Remembrance

Instead, what I kept seeing and feeling was Tavistock. His eyes. His hands. I remembered the way he made me feel when he kissed me. I remembered how fascinated with him I had been, how I’d wanted to follow him wherever he went. I thought of how I felt when I was near him, as though I were supposed to be with him. I hated him; he was despicable, dishonorable, and all-round rotten, but there was a feeling inside me that he was mine. How could some other woman have him? I think I might kill him myself rather than allow another woman to have him.

“You will go back to where it all began,” the man was saying and I was already feeling dreamy.

“You will go back to the beginning.”

Yes, I thought. Back to the beginning. I began in New York.

I could feel my spirit detaching from Lady de Grey’s body, and as I again felt that floating sensation, I smiled. Back to…What was that name I’d seemed to remember when Milly’s hypnotist had put me under? Tally. Yes, that was it. Back to Tally.

Suddenly, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. There seemed to be a voice inside my head—was it Nora’s?—that said that something was wrong. No, I thought, I don’t want to go back to the beginning. I want to go back to 1994. Not th

e beginning. I opened my mouth to protest, but now it seemed that I was no longer attached to a body. I tried to will myself back into Lady de Grey’s body, but I couldn’t seem to move.

Slowly, I began to feel…What was it I was feeling? I was feeling as though I were trapped and I had to get out. Had to, had to, had to. I was going to die if I didn’t get out.

In the next second I had the freakish realization that I was a baby about to be born.

Part Two

13

England

1571

There, madam, is a son,” John Hadley said to his heavily pregnant wife. He didn’t so much say the words as spat them. In nineteen years of marriage he had had much practice in saying these same words to her. As a man of little imagination and no complexity, his one goal in life had been to have a son as tall, broad shouldered and as handsome as he was himself.

His beautiful blonde wife, Alida, her hand on her enormous belly, sat by him, her eyes glittering with blue fire. She knew better than to answer him or to make any comment; it was better to let him rage.

“Look you at what you have given me,” he said, not bothering to keep his voice down, but truthfully no one could have heard him if he’d shouted. The old stone castle that had been in his wife’s family for a couple of hundred years was now filled with half-drunken guests at the wedding of the first of John’s eight daughters. The girl was eighteen, late to be marrying, but it had taken years of begging her father to find her a husband before she was allowed to marry. John’s reluctance to allow a daughter to marry was caused by the fact that he cared only for the expense of such a marriage. He had hated the idea of giving the girl a dowry of one of his castles. It did not matter to him that this and all of the property he owned had come to him through his unexpected marriage to the rich Alida Le Clerc so many years ago.

As always, John’s anger toward his wife came not only from the eight daughters she had borne him but from the two sons, whom he despised. Rarely did he see all of his ten children together because they expended great effort in staying away from their father, for he never considered keeping his hostility secret. The girls begged their mother to persuade their father to get husbands for them—any husbands. There were no complaints if their father suggested marriage to a man thrice their ages, a man with blackened teeth and foul breath. The girls were in accord in their single goal to get out from under the constant fiery furnace of their father’s enmity.

Now, one of the girls was escaping and her seven sisters looked on with envy. Never mind that the man she was marrying was so thin his bones nearly showed through his clothes and that his manners were worse than any stable lad’s. What mattered was that tomorrow this daughter would be able to escape their father’s house.

As for John he tried his best to forget that his life was plagued with eight daughters and two worthless sons. He spent every waking moment badgering the peasants in the fields, trying to squeeze yet more money and work out of them, and killing any creature that had the misfortune to walk or fly across his lands.

“Look you at them,” John repeated to his wife. “I must bribe some poor man to marry them, eight of them. Do you know what that will cost me?”

Alida wanted to say that it would cost him about half of what her father had given him to marry her, but she did not dare. Brains did not stand up against muscle and obstinacy.

It wasn’t that her husband was stupid. In fact, he was clever in his own way. He was very good with the everyday aspects of life, such as hounding the peasants into producing more food than any other farmers in the county. He knew where every grain of wheat went and no one ever cheated him, as he always found them out. And when he did, his punishments were swift. He was a big, good-looking man, with as flat a stomach today as he had when they were married nineteen years ago.

But John had no understanding of anything that didn’t involve producing more coin, food, or power. Music bored him. “It does not feed me,” he said. He thought education was a waste of time; he thought any entertainment except getting drunk now and then was for fools. Once when he caught his wife reading a book, he grabbed it from her and threw it out the window. “This is why you give me daughters,” he bellowed at her. “I put sons into your belly and you change them into worthless females with your fairy stories.”

Now, John was in his worst mood because he could see all eight of his daughters and his two young sons. Four years ago when Alida had at last given birth to the much-coveted son, she had wept with joy. And through her tears she had seen her husband come running to her. As he grabbed her into his arms, heedless of the fact that she had just given birth, Alida did not care, for there was such happiness on his face. For a moment her heart filled with all the hope and joy she’d felt before she married him. Dreams of a happy life filled her as John held her, kissing her face and neck, telling her she was the most wonderful of wives.

“Let me see him,” John had demanded, and in an instant Alida’s happiness had fled her, for she saw the faces of her maids and knew instantly that something was very wrong.

“No,” she whispered, trying to prolong the moment of truth when that sublime joy would leave her husband’s face when he saw whatever was wrong with the child.

Alida could see that the maids were trying to conceal the problem, so they presented the boy in swaddling clothes, bound tightly to prevent his limbs from growing crooked. But John wanted to see for himself that the child was a boy and bade the maids unwrap him.

With her breath held, Alida watched her husband and when he saw the boy’s perfect body, his face seemed to melt in tenderness as he cradled it in his arms. John had never touched one of their daughters, never done anything but ask its sex, then wave it away. But now he cradled his son as though it were what he had lived his life for—as it was.

“He is beautiful,” John said and Alida’s eyes overflowed with tears. Her husband had never seen beauty in a flower or a sunset or even a woman, but he thought that this son she had given him was beautiful.

With her maid’s help, Alida had sat up straighter in the bed to look with her adoring husband at the child and, innocently, she had started to move the swaddling cloth back from the child’s feet. But the quick intake of breath from her maid had made her draw her hand back as though the cloth were on fire.