“The Lord’s vengeance on a wicked people,” I mused slowly, then glanced up in apology. “That is what my uncle calls it.”
His face hardened. “Your uncle is a fool. The vengeance is in his own mind, and nowhere else. His side has lost the battle, and he would see the victors suffer.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending, and he smiled suddenly, the blackness lifting from his features. “But our talk has grown dreary,” he complained. “I apologize. Come, let me show you round the house before we dine.”
“I cannot dine with you, my lord,” I protested, shaking my head.
“I insist. I am not often graced by visitors.”
I held my ground. “I cannot,” I repeated. “Rachel would worry if I were late in returning home.”
He smiled slyly. “I could send Evan round to Greywethers, to inform her of your delay,” he said. “She would not be so eager for your return, then.”
I flashed him a quick look of alarm. “You would not send Evan to her, surely!”
“He may be there already, for all I know.”
“But Rachel is betrothed,” I told him, “to Elias Webb.”
“What of it?” He shrugged. “’Tis plain to see that she does not love that corrupt old man. And I’ll wager Evan will not cheerfully step aside for our black-hearted bailiff.”
“She cannot go against my uncle,” I said quietly.
“Then she is not worthy of the love of my friend. Christ’s blood, I despise a weak and mincing woman!” He was challenging me, and I knew it. He took a step closer, crowding me against the fireplace. “Will you dine with me, or no?”
I shook my head again, not trusting my voice.
“A dance, then,” he suggested unexpectedly, with a laughing gleam in his eyes. “I must have some recompense for my hospitality.”
“I do not dance.”
“I’ll keep the step simple,” he promised, and I shook my head helplessly. It was unheard of, I thought, to dance in private with a man, and that man not your husband. It would be improper, wanton, and yet the thought of it set my blood racing with unladylike excitement.
“There is no music,” I remarked, retreating another step.
Richard de Mornay smiled. “Would you like me to call for my stableboy? He is unequaled on the lute, and I’m sure he would favor us with a danceable tune.”
“No,” I said hastily. I had no desire for a witness to my folly.
“Then you must make do without. Or I could sing, if you wish it.” He held out his hand. “Come, you are no coward. One dance, a simple step, and the debt is paid.”
Trapped, I took his hand.
He did sing, after all, softly and in French. He had a deep and pleasant voice, and his warm breath fanned my cheek as he twirled me round and round the deserted, echoing room. It was a sinful feeling.
I coughed a little to clear my throat. “What is that air you sing?”
“Aux plaisirs, aux délices bergères,” he replied. “My mother used to sing it when I was a boy.”
“It sounds a happy song.”
“It is. It tells us to pass our lives in loving, for time is lost, hour by hour, until only regret remains.” He whirled me wide beneath the long windows. “A l’amour, aux plaisir, aux boccage,” he quoted softly, then turned the words to English: “In love, in pleasure, in the woods, spend your beautiful days…”
I stared up at him, dumbly, my heart rising in my throat. I was not aware of the precise moment when we stopped dancing, when he turned those deep, forest-colored eyes on mine and traced the outline of my face with a delicate touch.
“These are your beautiful days, Mariana Farr,” he said gently, and then his shoulders blocked the sunlight as he lowered his head to mine and kissed me.
He must have known that it was the first time I had been kissed by a man. I had no idea what to do, no idea how to respond to the flood of strange and new sensations. His touch was sweetly, exquisitely, achingly wonderful, and when it ended I felt robbed.
He looked down at me and laughed, and took my face in his hands and said something, low and in French, some phrase I couldn’t catch, and his face blurred before my eyes as he bent to kiss me again…
My vision cleared. I was standing, quite alone, by the tall windows of the Great Hall, gazing out over the lawn where the gathering shadows of late afternoon were growing longer. I could see Geoff and Iain, still standing in the rose garden by the churchyard wall, the dark head bent to the russet one, listening, while Iain leaned on his spade and talked.
