Page 33 of The Tides of Time (Storm Tide #1)
L ili!” Armitage bobbed on a wave. “Lili!”
The lower light was lit and not very far distant. Had she swum ashore already? Not enough time had passed. Perhaps she was still in the rowboat. He turned himself, grateful the cork vest helped keep him afloat.
No rowboat. No sailing ship. Nothing that should have been nearby was.
And the lower light was lit. It shouldn’t have been yet. But the sky was also darker than it had been. In an instant, everything had changed.
He didn’t want to think about what had likely happened. He would focus on finding Lili.
“Lili!” Shouting while water crashed against his face was difficult. “Lili!” He didn’t see her. “Lili!”
A couple of yards away, she popped up, gasping. Blessed heavens.
He swam toward her as swiftly as he could. The cork vests were keeping them afloat, but the water was frigid. If they didn’t reach shore and dry off, they’d succumb to the cold. She was fighting her way toward him, but the waves were hindering her.
He reached her at last. “We have ... to get to shore.”
They fought their way in that direction. He kept as close as he could, ready to snatch hold of her if she needed him to, all the while hoping she didn’t, and not knowing if his own strength would hold out.
At last, they were near enough for their feet to touch the sand beneath the tides. The depth changed as waves rushed past them and as the water rushed back out to sea. But they trudged ever closer. Once both were on more stable footing, he took her hand, vowing not to let go again until he absolutely had to.
She was breathing heavily. Water dripped from every exposed bit of clothing and skin and hair on them both. But they were safe.
They walked far enough onto the beach that the waves washing up barely reached their feet.
“I can’t go much farther,” Lili said. “This dress is so heavy, and I’m exhausted.”
“Can you get as far as the lower light?” he asked, feeling that same bone-deep exhaustion. “Us needs out of the cold air.”
Still breathing heavily, still holding his hand, she said, “I can get that far.”
It took effort, but they climbed onto the rocky outcropping and began trudging toward the tower.
“When was the lower light built?” she asked.
He knew without inquiring why she was asking. “There’s been a lower light for centuries. But it was moved to this spot in 1821.”
She coughed a little. “Then, we’re not farther back than that.”
“Could be us has gone forward.”
She nodded. “At least whenever we’ve gone, we’ve gone together.”
He was grateful for that. If the tides had pulled them apart, he didn’t know how he’d have gone on.
They reached the door, and he knocked. Somewho might very well be inside. But two more knocks went unanswered. He reached up and ran his fingers behind the stone that had held the key to the lower light for as long as he could remember. It was there now.
The interior of the tower was dark, as it often was at the very bottom. The chipped paraffin lantern wasn’t in its usual place. There must be a candle or something somewhere.
“I think I’ve found a fireplace,” Lili said.
“There should be a round stove right beside it.”
He could hear her moving about. It was unnerving being in a space he knew so well yet couldn’t navigate. He’d made his way around this very room countless times with no light. It was unsettling not being able to do so now.
“ Il n’y en a pas un. ”
If he weren’t so tired and upended, he might have been able to sort out what she was saying. His mind seemed incapable of even trying. “I don’t know what that means.”
“I am sorry, mon chéri. I cannot think first en anglaise. My brain, c’est too fatigued.”
“Us’ll sort this. Don’t fret.” He was speaking as much to himself as to her.
“I did not find le stove, but I think this is a tinderbox.”
Brilliant. “A fire in the fireplace’ll warm and light the room. That’ll help a great deal.” He moved carefully toward the fireplace.
“There’s flint et steel,” she said.
He lowered himself to the floor in front of the fireplace. “That’s a bit of bad luck. I’ve only ever used chemical or friction matches.” She’d been so confused by those matches.
In the darkness, he heard a scraping and striking sound. Several times, it repeated. And with nearly every instance, a spark appeared in the dark. And then a tiny flame. It lit bits of tinder in the fireplace. He knew what to do now. He lightly blew on the fragile flames, encouraging them to grow brighter.
Lili added a log from the pile beside the fireplace. That took to flame as well.
Armitage could see Lili clearly for the first time since emerging in the water. Her lips were a little blue, and the rest of her face was worryingly pale. And she was shivering.
“Us needs to find dry clothes.”
He turned to have a look at the room. Such an odd combination of familiar sights and unfamiliar arrangements. Much of the furniture was the same, but less than half of it was in the place where he’d always seen it. The lantern he’d been searching for was nowhere to be seen. But he did spot a candle and candlestick.
