by J. Jay Kamp
Chapter One
Wolvesfield Country House Hotel, England, 1991
He was definitely Irish. Ravenna sat on the bed, hands shaking, telephone receiver pressed against her ear. Would it do any good if she closed her eyes? She didn’t think so. No matter how hard she tried, still she couldn’t escape the image so forcibly thrust into her hazy thoughts: Russet-brown hair. Pale complexion. Freckles that’d look ridiculous if it weren’t for his ruggedly handsome features.
“This is crazy,” she muttered.
“Who’s gonna know?” Alia’s voice was supportive but firm over the crackling, long distance line. “Just go with it. See what happens.”
“But what if I pass out like I did before?” No way was Ravenna going through that again. One moment she’d been digging for her credit card, chatting away with the hotel front desk clerk, and the next she’d been floating—in her mind, at least. In reality, she’d hit the floor. The clerk, the other guests, everyone within shouting distance had huddled around her, fanned her face, offered to contact relatives back home, but Ravenna hadn’t even heard their offers. Instead, she’d seen…
“What if I have some sort of tumor?” She bit her lip, imagined the possibilities. “I mean, I could be suffering from a brain disorder, a hemorrhage or something, and you want me to encourage this?”
From halfway around the world, her cousin made a huffing sound. “Do what you want. Only I think you wouldn’t have called me if you didn’t already believe it’s true.”
“That this is a past life?”
Hearing herself say it out loud, Ravenna wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. A past life. Here she was, two days into the trip of a lifetime, and rather than driving along the beautiful Devon coastline or trying to meet British men, instead she was spending six dollars a minute to discuss reincarnation with her New Age cousin. I must be losing my mind, she thought.
Still, she went along with Alia’s idea. “OK, so what if it is a past life? What should I do? Look at my feet to see what kind of shoes I’m wearing?”
“Concentrate on your feelings,” Alia said.
Before, back home in Washington, she’d mostly experienced sensations that were manageable; she'd had emotional responses to these visions that weren’t anything to fear. Not now. Everything she’d felt since coming to this hotel was overwhelming, unavoidable. If she did as Alia asked and tried to access those buried feelings, she knew it would get out of hand. She couldn’t turn it off anymore, not the way she’d done at home, and it was frightening.
It was also exciting as hell.
When it’d started several weeks ago—just after the court case had been lost, in fact—she’d suffered only a mild episode. She’d been sitting on the bluff, crying, listening to the waves crashing on the beach below, when she’d found herself thinking again of the Dubliner, his flirtatious grin, his tall-heeled boots. After all, nothing held her back now. She was free to wander the world to look for him. She had the money, and she’d wondered, what had become of him since 1977? If she were to see him again, would she even recognize the man he’d grown into?
Trying to imagine it, she’d conjured up his well-memorized face, the inflection of his foreign tone.
Then came the shock. Without really trying, she’d found she could see him. It was as if a picture of what he now looked like had been placed in her mind, an instant photograph in supernatural clarity.
That had been only the beginning. As Ravenna had taken in the planes of his face, reveling in the detail, other visions had formed. She’d seen moving pictures of this man, and although they’d retained all the presence of the boy she remembered from Disneyland, his eyes had seemed more impassioned in these images. He’d been gazing at her as if he’d loved her.
Perched atop her island bluff, she’d gasped with the solidity of it. How could she have seen him if she hadn’t been consciously sustaining the visions?
But she hadn’t been. And she did see him. Unleashed from those archives where dream and expression were kept, images had flashed before her eyes as if she were being shown a private screening of some historical film—except you can’t feel a movie. With that boy from Disneyland grown and in her arms, Ravenna had lived those memories. She’d been with him in a way she could never have been in real life, not in 1977, for she’d been touching his skin, whispering his name, even opening his mouth with the eagerness of her kiss.
“Are you concentrating?” asked Alia.
Ravenna sat back, stretched on the bed. “I’m seeing him.”
“Tell me again. What is he like?”
A picture of heaven, that’s what he’s like. The Irishman was etched in her mind with perfect detail and an eerie tangibility that made her quiver. His eyes were blue. His angular features exuded a warmth, a slight vulnerability, and even in the midst of his serious gaze, she could tell he had a big heart. He also had a gigantic sword. By the way his fingers rested on the hilt, she guessed he’d used it quite a lot. As his clothes were reminiscent of the Revolutionary War, she understood he wasn’t a man she’d seen around town, that was for sure…but he did look like someone.
