Remembrance

“How else did your Lady de Grey die if not from your spirit leaving her body? She was not murdered as your history books hint, and if there is a restless spirit in that house it is not hers.”

I think that if I’d strangled her then it would have been justifiable homicide. I was to receive no credit for ingenuity; everything was predestined.

Oh well, I thought, who cares who takes the credit if I get my Tally? “How will he find me? When?”

Nora gave a little shrug and there was apology on her face. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” I said flatly.

She nodded.

“But you do know he will find me.”

“No,” she said, somewhat exasperated, then she calmed. “You have…shall we say, changed things and my visions of the future are a bit, well, confused.”

I couldn’t help smiling at that, since Nora usually seemed to know and understand everything.

As I opened my mouth to ask one of my never-ending questions, she put up her hand. “I cannot answer what I do not know. But if he is meant to find you, then you can lock yourself in your apartment, see no one and yet I know he will appear.”

“Only if he delivers from the deli,” I said, not believing a word she said. I couldn’t imagine Tally as a delivery boy, yet delivery people were the only ones allowed into my building. Twenty-eight men guarded my apartment every minute day and night. How could he come to me? I would have to search for him.

“Can I put an ad in the paper?”

“Which paper?” she asked. “Which country? What language?”

“Oh.” I remembered her saying that I must be willing to accept my soul mate in whatever package God had made for him. “With my luck he’ll be a nine-year-old transvestite,” I muttered.

Nora laughed. “Somehow, I doubt it.”

All I could do now was go home and wait. As I gathered my things I turned back. “What happened to Catherine’s body?”

“The old man, Jack…” She looked at me as though waiting for something.

“Yes,” I said, only at that moment realizing who he was. “He was John Hadley’s spirit, wasn’t he?” I paused a moment. “His conduct in the Elizabethan Age lost him everything, didn’t it? He lost his money, his prestige, his family, even his healthy body.” Just thinking of what had happened to him made me vow to behave myself in this life.

Nora nodded, pleased with my memory and insight—or at least that’s how I interpreted her nod. “Jack found the bodies together and thought they’d committed suicide, so he knew they wouldn’t be allowed to be buried in the churchyard. He took Catherine’s body away and hid it until after Tavistock’s funeral. Then, secretly at night he dug into the grave and put Catherine inside the coffin with her Tavey. Their bodies sleep together forever.”

“Just as they did in the Middle Ages,?

?? I said softly. “Born together. Died together.”

I couldn’t say any more as I left Nora’s office and walked slowly home, thinking about all that I’d been through and had learned.

I kept myself busy while I waited. I spent a great deal of time with Nora, pestering her for all the information I could pry out of her. Then I put my researching abilities to work. First of all, I found the tomb that had been made for Callie and her beloved Talis.

“One of the finest examples of Elizabethan sculpture ever made,” a guidebook read. “Exquisite carving. Dare we say, sensual?” an art critic wrote.

Something that made my head fill with happiness was to read that the marble figures had not been desecrated with graffiti. In the seventeenth century a fire destroyed most of the village and half of the church. Because of this, the church had been shut up and vines had grown through the windows, covering the area where the statues were. Hermetically sealed, as it were. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, when the church ruin was destined to be pulled down, that the statues, in near pristine condition, were found. The National Trust stepped in and restored what they could of the church and protected the beautiful marble sculptures.

While I waited I collated the information I had gathered from Nora and what I had read, added what I had experienced, and managed to turn in a six-hundred-page book on past lives to Daria. She was so happy that I hoped she wouldn’t notice that the book didn’t have an ending. Needless to say, she noticed, but she didn’t bat an eyelash when I told her that I didn’t know what happened to the end of the story because it hadn’t happened to me yet. There was a tiny silence on her end of the telephone, then she said, “Let me know when you’re ready.” Her trust in me was enough to make me cry.

While I continued to wait for Talis, I continued my research. I looked up what happened to Peniman Manor, the place that Alida had held over so many heads as a reward for doing what she wanted done. When I was in Catherine’s body, before I saw what had happened with Talis and Callasandra, I hadn’t realized that Tavistock was living in Peniman Manor. Thinking of how that rich place had been used as reward/punishment, I could believe that Cathy and Tavistock could never have been happy there. If any spirit haunted the place it was Aya/Alida’s. When I read that the contents of the manor, all the paintings and furniture I had seen, had been put in storage during the First World War and the house used as a hospital, I was glad. When I read that on the night the war ended, some careless man, drunk with happiness, had accidentally set the place on fire, I was almost relieved. It would take a fire to cleanse that place.

I called an estate agent in England (real estate to us Americans) and started searching for a thatched cottage that had been a farmhouse in the Elizabethan age. It wasn’t all that difficult to find and, somehow, it didn’t surprise me that it was for sale. I was long past being surprised by anything. I bought it for £120,000, about $180,000. Cute little farm cottages with medieval origins aren’t cheap, but I knew that under the floorboards were six jewel-encrusted goblets and a silver candlestick, all of which Meg and William had stolen from the Hadley family. I was going to see my name on a plaque in a museum as a donor, and I was going to have a holiday cottage in England.

Speaking of Meg and Will, I called Milly in Texas and told her that I desperately needed to see her. I told her that I was so depressed I couldn’t write. She was on a plane for New York almost before I finished the sentence.

Then I called my dear publisher, William Warren. It was easy to make him move. All I said was, “Another publishing house is offering me lots of lovely things.” We made a dinner date immediately.