Montgomery couldn’t remember the last time he felt this free, sighing lazily.
The woman’s voice, the one stroking his hair, laughed. “Don’t fall asleep on me now.”
“How can I when I am yer arms?”
“Besides,” he whispered, “this is a dream. Canna sleep in a dream.”
Edeline smiled. “If it is a dream, then it is a good one.”
“I wish I could stay here forever.”
She laughed again as he heard the cries of a baby.
He sat up, confused. “I hear a bairn.”
Edeline scoffed, and when he turned to face her, she was holding a baby girl with his red hair and blue eyes. “Well, I would hope so, considering Maggie is sitting right with us.”
“Our daughter, darling. You’re acting quite strange, you know.” She looked around, unfazed by his shocked expression. “Bernie! Come here!”
“Bernie? But-but-” He cut himself off the moment a boy of around fourteen ran toward the blanket, his face a mix of his and Edeline’s.
“I think your father has some sort of temporary amnesia.”
Bernie turned to Montgomery. “Ya alright, Da?” He had a faint Scottish accent.
The Scotsman stood up, looking back and forth. “This-this isn’t real. Yer not real. It’s only a dream.”
“Of course it’s not real, Montgomery,” a voice he recognized well replied, and he turned to see Samira with Miranda in her lap. “It’s only a dream.”
He panted heavily, trying to force himself awake.
He closed his eyes tightly until everything was black, but when he opened them, he found himself surrounded by darkness, and in front of him, his two dead wives, dressed like a cabaret act in a giant v-shaped glass in their favorite colors, red and green.
“Do you remember?” Samira asked. “The cabaret shows we used to go to in London? The girls dressed like this, didn’t they?”
Edeline smiled like a shark as the pair posed seductively. “We never went to shows like this when we were together. You only told me you had loved men when you proposed. Were you ashamed of your proclivities? That I, a sheltered English girl, could not understand the decadence of it all?”
He swallowed, equally disturbed and transfixed. “No, I-It’s not that. It weren’t like that. I… were ashamed of meself, wanted to lock that part of meself away from ya, from… everythin’.”
The women were suddenly embracing one another, still making intense eye contact.
“I wonder if you would have left me if I had lived and you still had met Samira. You loved her passionately… until she died in your arms.”
Samira finally turned her head, gazing at Edeline with an emotion Montgomery didn’t recognize. “I always stared at her photographs. She was beautiful. Pale, blonde, thin… I’d wonder what I’d do if I ever met her.” She caressed the blonde woman’s face. “Do you think she would love me the way you did? Would she let me kiss her lips?” She whispered before kissing her gently.
Montgomery watched, entranced as his wives ravished one another with a creeping feeling of dread falling upon him as if he was privy to something he was not meant to see.
Samira looked up from her neck, her dark brown eyes twinkling with malice. “How do you would tell her? Tell Edeline that you fell in love with her brother, and he doesn’t love you. That the only reason you have yet to take your life is because of some foolish wish that he will return those feelings, and you won’t be alone anymore—someone to hold you in your sleep and whisper soothing words when you have nightmares of your dead. All you have is your daughter. Our daughter.”
He opened his mouth and found he could not speak. He felt faint, his vision blurring, bleeding into color, and Montgomery found himself in his bedroom, held by Edeline as Samira watched with the same enigmatic expression from before.
“Hush now, Edeline whispered, “it shall be over soon. I have you in my arms.”
“It could be,” Samira mused. “Do you wish it?”
He did not answer, letting his two wives touch and kiss him as he closed his eyes. Perhaps he could enjoy it, enjoy them, even if he knew he was in some sort of dream or nightmare or somewhere in between. He felt their touch on his body and wondered how he’d managed five years of no romantic love. But then perhaps he hadn’t, thinking his quitting of everything that mattered to him, staying shut up in a house owned by a duke and duchess, who were supposed to be everything he opposed about the class system, but instead, he was hopelessly in love with one and cared too deeply for the other.
The touch suddenly stopped, and he opened his eyes, his vision perfect for once, to see Edeline and Samira staring at him from the foot of his bed, looking exactly as they did when they perished. Blood covered Edeline’s chest and mouth, staining her olive green nightgown she loved so dearly as the blood from Samira’s navy skirt and legs dripped onto the floor. Overwhelming guilt racked his body as they stared with lifeless eyes, boring into his soul.
“It is funny your face was the last one we ever saw,” Edeline muttered.
“Do you want it to be real?” Samira asked again.
“No-I dinna ken—aye,” he finally confessed.
He gasped awake, finding himself in his bedroom once more, the morning rays pouring in from the window. He was awake. The dream was over. But it was not a consolation, he quickly realized as tears welled up in his eyes, and he fell back into his bed, beginning to sob.
By the time Miranda, still in her nightgown, wandered into his room, looking for her father, Montgomery was completely unaware of anything else other than his hammering heart and aching cries. Miranda watched him, too shocked to do anything else.
