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It was just one line with five small words, maddening in its simplicity. But as it turned out, five small words have the power to change your life. To right your ship when she’s sailed off course.
Of course I loved you…
There was a new spring in my step. A lightness. Everything in the world felt rosy and good. My dad’s stamp collection suddenly fascinated me. My mum’s probing questions now maternal interest, rather than the matriarchal inquisition of a floundering adult child flown back to the nest.
“Something’s gotten into you,” Mai remarked.
“Or someone,” my dad winked.
The once misappropriated copy of Rogue Male was dog-eared now, the pages creased from his repeat readings and now mine. The single page with his looping cursive at the bottom. It sent a tiny thrill through me knowing that his hands had touched it, peeling back the pages with the cigarette-stained tips that had once touched me just as gently. I kept the book tucked inside my jacket next to my heart, as if by keeping it there it would bring him back to me, despite knowing rationally I had lost him.
No. Not lost—had driven him away. Betrayed him.
My only clue he was even alive was a vague photograph of a distant woman’s red-blond strands against a glistening northern lake. Alaska, my dad had said. But of course it would be Alaska.
And so there I was, with a one-way ticket to Anchorage. But as it so often goes when reality inevitably sinks her claws in, I was second guessing my decision, questioning whether I was doing the right thing. I didn’t really know if he wanted me to find him, or if the mysterious package turned up on our doorstep had merely been a concession—a gentle reassurance that he and Margaret were alive, and that I could rest well knowing. After all, the last time I’d seen him, he’d been holding me at gunpoint.
Of course I loved you…
I ruminated and then ruminated on my ruminating. Was this just the sort of silly rom-com movie, modern day overture he would scoff at, the edges of his mouth twitching with contempt?
Shut up.
There is no ‘you and I’.
Was I pinning my hopes and desires onto him again; painting half-truths and dreams on him like an empty canvas? Hadn’t I done just that in our year spent together as his bridge, reducing him to nothing more than the pages of a history lesson I was eager to study?
I slept restlessly on the plane to a layover in Reykjavík, then Alaska, waking up in fits and starts. At one moment dreaming of his breath against my neck so vivid I could almost feel it, and the next of his cold stare, seated rigid at the table, the barrel of my Ministry-issue gun staring down at me. I threw up in the cramped aeroplane toilet the pre-packaged chicken wrap I had shovelled down in an attempt to quell my racing thoughts, sick not from turbulence, but fear.
I looked down at the boarding pass crumpled in my sweaty fist. Anchorage, Alaska.
It wasn’t too late to turn back, I thought. Only that I would have to explain to my disappointed parents why my big plan to hike with friends in Alaska (and in turn, stop moping around their house) was over before it had a chance to begin.
But then my hand found its way down to chicken necklace, still resting delicately beneath my collarbones. No. This was the right way. The only way.
He was imprinted on my soul, you see.
It was summer in Alaska, the days mild and the hours longer, the sun warming over the frozen earth. I checked in at a tiny inn in central Anchorage, the rich mahoganies and unironic elk heads mounted on the walls like something out of an episode of Twin Peaks. I paid for one week’s stay upfront with the cash I’d withdrawn from my redundancy savings, the lingering paranoia of who from the Ministry—or future—might still be trying to find me. Or worse: using me to find him.
No sooner had I checked in, throwing down my bags in the tiny room before I was finding my way to a pub next door. I hadn’t showered since I’d left London. The stink of my nervous sweat would go well with my desperation.
The pub was quintessential rustic-cozy with a curious mix of American cruise ship tourists and blasé regulars sipping on local ales. A fire crackled in the stone fireplace. I thought of how well he would fit there, his boots resting on the hearth, fingers woven through mine, lamenting that times were infinitely better when one could smoke inside public establishments, but only if there was no one there to bear witness to such a scandalous demonstration of our affection.
I was here, now I just had to find him. In a city populated by less than 300,000—minuscule compared to the melting pot of a metropolis I had just come from, really—how difficult could it be?
As it turned out, quite.
I roamed from shop to shop, pub to pub until they all began to blur together.
He’s about yea tall, thin with an unruly mass of black curls; a prominent nose, striking in its confidence.
“Nope, never seen no one of that description, miss.” The bartender said, broad shouldered in lumberjack flannel as he wiped down the bar with a faded dishcloth. I was fortunate enough that most of the shopkeepers here were friendly in that way of smalltown folks used to meandering, oddball tourists.
