Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Read online

  Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance

  Book Four in the Lavender, Texas Series

  Barbara Bartholomew

  Lavender Blue

  Published by Barbara Bartholomew at Amazon Kindle

  Copyright 2013 by Barbara Bartholomew

  Cover Design by Melchelle Designs

  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

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Even though she was alone at her home on Crockett Street, Betsy Stephens heard voices whispering somewhere in the house. She strained to hear what they were saying, but could detect no more than a low hum of two men in conversation. She couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  Strange things had happened to her ever since her mom brought her to the time-locked town of Lavender, Texas when she was only eight or nine, but nobody had ever accused her of hearing non-existent voices before.

  And she was quite certain the whole family was out. Mama and Papa were on a call to a country farmstead where an elderly man lay dying. Like most of their patients, he was an old friend so they’d gone not only to ease his way with their medicines, but to bid him a last farewell. The young doctor trained as their assistant practiced from his own home and the two nurses would be working at his place while her parents out of the office on the far side of the big Victorian house where she lived.

  At this time of day, her little sister Sylvie was still at school, and their housekeepers, Mrs. Myers and her granddaughter, had taken the afternoon off to go view the fashion show of new dress designs made by local seamstresses.

  And Grandpa Forrest was down at his store, chatting with the young manager who ran it for him these days.

  It was a rare few hours when she was actually alone in the house and she’d planned to make the most of it by working on the latest story she was making up for presentation to the community. It was called Siege at Vicksburg and was designed to impart a little history as well as tell a dramatic story.

  She had just gotten to the part where the starving people were desperate for anything at all to eat when she realized somebody was talking elsewhere in the house.

  Getting to her feet, she brushed her long skirt into place, took off the apron she still wore after a baking session in the kitchen, and went exploring. She stepped out into the second floor hallway, the sound of her high-topped shoes soft against the rug. Long ago she’d gotten used to the idea that she lived in a big family home in what was now the summer of 1908 by the best reckoning of the residents of the town that had gone behind its own invisible walls back in 1883 when her step great-grandfather had taken them out of time to keep from spreading deadly influenza to neighboring Texas counties.

  So though she’d been born in the 21st century, she liked the late 19th and early 20th better. It was a choice she’d consciously made and she’d didn’t want to make her home anywhere else but here with Mama, Papa and the rest of the family.

  Naturally nobody was in the hall. She hadn’t expected anything different. Mama and Papa’s room was on the third floor in the tower room, but both the housekeepers, the old and the young, had rooms on this floor as did her little sister.

  She didn’t think any of them would mind, not considering that an intruder might be in the house, if she just opened the doors and took a peek inside to make certain everything was all right.

  Mrs. Myers room was as impeccable as always. The coverlet she’d made herself and the pillows in beautifully embroidered cases were neatly in place. The rocking chair where the aging woman spent most of her days now that she suffered from the pangs of rheumatism stayed unmoving. Not even a mouse dared stir in their long-time housekeeper and friend’s domain.

  Next she checked out Dorothea’s room. Dorothea Johnson was the latest in the line of Mrs. Myers grandchildren to take on the role of housekeeper under their grandmother’s supervision. Dottie didn’t even spend much time there herself, being more interested in the company of young people her own age than hanging around the house in her leisure hours.

  From the vantage point of nearly twenty five, Betsy considered herself a confirmed spinster and the younger Dottie was as frivolous as she’d been in her girlhood, though she didn’t seem to be leaving a trail of broken engagements as Betsy had done.

  Nobody in Dottie’s room, though with clothes strewn across the bed as though she’d tried and rejected several outfits before departing, she didn’t quite live up to her grandmother’s standard of perfection.

  Betsy grinned. It was a standard to which she only aspired, but under the housekeeper’s tutelage she’d learned to cook, bake and maintain a household. She’d make a good wife for some man, but since she was holding out for somebody she felt as strongly about as her sister Eddie felt for her husband Zan, it didn’t seem likely.

  After all she was acquainted with every single man of any age in Lavender and no one of them had made the bells in her head ring.

  The trouble was that Zan and Eddie, crazy as they were, set too high a goal. She missed them both, drat their world-saving hides.

  Sylvie seemed to have inherited Eddie’s comfort with disorder. The fourteen-year-old had left her room in disarray when she went to school this morning. Her bed unmade, a skirt draped on the bed post, her jacks and ball in the middle of the floor; yep, everything looked normal in their little sister’s world. No visitors.

  With each futile search Betsy was becoming more confident that she’d imagined the whole thing. Voices! What next? She would soon be imagining that she was the only person in the town of Lavender who for some unknown reason could cross the time walls set up by Great-Grandpa Tyler that kept them in their own slow moving time while the world outside whirled into the future.

