Remembrance

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?