by J. Jay Kamp
Chapter Three
The marquess led Ravenna to his office, saying, “Let me just ask Kathryn to get the water.”
Yet when he approached the secretary’s desk, when they fell to talking about guest reservations, insurance agents and other business, it wasn’t long before the water was forgotten. Ravenna didn’t bother to remind her host; instead, she listened with interest as the secretary practically pleaded with the young man. “Lord Huntingdon requests your presence at his annual charity ball,” Kathryn said, the phone’s receiver pressed to her hand. “David, it’s next week. We have to tell them something.”
The marquess touched his fingers to his brow. “Send them a check for two thousand pounds, and tell Huntingdon I’m not able to make it. Tell him I haven’t yet learned my social graces. And call Emma Steiner.”
“What about Mr. Collins?”
The marquess frowned. “Keep trying, please?”
With that, he ushered Ravenna forward. “Why must the world revolve around money?” Leading her into the next room, he seemed to make an effort to lighten the mood. “These charity things are merely an excuse for rich people to go clothes shopping, if you ask me.” He pointed to an overstuffed chair. “Go ahead, make yourself at home. Do you feel any better?”
Anxious and a little taken aback by such chatter for a landed peer, she took a seat. “I’m fine.”
“Well, you looked like a ghost a moment ago. Or like you’d seen a ghost. That's been known to happen around here.”
“You’ve seen a ghost, Marquess?”
“Oh goodness, don’t call me that. I’m David. David Hallett.” He held out his hand to shake hers, and when she took it, he stepped a little nearer. “Look,” he said, and his voice was soft, “I don’t mean to pry, but…why were you crying in my music room just now? If there’s something I can do to help—”
“Actually, thank you,” and working up her courage, Ravenna tried to seem as normal as possible as she put into action the rough plan she’d conjured on the drive down to Devon, “yes, there is something you can help me with.” Try to sound like a college student, Ravenna. “I came to your hotel to research the history of ‘The Evening Walk,’ by John Singleton Copley—you know, that painting in the National Gallery of your ancestors?”
Taking the chair opposite hers, David nodded.
“Well, I didn’t see a ghost, but sometimes I get so wrapped up in my, um, research,” she lied, “that, as I’m trying to envision what life was like for these people, I feel like I really am the person I’m investigating. I guess I got a little carried away in your music room.”
There was something in his face then, she wasn’t sure what. Still, his attention remained undivided, and taking this to heart, she ventured on. “It’s like when you hear a sad song on the radio. It takes you back to whatever happened when that song was your favorite, makes you live it all over again, the feelings, the hurt. I think your hotel is doing that to me. Only,” and she caught herself—she was a terrible liar—“only I wasn’t really Mrs. Hallett. It’s just easy for me to imagine what it must’ve been like, living here as her. She must’ve had an awful time with the Irishman who played the piano. And I don’t think she could’ve been too happy about being married to Mr. Hallett, either.”
Slowly, as if edging away from something unseen, the young man sat back. “No,” he said quietly. “No, she wasn’t.”
His eyes were locked on hers with intensity. She wanted to hold her breath, for his easygoing manner had completely disappeared; he was rigid in his seat, and as she watched the scowl settle over his face, she wondered exactly which part of what she’d said had offended him most. Was he going to throw her out of the hotel? That slant to his features made her think he might, and she sat there nervously, waited in silence, until finally she couldn’t take it anymore. “Silly, huh?” She laughed uneasily. “I mean, coming here on vacation and getting so wrapped up in things that happened hundreds of years ago, that’s sort of a strange hobby. You must think I’m insane.”
“No,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Not insane, just…unusual.”
“Incredibly unusual, and I’m sorry if I’ve—”
“Elizabeth,” he said, and he looked away toward the window and the trees outside. “Your name was Elizabeth Mary Hallett.”
Hearing him say it, seeing the expression of gravity on his face, Ravenna could hardly believe what was happening. Clasping her hands tight to her chest, she felt a tide of shock wash over her. “You mean her name?” She blanched. “The girl in the picture?”
“No, in fact I mean you.”
She had no idea how to react to that. Was he baiting her? Trying to get crazy talk out of her so he’d have evidence for the police when they arrived to arrest her? Think fast, Ravenna.
Yet before she could come up with a rational response, he was talking again. “Well, you resemble her, don’t you?” His gaze swung back to meet hers, traveled over her hair again, her shirt, her jeans, so that it made her feel increasingly self-conscious. Yet his attention wasn’t lurid, or even accusatory. It was…sad. He was hurting, it was obvious in his tone when he went on, “You’re identical to her. Indistinguishable. Certainly you’ve noticed this, and if you feel as if you were Elizabeth, what other conclusions could one draw? Unless this is all a hoax, Miss Evans, and you’re an actress hand-picked because your appearance is similar to my ancestor? Is this a hoax, Miss Evans?”
Ravenna could hardly breathe. “No, never.” He looked as if he were about to cry.
“I thought not,” he said.
This wasn’t what she’d rehearsed on the drive down from London. She’d planned to represent herself as a history freak, an artist, a person who wanted to learn more about country life in the eighteenth century. And yet he was correct: Ravenna did seem exactly like the woman in the painting, right down to the V-shaped point in her hairline. Did she dare trust this marquess with the truth of her plight?
“So…” She fought with herself, knowing everything hinged upon whether or not she was perceived as deranged. “So you see the similarity?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you’d believe me if I told you something crazy? That I remember living in your house?” She winced, waiting for the inevitable call for security. None came. “With Mr. Hallett?”
