She waited, then went on. ‘Do you remember me telling you months ago that I had come from another time in the future? It was the truth, my dear. My name is Karen Courtney, and in my own life I have been married and born a child. For my birthday I was given a miniature of a gentleman of the Regency. It fascinated me. I knew that face. I had seen its original. And yet, I knew that couldn’t possibly be so. In tracing its origin I was led to a country house in Devon, a house called Ashbourne Manor – a house with a ruined tower.’ Her voice faltered.
Antony’s shoulders moved, then he was still.
Karen continued. ‘Something happened to me at that place. A thing buried deep in the most forgotten part of my mind was triggered by the sight of that tower. I felt overwhelmed with panic, stunned by it. I couldn’t think or see. It was awful. I never want to experience such terror again.’
This time she paused because her voice had dried up. She swallowed, and when he didn’t respond, eventually went on. ‘I don’t know that happened after that. Amanda seems to think I must have fallen and injured myself, and that my spirit was shocked out of my unconscious body. What I do know is that I came to my senses in another time and place, and in the body of a stranger.
‘Amanda believes that Caroline died from the fall downstairs. She thinks my roaming spirit entered the vacant body before it ceased to function. That explains my strange behavior as Caro – because I was not Caro at all. I have had to learn how to behave like a woman of her times. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve never ceased to long for my own place and time, and for the little daughter I was forced to leave when she needed me.’ A sob broke off her narrative. She couldn’t go on.
Then Antony moved. Slowly he turned to her and she saw his ravaged face. He brought his fists down to his sides. His voice was weary, as if he had difficulty in forcing it out.
‘Let us suppose that I credit this farrago. What possible connection does it have with my Jenny? If you are, as you aver, this woman from a future time, you cannot be Jenny as well.’
‘I am both,’ she said calmly. Meeting his gaze was possibly the hardest thing she had ever done. His torment was her own, and she could nothing to help if he refused to believe her. ‘Do you know anything about reincarnation?’
‘I am told it is a mystical eastern belief in the recurrent birth of the soul –’ He broke off. ‘No! I am no simpleton to be taken in by such claptrap! If that is the sort of explanation I am to receive…’ Shaking his head, he turned away and moved towards the door.
‘Antony!’ The urgency of the cry stopped him. ‘Dear love, do you recall our last day spent together in the tower? You were to ride out to meet with some of your tenants. It had been a hot summer and there were crop losses, and much discontent over them. We played with our baby girl and talked a little and loved a little; and then I shared with you a secret that no one else held.’
Arrested with his hand on the latch, he stood immobile, waiting, as if her next words would mean life or death to him. Very slowly he turned his head and looked at her.
‘Oh, Antony, we were so happy. We were to have another child.’
Their eyes locked, building a bridge between them, so tenuous and frail, yet quivering with unspoken hopes. Karen felt as though she had run a great race and collapsed at the finishing line. The bones of her spine and legs softened and melted, letting her slide down to the floor in a billow of silk. But yet her eyes held his, sending him a message that had transcended time.
His whisper had the clarity of a shout. ‘No one else knew. Only we two.’
‘Only we two,’ she echoed.
‘I cannot, yet I must believe it. You are Jenny?’ It seemed he could not take it in. His hand still clutched the doorknob with whitened fingers. He looked at her dazedly, seeming rather to look through her at his own thoughts and visions.
She bowed her head and let the tears come. She could do no more.
He had crossed the room in three strides and gathered her to him, pressing her wet face to his chest so that he could feel the sobs racking her.
‘Love, do not weep. I cannot bear to see you unhappy.’
‘You always said that,’ came the muffled voice from his shirt front. ‘Even when I wept with happiness, you were distressed.’
Gently he raised her chin and she saw the tears standing in his own eyes. ‘God has been good to me. He has sent you back to heal the wound that has drained my heart’s blood for four years. I am a whole man again.’ His lips came down to meet hers, blotting out all misunderstanding, all need to explain.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Tell me more about your own time. I want to know the circumstances that shaped you. I have this need to understand everything about the woman who has me in her toils.’ Antony looked down at Karen with such a laughing, tender light in his eyes, she felt tears spring up.
Her new emotionalism frightened her a little. It was so foreign to her. Ever since the day when she’d finally acknowledged her Mama and Papa were never coming back to her, that the string of carers and foster parents would never feel the same way about her as her own parents had, she’d closed off one side of her nature. If love couldn’t be coaxed or bought or stolen, then she’d learn to live without it, which meant denying all the softer, more vulnerable feelings that went with love. It was too easy to have them trodden on and mangled. Better not to let them out at all. Better to be a stoic.
She had made the right decision. Just look what happened to her when she let Humphrey draw all those feelings out of cold storage. Yet now she was allowing it to happen all over again. Was it wise? Was it safe? Was it possible that she’d been wrong, after all?
