Stepping outside, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders to ward off the chill, she gazed at the land, and at the tall, dark-haired man who was chopping firewood near the barn.
She was about to go back into the house to start breakfast when Relámpago trotted up to the porch. “Hey, boy,” she murmured. “What should I do?”
The stallion shook his head, then whinnied softly.
“I’ve been asking the wrong question, haven’t I? The question isn’t whether I can be happy here, in the past. The question is, can I be happy in the future without Bowdry? And you know what? The answer is no.”
With her decision made, laughter bubbled up inside Macie. Life wouldn’t be easy here, but suddenly, it didn’t matter. She was here, with Bowdry, and that was where she belonged. In a fl ash of intuition, she saw herself married to Ace Bowdry, saw them raising half a dozen kids, growing old together, living happily ever after.
Bowdry looked up just then, a smile curving his lips when he saw her. He sank the blade of the axe into a piece of wood, then strode towards her, his dark eyes alight.
“You can go now,” she said, giving the stallion a pat on the rump as she hurried towards Bowdry. “I’m home.”
Steam
Jean Johnson
“So this house has just been sitting there, waiting for you to come along and inherit it?”
David refrained from nodding, since that would have caused his cell phone to slip from between his shoulder and ear. His hands were busy carefully pulling dust covers from strange pieces of archaic electrical equipment. “Yeah, that’s right. I never even met this guy, but Mom and Dad, and even Grandma and Grandpa always swore he was like the family’s Secret Santa, for decades. And ‘Uncle’ David left it tomein his will. Said his ‘namesake’ should be his inheritor. A pity he and his wife ended up disappearing during that hurricane . . .”
“Well, I hope it was a quick end. And all that Victorian chinoiserie will be right up your steampunk alley, bro,” Kevin offered not unsympathetically.
“Actually, I’m more Edwardian than Victorian in my chosen era,” David countered. He pulled yet another dusty sheet off a chunk of furniture and found a beautiful, wonderfully preserved oak roll-top desk. “Ooh, baby . . .”
“What, a sexy picture of a dame?” his best friend joked.
“Almost that good, bro. A late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century roll-top desk.”
“You’re sick, man.” The tone of his friend’s voice was more dismissive than disgusted, so David ignored the insult. “Listen, after you’re done drooling over your Edwardian love desk, you wanna hit the pub for a darts game?”
“That’s rather tempting,” David admitted, gently rifl ing through the papers pigeon-holed in the desk, some of which were quite oldand yellow, while others were a lot newer. A stack of old photographs, sepia with age, drew his attention. He pulled the pictures out, blinking in shock. They were of a beautiful young woman, her curls piled on her head in a Gibson hairstyle and her dress equally turn of the previous century. But her pose was anythingbutthe staid, starchy, glassy-eyed stare of someone forced to sit still for several seconds while the photographic plates were exposed.
Instead, she had coyly unbuttoned her waistcoat and blouse and had lifted her breasts out of her corset, displaying them with a small but clearly lecherous smile.
He dropped the phone. Scrambling to catch it even as it fell from his shoulder, David almost crumpled the pictures as well. For a moment, he was all thumbs, juggling cardstock and plastic, until the pictures fluttered on to the desk surface. The disarray displayed more lascivious images, some half-hidden by the photos that had fallen face down. Gaping, David swallowed and lifted his cellphone back to his ear.
“Uh, listen,” he stated, interrupting his friend’s rambling comments about doing something or other at the proposed bar, “I just found some very important, uh . . . paperwork . . . that I have to . . . examine much more closely. I think it’ll take me all night.”
“Paperwork?” Kevin asked, his tone dubious.
“Yeah. Paperwork. Very . . . important . . . paper. Work. I’ll chat with you later, OK? Bye.” Thumbing the red button, he pressed and held it a second time as soon as the phone blipped, letting him know the call was ended. It blipped and buzzed a second time, letting him know it was now turned off. That left him in the privacy of a gadget-crammed attic with a roll-top desk that would have made an antiques collector weep, and some rather outstanding examples of turn-of-the-century pornography.
Writing on the back of some of the “paperwork” caught his eye. In lovely, large loops, a woman – presumably the one in the photograph– had carefully written, “To my B-beloved David, may this image I-inspire you to look deeper into the mysteries of love and life. Yours F-Forever, Elaine.’
Turning it over, he found his breath escaping him. David fumbled the chair out from the desk, shoved aside the dust cloth which had partially snagged on the oak-rail chair and sat down before the last dregs of blood vanished from his head. He arrangedeach photograph lovingly.She’s probably quite dead by now. These photos are from a hundred years ago. No one lives that long . . .
He had always been fascinated with the turn of the previous century. When other kids were grumbling about having to take a newspaper route to pay for Walkmans and CDs, he had been dreaming he was a street urchin hawking papers on a city corner in the days of horses and carriages. When they chatted about the latest action movie, he had wanted to talk about the old silent films. And now, here in this house he had inherited, he had found a treasure trove of antique delights.
David had seen turn of the century erotica before, and had found the profusion of ruffles, the crispness of the muslin and the contrast between demure layers and exposed skin incredibly sensual. But those pictures usually had been taken rather impersonally, either for commercial sale – however discreetly underground– or for someone he didn’t know. These pictures had been taken for someone he knew. Sort of. And the subject of all these photographs was beautiful. Long, dark hair, gleaming eyes, mischievous smile, little round spectacles perched on her nose in some of the pictures, and every last one of them was provocatively posed.
Those intimate bits of feminine flesh below her slender neck kept drawing his attention. He could easily imagine kissing her lips, her breasts, even the secrets exposed between her thighs. Knowing he had to move on, David reluctantly returned the erotic images to their pigeonhole in the desk. Studying them in depth could wait until after he had fi nished exploring the rest of the attic.
His fingers brushed against a book. He pulled it out and opened the plain, dark green leather cover to a random page, finding more of the same looping, feminine handwriting inside as on the back of the photos. It seemed to be a personal journal of scientific experiments of some kind. Sorting through to the front page, David found a piece of paper, much whiter and newer than the rest, tucked into the front.
The moment he opened it, he felt the blood rushing out of his face a second time – but not, now, from lust. It was written inhishandwriting, and was signed withhissignature, in the spiky loops that weren’t quite copperplate.
Dear Me,
