Timeline

By Christine Baldock

When she inherits an old house, Gothic Tower, on the wild North Yorkshire coast, Jen comes face to face with another version of herself who lived there two centuries ago. The girl is desperately unhappy and in need of help. Somehow, Jen must reach across the years to prevent a terrible tragedy that has already happened and so long ago, and with repercussions she can’t even imagine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781035811052

Christine Baldock

Christine Baldock was born in Liverpool, the youngest of three children. Both her parents were teachers. Following the death of her father, her mother took the position of Headmistress in Yorkshire not far from the coast. Weekends were spent either on the beaches or exploring the wild North Yorkshire moors and the beautiful scenic Dales. After spending eight years in America, Christine returned to England and married her childhood sweetheart. She and her husband, Tony, now reside in the West of Ireland. Timeline is her second novel.

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About the Author

Christine Baldock was born in Liverpool, the youngest of three children. Both her parents were teachers. Following the death of her father, her mother took the position of Headmistress in Yorkshire not far from the coast. Weekends were spent either on the beaches or exploring the wild North Yorkshire moors and the beautiful scenic Dales. After spending eight years in America, Christine returned to England and married her childhood sweetheart. She and her husband, Tony, now reside in the West of Ireland.

Timeline is her second novel.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family; my husband, Tony; and my three children, Annette, Clifford, and Tina, without whom this story would never have been told.

Copyright Information ©

Christine Baldock 2023

The right of Christine Baldock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035811038 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035811045 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781035811052 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Prologue

Staring up at a clear night sky twinkling with millions of stars, it is easy to imagine that Space is infinite. The time it takes to cross it must be infinite as well. And if Time is infinite, then it must also be coexistent.

Because our lives are finite, we have divided time into manageable units of years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Time travels in straight lines from start to finish, from beginning to end. Our lives travel these straight lines like a train on a track. We get on at a town called Birth and get off at a town called Death and it is conceivable that where these timelines cross, we experience a Déjà vu moment or perhaps a dream.

Imagine for a moment that your particular train of life has paused at another station beside another train. You catch a glimpse of a person sitting in the carriage opposite your window and it is your own face you see. This is not a reflection but another YOU on another train in another time. If all time is infinite and coexistent, then it is quite possible that there are an infinite number of each of us living an infinite number of different lives.

If it were possible to reach across from one train to another and make contact with your other self, would you be brave enough to attempt it? And would you try to influence that person’s fortunes or the manner of their existence? If you were aware that your other self was desperately unhappy or in pain, I’m sure that the temptation to interfere would be impossible to resist.

Chapter One

NOW

Jen stared at the official-looking envelope that had eased through her letter box and plopped onto the mat, along with a utilities bill and a flyer advertising the new kebab takeaway in the main street. She knew if she opened it that nothing in her life would ever be the same again. She moved it to one side tentatively with her slippered foot as though she expected it to rise up and snap at her, and then she bent down and collected the bill and the flyer. She took them into the kitchen and deposited the flyer in the recycling bin, then opened the bill. She grunted in disgust at the amount, passing a hand through her red hair, then put down the switch on the electric kettle, checking the water level, and made herself a cup of instant black coffee.

She idly mused about the defining events in history that had impacted so harshly on the lives of ordinary people and aimed a lecture at the kitchen wall. ‘The dates of these events are like the pegs in the children’s cloakroom where they hang their coats. The Roman invasion of 55 BC, the birth of Jesus and Christianity, 400 AD when the Romans left England to the ravages of the Vikings and the Norsemen, the battle of Hastings in 1066 when the Normans arrived, the Black Death and the Great Fire of London that followed, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and two World Wars.’

She smiled at herself and the extravagant analogies. But, she thought, it doesn’t have to be something huge that changes your life. It can be something small and insignificant to anyone else. Like the arrival of THAT. She stabbed an accusing finger at the offending buff envelope.

Jan poured herself a bowl of muesli and covered it with milk, reaching for a spoon from the drawer at the end of the table. From her chair, she could see the envelope lurking on the mat. Finally, curiosity got the better of her and she picked it up and carried it back to the kitchen. In the top left-hand corner was the name and address of the sender—Freeman and Grosmith, Solicitors—and they had used her full name, Ms Genevieve Harding. Jen hated the title of Ms, as though she were of indiscriminate status, or of undetermined sex, or in some halfway house between married and single. She tore open the offending missive and laid the letter flat upon the table.

The names Frank and Martha Campbell leapt from the page. For a moment, Jen felt a sensation akin to dizziness, although it was more like the kitchen had rocked to one side, throwing her off balance. Apparently, the firm of Freeman and Grosmith, Solicitors, were acting as executors for the last will and testament of Mr and Mrs Campbell. The Campbells had been killed simultaneously in a tragic road accident involving a fully loaded logging lorry with trailer. The driver of the lorry was unhurt, but the Campbells were announced dead at the scene. Messrs. Freeman and Grosmith would like Ms Genevieve Harding to attend at their offices that afternoon and to bring with her some form of photographic proof of her identity, such as a driving license or a passport.

Jen read the letter again. It brought back a mix of memories, some happy, some miserable and even some embarrassment and regret. Jen never knew her parents. She was told only that she had been abandoned as a baby, left on the doorstep of a medical centre. She was brought up in a series of foster homes, but never stayed long in any one of them. She was considered to be uncontrollable, a child with severe psychological problems. Certainly, she was angry. She was a loner, not prepared to trust easily. She felt isolated, different from the other children. The file on her stated that she had an extraordinary imagination, but that she was an inveterate liar, claiming that she could know things before they happened.

