Nora sat there and looked at me, blinking for a few moments. Then she nearly sent me into a rage worthy of one of my heroines because she started laughing at me. That’s right. She laughed at me.
She didn’t have to tell me why she was laughing because I knew. It was the same laugh my mother used after I’d promised her that I’d behave myself and not get into trouble. I used to promise not to open my mouth and give my opinions on things. I promised to “act like a lady.” I promised all sorts of things but I never seemed able to keep my promises. Life was so very exciting and I wanted to participate and people who participate in life cannot “act like a lady.”
“You don’t think this is me?” I said meekly, thinking how unfair this was. Every person I’d ever heard of who’d had her past lives done always came out as someone exciting. My current life was quite exciting enough, thank you. What I wanted was to read that at some time in the past I had loved a man for thirty-five whole years, that we’d had a life that was one long honeymoon.
Already, I was getting used to Nora reading my thoughts. “You have loved greatly in the past,” she said gently, no longer laughing at me because she could sense that I was truly hurt. “But you are not a woman who…” She hesitated.
“A woman who stands quietly in the background,” I said, feeling as though there was no hope. What was wrong with wanting to be the kind of person who everyone liked?
I no longer felt full of ego and pride. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked. “I write love stories for a living. It seems that love is all I ever wanted out of life. Most people who meet me think I’m hard and cynical but I’m not. I just want what other women have but something is wrong with me.” There were tears at the back of my eyes and I realized that I was being more honest with this woman than with any other person in my life. “Something is wrong with me. I’m defective or something. I seem to be different from everyone else. I had a wonderful man who was in love with me. He was perfect yet I just threw him away. I let him walk out of my life and now I have no one. Just a man on paper. A man who doesn’t exist.”
The tears started coming then, great drops of self-pity, and Nora waited while I got myself together before she spoke.
“In the past,” she said softly, “you loved a man very, very much. You loved him so hard that throughout time you have not been able to forget that love. No other man lives up to the love you had for him, so when you meet a man who you could love, you push him away because you still love this man from your past.”
I blew my nose. “Fat lot of good that does me when I climb into an empty bed at night.”
Nora smiled at me but said nothing.
I sniffed and my brain started working again. “If I still love him, how does he feel about me?”
“He loves you as much as you love him.”
There were so many thoughts in my head that my tongue got tangled trying to get them all out. “You mean that somewhere out there is a man who loves me just as much as I love him and it’s all based on our past lives? Is he looking for me? How do I find him? Is he turning down other women while he waits for me? What do I do?”
Nora’s face had a sad expression on it. “I have told you.”
I am a can-do type person, not one of those acceptance people. I never believe that a person has to accept what is; if you don’t like it, you should do your best to change it. But I could see that Nora was an acceptance-type person.
I took a deep breath. “Can you give me more information about all of this? Maybe if I know more facts, I’ll be able to understand more clearly.” And then I can figure out what to do about this problem, I thought. If there was a man out there who was mine, a man who I just knew was the personification of Jamie, then I was going to do whatever I could to find him.
Nora smiled in a way that I found quite annoying, as though she knew what was in my head, as she started telling me about soul mates. At that term I groaned. If there was ever a more overused word in the world it was soul mate. It ranked right up there with my two most hated words in the world (right after rewrite): utilize and (gag!) snuck. I’d like to erase both of those words from the face of the world.
Anyway, after nearly an hour of back and forth, I think I got the hang of what a soul mate is in psychic terms.
Question: What is a soul mate?
Answer: It’s one of those terms some Californian out promoting a book made up. Like lifestyles. As in, one brainless actor says to an adoring interviewer: “My lifestyle includes my soul mate, Bambi.” Three weeks later, of course, they’re divorced.
In psychic terms a soul mate is the other half of you. Remember in the Bible where it says God made Adam, then took a rib and made Eve? According to Nora that’s how all the first souls were made: one spirit split in half, one male, one female. The very first clones, so to speak. I guess it’s true that there’s nothing new under the sun.
The theory is that the person is your perfect mate. You can be happy with other people but no one is quite like this person. Your soul mate “fulfills your spirit,” as she says.
In theory soul mates should be together every lifetime, but over the centuries things get messed up. Schedules get out of sync. Boys get killed more often than girls. A couple of soul mates are born living next door to each other in Greece, but he falls off a horse and breaks his neck when he’s eighteen; she lives to be eighty. After he’s dead he’s reborn as a Roman gladiator, which makes her old enough to be his mother, as well as their now being quite far apart. So about a hundred years later the time evens out and they’re born living next door to each other again but the fathers have a falling out and won’t let the kids-in-love marry. Etc. Etc.
You can see how soul mates get separated. I have trouble coordinating my Filofax with friends, so I can’t imagine Heaven Control Center trying to get soul mates together over the centuries and around the world.
Considering the impossibility of all this, how do soul mates ever get together? It seems that being put with your other half is a great Gift from God. You have to: (1) ask for your soul mate; (2) deserve this person; (3) accept this person in whatever form he/she happens to be in at the moment.
