Then golden light shimmered along the spiked leaves of the holly, and Avery was there, standing across the garden from him as if he had never vanished at all.
Laurence walked straight to him, no longer lost but certain of his path, and Avery fell forward into his arms, golden light still glinting in his hair and eyes. Laurence kissed him with the intention of never letting him vanish again.
And it was magical.
He barely noticed the golden light fading until Avery pulled back and said, “Laurence?”
Laurence looked at him then and saw him as he had in only the most unguarded moments of their last Christmas. The man he held in his arms now was not the brilliant warlock who haunted these woods, but a very human figure—still broad shouldered and handsome, but also a little tired and bewildered, shadows under his eyes and an uneven flush in his cheeks.
“Come inside,” Laurence said.
“Yes,” Avery said, taking his hand too tightly for comfort.
Laurence didn’t mind. He led Avery inside and paused when Avery stopped in the doorway to the sitting room, his eyes going wide as his hand clenched on Laurence’s again. “I…. Usually when I wake, the house is cold.”
“I’ve been living here since midsummer,” Laurence reminded him and nudged closer. “I spoke to you in dreams, remember?”
He saw Avery swallow hard. “I didn’t dare hope…. Is this all for me?”
“For both of us,” Laurence said. When Avery turned to stare at him, he added gruffly, “Mind you, we’ll have to be cunning to make it work without rousing suspicion.”
Avery laughed and clicked his fingers. “Why, then, we will beguile them with illusion and….” He trailed off and then clicked his fingers again, frowning a little.
“What’s wrong?”
Avery lifted his hand to his mouth. “My magic. ’Tis gone.”
“Gone?”
Avery nodded. Then, to Laurence’s surprise, he began to smile, widemouthed and uncertain. “Gone. Laurence… Laurence!” And then he threw himself at Laurence, burying his face in Laurence’s shoulder. “You broke it! You broke my curse!”
“We can’t know for certain,” Laurence started, but he couldn’t help wrapping his arms around Avery and kissing that dear face when Avery looked up at him, caught between tears and laughter.
Avery kissed him back, fierce and clumsy. “I thought I would never—I had stopped hoping.”
Laurence said, the words caught between kisses, “You gave me hope. I had to find a suitable gift in return.”
“And so you gave me back my summers.”
Laurence swallowed hard. “We won’t know for certain until Twelfth Night is over.”
“I believe,” Avery declared grandly, then smiled at him, bright with simple joy. “But you are a skeptical man of science, are you not, my love? Let us wait, then, and prove it true.”
“Twelve days of Christmas to fill before then,” Laurence said, feeling his own heart grow light.
Avery laughed, the sound light and happy, “So let us make merry, my heart, and while the time away.”
AND SO they did, with both comfort and joy, until the Twelfth Night passed, the Yule log crumbled to nothing in the hearth, and they sat with their hands clasped to watch the sun rise on a new day, a thirteenth day, a new beginning.
Outside, in the holly, a robin, not a thrush, began to sing, and inside, two lovers met, encircled within each other’s arms, no longer lost in either time or space, but come safe at last to a place where both belonged.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear….
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V
Author’s Note
LAURENCE AND Avery’s story is a fairy tale, and like most fairy tales, it dances around reality in several ways. Whilst a close look at a map of Hampshire will reveal that Privett is a real village and allow a keen reader to trace the route Laurence takes from the station, they will not find Mistle Cottage at the end of that path. Nor is there any local legend about a cursed wizard from any era, and the village (and villagers) described in this story are not meant to bear any resemblance to the real Privett, now or then.
As for the rest of the story, the winter of 1947 really was one of the worst on record in the UK, but it didn’t really get started until January. Laurence’s time in the head-injury ward in Oxford would have been spent in the grounds of St Hugh’s College, which was requisitioned for the duration of the war. Jeannie likely spent her war at Bletchley Park or one of the other British code-breaking sites. Millie’s escapade with the Typhoon is unlikely, but not entirely impossible—the only WW2 pilot who ever successfully landed a Typhoon after its underside fell off was a real ATA pilot, Diana Barnato Walker.
Would Laurence really have been able to get his license back? I don’t know, but since this is a fairy tale, let’s allow him a happy ever after.