He broke off as she moved toward him. “What kind of lover is a gentleman like you?” she asked, sliding her body toward his. “I’ll bet you’re too uptight to even take your clothes off. Do you throw a lady’s nightgown over her head then do your business and leave?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling, eyes closed as he felt her body move on top of his. “Only the lower classes know about love,” he said facetiously.
As she put her hands on his shirt front, he opened his eyes to look at her, at the black, black hair floating about her face, hiding most of it. In the flickering, dim light of the fire she looked almost like Catherine, his beloved wife, but then he always imagined that every woman he was attracted to was Catherine.
She startled him when she tore his shirt open, buttons flying across the room, one sizzling as it hit the fire in the brazier.
For a moment he didn’t move as she straddled him, then ran her hands up his chest, her nails over his stomach. “Come on, pretty boy, can you make love to a woman?”
Tavistock knew he had never been so excited in his life as he reached up and entwined his hands in the woman’s abundant hair and pulled her lips down to his. And after that he had no more thoughts at all. He was blind not from a blast of gunpowder, but from the lust that took over his body. This woman seemed to be all that he’d ever wanted in his life, and he knew that he’d die if he didn’t take her. There were no more thoughts of the consequences of his action, but just his overpowering need for her.
He had always prided himself on being a skillful lover. Since he was always in bed with women other than his wife, he knew that they would talk and compare him to their other men. Such gossip carried responsibility with it, so Tavistock knew he had a duty to have the women say that he was a lover of great tenderness, a man who thought a great deal of his partner’s satisfaction.
But with this woman, he wanted her too much to think of anything but his own needs. But she met him more than halfway. As he tore her clothes from her body, he felt his own being taken from him. Her enthusiasm matched his.
Within seconds they were both naked and he lost no time on the niceties of lovemaking. What he felt for her was primitive, a hunger that had to be fulfilled.
When he entered her, he was vaguely aware of the tiny membrane he encountered and he heard her little yelp of pain, but he was too far removed from the basics of earth to think what this meant. His need of her was such that it took only moments before he was ready to spill his seed inside her.
When he did come inside her, it was like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was like part of him died, but as though part of him were given life again. The release he felt was as though he’d been waiting for this all his life. It was the end of something, the beginning of something.
He was trembling from head to foot as he held her to him, wrapping his whole body about her; there were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t know why.
“I did it,” the woman said. “I did it.”
For a moment Tavistock was disoriented, not remembering all that had happened to him before the last minutes. Oh yes, something to do with gunpowder and a woman with black hair. When she tried to extricate herself from his arms, his first response was to hold on to her, to never release her. “No,” he whispered, and wanted to beg her to never leave him.
“It’s all right,” she said as she began to kiss his neck. “It’s all right now. It’s over. The curses are finished.”
His head still hurt; his eyes were still foggy and his hearing was dull, but he knew that voice. Grabbing her shoulders, he held her away from him to stare into her eyes. Under the smeared makeup, beneath the black hair, he saw Catherine.
For a moment he was angry. How could she play such a trick on him? What was his wife doing dressed up like a slut? What was—
It took a bit but he realized what had just happened. He had just made love to Catherine, to the woman he loved. There had been no physical problem. “But how did you—”
She put her hand over his mouth. “Do you really want to talk?” she asked.
At that he laughed, grabbed her to him, and the next moment his hands and mouth were all over her—as hers were him. Had he not drunk a great deal of rum, had gunpowder go off near his head, and been hit on the head by a rock, not to mention falling off a horse at full speed, he might have spent some time asking her just where the hell she learned all that she seemed to know. But then, on the other hand, he wasn’t fool enough to stop what she was doing to his body to ask questions.
He had always known that making love with Catherine would be wonderful, but it was better than he’d imagined. He could not, of course, tell anyone, but it was almost as though he could feel both parts of their lovemaking. It was almost as though her mind were his and his was hers. If a thought passed through his mind, she acted upon it, and he seemed to intuit what she wanted and needed.
They made love all night, moving from one position to another with such familiar ease that it was as though they had made love many, many times before. They seemed to know all there was to know about each other.
“I feel as though we have always been lovers,” he whispered.
“Never,” she answered. “Never in the history of time, but we have wanted each other for so many centuries that we know everything. We are making love to ourselves.”
“Yes,” he said, not understanding her, but at the same time understanding every word she spoke.
Being in bed with her made him feel free. With other women he was aware that he had a reputation to uphold. He must at all times appear knowledgeable and experienced.
But with this black-haired Catherine, he could be…well, experimental. Would this feel good? he wondered as he picked her up, turned her around, and sat her down on the rampant evidence of his desire for her.
“Oooooh, nice,” she said, making him laugh as he ran his hands over her breasts, then down her flat stomach, his hands spanning her little waist.
Later, as he collapsed against her for the fourth time in as many hours, he started telling her how much he loved her.
“Still going to marry Fiona?” she asked innocently.
At that he gave her a whisker burn on her soft neck that made her squeal.
“Will this come out?” he asked, holding her hair up and referring to the color. There was light coming through the window and his vision was clearing more with every hour.
“Do you care?”
“I love you whatever color your hair, but…It is nice having a little variety.”
“You!” she said and rolled on top of him.
The next moment she was clasping her head in pain.
