2

The wedding reception had lasted until long after midnight. Guests and family had clinked glasses until deep into the wedding hours. What had been predicted as a seasonably warm day without rain, however, had turned dark. Clouds had descended over the estate. Despite the strange weather, the wedding went off on a good note, and William and Ally stayed the night at his house in Collinsport and planned to depart the following morning for their honeymoon in Martinique; it was a gift from his parents. Angelique helped Carolyn clean up some of the mess from the guests for a while, but then decided to leave the rest of it until the morning. After midnight, the unexpected rainstorm was pummeling the estate. No one could see the town from the hill because of it. Quentin drove Barnabas and Angelique back to the Old House, and the proud parents were already discussing names for grandchildren when they retired for bed. The former sorceress retired with her head on her husband's shoulder as usual, but when she woke the next morning, she was on the edge of the bed. She took a deep breath ready to rise and looked around the room, but she failed to recognize it. She was not at home!

"Barnabas!" She prodded her husband awake. "Barnabas!" He awoke with a full beard instead of his shaved handsome features. He immediately noticed the changes as well and clutched at his beard. This was not their room. It was their furniture, but not their room.

"This is Elizabeth's room at the main house!" Barnabas rose in his flannel pajamas. "How did we get here?"

"We are in the main house!" Angelique looked out the window. The roof of the Old house was still in the distance, but the view was somehow clearer. The trees were not as full. The lighthouse that been lost by the storm in 1957 was back where it once was. Something had happened. "This is our furniture. Look…" She picked up a woodcarving. "I purchased this in 1797 after you traveled back in time to help Vicki."

"This is not what I was wearing last night." Barnabas was equally confused if not more. "I retired in the blue pajamas you had bought for me. Angelique, is this a spell?"

"My cell phone is not here!" Angelique studied the room. She was still middle-aged, but she was subtly older than that, maybe in her sixties despite the fact she had stopped aging in her late thirties. "No light switch! No electrical lights… Barnabas, are we back in 1795?" They looked at each other.

"If we are…" He grasped distraughtly confused as his silver and gray beard. "Why are we in the main house instead of the Old House?" Angelique stared at him waiting to take charge. "Compose yourself." He looked around and found a man's house frock and pulled it on himself. "I'll go down and get some answers. I'll come back at get you."

"I'm far more capable than that." She grabbed a long house coat to pull over her nightdress and followed her husband out of the room. If they were in Elizabeth's room, where were Willie and Carolyn? They had moved into her room three years after Elizabeth had passed away. The clues they had traveled back in time were more and more. Kerosene lamps dotted the upstairs hallway, and furniture that had been stored away years ago now filled the corridor at the top of the staircase to the downstairs back hall off the drawing room. The portrait of Joshua and Naomi Collins was missing from the dining room. All the renovations Carolyn had carried out in 1995 had been undone. In the kitchen, a log burning stove rested in the place of the electric stove. The dishwasher was gone and the family blackboard for messages was replaced for the bare wall. As Barnabas turned around confused and nervously paranoid, Angelique peeked into the pantry. Two large pork sides hung in there. There was no refrigerator. Everything had reverted back to what the estate was in 1795.

There was a noise. Someone was coming along the walkway in the garden, through the gate outside the kitchen and toward the back door. Angelique saw the huge figure in the window briefly before he came in. She turned around and recognized the face of Ben Stokes as an old man. He was thinner than she remembered, and his brown hair was a faded gray. He wore the same tweed jacket and breech pants that she remembered.

"Ben…" Barnabas was stunned to see him alive. "You're alive."

"Or what passes for it…" Ben's gravelly voice answered. "I was already up so I thought I'd bring you the morning firewood for breakfast. I know I don't have to, but I promised your father on his deathbed I'd look after you. I still vow to carry out that promise."

"My father…" Barnabas anxiously looked to Angelique and back to the man he adored as a child. "Ben, excuse me, but I'm a bit confused…"

"Ben," Angelique stepped forward. "What's the date today?"

"May 25…"

"The year, Ben."

Ben looked at him as of Barnabas was a bit touched or addled.

"1820…"

Barnabas and Angelique looked at each other stunned and confused. They knew where they were, but they did not know the how or the why? Did someone alter the past? Was this where they would have been if history had been changed? Angelique turned to brace herself on the counter.

"Master Barnabas, I don't understand."

"Ben, please excuse my questions, but if you would so indulge me…" Barnabas adjusted his frock. "Who is master of Collinwood here?"

"Well, you are…" Ben looked at them. Angelique clutched her chest, and Barnabas tried to bravely absorb the stunned news. It was just as his father had wanted. He was master of Collinwood, and Angelique was his wife, but how? Why? What had happened to them?

"Barnabas, is there anything wrong?"

"No, Ben…"

"Okay, " Ben had placed the firewood by the stove and turned to head out the rear door. "Now, if you won't be needing me, I'm going to take the coach to pick up your sister and her husband at the at the docks. I imagine they'll be needing their room turned down if they're staying for young William's wedding."

"My sister?" Barnabas turned excitedly. "Sara? She's alive as well?"

"And William?" Angelique had forgotten about her children in her confusion. "What about my daughter? Where's my daughter, Sara?"

"Probably still asleep in their rooms…" It was now Ben's turn to be confused. "Master Barnabas, are you sure you two are okay?"

