Lavender Dreaming: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 5) Read online

  Lavender Dreaming

  Lavender, Texas Series

  Barbara Bartholomew

  Lavender Dreaming

  Published by Barbara Bartholomew at Amazon Kindle

  Copyright July, 2014 by Barbara Bartholomew

  Cover Design by Melchelle Designs

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Epilogue

  Books by the Author

  The House Near the River

  The Ghost and Miss Hallam (Lavender series)

  Letters From Another Town (Lavender series)

  Leaving Lavender (Lavender series)

  Lavender Blue (Lavender series)

  By The Bay

  At This Time of Year (novella)

  Nightmare Kingdom

  Wrong Face in the Mirror (Medicine Stick series)

  Wakening the Past (Medicine Stick series)

  Bobbi and the Bootlegger (Medicine Stick series)

  This Edge of Forever

  For Younger Readers

  The Time Keeper (Timeways series)

  Child of Tomorrow (Timeways series)

  When Dreamers Cease to Dream (Timeways series)

  The Second Jeep Harris

  Dreams of Earth

  Finding Endymion

  Royal Blood

  Princess Alice

  Chapter One

  Betsy Stephens Carr was two days early for the celebration, but decided she needed a little vacation from the farm her husband loved and, bringing her two young children with her, dropped in on her parents, intending to occupy the room that had been her own before her marriage.

  Life these days in a 1910 era country home with two children under the age of three was wonderful and difficult. Heck, keeping up with her very active two-year-old Ben was enough to drive any sane woman out of her mind, especially now that his younger ‘twin’ sister Emilee was beginning to walk and tried too hard to keep up with him.

  They were an unusual family, the Carrs, made up of Caleb, her husband who had been a soldier in the civil war, twins who had spent their first months in different times so that one had grown faster than the other, and then there was her. Betsy had come to time-locked Lavender as a child from the 21st century. Nobody should be surprised, she told herself now, that their marriage was presenting a few problems of adjustment.

  Not that Caleb wasn’t the best man in the whole world. Not that she didn’t love him and the kids with her entire heart.

  But she was tired and she missed running water and food someone else had cooked. And most of all she missed her career as story-teller to a community that possessed few books. She loved the feeling of being surrounded by townspeople with their eyes fixed on her, waiting for the next words she would spin in her tale.

  She hoped the people of Lavender missed her as well.

  As she got down from the wagon, prepared to help the children down, Ben launched himself out on his own with his customary insouciance and as usual, ended up tumbling face down on the ground, screaming in angry indignation as she lifted him up to view a small round face now covered with scrapes and cuts. Blood dripped on to the white shirt she’d dressed him in to greet his grandparents.

  Emilee added her own cries of alarm to her brother’s and Betsy found herself trying to manage two busy little persons at once and was grateful when a tall young man raced to her side, grabbing the baby from her precarious perch on the wagon while Betsy offered what comfort she could to the injured victim who yelled louder now that he’d spotted the blood on his shirt.

  “No serious damage,” the young constable she’d known for half her life, soothed her little daughter with his customary gentleness. Warne was uncommonly tall and strongly built with broad shoulders and large hands and with his strength could have lorded it over the other men in town if he chose, but he wielded power lightly. That was why he was such a good police officer for the little town, a job carefully filled by the town council. “Your brother’s not really hurt.”

  “Not hurt?” Betsy smiled at the seriousness with which her little son regarded Warne Chapman. If she’d told him, he was okay, he would have doubted. She was only his mother, but Warne was one of his heroes. If Warne said he wasn’t hurt, it must be so.

  “You’re tough,” Warne told him, taking the small hand in one of his big ones as he carried the little girl in his other arm and, with a nod at Betsy, started toward the front door of the house on Crockett Avenue where relatives and staff were beginning to pour out to see what all the screaming was about.

  Betsy smiled as she watched the young constable deliver her children into loving hands, thinking how Warne was one of her favorites in the town of Lavender.

  Missing Caleb as she already was even though she’d last seen him less than two hours ago, she couldn’t help thinking that it was good to be home.

  Then, as Warne came back toward her, closing the distance quickly with his long stride, she asked, “How is Violet these days.”

  His face grew solemn and he glanced over his shoulder as though to make sure all attention was focusing on the children and nobody overhearing their conversation.

  “Not good,” he said. “There’s a war and bombs are dropping around her every night. I can’t help being fearful for her.”

  When the sirens sounded Violet stirred from heavy sleep, blinking her eyes open with difficulty and got up to follow the others through the darkness to the cellar where they took refuge from the bombing.

  After a long day of doing the job of two—or three—in the big house on the square, she wouldn’t have minded staying in her narrow bed and could have easily slept through all the noise and clamor as the German flyers came across the channel to attack London in a routine that was quickly becoming her young life.

