“Where is Talis?” Dorothy shouted at Hugh over the noise of her father’s bellowing.
When Hugh looked at her, Dorothy wanted to shrink away, for Hugh’s eyes were bleak with despair. “They have killed the boy’s spirit. They should have taken a knife to his throat, it would have been kinder.”
“Where is he?” Dorothy demanded.
“He is in the stables. But it is as though there is no one inside him now. As though he is no longer alive.”
Holding her skirts up, Dorothy began to run, and once she reached the stables, she had to elbow her way through the crowd to get to Talis. She didn’t care that people snapped at her or told her to mind her own business.
“Come,” she said to Talis, holding out her hand to him.
Three women pushed her away, but Dorothy pushed them back in a way that was fueled by necessity. “Come!” she commanded Talis.
As though in a trance, he stood up from the little stool, took her hand, and left with her. When people began to follow them, Dorothy yelled at them to get back and they obeyed her.
They were still quite some distance from the old burned tower when Talis put his head up, as though he heard something in the cool night air. The next moment he dropped Dorothy’s hand and began to run to the tower, leaving her behind him.
Taking the steps two at a time, Talis ran up to the top. This tower was where so many things had happened to the two of them. Here they had been saved from death, here they had laughed together when he had sent her headdress and corset flying over the parapets. Here they had been happy; here they had lived.
Callie was sitting on the parapet, her hand hanging limply to one side; when she heard him, she did not turn.
“Callie,” he said, flinging himself onto her, his head on her breast. “Callie, what have you done?”
She put her hand on his head, feeling the curls of his hair, but already there was no life in her hand, no life in her body. “I am giving you freedom,” she whispered.
He was crying, his tears wetting her bosom. “I never wanted freedom. I want only you. Callie, please don’t leave me. I cannot live without you.”
“Yes,” she said. “You can live without me. You must live for me. You will be a king. You will be the greatest king the world has ever seen.”
“No,” he said, looking up at her, his eyes huge with tears. He knew without being told that she had taken something from that hideous garden of hers. With each second he could feel her life ebbing from her. “I do not want to be anything without you. Why did you not tell me? Why did you not—”
She put her fingers to his lips. “It is over now. Talis, I loved you. I loved you with all my heart, with all my soul. I could not love you more than I did. But I feel that it was not enough to make you love me in the same way. I feel that I failed somewhere.”
“No, no,” he said. “I loved you. I loved you more than—”
He could see that Callie was past hearing him. He could see that the breath was leaving her body.
How was he to live without Callie? What meaning would life have if he didn’t live it with her? He thought of years without her laughter; years without her there to tell him he was wonderful, that he could do anything, be anything.
“I am nothing without you,” he whispered. He could feel her life departing her. As though someone had stuck a needle into his vein and his blood was flowing from him, with her approaching death, he could feel his own life leaving him. Half of him, he thought. She was the other half of him and now one half of him was dying.
Carefully, he pulled her nearly lifeless body into his arms, then climbed on top of the parapets. He did not think about what he was doing. There was no need to think.
As he pressed his lips to Callie’s, she opened her eyes and looked into his. She did not have to look down to see that they were on the edge of the stone wall and it was many stories down to the ground. “No,” she whispered, but there was no strength in her protest.
With what was left in her body, she flung her arms about Talis’s neck and kissed him. And when he stepped off the wall into the open air, she did not break her connection to him. She kept her lips to his until they hit the stones below.
John Hadley arrived in time to see his beloved son crash onto the stones, then stood in stunned silence as he looked down at the two young bodies, so tightly entwined that he could not tell where one body began and the other ended. At Callie’s feet was the broken body of the little monkey, her beloved gift from Talis.
When John put back his head, the cry he let out could be heard echoing off the hills miles away. “No, God no,” he cried, flinging himself on top of the two broken people.
Two innocent young people had died because they had loved too much and others had loved too little.
41
Upon hearing that Talis was dead, it was as though both parents gave up the will to live. Alida lingered for little more than hours before she died.
“Hell is richer now,” Penella had decreed, making no attempt to conceal her hatred of her mistress.
Overnight John Hadley became a broken man, aging before the eyes of everyone.
But there was a gloom over Hadley Hall that even the deaths of the two young people could not explain. There was more than death about the beautiful house with the old, ruined castle in the background.
“It is the absence of love,” Hugh Kellon said, just before he rode away forever. “For a while there was love in this place and we all felt it. Before they came we had resigned ourselves to the absence of love around us, but those children awakened us. They made me remember sweetness I thought I could not remember. There was not a life they did not affect.”
It was true: Callie and Talis had affected everyone. With her mother gone, Edith lost no time in swooping up the available Peter Erondell; she was married to him before he knew her name. Then she quickly found husbands for her other sisters. John stayed in the background; he was an old man now and he did not care what happened to the money he had so carefully hoarded all his life.
Penella lost not a minute in setting herself up as housekeeper to the broken John, and soon Hadley Hall was run with more efficiency than it ever had been before. And she easily persuaded John that Alida could not be buried at her precious Peniman Manor. She had used that rich estate to entice and threaten; she was not going to have it in death, since she would not give it in life.