“Are you still there, Ravenna?”
With the vision hovering behind closed eyes, she nodded. “He has a square chin.”
“You can’t describe him any better than that?”
She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said, trusting her cousin. And with a deepening and solidity that astonished her, the images poured forth. She was with him as she’d never been with the real boy, pressed so close she felt every contour of his sturdy torso, each crisp, black hair on his burly chest.
“Alia, I’ve—” She couldn’t finish her sentence. Nearby was the shuffling of horses’ hooves, the comforting sounds of hay being munched. In the dim lamplight, she saw his face. Then the sudden feel of his skin against hers, his searing kisses along her neck, made her gasp with pleasure.
He’d undone her bodice. His hands were fumbling with her corset laces, and—
“Ravenna?”
No, she thought. No that’s…impossible. How would I know what to do with a man?
“Ravenna, this phone call is costing a fortune.”
“I’m…touching him.” There, she’d said it. Never in her life had she done something so extremely intimate, let alone so forward, and yet with a downward massage of her fingers, she couldn’t help it. She felt along the front of his trousers, stroking, caressing.
“And how does that make you feel?” Ever the counselor, Alia waited in the quiet that followed. It made her feel damned hot and bothered, that’s what it did, but Ravenna wasn’t going to say so. “There might be issues you need to explore. Search your feelings. Are you happy? Does this man love you?”
Love you. The words spilled into her, hazing the scene before her with doubt. She didn’t have the slightest idea why, but she started to tremble. Something was wrong. “Alia, I don’t think he loves me.”
“Why? What makes you say that?”
She opened her mind to find out, and like a storm front the visions gathered her up, made her feel what she’d felt in that life—in a different place.
She saw the Irishman. He’s talking to James, that’s what had upset her. James was her brother, this tall, black-haired man she saw, and he was making fun of her for the umpteenth time.
As they joked between themselves, ever glancing at her from behind their papers, the Irishman and James were behaving deplorably. The Irishman even spoke as an honorable gentleman ought never to speak of his intimate lover: with derision and mockery. It was as if it were nothing to insult her so. When he began glorifying the sailor’s life, the many ports, the exotic women they’d meet, she tried to remain calm. How long would she miss him? Would he even remember her very existence, swinging in his canvas hammock?
Ravenna froze, thinking of what it meant.
This man had been a seafarer, too.
Excited by the notion that they had something in common, she went on with it, focuse
d on the Irishman’s face until it came over her again—another vision, yet another situation. He was watching her from his pianoforte.
He’d been playing Mozart. She knew it because the bright, clear notes still rung in the air, his personal message of contempt for her all too clear in his choice of music. His cold blue eyes were proof enough of his malicious intentions. When he told her their liaison had been pleasurable but nothing more—certainly not a reason for marriage—her fate was sealed.
He didn’t love her.
This wasn’t the sweet boy she’d met at Disneyland. This man seemed a rogue. If these were their moments together in a past life, the Irishman’s and hers, what good could come in trying to find him?
Back in America, Alia was losing patience. “Why didn’t this man love you? Try to listen to your inner voice.” In the stillness, her pleas seemed distant as Ravenna sorted through her deepening pain. With his callous grin, how could she have kissed those lips? And yet she had…and would again, if given the chance.
“Ravenna? What’s going on?”
“If I tell you the truth, do you promise not to give me a Buddhist sermon?”
“It’s the boy from the pirate ride, isn’t it?” Alia’s tone was snappish. “Actually, that would make perfect sense. That’s why you went on this trip in the first place.”
“I came because I got a check from the government.”
“You came to find him, and this Irishman, he looks like the boy, right?”
Ravenna sighed. The last time she’d seen him at Disneyland, he’d been walking away, mumbling to himself, leather jacket strung over his shoulder. Of course she’d lied, said she was fifteen when really she’d only been twelve, and that was probably why he’d skipped their silly bayou lunch date. He must have guessed her true age, surely, and what self-respecting seventeen-year-old boy would be interested in a twelve-year-old?
