‘Yes.’
‘So this was home for you in your own time, as well.’
Claire gave a nod. ‘It still is, come to that. I still go back and forth, my dear. Not quite as often, any more. The process seems to slow with age, but even so it’s really not a thing one can control.’
Of course, I thought; and with a dawning sense of understanding I recalled what Mark had told me on the day we’d argued in the field: ‘When I was young,’ he’d said, ‘Claire used to go away for days, for weeks, sometimes, to do her work … She still does, every now and then …’
I said, ‘It can’t be easy, though, with Uncle George gone.’
‘It was never easy.’
When all this had begun back in her own time, for the first few weeks after she’d moved her things into the cottage nothing untoward had happened. And then one day while walking in the gardens she’d heard voices, and passing the half-open door in the high wall she’d found Mark and George pruning roses.
George had smiled at her. ‘Hello,’ he’d said. ‘You came back.’
She’d been lost after that.
But it hadn’t been easy.
‘It was,’ she said, ‘a very different life than I was used to. You think women have achieved things now, you want to wait and see what’s yet to come. And then of course there were the children and their feelings to consider, and the more I fell in love with George the more it all became so very complicated.’
In the woods the bird had stopped its song. Some little creature rustled briefly in the undergrowth and then was gone, and all I heard then was the whisper of the wind among the leaves and further off the plaintive crying of a gull above the shore.
‘I went away,’ she told me quietly. ‘I found it all too much, you see, and once I had returned to my own time I left my cottage and I went away to London.’
She had stayed away for nearly a full year.
‘What brought you back?’ I asked.
Her answer was a simple one. ‘I loved him.’
We sat quietly together in the garden for a moment while I turned this over in my mind, and then she shook the memories off and looked at me.
‘Do you feel that you can talk about it yet, my dear? I rather think your story might be more exciting than my own.’
‘Oh? Why is that?’
‘Because.’ She reached across and lightly touched my hand. My left hand. ‘Your ring is on a different finger now, and knowing you that is no accident,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken a rare interest in the smugglers of Polgelly. And the coat you wore when you came back last night was stained with blood.’ Her hand moved up to smooth the hair back from my swollen cheekbone. ‘Then there’s this. He didn’t do that, did he?’
‘Who?’
‘The man you’ve married.’
I had always marvelled how Claire could just accept things, never doubting, taking everything in her stride, and now I finally knew the reason for it. Nothing would surprise her, I thought, after what she’d lived, herself.
I shook my head and told her, ‘No. He would never hit me.’
And I settled back, and told her all of it, beginning where we’d started once before here in this garden, with the voices in the next room and the path that wasn’t there.
It took some time to tell it properly. Enough time that we’d gone through one more pot of tea and half a plate of sandwiches before with difficulty, haltingly, I reached the point where I had stabbed the constable.
‘And good for you,’ was Claire’s pronouncement. ‘What a bastard.’
‘Yes, well let’s just hope he wasn’t meant to father somebody important later on.’
Claire didn’t think it very likely. ‘Anyway, your actions can’t change history, as you said.’
‘That’s Daniel’s theory,’ I corrected her. ‘He thinks that what has happened is already cast in stone, and can’t be changed. That’s why I couldn’t stop Jack being shot and killed, no matter what I did.’ That knowledge didn’t make it easier to say the words. ‘It was his time to die.’
Claire’s quiet glance was comforting. ‘He seems a very clever man, your Daniel.’
‘Yes.’ Which brought to mind another theory Daniel and I shared. ‘Claire?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘When you went away that time, and stayed away so long,’ I asked, ‘what happened? I mean, did you travel back in time at all?’
She shook her head. ‘No. When I wasn’t at Trelowarth, nothing happened.’
‘And when you were here,’ I pressed further, ‘did you ever travel back in time when you were in Polgelly, or St Non’s?’
‘No. Only here.’
I felt a twist of hope. ‘So then it is tied to Trelowarth.’
Claire agreed that it did seem to be. ‘Perhaps it has something to do with Felicity’s ley lines.’
I frowned. ‘But why us, though? Why are only the two of us affected? Why not Susan, or Felicity, or—’
‘Darling, it’s a mystery, and it likely will remain one. I don’t know what brought your Uncle George and I together, and I doubt I ever will. He called to me, somehow,’ she said. ‘That’s all I truly know. He called to me, or else I called to him.’ The sun was setting now, the shadows growing longer on the sundial as she looked at it serenely. ‘We were both a little lost, I think, and so we found each other. How does anyone find anyone?’