“He’s quite gregarious…very posh. Former navy?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” a kindly bookshop owner offered apologetically. “I never forget a face and that one just doesn’t ring a bell.”
In a sudden panic it dawned on me that no other living person might know him, so carefully could he choose whether to leave a trace. I had no photographic evidence of him. No proof he’d ever existed in this era. Surely the friendly shopkeepers would throw me out the door were I to pull up his 1840s daguerreotype courtesy of Wikipedia, and ask, have you seen this man? There were no words that would do him justice, to capture with basic vocabulary the real-life man who had reshaped my life and reformed me. He was larger than any life I’d lived, in any time period. More real than the limited archives could remember him. And I missed him so much, I could feel it in my marrow.
My doubts seeded again then germinated. I pictured them huddled in a remote log cabin in the great Alaskan abyss, hunting game for sustenance with his deadly aim. Perhaps I would never find him. My desperate search in this strange, vast landscape was proving to be fruitless.
Until it wasn’t.
It was a young man, pink cheeked and nervous at the US postal office, his eyes lighting up when I described Margaret to him.
“Oh, yes. Miss Kemble comes in here all the time!” The pink in his cheeks deepened at the mention of her, seemingly clueless as to the seventeenth century bombshell’s predilection for twenty-first century lasses. “I post her mail for free,” he admitted rather sheepishly.
My heart skipped a beat. The commander and Margaret. Really here in Alaska!
I leaned forward, my elbows resting on the counter. “Do you think I could leave a note for her…here?”
He must have been confused why this strange little English woman was asking to leave someone she supposedly knew a handwritten note at the post office. But it was as if the temptation of having a new excuse to interact with the beautiful young Margaret relieved him of those doubts. Great beauty will do that.
“Of course!” He nodded enthusiastically. “She’s usually in here ‘bout once or twice a week, buying things.”
“And you’ll ask her to write me back here?”
And then he nodded so exuberantly, I was sure his head would roll right off his shoulders.
One day passed, then two, waiting in the hopes Margaret would visit the post office. It could be weeks before she showed up, if she showed up at all.
“Should go for a hike,” the rather nosy innkeeper suggested when he saw me in the great room, staring dead-eyed at my laptop for the second day in a row. “That’s what all our guests come here to do.”
So I tried to keep busy, to enjoy the pleasures of this unspoiled land in a way I thought at least my dad might appreciate. I tried not to think about the possibility that they had already moved on, forcing myself through postcard-perfect parks and the Anchorage city streets so I could feel like I’d done something besides waiting, all the while picturing the things I would say to him. But my enthusiasm for playing tourist was waning. I had no more leads. No more clues guiding me where to find them. My doubts threatened to paralyze me.
I thought of the scornful twist of his mouth and the coldness in his eyes that night in the safehouse when he told me not to follow him. And yet here I was, halfway across the world, following him.
I was on the verge of concluding that this plan really had been fruitless when I got a call at the front desk.
“She left a message!”
I hung up before he could say goodbye and dashed on foot to the post office. It was nine blocks west from the inn. I made it there in ten minutes.
Her scrawl was winsome on the note she’d entrusted to the bashful postman, whose name I had learned was Steve.
Meet us in Far North Bicentennial park on the morrow at half past ten! Have not told Forty-Seven that ye found us—he is very peculiar at the mention of ye.
'Tis rather annoying how bloody often he brings ye up!
Your loyal friend,
Maggie
My heart felt like it had simply ceased to keep beating before frantically restarting, thrumming like an alarm clock in my chest cavity.
“Is there anything else I can do to help you with…with Missus Kemble?”
I assured Steve he had helped me more than he would ever know.
It was her I saw first in the distance. Her strawberry-blond hair was tucked under a bright pink cap, her pale skin luminescent against the backdrop of towering mountains and spruce trees.
For a moment I just watched them. They were standing inside the park’s entrance. Margaret faced my direction. He stood in front of her with his back to me. His arms clearly folded, he appeared to be concentrating keenly on a sign detailing the park’s many hiking trails. He wore a black windbreaker with the collar pulled up to his ears. Dark tufts of his curls peeked out from beneath a knitted cap, and even though it seemed woefully inappropriate in the biting climate, around his neck he wore the silk aviator scarf I’d given him last Christmas. Briefly my heart surged with hope.
How I had missed them both. How boring my life had seemed without them!