“What is it? Catherine? What is it?”
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here.”
“Of course we can stay here. Oh, you mean you don’t want to go to the house. If you don’t want to go—”
“No!” she said sharply, her eyes shut tightly, and it was as though she were talking to someone else. “I don’t want to go back.”
When she looked up at him, there was agony in her eyes. “It is Nora. She is calling me back. She says that I have done what I needed to do and now I must return. She says that I do not belong here. Don’t let her take me.”
He didn’t understand what she was saying but he knew that she was frightened. And if she was frightened then so was he. Wrapping his body about her, he held her as tightly as he could without breaking her bones. “I will let no one take you. You are mine.”
“Yes,” she said, “I am yours and only yours. I have never loved anyone but you. Not in all my lives. Even the ones I spent without you.”
He didn’t bother trying to understand what she meant, but just held her, as that was what they both needed.
“Don’t let her take me. She is calling for me. She means to take me away from you.”
“I won’t let her take you.”
“No, you don’t understand. She will take my spirit, but she wil
l leave my body. Oh, Talis, don’t leave me. I have lost you too many times.”
“You won’t lose me this time as I will go with you. I will always stay with you.”
Pulling her head back, she looked at him. “I wish I had time to explain everything to you. Take care of Catherine. She is me and she loves you.”
“You are Catherine; you love me,” he said and was frightened at her words, which made no sense. It was almost as though she believed that she was dying. “I will not allow you to leave me.”
“I am not Catherine. I am Hayden Lane and I live in another time and place, but I love you there as much as I love you here. Hold me tighter. Hold me. She’s getting stronger. Make her leave me alone. I don’t want to go back. I want to stay with you forever.”
He held her, caressing her hair and trying to pull her body into his while he talked to her calmly and with all the love he felt. “I will not leave you. Wherever you go, I will go with you.”
“Swear it!” she said, her voice muffled from her face pressed against his chest. “Swear it on your immortal soul!”
“I swear it,” he said softly. “I make a sacred vow to you and God. I will go with you wherever you go. I will never leave you. Never.”
And it was with those words that Hayden began to feel herself growing weaker. Her spirit was leaving Catherine’s body. She protested in her mind, protested out loud. She tried to reason with the voice of Nora in her head, the voice that was growing stronger by the minute.
But she knew that she was losing when she heard Milly’s voice. “Hayden, please wake up. We love you and need you. Please come back to us. Please don’t die.”
When Hayden tried to speak to Tavistock, nothing came out of her mouth, and she could feel his body fading from her arms. She screamed, “No!” but everything went black and for a moment she was in no body.
The next minute Hayden opened her eyes and she was lying on a chaise in Milly’s Texas living room and staring into the eyes of some very frightened people.
No one said a word when she turned her head away and silent, hot tears began to run down her cheeks.
Part Four
44
Catherine was attached to you and didn’t want to be separated. Like Siamese twins who share one heart. When you returned, she tried to stay connected to you. Her body could not live.”
What Nora meant was that I had killed Catherine. When I left Catherine’s mind, she had clung to me—and a body without a spirit dies.
“And what of…of Tavey?” It hurt even to say the name.
Nora looked at me a long while before she spoke. “You are soul mates. You are the same. You are one.”
“That’s all very romantic,” I said, “but just exactly what does that mean?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know. Perhaps his spirit stayed there and waited for you.”
“You mean he’s the ghost of Peniman Manor?”
“Possibly. Or he could have followed you here.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You made him swear he would return to 1994 with you. Perhaps he did.”
Obviously, she had not liked my using what I had learned about curses and vows holding true across centuries, but Nora’s displeasure seemed a small price to pay for getting back my soul mate.
I sat there with my mouth opening and closing as I tried to understand what she had said about Tavey following me. I couldn’t quite do it so I just whispered, “Tell me.”
Nora smiled, since I guess she understood my shock. “Catherine’s spirit left her body when yours did.”
“You mean she died.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
I was so eager to hear the story I didn’t even interrupt to comment that dead was dead, no matter how I spoke of it.
“When your…When Tavistock felt you leave the body, he couldn’t bear to live without you. I don’t know what happened next. Maybe his spirit clung to yours and followed you?”
Nora’s eyes showed bewilderment, and I realized I had come to depend on her answers to my questions. Now I had fallen into uncharted territory and was on my own. Everything that was most important to me hung in the balance, and without her guidance I felt bereft—orphaned.
“Do you think he’s inside me?”
Nora laughed. “No, his spirit would have been put inside the body of the man who he is in this life.”
Oh good, I thought, and didn’t bother to understand. I was sick of voodoo. I wanted flesh and blood. “How do I find him?”
“You must wait for him to find you.”
I said a very nasty word and got a chastising look from Nora. “Sorry,” I mumbled, “but I hate to wait.”
“You think I don’t know this?” Nora said with heavy sarcasm.
But it was my turn to be smug. I sent her thoughts that told her that if it hadn’t been for my inability to wait I wouldn’t be receiving Jamie/Tavey/Talis for another three lifetimes.
Nora smiled in answer to my silent thoughts. “Nothing ever happens that is not meant to be.”
“Oh. So now I guess I’m to believe I was predestined to return to Edwardian times even though you told me not to go.”
“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.