“A little disoriented,” I managed to say, then tried to sit up from where I was lounging on a brocade-covered fainting couch—and it seemed the piece was appropriately named.
“I think you’ll be fine,” the doctor said while he patted my hand as though I were a four-year-old. “Perhaps there’s another reason for this fainting,” he said, his eyes twinkling knowingly.
I didn’t think he meant time travel so I just gave him what I hoped was a ladylike smile. The last thing I wanted to find out about Edwardian times was how a gynecological exam was carried out.
My smile must have satisfied him because he stood up, began rummaging in his monogrammed doctor’s bag, then gave me the obligatory advice about rest and careful diet before leaving the room. Just like my doctor, I thought, except I would have to go to his office and he’d charge more.
Through all of this the maid was trying to look busy, fussing with clothes in a wardrobe, restraightening silver-backed brushes on a dressing table, but I could see she was dying to find out why I had fainted. At least this told me Lady de Grey didn’t faint often. Which to me meant that she was tough enough to have learned how to breathe while locked into an iron maiden.
Again, I tried to sit up, but it wasn’t easy for this thing that was on under my clothes encased me from just below my breasts to my hips, and it was about as flexible as one of those old diving suits from a Jules Verne book.
“Leave us,” the girl said to the maid, and there was authority in her voice.
Instantly, I was alone in the room with the girl, who was looking at me intently. Okay, Hayden, I thought, Now what?
“What has happened?” the girl asked. “You are different.”
“Am I?” I asked, lying back and closing my eyes so the girl couldn’t see into them. I needed time alone to orient myself. Surreptitiously, I was trying to look about the sumptuous room. Perfectly polished silver ornaments winked from every surface in the room. Jeweled Fabergé trinkets filled a tall corner cabinet and I could see the little green jade monkey pictured in the book.
With a wince, I thought of my bedroom in New York with powder all over the top of my dressing table, Horchow Home catalogs falling off the dresser, a box of clothes I’d been meaning to send my sister in one corner.
“Catherine?” the girl said. “Are you all right?”
Turning, I gave the girl what I hoped was a wan smile. I’d better get this over with. As soon as I spoke, she was going to know I was an imposter. “I’m not feeling well,” I said and for the first time actually heard myself. I had an English accent. To test myself I said, “Castle, tomato, and bath.” They came out as “Cahstle, tomahto, and bahth.” I don’t want to go into it, but when I first came to New York, I had an editor say to me, “I just saw a movie about your life.” “Oh? And what was that?” I asked. “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
I can tell you that now I was thrilled to hear myself sounding like Princess Diana.
The girl sat down on the edge of the chaise and glared at me. “If you’re concocting another of your stories, I’ll not help you this time. My brother is very angry with me.”
Before I thought, I said, “Who is your brother?” but even as I said it, I knew. This girl was my sister-in-law, she was sixteen years old, and she desperately, frantically wanted a husband.
The girl gave a grimace. “I know you hate him, but I don’t. If you’d just give him a chance, he—”
“Chance!” I heard myself say. “Your brother deserves no more chances. I have done everything to make my marriage work but what can I do when he refuses to…Refuses to…”
Refuses to what? I thought, then felt a distinct pain in my temples as I tried to read the thoughts inside my head. But then this head wasn’t mine, it belonged to someone else. Does that make sense to anyone besides me?
“Catherine,” the girl said impatiently, “what is wrong with you?”
I would have loved to take a deep breath but my “loosened” stays still allowed my waist to be only about twenty inches in diameter. “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t remember what?”
“I don’t remember what I don’t remember,” I said, smiling.
“One of your riddles! Oh, Catherine, can’t you ever be serious?”
I frowned at that. I hadn’t expected to travel a hundred years into the past and hear the same complaints about my character I’d heard all my life.
The girl got up and began to pace about the room. “You don’t know how serious this is. Tavey is really angry at you this time.” She turned to glare at me. “He’s planning to divorce you!”