“It’s him,” Alia went on, and Ravenna knew only too well what sort of crystal-chakra nonsense would follow. “And yes, I’m going to give you a Buddhist sermon. You’ve spent all your life pining away for this guy, saving yourself for him when you could’ve had Don or Gary or even Frank the hottie boat mechanic, and now you expect me to believe you didn’t go to Europe to find him? You did, and you were supposed to. It’s fate, Ravenna. You lost your island for a reason—it was to get you out of your hermit hole and into the real world.”
At the mention of her island, her mind flitted back to her troubles, the things she should be forgetting on this vacation. Don’t think about it. Numbing her feelings, she tried to center on Alia’s voice, but the pain still surfaced. She couldn’t not think about it. Her island. Gone.
“If you hadn’t lost your island, you’d still be sitting there in your boat, cutting herring plugs for bait, wouldn’t you? Is that really how you want to spend the rest of your life, Ravenna? Fishing by yourself? Scuba diving under boats for some guy named Delwin who pays you to scrape the scum off hulls?”
No, she wanted to say, but she kept quiet and let the sermon continue.
“Everything happens on purpose, Hun. Your island was made into a bird refuge by the government for a bigger cosmic reason: to get you off your butt. And why on earth didn’t you choose a nonstop flight to Dublin? But no, you picked a layover in London subconsciously. You knew you needed to go to Devon. You went to the National Gallery and found that painting without even trying. You’re being guided, Ravenna. Your higher self is guiding you to the Irishman, and he has to be in Devon.”
Swallowing hard, Ravenna sat up. “Alia, I’ve got something I have to do,” she said, and without even thinking, she put down the phone.
How many weeks had it been since she’d first started remembering this man? Since that night on the bluff? When she’d gotten the government’s reimbursement for her property, the first thing she’d done had been to climb into her boat, take her belongings and her beloved Siberian husky, Nick, and head for her parents’ new home in British Columbia. There she’d stored her scuba gear. She’d delivered her dog for safekeeping. Yet even then, tying up her boat at the government dock in Mitchell Bay, even at the north end of Vancouver Island she’d had memories descend upon her from nowhere.
It’d only gotten worse when she’d reached England, when she’d found that painting Alia had mentioned.
Hanging in one of the many alcoves of the National Gallery, it had been a life-sized double portrait by John Singleton Copley that had stopped Ravenna dead in her tracks. Like many of its time, it featured a couple in fancy dress walking their dog. Never mind that the woman looked exactly like Ravenna; no, that wasn’t even the most disturbing thing about the picture. It was the husband in the portrait who had jarred her heart most. Just the sight of him had brought out an irrational response, a terrible sadness defying explanation. She’d felt friendship and loathing for him, each emotion as strong as the other. This was not the boy from Disneyland. This was not the Irishman. This new man, with his elegant, careful pose, was someone Ravenna had pitied, not loved.
Resonance, that’s the best way to describe it. It’d been as if there were a bridge between paint and flesh, a portal between that life and this one. Ravenna ached with misery as she read the picture’s title. “Lord and Lady Launceston, or ‘The Evening Walk,’ 1788. Wedding portrait of William and Elizabeth Hallett, donated by the Hallett family of Wolvesfield, Devon, 1840.”
This was all she’d needed. She’d rented a car, studied a county map of Devonshire. Tourist destinations were clearly marked. Castles and historic homes were indicated by symbols, and beside one of these, on the coast near the town of Dartmouth, she’d found the words Wolvesfield Country House Hotel.
The check-in incident had followed shortly thereafter.
Now, shivering with the image of her Irishman, she rose from the bed, eyes fixed in bleary disbelief as she looked around at the Georgian furnishings, the mellow gray walls and plaster decoration of her hotel room. A ribband-back chair stood in the corner. A copy of The Blue Boy hung over the bed. It seemed a world away from her island, the comfortable cabin on her little boat, and yet she felt so…Running her finger along the white marble mantel, she shuddered.
It’s this house.
Grabbing her room key, she went downstairs. Guests milled in the hotel corridor, but she avoided their stares as she rushed through the midst of them, intent on only one destination.
When she got to the music room door, she stopped.