The early summer morning had begun to wake around them. The air thrummed with bird calls and was heavy with the rich scent of roses, hundreds of them, creating a private bower for lovers to stroll in. Her own latent homemaking instincts had been boosted by the recent discovery of a lady’s memoirs in the bookroom, and in these a detailed account of the laying-out of the garden by Antony’s grandmother, in an age when formality was the rage. The Lady Hermione, disdaining to be one of the herd, had gone ahead with her own notions of how a garden should look. The Elizabethan herb plots were extended, and the espaliered fruit trees, their limbs as thick as a man’s arm, continued to roam over the red brick walls. Above all, the roses had been encouraged, grafted and added to. They had even been given new red brick walls of their own to enclose and trap the sun’s heat, creating an arbor more intimate and equally as lovely as that of Hampton Court Palace.
Karen paused to sniff at a particularly choice pink bloom, which her husband promptly picked and tucked into the bosom of her gown. The sight of long brown fingers gently moving among the lace frills made her feel weak at the knees. Nothing had prepared her for the night she had spent with Antony, renewing their knowledge of one another, nor the many nights that followed.
While she was able to recall her life as Jenny, over the last few days the memories had faded. Now it was much like rereading a loved story – a dream of the past to be treasured and kept green in the memory. But it wasn’t real. The emotion that powered all experience had seeped away from her recollection. It was the difference between a rose long pressed between the pages of a book, faded and frail and dry, a mere redolence of what a rose really was, and the vibrant, perfumed reality, richly velvet, sequined with dew, its golden heart wide open to the world.
Thus Antony’s lovemaking had come as a shock. In most ways she still remained a woman of the twenty-first century, mentally emancipated, emotionally prepared, but hoping not to be used. Romantic, yet cynical at the same time. Used to going it alone, she’d longed for a soul mate, and got Humphrey, who taught her what it meant to be really used.
Now there was Antony, a gentle man in the best sense, a strong man who used his strength to protect, not violate. In his hands she experienced for the first time the selflessness that made two into one, and emancipation sank without trace. Totally bewitched, she gave herself up to the new
experience, half fearful that she’d wake one morning and find she’d dreamed of being loved. Knowing what she was inviting in the way of guilty suffering, she made her choice. Whatever opportunity might come in the future, she would stay with him.
‘You have not heard me, little featherhead. What are you thinking?’ The teasing voice recalled her.
She flushed a little, but answered honestly, ‘I was thinking about love, married love. Our love. I am still overwhelmed by it. I never dreamed that two people could be so close, nor so full of trust in each other. We even seem to have the same thoughts, simultaneously.’
He smiled wickedly. ‘And what are my thoughts at present, do you suppose?’
Laughter bubbled up and out. ‘The usual ones, I imagine. And yes, they are my thoughts, too. Oh, Antony, I’m frightened at such happiness.’
His arms came around her and the rose was crushed irretrievably between them. Karen felt she might lose her senses, caught in the powerful turbine of passion this man could arouse in her. No one had told her such feelings existed. She wouldn’t have believed them. Who could relate the power of command with tenderness, the wildness of riding the stormy winds like a Valkyrie with the peace when cradled in the valley of a man’s cupped hands? No poet she ever heard of could find the rhythm and meter to describe two madly pulsing hearts in the moment of revelation. No song ever written, no painting, no creation of the hand and mind of man could do justice to these things. They must be experienced.
When they drew apart she brushed her fingers across the bruised sweetness of the rose and said, in a shaken voice, ‘I do love you so much. I’ve never said that before to anyone. I didn’t know I could say it.’
Antony turned her face up to his. He searched each feature, examining, seemingly memorizing, as if she were a map and he must learn his way so that it would never be forgotten.
‘My Caro, do you recall the particular sonnet that compares a woman with a summer’s day? “’Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date. But thy eternal summer shall not fade.” You will always be my Jenny, a part of me… and my Caro, and the sum of all the lovely parts of you scattered throughout time. I am the most fortunate of men to be granted a second chance at heaven on earth.’
‘We are both fortunate. I… my life in my future time was not happy. It was largely my own fault. My marriage was such a disappointment that I rejected love, or rather, denied that it even existed. But for you, I might never have known what it was like to give until the giving came back a thousand fold. With you I feel empowered. It’s like a gift of wings, so that I may take flight. It’s… beyond any words.’
Keeping an arm about her, he stroked her springing hair back from her forehead and dropped a kiss there. ‘You had no one at all?’
‘There was Adele. I have told you about her.’ She couldn’t keep the sadness from her voice.
‘My love, there is no way for you to return to your little daughter. Can you not be happy with me, and with Chloe, who is also your child?’
‘I can’t help being torn. It’s useless to long for what I cannot have, yet if offered the choice, I could not bear to give you up. I love you and I love Chloe, but, God help me, I want more.’
He held her and comforted her. She felt the steady beat of his heart beneath her cheek and knew how fortunate she was to have his support in every way. Telling herself to stop crying for the moon, she gave herself up to the enjoyment of what she had.
*
They took a picnic lunch into the park and spread it beneath the shade of a massive chestnut tree. Antony’s semi-crippled father, the Earl of Roth, kept to his own apartments for most of the day, although in deference to Karen’s presence he struggled into evening clothes and dined with them. Karen felt that he was wary of her, which made her sad. She thought him a fine old man whose intellect and will allowed him to rise above his physical disabilities. He led a disciplined and rather Spartan life in his suite in the western, modern wing, only emerging upon occasion in a wheeled chair to take the air on the terrace. With the help of a secretary he worked each morning on the compilation of a history of his line, but he never discussed this. His conversational skills eased their meetings, but she felt she was kept at a distance. He was an enigma to her, and one she’d have liked to solve.
