Mariana (19 page)

'Dozens of them,' I admitted. 'But I'm not entirely sure I want to know the answers.'

She nodded, just once, but with emphasis. 'Nor should you. It's a kind of journey that you've begun, Julia, and no one can show you the way of it. You must find your own direction.'

'But, surely
you
could ...'

'I could tell you certain things, yes. But my interference might be more of a hindrance than a help to you.'

'Oh.' I was disappointed, and she smiled-at-my--expression.

'Don't look so crestfallen, child,' she said. 'You've come this far without me, and you've done very well. You know something about Mariana, and you've accepted a reality that many people would be unable or unwilling to accept. And more importantly, you're beginning, I think, to understand that you have more control over the situation than you realize, are you not?'

I nodded.

'Well, then.' She spread her hands in an expressive gesture. 'It seems to me you're doing fine all on your own. You must be patient, Julia, and trust the process. You will have your answers soon enough, and without my help.'
'I bought something last weekend,' I told her, running a finger along the rim of my cup. 'A sort of box.'

'The lap desk. Yes.'

I raised my head. 'It was inscribed with a letter
HI

She tilted her head, birdlike, and studied me. 'The
H,
of course, is for Howard. You knew that, didn't you?'

'Yes. But

'Which one? Well, I don't suppose I can do any harm by telling you that much.' Her eyes slid away from mine. 'It belonged to John Howard.'

'John?' I turned the name over in my head. 'John? Caroline's baby, John?' I thought of the tiny, red-faced baby, and then of the faded bracelet set carefully away in the lap desk's secret drawer. 'But how did he ... ?'

She cut me off with a shake of her head. 'That is for you to find out,' she told me. 'And you will. Would you like another biscuit?'

She passed me the plate and I took a chocolate wafer, feeling a little dazed. It was strange, I thought, to be sitting here in a perfectly ordinary, cozy kitchen, discussing reincarnation with a witch. In these normal, plain, everyday surroundings our conversation seemed oddly surreal, like people discussing dress patterns at a funeral. And yet, here I was, placidly munching my biscuit and sitting not three feet away from a woman who could read my thoughts as easily as I might read a printed page. She was reading me now, I could tell by the way her eyes met mine....

'I'm sorry if it disturbs you,' she said quietly. 'My knowing things that you don't. But I'm not an old woman for nothing. I've seen a good deal of time, and I've watched it passing, and if I've learned nothing else, I've learned that fate works to a schedule of its own making.' She sat back in her chair and faced me, philosophically. 'It's all rather like a circle, you know,' she went on, 'life is. You start off in one place, and choose your path, and when you finish up you find you're right back where you started from. And that's what you're doing now, with Mariana's life. When you've
gone all the way round, when you've closed the circle, then and only then will the purpose of your journey become clear to you.'

'And you're absolutely sure,' I asked her, 'that I'm her ... I mean, that she's ... that Mariana Farr and I are the same person?'

'Oh, yes.' Her eyes were gentle. 'I recognized you at once.'

'Recognized me?'

'I'd seen you before,' she explained. 'Not you as you are now, of course, but you, all the same.'

'Of course,' I said, remembering. 'The Green Lady.'

'And the woman in the Cavalier bedroom upstairs,' she added. 'Mariana haunted both places, for a long time.'

I frowned. 'But I thought that the ghost upstairs was still in residence. It's impossible, isn't it, for a soul to be in two places at once?'

Alfreda Hutherson shook her head patiently. 'There is no ghost upstairs,' she told me. 'Not anymore. What you felt up there was simply the aura of what had been. She left that in the room, you see, much as a person casts a shadow on a wall.'

I was silent for a moment, thinking.

'I see a man, sometimes,' I said slowly. 'A man on a gray horse.