At that statement I knew that the woman cowering inside me did know that her husband planned to divorce her. Was that what she was afraid of? Scandal? Come on, wasn’t she—I—made of sterner stuff than that? “Why?”
The girl put her face in her hands and began to cry.
With difficulty, since the middle of me did not flex, I got up and went to the child. “Ellen,” I said softly when the name came to me. “Everything has changed now. There will be no divorce. Your brother…Tavey and I will make up and everything will be fine.” I tried not to be too smug when I smiled. Ellen had no way of knowing that she was not talking to an innocent Edwardian lady, sheltered and protected all her life, but to a thirty-nine-year-old woman who’d seen some of life. And, also, I knew so much more than Lady de Grey did. I knew that this man, my husband, was my soul mate, the one person who was most perfect for me on all the earth. Lady de Grey had never known that.
Ellen pushed me away. “Not this time. This time you’ve gone too far. Tavey knows about…about him.”
At that my eyes widened and I tried to get the spirit of Lady de Grey who was cowering inside my own mind to own up to what she had done, but I couldn’t get a peep out of her. “It will be all right,” I said, trying to reassure the girl.
“It must be all right. It has to be! You promised.”
Instantly, I knew that I had sworn to get Ellen a husband. “I will keep my promise.” Heaven only knows how, I thought. Buy one? Three Fabergé eggs for one husband?
“You know how Tavey hates marriage. He says I’m better off unmarried. But I must, must, must get married!!”
At that I took Ellen’s hand in my own. “Are you…in the family way?” I asked softly.
She was aghast. “Do you mean, am I going to have a baby? You know I’m not married, so how could I be going to have a baby?”
I did not laugh at that. I wasn’t going to allow myself to laugh at Ellen’s innocence. When I was a kid I thought that going to Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday morning was how you made a baby. Looking back on it, it made perfect sense. Every Sunday, my mother came home from church and said, “George, if that oldest Bales girl doesn’t stop going to Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday morning instead of attending church, she’s going to get into trouble.” Then one day came the big, big scandal when it was found out that the oldest Bales girl was going to have a baby but she had no husband. I put two and two together and realized that “getting into trouble” meant “having a baby without having a husband.” And this came about by going to Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday morning. The bad time came when my mother stopped at the drugstore after church and asked me to go in and pick up her prescription. I was paralyzed with fear.
In the end, though, my fear of my mother won over my terror of what happened in Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday mornings.
So now I wasn’t about to laugh at Ellen, but she sensed that something was wrong, or at least that something was different about me. She grabbed my arm, showing an extraordinary amount of strength for one so young. But then I remembered that upper-class Edwardian girls often spent their lives on horses, so maybe her strength wasn’t unusual.
She stared into my eyes. “If you betray me, I’ll…I’ll…I don’t know what I’ll do to you but you must not break your promise.”
Maybe it was this cowardly other self inside me, but there was a little thrill of
fear that ran through me at her words. I reminded myself that Lady de Grey had “disappeared” off the face of the earth and her remains had never been found. Someone had not wished her well. Could it be her little sister-in-law who thought a promise was going to be broken?
All I could think of was that I wanted to see Jamie. I needed to tell him that I loved him, that I didn’t hate him and that we belonged together. I wanted to warn him; I wanted to—
“Where is my husband?” I asked Ellen. “And do we have any guests?” Visions of Jennie Churchill and the Duchess of Devonshire danced through my head. What about Consuelo Vanderbilt? How about the king?
From Ellen’s sharp intake of breath, I took it there were no guests. She looked shocked. Story of my life, I thought. I’m always shocking someone.
“No one will come here after what has happened.”
I wanted to ask her what had happened but at the look in her eyes, I held back. Or maybe it was Catherine keeping me from asking. There was more to this Ellen than I thought. Why was I to procure her a husband? Wasn’t that her brother’s job? But then from what I’d read, Lady de Grey could have chosen a husband for her based on who was the best in bed, since she seemed to have gone to bed with all of the men.