Considering all this information, how do I personally come into this? According to Nora I have been praying to be given my soul mate for years. With a straight face I said, “Preferably gift wrapped in ribbon and left under the Christmas tree.”
It had taken Nora a while to get the hang of my sense of humor, but we were beginning to spend a great deal of time together. She says that people who come to her are very serious. Considering that people come to her after they’ve given up on therapists and suicide counselors, I could see why they wouldn’t be exactly a jolly little elf.
But I find humor everywhere and I didn’t have to look very hard to see the idea of my praying for a soul mate as quite amusing. My mother impressed on me that good little girls prayed only for world peace.
Anyway, good girl aside, if I’d prayed for a soul mate I would have been afraid I’d receive some hairy LA guy who swore he was a producer and could make me a star. I assured Nora I had not been praying for a soul mate.
So here’s where Nora shocked me. We always believe our minds are our own private territory, unassailable, but then a psychic comes along and tells you what you’ve been thinking and dreaming for the last three years.
She calls it praying but I prefer to call it wishing. I have been wishing I could find the man who’d suit me more than any other man. I remember rather fiercely thinking, There must be one man for me. One man who is better than the others. A man I could love as hard as I wanted to love and he’d love me as much in return. I wanted a man I wouldn’t have to play games with and pretend I didn’t care when he hurt me. I wished for a man I could yell at yet he’d still love me. I wanted a man who made me feel safe. I wanted a man who I deep down inside knew loved me. Not because he told me he did but because I felt it, because just his existence made something deep within me vibrate.
Nor
a said that my books were blueprints for this man.
Nora told me all of this, making my face turn red at having my most private thoughts seen. People who knew me thought I was cynical; my sarcastic humor proved that. No one saw that inside I was mush.
What else Nora pointed out to me was that I’d said I’d take this man in any size, any shape.
It took me a while to remember what she meant. There was one night when I was all alone and I’d had a healthy gin and tonic that I remember with deep embarrassment. Sometimes loneliness and despair can drive a person to new lows. That night I “wished” very hard for this one man and I especially remember thinking that since I was a writer and could travel I’d take him from any country, any state of health, any anything.
So after Nora had told me all this and I felt that I understood it, I felt a little hope. Where was this soul mate of mine? How did I find him? Put an ad in the paper?
Unfortunately, once again, Nora gave me a look of despair. She told me my “spirit guides” had led me to come to her so she could tell me the bad news. Well, actually, Nora said it was good news. I was slated to be given my soul mate three lifetimes from now.
It was all I could do to keep from screaming. Did any part of this woman’s brain live in the real world? There was no such thing as past lives and there sure as hell weren’t any “spirit guides.”
Her obstinacy, her unflappability made me grit my teeth. “I want Jamie and I want him in this lifetime,” I said. “I am an American and I want instant gratification!”
She did laugh at that. “You could have him if you could change the past,” she said, smiling. “But if you met him this afternoon you wouldn’t love him, you’d hate him. You’d hate him at first sight. You’d hate him so much you would never want to see him again.”
I just sat there as she told me that our time was up long ago and she had other clients coming. “Why don’t you find the real Lady de Grey? There must have been more than one of them.”
“Yes,” I muttered, collecting my things and heading for the door. All of this wasn’t real so I might as well do some more research. For all that Rachel de Grey was a nice lady, she wasn’t heroine material. I needed to find a feisty woman who was a match for my Jamie.
I headed for the library, grabbing a hot dog from a street vendor on the way there. No more arrogance, I thought. This time the digging was for real.
5
Once I calmed down and conquered my own ego, I was able to see right away that Rachel couldn’t have been the Fabergé Lady de Grey. Even in terms of personality, Rachel seemed too dedicated to her husband to truly care about perpetuating the art of a great man like Fabergé.
Okay, so now that I’d found out that Rachel wasn’t “me” I could indulge in a little sour grapes. “My” Lady de Grey wasn’t a frivolous woman who spent too much, she was a “patron of the arts.”
Since the Lady de Grey I was looking for did not have the good fortune to be married to a famous man, she was quite difficult to find. It is a disgusting but true fact that women were fairly insignificant unless attached to the coattails of a man. On the other hand, to be fair, there were some famous women whose husbands are not remembered. But, to be even more fair and honest, most famous women never got married, so they didn’t have to ask a man’s permission to do whatever it was they wanted to do.
Anyway, my Lady de Grey was indeed difficult to find. Her name was Hortense but I couldn’t find a birth date on her because in the Edwardian times it was considered impolite to tell a woman’s age, even in a book on the family history. Personally, I wish a little of these manners could extend to the present age. Especially to People magazine. They are incapable of writing about anyone without putting the age of that person beside them, as though age were everything. (I began to hate this custom on the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday.)
