Summer Magic

by Lorraine Bartlett

  Drew looked only slightly better than she did when he arrived. He got coffee and slipped into the seat next to her.

  "You didn't sleep well," Ellie pointed out.

  "I see you're the bright picture of a morning person," he teased.

  Ellie turned to face him. "We have to ask Blythe," she said in a stage whisper.

  "Ask Blythe what?"

  Blythe had come in quietly and approached the table. She went about arranging salt and pepper shakers and straightening the cloth as if their question was something common to the guests of the Manor. Ellie knew it was anything but normal.

  Drew found his voice first. "Blythe, tell us about the curse." He stated it as if she knew someone would ask.

  "What curse?" Blythe asked. She didn't look up at them, but her hand shook a moment before she lifted an empty saucer. And Ellie would swear her body stiffened.

  "Blythe," Drew's voice had a warning note to it.

  She turned to them, her face the picture of innocence. Drew and Ellie looked at each other.

  "Come with us," Drew said.

  "Come where?"

  Drew didn't answer. He rose and took Blythe's arm, leading her to the library. Ellie followed and closed the door so they would be undisturbed. Drew came and stood next to Ellie. Blythe turned to them.

  "I still don't understand," she said.

  Raising their hands, they linked one finger together. The room took on a gauzy tint and the captain appeared as if on cue. Ellie stared at Blythe. Blythe looked at their hands, but her eyes moved from one to the other. It wasn't the reaction Ellie expected.

  "She doesn't see it," Drew whispered.

  "See what?" Blythe asked. "There's a little haze next to your hand." Blythe blinked and adjusted her glasses.

  The captain in the vision turned and stared hard at Ellie. He pointed a finger from the distance of space and time. "You," he said. His gravelly voice came from beyond the grave. It was slow, his mouth opening and closing as if it worked in slow motion. "The curse," he said again. "I curse you."

  Ellie snatched her hand away, her body taking a step back with the force of momentum. The vision broke.

  "You didn't see a man? A vision of a captain?"

  Blythe shook her head. "What captain?"

  "You tell us, Blythe," Drew said. "Even if you didn't see him, you know who we're talking about. Do you know why he points at Ellie and says he curses her?"

  Blythe took a seat and looked at the two people in her library. Gesturing, she had them take seats across from her. The book lined room had a large fireplace and well-used chairs. Ellie and Drew sat side by side on the sofa.

  "I may not know the full story," she began. "It's been generations since this happened. But apparently, the captain fell in love with a young lady from the wrong side of the ton."

  "Ton," Drew repeated. "What's that?"

  "She was rich and he was poor," Ellie explained. "I got that much from the diary."

  "What diary?" Blythe frowned.

  "It doesn't matter," Drew said. "Go on about the captain."

  "In the time period when the captain lived, name and heritage was an important commodity. Fortunes depended on it."

  "What year are we talking about?" Drew asked.

  "Some time during the Eighteenth Century by the look of his clothes," Ellie stated.

  "Apparently that's when it began," Blythe said.

  "The curse?" Ellie asked.

  Blythe nodded. "Captain Robert Warwick met and fell in love with a woman named Lady Jane Pryet. Although he was a sea captain and regarded by the English crown, he was not of her station. Yet, they still fell in love. He asked her to marry him and she agreed. Her family disapproved vehemently and sent her to the country where she couldn't be found. The captain searched for weeks trying to discover her whereabouts. But time passed and he was forced to return to sea."

  "Did he ever find her?" Ellie asked. She was caught up in the romance of the two lovers.

  Blythe nodded. "The night before he sailed, she made her way to his ship and climbed aboard. She hid there all night, but someone alerted her family that she had returned and was onboard. Her father and brothers stormed the ship and dragged her ashore. At gunpoint, they forced the captain to sail. As his ship slipped out into the open sea, he could hear her shouting that she would wait for him to return."

  "And did she?" Ellie asked.

  "He returned two years later to discover that she'd taken her own life."

  Ellie gasped, her hand going to her throat.

  "The captain cursed her family and all their descendants, saying they would never rest in peace. Until things were put right, they would lose everything. They would be earthbound, watching the evil in the world, unable to rest in peace."

  "I've heard this or something like it before," Drew said. "It's an urban legend. No one really believes curses are real."

  "It was real," Blythe said. "After the captain uttered that curse, the family lost their fortune and was reduced to poverty. Children born to them died mysteriously and the rumor that something is not right with any place they live has persisted through generations."

  "What do you mean by not right?" Drew asked.

  "Haunted," she said. "Strange things happened to both the inhabitants and the property. Things that no one else has ever reported."

  "You mean like the visions we have?" Ellie confirmed. "The souls walk the earth and travel wherever a family member goes?"

  "Exactly like that."

  There was silence after her final statement. Ellie and Drew stared at Blythe and she looked at them without the waver of an eyelash.

  "Have either of you experienced anything like that?" Blythe asked.

  Ellie glanced at Drew. After a second, he nodded.

  "I was in my apartment when it happened the first time. When it was over I was standing in a park, with no memory of how I got there."

  "What about you, Ellie?" Blythe turned her attention to her.

