I felt like Alice in Wonderland, falling into the rabbit hole, spinning and spiraling downward into a dark mist, reaching out my arms and hands but feeling nothing but the rush of air. I closed my eyes...Surely I was dreaming...
But when I felt my feet touch solid ground and smelled the musky odor of river water, it seemed too real just to be another one of the vivid and frightening dreams I'd been having lately...especially the one I'd been having over and over...
Slowly I opened my eyes.
I was standing on a quay next to a swiftly flowing river. I judged it to be slightly after dawn when I looked up at the sky. There was a chill in the air, and I pulled my shawl tightly around my shoulders.
A shawl?! I was wearing a shawl? But how could that be?! I didn't even own one! I quickly looked down at my attire, and my eyes opened wide. It was a period costume, something I judged to be from the early 1800s...a dress of pale yellow muslin with an empire-style waist. When I lifted the hem of the skirt, I saw I was wearing a pair of short boots with laces across the top, and when I reached up to touch my hair, I found it to be pulled up into a knot on the top of my head with some tendrils falling down around the sides of my face.
Was it Halloween, and was I on my way to a party? Was I auditioning for a play?
I closed my eyes again, squeezing them shut this time and willing myself out of my dream, but when nothing happened, and I could still hear the sound of water rushing by, I opened them again to see a small boat approaching the quay with a dark-haired man at the oars. He lifted a hand to me, and a smile spread across my face while my heart fluttered...and I knew it was James come to take me away.
If this was a dream, at that moment, it became my reality. I had slipped through the portal of time and was in a different period and place...perhaps it was my past, a past I had forgotten from another lifetime...
James steadied the boat as it bumped against the wood of the quay and held out his hand to me.
"Hurry," he shouted above the sound of the water.
I looked over my shoulder, feeling ice in my veins and hairs raising on the back of my neck, knowing they were after me and that if I were caught, they would drag me away, and I'd never see James again.
He gave me a brief kiss on the cheek as I settled down into the bobbing craft, then he pushed away from the quay with an oar, and we headed downstream on the swift current. I pulled my shawl even more tightly around my shoulders, feeling the chill from the wind reach into my bones. But I knew the chill was from more than the wind...it was from fear.
When I glanced at James, his face was intent on the task of getting us away, and when I glanced back towards the quay, I could see a half dozen horses approaching with men atop them. I knew one of them was my father and that he was determined to catch me.
The wind and the roaring current carried us swiftly downriver, and I remained silent, knowing James needed every ounce of concentration to get us to our destination. I tried my best not to think of my father and his party of friends who were most likely on the river themselves by now, putting all of my faith into James, the man I was determined to spend the rest of my life with despite the objections of my parents.
My father had made it clear that James was unacceptable as a marriage prospect for me, his family being of less noble birth as well as him being a third son, unlikely to inherit a title. When he discovered James and me alone, embracing in the conservatory, he became incensed, booting James out and forbidding any further contact between us. Without my consent, I'd been betrothed to an elderly, titled acquaintance of his and locked into my chambers.