With Talis and Callie gone, there was no soul left in the house, or in the family. As Hugh said, there was no more love left. One by one the children left the place, not one of them wanting to remain near their father or Hadley Hall.
Gilbert Rasher never came to the hall, never even saw his son as an adult. On his way to claim his son and make him king, he and his other sons were set upon by brigands and killed when they refused to give up the few coins they carried with them. But then, there were very few people at Hadley Hall who knew he was to have come and given revenge to Lady Alida, so Gilbert Rasher was not missed.
It was three years after the deaths of the children that Penella demanded that John do something to commemorate the deaths. In their memory, John had a chapel built, a chapel of great beauty, with a coffered ceiling and marble floors. In the east end was a large marble monument. Lying on tasseled pillows of the purest white marble were full-length statues of Callie and Talis, a little monkey twined about Callie’s ankle. Their heads were turned toward each other, their hands clasped, their eyes gazing into each other’s for all eternity. Above their heads doves held a white marble canopy open, as though the viewer were seeing something that was private and should not be seen.
Below the statues was a brass plaque that said:
BORN IN THE SAME HOUR
DIED IN THE SAME HOUR
APART IN LIFE
TOGETHER IN DEATH
Part Three
42
I was crying when I came out of my trance, and for a moment I didn’t recognize the two people bending over me. One was a young man with a
n oddly dirty face. Under what looked like very cheap makeup streaked with sweat, he was pale.
“We thought you were a goner,” he said in an accent that showed he hadn’t bothered much with school.
“You were dead,” whispered a pretty girl on the other side of me.
Turning, I looked into the eyes of Edith, the woman who had been my elder sister in the Elizabethan Age. With difficulty, I remembered that now she was called Ellen and she desperately wanted a husband. No wonder, I thought, after all she’d been through with her lying mother.
I started to get up but felt faint and fell back onto the hard little couch. When had they invented upholstered furniture? And why did I seem to remember carriages that had no horses?
“Catherine,” Ellen/Edith said, “we must get home. It’s late and you’ve had a…a difficult day.”
I guess committing suicide does tend to make one tired, I thought as I allowed her to help me up. Not to mention a hypnotic trance so deep I may have died. The young man was already by the open door, obviously very anxious to get rid of the two of us before he was accused of murder.
I wasn’t much use as I allowed Ellen to put me in a carriage and take me back to her brother’s house. I stood still, in an exhausted daze, while the maid undressed me and put me to bed. I was asleep immediately.
When I awoke it was morning and I felt much better, although ravenously hungry. My memory was slowly returning to me. I seemed able to remember all of it: my life in New York in 1994, my Edwardian life, and my life with Talis.
After ringing for the maid I let my thoughts wander, as I did when I was plotting a book. I wanted to remember everything.
Now I understood Tavistock’s old nanny’s hostility to me and my inexplicable desire to make her love me. Aya was Alida, in truth my mother. In this Edwardian life, she finally had Talis for her son, in a manner of speaking. At least a nanny was fairly close. And Tavistock no doubt kept her here because Talis had died believing that Alida had his best interests at heart.
Tavistock’s uncle Hubert was Hugh Kellon, still trying to get us together after all these years.
Smiling, I looked up at the underside of the bed canopy. Dorothy was Daria, still listening to my stories, still wanting to have lots of men. She’d gotten her wish of making men adore her. No man ever ignored Daria. And we had been friends for centuries.
With a grimace I thought that although I’d not met her, Fiona had to be Lady Frances. I felt sure that she had been chasing my man for a few hundred years.
When my maid entered with a tray she placed over my knees, I kept looking at her very hard. Had I known her in the past? As far as I could tell, I hadn’t.
“Will there be anything else, madam?” she asked.
“No, nothing. I feel much better after a night’s sleep.”
At that the maid smiled. “You have been asleep for two nights and a day. His lordship gave orders that you were not to be disturbed.”
After the maid left, I ate everything on the tray and was tempted to eat the flowers in the vase. Two nights and a day, I thought, smiling. No wonder I felt as though I’d slept under a thousand pounds of blankets.
As I finished the food, my husband came into the room. For a moment I trembled with emotion as I looked at him and remembered all that we had been to each other. He had not wanted to live without me and I would not live without him.
“I am glad to see that you are better,” he said formally.
I knew now what he was really like, how vulnerable, how soft he was inside. Like me, I thought. People think I’m hard-hearted and cynical, but I’m not.
“Tally,” I said without thinking and reached out my hand to him.
He did not take it. “Now you have forgotten my name.”
“No, I haven’t. It’s just that—” That what? That I know so much more now? “Tavey, I want us to try again. We love each other. I know you love me. You have always loved me and you always will.”
For a moment it looked as though there were tears in his eyes, but he recovered himself. “Yes,” he said in a harsh voice. “I have always loved you but you and I cannot…We cannot…” When he couldn’t finish the sentence, he turned and hurriedly left the room.