  Ellie told her about renovating the old house and finding the diary in the wall. She said it directed her to come to the Manor. She didn't mention the visions she'd seen.

  "What about seeing the captain?" Blythe asked as if she knew Ellie had deliberately held back.

  "That only happened here," Ellie said. The vision I saw in Tennessee was of the Manor and the beach. I only saw the captain once I'd arrived."

  "Anything or anyone else?"

  "Only you," Ellie said. "You were in my vision."

  "Drew wasn't?"

  Ellie shook her head.

  "She was in mine," Drew reported.

  "Once I arrived here and tried the stone, the visions took other shapes, but only inside the Manor."

  "Stone? You tried it here?" Blythe glanced from one to the other.

  "We had to," Drew said. "We needed to know what would happen. Why these visions were coming to us. And why they only occur when we're inside the Manor."

  "Did you find out anything?"

  "Not much," Ellie said. "That's why we came to talk to you. Since you were in my vision, you had to have a part in…." Ellie spread her hands in exasperation.

  "What about you, Blythe?" Drew asked. "Have you seen any of these visions?"

  She shook her head. "I haven't ever seen anything. Of course, every now and then something I think I put in one place is somewhere else, but no captain or other person has ever appeared before me."

  She looked a little nervous, as if she was remembering something else.

  "How do you think this ghost or all the ghosts expect us to put things right?" Drew asked. "If the curse happened in the Eighteenth Century, all the people involved are dead."

  "But not their descendants," Blythe said.

  Drew looked at Ellie, then back at Blythe. "You think we're the descendants?"

  "That's the only explanation I can come up with for what you two have seen or heard."

  "But what you've told us about the story isn't anything like my family."

&nbs
p; She looked at Drew.

  "Or mine," he said.

  "Our family isn't poverty stricken. There haven't been any children dying mysteriously. My father owned a small business," Ellie explained. "We were middle class and live comfortably. I went to a major college, won some great awards and enjoy what I work at now."

  She wondered if Drew could say the same thing. For a moment, he was quiet, but as Ellie finished speaking, Drew took up the mantle.

  "My parents inherited wealth. I went to all the best schools and never worried about money. My parents have had some business setbacks, but nothing that didn't work out for the best."

  "Keep digging," Blythe said. "You may find the reason. But be ready to see or hear it."

  "What do you mean?" Ellie asked.

  "The answer may not be what you expect."

  "What does that mean?" Drew asked. Ellie could hear the irritation in his voice.

  Blythe took a moment before she spoke. "You two are seeing a lot of each other."

  Both Ellie and Drew nodded.

  "And it's obvious you're attracted to each other."

  Neither of them moved or said a word, but the answer hung in the air between them.

  "Suppose you discover you're descendants of the same bloodline?"

  5

  They couldn't be, Ellie told herself hours later in her room. They couldn't be related. And even if they were, they'd have to be cousins many times removed. Outside the birds sang, the surf pounded, the breeze blew, yet inside she was in turmoil. She didn't know which way to turn. Whom should she talk to? Was she losing her mind? Maybe this was an elaborate dream or some practical joke. Ellie didn't know anyone who would go through this much trouble to play a joke. She wasn't rich, so there was no reason for someone to try and drive her insane. Yet insanity was the only logical thing that could be happening.

  Descendants of the same bloodline. Blythe's words played over and over in Ellie's head for the rest of the day. She and Drew left the Manor after their talk. Neither believed they were related, but the thought had been born and it was trying to grow.

  Maybe that was why the curse didn't appear to work for them. They were both from the captain's side of the curse. That was why the captain appeared to them. But he'd pointed at Ellie and said she was involved in the curse. Drew never said the captain ever appeared to him or that he ever said anything. Was someone else appearing to Drew and he wasn't telling her?

  Ellie scolded herself. Why would she even think such a thing? The two of them were in this together. He was the only other person who understood what she was going through because he was caught up in it too. And even if Blythe was right, even if the curse was part of their lives, how could they make it right?

  Ellie opened the drawer in her room and looked down at the cloth holding the stone. She was going to have to test it again. She needed to understand the captain and what he wanted. She needed to know what she or they could do to change the curse. She almost laughed at her thoughts. Here was practical, logical, intelligent Eleanora Sloan acting on a curse. Something she'd never believed in before. But then, when had visions and heated stones been part of her perspective? Now she could believe a lot more than she ever thought she would.

  Lifting the cloth, she stared at the stone. If it had a power, she wondered why it looked so ordinary. Why wasn't it a large ruby, polished to a shine, or a huge diamond, faceted and glimmering in the light? Why did it look like something someone had found on a back lot?

  Removing the layers of cloth that separated most of the stone from her skin, she drew her fingers in, surrounding the rest. Closing her eyes, Ellie waited a few seconds before opening them. The room went hazy, then the part where she stood cleared. She felt as if she was on one side of time and her vision on another. The captain didn't come, but there was water. She was looking at a shipyard. There were a lot of sailing vessels moored to a pier. She could hear the sounds of men pulling rigging, smell the waterlogged wood.

