Page 9 of The Tides of Time (Storm Tide #1)

A rmitage focused solely on Lili, who was facing the direction the train was coming from, her eyes pulling wider and wider.

“You have truly never seen a train?” he pressed.

Her breathing grew panicked. That, he knew instantly, was a no.

Enormous. Deafening. Spewing billowing clouds. Moving entirely on its own. And it was, at this very moment, barreling toward them. A person who’d never seen it before would be terrified.

Armitage bent enough to look her in the eye. “It won’t hurt you, Lili Minet. It’s not— Ce n’est pas dangereux .”

Her eyes didn’t stay on him though. With a visibly growing horror, she watched the train approach.

“ Ce n’est pas dangereux .”

She was frozen in place, mouth a bit agape, staring at the approaching locomotive. The train’s sharp, piercing whistle broke the air. The platform shook all the harder.

“ Ce n’est— ” Before he could repeat his reassurance yet again, Lili ran.

Ah, cusnation . What ought he to do now? He needed to meet the lightkeeper, but Lili had just fled in a complete panic.

The whoosh of air that always accompanied the arrival of a train pushed against him in the same moment the squeal of the brakes grew almost unbearable. The new lightkeeper would simply have to wait at the station.

Armitage took off after Lili.

He didn’t have to go far. She’d run only as far as the edge of the station, where he found her tucked against the side of the building.

“Lili.” Armitage was surprised at how relieved he sounded, how relieved he felt. “Are you—” How did he say it? His grasp of French had never been enormous, but he was now woefully out of practice. “ ?a va ?”

“ Comment suis-je? ” She stood pressed against the wall. “ Ici, il y a des monstres. Ce sont horribles, terribles. Comment puis-je être en paix maintenant ?”

“That is too much French. I don’t—” He rubbed at his forehead. “I didn’t realize you hadn’t seen a train before. I would have warned you.”

“ Il n’y a pas trains in my France.” He couldn’t tell if she was angry or terrified. Both, likely. “No trains. Aucun. None.”

She must have lived somewhere extremely remote. Yet she’d worked at a tailor shop. He couldn’t entirely make sense of her past.

The enormous engine sat perfectly still, but Lili eyed it as if she expected it to jump off the track and bowl her over.

“I need to fetch our lightkeeper,” he said, adjusting the strap of his knapsack so it rested more securely on his shoulder once more. “Will you—Will you wait here?”

“Can the train ... ?” She took a shaking breath. “Can it reach me ici ?”

“No,” he said. “It can only stay on the tracks.”

“It cannot come here ?” she pressed.

He shook his head.

Her chin tipped upward. “Then, I will stay precisely where I am.”

That could be a problem. “Us’ll need to return to the lighthouse.”

Lili’s gaze narrowed on him. “Does the train go to le phare ?

Armitage shook his head. She wrapped her arms around her middle, a stance of vulnerability that somehow still didn’t make her seem weak or cowardly. Lili’s eyes darted to the engine before she turned a bit away.

“I’ll fetch our new lightkeeper, and us’ll make a sprack jaunt back to the lighthouse.”

A silent nod was all the response he received. What a sossle this was turning into.

Armitage moved swiftly back onto the platform and studied the passenger cars. The new lightkeeper would, or perhaps already had, alighted from one of them. Mr. Carr, who ran the station and the attached telegraph office, looked at Armitage with curiosity and suspicion.

“Poor woman,” Armitage said with a quick twitch of his head in Lili’s direction. “Loud noises bother her more than most.”

“Ah.” Mr. Carr appeared to believe the explanation. A porter grabbed the man’s attention, motioning him toward the back cars of the train, where the cargo was.

No unfamiliar people stood about the platform looking confused to have been left alone there. Had the new lightkeeper not alighted yet? Armitage looked to the train once more.

A young man, likely no more than eighteen or nineteen years old, wearing a long wool coat and a dark-blue flat cap, stepped off the train and onto the platform. That was him, Armitage’d wager.

The young man spotted him and smiled broadly before crossing to him. “Are you Mr. Pierce?”

“One of.”

He snatched hold of Armitage’s free hand and shook it vigorously. “An honor to make your acquaintance, Mr. Pierce. Your family’s right legends among lightkeepers.”

“I know.”

Still shaking his hand, the young man continued. “Mikhail McGuile, Mr. Pierce. I’m a hard worker and eager to learn.”

“Mikhail McGuile?” It sounded like the same name repeated twice.

The new lightkeeper nodded. “An odd name, I know. M’mum thought it a fine thing that I’d only have to learn one name.”

Armitage joined in Mikhail’s smile. He’d no room to brock a fella about having an unusual name.

“Fetch your traveling trunk,” Armitage told him. “Us has a long walk back.”

“Good cess I only have a portmanteau, i’n’it?” Mikhail was clearly from London; everything about his speech said as much.

He walked beside Armitage to the edge of the platform, then around the side of the station building. Lili was waiting there, just as she’d said she’d be.

“Found our man.” Armitage hooked a thumb in Mikhail’s direction.

“Is this your missus?” Mikhail asked.

“No,” Armitage said. “Lili’s a family friend visiting from France.”

“ Oh reevar .” Mikhail followed those three syllables of nonsense with a quick bow.

Lili looked as confused as Armitage felt.

Mikhail’s eyes darted from one of them to the other. “That’s the Frenchified way of offering a halloo, i’n’it?”

Ah. Armitage grinned at Lili. “I believe he’s saying, ‘ Au revoir. ’”

Lili’s expression softened. It seemed everyone was to be received with graciousness from her but himself.

To Mikhail, Armitage said, “ Au revoir actually means goodbye.”

