Book Club Reads: 3-Book Collection: Yesterday’s Sun, The Sea Sisters, Someone to Watch Over Me
towards the moondial which was now half hidden beneath the new summer’s growth of grass and weeds. Jocelyn followed her gaze.
‘It came from Hardmonton Hall – the moondial, that is,’ she told Holly. ‘There was a massive fire that razed the Hall to the ground in the seventies and the moondial was amongst the few things that survived it.’
‘I read up on that. The family actually died in the fire,’ added Tom.
‘Lord and Lady Hardmonton perished, but their young son was away at the time. He never returned and what little was left of the estate was sold off.’
‘And that’s how you came by the moondial,’ concluded Tom.
‘I can see why you make a living from your enquiring mind,’ laughed Jocelyn. ‘Yes, Harry spotted the dial and just had to buy it, not because he liked it but because he knew I wouldn’t. We’d been married a good while by then. I think Paul would have been about ten and life wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all.’ She turned to Tom before she continued, ready to make a point. ‘Hard as it is to believe, the garden was beautiful back then. It was the one part of my life I still felt I had some control over, a form of escape, but Harry tried his best to spoil that too. He set up the moondial in the middle of my beautiful garden just because he thought it would sully it.’
They all stood up without prompting and walked over to the dial. Tom did his best to stamp down the overgrowth to make it easier for Jocelyn to get to the dial. ‘I will make it good,’ he promised her apologetically. ‘Once I’m done with all of this travelling, it’ll be restored to its former glory, and that’s a promise.’
‘Well, make sure you do,’ Jocelyn answered.
Holly stood in front of the dial but was reluctant to touch it. She had purposely avoided getting close to the dial since her fall, and seeing the stone up close, watching the quartz glinting menacingly in the sunlight, she could almost feel the electric shock she had received from the dial course up her arm.
It was Jocelyn who tentatively reached out and touched the surface of the dial first. ‘You found the mechanism,’ she whispered. Holly thought she detected a slight tremor in her voice.
‘Yes, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. We tried putting the glass ball thing in the claws but it didn’t fit properly,’ explained Tom.
Jocelyn visibly relaxed. ‘It doesn’t work, never has,’ she told Tom. ‘Still, it makes a good bird table.’
‘I’ve never seen a bird land on it yet,’ Holly said, almost to herself, as she realized how strange it was that she hadn’t actually seen a bird anywhere near it.
‘So what else do we know of the moondial?’ Tom asked her, his eyebrow raised in suspicion.
Guilt flushed Holly’s cheeks. ‘What do you mean?’ she stammered.
Tom turned to Jocelyn. ‘My wife here has been doing her own research. I’ve been waiting patiently for her to reveal the murky history of the moondial, but so far she’s keeping her information to herself. She hasn’t even apologized for spilling coffee all over my computer.’
Tom turned back to Holly. Her mouth opened to speak but she couldn’t quite find the words that would help her wriggle out of a conversation that was making her decidedly uncomfortable.
‘You switched the screen off, but you didn’t close down the computer,’ he explained.
‘I was just trying to find out where the moondial came from,’ she confessed. ‘Sorry about the coffee.’
‘What did you find out?’ Jocelyn asked tentatively.
‘There was a Lord Hardmonton in the nineteenth century who was an explorer,’ Holly explained. ‘He discovered something called a Moon Stone in Mexico and it went missing on the return voyage to England. I think maybe he kept the stone for himself and made the moondial from it.’
Jocelyn’s eyes didn’t flicker. If she knew any more about the moondial, Holly thought, she was hiding it well.
‘Not only that,’ added Tom, eager to share his own discoveries, ‘there was a legend that the stone could summon up visions. I found some suggestion that the Aztecs actually believed these were visions of the future, although, if you ask me, it had more to do with the hallucinogenic drugs they would have been taking back then. Still, it’s made me look at the dial in a new light.’
Tom ran his fingers across the etched words on the outer edge of the dial. ‘I read it wrong,’ he told the two women, who both seemed to have turned to stone, with complexions as grey as the moondial. ‘Reflection is the key to travelling in time.’
They all fell silent and the only thing Holly could hear was the hammering of her heart in her chest.
‘All stuff and nonsense,’ sniffed Jocelyn, breaking the spell.
‘I think you might be right there,’ agreed Tom. ‘After all, if it had worked, then why didn’t Lord Hardmonton know that the electrical rewiring he’d just had installed at the Hall would raze it to the ground?’
An electric current of her very own making coursed up Holly’s spine and sent stars glittering across her vision. She was sure she was going to faint so, despite her best intentions, she put her hand on the dial to steady herself. The stone felt cold and Holly felt an almost imperceptible tingling between her palms and the dial. As her vision settled, Holly looked across to Jocelyn, but Jocelyn was looking just as intently at the dial and didn’t meet her gaze.
‘I wonder if this thing could tell me if my wife will burn our supper tonight?’ Tom asked mischievously.
‘Bread and water is all you deserve until you get this garden in order, young man,’ scolded Jocelyn. ‘These nettles are stinging the backs of my legs.’
It was only when their laughter filled the garden that Holly felt the moondial loosen its grip on her.
‘Time for another cup of tea, I think,’ Holly told Tom, who led the two women carefully back to the safety of the patio.
Tom seemed more relaxed as the time approached for him to set off on his travels again. Meeting Jocelyn had obviously eased his guilt and allayed any fears he might have had about leaving Holly alone and isolated in her new surroundings.
‘There’s going to be a major time difference this time around,’ he warned Holly, as he started to cram clothes into his suitcase for the early start the next day. They were in the bedroom and the open window was easing in the summer night’s breeze and the sweet smell of the overgrown honeysuckle that had clawed its way out of the neglected garden and along the back of the house. ‘I think we’re only going to manage to speak once a day.’
‘Without exception,’ Holly warned him. She was leaning over the open suitcase, plucking out the crumpled clothes and then neatly folding them and placing them back in the suitcase.
‘Speaking of phone calls …’ Tom started.
‘Speaking of phone calls, are you finally going to tell me what your long conversation with the studio was about this morning?’
‘I told you, it’s nothing bad. It’s still the same plan. I’ll spend a month in Canada, then come home briefly before setting off again. It’s looking like the next assignment will definitely be in Haiti and I could be away for longer this time, maybe a couple of months.’
‘So I knew that anyway. What’s new?’ Holly asked suspiciously. Tom had already broken the bad news about his next assignment days earlier. Although Holly wasn’t happy about the travelling, or where he was going, for that matter, their future was there, written down in their five-year plan, so all was well in the world and Holly had reluctantly accepted the news.
‘They were saying how happy they were with my front-of-camera work,’ continued Tom a little sheepishly.
‘But?’ Holly demanded.
‘They want