Page 5 of The Book of Lost Hours

Amelia drew her wrist ever so slightly toward her chest, catching herself in time to pass it off by folding her arms. She turned and walked away, hurrying through the rain. Moira watched her disappear through the gates and down the street.

A MELIA WAS late to her first class of the morning, but for once, her teacher didn’t seem to mind.

Normally Mr. Markham was very strict about such things.

Most of her many demerits for tardiness came from him.

His class took place promptly at eight in the morning and Amelia found it difficult to wake any time before nine.

This morning he simply waved her into the room when she opened the door.

She thought perhaps he was sparing her the lecture because of the burial that morning, but then he called out as she made her way over to her desk.

“By the way, Miss Duquesne. This is your third tardy this month. Please see me after class.”

Amelia’s heart sank. She took her seat miserably amid the sound of snickering.

Mr. Markham continued, picking up his lecture on the Civil War where he’d left off.

Amelia flipped through her textbook, conscious of the many eyes on her.

Her uncle’s death had been the gossip of the school this past week.

Rumors of his treason had followed Amelia around campus like a storm cloud.

“I heard they buried him this morning,” said the girl seated in front of her, turning around to taunt her in a low whisper as Mr. Markham wrote on the chalkboard.

The girl, Rebecca, was the daughter of a congressman.

One of many who attended Pembroke. The school was a popular choice for politicians to send their daughters, given its proximity to most major cities on the East Coast, as well as its track record for churning out both university candidates and well-mannered debutantes.

Amelia, for whom neither path held much appeal, had always been an outsider despite her uncle’s position working for the State Department.

His fall from grace only served to push her further from the center of Pembroke’s social circle.

“So does this mean you’ll be defecting back to the motherland now that your uncle is dead?” Rebecca asked a few minutes later.

“Yup,” Amelia responded dryly, head bent over her textbook. “Just waiting for Stalin to send a plane.” Another student to her left let out a gasp.

“You should be careful making jokes like that,” Rebecca said threateningly. “My father said that if your uncle was still alive, he would have been given the chair. He says he would have deserved it for betraying his country like that.”

“That’s an awful lot of gumption coming from a man who forged results of a hearing test to avoid the draft,” Amelia bit back.

Mr. Markham shushed them from the front of the room, calling out Amelia’s name in warning. Rebecca waited until he turned back around before striking again.

“I heard he was killed right in the act of selling secrets to the Russians. Shot in the head, wasn’t he?”

Amelia tilted her book up to create a blockade, refusing to look up.

“Didn’t your mother get shot in the head too? I seem to recall that’s how she died. Only I suppose with her it was different. She did it to herself.”

Amelia’s grip on the book tightened. Her eyes slid to Mr. Markham, weighing the consequences of a demerit against the possible satisfaction of firing off a few choice curse words.

Rebecca leaned closer, putting an intrusive hand over the passage Amelia was reading. “I get it, though. I’d want to die, too, if I had a baby with a married man. Can you imagine? What would it be like to be so unwanted? Only… I guess you don’t have to imagine, do you?”

Amelia slammed the textbook closed on Rebecca’s fingers. Rebecca let out a yelp, far louder than was warranted.

“Miss Duquesne!” Mr. Markham snapped. He pointed to the door. “Out.”

Amelia collected her things amid the sound of snickering. In the hall she took her seat on the bench that seemed to have been placed there exclusively for her. She glanced at the clock on the wall. Five minutes was a new record for her.

Pembroke Academy was a private, all girls’ boarding school of great prestige.

They had no tolerance for rule bending and little patience for snark; two things that Amelia had always had an overabundance of.

Showing up late, sneaking into dining halls after curfew, and talking back to her teachers with frequency were par for the course for her.

It was a defense mechanism. She’d learned early in life to recognize the look of pity in someone’s eyes and hated it.

Amelia tried to swallow down the tears welling in her eyes in case anyone walked by.

She wasn’t sure if she was even allowed to grieve.

