11
I must have fallen asleep and when I awoke I knew that I had been crying. Crying for what I had lost and for what would never be. Why hadn’t I just left well enough alone and married good, safe Steven?
Hunger drove me out of bed and out of the room. Whatever happened to maids who brought the mistress meals on a tray? In fact, what happened to my efficient, silent maid altogether? From what I knew of Edwardian history, I was aware that I was off schedule and therefore would probably not be fed.
I started to dress in something other than a frilly robe, but there was no way I could get into one of Lady de Grey’s dresses without that iron maiden lashed about my middle, and I wasn’t masochistic enough to put it on when I didn’t have to. The room was dark and one glance at the drawn curtains at the windows told me it was night.
When I opened the door, out of the dim hallway sprang a woman holding a candle, which she promptly shoved into my face, so close that I feared I might be burned.
“He is mine,” she said. “You cannot have him. You will never own him.” With that she turned and ran down the hallway, her long dark skirts swishing after her.
Had she been younger I would have thought she was the fertile Fiona, but she was about my mother’s age, with that unlined, perfect skin that the moist English climate produces. When she was younger she must have been quite pretty, but now her features had twisted in malevolence when she saw me.
“I am living in a Gothic novel,” I muttered aloud and wished very much that I could go home. At that thought Lady de Grey piped up and said, “I want to go with you,” which made me laugh.
I followed my nose to find food. In a beautiful dining room, aglow with candlelight, sat my loved/hated husband with a feast before him and he was chowing down as though there were no tomorrow.
Oh yeah, I thought, soul mates. Any stress sends me to the kitchen.
“Do you mind?” I asked, and at his gesture, I took a seat to his right and filled a plate higher than his. He didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. Let’s see Lady de Grey get back into her corset after I had finished with her body, I thought.
“Tell me about the letters,” I said, mouth full.
“Why should I tell you about your own letters?” was his unhelpful reply.
“I have lost my memory. I’m from the future and my spirit has taken over your wife’s body so I’m actually someone else. Take your pick.”
“Ah, Catherine, I shall miss your stories.”
I didn’t even make a smart reply.
“All right,” he said, “I will play along with your little game. I do not think you meant for them to be delivered. I can see that now.” With that he gave me a look up and down. Maybe it had been a jolt for him to find out that I was a virgin. “Where did you learn all the things that you wrote about…about love?”
“Sex, you mean?”
At that he raised one eyebrow. I don’t think Catherine had ever said that word, or maybe even knew it. “I’m good at research,” I said. “Very good. Any information I want to know I can find out. So I wrote some hot little letters to whom?”
“Half the men in England, it would seem. Some of your letters found their way to the newspaper office. The king has declared that he does not know us. He fears more scandal.”
“I see. Do you have any idea who sent them to the men and to the newspaper office?”
He gave a shrug that seemed to mean that he didn’t know or care.
“Is it possible that I wrote them only to make you jealous? That I meant for you to see them and no one else?” This is what I would have had one of my heroines do if she needed to get the hero’s attention. But of course I had never had a hero who had the “problem” that this one did. And all my heroes were rampantly virile and paid enormous amounts of attention to the heroine.
“It does not matter why you wrote them or who sent them. It matters only that it has been done. It is a point of honor to me that I must now divorce you.”
I kept eating. I wish I could describe how I felt in his presence. I thought that what he was doing was about the lowest, rottenest thing I had ever heard of. None of my heroes would ever do what he was doing. Of course with my heroes, after years of marriage the heroine would have three children and another one on the way. I detested him, but at the same time I wanted to be with him. There was something about his very presence that fulfilled something inside me. It wasn’t that he made me happy, far from it. But when I was near him I felt, This is where I should be. How could he send me away?
“I have never loved anyone but you,” I heard myself saying softly. “Not in any life have I ever loved anyone but you.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know that.”
“Then how could you do this to me?” I was not going to cry. I was not!
“We are not good for each other,” he said. “There is something wrong between us.”
“You didn’t marry me just for my money, did you?”
“Of course not!” he said angrily, as though I had made that up.
“But you said—”
“You said that you’d been to bed with every man in England! How could you have done that to me, Catherine? How could you? We had agreed that it was better that we divorce quietly, but you had to write those letters. Lord! But why doesn’t someone take your pen away from you? I have never seen anyone lie as you do when you have a pen in your hand.”
“Perhaps I should write novels.”
“Always making a jest, aren’t you? Well, I have had enough of it. You have gone too far this time. Tomorrow is the sixth and I must go to London on the tenth. Then I will—”
That jolted me. Why hadn’t I thought of looking at a calendar to see what today’s date was? “The sixth of what?” I asked.
“June of course. Do you want to know the year also?” he asked archly.
“You will not go to London,” I said softly. “On the eighth of June you and I will die together. At least I think I die. My body will never be found.”
For a moment he just stared at me, then he threw back his head and laughed. “Catherine, I will indeed miss you and your stories. I shall miss them very much. You have been most entertaining during these years.”