'Richard.' She nodded. 'He is a kind of shadow, too, when you see him like that. Under the old oak tree in the hollow, isn't it? Yes, he spent a good deal of time there. It's natural that something of him should linger. Part of it, you must understand, is a projection of your own mind. When you stare at the sun too long, you see it everywhere.'

Then my instincts were correct, I thought. If Richard de Mornay was not a ghost, then he, like Mariana, could be alive and well and living in Exbury. He could even, I postulated, be living at Crofton Hall. What was it that Tom had told me before? That people who chose to be born into new lives tended to surround themselves with people from
their previous lives. We were all of us connected, somehow. Vivien and Iain and Geoff and I ... and perhaps even ...

'Have you and I ever met?' I asked Mrs. Hutherson, suddenly curious. 'Before, I mean. Were you someone I knew?'

She smiled at that, but it seemed to me a sad little smile, and her eyes, when they met mine, had a faraway look in them. 'Ah, well,' she said, turning her gaze away toward the window, 'we were all somebody, once.' She cocked her head, listening. 'That'll be Vivien,' she said, in a decided tone. 'I'd best put the kettle
on
for a fresh pot of tea.'

I myself could hear nothing but the wind and a faint twittering of birds, but I wasn't in the least surprised a moment later to see Vivien come bounding through the kitchen door as the kettle came shrieking to a boil on the stove.

*-*-*-*

That night I dreamed of my mother. I dreamed I was a small child again, with skinned knees and pigtails, playing in the yard of our home in Oxford, while my mother sat on the lawn beside me, reading. In my dream, my mother's eyes were blue. She is very dark, like me, and I remember thinking how very odd that was, that her eyes should have suddenly turned blue in place of their normal brown, but when I asked her about it, she merely smiled, and kissed me, and sent me off to play.

Our backyard was actually quite small, but as I walked toward the fence, the boundary seemed to recede before me, until I found myself walking in a field of waving flowers, with the sunshine warm upon my shoulders and the air alive with the humming of contented insects. If I reached out a hand and brushed the tops of the flowers, I could smell the sweet and sudden release of their fragrance.

I was quite far from the house now. When I turned to look behind me, it was nothing more than a small speck in the distance. As lovely and beckoning as the field of flowers was, I knew that my mother would be worried if I strayed too far. Reluctantly, I started back. It seemed an even longer
walk this time, and I had
to
scramble over the fence to get back into the yard. When I finally arrived back the sunshine had faded, and the air was cool and damp. My mother was no longer sitting on the lawn.

I went into the house, but there was no one there, either. It was quite empty, and desolate, the silence itself more disturbing than any eerie sound I could have imagined. Confused and terrified, I ran, half stumbling, up the street to a friend's house and pounded urgently on the door. My friend answered the summons, but she was no longer a child like me—she was a grown woman, and she stood on the doorstep gazing down at me with pitying eyes.

'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'Hasn't anyone told you? Your mother died years ago....'

The tears were still on my face when the dream ended. I could taste them as I lay there in the darkness, listening to the dripping
o{
my bathroom taps and watching the shadow of the poplar dance across my blankets while I tried to calm the frantic beating of my heart against my ribs. When I could breathe normally again, I reached to switch on the reading lamp on my bedside table and sat up, pushing both hands through my damp, tangled hair and drawing them down to cover my eyes.

It was only a dream,
I told myself.
You're not a child anymore, you're nearly thirty years old, and your mother isn't dead.
I picked up my dressing gown from the floor, where I'd discarded it before going to bed, and shrugged my arms into the sleeves, wrapping the belt around my waist as I shuffled out into the hallway. I would not sleep, I knew from experience, until I had shaken off the clinging memory of that dream. At times like these I often wished I had a television, like normal people, but I had given away my own
set
years ago. It had been too tempting a distraction from my work.

Instead, I settled now for a late-night talk program on my portable radio and a soothing cup of cocoa. When that failed to work, I tried reading. A full hour later, still unable
to shake my vague uneasiness and the dull, cold, unnamed fear that had wrapped its tight fingers round my heart, I gave in and picked up the phone, dialing the New Zealand number with an unsteady hand.