  But Mrs. Rolfe, the old cook who had come back to work when most of the household staff had gone off to either fight in the war or work at one of the factories, wouldn’t hear of it. Having once commanded a staff of dozens, she now considered herself particularly responsible for Violet and Margaret, the two remaining servants, and if Violet tried to linger in sleep would have shaken her awake and personally seen to it that she went down the steep steps to the safety of the cellar.

  Sleeping was safety and Violet wished she could have just stayed there instead of waking to all the possibilities of a unusually warm autumn night in the house darkened by black curtains and stirred by bombs falling around them into nightmare. She’d always hoped if she was hit by a bomb, it would be while she was asleep and in her dreams. The way she had it planned she would just never wake on, but go on without interruption to Heaven.

  Her worst fear was this one as she hovered
into a corner, listening to Margaret sob that they were all going to die, and watching the stubborn old cousin who was the only member of the family living in the bomb-damaged house. Lady Laura Smyth-Hatton was at least in her eighties and never married had refused to accompany the rest of them to the relative safety of their country home.

  She would do her part, just like the brave young men on the front, she’d informed her relatives, and stay the course. If the only thing she could do at her age was remain where she was and show the enemy that she would not be frightened away from her home, then she would do it. She would not turn tail and run.

  Watching her now as she sat in her usual chair, her knitting in her hands, Violet thought the old lady out of her mind.

  If she could have run, then she would have and it was because of Lady Laura that she, Margaret and Mrs. Rolfe were still here. Mrs. Downing had not thought it proper to leave her stubborn old cousin alone in London without servants to care for her and those made to stay behind would be easiest to do without.

  Margaret and Mrs. Rolfe were old, but Violet was young and strong except for the limp that kept her from being called to service like the other, more able members of the townhouse staff.

  Cousin Laura had to have somebody to look after her. Otherwise people would talk. They would say her family had abandoned her, though the truth was that she simply wouldn’t budge.

  It was a good thing really, the family decided, this way the house wouldn’t be left to looters and squatters. Though as Mrs. Downing’s soldier son Ronald said, three old women and a crippled girl didn’t exactly constitute a serious guard.

  Mrs. Rolfe tried to comfort Margaret while Lady Laura calmly knitted as though she were in her own sitting room. Violet, who knew that tomorrow’s work would come early as long as she was alive, snuggled under her blanket and tried to go back to sleep.

  Even tired as she was, she didn’t sink immediately into unconsciousness. She was afraid of so many things these days: bombs and the possibility of invasion, thieves and murderers who might break into the house to find only her and the three old women, but most of all she feared a second bombing of the house that would bring its walls down on them here in the cellar.

  More than anything she was afraid of being trapped and smothered underneath the weight of the Downing family’s once elegant mansion. This was what haunted her nightmares, making her wake up whimpering each night from dreams of being trapped in overwhelming darkness.

  Dreams were bad and good. They brought her the greatest delight and the worst terror. And now to the sound of Margaret’s soft sobs, she sank into the heavy sleep of exhaustion, promising God a tradeoff. If he allowed her to simply sleep without the nightmares, then she would be content this one night to forfeit the other kind of dream that took her to a faraway place called Lavender.

  Chapter Two

  Warne worried sometime. How could he, a practical young man who helped safeguard his little hometown, feel more alive with his dream friend than with the people he knew in real life?

  Now as he patrolled the streets of Lavender, stepping through a lovely summer night where honeysuckle and lilac scented the air and crickets chirped softly, he seemed to hear in the distance the sound of bombs whistling in the air, landing with terrific thuds around him.

  Lavender, the little town set aside in time before he was born, did not experience war, at least not so far. There was hardly enough of them to get up a good feud, the people of the little town and the surrounding rural community numbering only in the low thousands.

  He knew about war because Betsy Carr’s sister Eddie told them of it in her accounts of their history and Betsy herself, their resident time walker, had actually lived for a time during the terrible war between the states and had brought home with her a husband who was a former confederate soldier.

  But the war he lived through second hand was where a neighboring country was nightly attacking the city where Violet lived. This account of war his friend from childhood, visiting him in dreams and imagination, told him about.

  Not that he was asleep when he dreamed. He was wide awake when Violet came to see him. But nobody else saw her.

  Until lately he had been largely untroubled by these events. Anybody who lived in a town set aside from the world’s time-flow where the years passed more slowly and nobody, well, nobody but Betsy Carr and the few she escorted over the line, had an inkling of what was happening outside, got used to unusual happenings.

  But those things didn’t happen to him. Warne had been a solid kid who didn’t get into trouble anymore than the average boy, made fair grades, was more interested in baseball than arithmetic, hadn’t paid much attention back in first grade when a skinny little girl dressed in funny clothes began to hover around him.

