The studio was a hive of frenetic activity and Holly was all but lost in the heat, dust and deafening noise of hard labour. The piece of marble she had picked for the base of Mrs Bronson’s sculpture was beautiful, even before she started working on it. It was almost a pity to have to hack away at the multicoloured veins that threaded life into the blackest stone. But hack away she did. Three days had passed since Holly had taken that fateful walk to the ruins with Jocelyn. She had started to accept that she must surrender her dreams of holding Libby in her arms, of watching her grow and completing the family that Tom so desperately wanted, that she so desperately wanted. But the pain of the loss, the burden of guilt in taking the decision without Tom, the shame of sacrificing her daughter’s life for her own, these were emotions she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to come to terms with.
Dust billowed around her as she cut into the stone with a chainsaw, obscuring her vision. Slowly but surely, the spiral was taking form, to become a dramatic foundation for the mother and child figures that would emerge above it. Despite her progress, Holly found no joy in her work. She had a job to do, that was all.
Holly felt like the worst kind of hypocrite. There had been no bond with her own mother, no foundation on which to build a future, and now there would be no Libby to build a future for. She had been right to doubt herself all along. She was never going to make a good mother. She was willing to forfeit Libby’s life for her own. Holly had read and reread the poem, over and over again. She had scrutinized every page of the journal, hoping to uncover a secret that would help her avoid the life for a life rule, but her efforts were futile and she knew it. If there had been any way to avoid the sacrifice that had to be made then Edward Hardmonton would have found it.
As Holly chipped away great chunks of stone, she toyed with the idea of using the dial again. The moondial might have thrown her life into chaos but it still gave Holly a way in which she could spend time with the child she was sacrificing. Perhaps Jocelyn was right. Perhaps it was a gift and Holly shouldn’t be so quick to turn away from it.
Not every lesson she had learnt about the dial’s workings had been a harsh one. Holly now knew that her presence would be strongest under direct moonlight. She remembered leafing through Tom’s papers in the study, with the full moon shining through the window. That had been why she had found it so much easier to move things in that room. Perhaps she could find a way to finally hold Libby. Every nerve in her body cried out just at the thought of cradling her baby in her arms. But then her thoughts turned to Tom. She would have to face his grief, his eyes looking through her again, and she didn’t think she could do that.
There were other fears too. She couldn’t be sure if the decision she had now taken, the decision not to conceive Libby, had already rewritten her future. If that was the case, Holly wasn’t ready to face what the moondial might reveal. She wouldn’t use the dial, not yet. Reluctantly, however, she knew that it still had a part to play in her future. There was still one question that she would need an answer to eventually. If the dial was keeping score, was Holly sacrificing just Libby’s life or her chances of ever being a mother?
The question at the moment was almost irrelevant. She didn’t think she deserved to be a mother and she was tempted to smash up the moondial as surely as she was smashing away at the marble in front of her.
‘Ever thought of taking up the building trade?’ Billy was standing at the open studio doors and he had to shout over the din that Holly was making.
‘Is it lunchtime already?’ Holly asked. She was used to being dragged away from her work to feed the hungry horde of builders who were putting the final touches to the conservatory.
‘Lunchtime? More like home time! It’s three-thirty.’
‘I’m sorry, Billy, I must have got carried away.’
‘We thought as much, but don’t worry. We’ve worked right through and we’ll have an early start, if you don’t mind. It’s a glorious day out there, probably the last of the year. You should get out into the sunshine once in a while.’
‘Well, if you hadn’t disappeared for weeks and left me with a half-finished conservatory, I’d have been catching the rays in there,’ scolded Holly. Billy had risen significantly in her estimation since Jocelyn’s revelations, but she wasn’t about to let him know that.
‘It’ll be worth the wait,’ he said with pride.
‘So when will you be finished?’
‘Another couple of days and we’ll be done. But you haven’t seen the last of me. I’m still finishing the plans for the garden.’
‘So Tom is getting you to do the garden!’ exclaimed Holly.
Billy hit his palm against his head in despair and his cheeks flushed with embarrassment. ‘What am I like? The cat is well and truly out of the bag. Your husband is going to be so annoyed with me.’
‘Well, by rights, he should be home doing the work himself. But I suppose if he’s running around the globe earning lots of money, the least we can do is spend it for him,’ sighed Holly.
‘When is that man of yours coming home? I keep telling him that he shouldn’t leave you alone for so long. You need looking after, whether you think you do or not.’
‘He’s back in a couple of weeks, but not for long. He’s got plans to go jetting off somewhere in South America next.’
Billy shook his head slowly in disapproval. ‘You’ve never considered going with him on his travels?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t been tempted,’ Holly replied, and her body wrenched with a renewed sense of guilt. She wriggled her toes in her shoes, seeking the firmness of the floor to anchor her, but all she found was the painful crunch of stone debris underfoot.
She ached for Tom more than ever. Billy was right, she did need looking after and no one could do that better than Tom. But she wanted to spare Tom from the torment she was now going through. Her decision to erase Libby from their future would be a matter for her conscience, not his. She wouldn’t tell him until the new year, when he was home for good and the date had passed when Libby was meant to be conceived.
‘Well, if you need company, you know where I am,’ Billy said, shaking her from her thoughts. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem yourself. You should get out more. It’s not good for a person to lock themselves away.’
‘I go to the village, I have Tom’s parents, and then there’s always Jocelyn,’ Holly told him. ‘Besides, I speak to Tom every day.’
‘You can be in a crowded room and still be alone,’ Billy answered.
‘Sage words,’ agreed Holly, taken aback slightly by the seriousness of Billy’s warning. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘And next time you speak to that husband of yours, you tell him his conservatory will be ready for a grand opening when he comes home.’
‘Shall I tell him the garden will be fully landscaped too?’
‘Hmm,’ replied Billy with a stern look that turned into a smirk, ‘the less said about that the better.’
Although the teashop wasn’t bustling with customers at this time of year, Jocelyn was busier than ever. When she wasn’t doing the day job, she had more than enough extracurricular activities to keep her occupied. She seemed to be on almost every committee or voluntary group for miles around. With harvest time in full swing, her schedule was so full that she couldn’t get away from the teashop to visit Holly for their usual Sunday brunch, but she wasn’t about to let Holly off the hook so easily, so she invited Holly over for brunch at the teashop instead. Holly suspected that Billy had shared his concerns about her frame of mind with Jocelyn and there was simply no way to turn down her invitation.
The atmosphere