Turning away from me, he left the room.
When he was gone, all I could think of was that I wanted to go home, home to my safe apartment, home to a world that I understood. With heavy feet, I went upstairs and went to bed.
When I awoke the next morning, I had only one thought on my mind: I must return to my own time period. Nora had been absolutely, totally right, and I should never have done this. I had made things worse rather than better. Knowledge did not conquer emotion. Knowing that this man and I should be together didn’t help anything at all.
When writing my books, I was always willing to toss out novels that didn’t work. As far as I was concerned, this was a story that wasn’t working and I needed to cut my losses and get out of here.
But how? How did I go back? There was a chance that in two days, when Lady de Grey and her angry, impotent husband were killed, my spirit would be sent back to the present, but I didn’t want to risk it. I wanted to go back now.
I found out when and where breakfast was and managed to show up for it. There I met Hubert de Grey, Tavistock’s uncle, a sweet man, who kept looking at me in great sadness.
“If there were anything I could do to prevent this,” he said, “I would.” I assumed he meant the divorce.
Ellen was there and I asked her about him. “He arranged the marriage between you. How could you have forgotten, Catherine? He loves both of you.”
After breakfast I walked in the garden; actually, I paced, as was my habit when I was trying to figure out some problem. An old man named Jack, a great lump growing on one shoulder, gave me a small bouquet of flowers and whispered, “I am sorry for all that has happened to you, my lady,” then disappeared.
Nora had said that people remembered things from past lives, and sometimes I got little shivers when I looked at these people. That woman Aya hated me and she seemed to be everywhere, looking at me as though she wished to wipe me off the face of the earth. I could sense that Catherine was very afraid of her. If there was ever an unhappy spirit, this old nanny that Tavistock seemed to think was harmless, was it. I couldn’t help but think that it had taken more than one generation for her hatred for me to grow. Yet, somewhere inside of me, I kept feeling that I very much wanted her to love me. Which of course was ridiculous.
What I really, truly wanted was to stop trying to figure out people’s motives and to go home.
12
JAMAL, the headline blazed, THE WORLD’S GREATEST MESMERIST, WILL BE APPEARING IN BURY ST EDMONDS ON THE SIXTH OF JUNE AT EIGHT O’CLOCK. ONE NIGHT ONLY.
Reading the ad on the back of the newspaper my silent husband had placed between us over lunch made me nearly choke on my overcooked vegetables.
“Are you all right?” Ellen asked, but my husband—the love of all my lives—said nothing. If I did choke it would no doubt save him a great deal of time and expense. And clear the way for his precious Fiona, I thought. Maybe she was the killer.
“I am fine,” I answered. My impulse was to demand that I be “allowed” to go to see this mesmerist, but I decided to be quiet and find a way to get to him. If I had been hypnotized to get here, maybe I could be hypnotized to get out of here.
During the meal, I could hardly sit still as I was dying to get Ellen aside and ask her, among other things, where Bury St Edmonds was. As far as I was concerned the town was in Chaucer and that was a long way from the time of Edward VII.
An hour later, in whispers, I told Ellen what I wanted.
She gave me an odd look. “You are not a prisoner, Catherine. You may go where you wish, and Bury is not far, as you well know.”
“Yes, of course,” I said aloud, straightening from my spy position. “Do you think we could go tonight? I mean if you don’t mind, that is.” I didn’t want to go alone because there was no telling where I’d end up. In theory, I spoke English, but there were some men in the garden who spoke a variety of English that could have been Arabic as far as I could understand it, so I had to have someone with me.
“Tavey will be away tonight so we may go where we wish,” Ellen said.
Still feeling quite foolish, we made arrangements for what time to leave. It seemed that Catherine was always interested in things like mesmerists and palm readers, as well as gorgeous Fabergé ornaments, so my wanting to see the great Jamal was no surprise to her.
Have you ever tried to explain past lives to an Edwardian man? I think I could have easier explained what a CD ROM was. For all that the man called himself “Jamal” and tried to make himself look old enough to have some wisdom, I could see that he was just a young man from the English equivalent of Brooklyn. The stain he’d used to darken his skin during his performance had furrows from his sweat.
“You have lived other lives?” he asked, and I recognized a kindred soul; he was thinking how he could use this information in his next act. It wasn’t that the concept of past lives was not known in Edwardian times, it was just that this man had never heard of it. I doubt if he’d ever read much and there were no TV specials to inform him, so he had missed this bit of knowledge. For a moment I thought of how much information we absorbed in the modern world thanks to mass media.
“And you want me to send you back to one of these lives?” He looked me up and down in a timeless way. “Shame to lose all that.”
“Listen, kid,” I said, feeling all of my thirty-nine years, “keep your hands off the merchandise. I just want one kind of service from you, not anything else.”
He smiled at me. “All right, but it’ll be ten pounds for a private performance, so to speak.”
Poor little Ellen had been hovering in the background, torn between horror at being backstage at such a low place as a theater, and being thrilled within an inch of her perfect little life. Now I held out my hand for her to give me money, since I had none.
It was fifteen minutes later, after Ellen had scurried outside and borrowed some money from the driver of the Tavistock coach, that I was stretched out on a table and the young man had started putting me in a trance.
“All you have to do is want to go under,” Nora had told me, and I did indeed want to go under. Very much. I envisioned my apartment with the white linens on my bed. I thought of my computer and Daria and Milly and of movies. I tried to see all that my life in New York held for me.