  He wasn’t particularly disturbed, being too young to know how rarely strangers showed up in Lavender. He could remember, in fact, having seen her a time or two when he was hardly more than a baby.

  He was seven when they had their first conversation. They were out on the playground, boys and girls playing a rushed game of tag during recess when he’d reached for her hand as she brushed past and said, “Tag. You’re it.”

  His best buddy, Harlan Crombacher, had laughed rudely and said, “Come on Warne. You can’t tag the clear air. Ain’t nobody there.”

  An uncertain little smile flickered on the thin face of the girl. Tiny, she looked years younger than him, but he guessed she was closer to his age than she looked. “I’m Violet,” she said in a funny kind of accent. “You can’t catch me.”

  She’d raced off, fast as the wind, and instinctively he’d run after her, ignoring Harlan’s jeers. When he caught up instead of tagging her, he said, “My name is Warne.”

  People soon got used to the fact that Warne talked and even played with a girl who wasn’t there, but by the time he reached his teen years, he began to be teased more seriously.

  The day after the school dance where he’d ambled around the floor with nobody floating in his arms, the teacher had brought in his friend Betsy to talk to the class.

  As story-teller for the community and a member of the doctors’ family, everybody listened to Betsy. This morning she didn’t waste words. “Warne Chapman does not have an imaginary friend,” she said. “Just because the rest of you can’t see or hear Violet doesn’t mean she isn’t real. He sees her and, let me tell you what else. I hear her. I suppose she’s a little shy because she doesn’t talk to anyone but Warne. I don’t know why or how she can find us here, but she seems to need us. Especially Warne.”

  After that the teasing was only light-hearted and apparently only Warne wondered if Betsy said what she did to get him out of trouble. He still wasn’t certain that anybody else in Lavender, even Betsy, ever heard Violet.

  Lady Laura ate alone at the long table in the formal dining room these days, but food was beginning to be too hard to come by for the elaborate buffet of the past to be laid out on the sideboard with its rashers of bacon, toast racks, kidneys and ham. The morning after the latest raid Violet brought in the usual tray of tea, no milk and little sugar, and toast to the old lady who sat at the head of the table, dressed for the day in one of the garments made up for her at least a decade ago.

  The clothes might not be the latest in fashion, but they were freshly washed and ironed, a task not assigned to Violet who was considered insufficient in laundry skills, but accomplished by Margaret who still considered herself a ladies maid.

  She placed the dishes in front of Lady Laura, thinking as she did that the old lady grew thinner every day and that it was only by sheer force of will that she stayed alive considering the amount she ate.

  Violet didn’t feel like trying to offer comfort or care, however, to this woman old enough to be her great-grandmother. The had too little in common and though they had lived in the same house for years her life, they rarely spoke to each other. The ladies of the household said little to servants of such lowly status as a kitchen maid.

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nbsp; Looking a little like a statue made of stone, Lady Laura nodded her head only slightly and then reached for her tea.

  Violet went back into the kitchen to her own breakfast of porridge and toast. Mrs. Rolfe and Margaret hardly seemed to notice as she slipped into place. These days with the addition of a part-time gardener who didn’t live in, they constituted the staff of the great house which had once been served by a dozen or more.

  Violet didn’t miss those days. She’d started out here as a young scullery maid, at the bottom of the social order with little thought of climbing much higher, largely confined to the lower ranges of the household and not often even allowed out on the streets.

  Even before then she’d been a barely tolerated member of the household, a kind of foundling brought up by Mrs. Rolfe, then cook, who might have been suspected of having a bastard child if she hadn’t been too old for that to be a possibility.

  Now with everybody gone, she went where she pleased in the house as long as she stayed out of Lady Laura’s sight and wandered the streets at her own risk, only occasionally scolded by Mrs. Rolfe who still tried to look after her, not wanting to drive her away most probably because she would have to do all the work herself since Margaret was largely useless.

  And even a half-crippled young woman could find work in these days when most of the young were being called into service either fighting the war, making munitions, or working the land.

  Most of the house was closed up these days, the beautiful rooms shrouded in darkness by the blackout curtains that stayed in place even during the day. The elegant furniture covered before the family left, it was a place of shadows, caught in the past where a once-powerful family had lived and entertained. These days it was solitary, unpopulated except for the three of them who clung to a bare sampling of occupancy.

  The rear of the house had taken damage from the bomb that had destroyed two neighboring houses that had been left as empty shells, tribute to those who died within. The family, claiming to barely eke out their luxurious lifestyle at their country place these days hadn’t even sent anyone to examine the damage, much less to attempt repairs.