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.