Free The Last Killiney by J. Jay Kamp

win him .
    Raising a hand to steady her trembling, Killiney spoke softly. “You’re a wild creature, my Mary.” With a gentleness that shocked her, he stroked back the length of her raven-black hair. “Were things not as they are, indeed I might come to love you in time. I might.”
     

Chapter Five
     
    When at last Ravenna closed the diary, the fields outside had fallen into darkness. The house was quiet. Her head was spinning with the diary’s sadness, crowded with images of Killiney here, maybe in this very room—hadn’t he sat just there, his back to the door, when he’d talked about his precious angel? Where will you take me, Wolvesfield House? Will you show me what happened to them after the diary? What became of Killiney and his arrogant ways?
    Then it hit her, what the diary had said. Killiney had gone on Vancouver’s voyage. George Vancouver. The famous captain, that great navigator after whom the city in British Columbia had been named, he had stayed here , in this house.
    She’d met George Vancouver in her past life .
    This was a big deal to Ravenna. How many times had she pictured this man? His eighteenth-century naval uniform, his tall ships at anchor near her island home? Back when those headlands had been undisturbed by vacation homes, Vancouver had been the first European to chart Puget Sound and all the waterways of the Pacific Northwest. Now Ravenna was to learn that when Vancouver had named Mount Rainier, Port Townsend, and countless other features of the Washington landscape—even her own island—she’d been on friendly terms with the man?
    She could have wrestled with such a coincidence for hours, wanting to accept it, skeptical nonetheless, but she had little time to consider. Hearing David’s voice in the hallway, she had to put down the diary and go off to greet him.
    * * *
    She felt a little awkward about joining him for dinner. Not because it was in his private apartments—which, perhaps, she should have at least paused over—but rather because of the books he brought to the table with him. The man was indeed obsessed. As Ravenna was served a French-looking appetizer from the hotel’s kitchen, David propped up a country house volume beside his plate; he picked up a fork, and without eating a single bite, he began to read. Out loud.
    It was something about his ancestors, a man named Christopher whose marriage to a commoner was the source of many rumors. Ravenna listened…a little. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning. The French-looking appetizer was calling her name, and as she dug into it greedily, she didn’t care much about Christopher Hallett.
    “So Killiney,” she said, breaking into David’s recitation, “he went on Vancouver’s voyage, right? In 1791?”
    “He died on that voyage, yes.”
    Ravenna stopped chewing. “He died on Vancouver’s voyage?”
    “Somewhere.” Peering down at the illustrations, David added mysteriously, “Maybe James will tell us where.”
    She squished her brows. “What do you mean?”
    “James had a safe. It’s in the library under the wallpaper. You never know what you’ll find when you de-Victorianize a five-hundred-year-old house, do you?”
    “And you haven’t opened it? The safe, I mean?”
    “We’ve only just found it. I’ve got a specialist in antique locks coming next month. Seems we can’t get it open without breaking the thing, so no, we haven’t opened it yet.”
    Ravenna imagined the contents of that safe. Indian artifacts, rare jewels, maybe even the most valuable of treasures, historic information. “You think James wrote about Killiney’s death?”
    “Look,” David said, and he flattened the book firmly, “let me just read this before I answer any more questions, all right? It says ‘Augustus James, Lord Broughton (later fourth Marquess Wolvesfield) was also known for his association with the explorer, George Vancouver. When James accompanied this famous captain to the North Pacific in