I usher her along the corridor. Once we’re past the locked door, I glance back at it and wait for my heart to start tripping. When it does not, a curious lightness rises in me, and I find myself smiling at the closed door.
Not a gateway to hell, but a passage to adventure.
“Rosie?”
I prod Miranda along. “Christmas awaits. Let us get to it.”
Thank you for reading!
I hope you enjoyed Rosalind and August’s holiday adventure. You may have guessed that the “pirate ghost” was more than a passing side note . . . and that Miranda is not going to forget the mystery of that locked door or Rosalind’s unusual clothing. Those stories will collide in book three in the series, coming in October 2022.
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A Turn of the Tide stars Miranda, who learns about the stitch, sneaks through to see the future…and instead goes back to 1790, where she meets a certain very-much-alive young privateer and gets caught up in his Robin-Hood campaign.
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More details will come in early 2022, but for now you can read an early draft of the first two chapters starting on the next page.
A Turn of the Tide
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A Stitch in Time book 3
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Coming October 2022
1
Imagine, if you will, that a locked door stands between you and the greatest adventure imaginable. It is not the sort of lock one might find on a safe containing such a treasure, but a mere interior door lock, easily opened with a hairpin. Imagine having an older sister who honestly believes that will keep you from the adventure. A sister, I might point out, who is speaking to a sibling already six-and-twenty, and not a small child in need of protecting.
What lies on the other side of that door? A time machine. That is what I’ve heard them call it—Rosalind and her husband August, whispering together when they think I cannot hear them, when they think I will not press my ear to the door to listen. Yes, yes, at my age, I ought to be past such shenanigans, but I learned early in my life that the best conversations are always held behind closed doors.
Time machine. I have never heard those words combined, yet I am a writer with a very healthy imagination capable of conjuring meaning from the words. They also refer to this thing as a “time stitch,” which makes even less sense. No matter. I know what lies behind that door. A passage to the future. From our century—the nineteenth—to the twenty-first.
Is any lock supposed to keep me from that?
Honestly, I wonder whether my sister knows me at all.
Fine. I will concede that she knows me very well—having raised me and my other sister, Portia, after our parents died. She knows me well enough to have all those delicious “time machine” conversations behind closed doors. And, perhaps, she believed that, given the sense of responsibility she worked so hard to instill in me, that I will not open that locked door when it resides in the home of another.
To get to this doorway to untold adventure, I must enter the home of my sister’s dear friends—Lord and Lady Thorne—while they are not at home, and I believe the correct term is “trespass.” Also, “breaking in illegally.” I feel bad about that. I really do. I am not above minor criminality, but this is a much greater offense. I can only sooth my conscience by insisting to it that the Thornes are excellent people who would never begrudge my adventure, and it is only my sister’s damnable caution that keeps me from openly pursuing my goal. Or, perhaps, my sister’s lack of trust in my ability to keep a secret, which is reprehensibly offensive . . . and also justified.
In this, though, I understand the magnitude of the secret, and so I shall indeed keep it until my dying day. I am perfectly trustworthy when it comes to what matters, and this does.
I first encountered the locked door on Christmas Day, quite by accident. At the same time I discovered—in the guest room my sister was using—items of clothing that did not look like anything I’d ever seen, though she insisted they were simply Yorkshire fashions. That set my inner detective tingling. Two mysteries to be solved. Might they be linked?
It took months—five agonizing months!—to get my answers. Given that I make part of my living as a newspaper writer, I ought to have been able to get to the bottom of the story faster. The problem was lack of access. I live in London with Portia while Rosalyn lives in Yorkshire with her husband and son. I had to come up with endless excuses for visiting them, which is not a hardship. They live at an earl’s summer estate—the earl being August’s brother—and it is a glorious place, filled with forests and lakes and follies and secret passages. The company of my brother-in-law and adorable nephew are also an attraction. Fine, I even enjoyed being around Rosalind, who is quite lovely when not thwarting my deepest desires.
Five months of finding excuses to visit Courtenay Hall and listening at doors—well, listening when noises within didn’t tell me I absolutely should not be listening. Bits and pieces of conversations to piece together until I understood the staggering truth. There was a spot in that locked room in Thorne Manor, through which they could leap forward nearly two centuries. A spot that my sister had stumbled through and been trapped there for four years, during which we thought her dead.
I think that is the most difficult part of the secret to keep. I know why my sister vanished, and the answer was not “an accident and amnesia,” and I so desperately want to talk about that, to console her on an ordeal even my imagination cannot fathom. But no, for now I must pretend I don’t know the truth. That is yet another reason to pass through time—so that I can return and tell her and we can talk what happened to her.
Enough maudlin meandering. I am thoroughly annoyed with Rosalind for keeping such a marvel as a “time machine” from me, and I will not pause to admit that, yes, she probably is doing so out of fear that I would race through and be lost to her.
I don’t know what happened to keep Rosalind from returning, but if such a thing happens to me, while it would be a difficult adjustment, I would be far better circumstances than she’d been. I have no husband or child, and Rosalind would be able to pass over and visit me. Of course, there is Portia, and my friends, and my career . . . But I will not think of that. There is risk, yes. But reward beyond measure. I am going to see the future. The future!
I have chosen my timing with care and such patience that Rosalind would be impressed. All right, “patience” may overstate the matter. When I first understood what lay behind that door, it took all my willpower not to run to Thorne Manor, burst in on the Thornes and break open the door right in front of them. That wouldn’t do. I had to wait until they were in London, Thorne Manor left empty. Then I was off.
I came in through the kitchen door, which I will point out did not require breaking any locks. The door doesn’t close properly, and William Thorne is in no rush to fix it. He would say that his reputation should stop anyone from breaking in, but I suspect he also presumes that anyone who does break in must be in dire need. The Thorne family has long had a reputation for being eccentric, which only means that they do not act as others expect from nobility, and I find them fascinating for it. Many might eschew the title of “eccentric,” but I consider it a lofty achievement, one I hope to claim myself.