  That was funny because it was true. She could cross time dimensions at will and take others with her as long as they were holding on to her in some way. The problem with that was that it was an insignificant talent, considering she had no interest in going anywhere else. She was happy right where she was.

  She searched the empty-feeling room that had once belonged to the girl who had become her sister when Eddie’s mama married Betsy’s papa. Now, when she was here, Eddie lived with her husband in the little house across town that they rented from Grandpapa Forrest.

  Refusing to further indulge in memories of the days when she and Eddie had been girls, fighting and playing together, she went down the wide, carpeted stairs to the living room with its oval pictures and old paintings on the walls, its huge piano and comfortable chairs and sofas.

  Before going to the separate kitchen in the back, she peeked into the rooms set aside as doctors’ offices for her parents. No waiting patients occupied the chairs that lined the far wall. No home trained nurse sat at the reception desk. She crossed the living room to go back to the dining room, through the covered walk that lay open to the scent of honeysuckle blooms, and
then opened the door to a kitchen built back of the house to keep it from heating the other rooms, or even possibly catching them on fire.

  Everything else—the flowers in the back yard—the gray and pink house towering behind her—vanished as she peered into an unfamiliar room.

  It was a kitchen, but not the familiar one where she baked cookies and had made hundreds of breakfasts. Instead of a cookstove, a huge fireplace loomed at the far end of the room, and a middle-aged black woman in the dress of another time tended the roasting meat.

  The smell of the roast filled the air, blotting out the flower scent of only seconds before. The room was cold around the edges and she could see, looking through the single window that it was winter outside. The place she’d just left had been in summer.

  A rough-hewn table and an odd match of chairs filled the center of the room. Instead of the pump and sink of her home, she saw a large wash basin, empty of water, and from the ceiling hung huge hams and slabs of bacon.

  Two men sat at the table. Food lay before them, but they seemed more engaged in conversation than eating. Neither looked up to see her.

  The man with his back to her was slightly stooped, his hair white. He was older and she heard his voice saying, “You young men, you have no idea what war is really like.” He said what sounded like an expletive in a language she didn’t comprehend and she realized that he spoke with a slight accent, something she thought might come from a boyhood in middle Europe. “You think it all glory and flag waving, all bravery and honor like those old knights in story books. ‘Men now in England asleep in their beds,’ she recognized the Shakespearean paraphrase and knew it came from Henry V and had to do with the brotherhood of warriors.

  “Let me tell you, Caleb, war is brutal, bloody, tragic and nobody wins. You will rue the day you put on that uniform to fight against your own country that men like Washington and Jefferson fought to establish.”

  An amused voice with a decided southern drawl responded. “Come on, Tyler, Washington most certainly fought, but I believe Thomas Jefferson was a man of elegant expression. His tools were written words.”

  That voice, deep and mellow, intrigued her. She looked past the first man to the second, the one whose face she could see.

  It was a face to mark in her mind, an intelligent face with deep set gray eyes, fringed with dark lashes. Surprisingly his dark hair was already turning white on either side of a still young face. Shadowed hollows deepened just below high cheek bones and darker shadows showed under his eyes.

  She stared, fascinated by the depth of those eyes, the sensitivity of the lines of his mouth. Caleb, the other man had called him Caleb.

  He was dressed in a worn gray uniform that fit his slender form and broad shoulders somewhat loosely, one button dangling by a thread from his shirt. She longed to run for her sewing basket and fix the button into place. His was almost a forsaken figure; he needed cherishing.

  Then she realized. He wore the uniform of the Confederate States of America. The woman who came over now to serve them hot biscuits and thick slices of bacon was most likely a black slave.

  Without even crossing the line that lay just past the creek on the farm side of the Lavender community, she was peering back into a time she had no desire to see. Even though she lived in Texas and had heard the sad stories of former southern soldiers, she held no romantic notions about the defeated confederacy. She could never understand or forgive a society that bought and sold people into slavery.

  Her best friend was black and her mother had been a daughter to slaves. Betsy knew that if it was a matter of blue and gray, she was blue to the core of her being.

  She could never be sympathetic to a confederate soldier. And yet her gaze continued to fix on that strange man’s mesmerizing face until she accidentally fell backward. The scene before her eyes faded and she was once more looking into the familiar back yard kitchen where she had helped Mrs. Myers cook so many meals during the years she was growing up.

  Chapter Two

  Betsy felt weird as she helped Dottie serve supper in the kitchen where only hours before she’d watched a gray-clad stranger chat about war. Family members were uncommonly quiet this evening, taking their cue from her parents.

  Cynthia and Evan Stephens had lost an old friend today and they looked weary and a little sad. As doctors they dealt with death on a more regular basis than they liked, but all patients were part of their community and losses never dismissed easily.

