Some Enchanted Dream: A Time Travel Adventure (Seasons of Enchantment Book 2) Read online

  He nodded, simply to be polite. He had no greater grasp of this modern invention than before Tara tried to explain it to him. “Are you hungry, my sweet?”

  Her eyes danced a little with amusement as she tilted her head to look up at him. “Yes. Are you going to ring for something to be brought up from the kitchens, my lord?”

  “Would that I could,” Adrian huffed in a long, frustrated sigh. “What do you suggest?”

  As soon as he asked, he was sorry. Her look said it all. Helpless dolt.

  “One of us will need to go out and purchase something to eat, be it soup, sandwiches, or a roasted chicken at one of the neighborhood cafes and bring it home.”

  That was not what he wanted to hear, as the ‘one of us’ clearly implied it would be him. Tara could not go out alone at this time of night to purchase food. He was rather hoping something would already be here for them, cooked and ready to eat.

  “And buy a bottle of wine, too,” Tara directed, taking on a dictatorial demeanor. “Buy a chicken—a cooked chicken mind, you. If you can’t find that, buy some cheese, fruit and bread. Riley bought me a meat pie at noon, but I doubt that food stall is open at night.”

  An hour later, Adrian returned home with their dinner. He felt like a bloody footman. Fortunately, he only had to go one street over to find a restaurant willing to sell him a whole cooked chicken, a bottle of wine, and a hunk of cheese. A loaf of long, narrow bread was added to his bill, and he managed to walk easily on the level street with the booty in a wicker basket.

  He missed the days of creeping silently in the night, a masked leader fighting for a just cause. Nearly one hundred years later, would Ireland be free? Perhaps, when Tara recovered, she could take him to present day Ireland so they could find out.

  Men lurked in the shadows here and there, laughing, cursing, and drinking cheap liquor. The darkened streets had a distinct presence of danger. During the day Montmartre was a busy place, but the people were friendly, jovial. At night, the shadows gave way to a different Montmartre, a more sinister threatening place. It seemed as if eyes watched him from every arched door and open alleyway. He shrugged the deep wicker basket handle up onto his shoulder, clutched his cane, and reached into his pocket for his pistol.

  Damn, he wished he still had his sword.

  Once he overcame the flights of stairs and entered their humble lodgings with the required meal, he found Tara gazing out the window toward the illuminated tower. Her expression was morose. He suspected she was pining for her own time and the modern conveniences she and Dan spoke so often about with a wistfulness in their voices.

  “Come, I’ve brought what you requested, love. Don’t linger at the window, you’ll catch a draft and become ill.” It was May, still, the nights became cold. He’d close the window before they retired.

  She did as he asked, slowly, with a distant look on her face. She was lost in memories. Her fluid movement to the table in her long, billowy bed gown made him pause to admire her. She was so beautiful, and so lost at the moment with the loss of their child.

  The scent of baked chicken filled the room. He paid extra to have the cook cut up the carcass for ease of eating, being uncertain as to the contents of their meager shelves. He wasn’t sure they had forks or knives, and sparing Tara the inconvenience of having to rip the chicken apart with her fingers and eat barbarian style seemed worth a few extra shillings. He pulled the chair out for her, a habit learned from his life as an Irish lord.

  A grimace twisted his mouth as he looked about the shabby little room. Here, he was plain Mr. Dillon, vagabond traveler with limited coin.

  “What is it?” Tara asked, noting his displeasure. “You look upset.”

  Adrian shook his head. No reason to disturb her with his misgivings about their future here. “I’m tired, pet. The stairs prove cruel to my healing hip.”

  Tara, the darling of his heart, nodded, but she held his gaze with more perception than he cared for. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then pointed behind him to the open cupboard shelves. “Plates, and forks, if you would, my lord. And cups for the wine.”

  Indeed. Without needing to rise, he reached behind him to find the items and placed them on the table. His privileged status as a wealthy lord was never more obvious at this moment. No one, including Tara, was going to wait on him. Not unless he gained access to his hoarded funds at the bank and could pay for the honor of being ‘served’. He pried open the cork and poured the cheap wine into their tin cups and handed her one.

