Chapter 7Morning. Reality, clear-edged and sunlit. If it was real. Charlie wasn’t quite convinced.
Was this his life, now? This world, in which he went to work in a luxurious nineteenth-century library, nestled inside sixteenth-century bones? This space with towering baroque painted ceilings, and family portraits dating back hundreds of years, and polished suits of armor casually on display around random corners? With lavish gardens and paths beckoning, if he needed a walk—or if he needed to find a gardener again, a kind-hearted wild green man who’d walked out of the woods and into Charlie’s daydreams?
He touched a book, an estate ledger. Stewards’ accounts from the eighteenth century gazed back at him limpidly, in graceful flowing columns and figures.
Sunshine poured in through the tal
