Chapter One
Devon, England
Dartmouth Castle
1780
Tessa Blagden hadto try to remember that the boy was not yet ten summers old. He was squirming in his seat while she spoke because he wanted to go play with his friends. At the thought of him playing, she remembered his father mentioning that since the disappearance of his mother two and a half years ago, the child didn’t play all that much. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Now wasn’t the time to let pity rule her. The boy had to stay strong.
“Grayson…child, listen to me.” She took hold of him by the shoulders and stared into his wide, cerulean eyes—the same color as his great-grandfather, Thoren Ashmore. “I can get into terrible trouble if it is discovered that I gave this to you, though you can probably travel on your own, but just in case, you must keep it hidden. Do you understand?”
“Aye, Grandmother,” he said, opening his small hands to receive a master key—the likes of which hadn’t been invented yet. This one was fashioned from pure gold.
It was one of manytime-alterersin Tessa’s care since she became a timekeeper over a century or so ago.
“This key will lead you to your heart’s desire.”
The child nodded and gazed at the door.
“Grayson, are you listening to me? It will help you heal.”
His gaze slipped back to hers. He tilted his head slightly as if he was listening to something only he could hear. Then, he spoke in his small voice, “Grandmother, are you going away too?”
She felt her eyes begin to sting with hot tears. He definitely had gifts. As the only living Ashmore male, he potentially hadallthe Ashmore/Blagden gifts. She suspected he could communicate with animals after she saw him sitting at the tree line around Dartmouth Castle with a brown squirrel, a fox and a dozen birds nearby, including a big raven flying above his head on more than one occasion. Animals often stayed close to him, and on several occasions, she had seen him in telepathic communication with them, laughing or teasing a red squirrel or racoon. He’d known his mother would disappear before Tessa had known, but she didn’t think he was a seer. When she’d asked him how he’d known about his mother, he told her that he had dreamed about her telling him she had to go away. He was capable of dream communication. Could he travel through time, speak to spirits, see the future? He never spoke of any of it.
“Grayson?” she said instead of answering him and covered the key and his hands in hers. “Did you make any new friends?”
He lowered his gaze and shook his head. “The others do not like me.”
“Whyever would they not like you? You are generous and you have a kind heart.” He was also the most beautiful of all the children in the castle and the villages surrounding it, but best not to tell him too often.
“They call me names,” he confided in his softest voice.
She scowled at his bent head and the glossy black locks falling forward. “What kinds of names?”
“Ballet Gray, Go-away-Gray. They say Mother left because of me.”
Tessa stood up with her hands on her hips. “Which children said that to you? Tell me and I will whip their hides with a switch.”
He looked up at her and the blue-green facets of his eyes darkened like oceans beneath a thundering sky. “Harry Gable, Timothy Cavendish, Nicholas Rowe, and Alan Stephens. But,” he hesitated, looking away again for a moment. “Mother told me not to let the animals hurt them because the animals will suffer.” He gave her a worried look. “Will you suffer if you whip their hides?”
She smiled and shook her head, but oh, she had tears to shed for this child. His father kept the boy confined within the castle walls to keep him from being kidnapped by his runaway wife. But the duke was rarely home, and his son escaped often to go play in the forest, where he felt completely at home.
When the duke was at Dartmouth, he didn’t know how to raise a boy alone, especially one who was a little odd and had more animal friends than human ones. A boy who snarled, showing his teeth when he was either joyful or angry, and who constantly practiced ballet moves and jumps like the saut de pendu, also known as the ‘hanged man’s jump’ or pirouette basse,or‘low pirouette’.
A time-traveler, Tessa had lived in the twenty-first century long enough to be familiar with classical ballet. Gray’s obsession was what, in the eighteenth century, was called comic or grotesque ballet. Grotesque in the sense of the dancer dancing like a dead person, mainly with his head tilted to one side and arms hanging low. The boy was quite good. Even from a springing jump with one toe touching the floor while stretching the other foot well out into the air as high as possible.
“Grandmother, are you going away too?” he asked again.
It was hard to look at him with the truth. Tessa loved him, having been in his life since the moment he entered the world. Her blood flowed through his veins. Gray’s mother, Emma, a descendant of Thoren Ashmore, had produced a baby boy but the eighteenth century was not for her. She’d tried to change it but failed.
Tessa held his hands and then lifted them to her cheek. “Yes, Grayson, I have to go away, but I will return to you.”
He was silent for three breaths—Tessa Blagden counted them. And then his eyes misted, and the whites reddened, along with his cheeks. But no tears fell. With disdain staining his little face, he yanked his hands free of her grip and stepped back, out of her reach.
“Farewell then,” he ground out, then ran from the room.
Tessa took a step to go after him, then stopped. She wiped her eyes, then drew in a deep breath. The coming years were going to be very difficult for him. She wished more than anything that she could remain with him, but it was impossible. In fact, she could feel time changing around her already. Soon, she would be gone, just like his mother, but if Tessa didn’t go, the male line of Blagden/Ashmore would cease forever. She had to prepare for her sweet Grayson’s future. She would leave Harper to help him when the time came.