Mariana (33 page)

'Heavens, no.' She hastened to reassure me. 'No, those memories are a part of your essential makeup, Julia, you'll never forget them. You just won't be able to
live
them anymore, you understand?'

'No, I don't.'

'It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.'

I struggled to absorb the thought, unhappy.

'It's better this way,' she told me gently. 'Really it is. Otherwise you might go on reliving that single summer, year after year, when you ought to be getting on with life in the here and now.'
'And how much longer will it be,' I asked, 'before the circle closes, as you say?'

Mrs. Hutherson smiled. 'Not long. You'll know the moment, when it comes. Are you finished with your breakfast? Yes? Well, then it's time you were home, in bed. You'll feel better once you've slept, and so, for that matter, will I.' She stifled a yawn. 'I've had a busy night, keeping up with you.'

Of course, I thought, a little shamefaced. Someone must have been following me around, opening the doors of the manor house for me, seeing that I came to no harm. Someone had even gone to the bother of oiling the lock on the courtyard door, in preparation for my coming, so that my key would turn.

I apologized for putting her to such trouble, but she brushed the apology aside.

'I found it fascinating, to tell the truth,' she admitted. 'You never spoke aloud, if you want to know. You only stood, and looked, and reacted. And in the Cavalier bedroom you were the very image of the ghost I'd seen all those years ago. It was Richard's return that you saw, wasn't it, that caused you such pain?'

I nodded. 'He fell from his horse, you see. He fell, and then ..." I bit my lip, the pain resurfacing, and she leaned across the table to cover my hand with her strong one.

'I am so sorry, my dear. I forget that you lost him only this morning.'

I smiled, gathering the pieces of my composure round me like a shield. 'It's odd,' I told her, 'that his burial wasn't noted in the church register.'

'Not so odd, really.' She rose to clear the table, practical as always. 'It was a time of great confusion, the plague year. It's hard to keep a written record when the world is tumbling down around you. Besides, it's all worked out for the best, this way.'

'How's that?'

'It was better, I think, that you did not know ahead of time what happened to Mariana and Richard,' she explained
mildly. 'Better to find out certain things by living them, not by reading them in a book. Would you have been as anxious to go back, do you think, if you had known that Richard would die young?'

'Perhaps not.' I considered the logic of her argument, and accepted it. 'May I ask you something?'

She smiled. 'If it concerns Geoffrey, I'm still not interfering on that front.'

'It's nothing to do with Geoff. Actually, it's about you.'

'Oh?'

'The other day, when we were talking, you were about to say something. About you and Jabez Howard, and how you knew his temper.'

She hesitated, but only for a moment. 'He was my brother.'

I stared at her, realization dawning. 'Then that makes you ... you must have been ...'

'So you see,' she said, 'why I had to help you through this. I'd left you once, when you needed me. Left you to the mercy of my brother, and as a spirit I could only watch and suffer with you when you suffered. This life is my way of making up for that.'

It should have been a glorious reunion. I should have hugged her, kissed her, wept over her. But I merely sat in my chair, and she went on wiping dishes, and somehow the love and comfort and understanding flowed between us anyway, like waves washing back and forth along a windswept beach. There would be time for talking later. For now, the knowing was enough.

The plain truth was, I had no more emotion to give at the moment. My grief for Richard was still a living pain, my nerves were strung like tightropes and my eyes were raw and dry with weariness and unshed tears.

When I finally left the kitchen, instead of leaving by the back door, I went back through the main passageway and out into the courtyard. The air was still, there, and nothing moved. The ivy on the wall had changed colour in the autumn air, no longer green alone, but green tinged with vivid crimson and gold, so bright it almost hurt the eyes to look at it. I pushed aside the ivy and stooped, looking for the door.

It had been oiled, as I suspected. Not just the lock, but the hinges as well. My key was still protruding from the lock, and when I turned and withdrew it the oil came with it and clung to my fingers. I pulled open the little door and stepped out into the lane, closing my hand possessively round the key.

Richard had given me that key, I reminded myself, and I would not part with it. Richard ...

