by Speer, Flora
“You have no scars,” she murmured, touching a place where once a ridge of reddish tissue had snaked its way across his torso— would snake in the future—might not scar him at all if she did her work well in this lifetime. Her fingertips traced smooth skin over hard muscles, and she rejoiced in the sound of his groan of mounting desire. “I have dreamed of touching you like this.”
“Touch me here.” He took her hand and put it on himself, letting Carol feel his strength and his throbbing, eager heat. In return he touched her, and kissed her until she was trembling and tossing her head upon the pillow and begging him to take her.
He was all the men she had loved—the men she loved still—in past, present, and future. He was the same man, for though his body might change slightly, his spirit and his courage were unalterable by time or changing circumstances. Her own spirit always recognized him. He was her only love and he would be through all eternity. And she was his. In this present time they would not be parted. She knew it with absolute certainty.
She looked into his eyes as he moved into her with a sure, bold stroke. She returned his passion with her own, freely giving to him everything he needed, everything he wanted of her. He gave to her in equal measure, holding back nothing, taking her with him as his passion soared until at the end they cried out the triumph of their everlasting love with one voice and one heart.
Chapter 22
It was the night between the fifth and the sixth of January, the time which is called Twelfth Night and which is generally acknowledged by traditionally minded folk to be the end of the Christmas season. It was also the night on which Lady Augusta had promised to make her last visit to Carol.
Nicholas did not stir when Carol slipped out of bed shortly before midnight. Nor did he move when she caught up her robe and slippers in one hand and let herself out of his bedroom. She paused to scuff her feet into the slippers. It was chilly in the hall. Carol shivered a little as she pulled on the robe and fastened the sash at her waist.
She did not expect to meet anyone else wandering about Marlowe House so late at night. The servants were all asleep in their own quarters, and Will and Joanna Bascome were away from London on a week’s visit to Will’s family, who lived in Cornwall. As for Nicholas, Carol could only hope he would not sense her absence from his side and begin a search for her.
The upper floor of Marlowe House seemed even colder than usual to her, but that might well have been because she had just left Nicholas’s warm embrace. Carol’s old room was positively frigid. It was also empty. No ghostly apparition awaited her. The paperwhite narcissus were dead and gone, although a trace of their fragrance lingered on the still air.
“I guess Lady Augusta is going to be late.” Carol pulled a blanket off the bed. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she sat down in the wing chair. Minutes passed. Nothing happened. Carol shivered, looked about the room, stared into the empty fireplace. No one joined her. Her feet were freezing. She pulled them up beneath her, tucked a corner of the blanket around them, and continued to wait. After a while her eyelids began to droop.
The light appeared suddenly, flooding the room with brightness. Carol’s head snapped up, her eyes opened wide again, and all her senses came alert. She blinked at the brilliant yet soft pulsations now surrounding her.
“Good evening, Carol.” When Lady Augusta stepped from the light to stand before her, Carol rose to her feet. There was no way that she could not stand upon encountering such a resplendent creature.
Gone were the gray and black tatters of Lady Augusta’s most recent materialization. Gone, too, the lavender chiffon of her first appearance and the rich red velvet of her second. This time, Lady Augusta was garbed in a gleaming, iridescent robe that contained within itself all the colors of the rainbow along with every conceivable shade of each of those colors. And yet, the overall effect of that multiplicity of colors was to create a soft, pearl-like white. The sleeves of the robe were long and loose, and the ever-drifting folds of the skirt fell to Lady Augusta’s feet. A cord of mixed gold and silver bound her waist.
This version of Lady Augusta was tall and slim and youthful-looking, her face unlined and shining with an unearthly joy. Her long, loose hair was pure white, and a wreath of white roses sat upon her brow. The scent of roses surrounded her.
“Is that really you?” Carol whispered, awestruck.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Lady Augusta’s voice was different, too, having acquired the rich tones of a finely cast bell. The sound, though quiet, reverberated in Carol’s mind.
“Well,” Carol said, making one last attempt to retrieve her former assertive and falsely casual attitude when dealing with this ghost, “it looks to me as if you have finally achieved your proper place with my help, just as you wanted. I guess we can both relax now.”
“Not at all.” Lady Augusta shook her lovely, shining head and the light in the room pulsated and shimmered in response to the motion. “There can be no laziness for me in that place where joyful work in service to others is the most sincere form of worship. Nor can you ever revert to your former indifference to other people.
“You have done well thus far, Carol,” Lady Augusta went on. “You have transformed yourself and you have begun to change the world around you. You must continue with this work, for with it you are also changing the future into what you hope it will become.”
The unexpected compliment destroyed the final remnants of the cleverness and the too-smart attitude to which Carol had been clinging. In her heart she knew she did not need tough defenses when dealing with Lady Augusta. What she needed was unflinching honesty.