I saw them only for an instant, really, and then my vision blurred a second time, this time with tears. As quickly as I could blink them back, they rose again from some seemingly endless spring inside me, welling hotly in my anguished eyes. It was foolish to cry, I told myself firmly. Utterly foolish. It was only a kiss, after all, and it had happened so long ago… so very long ago…
I heard a small, tentative footstep on the floor behind me, followed by an uncertain cough. “Excuse me, miss, but… may I help you?” It was a girl’s voice, and I suddenly remembered the tour guides.
I turned, and saw the girl’s face relax as she recognized me. “Oh, it’s you, Miss Beckett. I couldn’t think who it… I say,” she said, frowning, “are you feeling all right?”
I raised my hands to my burning face and felt the tears come spilling over onto my cheeks, horrified that I could do nothing to stop them. It was a relief to hear the calm, crisp voice of Mrs. Hutherson speaking from the doorway of the room.
“Nothing to worry at, Sally,” she said evenly, dismissing the younger girl. “Miss Beckett’s just had a bit of a shock, that’s all. You can get on with the locking up, now.”
She might have been my mother, taking me firmly by the arm and leading me out of the Great Hall and down the long corridor to the kitchen, all the while keeping up a steady stream of cheerful talk. I didn’t really hear anything that she said to me, but the quiet strength of her voice calmed me, and by the time she deposited me in one of the kitchen chairs my tears had subsided into small, hiccupping sniffles.
“There, now.” She patted my shoulder reassuringly. “What you need is a nice strong cup of tea.”
A nice strong cup of tea would, I felt certain, be Alfreda Hutherson’s first reaction to any crisis.
She put the kettle on the cooker and looked at me, her eyes sympathetic. “Bit of a jolt for you, I expect, having it happen like that.”
“He kissed me,” I said, as if that explained everything.
“Yes, dear, I know. Now, give your face a wipe with that,” she instructed, handing me a damp cloth. “The men will be in from the garden any minute.”
I wiped my face and dried it, pulling myself together with an effort. I suddenly remembered something, and looked up sharply, troubled by the thought. “I couldn’t stop it from happening,” I told her. “I’ve been able to stop it before, but this time I just couldn’t stop it from happening.”
“Well, now.” Her blue eyes were very wise. “You’ve learned a valuable lesson from this, then, haven’t you? You can’t cheat fate, Julia. If you don’t go looking for the lessons of the past, then the past will come looking for you.”
Chapter 24
I remembered those words often over the next few days, and thought long about their meaning. Not that I had any idea, then, what the lessons of the past might be. I knew only that the past—my past—would not be ignored, and that the longer I delayed the journey the more difficult the trip back would be, both physically and emotionally. And after my most recent experience, I wasn’t sure I wanted to delay the journey any longer. However disturbing it might be, I had to admit that the memory of a man long dead had a more powerful influence over me than anything I could touch in the modern day.
If the thought disturbed me, it horrified Tom. I could
feel the force of his disapproval over the telephone line.
“It’s too dangerous,” was his judgment.
“Well, it’s hardly my decision anymore, is it?” I challenged him bluntly. “It’s going to happen whether I like it or not.”
“I thought you said you could control it. You said you’d found some way of blocking it out, making it go away.”
“It doesn’t always work,” I admitted. “Look, Tom, I promise I’ll be careful. I’ll lock all the doors and hide the keys, if you like. I’ll stay inside the house. And I’ll only do it once a week, I pro—”
“No, don’t promise.” He was smiling, finally. I could hear it, and I felt myself relaxing in response. When he spoke his voice was less uncompromising. “I don’t like the idea,” he told me. “I still think you’re taking too great a risk. But if you’re cautious and sensible, and try to keep things in perspective, then I guess I can’t really object, can I? I mean, like you say, there don’t seem to be a lot of alternatives.”
It was my turn to smile. “Exorcisms don’t apply in this sort of situation, do they?”