Margaret spotted me first. Her hands sprung to her mouth in surprise, eyes wide and sparkling with mischief.
“Whatever are you looking at, Maggie?” He had turned around and his eyes fell level with mine. “Oh.” It was a loaded oh, pregnant with a meaning I couldn’t discern.
I felt my stomach lurching.
He was as handsome as I remembered and yet more shockingly vivid. His shoulders had lost some of their broadening courtesy of the rigorous physical field training he’d enjoyed back in England, but he looked healthy, his cheeks flushed from the Alaskan cold.
For what felt like several minutes we stood there staring. He had gone stock-still, arms fallen stiffly at his sides. His face was vacant of any expression. Implacable and unwavering. I couldn’t read him.
My hands shook. I was dizzy at the sight of him, a wave of grief, love and anticipation coagulating inside of me. After all this time, still he took my breath away.
I thought he would turn away, eyes flashing with disdain. But then he took one stride towards me. Then another. Then he was standing right in front of me in vibrant technicolour, so close I could have reached out and touched him. I could see the sharp rise and fall of his chest with his breathing, the sprig of curls that fanned out around his neck.
He took another step forward.
And then he was closing the distance between us, his hands in my hair as his mouth found its way to mine and I clung to his waist. Our lips still knew the other’s, sliding hungrily, fervently, into their rightful places. I could feel his want, the shudder of his hips against mine. The rigid set of his torso.
I forgot all the things I’d wanted to say: what he had taught me about himself and in turn, what he’d taught me about myself. That I had been ‘following orders’, yes—but I would spend the rest of my life making it up to him, doing everything in my power to show him I was not the Adela from our future, hands entangled in the Ministry’s strings.
When at last he pulled away, we were breathless and panting.
Respectfully (and perhaps knowing exactly what he was like), Margaret had walked away to give us privacy, an impish smile on her face. I would hug her, cry with the relief of being reunited, thank her for her part in bringing us together—but that would come later.
“Hi.” I was both suddenly shy and drunk with elation. “I think this time you may have kissed me first...”
He pulled me into his arms. “My silly little cat,” he murmured. I felt his breath at my earlobe, his hands at the small of my back. “Sometimes I feared you really were just a dream.”
Then I started laughing—the absurdity that I had actually found him on that scant trail of breadcrumbs; the relief of being in his arms again. Then just as abruptly I began to cry.
“Don’t cry.” His face was worried. He wiped a stray tear away with his finger.
“It’s…it’s a good cry,” I explained.
His face broke into an elated smile, treating me to his dimples. “You received my parcel.”
“And 'it was as if I had been born yesterday, and everything was new…’”
He leaned down his head so that his forehead was pressed against mine.
“I love you," he said, so quiet it was almost imperceptible. If he hadn’t been so close I might have missed it altogether. He stared at me searchingly, the green rings in his eyes blazing. Then he said it again, still quietly but firmly this time, as if testing how the words sounded on his tongue for the first time. “I love you.”
“And I love you.” I buried my face in his neck as he cradled me, drinking in the scent of his skin, the faint traces of soap and tobacco as familiar as an old friend but with a rush of new. It was the first time we had said the words and already I knew I couldn’t bear never hearing them again.
“I’m so sorry,” I wept into his neck. “For everything.”
He tilted my chin up to look at him, placed a gentle finger on my lips. “As am I, little cat. As am I.” His hand wended through my hair. “But I’ve found you.”
And then I looked into his eyes. Really looked at him.
“You never lost me.”
I left the name of the inn where I was staying and the phone number for the front desk with Margaret. She programmed it into her prepaid phone, promising they would be in touch and thus forgoing any further involvement of smitten post office boys. Seemingly in my rush to flee to Alaska, I hadn’t the wherewithal to buy a data card for my phone. To speak with me he would have to call the front desk.
I waited patiently for them to call, but then two days passed without a word. Then three. I paid for two more nights at the inn, hoping.
The rush of joy and adrenaline I’d just gotten to feel again was quickly fading into their more shameful counterparts of despair and anxiety. I felt the desperate need tugging at me that I had tried so hard to relinquish. I was aching for his touch again, longing for his taste. An addict, jonesing for their next fix. I’d become the desperate little girl waiting for the boy to text, only this one had been born in 1809, and he rarely used a cell phone, because he thought them infernal little machines that made people lazy and uncommunicative, and the bane of this modern era.