What had her life been like before? Those twenty-seven years she’d spent on the water, the beaches she’d walked, the resident killer whales she’d known by name, every shred of it slipped away when she saw the piano. His piano.
What the hell was happening to her? Staggering forward, she squeezed her eyes shut. She tried in vain to retain her identity, her sense of surroundings, but a dizzy melancholy gained momentum in her thoughts as the feel of this room, the smell of it, rapidly flooded her consciousness and drowned out everything she’d known before.
Hadn’t she stood at this very window? Grief consumed her. He was never coming back. She’d never hear his satin voice, feel the dampness in his russet-colored hair nor see that wonderful, lumbering gait of his through these halls, never again. She heard the wind move over the fields. She felt its draft coming through where it could. Lifting the sash window, letting in the storm, she wrapped her arms about herself and repeated his name like an incantation. Love you, she thought. I’ll do my best, but I’ll never love anyone the way I loved you.
Tears filled her eyes when finally she focused on the woman beside her.
“Miss Evans?” The woman smiled, and Ravenna recognized the check-in clerk. “Are you all right, Miss Evans? Can I get you anything?”
Ravenna was shaking uncontrollably now. Her knees felt weak. She reached for the piano, turned away from the woman’s stare, for how could she speak? Words seemed impossible when all she could think of was living without him, drowning, dying.
When the clerk disappeared in the dir
ection of the front desk, Ravenna sat down. With her back to the wall, she mashed her face in her trembling palms and tried to determine what she’d just been through. Was she losing her mind? Making sense of these spontaneous images, insulted by the Irishman in one scene and in terrible grief over him in the next, was becoming more difficult with each passing moment. Had he loved her? If he’d hurt her so bitterly, why would she mourn him?
Maybe I ought to rest for a while, she cautioned herself. Take a nap. Have some chamomile tea.
Then she became aware of a presence. Someone was approaching her again, probably the clerk coming back, and she wondered, how many people would offer to help her?
Yet before she could decide whether to look up or not, she heard a gentle, hesitant voice. “Miss Evans?”
She jumped at the sound. There’d been nothing threatening about it, and yet she’d started at the young man’s proximity: He was crouched right at her outstretched feet and she hadn’t even noticed him there.
Get a hold of yourself, Ravenna. “No,” she said, feeling ridiculous in front of this stranger. “I mean, yes, I’m Ravenna Evans. I was just…” What was she doing? And why had the clerk given out her name?
Wiping her eyes, she tried to stand, for surely she shouldn’t be leaning against the antique wallpaper. But the young man put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re upset,” he said gently, and he looked at her with such a warmth and concern, she forgot her grief. “Please, stay where you are. Relax for a moment. I’ll find a glass of water for you, all right?”
Embarrassed, she nodded. Still the young man didn’t leave. His gray eyes wandered over her face. His fingers at her shoulder tightened reassuringly, calming her, lulling her, making her thoughts drift ever so slightly, until at last it dawned on her what was going on.
He was staring at her.
As if she were an apparition, a movie star, a girlfriend he hadn’t seen in years—this was the way he looked at her.
She saw nothing unusual about him. Dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, he wore no tie and there was no particular order to the layered mess of his dusky blond hair. He had a thickset, effeminate face, and almond-shaped eyes the color of slate. He was trim and attractive in a comfortable sort of way, but no matter how much he tried to disguise the fact, he was obviously not comfortable with her.
She began to fidget under such attention. Pushing the hair back from her eyes, she took a deep breath, shifted her feet whilst his gaze moved over her face, her earrings, the Celtic cross around her neck.
Finally the man collected himself, stood up from his crouching position. “Will you stay, Miss Evans?” Straightening, he turned toward the door with the promise, “I’ll be back in two moments with something cold.”
Only then did she realize it. He was the marquess. He was the owner of Wolvesfield Hotel. It’d taken a moment for his features to register, but she recognized him from the photo displayed at the check-in desk.
“Wait,” she called after him, getting to her feet. Maybe she shouldn’t be alone in this room, because what sort of delusion would come over her next? “I’m fine,” she said, brushing off her jeans. “I just need a change of scenery, that’s all. Would you…would you mind?”
She nodded toward the door, and the marquess broke into a friendly smile. He held out his hand. “Would my office do?”
