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‘I know that. I do know, honestly. But I saw the struggle he had every day about Jennet and Bevil with his conscience. I felt the guilt he felt over keeping such a huge secret from his brother. And then when he was here with us…’
Her voice trailed off and she bit her lip.
‘Go on,’ Sirius said suspiciously. ‘What about it?’
‘He really liked us,’ Celeste said, shooting him a look that dared him to question it. ‘Genuinely. He was starting to see us as real family. He even grudgingly admired you, Hector. Imagine that.’
‘Imagine.’ Hector gave her a crooked smile. ‘I’m guessing he liked you, too? Maybe even more than liked you?’
‘That was faked. He was using her,’ Sirius said immediately.
Celeste looked worriedly at Hector.
‘It’s no more than I’d already suspected,’ Hector said gently. He got to his feet and gazed down at her. ‘He fell in love with you, didn’t he?’
‘He did,’ she said, and I heard the bewilderment in her voice as she spoke the words. Evidently she was still absorbing that little bombshell. ‘I thought he’d lied about the whole thing, but he—he really fell in love. He wanted to stay in Castle Clair and make a life with me.’
‘Then why didn’t he?’ Sirius demanded.
‘Because,’ she said heavily, ‘there was something he wanted even more. He wanted to take what he’d learned in our world back to his own time and use it to help people. He was convinced it was for the greater good. He absorbed knowledge like a sponge, didn’t he? He wanted to learn about everything, and he’d made so many notes and drawn so many diagrams… He thought he could take some of that information back. He wanted to help with medicines and treatments. That was his main priority. But he also thought he could stop some of the mistakes that he’d read about in the history books.’
‘Change history?’
‘For the better!’
‘Did he ever stop to think that meddling in time could cause more problems than it would solve? Many more problems!’ Sirius sounded scornful. ‘You can’t just change the course of history like that. How selfish can you be?’
‘You’re not going to give him a chance, are you?’ Celeste said, exasperated.
‘Well, come on! Okay, I get it. He was a criminal with a heart. He wanted to do good, but it still meant he was willing to do bad things to achieve his goals.’
‘He didn’t really have a choice,’ she said.
‘We all have choices, Celeste,’ Sirius said, a tad patronisingly to be honest. I’d have a word with him about that later. ‘You can’t make excuses for a man who made countless wrong ones.’
‘You’re not listening,’ she said, turning beseeching eyes on him. ‘He didn’t have a choice!’
We all looked at each other. Evidently, Sirius and Hector heard the note of desperation in her voice, too.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Every time,’ she said, her voice cracking with emotion as her eyes filled with tears. ‘It forced him on, every single time.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Hector crouched down in front of her and took her hands.
‘Fate,’ she said bitterly. ‘Every time he tried to back away from his mission it called to him. Every time he found himself wanting to do the right thing—whether that was telling Jennet the magical experiments were over, or listening to her that night of the witch’s leap, or when his memory came back while he was living with us—every single time it was like a compulsion took over, forcing him to continue, even though every part of him rebelled at the thought. Blaise St Clair,’ she said firmly, ‘was a victim of fate, just as much as Lowen is. How can you have such sympathy for Lowen but none for Blaise?’
‘Well…’ Sirius looked a bit nonplussed. ‘To be fair, Lowen’s trying to bring peace to the world. Blaise would have brought chaos if he’d succeeded.’
‘But that’s just it,’ Celeste said eagerly. ‘Don’t you see? There’s more to all this than we thought. I know it! Think about it. Blaise’s destiny was always to come through time to be here with us in the present, right?’
‘Nooo,’ Sirius said slowly. ‘It was to come through time, gather information and return to the past to wreak havoc. And he would have done if Hector hadn’t taken his magic.’
‘That’s what I used to think,’ Celeste said.
‘But you don’t any longer?’ Hector asked.
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. Because I felt it, Hector. I felt the pull of fate. I’d already experienced it for myself, in a smaller way. That obsession with Blaise that haunted me all those years. Remember, Sirius? Remember how you and Star used to tease me because I was “in love” with a portrait of a man who’d died three hundred and fifty years earlier?