“Yes,” I said aloud to the silent room. “I know. We cannot.”
“May you never love anyone but me,” is what Talis had said.
“May you always love me and want me but never have me,” was what Callie had said.
Nora had told me that curses were involved in keeping my soul mate and me apart and it was because of these curses that we did not trust each other in this life. And unresolved differences in Edwardian times were why we couldn’t find each other in 1994.
After what I had seen in the Elizabethan Age, of how other people manipulated Talis and Callasandra, I was ready to forgive and forget.
“I hereby rescind my curse,” I said aloud, half in jest, but there was an odd little tightening of my skin that made a chill run through me. I think curses said for real were stronger than curses removed in jest.
So how did I remove the curse?
My first thought was that I wished Nora were here to tell me what to do. Did the removal of curses involve crystals and little dolls that looked like a real person? How about dead frogs and powdered unicorn horns?
While I was entertaining myself I noticed that a newspaper had been placed in the pocket of the breakfast tray. I’ve never read newspapers much, but when I moved the tray to the side, I noticed the date. The eighth of June. For a second I wasn’t sure why that date startled me so much, but then I remembered.
Today Tavistock and I die. Today someone kills us or we kill ourselves and my body is never found.
At that thought all humor left me. Murder is serious.
The question uppermost in my mind was, How can I stop these deaths? And if I can’t stop them, how can I get out of here before they happen?
I remembered something Nora had told me. “You will be very happy together. But you have many things to learn before you find him.”
Learn, I thought. What was I to learn? That past lives affect everything? That you shouldn’t put a curse on anyone’s head no matter how angry you are?
As I lay there it came to me that I knew what I was to learn: Love is everything in life. Nora had been right: I wanted to marry Steven because I was afraid I had only a few fertile years left and if I was going to marry it had better be now. I hadn’t actually loved Steven. Proof of that was that I thought he was perfect. Tavistock wasn’t perfect. In fact he was about as imperfect as a person could get. He was vain, arrogant, proud, and he thought I was an extension of himself. All in all, he was horrible.
At that thought, I put my hands over my face and began to cry. Maybe he was awful, maybe he was exasperating and unfair. Maybe he expected a thousand times more from me than he gave, but he was mine. He was mine as no one else had ever been or ever would be.
“May you never love anyone but me,” he’d said and I didn’t and I wouldn’t.
“I must get rid of that curse,” I said aloud. “I must!”
But how? I knew nothing about getting rid of curses. All I knew was how to tell stories and entertain people. Now if this were one of my stories, I thought, smiling. If I were writing this I’d—
I sat bolt upright in bed. “That’s it! Stories are my talent and I must use that God-given gift to figure out what needs to be done. I must—”
I was out of bed in a flash. Just like Scarlett, I got my strength from the land. In New York, when I needed to think I went to Central Park and walked. Walked for miles. Now I must dress and go to the garden and figure out what my heroine—I—must do to rid herself of this curse.
Four hours later my legs were tired, but I had a plot, no, a plan. All I needed was a little gunpowder, some cosmetics, hair dye, and a whole lot of luck.
As I walked back to the house, I wasn’t wishing, I was praying.
43
Adam Tavistock, Lord de Grey, r
ode the horse as though he were part of it, his long legs gripping the sweating sides of the animal as it leaped over hedges and ditches. Mud spattered him; brambles tore at his clothes and tree branches swiped at his face. But he didn’t care as he urged his horse on, faster and farther. If it were possible, he wanted to escape himself. He had a feeling that what he would like to do is ride so fast and hard that he left his very soul behind.
But where would he go? he wondered, for no matter how hard he rode, he couldn’t stop his thoughts. Where was there to go? Into the waiting and willing arms of Fiona? Sometimes when he looked at her he was enraptured with her beauty and he wanted her very much, but most of the time he nearly fell asleep in her presence.
She’s so beautiful she doesn’t need a sense of humor, he thought as his horse sailed over a tall hedge. She’d never had to make a man laugh; never had to entertain anyone. Just the sheer presence of her was enough to satisfy most people. All she had to do was sit and that was enough. No one seemed to care that she never listened. But then she never had anything to say, so why should she learn to listen?
Yet Tavistock was planning to marry her. Why? he asked himself, knowing that the answer was that all he wanted was to make Catherine jealous. Catherine seemed to hate Fiona, truly hate her. When Tavistock had first seen the beautiful Fiona he hadn’t paid much attention to her, only noted that she was extraordinarily pretty, but he had never thought of possessing her. He hadn’t thought of making her his own any more than he would have taken a painting off the wall of a friend’s house.
What had made him interested in Fiona was Catherine’s animosity, her instant hatred of the woman. And for some odd reason, Catherine seemed to think that Tavistock was passionately interested in the divine Lady Fiona. Catherine’s unfounded jealousy had made Tavistock take much more notice of the lovely Fiona than he would have otherwise.
The horse leaped at a stream with steep banks, lost its footing on the other side and almost fell, but Tavistock’s sheer willpower and his expert handling of the reins kept the animal on its feet.