Remembrance Read online

  11

  I must have fallen asleep and when I awoke I knew that I had been crying. Crying for what I had lost and for what would never be. Why hadn’t I just left well enough alone and married good, safe Steven?

  Hunger drove me out of bed and out of the room. Whatever happened to maids who brought the mistress meals on a tray? In fact, what happened to my efficient, silent maid altogether? From what I knew of Edwardian history, I was aware that I was off schedule and therefore would probably not be fed.

  I started to dress in something other than a frilly robe, but there was no way I could get into one of Lady de Grey’s dresses without that iron maiden lashed about my middle, and I wasn’t masochistic enough to put it on when I didn’t have to. The room was dark and one glance at the drawn curtains at the windows told me it was night.

  When I opened the door, out of the dim hallway sprang a woman holding a candle, which she promptly shoved into my face, so close that I feared I might be burned.

  “He is mine,” she said. “You cannot have him. You will never own him.” With that she turned and ran down the hallway, her long dark skirts swishing after her.

  Had she been younger I would have thought she was the fertile Fiona, but she was about my mother’s age, with that unlined, perfect skin that the moist English climate produces. When she was younger she must have been quite pretty, but now her features had twisted in malevolence when she saw me.

  “I am living in a Gothic novel,” I muttered aloud and wished very much that I could go home. At that thought Lady de Grey piped up and said, “I want to go with you,” which made me laugh.

  I followed my nose to find food. In a beautiful dining room, aglow with candlelight, sat my loved/hated husband with a feast before him and he was chowing down as though there were no tomorrow.

  Oh yeah, I thought, soul mates. Any stress sends me to the kitchen.

  “Do you mind?” I asked, and at his gesture, I took a seat to his right and filled a plate higher than his. He didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. Let’s see Lady de Grey get back into her corset after I had finished with her body, I thought.

  “Tell me about the letters,” I said, mouth full.

  “Why should I tell you about your own letters?” was his unhelpful reply.

  “I have lost my memory. I’m from the future and my spirit has taken over your wife’s body so I’m actually someone else. Take your pick.”

  “Ah, Catherine, I shall miss your stories.”

  I didn’t even make a smart reply.

  “All right,” he said, “I will play along with your little game. I do not think you meant for them to be delivered. I can see that now.” With that he gave me a look up and down. Maybe it had been a jolt for him to find out that I was a virgin. “Where did you learn all the things that you wrote about…about love?”

  “Sex, you mean?”

  At that he raised one eyebrow. I don’t think Catherine had ever said that word, or maybe even knew it. “I’m good at research,” I said. “Very good. Any information I want to know I can find out. So I wrote some hot little letters to whom?”

  “Half the men in England, it would seem. Some of your letters found their way to the newspaper office. The king has declared that he does not know us. He fears more scandal.”

  “I see. Do you have any idea who sent them to the men and to the newspaper office?”

  He gave a shrug that seemed to mean that he didn’t know or care.

  “Is it possible that I wrote them only to make you jealous? That I meant for you to see them and no one else?” This is what I would have had one of my heroines do if she needed to get the hero’s attention. But of course I had never had a hero who had the “problem” that this one did. And all my heroes were rampantly virile and paid enormous amounts of attention to the heroine.

  “It does not matter why you wrote them or who sent them. It matters only that it has been done. It is a point of honor to me that I must now divorce you.”

  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