I was learning that I handled rejection very poorly. I languished at that inn, picking at the innkeeper’s offerings of reindeer meat and continental breakfasts, trying not to promptly throw it all back up again. Laid motionless on the pilling rug on the floor of my rented room, curated ‘sad girl’ playlist on repeat. I even threw Sinead O’Connor in, for good measure.
One evening at around midnight, I gave in to my impulses and messaged Margaret on WhatsApp, hoping someone had taught her about ‘girl code’, and that she would go to her grave before passing this on to him.
So what have you been up to? I wrote, trying my hand at sounding casual and nonplussed.
He hath barely spoken a word for the last three days since he saw ye, the pestilent, brooding little blockhead. I shall have to ’stage an intervention’ if he smokes but one more of those blasted tobacco sticks!
I was asking about you, Maggie.
Right balderdash, that is!
Margaret’s messages gave me a brief reprieve before I slowly sank back into my melancholy. At this point it was turning out to be an old friend.
Another day passed and still nothing. Choking back sobs, I began to pack my things. Even for me, this was a new low.
He’d simply changed his mind. Realized it was too much to offer me a second chance, my betrayal a cut too deep. I oscillated between sickness and dread, then finally just resignation. I resolved to let it go—to let him go. To be glad that at least I had gotten to experience one more kiss. One more moment with the man I loved more than I’d ever known I was capable.
The telephone beside my bed rang suddenly, startling me out of my reverie of self-pity.
“Hullo?” I said meekly into the receiver.
“Very polite, that young gentleman at the desk, isn’t he?” His easy Oxford cadence rolled through the phone, fluid and coppery and instantly sending shockwaves through my entire body.
I sank into the mattress, letting out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “You…you called.” I still couldn’t bring himself to say his name, not after—
Stop saying my name!
As though saying it aloud might ruin me.
“I’m sorry that I took so long to telephone, little cat. I haven’t an acceptable excuse, only that I…” He was silent.
“Only that you…what?”
He sighed. “Only that I was…afraid.”
“Commander Gore of HMS Erebus, afraid?" I rolled my eyes. "Now I know you’re pulling my leg.”
“As it turns out, these matters of the heart are proving far more treacherous than the perils of Erebus.” I heard him take a sharp draw on his cigarette. “Why, I was afraid for…afraid of…” He exhaled. “Of my love for you.”
I made an involuntary sound like a strangled bird and covered my mouth with my hand.
The words were just as exhilarating as they had been yesterday.
“Meet me at the Far North park again,” he continued. “Tomorrow at nine and twenty, just before sunset. There's something special I would like to show you.” He paused. “If you will join me?”
“Awfully late then, isn’t it? Are you planning to finish what you started in London?” The line went taut with his silence. I winced. “Too soon?”
“Please.” His voice was quieter, more urgent.
My pulse quickened. I wasn’t used to him begging.
“I’ll be there.”
“I do hope you brought proper trousers and hiking attire. Dress warmly. It cools significantly when the sun goes down.”
The innkeeper gave me another lift to the park. Staring out into the rushing landscape from the car window, I thought how surreal it was that I was going out to meet him. To be in his orbit, yet not just a wall away, knowing of his every whereabout—a relic of my time as his failed bridge to a new world. To meet him now, not as his bridge but as his equal.
“You know there’s a lot more Anchorage has to offer than the Far North Bicentennial Park,” the innkeeper said.
I shrugged. “I guess there’s just something about this one.”
It was just him this time, waiting at the park entrance. As we pulled up it surprised me to see that he looked unsettled, tugging at his collar as though it were choking him. When he saw us he straightened. An officer, standing at the ready.
“That your friend?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said, for was it really just a friend who could make a girl’s heart race so voraciously?
“Ah. So this is the one you’ve been moping on about. Broke your heart, did he?”
As I said, he was really rather nosy, that innkeeper.
“Good evening.”
I nodded in greeting. I was being awkward, for I too was incredibly nervous. “Commander Gore.”
“Graham,” he corrected, a small smile on his lips with just one dimple. “Please.”
“Graham,” I repeated quietly, his name a religion on mine.
He led me down a marked trail. The sky was darkening but he knew the way. We walked for some time, making polite if not slightly stilted conversation. He kept a heartbreakingly safe distance between us. He told me what he and Margaret had been up to the last few months: how they’d stolen away on a ship to New York with their doctored passports, making their way across the North American continent to the Pacific Northwest. They’d been careful to hide their tracks, ensuring that no one from the Ministry—or perhaps I—could trace them.