He helped Lili get her cork vest off, and she helped with his. That was at least one bit of sodden clothing they were free of.
He lit the candle with a thin bit of tinder, itself lit in the fire, then he made his way up the winding stairs. The room above was where the keepers slept when passing a night at the lower light. It was also where the tallboy was. There’d be clothes inside.
This room, unlike the one below, looked precisely as he had known it, except that the furniture looked newer. It was the same bed and tallboy and spindle-back chair but a less-scratched and less-dented version.
We went backward, then.
He pulled a long nightshirt from the uppermost drawer of the tallboy. It wasn’t a nightshirt he’d seen before. He searched the next drawer and the next and found a pair of trousers and a shirt. The fabric felt odd, rougher than what he was accustomed to. The shirt was very simple, lacking any of the pleats even his plainest shirts had. And the trousers had button holes for suspenders but no belt loops.
It wasn’t jarringly different from what he was wearing or what he’d known, but it still made him feel vaguely off balance. How had Lili endured far more drastic changes with such equanimity?
Armitage moved down the stairs with all the speed his stiff, cold body allowed. Lili stood near the fireplace, bouncing a bit and rubbing at the sodden sleeves of her dress.
“I found a nightshirt,” he said. “It’ll be enormous on you, but it should be warm.”
“And I found an almanac. The cover says it is for the year 1848.”
Grandfather had always kept a current copy of Old Moore’s Almanack in both the lighthouse tower and the lower light. Out-of-date editions he moved to his side of the keepers’ house to peruse on his own time. It had likely been true since before Armitage was born.
“1848.” He tried to wrap his mind around that as he crossed to Lili. He held the nightshirt out to her. “Tell me how you’d like to arrange this. I’ll go back up the stairs, or you can, or whatever you’d like.”
“I’ll go up. You needn’t do so une seconde fois. ”
By the time she returned in the long nightshirt, carrying her wet clothes, with a wool blanket wrapped around her, he had changed into the clothes he’d found and laid his wet clothes in front of the fire to dry.
She handed him her clothes, one item at a time. “Twenty-five years,” she said softly.
He’d done the calculating as well. “It’s possible I’ve not even been born.”
“And yet, we are still so far from when I lived that had I not been pulled through time, I would likely already be dead.”
He laid the last of her sea-soaked clothes out to dry. “I’m feeling only a small bit of the befuddlement you must’ve been feeling since the Tides of Time pulled you forward, and I’m a bit overwhelmed. I don’t know how you’ve managed it.”
“Because quitting has never been an option I have been willing to accept.” She was shivering still.
Armitage rubbed at her arms, hidden beneath the wool blanket. “Us’d do best to sit near the fire until the chill leaves our bones. Then you should go back up the stairs and get some sleep.”
“Why would you not be given the comfortable place to sleep? You have spent well over a week sleeping on the floor of the storage room. You need a good rest, Armitage.”
He brushed his lips over her forehead. “I am feeling very heroic just now, bien-aimée. Allow me to continue with that feeling.”
“Where did you learn ‘ bien-aimée ’?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Likely something my father used to say to my mum.”
He spread a woolen blanket on the stone floor near the fireplace. She sat with her back to the nearby wall while he pulled another blanket around his shoulders. He then sat beside her.
Without prompting, without hesitation, she rested her head on his shoulder, wrapped as tightly in her blanket as he was in his.
“Your father spoke French very well in Paris,” she said. “If he hadn’t, that would have seen him labeled a traitor or a spy. He would have been killed early on in the Révolution, and your mother with him.”
“Killed because of the language him spoke?”
“It has become a movement based on demonstrating worthiness and loyalty. Anything about a person that is seen as not French enough is reason for condemnation.” She curled her feet up under her. “Everyone is sorted into one of two categories: those who show complete fealty to the faction of the day and those who are traitors worthy of death.”
“And you found yourself in the second category.”
“I chose the second category. I could not have lived with myself otherwise.”
They sat together as the fire warmed them, neither speaking further. After a time, she grew heavy against him. Armitage closed his eyes, willing himself to follow her into the oblivion of sleep, where he wouldn’t have to think about what it meant to have been tossed twenty-five years out of his time.
When sleep did at last come, he dreamed of Lili.