Mikhail laughed. The sound emerged too easily and too naturally to have been a rare thing for the young man. “How’m I meant to make a greeting?”

“ Bonjour ,” Armitage said.

“ Bonjour , miss,” Mikhail said to Lili.

“ Bonjour, monsieur. ” Lili’s voice was quieter than usual, but he didn’t think it was a pretended bashfulness. The train had unnerved her.

Mikhail stuck his thumb against his chest. “I’m Mikhail McGuile.”

Her smile quivered a little, and she didn’t entirely prevent her eyes from wandering back to the train. She dipped a quick curtsy. “ Je m’appelle Lili Minet.”

As they walked back into the village, Mikhail’s eager eyes took in everything around them. Lili walked in silence, face still pale. She must have lived near the French coast to have reached it without taking a train. Surely she’d at least seen one in Honfleur or Le Havre or whichever port city she’d departed from. There was something ... odd about Lili Minet, beyond her constant fluctuations between prickly and almost genial.

They were not more than a few steps back among the village shops when Mrs. Goddard, who’d been a friend of his mum’s, rushed out of her house toward them. Her pince-nez glasses maintained their usual desperate grip on her nose, even as the chain bounced about like a ship’s rigging in a gale. “Oh, Armitage! You ought to have told we that you were coming through the village.” She held out a small basket of vegetables to him.

“You’re too generous,” Armitage said. “Us has food enough at the lighthouse.”

She gave him her all-too-familiar look of amused indulgence. “Are you suggesting Loftstone stop looking after our orphans?”

“When those orphans are twenty-five, yes.”

“Nonsense.” Mrs. Goddard pressed the basket so firmly against his chest that he had no choice but to take hold of it. “There are sweet biscuits tucked in the bottom.”

No matter that the woman’s tendency to mollycoddle him was sometimes a bit frustrating, he had to smile at that. “If my grandfather asks, there weren’t any sweet biscuits.”

She winked at him. “What sweet biscuits?”

“Precisely.”

Mrs. Goddard’s gaze shifted to his companions. “This must be your visitor and the new lightkeeper being trained.”

Word had spread every bit as quickly as he’d expected. “Who whispered that to you?”

“Captain Travert, who heard it from somewho or other.” Mrs. Goddard eyed the new arrivals eagerly.

“This is Lili Minet, whose mother was a friend of my mother’s,” Armitage said. “And Mikhail McGuile, a lightkeeper-in-training, just arrived on the train.”

To Lili, Mrs. Goddard said, “You didn’t arrive on the train?”

“My English is ... not good,” Lili said, her French accent thick and impossible to miss and her tone clearly apologetic.

“Her is French?” There was no way of knowing for whom the question was meant; Mrs. Goddard was still watching Lili but speaking of her, not to her.

“ Oui ,” Armitage said. “It is how our mothers knew each other.”

Mrs. Goddard still gave every impression of being happy to see them and welcoming of the newest people in Loftstone, but she did watch Lili a moment longer than she needed to. “You didn’t arrive by train?”

“There is no train from England to France,” Armitage reminded her.

“That is true.” Some of the suspicion beginning to trickle into Mrs. Goddard’s expression eased once more. To Mikhail, she said, “And where do you hail from?”

“London, ma’am,” Mikhail said, the smile still not leaving his eyes. “And I’m right pleased to be here.”

“Us needs to be on our way.” Armitage tipped his hat to Mrs. Goddard, then motioned for his companions to follow him. It was an abrupt departure, but too many questions were being asked.

They were stopped twice more. The grocer introduced himself and seemed satisfied with the explanation he received of the new arrivals. Then the proprietor of the general goods shop stopped them.

“Your grandfather ordered a new shaving razor,” Mr. Roydon said to Armitage, though the proprietor watched the other two very closely. “It’s come.”

“Has him paid for it?”

Mr. Roydon nodded. He held out a small, twine-bound package. Armitage handed the heavy-laden basket to Lili, then opened his knapsack to put the package inside.

Mr. Roydon’s gaze shifted to Lili. “You’re the Frenchwoman.” He didn’t need to phrase it as a question.

Lili tipped a tiny curtsy. She was proving adept at playing the role required: a bit shy, struggling with the language. While it was a helpful skill at the moment, it didn’t help Armitage to trust her.

“This is Lili,” Armitage said. “Our mums were friends, and her is visiting.” He dipped his head toward Mikhail. “This is Mikhail. Him’s here to finish his training to be a lighthouse keeper.”

“Couldn’t pick a better place to spend a bit of time,” Mr. Roydon said.

Several other villagers joined in the greetings in the next moment. The well-wishes felt genuine, but Armitage knew Loftstone too well to not know that the villagers were itching for something to gossip about. They pressed in on all sides, bumping into the three of them now and then. The villagers, in essence, accompanied them all the way to the far end of the village.

Mikhail grinned as they continued onward down the narrow lane toward the lighthouse. His steps bounced a bit. Perhaps Armitage ought to warn the young man that the lighthouse was isolated and quiet most of the time, give him a chance to turn back while he still could.

Lili’s eyes met Armitage’s for the tiniest fraction of a moment. “It cannot go to le phare ?”

He didn’t have to ask what. “The train doesn’t get past the village.”

Her mouth pulled in a tight line. “I do not like this—this place.”

Had she said as much the day before, he’d likely have taken offense. But so much of the fear Grandfather had opened Armitage’s eyes to was still in her expression, combined with a degree of determination he couldn’t help admiring.

Armitage still didn’t know what she was hiding or why, but he found himself hoping she sorted out whatever it was that frightened her so she could find some peace.