Slowly, David nodded. He seemed as if he were in some sort of altered state. What the hell was going on? Did the marquess do drugs? Was he even more mentally unhinged than herself? But rather than tread cautiously as she ought to, Ravenna couldn’t help but ask, “What about the Irishman? Do you know about him?”
“That would be Richard Julian Henley, sixth Viscount Killiney. He played the piano, just like you said.”
She repeated the title carefully, Viscount Killiney. She waited for resonance, for anything that might trigger those feelings she’d had in the music room…but nothing came to her. Maybe a good thing. “He died young, didn’t he?”
David’s gaze burrowed into hers. “Yes.”
The clock on the bookshelf ticked away as she sat there, analyzing the marquess’s coltish face. His features were so sullen, so utterly affected by what they were talking about, Ravenna realized why he’d been so anxious to help her: He was obsessed the same way she was. It dawned on her suddenly that the calendar on the wall behind him, opened to May of 1989, was a National Gallery calendar, and that the illustration for that particular month was her own face, staring back. She glanced around then and realized that Copley's picture was everywhere; on a cookie tin beside his phone, on a paperweight above his mess of papers, even a set of porcelain figurines depicting the romantic couple and their dog perched on the white marble fireplace mantel. It didn’t matter how outlandish it sounded, that she might have been his ancestor, because for whatever reason, he felt the tug of history, too. She could see it in his eyes. He was in love with the girl in that painting, Ravenna knew it. And what had the hotel clerk said to her earlier? Nice fellah, Lord Wolvesfield
is. Knows all the history of this house.
“Ravenna?”
“You just…This is too weird. I didn’t expect to come here and tell you the truth. I sound like I’m nuts.”
“Whether you’re nutters or not,” he said, “we have something in common, don’t we? It’s not just anybody who’s interested in talking about people who’ve been dead for two hundred years.”
“So this is your hobby? Researching your family history?”
“I don’t feel this way about my other ancestors.”
“Because of Copley’s painting. It’s given Elizabeth a face,” she said, leaning forward in her seat and pointing at the paperweight, “it’s made her more than just an abstract ancestor.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “no, whenever I go to London on business, I always end up in front of that painting. I look up at Launceston, and it’s as if something were pulling me to figure it all out, why he did what he did, why he died in the front yard and—”
Before he could say another word, a knock came at the office door. “Excuse me, but David,” the secretary said, popping her head in, “I’ve got Mr. Collins. Will you take it?”
Reluctantly, he nodded. “Insurance agent,” he mumbled, obviously not thrilled at the interruption. “I’ve been trying to reach him for two days. Do you mind, Miss Evans?”
She didn’t mind. Not one whit. For the next ten minutes while he was on the phone, she was free to stare at all the other Georgian items in his office. Besides the Copley set, there were other figurines on the mantel, and small, gold-framed prints on the walls that seemed to be the work of Thomas Rowlandson or some other eighteenth-century cartoonist. But rather than these or the Copley items, the thing most fascinating to Ravenna hung right above David’s cluttered fireplace mantel: an antique sword of polished steel.
As the marquess chattered on, Ravenna reached up, took the hilt with both hands. Familiar as the house itself, as the piano in the music room, the cold metal felt right and good in the same peculiar, unspoken way. She saw no visions in holding the sword, no Irishman wielding it against his foes. Nothing appeared to show her the deeds committed with the weapon, but when David hung up, he was quick to compensate.
“I’ve been told it’s over three hundred years old,” he said, taking it from her with the gentlest touch. He held it up to the window’s light, and she saw what could only be described as reverence as he tilted the weapon this way and that.
She stepped back a bit. “So this is a special sword?”
He didn’t answer right away. He stared at the four-foot double-edged blade, the S-shaped guard, and the corner of his mouth rose in a twitch before he dared to speak again. “In front of Wolvesfield, in a heavy fog at dawn on April 28, 1793, Christian Hallett died of a single thrust of this sword, yes.”
“Christian?” She struggled to place the name. “Is this someone I should be remembering?”
“William Christian Hallett, the second Earl of Launceston. He went by his middle name.”
“And he was Elizabeth’s husband, right?”
“My great-uncle eight times over,” David agreed.
Running her finger down the groove in the blade, Ravenna was intrigued. “Well, it’s very pretty, whomever it killed.” She paused a moment. “Do you know who it belonged to?” She held her breath, waited for the answer. The Irishman, say it belonged to the Irishman.
But glaring at the length of it, a veil of despair slipping fast over his eyes, David held the sword calmly. “I only wish I knew to whom it belonged. It wasn’t the fourth Marquess of Wolvesfield’s sword. I very much doubt he’d kill a man and then pay for everything, the doctor, the funeral, the coffin—it’s in the accounts. He even spoke at Christian’s service.”
“So who killed him, then? Killiney, I suppose?”
“The diary describes his rapier as being exactly like James’s, and this one is close enough to be its twin.”
“James?” This was not what Ravenna had expected to hear. Killiney, yes, but the brother in her vision? The brother who’d been so disrespectful of her feelings? “Wait a minute,” she said, “James was the fourth Marquess of Wolvesfield? But he was Elizabeth’s brother, I remember him. He had black hair, really straight and jet-black, and these broad, broad shoulders that wouldn’t fit into his double-breasted coat, and he was mean to Elizabeth.”
David gave her a sidelong glance.
“I saw him,” she explained. “In one of my visions, he was sitting with Killiney and making fun of me.”
Fingering the sword, David turned away. “If you can remember that much, we’d better get you to reading the diary.”
“What do you mean? What diary?”
“Yours,” he said, and hanging the sword in its place above the mantel, he led her toward the office door.
