Cottage by the Sea (11 page)

   "Is there no record of what ultimately happened to Kit's wife?" Blythe insisted.

   "Your namesake? I've never come across any. Whatever supporting letters or diaries that may have existed have been lost or misplaced after all this time."

   "Or were destroyed…" Blythe murmured absently.

   "Possibly," Luke agreed. "My wife, Lindsay, was always struck by the mystery of how the house came into my branch. She insisted on christening our son Richard Garrett Barton Trevelyan Teague, saddling the poor lad with the same collection of surnames that I have strung after mine." He paused briefly, lost in thought. "I thought it a rather sweet attempt, really, to reunite the family—if only in name."

   "You have a son?" Blythe exclaimed, glancing over at Luke's family tree. "Oh! Of course… there he is… listed at the very bottom. You never mentioned him. How old is he?"

   Her incredulous gaze was an uncomfortable reminder that Luke had maintained a decidedly distant relationship with his only child these last two years.

   "He'll be ten soon," he replied evenly. "He's due home from school for the summer holidays in a few weeks' time."

   Blythe placed her brandy snifter on Luke's desk and prepared to return to bed.

   "It's always been amazing to me how you Brits still pack your children off to boarding school at such a tender age," she said wearily, looking as if she were fatigued to her very marrow. "It's absolutely Dickensian."

   Then she turned to face him suddenly and appeared conscience-stricken.

   "What a rude thing to say," she apologized. "Forgive me, truly. It's just that it's so different in America. I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. From the time I could toddle, I helped my dad feed our cattle with a team of horses and a sled throughout the winter… and spent the summers on horseback, chasing lost cows in the hills. I couldn't imagine being sent away from all that."

   "And your mother?" Luke asked curiously. "Did she ride too?"

   "Not after my sister was born," Blythe disclosed quietly. "She was twenty-six when she had Ellie, and died of a blood clot in the brain about five years later. So, you see…" she concluded, as if she were embarrassed to have offered such a lengthy account of her various relations, "from the time I was eleven, my grandmother, my brother, and I all competed in the local rodeo—a kind of gymkhana, I think you call it here. I loved Jackson Hole. I never wanted to leave my family—or my home."

   "So you're a genuine cowgirl," Luke laughed admiringly, tacitly accepting her apology and grateful that the conversation had veered away from the subject of his young son. "We must go riding on the moor while you're here."

   "
Retired
cowgirl," Blythe corrected him.

   With a small sigh she turned toward the staircase. Luke strode across the room and escorted her up the wide oaken steps. As they reached the landing, he suppressed a desire to guide her farther down the corridor on the right into his own bedroom.

   
The woman's an emotional mess. You, of all people, Lucas Teague,
should understand what that's like.

   Turning to his left, Luke walked her to her bedroom door. Smiling faintly, he said, "You'll be all right, will you, cousin? Not afraid of any ghosts?"

   "Wouldn't that be something?" Then she added hastily, "Our being distant cousins, I mean?"

   "Hands across the sea, and all that?" He grinned. "I think it would be splendid."

   Instead of clasping her hands to emphasize just how splendid he thought their potential kinship could be, the current owner of the threadbare Barton-Trevelyan-Teague estate politely bade her good night and quickly retraced his steps to the landing. And before his houseguest had stepped into the sanctuary of her own bedroom, the bathrobe-clad lord of the manor marched resolutely into the shadows of the opposite hallway that led to the castle's master suite.

Blythe gently closed the door to the yellow guest bedroom and slumped against the wood paneling. She took a deep breath to try to steady her nerves, wondering if she had finally, completely, lost her sanity.

   Who was that raving lunatic storming around the castle waving his sword, and why was he clothed as if he were playing some down-at-the-heels Sir Percy Blakeney in
The
Scarlet Pimpernel?
She glanced down at her trim waistline, cloaked, as before she'd descended the stairs into Luke's library, by her cotton nightgown. She was at a loss to explain how its sheer material had been replaced earlier by the thick folds of the boned gown that had pressed painfully against her bulging stomach.