  “To freedom,” Tara lifted her cup to him. “And to life. May it be a long life, my lord.”

  He touched her cup with his own and drank to her toast, humbled by the reality before him as he scanned their rude surroundings.

  The price of this freedom, nay, the price of escaping the hangman, was indeed steep.

  Chapter Five

  This was Le Heure Verte.

  Dan was enchanted by the phrase. The Parisians actually had a name for the time of day when everyone indulged in a glass of green liquor. L’heure Verte. The Green Hour.

  He was sitting at an outdoor table on the terrace of the Cafe Veron on Blvd Montmartre, sipping absinthe with two men he had met in the tobacco shop that afternoon.

  Never one for art, Dan couldn’t name the famous fellow who had painted an outdoor cafe’ scene at night, he only remembered the guy had flaming red hair and was supposed to have cut off his ear and gifted it to some poor lady he admired. Mad fellow, that, but his paintings from this time were worth millions in the future.

  I’ll ask Tara about the fellow, surely she’ll know his name. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they could meet that famous painter?

  He was mimicking his companions, taking small sips of the bittersweet drink of vibrant green that had an hour of the day named after it. Some drank it with water to soften its bite, but these fellows preferred it straight up. Dan tasted licorice, lemon balm and some other delicate flavoring that tickled his senses.

  “Where are you from, good fellow?” Dan’s companion asked politely. Arthur Bellows was the man who had directed them to their present lodgings the other day. Bellows hailed from England. He was spending a year in Paris, trying to establish himself as an artist.

  “America,” Dan answered, rolling his lips and letting his tongue dart about them to garner another taste of the unusual drink. “I was visiting my daughter and her husband in Dublin. They decided to come to Paris on a whim. It seemed a pleasant diversion.”

  “I salute their effort at spontaneity,” Mr. Paul Gouffe’ said with bold authority. “Didn’t they realize every room in Paris would be let for the Exposition?” The man had a nose that seemed more broken than hooked. His face was grave, his hair black and his beard bushy and full. His comrade, Mr. Bellows, had a countenance that was smooth shaven and his manner was quiet and cultured. “The world has come to bow at our feet. We are the city of light.”

  An odd pair, these two, but friendly toward a stranger, Dan conceded.

  “Paul, don’t be so hard on the fellow,” Arthur argued. “Here’s to you and your daughter, Sir. May your dreams become manifest in our fair city of light.” Arthur raised his small glass toward the tower glowing in the distance, the Eiffel Tower, and they drank to his toast.

  “It is the time for dreams, no?” Paul, the burly fellow, gestured about. “Take me? I’ve left my stuffy life as a bank clerk to become a painter. We must all embrace our dreams, oui?”

  “Yes. And if only you could find patrons for your primitive nudes,” Arthur laughed, and slapped the brute fellow on the shoulder. “Then you’d stop complaining about not having two sous to rub together in this glorious city of light.”

  Paul’s face, coarse and unpleasant as it was, grew red, signaling trouble. He stood up, and tossed his empty glass to the curb. The noise of it shattering made the men at the tables around them turn to look. “M’sieur Bellows, you insult me with your jest in front of our guest!”

  “Paul, sit. I meant no insult t
o you and you know it. You tell everyone here night after night how you cannot sell your glorious paintings to the salon, how you need to find patrons to fund your next trip around the world, so why the pretended offense if I tell the same story to a visitor in our midst?” Arthur argued.

  Murmurs about them, mostly in French, gave Dan the uneasy feeling a fight was about to ensue between the gruff Mr. Gouffe’ and his more temperate English friend.

  A long string of French exploded from Paul’s ruddy lips like a wind storm. He glared at Arthur. Arthur stood up, appearing to take issue with the Frenchman’s hot words.

  “Gentleman,” Dan rose and extended a hand toward each of them. “Don’t ruin my first evening out in Paris with a brawl. I should like to hear more about your paintings, Paul.”

  “Not tonight,” the Frenchman hissed and lumbered away from the open cafe.