"Yes, Ben…" Barnabas tried to control his anxious glee and awkward confusion. "Just go about your duties… We'll be all right."

"Of course…" He turned to head out. Left behind as the masters of Collinwood, Barnabas now sat down as Angelique looked at him and grasped his hand. She forced a nervous chuckle and looked around unsure what to say. They looked across the table in a strange world.

"This is not the past." Her rich azure eyes looked as if they were descending into madness. "Barnabas, this is… another band of time."

"Like the room in the east wing…" Barnabas recalled a haunted room in the house that glimpsed other versions of Collinwood in other realities. It had been boarded up years ago to keep the children out of it, but he knew very well of it through his encounters with it.

"Yes…" Angelique tried to keep her composure. "Some force has placed us here, the children… perhaps the rest of the family. All of us somehow reverted to our past time counterparts."

"But why?" Barnabas asked the question. "For what reason?"

"I don't know…" Angelique looked to him and stroked his new beard fondly. "But we must play these roles until we find out."

"Good morning, Barnabas…" Naomi Collins strolled in supporting herself on a cane. She was Barnabas's mother. She was very much up in age now, a woman at the crisp age of seventy-five living with her children and grandchildren. Still sharp as a tack at her age, she strolled in looking at the cold stove and looked around the kitchen. "No coffee, Angelique?"

"Oh, yes, of course…" Angelique hurriedly and befuddledly rose to fill the stove with wood to boil the water. She took down the kettle and pumped the water at the sink, reverting quickly to her life in pre-Civil War America. Barnabas turned to a boy again before his mother. Rising from his chair, he rose to meet her and was horrified to see her so old. When he last saw her, she was forty-two and a beautiful woman, but now her hair was tinged with silver and she was as thin as a skeleton. Her bright blue eyes had clouded a bit, and her white complexion was mottled with spots on her forehead. She looked up to him expecting him to say something.

"Mother," Barnabas was humbled before her. "You look as beautiful as always."

"And you're just now noticing?" She lowered herself slowly into her chair as a servant in a blue-gray dress brought her shawl to her. Angelique looked over as the young lady assisting Naomi helped to prepare breakfast for the family. Her daughter, Sara, appeared very Mennonite in her period dress and very natural without her Twentieth-Century makeup, but her appetite was still the same, only eating biscuits with fresh farm jam and a few pieces of bacon with a cup of milk. Barnabas shined to see William in the period clothes, but his hair was longer and his beard was shaved off by straight razor instead of by an electric razor, but neither of the two knew or felt the house was any different. To them, they had always lived in 1820. Young Sara was a young single beauty, and instead of being a writer, William was a stalwart member of the community who worked in the mayor's office, but it was not the same for everyone.

"Barnabas…" Quentin arrived to meet him just as confused as Barnabas and Angelique. "When I woke up in the Old House, I thought I had just got really drunk last night, but Maggie is insisting she's Josette Collins."

"Josette?!" Barnabas scratched his beard and plotted to shave it. It had been two hours since breakfast, and Barnabas was just about to head to the Old House for answers when Quentin appeared at the door. "She's alive?"

"Apparently…" Quentin headed to the liquor cabinet in the drawing room where it had been for over three hundred years. "Now, according to the snippets of dialogue I got from her… I married her in 1795 after you married Angelique."

"Well, " Barnabas was somewhat irked by this revelation. "That's not exactly what happened, but go on…"

"Jamison and Amanda are here too, but they have no memory I can tell of their lives in the future." Quentin continued.

"Neither do William or Sara…" Barnabas dramatically turned away from him out of nervous tension. "And I have not yet seen Willie or Carolyn either or the rest of the kids, but there is one thing I do understand. Quentin, this is not the past. This is a distorted version of it. William still thinks he's marrying Ally. He went to present himself to her parents coming up from Boston. They are here too!"

"What the hell is going on here?" Quentin downed his sherry and paused. "Have you checked the family history?"

"It hasn't been written yet." Barnabas stood by him. "We have no guide, no answers… we seem to be merely players in this strange world."

"I have a theory." Quentin had been thinking about the parallel time room. "Is it possible…" There was a roar of noise outside the house. The horse drawn coach had pulled up outside the front veranda. Ben's voice called them to calm down and a woman's voice yelled at someone. There were more yells and someone rushed to the door. Fighting with the entryway, Willie Loomis came rushing in wearing his clothes of the time. Dress in a long leather jacket with a fine suit underneath, he charged the foyer and quickly noticed Barnabas and Quentin.

"Barnabas? Quentin?" He came to them. "Is that you? Please tell me its you!"

"Yes, Willie…" Both Barnabas and Quentin tried to calm him. "It's us. Are you okay? Where's Carolyn?"

"She's not here." Willie confessed as if he was going mad. "I mean – the kids are here, but she's not. Barnabas, you'll never guess who I'm married to!"

"William Hollingshead Loomis!" His wife called. She wore a period floor length dress with a traveling cloak and the hood pulled up over her head. Still as full-figured she was in the future, Lizzie came up behind her to help her with it. "Why did you charge in here without helping me from the coach?" She pulled back her hood and handed it to Lizzie. She looked very much like Carolyn did with the long hair back and without the Twentieth-century face-lift, but when she looked at Barnabas, her face filled with pride and admiration. "There's my handsome brother. Barnabas, no hug for your sister, Sara?" She grinned toward him.