“If my character has improved recently, it is largely your doing, and I know it.” Carol spoke with more humility than she had ever felt before. “Left to myself I would have stayed exactly as I was, a miserable human being. But the awful truth is that I am still a selfish person. For example, I know that leaving here to take your proper place is what you want and what we have both been working for, but I wish you did not have to go. I will miss you terribly and I would keep you with me if I could. You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you?” She ended with a short, broken laugh that came close to degenerating into a sob.
Lady Augusta nodded in regal acknowledgment of the tribute paid to her. “I, too, have been altered by our time together, Carol. As you have learned from me, I have been learning from you. Each of my visits to you has taught me a little more about the true qualities of love between men and women. I have also learned how valuable friendship can be. I do have a few lingering regrets about the lack of both emotions during my own most recent time on earth, but I believe those particular problems will be resolved at a future date.”
“I am glad our association hasn’t been entirely one-sided,” Carol said. “It is a great relief to me to know that you finally have the place you wanted so badly.” She would have said more, but was stopped by the wry chuckle that accompanied Lady Augusta’s next words.
“The proper place which I so eagerly sought upon first reaching the hereafter is not at all what I expected it to be. In fact, the full revelation of my exact place came as a startling, though not altogether a displeasing, surprise to me.” Lady Augusta appeared to hesitate, considering, before she spoke again. “Which is why I have a final request to make of you, Carol.”
“Of course. Anything I can do. Just name it.”
“Ah, child, you make me ashamed that I did not value you at your true worth when I was alive.”
“I wasn’t worth much then. I was a different person. I still have relapses, as you may have noticed a few minutes ago.”
“The seeds of goodness were within you, though they were buried deep and required nourishing. Continue to nourish them, my dear. You now have friends to help you when you fear you will falter.
“Very well, then,” Lady Augusta went on. “This is my request. That you name your first daughter Augusta. Raise her with love, teach her to have a generous heart, and when she is grown you will discove
r in her a friend as constant and loving as I ought to have been to you when I was most recently alive.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Carol exclaimed.
“There are some things,” responded Lady Augusta, “which I am forbidden to explain. All the same, I believe you do understand what I cannot speak. You always have understood me in the past—and in the future.”
“I wish I could touch you,” Carol whispered. She stretched out her hand, but her fingers encountered only a cool, transparent light.
“You will touch me again, in time. In good time,” Lady Augusta said. Her figure was beginning to fade, as was the glorious light surrounding her. “Good-bye for now, Carol”
“Don’t go. Please, stay with me for just a while longer. There is so much I need to ask you.” Tears were pouring down Carol’s cheeks.
“Later, Carol…”
“Carol, love, for heaven’s sake, wake up!”
“What—where—?” Forcing her eyes to open, Carol looked around. She was curled up in the wing chair with the blanket tucked around her feet, and Nicholas was kneeling before her, talking to her and attempting to wipe the flowing tears off her face.
“Where is she?” Carol demanded.
“Where is who? Carol, your hands are cold as ice. What have you been doing alone in this unheated room?”
“I am not alone. Nicholas, didn’t you see—?”
She grabbed at his upper arms, holding on to him until the world around her settled down and stopped spinning. “I must have been dreaming.”
“It sounded like a nightmare, from the way you were screaming. I heard you all the way down in my room. Are you sure you’re all right?” He pulled her to her feet and held her close as if to warm her with his own body heat.
“Yes, I’m fine. I came up here to think, and fell asleep and had a bad dream, that’s all.” It was not all, and Carol knew it. She was beginning to understand so many wonderful things. She smiled at Nicholas, her love.
“Let’s go back to my room, where it’s warm.” His arm around her shoulders urged her toward the door. “I want to make love to you again.”
“I would like that very much.” She would decide later exactly when and how much to tell him about her adventures with Lady Augusta’s ghost. He might not believe her until he knew her as completely as she knew him—and after all, a wife was not required to reveal everything about her past life to her husband.
Nicholas would be her husband, when the time was right for them to marry. She was absolutely certain of it. This man had been her love in the past and would be her husband again in the distant future.
Carol knew beyond any doubting that her life had been on the wrong track when Lady Augusta’s ghost first appeared to her. Cold and distrustful as she had then been, she had almost destroyed her own future along with the future prospects of everyone for whom she now cared.
Lady Augusta had saved her. At the image of that once-cantankerous lady and the amazing possibilities she had suggested, Carol could not help smiling.
“What are you thinking about?” Nicholas paused in the doorway of Carol’s old room to kiss her. With one gentle finger he traced the new upward curve of her lips.
“I was thinking about Lady Augusta,” she said, casting a last glance backward into the room as Nicholas shut the door on it. “She is the one who brought me to Marlowe House, and who then brought you here, to me. All of it was meant to be, exactly as it happened.”
“I will always be grateful that you were here to meet me,” he whispered as they went down the stairs to his bedchamber.