   Whose bulging stomach? she wondered, utterly bewildered. Whose child? And was that woman named Blythe
her—
Blythe Barton Stowe from this century? It was as if she'd been in a dream and watching a dream at the same time.

   However, thanks to her extensive training in theatrical makeup and costume, Blythe hazarded a guess that the clothes and unpowdered hairstyle worn by the sword-wielding, breeches-clad, pockmarked apparition named Christopher "Kit" Trevelyan dated toward the end of the l700s.

   As for the portrait of Kit's brother—it had seemed genuine enough before it had been obliterated by Trevelyan's rapier thrusts. And as far as Ennis's portrait of the first Blythe Barton herself—the resemblance was close enough to be unsettling.

   She walked unsteadily to her bed and sank onto the mattress, her mind reeling. The genealogy chart had behaved as if it were a TV screen in some kind of Cornish "virtual reality" video arcade! To Blythe the anguished words uttered by Christopher "Kit" Trevelyan had reverberated across the book-lined chamber, across time, across the centuries, across oceans and continents. The agonized sound of his voice echoed, almost word for word, the phrases she'd shrieked at her husband that ghastly day when she had found him on the Paramount Pictures lot in his private trailer with Ellie.

   
I loved you! Everyone else must have known! How could you…?

   But was any of it real, or had she recently experienced some sort of weird hallucination—a vestige of the raging fever that had plagued her these last few days? How in the world could Luke's genealogy chart have provided such a world-class paranormal peep show—one that had offered a glimpse into the tumultuous lives of ancestors who, perhaps, had sired her branch of the American Bartons?

   Blythe ran the palm of her hand along her flat abdomen and mulled over several other possible explanations for the phantasmagoric display she had seen. The likeliest answer to these eerie developments, she concluded, was that she was simply having a nervous breakdown.

   And with that Blythe gulped down her antibiotics, plus two extra-strength headache tablets, and fell into bed.

A gentle knock roused her from a deep sleep that had been blessedly free of dreams—a remarkable feat in itself, she thought drowsily, considering her bizarre experience in Lucas Teague's study the previous night.

   The bedroom door opened a few discreet inches.

   "Morning tea, mum," Mrs. Quiller announced softly. "Shall I put it on the table beside your bed?"

   "That would be lovely," Blythe replied, struggling to sit up and arrange herself comfortably against the plump bed cushions. Barton Hall's housekeeper set the tea tray on the nightstand and immediately crossed the bedchamber to fling aside the heavy drapes. Brilliant morning sunshine flooded the room, and Blythe felt reassured that her strange encounters in Luke's library had, indeed, been only imagined.

   "And could I be bringin' you a poached egg, or perhaps you'd fancy a bit of kippers this morning for breakfast?"

   "That's so kind of you, Mrs. Q," Blythe replied. "I'd love to try the kippers, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. It reminds me of when my father and I used to eat trout for breakfast in cow camp in the Rockies when I was a child."

   "Cow camp, mum?" Mrs. Q asked with a puzzled smile.

   "In the summer in Wyoming, we moved our herd up to the foothills onto the summer range so we could use the lower range to grow and harvest our hay for winter. We'd catch our breakfast in the icy creeks feeding the Snake River." She threw aside her bed linen and reached for her dressing gown, flung carelessly across the bottom of the bed. "Which reminds me that I've lazed around a lot lately," she noted wryly. "I am definitely on the mend, so it's about time I had breakfast downstairs and let you get on with your usual duties."

   "Ah… 'tis no trouble, either way, so suit yerself, but you must show me where Wyoming be in the atlas, if you would, miss." Mrs. Quiller laughed in her easy manner that always seemed to erase any awkwardness between them. After all, the woman probably watched CNN, right along with her employer. "Mr. Teague was tellin' me you rode horses there as a girl, despite your bein' from Hollywood and all. Must be your Cornish roots, he says."