“No.” He laughed. “You’re all right otherwise, are you?”
“Perfectly,” I assured him. “My work is coming along wonderfully, and I’ve no complaints with the house so far.”
“You’re still going around with that Geoff fellow, I take it?”
I replied in the affirmative, and was grateful when he dropped the subject. I had not yet confided in Tom my suspicion that Geoffrey was really Richard. Nor had I told him about Mrs. Hutherson. I suppose I was afraid that, by telling him I was in effect consulting a psychic and chumming with the reincarnation of Mariana’s lover, I might stretch the bounds of my brother’s credulity. And I very badly needed him to believe in me.
So far, it appeared that he did. “Take care of yourself,” was the only advice that he gave me before I hung up the phone. I kept it in mind.
I selected a convenient hour of the morning, when few other people were yet awake. I slid all the furniture in my studio into one corner, so that there was nothing to impede Mariana’s progress from the doorway to her bed and from there to the window. I locked the dead bolts on both doors, from the inside, and buried the keys among the bills and letters in my desk drawer. Then, and only then, did I settle myself at the kitchen table and light the candle.
My first journey back lasted less than half an hour, which, after such elaborate preparations, was something of a disappointment to me. It was also, I conceded, deadly dull. For nearly all that time, Mariana was simply peeling vegetables at the kitchen table, while Caroline nursed the baby John by the fire. Neither woman spoke. When I returned to the present I felt utterly discouraged.
But my next few attempts were more fruitful. Curious, I tried my candle process in the lounge instead of the kitchen, and found myself sitting over an embroidery frame, listening to Caroline and Rachel discuss wedding plans. It was rather a one-sided conversation, actually. Caroline talked of flowers and gowns and guests in an animated voice, while Rachel bent low over her needlework and mumbled inaudible responses. She kept her expression hidden from her sister, but behind the fall of flaxen hair her face was flushed and miserable.
The wedding feast was to be held at Greywethers, the home of the bridegroom being too small to hold all the guests—and from Caroline’s talk I gathered every soul in the village had been invited. Bride and groom would spend their first night beneath my uncle’s roof, before removing to the bailiff’s house in the village. It was difficult to picture Rachel living with Elias Webb in that narrow, bleak little house with its dark chimneys and cheerless windows; more difficult still to imagine wedding guests dancing in my uncle’s parlor. I was trying to conjure the image when my aunt’s voice broke my thoughts.
“…and of course we must have Sir Richard de Mornay, for courtesy’s sake, although Jabez will not brook the man’s presence on any other day. And I do not doubt but that Sir Richard will bring that Gilroy fellow with him, for all he is not invited. ’Tis the trouble with the gentry,” she complained. “They may do what they will, and we bear the consequences.”
Beside me Rachel caught her breath as the needle bit painfully into her finger, and I saw a tiny drop of blood fall onto the linen she was working…
That particular excursion into the past ended there, and I waited a few days before trying again. By restricting myself to the inside of my own house, and repeating the process in various rooms, I found I was gaining a fairly complete picture of Mariana’s daily life, and the lives of those around her. The pity that I felt for Caroline deepened as the days passed. Rachel told me that Caroline had once been as lively and spirited as herself. That the spirit had gradually been beaten out of her by Jabez was a realization that dawned on me gradually, a suspicion strengthened by the sometime appearance of a bruise on Caroline’s pale face, or a newfound temerity in her gaze, as she held and rocked the squalling babe. The babe I pitied, also. There was no love in Jabez Howard’s eyes, no hint of tenderness when he looked upon his son, only a cold and distant form of loathing. I thought of my own father, and what he’d taught me, and my heart wept for baby John.
To me, Jabez Howard remained brusquely courteous, frequently indifferent, and irritatingly enigmatic. There were days when he was absent on business, and other days when a knock would sound at the front door and I would be summarily ordered to my room, to spend hours in pious silence. I did not mind overmuch, for it was then that I read the Shakespeare, drawing the precious borrowed book from its hiding place beneath my bed.