  Only fourteen-year-old Sylvie seemed unaffected as she told about her day at school and the doings of her friends. For Sylvie, the only child in a family of adults, life at home was monotonous and she was sure they were all entertained by accounts of the activities of her peer group.

  Presenting a meal in the Stephens household was not a formal thing, they ate breakfast and supper at the kitchen table, only the noontime dinner was consumed in the formal dining room inside the main house. Mrs. Myers and Dottie joined them for all meals. In Lavender there was no distinction between servants and those served. They’d never be able to hire needed staff if things were otherwise. All those years when Mrs. Myers had been helping raise the girls, she’d considered she was doing Cynthia and Evan a favor, not the other way round.

  Now Betsy listened to her sister chatter without really taking in the words. She nibbled at her pork chop, ate a bite of mashed potatoes, and thought gloomily that all she’d ever asked was for an ordinary life, but in spite of that, she always seemed to be given a heaping helping of extraordinary.

  Seeing two men and a woman across time in her own backyard seemed to fall in that category.

  She looked to where her grandfather by marriage sat in the place of honor at the head of the table. Forrest, a successful businessman, had always seemed to be a little at odds with her papa. People said he took more after his own grandfather than Forrest. But for the girls, Forrest Stephens was the best grandparent in the world.

  Tyler! That was the name of Forrest’s papa. The man in gray had called the other man ‘Tyler.’

  “How long has this house been here?” she asked suddenly, not directing the question to anyone in particular.

  Grandpapa answered, looking pleased with the switch of topics from activities at the local school. He liked to talk about the old days, but complained that nobody wanted to listen now that his historian granddaughter Eddie was away.

  “We started building it in 1880.” He stroked his carefully groomed beard thoughtfully. “Your grandmother and me. We wanted our family to have a fine home.” A look of sadness flickered across his face and she knew he was remembering his wife, who had died of the influenza that swept the town only a short time later. She’d not had much time to live in what back then must have seemed a magnificent house. There still was no residential structure in town to outclass it.

  Betsy was driven by a sense of urgency that didn’t allow time for ramblings. Grandpapa Forrest, who was Eddie and Sylvie’s grandparent by blood, seemed just as much her own since even before Cynthia Burden had married Evan Stephens and they’d become one united family. And even though his father had reputedly lived to be over a hundred, Grandpapa began to seem old now that he was in his eighties.

  “Where did you live before?” she inquired, thinking of that other kitchen back in Civil War days.

  He smiled as though remembering older and perhaps better days when his wife had been alive and his son a boy. “Here,” he gave the simplest answer possible.

  “I loved that old house,” Evan Stephens spoke up, his face brightening from the gloom he’d come home with after his friend’s death. “Grandpa built it when he first came here from the old world.”

  “It only started out as a four room box house,” Grandpapa added, “but they added on over the years as my father needed an office and medical laboratory and, of course, my mother wanted a place to entertain her friends. Things were close to pioneer days when they first came here.”

  “Close,” his son scoffed. “The Comanche we
re still making raids, killing and capturing the settlers. Grandpa had come here from an old civilization and he told me he thought he’d been set down in the middle of the wilderness.”

  “I guess the Comanche thought their home had been invaded,” Betsy said testily, annoyed by such a one-sided view of things.

  Usually her papa was good about seeing other people’s points of view, but now he just looked puzzled. “They were wild men,” he said, “fearful savages.”

  It wasn’t the first time Betsy was reminded that she’d grown up in another time and place. Back in 21st century California where she’d lived the first years of her life, intolerance was practically the only sin not tolerated.

  Even when she’d come to stay with her aunt and uncle in Oklahoma’s old Cheyenne-Arapaho territory, she’d learned to respect and even have a somewhat romantic view of the people from the tribe so tragically slaughtered at Wounded Knee. Her Aunt Lynne had Cheyenne friends, elderly women who still knew how to do the handcrafts that had once sustained their people both practically and artistically. She’d bought a lovely pair of moccasins for Betsy that were probably still among her belongings stored in a closet in the ranch house more than a hundred years away from here.

  Now for the first time, she felt a little apart from her family and friends in Lavender. They lived in a microcosm where little changed and everybody had to get along. They were mostly the same, descendants of the European pioneers who had built homes in wilderness Texas. Oh, they had a few blacks, her friend Susan had been born from a mixed marriage, and there were several families whose ancestors had come from Mexico, but the numbers were low and acceptance necessary in such a small community.

  Back home where she had been a child, things had been different. She realized then that for the first time in years she’d thought of someplace other than Lavender as home.

  But Evan and Forrest, son and father, were still reminiscing. She caught the words, “having supper on the very site of the old cookshack.”