“How did you find me, you resourceful little cat?”
“My dad. He…knows a lot about trees, apparently.”
He gave a vague smile. “I would very much like to meet him, your father.”
My heart stuttered and I almost tripped. He reached out an arm to steady me, like one might do for an elderly lady.
“So, Alaska,” I said quickly, because any discussion of Graham in my future was too much for me to bear just then.
“Yes.” He cocked his head thoughtfully. He had withdrawn his hand. “Well, I suppose you might say I wanted another chance at ‘conquering’ the elements…to clear my head of thoughts and…feelings.” At this he blushed, avoiding my stare.
We continued to make our way up the trail in a pleasant silence, stopping only once we’d reached an overlook that peeked over a vast valley of trees and water. The sky had grown dusky with a smattering of stars, flustering me with the memories.
He turned off his flashlight. “We’ve arrived.”
“Oh. It’s very pretty.”
The view was gorgeous after all, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
He nodded.
“Is this what you wanted…to show—”
“All right—”
We both stopped, laughing nervously.
“You first,” I finished.
He kept one hand in his coat pocket. He couldn’t seem to meet my eyes. My palms had begun to sweat in their thermal mittens. Was he going to tell me that we shouldn’t see each other again? He was a Victorian gentleman, after all. He might think it the nobler way, to let me down in person.
“I was terribly angry the last time we spoke. Furious, may be a more apt description. I felt betrayed. Out of sorts. Well, that may be slightly understated…” He coughed. “In fact, I was entirely discombobulated. And yet…with the passing of time I can say, perhaps I did act rather hastily with that gun.”
“Graham—” I started. I wanted to reassure him that it was water under the bridge now—an idiom of which genesis was from another time he hadn’t lived to see, but that he was sure to understand. That I didn’t want to dwell on the time that had wrenched out my insides.
But he held up his hand. “But in time the anger faded…faded to grief and then...to an ache so profound, it riddled my body worse than the scurvy or Arctic starvation ever could.”
I felt a deep yearning inside my chest for him. “Oh, Graham...”
“Back in my…day, as your era is wont to say, this would have been done with much more formality and grandeur.” His hand stirred in his pocket. He let out his breath. “There would have been arrangements between parents…a generous dowry.”
A dowry?
“Graham, what is going on? Please.”
“I could rather use a cigarette right now,” he muttered. With his free hand he rubbed the crease in his forehead, the other still burrowed in his pocket. For a sickening second I wondered if he still had the gun. “Maggie, bless her heart, tried to lend me some modern-day tips, but she is really rather crass with her own…affections. Nevertheless, from what I have learned of the women of your era, I understand many have foregone such traditions altogether...”
I raised an eyebrow. “What exactly are you trying to say, Graham?”
“All that to say…” At last his gaze found mine. He swallowed. “I believe this is how it is done, in your era.” And then he climbed down so that he was standing on just one knee.
He said my name again. My real name with his perfect pronunciation. The only other time he’d said it had been in the context of danger—of renegade time travellers and Ministry conspiracies blown open. Now there was no danger, and yet I felt like I was on the verge of falling from a great precipice.
With the hand in his pocket he pulled out a ring. I recognized it immediately. It was Arthur’s signet. He looked up, earnestly holding it up to me. “Will you marry me?”
Of all the proposal fantasies I had imagined as a naive millennial girl raised to be staunchly feminist and yet to still expect one, it had never been of a Victorian naval officer on his knee before me, offering himself to me.
Offering all of himself to me.
I sank to my knees so that I was kneeling at his level.
“Graham.” I touched the side of his face. “Yes. Yes. I…I would love nothing more than to be your wife.”
And then he smiled, a genuine smile that lit up his eyes and all of his dimples. He slid the ring on my finger. His grip was steady, but I could hear the staccato rhythm of his breathing. “I will…find you a more suitable ring in time, of course.”
“It’s perfect.” I leaned against his chest. I could feel his heart racing against mine. “I’ll make an honest man out of you yet, Graham Gore.”
We laughed. Then he took me by the hands, helping me up so that we were both standing. He held me in his arms as a vibrant kaleidoscope of colours stretched across the northern sky. The aurora borealis.
He kissed me.
A man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.
This time, I could see that he was crying too.