My first impulse was to plead with him to listen to me but inside of me Lady de Grey was telling me that she’d tried everything to make him listen to her, but he’d refused. Having written letters saying I’d had sex with most of London, while in truth I was a virgin, didn’t make me a candidate for Most Honest Person.
While I was thinking of this, he put his elbows on the table and looked at me. “All right, tell me,” he said. “You know that I can never resist your stories.”
I perked up at that. A man who couldn’t resist my stories. Steven used to listen politely but he never really, truly liked hearing about knights on horses rushing to save the heroine—or the other way around, as it often was in my stories.
I told him. I told him that we were soul mates, and explained what that was. I told him that I was a spirit from the future trapped in his wife’s body and that I needed to change the hatred and anger that was between us, so that I could be happy in my life in 1994.
He listened as though he’d had a lot of practice in listening to my stories, and when I finished, he lifted an eyebrow at me.
“I must say that that is one of your best. You really should write them down. Perhaps there is an audience for them. Now, if you will excuse me, I must get to bed.”
I was on my feet instantly and grabbed his arm. “What I have told you is true. Someone will kill us three days from now.”
“Oh? And who wants to kill us?”
“I…I don’t know. Your sister desperately wants a husband and there is an awful old woman skulking about the corridors saying that you belong to her.”
His mouth hardened into a tight line. “My little sister is a murderess? And I take it you mean Aya, my old nanny, is also a killer? She does not like the lies you have told about me. You cannot
blame her for that.”
“You must listen to me. We must—”
“Yes? We must what? Live together as man and wife?” He jerked his arm from me. “You have seen that that is impossible.”
I glared at him. “Yes, I have seen that I am to suffer the consequences of your inadequacies.”
From the look he gave me I knew that I had again overstepped myself. Were our deaths a murder/suicide? Did he kill me, then himself? If that were so, then what happened to Lady de Grey’s body?
Turning away from me, he left the room.
When he was gone, all I could think of was that I wanted to go home, home to my safe apartment, home to a world that I understood. With heavy feet, I went upstairs and went to bed.
When I awoke the next morning, I had only one thought on my mind: I must return to my own time period. Nora had been absolutely, totally right, and I should never have done this. I had made things worse rather than better. Knowledge did not conquer emotion. Knowing that this man and I should be together didn’t help anything at all.
When writing my books, I was always willing to toss out novels that didn’t work. As far as I was concerned, this was a story that wasn’t working and I needed to cut my losses and get out of here.
But how? How did I go back? There was a chance that in two days, when Lady de Grey and her angry, impotent husband were killed, my spirit would be sent back to the present, but I didn’t want to risk it. I wanted to go back now.
I found out when and where breakfast was and managed to show up for it. There I met Hubert de Grey, Tavistock’s uncle, a sweet man, who kept looking at me in great sadness.
“If there were anything I could do to prevent this,” he said, “I would.” I assumed he meant the divorce.
Ellen was there and I asked her about him. “He arranged the marriage between you. How could you have forgotten, Catherine? He loves both of you.”
After breakfast I walked in the garden; actually, I paced, as was my habit when I was trying to figure out some problem. An old man named Jack, a great lump growing on one shoulder, gave me a small bouquet of flowers and whispered, “I am sorry for all that has happened to you, my lady,” then disappeared.
Nora had said that people remembered things from past lives, and sometimes I got little shivers when I looked at these people. That woman Aya hated me and she seemed to be everywhere, looking at me as though she wished to wipe me off the face of the earth. I could sense that Catherine was very afraid of her. If there was ever an unhappy spirit, this old nanny that Tavistock seemed to think was harmless, was it. I couldn’t help but think that it had taken more than one generation for her hatred for me to grow. Yet, somewhere inside of me, I kept feeling that I very much wanted her to love me. Which of course was ridiculous.
What I really, truly wanted was to stop trying to figure out people’s motives and to go home.
12
JAMAL, the headline blazed, THE WORLD’S GREATEST MESMERIST, WILL BE APPEARING IN BURY ST EDMONDS ON THE SIXTH OF JUNE AT EIGHT O’CLOCK. ONE NIGHT ONLY.
Reading the ad on the back of the newspaper my silent husband had placed between us over lunch made me nearly choke on my overcooked vegetables.
“Are you all right?” Ellen asked, but my husband—the love of all my lives—said nothing. If I did choke it would no doubt save him a great deal of time and expense. And clear the way for his precious Fiona, I thought. Maybe she was the killer.
“I am fine,” I answered. My impulse was to demand that I be “allowed” to go to see this mesmerist, but I decided to be quiet and find a way to get to him. If I had been hypnotized to get here, maybe I could be hypnotized to get out of here.
During the meal, I could hardly sit still as I was dying to get Ellen aside and ask her, among other things, where Bury St Edmonds was. As far as I was concerned the town was in Chaucer and that was a long way from the time of Edward VII.
An hour later, in whispers, I told Ellen what I wanted.
She gave me an odd look. “You are not a prisoner, Catherine. You may go where you wish, and Bury is not far, as you well know.”
“Yes, of course,” I said aloud, straightening from my spy position. “Do you think we could go tonight? I mean if you don’t mind, that is.” I didn’t want to go alone because there was no telling where I’d end up. In theory, I spoke English, but there were some men in the garden who spoke a variety of English that could have been Arabic as far as I could understand it, so I had to have someone with me.