My mother answered after eight rings, her voice distracted but carefully precise. Seconds later she was fully alert.

'Julia? Is everything all right?'

I had to admit, rather sheepishly, that it was, and explain that I was only calling to say hello, and to see how they both were.

'At four o'clock in the morning?' My mother made the time calculation, sounding unconvinced.

I sighed. 'I had a nightmare, actually. I dreamed that you were dead.'

'Oh, darling ...' Her voice was like a hug over the telephone line. 'How terrible. Well, I'm not dead, as it happens, and I've no intention of dying in the foreseeable future, so you can stop worrying.' I heard a faint rustling sound and knew that she was settling herself in her chair, propping pillows to cushion her back. 'How are you enjoying life in your village?' she asked me. 'Tommy tells us that your house is absolutely lovely, though he has his doubts about the plumbing...."

Without waiting for a response, my mother plunged easily into a rather one-sided conversation that dealt mainly with the goings-on among our various relatives in Auckland, punctuated with periodic mumblings of an incoherent nature from my father, who was no doubt trying to read or nap beside her.

'What's that, Edward, darling?' she would ask him brightly. 'Oh, yes, I mustn't forget that. And then, Julia, she showed up wearing the most incredible
hat...
.' And off my mother would go again, spinning out another gossip-laden anecdote, cleverly designed to make me forget the terror of my nightmare.

My parents were really quite wonderful, I thought to
myself, when I finally replaced the telephone receiver nearly an hour later. Stretching my arms above my head, I looked around the hallway with idle interest. My mother's ploy had definitely worked. I was no longer afraid, nor apprehensive. I was also, unfortunately, no longer sleepy.

Well, I told myself stoutly, if I was going to be up and awake, I might as well get properly dressed. I trudged back up the stairs and exchanged my dressing gown for a pair of jeans and a loose T-shirt, in honour of our recent spell of warm weather. As I brushed my hair in front of the mirror, my eyes fell on the small blackened key that still sat on the dressing table before me. Slowly, my forehead creasing in a studious frown, I set the hairbrush down and picked up the little key, weighing it thoughtfully in my palm.

What hidden secrets was it waiting to unlock for me, I wondered. I remembered Mrs. Hutherson's gentle, knowing face smiling at me yesterday across the kitchen table at Crofton Hall.
It's a kind of journey that you've begun,
she had said. Closing my fingers around the key for a moment, I looked up at the resolute face in the mirror. There was no point in delaying the inevitable, I thought. It was time for me to take the next step on my journey. It was time to go back.

Downstairs, I lit the candle I had used during my last experimental session and placed it squarely in the center of my table. It was beginning to grow faintly light outside, and the candle flame was less mesmerizing as a result, but I focused on it with an effort and concentrated, half closing my eyes. Time stopped, and wavered. The sound of my breathing was very loud in the quiet room.

'Mariana!' Caroline's voice was sharp, and I snapped my head up, instantly alert. My aunt smiled a little at my reaction, her voice softening. 'You'll be doing yourself an injury,' she warned me, 'dreaming away like that. Did we wake you too early?'

'I slept badly,' I excused myself with a minor lie, not caring to confess that my inattentiveness had been caused by
thoughts of a certain dark-haired neighbor. I took a firmer hold on my knife and went on cutting vegetables for the soup that Rachel was simmering on the hearth.

'It is uncommonly warm,' Rachel said, in my defense. ' 'Twould make anyone sluggish.' She stood up, away from the fire, her face flushed and moist, and cast a sly sidelong glance at Caroline. 'I even saw you nodding at your prayers this morning, sister.'

'I do not nod at prayer,' Caroline responded primly, but her eyes twinkled merrily, and she looked almost young as she returned Rachel's teasing. 'I was only being devout.'