  “He is a hot headed chap,” Arthur explained as they took their seats again. “Doesn’t take much to set him off. He’ll be off to visit one of his whores to soothe his ego.”

  Dan nodded, but didn’t comment. The fellow had been so jovial earlier that afternoon when they met in the tobacco shop. He was sullen and ill tempered this evening. “So, he paints nudes, does he?”

  “This is Paris. We all paint nudes. To the beauty of the female form.” Arthur lifted his glass once again in a toast.

  Dan couldn’t contain his grin. This place was turning into paradise. “Here, here.”

  A waiter came out bearing a tray of cooked meat, and a woman followed with plates and forks. Dan swallowed hard, realizing he’d not eaten since before noon and it was now past six in the evening. He patted his pockets. “How much? I’ll toss in half.”

  “No.” Arthur held up a thin hand with long fingers. “You are my guest tonight, Mr. Wilson. And my father, the ill-humored Earl of Leicester, is the benefactor for our feast. Eat, friend. Eat. Drink. Celebrate. This is Paris, after all. And we are her suitors from afar, come to court Le belle dame sans merci, The beautiful woman without mercy.”

  The scent of roasted fowl was curling about Dan’s nose with exotic tendrils of seduction. He could not argue with his companion. Hopefully, he’d be able to return the favor and buy Arthur a few pints later this evening. “Are you a poet as well as an artist?”

  Arthur sliced a piece of breast meat from the sultry brown carcass between them. He offered it to Dan by reaching across the table and placing it on his plate. There were steaming potatoes, and green beans. Dan smiled with wicked delight. If Paul hadn’t become so foul tempered, he’d be eating with them now. Well, then, all the more for himself and Artie.

  “I do write verse from time to time, but that quote is not my own. It comes from Keats, written long ago. Do you not know your English Poets, my good man? “‘I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a fairy’s child, her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild’. To Keats, the beautiful woman without mercy is actually a fairy maid.”

  Dan choked on the mouthful of roasted duck he was trying to swallow. Fairy. He’d been slapped upside the head recently over that odd business. And wasn’t that what got him into this wild mess of time travel in the first place? Fairy magic. Tara’s fairy magic, to be precise.

  “I say, good fellow?” Arthur stopped fussing with his plate to regard Dan with concern.

  His eyes were watering. Dan grasped the glass of green juice and guzzled it in an attempt to get liquid into his throat. The liquor didn’t help. He coughed more and took to wheezing.

  Arthur was on his feet, shouting to someone to bring water to their table. He started thumping Dan on the back with more gusto than Dan thought possible for such a sparse man.

  The waiter and several others hovered over the table as Dan tried to recover from the embarrassment of choking in a public place. He grunted a few times, and tugged at the opening of his shirt. “I’m fine. Please … please, away.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. Arthur, his host, nodded and herded the others away with his arms.

  Fairies. Yeah, right. Dan was still trying to wrap his head around the reality of having a friend on the inside of that secret club. Tara and her brothers were actually fairies. He didn’t like to think about it too much. But when some jolly fellow like this made a random comment about creatures he had believed all his life were merely cartoon characters, Dan found himself choking and sputtering.

  “Travelling by sea can cause a fellow’s insides to become unsettled.” Arthur said as he sat down again. “You should eat lightly for a few days, and avoid strong drink.”

  “You have no idea,” Dan quipped. “I find I don’t travel well at all of late. But, never mind me, tell me more about this fairy woman without mercy.”

  Arthur made a face, as if considering his next words cautiously. And then he leaned in close, so those about them could not hear his low whisper. “My friend, you may think me mad, but there has been talk for many years of a fairy woman strolling the streets of Montmartre. She visits those who practice the creative arts and bestows the gift of inspiration upon a rare few.”

