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“Buy me a drink? I’ve had quite a few already.” James gestured to where he thought the empty tankards sat only to discover they had been cleared.

“Ah, no, my lord. I was going to offer you some well-earned advice. I have been in this world a long time, you see.”

In the golden-brown light of the pub, James squinted at the man. The odd thing of it was, he could have been fifty or one hundred, or anywhere in between. The Potato Famine and now the Cotton Famine made young men old before their time.

“I think I may be beyond saving at the moment.” James turned back to the bar where another drink was waiting for him.

Without invitation, the old man joined him, occupying the vacant seat next to him.

“Whether anyone is beyond saving is debatable, you know.”

Wishing the man would leave him be, James drank.

“You’re seeking solace in ale when you should be seeking forgiveness, I’d say.”

James paused in the act of lifting his drink. “You’re not one of those temperance fellows, are you? I can’t abide one of those temperance fellows.”

The man shrugged. “I’m Irish. Whiskey was born on my isle, son.” James did not correct the man’s slip from my lord. “Uisce beatha. The water of life. But even I know you won’t find absolution at the bottom of a whiskey barrel.”

“And what if I don’t want absolution?” A profound weariness had settled into his bones, a fatigue that extended far beyond the physical. He had grown weary of the incessant demand for charm and the hollow pleasantries of his station. The crushing weight of that legacy, of feeling anything, seemed like a millstone he could no longer bear. “I never asked for any of this. The title. The land. A wife.”

“Ah, the wife. That’s the reason a man buries his heart in pint after pint of ale.” The man nodded sagely.

“My heart,” James sputtered mid-sip. “My heart is not eng⁠—”

And just as the ale that spilled down his loosened and rumpled cravat, so did a wave of understanding.

His chest twisted as he finally allowed himself to acknowledge what he had seen in Mariah’s eyes: heartbreak. Devastation. The death of a dream.

That last one was the most painful, and the fact that he had physically destroyed something that killed Mariah’s dream made his chest pulse in agony.

“I wish…” he began slowly, his voice growing with conviction. “That I’d never met her. I wish I never had to experience this pain. I wish I’d just married some high-kick heiress from London to save the estate.”

Instead of the sympathy that the man had met him with thus far, when James glanced over, the man regarded him with disgust. “You wish you didn’t have to experience the pain?”

Shrugging, James turned his attention to the opposite side of the taproom, where the one of the workers who had confronted him earlier swore loudly at a story the other told. When James turned back to the bar, he found the man leaning over James’s half-drunk ale.

“Did you—?” James began but then he stopped himself. The man remained perfectly unbothered, his stillness so absolute that he seemed a permanent fixture of the Crown and the Loom, as if he had been sitting in that exact position for an eternity. James shook his head, the motion making his surroundings swim, desperately trying to clear the fog of ale and disbelief. He was certain he was seeing things, yet the weight of his own despair was heavier than any trick of the mind. He had not imbibed so much that reality should begin to bend and play such elaborate tricks on him, and yet the air in the taproom felt charged with an electricity he could not name.

“You never did say where you were from, Mr….?” he began, but the sentence died in his throat. As he spoke, the image of the man began blinking in and out before him, at odds with the warm lamplight. Between each rapid blink, the man’s appearance shifted violently; one moment he was ancient, his skin a roadmap of centuries of world-weary history, and the next he appeared quite young, his eyes bright with the unblemished fire of a new soul.

“I didn’t. Here and there,” the man replied, his voice losing the shaky, thin quality of someone who had spent a lifetime wondering where his next meal would come from. It was replaced by a rich, melodic brogue. The blinking increased and the transitions between youth and age became so frequent that they merged into a single, impossible presence. James’s eyelids fought the irresistible pull of rest, his consciousness slipping away as the world dissolved into a haze of shadow and gold.

“What is happening…to me?” he gasped, the words feeling like lead in his mouth. As total darkness finally descended upon him, a final whisper reached his ears, the voice of a very young man, clear and certain, promising him “Salvation”.

He woke in his chambers at Bailey Hall to an unearthly chill that seemed to have settled into the marrow of his bones. Shivering violently, he rose and rang the bell pull, his breath hitching in the frigid air, as the jarring sense of unreality from the previous night followed him into the waking world.

After several moments, no one came.

“Pickett!” he bellowed. James had never been one to bellow but the fact that he could not recall how he had arrived home the previous evening added to a jarring sense of unreality.

Footsteps came from down the hall, and while James waited, he took in his chambers. They were significantly mustier than the previous day. Despite his frequent absence to London, his wife kept his chambers quite clean and ready for him at a moment’s notice.

On top of all the other things on her shoulders.

The thought of his wife made him pause mid-stride. James knew with absolute certainty that Mariah would never permit the ancient stones of Bailey Hall to become so wretchedly chilled or besieged by drafts, especially as Christmastide approached.

Then again, he had not been at Bailey Hall for Christmas in years, but if he knew anything about his wife, she took care of things. Places. People.