Lacybourne Manor

Chapter Two Dream Man

Sibyl Godwin woke to the thunderous, rage-filled roar of a man.

Her eyes flew open and Bran, her cat, flew off the bed with an angry mew while Mallory, her dog (who had been taking up most of her wide mattress) jumped awkwardly off the other side and began barking.

The roar could not have come from the throat of the man of her dream.

That throat, in her dream, had just been slit.

She realised she was panting and absolutely, utterly terrified.

The shutters were closed on the windows and she threw back the heavy covers of her bed, running to the windows and throwing them open to let in the moonlight.

There was no moonlight.

She ran back to the bed and switched on her bedside lamp, wondering distractedly why she hadn’t thought of that first.

“Be quiet, Mallory!” she ordered and her mastiff immediately sat, his large tongue rolled out and a glob of drool slid off the side of his lip and landed with a plop on the carpet.

“That’s disgusting,” Sibyl told the dog affectionately as she shakily sat at the edge of the bed.

Her dog came forward, his whole body moving in opposite tandem with his fiercely wagging tail. He nudged her trembling hand and she sat there, petting her pup and trying to get control of her panic.

Something, she knew from years of experience with this type of thing, was terribly, horribly wrong.

“I need to call Mom,” she announced to Mallory and he just looked at her, all of his earlier mood gone, currently in blissful dog world as she scratched behind his ears.

She opened the drawer to her bedside table, took out the calling card that was her lifeline to home and grabbed the phone. She carefully dialled the numbers on the card and then added the memorised numbers that she knew would ring the phone in her parents’ house in Boulder, Colorado.

“Mom?” her voice was just as shaky as Sibyl felt and even though thousand of miles separated mother and daughter, Marguerite Godwin heard the tremulous tone.

“My goddess, Sibyl, what’s wrong?”

“Oh Mom, I just had the most terrible dream.”

And then, Sibyl started crying.

Sibyl Godwin had led a charmed life.

She was born to Albert Godwin, an Englishman, a professor of Medieval History and an amateur archaeologist and Marguerite Den, a hippy, a follower of Wicca and a hopeless romantic. Her parents loved each other with a love that just made your toes curl with happy delight at the sight of it.

Bertie and Mags had two daughters, Sibyl and Scarlett. Sibyl, named thus because Mags thought it was appropriately witch-sounding. Scarlett, after Mags’s idol and the best romantic heroine in the history of woman (which, at worst, was only a few short days after the beginning of the history of man, if one believed that sort of thing), Scarlett O’Hara.

Mags and Bertie loved their daughters with a love that was a shining testimony to all that was good and right about parenthood.

Even if they were just a tad bit weird and a much larger bit eccentric.

Mags, Sibyl and Scarlett happily followed after Bertie from teaching post to teaching post, at the University of Arizona, UNLV, UCLA, UC Berkeley (which Mags adored) and, finally, he gained tenure at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Mags spent a lot of time communing with Native Americans, opening sacred circles in the mountains or the dessert depending on where they lived (often she would simply resort to their backyard which frightened (or annoyed) the neighbours because she would do this skyclad, or utterly naked), doting on her small family and fretting after her two daughters.

Not that there was a great deal to fret over, Sibyl and Scarlett were both bright, vivacious, thoughtful and had wonderful senses of humour.

Sibyl did have a bit of a temper (or more than a bit on occasion and an explosive bit on other occasions).

And Scarlett had a penchant for collecting and discarding men (not on occasion but all the time).

Sibyl, Mags was convinced, was a clairvoyant, often having strange, vivid dreams of events that came true. Mags was certain these were premonitions if only her daughter would just learn to read them. Mags tried to help Sibyl channel this extraordinary power but Sibyl didn’t have any interest (much to Mags’s everlasting chagrin).

Further concerning Mags and Bertie was that Sibyl, from a very early age, had the deep belief that she would one day meet her one and only true love. A knight in shining armour, kind, loyal and strong, her soulmate, heartmate and helpmate. Sibyl knew to the depths of her very soul that one day she would meet this man who would turn her world golden and provide her with all the joy and happiness she could endure.

Scarlett was, luckily (in Bertie and Mags’s opinion), a lot more down-to-earth.

Nevertheless, there were two more worries for the Godwins.

Both of their girls’ hearts were way too open (and easily broken).

Then there was the way the girls looked.

And that was all Marguerite’s fault.

There was a reason stodgy, bookish Bertie Godwin fell for flamboyant Marguerite Den.

He’d told her straight out one day, “You’re sex on legs, woman.”

If Mags had been any other kind of woman, that might have been offensive. But considering the fact that she adored her red-haired (then), tall, straight-backed, thin, balding (now), brilliant, adorable husband, she found it the highest of compliments.

