Chapter 57: The Bride’s Journey

English Midlands, 1742

I sleep without dreams. For twenty‑eight years I drift in a darkness without shape or memory, a silence so complete it feels like the world has forgotten how to breathe. Time doesn’t pass for me the way it does for humans. The Maristela Bracelet has its own unique perception of time. It folds, it dissolves, it becomes a single unmoving surface. I don’t feel hunger or pain. I don’t feel fear or hope. I simply wait.

I don’t know when the bracelet is touched, or admired, or moved from one shelf to another. I don’t know when Sir Harold Dalworthy grows older, when his young wife becomes a mother, when their daughter learns to walk. I don’t know the seasons or the years. I know only stillness.

Until now.

A hand closes around the gold of the bracelet. Warm. Young. Curious. And the world rushes back.

Light cracks through the darkness like a blade. Sound follows ... muffled voices, distant footsteps, and the rustle of fabric. I feel the pulse of a living human being, quick and bright, like a bird’s heartbeat. I reach toward it instinctively, the way I have always reached toward the living. The connection forms.

I inhale sharply ... my first breath in decades ... and the world blooms around me.

The girl is standing in a sunlit room, holding me in both hands. She is eighteen, slender, with chestnut hair pinned in a careful twist. Her eyes are grey‑blue, wide with wonder. She turns the bracelet over, studying the gold work, the carved lines, the faint shimmer beneath the surface.

“Father,” she says, “it’s beautiful.”

Her voice is soft, but not timid. There is curiosity in it, and a quiet confidence.

Sir Harold Dalworthy stands beside her, older now, his hair silvered at the temples. He watches her with pride and a hint of melancholy ... the look of a father giving away something precious.

“It belonged to a Portuguese family,” he says. “Or so I was told. A relic of sorts. Foreign craftsmanship. Very fine.”

He doesn’t know what he has been holding all these years. He never has. Neither he nor his much younger wife ever wore the bracelet. Never awakened me. He kept the Maristela Bracelet locked away in his cabinet of curiosities, among the Roman coins, carved saints, Jacobite tokens, bits of history he admired but never touched. I slept through all of it.