Turn Back Time

A TERRIBLE WELSHMAN

"The wedding date was set for December," said Jem, reaching beneath the table to give Tessa's hand a reassuring squeeze. "But we have changed our minds. We intend to marry tomorrow."

* * * 

"You remember what else I said to you that day in the drawing-room," he said. "I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I would give over my own life for your happiness. I thought perhaps that when you told me you did not love me that my own feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that. It is unfair to tell you this, I know, when you can do nothing about it."

He took a shuddering breath. "How you must despise me." 

Tessa felt as if the ground had dropped out from beneath her. She remembered what she had told herself the night before: that surely Will's feelings for her had faded. That over the term of years, his pain would be less than hers. She had believed it. But now— 

"I do not despise you, Will. You have been nothing but honourable—more honourable than ever I could have asked you to be—"

"No," he said bitterly. "You expected nothing of me, I think." 

"I have expected everything of you, Will," she whispered. "More than you ever expected of yourself. But you have given even more than that." Her voice faltered. "They say you cannot divide your heart, and yet—" 

"Will! Tessa!" It was Charlotte's voice, calling up to them from the entryway. "Do stop dawdling! And can one of you fetch Cyril? We may need help with the carriage if the Silent Brothers intend to stay at all."

Tessa looked helplessly at Will, but the moment between them had snapped; his expression had closed; the desperation that had fueled him a moment before was gone. He was shut away as if a thousand locked doors stood between them. 

"You go on down. I will be there shortly." He said it without inflexion, turned, and sprinted up the steps. 

Tessa put a hand against the wall as she made her way numbly down the stairs. What had she almost done? What had she nearly told Will? 

And yet I love you.

* * *

Despite ducking his head into every room he could think of, Will had not been able to find Cyril. He was irritable about it, and his irritable mood had not been helped by his encounter with Tessa on the stairs. After two months of being so careful around her that it had felt like walking a knife's edge, he had spilt what he was feeling like blood from an open wound, and only Charlotte's call had prevented his foolishness from turning into a disaster. 

And still, her response nagged at him as he made his way down the corridor and past the kitchen. They say you cannot divide your heart, and yet— 

And yet what? What had she been about to say?

Bridget's voice trilled out from the dining room, where she and Sophie were doing the cleaning up. Will was wondering idly how Sophie refrained from hitting Bridget over the head with a plate, when a shock went through him as if he had been struck in the chest. 

He stumbled back against the wall with a short gasp, his hand going to his throat. He could feel something beating there, like a second heart against his own. The chain of the pendant Magnus had given him was cold to the touch, and he drew it hastily from his shirt and stared as the pendant that dangled there was revealed—deep red and pulsing with a scarlet light like the centre of a flame.