Wallflower Girl

Chapter 54

That night in early summer nineteen sixty-eight would be the last of the young couple's earthly nights together. In the early hours of the morning, a freakish short-circuit occurred, causing a spark in the fuse box on the side of the house. The spark ignited shavings from a hole drilled in timber, and the little cottage went up like a tinderbox. Nick and Patricia never woke. They died from smoke inhalation, cuddled in their bed together. Their remains were found by the fire crew in the morning.

Anne coughed and gasped for air, waking to the feel of a bony hand gripping her arm and shaking her.

"Are you all right there, miss?" It was an old man.

She sat up from where she had been lying on the concrete steps of the burnt house. She peered around herself; the knowledge that she had woken to her real life gripping her heart, tearing it, making her want to weep.

"Are you okay?" the old man enquired again, kindly. It was the farmer she had seen the other day.

"I'm sorry. I must have dozed off," she explained. It had been so real, so incredibly lucid. It could not have been a dream. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-" she went on apologetically. She was trespassing after all.

The old man helped her up. "It's fine, miss. I saw you looking around at the old place from out in the field. You sat down, then seemed to collapse. I thought you had fainted."

"How long was I lying here?" Anne asked. Physically, she felt fine, as if she had just woken from a deep restful sleep. But the knowledge that her beautiful dream had ended made it bittersweet.

"As long as it took me to ride over. Maybe thirty seconds. A minute at most. You sat and then just slumped over."

"I had the weirdest dream," Anne said. He seemed like a nice man. He had a kindly, wrinkled, suntanned face from which bright blue eyes sparkled. "Do you know anything of a woman named Patricia?"