Once, though, filled with reckless bravado and a burning curiosity, I left my room and stole to the top of the stairs as my uncle’s guests arrived. Peering through the balusters, I could see only the back of my uncle’s head and the face of the black-eyed bailiff Elias Webb, Rachel’s betrothed, although the voices of other unseen men filtered up to me. After exchanging greetings, they moved into the parlor and closed the door, and their voices were lost. Defeated, I slunk back to my room, none the wiser about my uncle’s strange activities.
Of course, because I never left the house during these backward trips in time, I never encountered Richard de Mornay, although I did see him several times riding in the fields behind the house. I also knew that Mariana had, on at least one occasion, returned to Crofton Hall. I knew this because the book I was reading changed from Shakespeare to Fletcher, and because I held in my mind the memory of Richard’s company on my last visit, when we’d walked to the center of the great maze, thick with the smell of rain-washed yew, then lost our bearings on the way out again so that we turned laughingly this way and that, seeking in vain the elusive opening.
He had kissed me then, too, as he had that day in the Great Hall, and the memory of that kiss brought a burning flush to my cheeks. I had run the whole way home in the rain, and Rachel had taken one look at my dripping gown and shining eyes and deduced instantly where I’d been. She smiled at me, a sad, forgiving little smile, and I knew she would not tell. “One of us, at least, should have some happiness,” she had said.
But while Richard de Mornay had undoubtedly kissed Mariana Farr, and on more than one occasion, they were not yet lovers. I was so certain in my own mind that they were destined to become lovers, that I found myself increasing the frequency of my trips backward. What had started as a weekly ritual became a daily one, and by the last week of July I was spending two or three hours each morning lost in the seventeenth century.
I explained my morning seclusion to everyone by saying that I was working on my drawings, but nobody seemed to take much notice, anyway. Geoff rarely rose more than an hour before midday—his excuse being that he stayed up late at night reading—while Tom was kept unusually busy with his parish, and Iain applied himself so diligently to his farming that I hardly saw him. Vivien, too, had begun to disappear some mornings, although no one was entirely sure where she went. O
n occasion, her disappearances extended into the afternoons, and when Geoff and I stopped in at the Lion on the last Saturday of July, we found Ned tending bar by himself.
“No good asking me,” Ned told us, pulling our pints with a disgruntled air, “I haven’t a clue where she is. No one ever bothers to tell me anything.” He returned to his newspaper, and since there was plainly no more conversation to be had at the bar, Geoff and I retired to a table by the window.
Jerry Walsh did not share his son’s taciturn nature. He hailed me cheerfully from the crowded corner table. “Hullo, gorgeous! How’s life been treating you?” he asked me, in a voice robust with drink.
I smiled back and assured him that life had been treating me fine.
“Hooked up with this troublemaker, have you?” He jerked a thumb at Geoff, and shook his head in mock sympathy. “You want to watch out for him, darling, he’s a real heartbreaker, he is.”
Geoff grinned. “You mind your words, Jerry,” he warned the older man good-naturedly, “or I’ll tell the girl the stories I’ve heard about you.”
“Fair enough,” Jerry said. He winked broadly at me, and turned back to his rollicking table-mates, several of whom glanced with interest in our direction as they drank their pints, no doubt speculating on the potential of this latest piece of gossip. “I saw young de Mornay with that artist girl in the pub today…” would, I wagered, be the opening line to many a teatime conversation that afternoon.
“So,” I said to Geoff, continuing the conversation we’d begun on our way to the pub, “you’ll be off to France again in September.”
“For six weeks.” He nodded. “Some of that will be business, unfortunately, with our office in Paris, but then I’ll be headed down to Antibes, and the boat. And my mother might be in Spain, in September, or so she says. I may nip down and visit her for a few days. I don’t know.” He hadn’t often mentioned his mother, in the months I’d known him.
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