For All Time Read online

  He covered the larger room in three strides and flung the door open.

  What he saw was a great surprise yet no surprise at all. Two women, wearing clothes like those he and Toby still had on from the dinner party, were standing by the fireplace. The room was painted yellow, with a bright red wood-framed sofa and a few chairs with needlepoint upholstery.

  Graydon stayed outside, looking into the room. He wasn’t sure about entering this place that seemed to have a very flexible attitude toward time.

  “Is Toby here?” he asked, but no one looked at him. “Is Tabby here?” he asked louder, but still no one reacted. Obviously they couldn’t hear him.

  Tentatively, he put his foot inside the doorway—and saw the slipper he’d been sent with the costume change to a square-toed boot. Ah, much better, he thought. When he looked up, he thought he saw Toby walking toward the stairs.

  Without hesitation, he entered the little sitting room.

  “Garrett!” one of the women said. “You have returned.” She was a pretty young woman and smiling in a way that seemed to mean they were friends. “We didn’t expect your ship to get in for another few weeks.”

  The other woman was older and she was frowning at Graydon. “Have you seen Mrs. Weber yet?”

  Graydon was glad for his training in diplomacy because he felt like saying that when he did see the woman he might strangle her. Instead, he smiled. “No, I haven’t seen her. Is Tabby here?”

  “I’m not sure,” the older woman said.

  The younger one stepped forward. “I just saw her with John Kendricks’s daughter.”

  “On the window seat,” he said and realized that he was now in Kingsley House and it looked like it was John and Parthenia’s wedding—which made him smile. That meant Tabby hadn’t yet been sacrificed to the storekeeper in an attempt to pay the bills.

  As he headed toward the door that led to the big parlor, the young woman stopped him. “Garrett,” she said softly so only he would hear, “I think you should know what’s been going on while you were away. Mrs. Weber has arranged for Tabby to marry—”

  “That little sea urchin, Silas Osborne? I know that. I’ve come home to rescue her.”

  “How fortunate for her,” she said. “I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you,” Graydon said and turned away. The large parlor of Kingsley House was full of people dancing and laughing, and Graydon in his tan trousers and short jacket fit right in. Many people greeted him by the name of Garrett, most of them expressing surprise that he was there so much earlier than expected.

  “Where’s your brother?” a few asked.

  Graydon covered himself by saying, “Which one?” He assumed they meant Captain Caleb, but he wasn’t sure. He looked over the heads of the dancers to see if he could find Valentina/Victoria, hoping she could tell him where Toby was. But he didn’t see her.

  In the far corner was the little girl Ali, with her drawing pad. She was sitting on the cushioned window seat that just an hour before Ken had taken apart. Graydon quickly made his way across the room. He didn’t have time to make introductions. Besides, he assumed Garrett and the child were acquainted. “Was there a woman here with you?”

  “Tabby,” the girl said. “Her mother is angry at her. She doesn’t want Tabby to marry you.”

  “I know,” Graydon said, “but in this life, she can marry me. Do you know where she is?”

  “I think she went home,” Ali said, and he knew the child meant the BEYOND TIME house. Graydon started to leave, but then he turned back. “Ali, I want to ask a favor of you.”

  She was quite young and he doubted if she’d remember what he was about to tell her, but he could try. “When you are twenty-three years old, I want you to have your portrait painted and put it in a big frame. Have your father make it with secret compartments in it. I want you to write about and draw pictures of the houses you and your husband create and hide everything inside the picture frame. I want to make sure the future knows who you are and what you two did. Do you think you can remember all that?”

  “Yes,” Ali said and nodded in that way children do when something nonsensical makes perfect sense to them. “Who will I marry?”

  “Valentina’s big, healthy boy,” he answered as he hurried toward the front door.

  When someone handed him a beer, he took it and kept walking. It was beginning to hit him that right now he was not a prince. He didn’t have the weight of a whole country on his shoulders. Who he married, where he lived, every word he spoke, was not going to be scrutinized, questioned, weighed, and measured. Any slip of his tongue would not be tomorrow’s headlines in the Lanconian newspapers. Being seen with a pretty girl wouldn’t show up on the Internet with the caption “Is This the Next Queen of Lanconia?”

  And speaking of pretty girls, he saw a circle of men surrounding two of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. In the modern world he was used to seeing women who’d spent hours making up their faces, but these young women had the faces they were born with and they were exquisite, almost too perfect to be real. As he looked, hardly able to blink, one of them smiled at him, and he was so enraptured he almost ran into a door.

  A man nearby laughed.

  “Who are they?” Graydon asked, still staring at them.

  “The Bell sisters, and don’t get too near or their father will go after you with a grappling hook.”

  “Somebody should paint their portraits.”

  “Garrett!”

  Reluctantly, Graydon turned away and saw his brother. He wasn’t exactly like Graydon, but enough like him that they must cause comment. “Rory,” he whispered.

  “Rory?” he said, laughing as he gave Graydon a masculine shoulder clasp. “I haven’t heard that nickname in years.” He turned to the woman on his arm. “Right after I was born, Cousin Caleb said I ‘roared like the wind’ and the name stayed with me. Until I was an adult, anyway.”

  Graydon hadn’t at first noticed the woman with his brother, but when he looked at her, his eyes widened. Unless he missed his guess, she was Danna—and she was heavily pregnant. He very much wanted to talk to his brother, but he wanted to see Toby more. “I must—”

  “I know. We all know,” Rory said, laughing. “Just back from the sea, and all you want is Tabby. But have you heard what Lavinia Weber is up to?”

  “In detail,” Graydon said over his shoulder as he practically ran to the front door. It took him about a minute and a half to cover the distance from Kingsley House to BEYOND TIME. If his guess was correct, that was where Toby would be trying to find him.

  She was standing under a huge tree at the side of the house, the white silk of her dress shimmering in the moonlight.

  Halting, he watched her as he tried to let everything sink in. It was quite possible all this was a dream. For days they’d been inundated with everything of the early 1800s. Food, clothing, manners had all been studied. On top of that, Toby’s dreams had filled their minds. And tonight, with Dr. Huntley’s story of Lavinia and her unhappy daughter, it’s no wonder that he would have the same dream.

  That’s what he consciously told himself. Inside, all he could think was that right now he wasn’t fated to be a king, and with that came a great deal of freedom.

  When he took a step forward, he felt taller, lighter, as though a great weight had been taken from him. He stopped a few feet behind Toby and waited for her to turn around and see him. When she did turn, she looked as though she was about to cry.

  Graydon didn’t say anything, just held out his arms, and she ran to him. He held her tightly, his face buried in her hair.

  “Tabby’s mother is going to—”

  “I know,” Graydon said softly. “I’ll take care of it.” He began kissing her neck.

  Toby pushed away from him. “No! You don’t know what’s ahead. She’s going to make Tabby marry Silas Osborne and he’ll treat her badly.”

  When she referred to Tabby as another person, Graydon realized that she thought he was Garrett a