Remembrance Read online

  I hated to admit it but reading this story made me feel quite depressed. Unfortunately, this did sound like me. What if my parents had forced me to marry a man I didn’t like? I have never been one to play by anyone else’s rules, and I know that if I am unhappy, I can do some awful things—none of which I am about to reveal to anyone. But I doubt very much if there’s any thirty-nine-year-old woman who hasn’t done one or two things that she’d rather not remember.

  So Lady de Grey was married for three years to a man she didn’t like and had lots of affairs. Was she trying to find love? Was she striking out in anger at people who’d forced her into this situation?

  I would have to do more digging, but now it was time to see Nora again, so I gathered my things and left the library.

  Nora had that hollow-eyed look that I was beginning to secretly (are there secrets you can keep from a psychic?) enjoy. It meant she had stayed up all night looking into her crystal ball or whatever, trying to find out about my past lives. I tried to contain my eagerness as I waited for another installment of the story. This whole thing was like reading an enormous novel, a novel that I couldn’t put down. The difference was that I couldn’t just snuggle on the couch with a glass of lemonade and read it straight through. I was finding out things piece by piece, day by day.

  “In Elizabethan times, many bad things happened to you and this man,” Nora said.

  “My soul mate?”

  “Yes. Both of you committed suicide.”

  “Why?” Why is always important to a story. Saying there was a murder holds no interest, but telling the emotions that led up to the murder holds people’s attention—and in my case, pays the bills.

  “You did not trust each other and there were curses involved.”

  “Curses? As in someone saying dirty words?” I wasn’t being flippant. Whether or not to use bad language was a big issue in the romance world.

  She didn’t answer, just stared at me, waiting for me to understand.

  “Oh. You mean those things like in a Sicilian movie? Or in really bad romance novels? Someone about to be hanged makes up a complex riddle that affects the next seven generations? That sort of thing?” From the look on Nora’s face she’d not read a few thousand romances as I had.

  I took a breath. “Are you saying that these two people, just before they killed themselves, cursed each other? Something like, May you never know happiness until a bald son marries a red-haired cat, then generations later there comes along some girl named Cat and…” I trailed off because obviously Nora had no idea what I was talking about. There are jokes that only other romance people truly appreciate.

  “What were the curses?”

  I knew what she was going to say before she answered. “I don’t know.”

  I started to complain but then I guess specific words get lost over centuries. “So they didn’t trust each other, cursed each other, then committed suicide?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is why today, hundreds of years later, I do something stupid like allow a great man like Steve to get away?”

  Nora smiled at me, as though she knew some secret that I was trying to hide.

  “What?!” I snapped, tired of trying to guess what she seemed to have found out about me.

  “You didn’t like this Steve. He bored you. You wanted to get married because you are afraid time is running out. You don’t want to be alone any longer. You want a husband to grow old with.” Her voice lowered. “You would like to have a child or two.”

  She did hit hard. When I went to therapists and talked for weeks about my parents and my parents, and well, uh, my parents, all I felt was that I was wasting money. But here this woman was telling me what even I didn’t allow myself to look at. Yes, I was becoming afraid of my age and my rapidly disappearing youth. Yes, I was afraid of being alone. For years it had been enough to write books and be a great success, but now it wasn’t enough. I was tired of validating myself. I wanted a great big, loud man hanging around and telling me I was the greatest.

  And yes, I thought, Steve had bored me. Steve was perfect. That would have been great if I were perfect too, but I’m about as far from perfect as you can get. There were many days when I wanted to eat ice cream instead of going to the gym. There were days—

  I didn’t want to think of Steven anymore. He was a great guy and I knew it and thinking anything else was lying to myself. I treated him badly but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t imagine that Nora’s medieval curses had much to do with it but something was wrong with me.

  “I’m thirty-nine years old,” I said, barely audible even to myself. “It’s a little late to find a man and have kids. Men my age don’t want infants—unless they’re eighteen and wearing a bikini,” I said, trying, as usual, to make a joke.

  The way Nora looked at me made me sure she didn’t foresee me as having kids. What was it she’d said? Your present is your future. I am as I’ll always be, I thought. Alone with only a bunch of paper heroes to love me.

  “Isn’t there anything I can do? Sure you don’t have a non-red-haired cousin or two who’d like a nice romance writer for a wife?”

  Nora didn’t smile. “I think he has cursed you to love no one but him.” She looked at me very sadly, as though she were glad no one had put this curse on her head.

  This startled me. “You mean that…I mean, assuming there is such a thing as past lives, that I have never loved anyone since the sixteenth century? That life after life I’ve been alone?”

  “You have married and—”

  “Kids?”

  “Not many. You are not a fertile woman.”

  Gee, I thought. I think I’ll go back to the therapist who told me I wanted to sleep with my father. At least she gave me some hope for the future. Nora didn’t even give me hope for the past. “But I didn’t love these husbands of mine?”

  “Not the way you loved the man who is the other half of you. His spirit will not allow you to truly love anyone but him.”

  “And I’ve never seen him since the Elizabethan Age?”

  “Oh yes,” she said as though I’d missed the point. “Your jewelry lady was married to him. She—”

  “What? Do you mean Lady de Grey was married to this man I love?”

  “Yes.”

  “But as far as I can find out she and her husband hated each other.”

  “Love. Hate. It’s the same thing.”

  Not in my book, I thought. I hated a guy I used to work with who was always trying to put his hands inside my clothing. I haven’t yet ever hated anyone I loved.

  “Real hatred,” Nora said, “is the other side of the coin from love. Hate lasts centuries, just as love does.”

  “If we hated each other why did we get married?”

  “Because you loved each other.”

  “Do you have any gin?”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry. Everything will work out soon.”

  “Soon. As in three lifetimes from now?”

  “Yes. You see, you are writing about him, about this man on paper…”

  She trailed off to let me supply a name.

  “Jamie,” I whispered. “Jamie is…is my soul mate?”

  “Yes. He is just like you, isn’t he? He is strong but not always sure of himself. And he needs you, does he not?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t say another word or I might have started crying.

  “You are beginning to forgive him for betraying you.”

  “Did he betray me?”

  “You thought he did. You thought he did not love you as you loved him so you—”

  “Killed myself.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then he killed himself too.”

  “On the same day, in the same hour.”

  I have never thought suicide pacts were romantic. The whole thing at Mayerling makes me ill. But if Nora were correct then I had been part of a suicide pact with a man I loved—and hated—enough to affect my life for the next four hundred years.

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