When they announced the closing of the library, I was still searching for anything about her. All I could find were the basic facts. She had married Rachel’s son, Adam, in 1904 and had died in 1907, four years after Rachel died.
According to the information I had found, both Hortense and her husband died on June 8, 1907, so I wondered if they had both been killed in an accident and made a note to look up the date of the sinking of the Titanic. After Adam’s death, the title was retired, since there was no one to inherit.
By the time I got home, I felt sad. Writing romances and spending as much time as I do with my nose in history books, I know how important an heir is. As I listened to the divine voice of Frederica von Stade on the stereo, I thought of the great tragedy of this young earl and his countess not producing a son to carry on the family name.
I know this is absurd, but I began to feel guilty about this because I just knew it was my fault. I’d never told anyone this but about ten years ago I’d had a boyfriend who I’d thought was the one, so, feeling it was an okay thing to do, I’d not used any birth control for a whole year. I’d not become pregnant and I think that was a contributing factor in ending that almost-union.
Maybe if what Nora said was true and character did stay the same, I wonder if a woman stayed barren over the centuries? After all, she, Hortense, and her husband were married three whole years but had no kids. And it couldn’t have been any problem with Adam. As every romance writer and reader knows, there are virile names and there are nonvirile names. There are even virile letters of the alphabet. There’s a reason you aren’t going to find too many heroes with names beginning with the letter O.L is also difficult. The best letters for heroes are R, S, and T. However, Adam and Alexander are good names, and every romance writer has at some time named her hero Nicholas.
Anyway, I knew that with a good virile name like Adam, it couldn’t be his fault; it was Hortense’s fault that the title had died out from the lack of an heir.
The next morning I was at the library early. During the night I’d had a brainstorm: If one of the other patrons of Fabergé was Queen Alexandra, maybe I could find my Lady de Grey in books about her.
All in all, I wish I’d never had such a good idea. I found Hortense in books on what was called the Marlborough Set. The house where the Prince of Wales lived, the man who was later to become Edward VII, was called Marlborough House, and the wild, fast people who frequented it were called the Marlborough Set.
Something that makes me crazy when dealing with people today, people who do not live eighty percent of their lives in the past as I do, is that when you say someone in the past was wild and fast, they smile smugly. Every generation thinks it is the one to have invented sex. Honest. This is true. People think their parents didn’t know anything about sex “back then,” so how in the world could people like the Victorians have known about sex? So what in the world could the Marlborough Set have done that was “wild,” right?
I do wish I could, through my books, make people today understand that every generation has liked sex. Today the electricity goes out or there’s a big snowstorm and nine months later the news reports that there’s—ha ha—a big increase in the number of babies born.
So why hasn’t anyone ever put two and two together and figured out why the people of the past had so damned many kids?
End of lecture, but the truth was, the Marlborough Set was fast. Every weekend they moved en masse to someone’s huge country estate and the hostess had to put little cards on the doors of the rooms telling who was where. This is so lovers could find each other. There is one funny story of a jealous man mixing up the cards so a duke found himself in bed with his own wife! How did this story get round unless it was told by the two involved and why was it considered amusing unless everyone was going to bed with everyone else?
You can see that these people figured out what to do with themselves without a television to suck their brains out of their skulls. Instead of sitting in a dark theater and watching the latest Hollywood beauty undress for some Hollywood hunk, the Edwardian man lay in a bed in a candlelit room and watched his wife remove some eight layers of
clothing. He got to see a body that no one else in the world had seen because, unlike women of today, the Edwardian female didn’t dress in T-shirt and jeans. Also, he hadn’t seen one centerfold to compare his wife to. He wouldn’t even know that cellulite was something a woman should not have! Ah, the good ol’ days.
As I read about the Marlborough Set, I found a few references to Lady de Grey and I began to become glad there weren’t too many such mentions. It seems that in a fast set, Lady de Grey was the fastest. She had many, many affairs with other men, so many, in fact, that she was almost ostracized by the prince’s set.
However, she wasn’t ostracized because she’d gone to bed with lots of men, but because she’d broken the cardinal rule: No affairs until after the heir is born. It was believed that a man who owned a huge estate and had a title generations old had a right to know for sure that his eldest son was his. So after the man married some nubile eighteen-year-old, he took her to the country and did his best to impregnate her immediately. As soon as she was pregnant, he, of course, went back to town to have a good time. After the first kid was born, he went back to give her another one. After producing two children, then her ladyship was free to live her own life.
In Edwardian society, it was imperative that the first two children look like the woman’s husband. After that it was a matter of endless speculation as to who the other children resembled.
One woman, in her memoirs, told how on her wedding day just before she was to be whisked off into society, her mother gave her one piece of advice: Never remark on who the younger children look like. Many years later this woman found out that her “uncle” Harry was actually her father.
It seems that Hortense had broken this rule and had started having affairs before she’d produced an heir. The only reason I could find for this transgression was that it was believed that she hated her husband. This, however, was not believed to have been any excuse for her actions.