Just liking the name wasn’t enough to make me think I was the reincarnation of this woman. In the index of one of the Fabergé books I found another page with a reference to Lady de Grey.
Here I found a little story about how all the society ladies hounded Fabergé to make more and more articles for them, never allowing him to sleep or eat.
“But none of them was worse than Lady de Grey,” the author wrote. “She was an utterly charming and brilliant young woman, but when she set her mind to something nothing on earth could stop her. One evening when Lady de Grey entered the shop at dinnertime, Fabergé tried to escape out the back but her ladyship had a second sense about people and she caught him. Between her charm, her humor and her indomitable will, Fabergé knew he’d not be going home to dinner that night.”
That description was so close to home that reading it left me feeling a little queasy. I sure liked the “brilliant” part but I could do without the “indomitable will.” It reminded me just an itty bit too much of all the things my mother said to me when I was a kid.
But then I reminded myself that none of this was real and that there weren’t past lives, so it didn’t matter if this woman did have an “indomitable will.” Nothing to do with me.
The index listed a photo credit of a piece of art owned by Lady de Grey. Frowning, annoyed at this whole character-stays-the-same garbage, I turned to the color photo.
There, on plate XVIII, was a picture of a beautiful jade carving of a sweet-faced little monkey.
I fell back onto the carpet and said out loud, “What have you stuck your nose into this time?”
4
The next day at 2 A.M. Nora called and told me that she had to leave town immediately. She didn’t seem to think that two o’clock in the morning was an odd time to call so I didn’t point it out. Even though she looked quite normal, she did live in a world of past lives and “reading thoughts” so I guess she was allowed a few idiosyncrasies.
Even though I was two-thirds asleep, I remembered to ask whether her trip was personal or business. There was a long silence on the end of the line and I knew I had overstepped the bounds of nosiness. However, this did not make me backtrack. Cowards never learn anything interesting they can use in a book.
After a while, she said, “It is business.” My head filled with questions. What in the world could be “urgent” to a clairvoyant? A ghost of a former self hanging around the bedroom? A former lover come back to get you? Maybe a man about to kill a woman he’d already killed in a past life.
At these thoughts I was beginning to wake up and maybe Nora sensed it because she was off the phone in a flash.
I lay awake for a while and thought about what a clairvoyant could possibly see and started thinking about a plot in which I had a heroine who could read minds. I wonder what she would see in Jamie’s mind, I thought. Would she be the blushing kind when she saw what was making his eyes so hot? Or would she say, “How dare you?” Or would she be like I would be if I saw Jamie? I’d put my hand to my forehead, say, “Take me, I’m yours,” then swoon gracefully into his strong, masculine arms.
After that I decided to get out of bed and cool myself off. Better not watch late-night cable shows or I’d never get to sleep. In the end, I had a tiny glass of my favorite liqueur, Mandarine Napoleon, and wrote a truly hot sex scene for the book about Jamie—you know, the one for which I still didn’t have a plot.
The next morning I went to the library to see what I could find out about myself, er, Lady de Grey.
Due to my superior ferreting abilities, I was able to find her in no time flat. In my mind, researching is so easy. I think where people go wrong is that they think of history in terms of the boring stuff they had to learn in school. Specifically, I mean wars. It seems that in school, history means wars and nothing else. You don’t even hear about the time between wars. Who knows what happened between World War I and World War II? Maybe you heard about economics but certainly nothing else.
I have written several million words, all set in historical time periods and I know nothing about wars. I have a rule in researching: Don’t read anything that isn’t interesting. I figure that if it isn’t interesting to me to read about, it won’t be interesting to write about and therefore my reader will be bored.
So when I research I read about the good stuff. I read about clothes and food and how people thought about things. How did they treat their kids? How were women treated? Those sorts of things.
To find this information, I never read encyclopedias or those books with three hundred biographies in one volume. I like specific books, such as books about eyeglasses or the history of dentistry. I own over four hundred books on the history of costume, with all of them cataloged and cross-referenced so I can find things. I truly hate reading a novel in which the author says, “Lady Daphne was wearing the very latest fashion.” What was the latest fashion? Was it a color or a sleeve shape or a new type of hat? I want to know.
One of my favorite authors, Nora Lofts, once said in an interview that people really want to know two things about a time period: how people earned their money and how they went to the bathroom. I have tried to follow that advice and put those things into my books in a subtle and relatively tasteful way. One time I laughed hard at a “medieval” book in which the idiot author thought the garderobe was a closet. Readers know that it was the toilet, but this dumb author kept having people sitting on the floor and discussing things. Very funny scenes actually.
Anyway, I had learned how to research long ago. Go for the specific, not the general. I headed straight for the genealogy room at the New York Public Library and had them hand me their oldest copy of Burke’s Peerage. Unfortunately, the New York Library has so much thievery, they can’t allow open stacks, so I try to use what I can find in the least amount of time.
It took about five minutes to find her. Rachel de Grey, died 1903. That would be about right for Fabergé. Her husband was the third Earl de Grey and the first Marquess of Ramsden.
I wrote down the tiny bit of information from that book, then hit the humongous card catalog in the library, all of it in difficult-to-read black books. Right away I found a book about the first Marquess of Ramsden. With my breath held, I turned the request card into the desk. Always, working at the New York Library is like skeet shooting because half the books have been stolen or “misplaced.”
Thirty minutes later, my number was placed on the board and I had the book. Minutes later I had found the two references to the man’s wife in the entire book. After all, how important can a man’s wife be? All she has to do is be there for him whenever he fails, then tell him he’s the best in the world so he has the courage to cont
inue. Hasn’t anyone yet realized that there’s a reason single men are rarely ever a success?
Anyway, I was so very pleased to read what the author had written about me…her, that I soon forgave him.
“Lady de Grey, despite her delicate health, was the most helpful of helpmates. Her sweet and buoyant temper completely matched that of her husband, and from the day of their marriage their life was one long honeymoon.”
Now that’s more like it! I thought. None of this indomitable will garbage. If this was what finding out about past lives was like, then I should have done this sooner.
I went on to read that Rachel and her husband were married for thirty-five years and had two sons; one died while in Turkey (set upon by brigands) and the other was named Adam and inherited the title. I spent the afternoon reading about “my” husband, lapping up every word it said about his dear, sweet wife who helped him every step of the way. When my—her—son died, she erected a beautiful chapel in his memory.