  Someone screamed. Ellie's head snapped around looking for the source of the sound. She saw the girl. Her dress was long, soiled at the hem and from another century. She was being restrained. Her arms and legs fought her captors as she screamed for them to let her go. There were three of them. Tall men. She was tiny compared to their strength. She had something in her hands. Even as she fought, she wouldn't let it go.

  Ellie craned her neck to see past the fight. The girl held the chest. She kicked and elbowed the men, but they overpowered her. Tears streamed down her face. Her eyes were angry and glazed with hatred as the men forced her away. At last, she turned to Ellie and stared across the ages.

  "Help me!" she screamed.

  Ellie reached for the tormented girl. The stone fell, it's sound a clunk on the wood floor.

  Ellie clamped her burning hand to her fast-beating heart. The vision vanished.

  But in that final connection, when her eyes met the tormented Lady Jane's, Ellie had looked into her own face.

  Ellie liked to dream. Most of the times her dreams were satisfying. She'd awaken with a smile or disappointment that her sleep had been interrupted. But when the box was discovered, all that changed. They were more like visions beckoning her to the Vineyard and to Blythe Cove Manor.

  And tonight she'd dreamed—again.

  Ellie threw the covers back. She'd been awakened by the dream; at least she'd been wakened by the voices and images of long ago lovers. There would be no more sleep tonight she told herself, getting up from the bed and slipping her feet into her shoes. Sleep always eluded her after one of those dreams.

  Pulling a robe over her gown, she looked out the window. The sky was silver, telling her it couldn't be more than two or three o'clock in the morning. She'd been asleep for only a couple of hours, but that was all she'd get this night. The rest of the house was silent as she crept from her room. Even Martha, the cat, didn't stir as Ellie moved passed her on the way to the kitchen.

  Intent on getting something to drink and returning to her room to read until the sun arrived or sleep overtook her, she noticed a light through the climbing roses that covered the back fence. Drew lived there. Was he awake? He'd been awake on another night when neither of them could sleep.

  Suddenly Ellie wondered if a dream had wakened him. Was it the same dream as hers? The two of them seemed to somehow be connected. She felt it, felt that the bond holding them together had been there for longer than the space of a week. This was outside of her realm of believability. She was practical. Psychic connections were for charlatans and late night television disguising a con game. Real people, practical people like her and Drew, didn't believe in such things. But there was no denying that something was happening between them. And something was or had happened centuries ago when Captain Warwick and Lady Jane watched the sea from this perch.

  Attraction, yes. Who wouldn't be attracted to a great looking man, especially one that pushed all her buttons? But to have known him in a previous life, that was what she was thinking, and that was preposterous. But it was the thought that pestered her. That the two of them were the captain and his Lady Jane.

  Impulsively, Ellie headed for the back door. Pulling it open, she went out into the warm night. The silver moon shone brightly over the ground, casting the darkness and shadows in bas relief as the reflection on the water set a romantic scene. Ellie fled across it, heading toward the back gate, a gothic maiden rushing from some danger. The gate opened easily, its hinges well-oiled and silent in the quiet garden. On the other side, several lights streamed from windows of the two story house. Ellie ran toward them. She could talk to Drew, tell him about her dream and see if he had a similar reaction.

  Fate had somehow brought them together and they were each other's confidant. Other than speaking to Blythe, no one else knew or could understand what was happening to them. Ellie didn't fully understand it. Knocking at the back door, she waited for Drew to come and open it. After several tries, with increasing levels of sound echoing in the night, he still did not app
ear through the leaded glass that framed the door. She tried the knob and found it opened. Like the garden gate, it swung inward as silent as a ghost.

  "Drew," she called, her voice too soft to carry beyond the kitchen. She didn't want to startle him, but breaking and entering wasn't something she wanted pointed to on her resume. "Drew," she called again, this time louder. Only silence echoed back to her. Advancing into the house, she headed for the next room where she saw a light. As she came around the curved staircase, she saw Drew standing in the center of a huge room with a large fireplace and French doors that offered views of the sea.

  Ellie watched him. He stood like a statute, dressed only in rumpled shorts, oblivious to her or anyone else in this world. Drew was in a trance. He was holding something. His hand was raised and he stared into space, lifting it as if it were a vessel. Ellie ventured forward. Moving quietly, she didn't want to startle him. One cautious step after another brought her within touching distance.

  Then she saw it.

  He was holding a stone in the palm of his hand and was obviously inside a story from the past. Anger coursed through her body like a roiling fire through dry wood.

  "Drew," she shouted, grabbing his hand.

  It was as if the world broke in half, then reshaped itself. He came out of the trance and returned to the century where she lived.

  "You have one," Ellie accused. "You have a stone. You've known about this all along, known what was happening and you didn't tell me, didn't share with me why these visions were happening and what I could do about them. You let me stumble around in the dark and all the time you knew."

  He reached for Ellie, but she sidestepped him.

  "I didn't know," he contradicted. "At least not until you were actually here. Until you fell off that step on the beach, I didn't know anything, but you were in my arms and the world opened up to me."

  "What world?"

  "The world of Jane Pryet and Captain Robert Warwick."

  "So that's why you weren't surprised when Blythe told us the story. You already knew. Why didn't you tell me?"