Easy to feel complimented by your very own husband, much harder to deal with when all the men who looked at your daughters obviously felt the same way.

If Bertie had hair, he would have lost it after years of tearing it out worrying about his daughters. Even though he was a pacifist (he couldn’t have married his hippy wife if he was not) and found all firearms distasteful, that didn’t mean he didn’t eventually resort to resting a shotgun by the side of his front door whenever one of his daughters was picked up for a date (desperate times, desperate measures, as it were).

Both girls were elegantly tall but they were not slender.

They were curvy.

Very curvy.

Sibyl had a tumble of shining, golden, thick, waving hair, warm hazel eyes and peaches and cream skin with freckles dancing across her nose. Scarlett had a mass of curly, equally thick, auburn hair, flashing blue eyes and freckles dancing everywhere.

Scarlett had poured her big heart into medical school.

Sibyl had poured her big heart into everything.

Bertie worried fiercely about his first born. She seemed not to be able to find her calling and the longer she waited for her true love, the more restless she became.

She’d graduated from university with a degree in languages, speaking three. She took this knowledge and went straight to work for Customs and Immigration, trying to help struggling, poverty stricken foreigners in their efforts to get into the country. Red tape, small minds and politics frustrated her out of that job.

She’d gone back to school to become a social worker and quickly threw herself into a job helping victims of domestic violence. That job nearly tore her apart, literally, when she became personally involved in her caseload. She parted ways with the charity, able to see that she was incapable of establishing appropriate boundaries considering she wanted to fight everyone’s battles.

Bertie didn’t even want to remember what happened with the people at the animal shelter.

This carried on for years, until Sibyl finally walked into their home in Boulder and asked Bertie and Mags if she could move to Brightrose Cottage.

Brightrose Cottage was where the Godwins would spend a goodly amount of their school holidays. The cottage was located in a small clearing of a dense wood that seemed somehow removed but was still very close to the small seaside town of Clevedon in the beautiful English county of North Somerset. Bertie had bought the house run down and derelict. Even though surrounded by trees, the clearing allowed cheerful shafts of sunlight to penetrate and warm the nearly ancient, ruin. Even in disrepair, Bertie had fallen in love with the place and its location and happily anticipated the work ahead of him in restoring it.

While Scarlett and Mags trundled off to Glastonbury, Bristol or other hippy hot spots, Bertie, with Sibyl a constant at his side, got down to the business of bringing Brightrose back to its original charm.

Under the creaking, warped stairwell they’d uncovered the arched remains of a window that dated back to the early 1400s and together they designed the stained glass that would be refit. They’d painstakingly refinished the wide-planked floors and Jacobean doors. They’d run the thick, coarse ropes up the stairs to act as period-fitting banisters. They’d fitted the heavy wrought iron sconces to the walls and chandelier over the huge, gleaming, round dining room table. They’d scrubbed years of dust, grime and soot off the stones of the inglenook fireplaces in the living room and the dining room and the vast hearth in the kitchen. In all the rooms they’d patched, primed and painted the plaster. On occasion, they uncovered and exposed secret alcoves, embedded beams and Somerset brick. They’d scoured the local antique stores and dragged back heavy pieces of furniture, carefully bringing them back to their former glory and positioning them perfectly around the house. They’d refitted the awkward kitchen to be a cook’s (or, Bertie’s, to be precise) dream and built a lovely Summer House in the garden for Mags’s potions and witch paraphernalia.

In the end, Brightrose Cottage was lovingly, beautifully and meticulously restored and it showed in every inch of the home. It was cosy, quaint, warm and inviting. You didn’t live at Brightrose, you didn’t visit Brightrose, you experienced Brightrose.

At Sibyl’s announcement that she wanted to move to England, Bertie demanded, “What on earth are you going to do there?”

Unfortunately, no matter how much he loved her; there were limits to his patience when it came to his daughter’s flightiness. She was thirty-one years old; she had to find an anchor.

This, Bertie felt, should come in the form of a man (although he would never dream of uttering this notion in front of his feminist wife).

But Sibyl didn’t allow herself to get close to men. Bertie found himself having the most unusual wish that his elder daughter could treat his sex the way his younger daughter did, taking them (quite terrifyingly frequently in Bertie’s opinion) and then leaving them with nary a thought.

Sibyl seemed, as with most anything, to find the most damaged men she could collect (quite terrifying infrequently in Mags’s opinion). Then she bent over backwards, turned herself inside and out and then twisted herself in knots to sort out all their troubles. And then, even though most of them would have probably laid down their lives for her, she scooted them on their way so some other woman could sort out their new problems of having lost the glory that was Sibyl.

