Remembrance

With that he left the room, closing the door behind him.

For a few moments I was too stunned to speak. Recovering from my encounter with him was rather like recovering from a two-week bout of flu. I felt weak and helpless and tired, and inside me, I could feel Lady de Grey shouting, “I told you so. I told you so.”

Maybe she had warned me and maybe I should have listened to her, but I was feeling the beginnings of unfairness. I had done nothing wrong. I—I mean, Catherine—had done nothing but write some hot little letters and if I knew myself I—she—had written them in an attempt to get his attention. Was she as attracted to him as I was? At that thought I felt a weakening of her spirit. She loved him very, very much. Worse than that, so did I. I knew without a doubt that if he walked back into the room, I’d lean back on the bed and open my arms to him.

“But I hate him, too,” I whispered, for who could not hate a man who was going to ruin a woman’s life by divorcing her because he could not perform with her? Hate him for the horrible things he had said to me.

Nora’s words echoed in my head. “Love. Hate. It’s the same thing.”

“I love him and I hate him,” I said, and I could feel Catherine agreeing with me. “Real hatred,” Nora had said, “is the other side of the coin from love. Hate lasts centuries, just as love does.” Now, at last, I understood what she meant, and I sure as hell wish I’d never found out.

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.”