  “You’re talking about the muses.” Dan interjected, warming to this philosophical discussion on this warm spring night. He was not the type to wax poetic or pursue profound thought, but this place, the company and the green drink all seemed to have an usually uplifting effect on his perceptions. He felt light, expansive, almost a little euphoric. “The daughters of Zeus are the muses. There were nine, each one had a creative talent. Let’s see, there was one for writing, one for music, and dance … “

  “No, no, this has nothing to do with the Greeks.” Arthur made a cutting gesture with the flat of his hand. “This is a French legend. The old men around here claim a fairy created Absinthe. The Green Fairy. She supposedly seduced a Frenchman who escaped the city during the Revolution and hid in the mountains in the region of the Swiss Alps. It is said he brought her back to Paris with him at the turn of the century, and she provided the magic ingredient that gives Absinthe the power to inspire creativity in the human soul.”

  Dan pondered that tidbit of knowledge. “So, you believe those with special talents are given their abilities by a fairy, simply because they drink her secret potion?”

  “Yes, and no,” Arthur replied, weaving a little to the left in his chair. He poured Dan a second glass of Absinthe, and one for himself. He lifted the glass between his fingers and held it up to the light to peer at it as if searching for that special bit of magic he was talking about. “It is not merely the mixture of herbs steeped in alcohol that awakens the creative side of the mind. She has to have touched it, imbued the elixir with her magic. There are plenty of cheap brands flooding the market, all of them claiming to be the original recipe that was lost to us when the old man died. Since his death, the Green Fairy is said to have taken many lovers among those who worship at her shrine—but none have charmed her as he did. So, she keeps searching.”

  The waiter came to clear away their dinner. Arthur was silent as he studied his glass of bright green liquid beneath the lights hanging from the canopy above them.

  Living with Tara and her fey brothers, Dan knew fairies actually did live in mounds or inside mountains. And they sometimes took humans as lovers. Art made a good argument. The legend of the Green Fairy might actually be true.

  Dan sat back in his chair and gazed out at the city lights below as he considered the finer points of keeping his own counsel on the reality of fairies while sharing a drink with a stranger. “That’s a captivating story. I’d write it down if I were you, before you forget it. Gives this,” he lifted his glass, “a unique allure. Here’s to the Green Fairy, may her legend always inspire you.”

  “She’s quite real.” Arthur tipped his glass at Dan for emphasis. “And pure Absinthe, the true formula given to men by this lovely fairy—that will be my conduit to finding her.”

  “Best of luck.” Dan sighed, and reached for his cigar inside his coat pocket. He had a bad feeling about this.

  “I�
��ve met her. I was transported to her court. It is an experience one can hardly forget. A beautiful garden cloaked in the night, with an amazing swirling green pool that glows, and iridescent flowers that wave and undulate in the night like fireflies with large, billowy illuminated wings.”

  Dan brushed his hand over his jaw, wondering if this Absinthe the man ingested regularly was similar to LSD when taken in heavy amounts. “I see. Was it a dream?”

  “No,” Arthur was adamant. “No, she kissed me. The Green Fairy kissed me, on the lips!”

  “Hmmm,” Dan refrained from commenting. He could imagine his new friend stoned out of his mind, half passed out in the alley and some pretty prostitute coming upon Arthur while he was dreaming of the green fairy and bending down to give him a kiss. “How about we go to a dance club, and find some naughty women with long legs to admire?”

  Chapter Six

  Another week passed since Gisele came to visit Tara bearing a huge carpetbag of clothes.

  The kind woman stopped in frequently in the following days to drop off fashion magazines to cheer Tara and to share a pastry from the corner bakery to add to the cup of tea Tara brewed for them. Gisele shared tidbits of neighborhood gossip. The woman across the street had kicked her husband out and taken to drinking Absinthe alone at the Chien Blanc Cafe in the evenings. Gisele warned Tara about the artist in the one room studio on the top floor of their building. He was an eccentric hermit who wanted everyone he met on the stairs to come up to his studio and pose nude for him.

  A bond formed between them quickly. Tara was the only woman amid the troupe of men she’d brought to nineteenth century Paris, and she hungered for a woman’s companionship. After two weeks of cloistering herself in the apartment and mourning her lost babe, Gisele coaxed Tara into an excursion to the dress shops in Paris.