“I’ve no idea, Daddy,” she’d answered his irate question, her voice small, so small he kicked himself for his sharp tone. “But I feel I need to be there. It’s the only place I’ve ever been truly happy and at peace.”

Now, how could a father argue with that?

Especially when that peace had been found mostly in his company and he knew exactly what she was talking about when it came to Brightrose Cottage.

They’d then argued about how, since there was no mortgage on the property, she could live there without paying. They’d won her over by explaining that Scarlett’s medical school would cost more than the house was even worth and they’d signed the deeds over to her.

Mags and Bertie were thrilled when Sibyl had found a part-time job in a local community centre working with old people and children (how much trouble could old people and children get her into?). She supplemented this with a small but soon lucrative business selling handmade bath oils, salts, lotions, shampoos, conditioners and divinely scented candles to exclusive shops and boutiques around Somerset (oils, salts and lotions didn’t live and breathe or have angry ex-husbands, which they felt was a good thing).

It seemed Sibyl was more at peace in England, but neither Bertie nor Mags could shake the feeling that their daughter still seemed restless.

And they knew exactly why.

For, as the weeks, months and years passed, it became more and more clear that Sibyl’s abiding belief that her one true love would walk in and shine his light on her life was not going to happen.

Throughout the telling of the dream, Marguerite muttered, “Oh my,” and a couple of times, the stronger, “Oh my goddess”.

Sibyl, as usual with her mother, didn’t leave anything out, including an abbreviated version of the very passionate activities that preceded her dream lover’s grisly murder.

Nor the belief that this lover was her lover, the man of her dreams, the man who would change her life forever.

Which, of course, led to the distressing fact that at the end he’d been killed.

“What do you think it means, Mom?” Sibyl knew her mother read tarot cards, runes, tea leaves and palms as well as dreams. She wasn’t really good at doing any of this but she tried very hard.

“You say this man was vivid in your dream?” Mags asked.

“I could draw you a picture, that is, if I could draw,” Sibyl answered.

“Describe him,” Mags demanded.

Sibyl did, in great detail, leaving nothing out.

“Oh my,” Mags whispered.

“Will you stop saying, ‘oh my’ and tell me what you think this means?” Sibyl was at her wit’s end.

Mags sighed hugely. “Honey, it means you need a man.”

Sibyl rolled her eyes. Even being a militant feminist, her mother often solved many serious issues with the words “you need a man”. Mags was very into the healing power of sex.

Then again, Sibyl’s mother had been lucky enough to marry the love of her life, had a completely faithful marriage and an active sex life that continued to this very day (a fact that Sibyl unfortunately knew all too well).

In order to get her emotion in check, Sibyl counted to ten. Bertie had taught her this tactic years ago when it seemed clear that Sibyl would never learn to control her fiery temper.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it, spectacularly, did not.

Then Sibyl said, “I need to get some sleep, I’ve got to be at the Centre tomorrow.”

“Where’s the cat?” Mags asked.

Sibyl had no idea why her mother would want to know where Bran was. “He’s wandered back in the room somewhere, why?”

“Because that damned dog of yours would probably make any murderous scoundrel a cup of tea if he had opposable thumbs. The cat would scratch his eyes out.”

Sibyl couldn’t help but laugh because this was true.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, baby. Get some sleep, go out on the prowl this weekend and find yourself a blessed man, for goddess’s sake. No woman should endure a year long dry spell.”

“Thanks for the advice, Mom,” Sibyl uttered the expression of gratitude but her tone said very clearly she didn’t mean it.

Mags, as usual, ignored her daughter’s tone. “I’m serious, Sibyl. Even if it is only sex, or companionship, everyone needs it.” Sibyl remained silent at Mags’s tender urging. Mags sighed and then said, “See you soon, my darling girl. It’ll be April before you know it.”

Finally.

The thought of seeing her parents in April did make Sibyl feel happy and relaxed.

“I hope so.” Again, Sibyl’s tone said exactly how she felt.

After hanging up the phone, Sibyl left the shutters open. She lay in bed thinking of the dream, or more to the point, the man in the dream. He was immensely handsome, dark and… well, hot. His touch set her on fire, it was fevered and insistent and nearly worshipful. Until she was ripped from the bed, his presence seemed the only thing in the universe. There was nothing else but him, his hands, his mouth, his body. He was her very essence (except a male), her other part, her completion.

Mallory broke into her thoughts by lumbering onto the high bed and settling in squeezing poor Bran and Sibyl to the edge leaving them hanging on for dear life. Somehow, even in this awkward but familiar position, she was finally able to allow her mind to calm enough to go to sleep.

Even if she did do so with the image of the handsome, hard-jawed, dark-haired man burned on the backs of her eyelids.