Jen suddenly recalled an incident when she was six or seven, and she and the couple who were fostering her were waiting to take a flight to Jersey.

When their flight was called, Jen refused to board the plane, screaming and throwing herself on the ground, causing so much confusion and embarrassment that they were removed from the departure lounge by the airport authorities. After the Jersey plane took off without them, its rear door flew outwards and the pilot was forced to return to the airport. The airport police took the couple together with Jen into an office and questioned them for two hours, believing them to be somehow involved in a possible act of terrorism.

After that, Jen was passed from one foster home to another. Some couples were physically abusive to her, convinced that her behaviour was simple wickedness. She was beaten with a bamboo cane by one man, locked in a dark and damp cellar by another couple. But, on that occasion, she retaliated by smashing all of the bottles of wine stored there. She was quickly moved on, this time to Frank and Martha.

However, the Campbells were good to her. They had no children of their own and they had applied to adopt an infant, boy or girl, but they were kept waiting while the powers that be decided they were too old to adopt a baby. They could be offered an older child but, in the meantime, perhaps they would like to foster in the short term. They immediately bonded with Jen. They were prepared to listen to her—something that her other foster parents had not done.

She had accompanied Frank to the site of a house that he and his workmen were renovating, ready to be sold on. She looked up at the steel girders and told Frank, ‘Don’t go up there, Papa Frank. It’s not safe.’ Frank sent one of his men to check and, sure enough, a heavy bolt joining two of the steel girders had loosened and was in danger of sliding out. On another occasion, Jen told Martha she should take a taxi because the car would have a flat tyre. Frank drove the car that day and his tyre blew out on the motorway so that he was barely able to hold the vehicle in a straight line.

Martha and Frank didn’t understand these strange episodes of Jen’s, but they learned to respect them and accepted them as being a result of the child’s unknown background. The Campbells were quite a flamboyant couple. They were enrolled in the local school of dance and took part in the ballroom dancing competitions. On one occasion, Martha discovered Jen trying on one of her ballet-length, full-skirted ball gowns which had been hanging on the door of her bedroom. Of course, the dress reached the floor on the child, ballooning out like a hooped crinoline. When Martha admonished her, ordering her to take it off, Jen replied miserably, ‘But I have nothing to wear.’

At weekends in the summertime, they would take a drive along the coast as far as Whitby, and then stop on the moors for a picnic. Sometimes, they took the steam train to Goetheland for tea and cake, or they would park the car above Robin Hoods Bay and take the steps down the winding cobble streets to the cove and have lunch at the old Bay Hotel which stood proudly on the corner overlooking the beach. Afterwards, to climb back up to where the car was parked, they would let her ride one of the patient donkeys that ferried people up and down the steep street.

On one such outing, they stopped to look at an ancient Gothic style house between Whitby and Robin Hoods Bay. Jen remembered the day well. There was a sign nailed to a board beside the broken metal gates which read For sale. House and outbuildings on ten acres with the name of the estate agent. She had leaned forward in the car and touched Frank on the shoulder.

‘I live here,’ she told him. Nobody seemed to question her use of the present tense. After all, she was only a child.

Frank got out of the car and disappeared through the overgrown gates, taking out his mobile phone. Jen knew that he was going to take photos of the house. That evening she was ushered up the stairs to bed earlier than usual and she lay wide awake, listening to the voices below. Martha and Frank were not arguing. They never argued. But Frank was doing most of the talking.

Eventually, Jen heard the usual late-night sounds of the curtains being drawn, the fire stoked up, the outside doors being locked and the television turned on for the nine o’clock news.

In the days that followed, there were meetings and appointments to which Jen was not invited. Frank would bury himself in his study with his computer, and Martha poured over home decor magazines. Jen had found three different views of Gothic Tower on the kitchen table and she carried them through to the study, forgetting to knock.

‘I live here,’ she said to Frank. ‘This is my home.’ And she recalled experiencing that uncomfortable feeling of a shift in her surroundings.

Jen remembered a terrible evening when the Campbells called her through to the lounge and sat her down on an easy chair that engulfed her. Frank looked serious. Martha had been crying. Frank pulled up a chair and sat opposite Jen.

‘We have some bad news for you, Jen,’ he began. ‘We can no longer be your family.’

Martha took both her hands in hers. ‘We will always love you. You know that, don’t you?’

Jen remembered snatching her hands away and her own bitter outburst. ‘No. No, I don’t know. You just don’t want me anymore.’

Martha had looked stricken. ‘You were only loaned to us. It was never going to be permanent.’

Frank interrupted, ‘We have to go away, Jen, and we can’t take you with us.’

That was all the explanation she was given. Jen thought later that they had finally been offered a child to adopt and they no longer wanted her. She took the perceived rejection hard and became quite bitter. She passed from one foster home to another and finally ended up in an orphanage until she was eighteen.

Jen read the letter again. Should she attend the meeting with the solicitors? She hadn’t even known that the Campbells had died. She wasn’t sure how she should feel about their passing. She surely should feel something, sadness, regret. They had been good to her. Then the old resentment came creeping in. They had rejected her in the end, hadn’t they? Just like all the others. Yes, she would go to the meeting with Messrs Freeman and Grosmith, if only to introduce herself to the Campbells adopted child!

Jen pushed the letter back into the envelope and tucked it into the pocket of her handbag. (Although she had sold her car when she moved to London, she still kept her driving license in the same pocket.) Then she went upstairs to shower and get dressed. She would go there after school, once the last of the little ones had been collected. They always finished early on a Friday, anyway.

*******

1798

Nathan Ridley towered over Genevieve, his dark eyes glistening with rage and suspicion. She stood meekly