermine him. Of course, unlike me, Harry wasn’t in the least bit submissive, so when I started to stand up to him, his reaction was explosive. The abuse and cruelty he inflicted on me escalated and the physical abuse became more frequent, more intense.”

“Oh, Jocelyn, I never imagined it had been so bad,” replied Holly, genuinely shocked by the horrors Jocelyn must have faced in the house that was now Holly’s home.

“I think the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’ certainly applies to me. And through it all, Harry still managed to keep the abuse hidden from Paul. In front of his son it was only veiled threats and warning looks, but he made up for it when Paul wasn’t there. Of course, he was a gentleman, he never hit my face. He made sure the bruises he gave me could be hidden from view, and so my secret shame would have remained just that if I hadn’t realized that I could use it to my advantage. I made certain other people knew. Slowly but surely, Harry’s work dried up as people refused to deal with him. The people in the village became my silent allies and, with the help of my sister, Harry was ostracized. He was close to the breaking point, but then I started to wonder if I’d gone too far, if maybe I would still die but at Harry’s hands instead of my own. It was only the intervention of a dear friend, my knight in shining armor, who tipped the balance back in my favor and really set the path of my future on its new course.”

“And who was this knight in shining armor?”

“Someone you already know,” answered Jocelyn cryptically. “He’s still a regular visitor to the gatehouse.”

“Billy?” gasped Holly.

Jocelyn nodded. “He was a young man in his prime back then. He had called around to the gatehouse to chase Harry for money that he owed him. It was the middle of the day and Paul was at school, so Harry was making the most of the time we had to ourselves by beating me to a pulp. One minute I was cowering in a corner and the next, Billy was there and it was Harry who was nursing bruises and broken ribs at the end of the day.”

“Well done, Billy.” Holly was smiling with a newfound admiration for her builder.

“It wasn’t so much the beating that Harry found so hard to take but the humiliation, and I reinforced his shame every chance I got. It broke him, and when he was at his lowest, I knew it was time to leave.”

“And that’s when the moondial showed you it would lead Harry to suicide?” asked Holly in disbelief. Holly had always known that Jocelyn was much, much stronger than the frail body that ensnared her, but it was still difficult to imagine Jocelyn taking her husband’s cruelty and using it as her own.

“There was just one more thing I had to do first. The moondial needs a specific event as a catalyst to switch from one vision of the future to another and, for me, it was sitting down and writing Harry a letter, telling him that I was leaving him. I told him how he had failed at everything and the world would be a better place without him, although I think I might not have put it quite so subtly. With the letter written and my bags packed, I used the moondial one last time. It confirmed that everyone I loved would be safe, that it would be Harry and not me who would commit suicide and that it was safe for me to leave.” Jocelyn lifted her head high and looked directly at Holly. “So, going back to your original question, yes, in a way I did kill Harry.”

“And you never told Paul.”

“No,” confirmed Jocelyn. “I couldn’t tell him before Harry died in case it changed the future, and afterward, I was wracked with guilt. I couldn’t justify what I had done even to myself, let alone justify it to Paul.”