“So will I.” Carol sighed, sinking into his arms so that he was obliged to pick her up and carry her the rest of the way to his bed. “Always and forever, Nicholas. Forever. Merry Christmas and many Happy New Years to come, my love.”
Part VI.
Merry Christmas
Lond, A. D. 2168
Chapter 23
It was snowing again, though not enough flakes floated downward to cause difficulties for travelers. On this Christmas Eve there was just enough snow to lightly frost the evergreen in the center of the square and make it look like the tree in a classical Christmas picture. It was an enormous tree, so tall that during the summer months birds nested in its uppermost branches in complete safety far above the vigorous city life that went on in the square even in the hottest of weather. On those hot, sunny days, children played in the shade beneath the tree or climbed along its trunk as high as their parents or their nurses would allow them to go.
Every Christmas the tree was decorated with lights. It had grown so tall that placing all the colored bulbs had become a long and tedious project, particularly when the weather turned blustery. In a recent year, the Government had suggested that the tree be cut down and a smaller one planted in its place. This, the Government claimed, would make holiday decorating easier and more efficient. The outcry of those who lived in or near the square had been so immediate and so loud with outrage that the Government at once withdrew the suggestion, bowing as usual to the will of the people and leaving the beautiful old symbol of a cherished holiday untouched for all to enjoy.
Car turned from the front window and contemplation of the decorated tree outside to give her full attention to the gathering in the drawing room of Mar House. Everyone she loved would be there. Dear friends Bas and Jo and their children sat beside the Christmas tree that almost touched the drawing room ceiling. Lin and Sue and Lin’s husband, Tom, were helping them to sort through a box of antique Christmas ornaments in preparation for the decorating party that was about to begin.
Out in the hall the most recent arrivals, Nik’s twin sisters, were pulling off their winter coats in eager expectation of joining the fun. Through the wide doorway Car could see the very pregnant Pen leaning against her beloved Al while the two of them listened to El’s new husband, the ever-smiling Luc, tell a slightly naughty joke.
“They don’t look like twins, do they?” Nik said, sliding an arm around Car’s waist. “I sometimes think the midwives mixed them up with someone else’s babies at birth.”
“I don’t,” Car responded. “Their characters are remarkably similar. Outer appearances can be deceiving.”
Pen was tall and slender save for the bulge of the child she carried within her. Her hair was pale blond and her eyes were blue. El was shorter and plump, with darker, curly blond hair and gray eyes. While they might not look like identical twins, they did look like sisters and their tastes were so similar that, to the utter despair of their brother and the frustration of their would-be lovers, they had traded Al and Luc back and forth between them for several years before finally deciding which sister would marry whom.
“Here is Aunt Aug.” Nik hurried forward to assist the elderly lady who had just appeared in the doorway to remove the old-fashioned cloak she insisted on wearing. Beneath the cloak Aug had on a bright red velvet dress trimmed with small bunches of artificial holly and mistletoe. Her thick white hair was pinned into a neat knot at the back of her head, with a small piece of mistletoe tucked into it.
“You look wonderful,” Car said, answering Aug’s usual question before she could ask it. After hugging her aunt and kissing her cheek with great fondness, Car inquired, “How did your meeting with the Prime Minister go?”
“Rather well,” Aug responded. “I do believe that Drum has seen the error of his recent autocratic ways and will in future pay much more attention to what the citizens of this country want him to do—and not just at election time, either.”
“He’s a hard man, our Prime Minister,” Car agreed, “but he is a fair man, too, and he wants to do what’s best.”
“He doesn’t have much choice, with you two females harrying him at regular intervals,” Nik teased.
“This time, it was Aunt Aug, not me, who convinced him to change his policy,” Car said. To the older woman she added, “You are a wonder.”
“Yes.” Aug gave her a knowing grin. “I certainly am. No
w, tell me, my girl, when do you intend to give me a great niece to carry on my name? I am not going to continue in this present life for much longer and I would like to be sure my successor is on the way before I leave you.”
“If we must remain childless to keep you with us,” said Nik, “then I shall send Car to the attic to sleep and make my own bed in the sub-basement.”
“Now, there is an arrangement that could not last for more than two hours at the most.” Pen had joined them in time to hear Nik’s joking words. “Aug, I beg you, stay with us. We need you. I cannot think how any of us would manage without you.”
“Especially Prime Minster Drum,” Car added, laughing, though the eyes with which she regarded Aug were shadowed by the certain knowledge that, at one hundred years of age, Aug could not live much longer.
“But my dear,” Aug said, patting Car’s arm, “I will always be with you. You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried. I thought you knew that by now.
“Enough of serious talk,” Aug went on, raising her voice to speak to all of the guests. “It is time for laughter and feasting and goodwill to everyone. It is time to celebrate Christmas. You young people, start singing. I expect to hear a few good old-fashioned Christmas carols from you. I, of course, intend to be the one to place the star on top of the Christmas tree. Someone bring a ladder.”