I put my hand to my forehead and did my best about-to-die act. “I am sorry, Ellen, but I seem to have forgotten so much lately. And you know how angry Tavey has been at me. If you’ll just tell me where he is, I’ll talk to him about your husband.”
Ellen squinted her eyes at me. “He is where he always is at this time of day. You know where he is.”
“Yes, of course I do. I’ll just go and see him.”
With a great deal of effort, I managed to get off the chaise and head for the door, but Ellen’s horror stopped me. “You do not mean to wear that, do you?”
“Whatever was I thinking of?” I asked as lightly as I could. “Where are my jeans and sweats?”
Ellen did not laugh; in fact she didn’t seem to laugh about much of anything.
“I will call your maid,” she said as she left the room and I was glad for that because I had no idea what the maid’s name was.
The maid came in, didn’t ask me a single question about what I was to put on, then began to undress and dress me without a word exchanged between us. I could get used to this, I thought as I extended my arm and let her put me into a scrumptious little dress of pale green cotton.
Being relieved of the necessity of dressing myself, I had time to think about my objective. I had no idea how long I would be here. After all it wasn’t as though I were actually here; I was just temporarily visiting this woman’s body. I could be pulled back by Milly’s chauvinistic hypnotist at any second. What I needed to do was make contact with my soul mate, erase centuries of hate, then go home and find the real Jamie.
If I didn’t accomplish this feat, I’d spend all of my life alone and the next and the next and not find Jamie until the next.
After I was dressed I went in search of the bathroom, hoping this wasn’t one of those houses with enameled pots under the bed, but I found a nice little room with a modern flush toilet, then spent some minutes trying to rearrange my clothing, which was no easy task considering how much there was of it.
All in all it was some time before I was on my way and by this time all I could think of was food. Having stayed in country house hotels in England I knew that meals were at set times, and if you missed them, you were out of luck.
I spent an hour exploring that house. It was huge and complicated and there were rich treasures beyond belief. On the walls: Renoir, Rubens, Gainsborough, lots of John Singer Sargent. Rugs the perfect size for each room, so no doubt they had commissioned someone in India to make them. Each piece of furniture was a work of art.
What I liked about the house was that it was used. This was no museum. Invitations had been stuck into the frame of a fifteenth-century portrait. New silk brocade upholstery was next to a chair with the leather falling off it. Boots and coats and walking sticks were flung about in a jumble that would have taken six decorators days to duplicate. This is what Ralph Lauren is trying to achieve, I thought, yet never quite makes it.
By the time I left the house to see the garden I was weak with hunger, as I’d had nothing to eat for hours and that corset was cutting off the blood going to my feet. No wonder Edwardian women didn’t run marathons, I thought as I began the slow process of walking through the gardens.
They were divine, manicured to look as though they just happened to grow the way they were. In the house I caught sight of servants, but they vanished as soon as they saw me coming, but in the garden it was different. Here there were several men with wheelbarrows and huge clipping shears. They wore heavy trousers and shirts rolled up to their elbows to show off their strong forearms.
I love blue-collar men. I know that shows my origins, and I know that now that I’m a writer and therefore an “intellectual” (except to the reviewers, of course) I’m supposed to like men wearing suits. But maybe I’m paranoid or maybe it’s just my rich fantasy life, but I keep thinking, If I were stranded on a desert island would I want to be there with the world’s best lawyer or with a building contractor? I like men who are useful.
And, well, okay, I also like muscles. Not those stringy muscles of the long-distance runner or the artificial ones made in a gym. I like a man with heavy forearms created from using a screwdriver most of his life. Seeing a man drive twenty-penny nails with one whack can make me weak-kneed. A shirtless man with a fifty-pound bag of cement over one shoulder climbing a ladder can make me so dizzy with desire I have to sit down.