   So Lucas Teague was already up this morning and had presumably had a friendly chat about her with his housekeeper in the early hours. Blythe recalled, suddenly, that she'd revealed a hint of her "cowgirl" past to Luke last night in the library, so that part of the evening's events was true, at least. But what of her host's rampaging ancestor—the one sporting the wickedly sharp sword? She fervently hoped that that peculiar phenomenon, experienced in the dead of night, might simply be an untoward reaction to the terrible stress of her ordeal in faraway California.

   Deciding that this conclusion was as likely an explanation as any, Blythe smiled warmly at Luke's housekeeper.

   "My Cornish roots tell me I've been a terrible layabout," she said with sudden decisiveness. "It's time I moved back into my own cottage and left you in peace."

   Obviously pleased to see that her "patient" was much improved, Mrs. Quiller departed downstairs to prepare the kippers while Blythe bathed and dressed in the jeans and turtleneck sweater she'd worn to tea at Barton Hall nearly a week earlier.

   As she descended the broad staircase en route to locating the breakfast room, her gaze was irresistibly drawn toward the library door. It stood open. On Luke's desk sat the Waterford crystal brandy decanter and two glasses—one empty, and one that remained a quarter full, just as Blythe had left it four or five hours earlier.

   Bright May sunlight shone through the casement windows, bathing the rows of books and mahogany paneling in a rich, warm glow. The enormous genealogy chart was also illuminated by shafts of light, and its swirling black calligraphy and colorfully gilded family crests were dazzling.

   Drawn magnetically into the room, Blythe gingerly approached the framed parchment. Like the biblical Lot's wife who had been unable to resist glancing back at the wicked city of Sodom, she extended her hand and cautiously traced the delicate lettering that spelled "Blythe Barton b.

1772 m. 1789 d. 1794 (?)."

   The placement of a question mark apparently denoted that her namesake's date of death was uncertain. As Luke had mentioned—family lore had it that the eighteenth-century heiress had "disappeared."

   As if conducting an experiment, Blythe rested her forefinger lightly on the glass that protected the genealogy chart itself. Then she whispered aloud her own name. Immediately she felt the same strange force as before beginning to pull at her, almost as if she were hurtling down a steep incline on a roller-coaster ride that was traveling at a hundred miles an hour.

   "
No
!" Blythe reacted sharply, her outburst filling the bookfilled chamber. Frantically she pushed a second time against her name etched on the chart beneath the glass covering, and to her relief, her world instantly returned to normal.

   
Good God!
she thought. The chart did seem to act like some interactive computer screen.

   Blythe was reminded of her first encounter with the makeyour-own-greeting-card machine at her local pharmacy. One Saturday as several other customers looked on curiously, she pushed her fingers as instructed against the smooth glass surface of what appeared to be a television screen. Laughingly she chose pictures and typed messages according to directions that had magically appeared on the screen to guide her. Her actions had instantly produced all sorts of images that ultimately became a tailor-made thank-you card for Lisa Spector in appreciation for the lawyer's hospitality on a weekend strategy session they'd shared at Lisa's second home in Santa Barbara. She had seen similar TV screens at airports and shopping malls dispensing interactive local information or airplane boarding passes to inquiring customers.

   
But this was totally insane
, Blythe chided herself.

   Had she really felt a gravitational pull when she'd touched the chart? Or was her overstressed mind converting Luke's family tree into some sort of
Back to the Future
carnival ride?

   
My life is not a movie
, she reminded herself for the nth time.

   However, Blythe found herself studying the name of Lucas Teague's eighteenth-century forebear—the "poor church mouse" who had inherited Barton Hall. To put to rest once and for all any demented notions she might harbor about the "supernatural" events of the previous night, she warily pushed a fingertip against the chart and defiantly pronounced, "Garrett Teague."

   Once again a potent jolt of energy began to shoot up her arm, succeeded by the now familiar sensation that she was being hurtled like a NASA rocket through uncharted space.