“Tavey will be away tonight so we may go where we wish,” Ellen said.
Still feeling quite foolish, we made arrangements for what time to leave. It seemed that Catherine was always interested in things like mesmerists and palm readers, as well as gorgeous Fabergé ornaments, so my wanting to see the great Jamal was no surprise to her.
Have you ever tried to explain past lives to an Edwardian man? I think I could have easier explained what a CD ROM was. For all that the man called himself “Jamal” and tried to make himself look old enough to have some wisdom, I could see that he was just a young man from the English equivalent of Brooklyn. The stain he’d used to darken his skin during his performance had furrows from his sweat.
“You have lived other lives?” he asked, and I recognized a kindred soul; he was thinking how he could use this information in his next act. It wasn’t that the concept of past lives was not known in Edwardian times, it was just that this man had never heard of it. I doubt if he’d ever read much and there were no TV specials to inform him, so he had missed this bit of knowledge. For a moment I thought of how much information we absorbed in the modern world thanks to mass media.
“And you want me to send you back to one of these lives?” He looked me up and down in a timeless way. “Shame to lose all that.”
“Listen, kid,” I said, feeling all of my thirty-nine years, “keep your hands off the merchandise. I just want one kind of service from you, not anything else.”
He smiled at me. “All right, but it’ll be ten pounds for a private performance, so to speak.”
Poor little Ellen had been hovering in the background, torn between horror at being backstage at such a low place as a theater, and being thrilled within an inch of her perfect little life. Now I held out my hand for her to give me money, since I had none.
It was fifteen minutes later, after Ellen had scurried outside and borrowed some money from the driver of the Tavistock coach, that I was stretched out on a table and the young man had started putting me in a trance.
“All you have to do is want to go under,” Nora had told me, and I did indeed want to go under. Very much. I envisioned my apartment with the white linens on my bed. I thought of my computer and Daria and Milly and of movies. I tried to see all that my life in New York held for me.
Instead, what I kept seeing and feeling was Tavistock. His eyes. His hands. I remembered the way he made me feel when he kissed me. I remembered how fascinated with him I had been, how I’d wanted to follow him wherever he went. I thought of how I felt when I was near him, as though I were supposed to be with him. I hated him; he was despicable, dishonorable, and all-round rotten, but there was a feeling inside me that he was mine. How could some other woman have him? I think I might kill him myself rather than allow another woman to have him.
“You will go back to where it all began,” the man was saying and I was already feeling dreamy.
“You will go back to the beginning.”
Yes, I thought. Back to the beginning. I began in New York.
I could feel my spirit detaching from Lady de Grey’s body, and as I again felt that floating sensation, I smiled. Back to…What was that name I’d seemed to remember when Milly’s hypnotist had put me under? Tally. Yes, that was it. Back to Tally.
Suddenly, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. There seemed to be a voice inside my head—was it Nora’s?—that said that something was wrong. No, I thought, I don’t want to go back to the beginning. I want to go back to 1994. Not th
e beginning. I opened my mouth to protest, but now it seemed that I was no longer attached to a body. I tried to will myself back into Lady de Grey’s body, but I couldn’t seem to move.
Slowly, I began to feel…What was it I was feeling? I was feeling as though I were trapped and I had to get out. Had to, had to, had to. I was going to die if I didn’t get out.
In the next second I had the freakish realization that I was a baby about to be born.
Part Two
13
England
1571
There, madam, is a son,” John Hadley said to his heavily pregnant wife. He didn’t so much say the words as spat them. In nineteen years of marriage he had had much practice in saying these same words to her. As a man of little imagination and no complexity, his one goal in life had been to have a son as tall, broad shouldered and as handsome as he was himself.
His beautiful blonde wife, Alida, her hand on her enormous belly, sat by him, her eyes glittering with blue fire. She knew better than to answer him or to make any comment; it was better to let him rage.
“Look you at what you have given me,” he said, not bothering to keep his voice down, but truthfully no one could have heard him if he’d shouted. The old stone castle that had been in his wife’s family for a couple of hundred years was now filled with half-drunken guests at the wedding of the first of John’s eight daughters. The girl was eighteen, late to be marrying, but it had taken years of begging her father to find her a husband before she was allowed to marry. John’s reluctance to allow a daughter to marry was caused by the fact that he cared only for the expense of such a marriage. He had hated the idea of giving the girl a dowry of one of his castles. It did not matter to him that this and all of the property he owned had come to him through his unexpected marriage to the rich Alida Le Clerc so many years ago.
As always, John’s anger toward his wife came not only from the eight daughters she had borne him but from the two sons, whom he despised. Rarely did he see all of his ten children together because they expended great effort in staying away from their father, for he never considered keeping his hostility secret. The girls begged their mother to persuade their father to get husbands for them—any husbands. There were no complaints if their father suggested marriage to a man thrice their ages, a man with blackened teeth and foul breath. The girls were in accord in their single goal to get out from under the constant fiery furnace of their father’s enmity.
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