Overnight John Hadley became a broken man, aging before the eyes of everyone.
But there was a gloom over Hadley Hall that even the deaths of the two young people could not explain. There was more than death about the beautiful house with the old, ruined castle in the background.
“It is the absence of love,” Hugh Kellon said, just before he rode away forever. “For a while there was love in this place and we all felt it. Before they came we had resigned ourselves to the absence of love around us, but those children awakened us. They made me remember sweetness I thought I could not remember. There was not a life they did not affect.”
It was true: Callie and Talis had affected everyone. With her mother gone, Edith lost no time in swooping up the available Peter Erondell; she was married to him before he knew her name. Then she quickly found husbands for her other sisters. John stayed in the background; he was an old man now and he did not care what happened to the money he had so carefully hoarded all his life.
Penella lost not a minute in setting herself up as housekeeper to the broken John, and soon Hadley Hall was run with more efficiency than it ever had been before. And she easily persuaded John that Alida could not be buried at her precious Peniman Manor. She had used that rich estate to entice and threaten; she was not going to have it in death, since she would not give it in life.
With Talis and Callie gone, there was no soul left in the house, or in the family. As Hugh said, there was no more love left. One by one the children left the place, not one of them wanting to remain near their father or Hadley Hall.
Gilbert Rasher never came to the hall, never even saw his son as an adult. On his way to claim his son and make him king, he and his other sons were set upon by brigands and killed when they refused to give up the few coins they carried with them. But then, there were very few people at Hadley Hall who knew he was to have come and given revenge to Lady Alida, so Gilbert Rasher was not missed.
It was three years after the deaths of the children that Penella demanded that John do something to commemorate the deaths. In their memory, John had a chapel built, a chapel of great beauty, with a coffered ceiling and marble floors. In the east end was a large marble monument. Lying on tasseled pillows of the purest white marble were full-length statues of Callie and Talis, a little monkey twined about Callie’s ankle. Their heads were turned toward each other, their hands clasped, their eyes gazing into each other’s for all eternity. Above their heads doves held a white marble canopy open, as though the viewer were seeing something that was private and should not be seen.
Below the statues was a brass plaque that said:
BORN IN THE SAME HOUR
DIED IN THE SAME HOUR
APART IN LIFE
TOGETHER IN DEATH
Part Three
42
I was crying when I came out of my trance, and for a moment I didn’t recognize the two people bending over me. One was a young man with a
n oddly dirty face. Under what looked like very cheap makeup streaked with sweat, he was pale.
“We thought you were a goner,” he said in an accent that showed he hadn’t bothered much with school.
“You were dead,” whispered a pretty girl on the other side of me.
Turning, I looked into the eyes of Edith, the woman who had been my elder sister in the Elizabethan Age. With difficulty, I remembered that now she was called Ellen and she desperately wanted a husband. No wonder, I thought, after all she’d been through with her lying mother.
I started to get up but felt faint and fell back onto the hard little couch. When had they invented upholstered furniture? And why did I seem to remember carriages that had no horses?
“Catherine,” Ellen/Edith said, “we must get home. It’s late and you’ve had a…a difficult day.”
I guess committing suicide does tend to make one tired, I thought as I allowed her to help me up. Not to mention a hypnotic trance so deep I may have died. The young man was already by the open door, obviously very anxious to get rid of the two of us before he was accused of murder.
I wasn’t much use as I allowed Ellen to put me in a carriage and take me back to her brother’s house. I stood still, in an exhausted daze, while the maid undressed me and put me to bed. I was asleep immediately.
When I awoke it was morning and I felt much better, although ravenously hungry. My memory was slowly returning to me. I seemed able to remember all of it: my life in New York in 1994, my Edwardian life, and my life with Talis.
After ringing for the maid I let my thoughts wander, as I did when I was plotting a book. I wanted to remember everything.
Now I understood Tavistock’s old nanny’s hostility to me and my inexplicable desire to make her love me. Aya was Alida, in truth my mother. In this Edwardian life, she finally had Talis for her son, in a manner of speaking. At least a nanny was fairly close. And Tavistock no doubt kept her here because Talis had died believing that Alida had his best interests at heart.
Tavistock’s uncle Hubert was Hugh Kellon, still trying to get us together after all these years.
Smiling, I looked up at the underside of the bed canopy. Dorothy was Daria, still listening to my stories, still wanting to have lots of men. She’d gotten her wish of making men adore her. No man ever ignored Daria. And we had been friends for centuries.
With a grimace I thought that although I’d not met her, Fiona had to be Lady Frances. I felt sure that she had been chasing my man for a few hundred years.