The burial was one thing, hardly anyone had been there.

But was it okay to continue crying like this after what he had done?

Was it acceptable to mourn a traitor, or would people start to assume she was one too?

She couldn’t get the image of his coffin out of her head.

The casket had been closed for the ceremony, and Amelia was glad for that at least. That she didn’t have to see him that way.

The uncle who had raised her when her mother had died, drained of color and life.

Amelia had been seven years old when her mother died, and Uncle Ernest, the bachelor with a busy schedule and absolutely no experience with children, had been the least likely candidate to take her in.

He was, however, the only one who volunteered.

For the first several months of living with him, Amelia had been so shy that she’d barely spoken, delivering head motions instead of words.

He had given her a room on the second floor that had once been a small library of sorts, filled with bookshelves that reached from floor to ceiling, and a big window overlooking the oak tree in the backyard.

Thick, leather-bound volumes packed to the brim with names and dates and stories of faraway countries.

“This was the European history section,” he had said sheepishly as they stood in the doorway for the first time, her tiny suitcase in his hand. “I promise I’ll move them out once I can find another place to put them.”

Where ? Amelia had thought to herself, looking around.

Uncle Ernest’s house seemed at times more like a library than an actual home, with shelves lining each wall and books stacked on every space that wasn’t for either eating or sleeping.

In an effort to clear her room, he had another set of shelves installed in the dining room.

But then Amelia had begun asking him questions about Joan of Arc and Maximilien Robespierre and King Henry VIII over breakfast and he realized that she’d been reading them on nights when dreams of her mother jerked her from sleep.

The first full conversation she ever had with him was to ask him the meaning of the word guillotine , breaking her self-enforced fast of words after two months of saying nothing at all.

So the books stayed, though he did remove a few of the more gruesome ones, replacing them with books of poetry, which she loved almost as much as the history.

So much that she had memorized them so she could quote them the way he did.

As Amelia had settled in, her dreams of her mother were replaced with nightmares of waking up in this house alone, abandoned, Uncle Ernest having fled in the night and leaving her by herself.

“You’re stuck with me, kiddo,” he said to her on those nights, stroking her hair and holding her close. “I’m never going to abandon you.”

But now here she was. Alone. He had abandoned her anyway.

As thoughts and memories tangled themselves in Amelia’s head, her hand closed around the watch on her wrist. She had been lying to Moira Donnelly when she told her she didn’t know where it was.

It had shown up in her school mailbox three days ago, wrapped carefully in brown paper.

No note. No return address. Nothing to indicate how it had come to be there, which should have alarmed her.

She was far too relieved to see it to be concerned.

The watch was the thing that most reminded her of Uncle Ernest. He had worn it every day for as long as she could remember.

The idea of parting with it, of giving it to that woman, was unbearable.

Don’t wind it , she’d said.

But why not? It was a watch. Watches were meant to be wound.

Her uncle had several others he kept in a box in his bedroom, and though this one was the only one he ever wore, he still wound them daily to keep the gears from rusting.

As a girl, Amelia had watched him while he did so, studying the way his hands worked to keep them moving forward.

A stopped watch was a dreaded outcome. Time neglected.

“Time is an intentional thing,” he told her as he worked. “You have to look after it and it will look after you.”

Amelia pulled back her sleeve. Her fingers hovered over the watch’s crown, wondering.

Maybe Moira assumed she didn’t know how to properly wind a watch.

They could break if wound incorrectly. But Amelia knew how to do it right.

Curiosity won out. She raised the crown of the watch with careful fingers.

She spun it around a few times, first forward, then backward, but nothing happened.

Amelia frowned, feeling vaguely disappointed.

She pushed the crown back in. The entire watch seemed to shudder as she did so and all of a sudden, the hands on the dial stopped moving.

There was a pause, barely even a second, and then it began to move again. Only this time, it was moving backward.

She sat up a little straighter.

“Amelia?” Mr. Markham had opened the door to the classroom.

She looked up, annoyed at him for interrupting. “What?”