In the house the servants had acted as though I had a contagious disease, but from the way these well-built men in the garden were smiling at me and pulling their forelocks as I walked by made me think I knew how Lady de Grey got her bad reputation. I hope I—she—didn’t have an affair with a gardener. Daria would be very disappointed in me. Everyone knows that the hero must be titled. If all the dukes in romances had actually lived, we would all be titled. Barbara Cartland alone could populate a small country with her dukes.
But I couldn’t help looking at these men as they went about their work in the garden. Not one of them was handsome, but several of them filled out their rough clothes rather well. As I walked, I began to like having a waist that felt as though it could not possibly be more than four inches in diameter. And Lady de Grey did have a nice bosom. All in all, she was a bit scrawny and no wonder, since she didn’t seem to eat, but her figure appeared to be rather fashionable.
I hoped that these thoughts might bring her out of hiding so I could find out some information about her life, but she stayed down very small and I could feel her fear.
The garden was glorious, acres of plants, all of them seeming to be in bloom. I walked along the paths, moving from long grassy avenues with riots of flowers on either side, to quiet glades, to ponds with lily pads growing in them. There were statues and hedges and trees and flowering shrubs. As I walked I was beginning to think of stories I wanted to set in this garden. A poor but titled heroine who married an old man to save her unappreciative family from poverty, then in this garden she met a man, a beautiful man, but they couldn’t marry because—
I broke off because coming toward me was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. Not that sunken-cheeked overly perfect look of an American model, but a look of repressed passion. Looking at him was like standing at the foot of an active volcano: You know what it’s capable of doing but will it do it now? As you walk up to the side of the volcano, your heart pounds faster the farther you get from safety.
That’s what this man did to me the closer he got: made my heart pound harder with each step he took. He hadn’t seen me, or if he had, he wasn’t interested, as he kept his eyes on the wheelbarrow he pushed in front of him.
He was dark: black hair, skin dark by birth and not just the sun, thick black lashes. His strong jaws and squared chin were dark with whiskers under the skin. Muscles mov
ed under his clothes in a way that made me feel quite warm.
As always, business was on my mind and I thought, This is the man I want on the cover of my next book. No, actually, this is the man I want on the cover of my next life.
As I took a step toward him, inside me I could hear Lady de Grey saying, “No, no.” Maybe gardeners were off-limits to a lady. But I’m from a more egalitarian century and country.
“Hello,” I said, smiling sweetly at him.
He walked past me without so much as a glance. Weren’t gardeners of old supposed to be thrilled to be spoken to by the lady of the manor?
“Hello,” I said again, only this time louder. Inside me, Catherine was frantic. “No!” she was screaming, and I knew she was afraid of this man. She’d disappeared, maybe been killed, so was this man a candidate to be her murderer?
I did my best to control my burgeoning lust and turned away to look back at the garden. After all, I did have my pride. If he wasn’t interested in me, I cared nothing about him. I—
“Ow!” I yelled as a sharp pain hit the back of my legs, then I turned around to see the back of the man, the full wheelbarrow before him, muscles straining as he wheeled it down the path away from me. He had on a dirty white shirt, a wide leather belt and heavy wool trousers. From the back he looked like Laurence Olivier at thirty-three, when he played Heathcliff.
As he passed me, he’d hit the back of my calves with the wheelbarrow, making a black mark on my pretty and undoubtedly expensive dress as well as hurting me.
Forgive my stupidity but I think that when a person hits you he should apologize, but this man just kept going. When he stopped about three yards from me, I walked over to him. “Excuse me, but did you know that you hit me with that?” I was being very polite but he didn’t so much as look at me as he lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow.
I leaned over the barrow and got closer to his face, never mind that my heart was pounding. Just because he was gorgeous gave him no right to cause me pain. On the other hand, maybe he was deaf. Whatever, I was ready to forgive him. “Excuse me,” I said much louder.