Page 75 of Time for You
Henry let her go and wiped at a stray tear. “Thank you.” He glanced at the door, where Shepard waited expectantly with George. “And I see what Shepard is to you,” he added quietly. “You should be happy, Ma. Maggie and Annie would understand.”
Lydia’s eyes widened. “I—that would—people would talk, Henry.”
“They would. But you’d be happy.”
She looked over her shoulder and then back at Henry, nodding. “Thank you. You grew into a good man, you know. Your father would be proud.”
Henry nodded in turn and brushed one last kiss to her cheek.
He had a train to catch.
Chapter Thirty-Two
George sat silently next to him as the train sped through the countryside, uncharacteristically silent. They were drawing near to Manchester, well out of Scotland by now.
“Everything all right?” Henry asked, although his own nerves were jangling. The planshouldwork—he’d gotten back to his time using the same basic method—but that didn’t mean it was foolproof. He could very well end up in the wrong year, or decade, or century, and fixing that would be next to impossible, even with Anne’s map. Then he would be trapped without Daphne or his family, and he didn’t much fancy that. Henry was not, at his core, an adventurer.
“I’ll miss you, is all,” George said, gaze firmly on the window. “I know why you’re leaving, and I understand, but it feels like I’m losing another family member.”
“I—”
“Don’t,” George said tightly. “You’re not going to stay, and anyway, I won’t let you. Doesn’t mean I don’t hate it, though.”
“I’ll miss you,” Henry offered, feeling like it wasn’t enough. He too was losing a brother, and the hope of seeing Daphne again didn’t quite quash the wave of sadness that brought on.
But a longer, heartfelt goodbye was not in the cards, as the train began to slow. “There’s no stop here, is there?” Henry asked, peering out.
“No, and we’re not to Manchester yet, either,” George agreed. He stood behind Henry, both of them craning their necks to try andsee down to the engine. The countryside surrounding them was still pastoral, not Manchester’s grimly imposing redbrick factories and warehouses.
“Excuse me, sir, but why have we stopped?” George asked a conductor who was making his way down the train, looking harried.
The man sighed heavily. “There’s a tree down on the line. We’ll have to move it before we can start again.”
Henry’s stomach jolted. “No, that can’t—we need to go. I must be in Manchester, soon.”
The conductor shrugged. “We’ll be on our way as soon as that tree is moved, sir. But not before.”
Henry looked at George pleadingly, and his friend nodded. “Then we get off. We’re, what, a half an hour from Manchester by train? There must be a mail coach headed that way. We just have to find it and convince them to go ... fast. Very fast,” George said.
Henry checked his watch. They had an hour and a half until the portal opened, which he’d felt was cutting it too fine in the first place, but his mother had asked him to stay one last night at home, and he hadn’t been willing to deny her that.
But now he was looking at the possibility of never seeing Daphne again, and his heart threatened to break all over again at the thought. “We’ve no time to waste, then.” Henry grabbed the backpack from the twenty-first century and headed for the train carriage’s door. The conductor was busy pacifying a middle-aged couple who did not like stopping on journeys, “on account of my wife’s nerves,” and didn’t so much as spare them a glance as Henry and George hopped down off the train into the middle of a field.
George’s boots hit the ground behind him, and Henry immediately turned around. “Which way, do you think?”
George looked around and nodded to his right. “Over there. See that ridge right at the end of the field? Looks to be a lane up there. If someone’s going toward town, we should be able to spot them there.”
Personally, Henry felt like this was a fairly thin plan, but then again, he didn’t have much choice. There was no way the train would make it to Manchester on time, so this was his only remaining hope.
It felt as though reaching the lane took forever, and once they made it, his heart sank further. It was hardly even a lane, much less a road, and barely more than a dirt track that connected farm fields to one another. It appeared to be utterly deserted, and now Henry’s fear reached full-blown panic.
“What now?” he insisted, as though George had a magical answer he had been keeping from Henry all this time.
As if a higher power heard him, the faint sound of horse hooves on dry, packed earth and the rattle of wagon wheels answered. A farmer driving a cart rose over a small hill farther down the lane, trundling steadily forward.
Henry didn’t wait for George and broke into a run. “Sir, I have—I need to beg a favor,” Henry called.
The man took in their clothes, rather out of place—if mussed—for a mostly deserted field. “You gentlemen look to be lost,” the farmer observed.