Karen fed her man and was filled with the contentment that this brings. Inspecting the remains of the chicken and pasties, the orange peel, the near empty wine bottle, she remarked, ‘I should like to show you a modern picnic. It would startle you.’
‘I am not easily startled.’
‘Well then, you would be nonplussed. I defy you to describe the taste of salami and cream cheese bagels, passion fruit pavlova, coca cola, hot dogs, chilled fruit cocktail…’ She stopped and laughed at his expression. ‘That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry. I come from a world when anything portable can be whisked from any place on earth to halfway around the equator in a matter of hours. Pineapples and bananas from the tropics can be put with strawberries from our own gardens and crushed ice from the nearest fridge… Oh, I haven’t described a fridge …’
‘If it can be carried on a picnic, then I should very much like to have one. Crushed ice could be used to cool the wine.’
‘I can’t be carried. It’s too big. And you would need electric power – No, that’s stupid. We take a cooler on a picnic.’
Antony grinned. ‘You are growing confused, my love, as well as over-laden on your picnic. But I will admit to an enormous curiosity concerning the hot dogs. What is their purpose?’
Karen stared at him. What a Pandora’s Box she’d opened. Where to begin to explain? How?
His grin widened. ‘Now I fear it is you who are nonplussed.’ Then his amusement faded. ‘Caro, you must have a care when speaking of such matters. ‘Tis an uneasy thing to know the future; and those who can are seldom understood by others.’
She nodded. ‘I shall guard my tongue.’
‘But not with me.’
‘No, not with you.’
Later, his manner turned solemn once more. As they gathered together the remains of the meal and placed it in the basket provided, he said, ‘There is a thing I need to know. Caro, can you tell me, will England succeed in crushing the French tyrant?’
She understood his anxiety. Matters stood badly at present, with England desperately alone against a totally subjugated Europe. The news-sheets cried it all over London. Cartoonists showed the Tsar in his vast frozen eyrie vacillating like a weather cock. The Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden walked a tightrope between him and the predatory French eagle; while the new-freed American Colonies still made warlike noises.
She carefully folded a napkin and laid it in the basked. ‘Napoleon will fall. The beginning will be his hollow victory in Moscow next year.’
‘Moscow! So, his Imperial Highness will align with us, after all. But – a French victory, you say?’
‘Napoleon’s army cannot yet be defeated by force, only by attrition. He will have no choice but to retreat, and the Russian winter will bring him down.’
Antony seized her and pulled her erect, dancing her about the grass in a mad mazurka. ‘A victory! The tyrant will fall!’
Laughing and capering he danced her around the basket and back to the foot of the tree, where they collapsed together on the picnic cushions.
Breathless, Karen warned, ‘It will not end next year, my dear. Not until 1815 will the western world be able to finally lay down arms against the French. Wellington will be the hero of the hour, and Blucher, the Prussian commander.’
Antony sobered. ‘So long. So many lives to be lost. He will have a heavy accounting to be made, the little Corsican.’
‘He will. But we both know that it will be paid in full measure. There is no escaping the universal law.’
‘You really believe that? I find the mysticism of the east sits not well in my practical mind. Yet you are the living proof of r
eincarnation.’ The deep tones caressed her more sweetly than any physical touch. ‘I adored you as Jenny. You were the music of nature personified – a nymph of the woodland, a darling of the gods made mortal. Now I am struck dumb by the new Caroline, the wayward flame who has slipped into my heart and holds it prisoner.’ He placed her hand over his heart, then raised her fingers to his lips.
‘And more, I find I have wed a woman of the future, a fine, intelligent creature who speaks her mind and does not hesitate to champion the unfortunate, no matter who opposes. I was proud of you at that dinner so many months ago. You told those time servers you saw through their equivocations. You knew what should be done, and so did they.’
She shook her head. ‘They were guests at our table. I should not have embarrassed them.’
‘Embarrassed!’ Antony threw back his head and laughed. ‘They know not the meaning of the word. You caused but a momentary pause in their step, I assure you. Still, it was well done. Few women would care enough for the cause, and too much for the possible social consequence of plain speaking. I fear you will not be popular with many of your peers.’
‘I don’t give tuppence for them. Do you, Antony?’
‘By no means.’ He let go her hand and sat back, resting comfortably against the tree trunk. ‘I should much prefer to leave them all to their paltry little lives and take up permanent residence with you here at the Manor. What say you, my lady sweet?’
She could have hugged herself for joy. But she answered carefully, ‘Is that what you really want?’
‘It is indeed. You will not long for the delights of town?’
‘Never! As Amanda would say, “’Tis a famous notion, my lord.” Just you and Chloe, and life in the country. What heaven.’ She hesitated, and he waited for the thing she found difficult to put into words. ‘There is something, one of several matters we have not yet discussed.’
Endless Time Page 28