I blinked the tears away, stoically, and turned my steps toward home, stumbling a little on the uneven ground of the roughened fields. A face swam before my eyes—a dark, achingly handsome face with serious, forest-green eyes. 'Which one of us do you see?' Geoff had asked me. 'Geoff, or Richard?'

I was further than ever from being able to answer him.

Thirty-three

I
believe I knew, even in the moment before I closed my eyes, that it would be my last journey back.

Only a few hours had passed since my return to Greywethers, but it had seemed an intolerable length of time. I had gone immediately to bed, trying my best to heed the advice of Mrs. Hutherson and the voice of my own weariness, and there I had lain, staring at the ceiling, while the sun passed above the house and spilled through the dancing poplar leaves that screened my bedroom window.

Sleep would not come. The thought of that invisible circle, closing in its unrelenting arc, spawned a sense of urgency that had made me increasingly restless. That same urgency had brought me now to this spot, outside the house, and I knew better than to question it.

Behind my back the poplar shivered as the clouds passed over the midday sun, and a faint breath of anticipation went rippling through the grass at my feet, and out across the wide fields.

This was the garden where the Green Lady stood. Not the dovecote garden that Iain had created among the rubble, but the original old kitchen garden, long grown over, where
Mariana's ghost had lingered all those years. Until the moment of my birth. It was a fitting place, I thought, to finish things.

I squared my stance and clenched my fists, lifting my face toward the sun with my eyes tightly closed. The light breeze ruffled my hair while I waited, forcing all thoughts from my mind but one....

There was no dizziness this time, nor noise. Time flowed smoothly backward like a river to the sea, and drew me in its sure and golden wake.

'Mariana.'

I opened my eyes, and turned to face the lad who came now across the yard toward me. He was a tall youth, tall and square and solid, with bright fair hair and eyes as blue as the autumn sky.

I had searched often for his father in him, hoping to find some part of Richard still preserved, but he was not there. Which was as well for John, I reasoned. No one had ever called him less than Jabez Howard's rightful son, and no one ever would while I had breath to deny it.

'Cousin,' he called me, halting his approach a few yards distant. 'It is done. I have left the fastening loose—if you do change your mind, I can reverse it.'

I smiled at him, resolute. 'I shall not change my mind.'

'It seems a terrible waste," he said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders, 'but you must do as you will.'

My smile held steady as my gaze moved past him to the abandoned dovecote. The birds had gone just that morning, taken in sacks by the servants of Sir George Staynor, new lord of Crofton Hall and all its lands. Sir George was a retired military man, and had set upon his new estate with true campaign vigor, seeking to restore wealth to the noble manor that Arthur de Mornay had despoiled.

Declaring the old dovecote ill repaired and inconvenient, Sir George had ordered the construction of a new and larger pigeon house nearer the Hall, with a fish pond and warren close by, and had sent five men to relocate the birds. I was
not sorry to witness their departure. When the last squab had been bundled off, I had sent John to nail the trapdoor closed.

Perhaps, I reasoned, the birds would not nest easily in the new dovecote. And if, in trying to return to their old nests, they found their entry barred, they might perhaps choose freedom as a better way. Perhaps. At any rate, I would not have them back again, imprisoned in my yard to wait for death. The trap would work no more.

There was only one occupant remaining in the dim and dusty nesting holes: a single key, and that placed there by my own hand. All else was silent, dead and empty.

John came across the grass to stand beside me, looking down into my face with a serious, critical eye. 'You did not sleep last night,' he said.

'I dreamed.'

'They were waking dreams, I think,' he accused me, gently. 'I heard you walk the floor. My mother had such dreams, when she did live, but then she was a nervous woman.'

'You make too great a fuss, John. 'Tis only the one night.'

'Ay. The same night every year. Perhaps one day I'll learn the reason for it.'

I smiled and touched his cheek. 'Perhaps. But not today.' Something fell jingling from my upraised wrist, and he caught it deftly in his hand.

'You ought to have this clasp replaced,' he told me, 'or else you'll lose this bracelet, and I cannot imagine you without it.'

I looked down at the timeworn birds of paradise that had ringed my wrist for sixteen years—John's entire lifetime—and smiled sadly. 'I cannot afford a new clasp.'

'Nonsense.' He closed his hand around the bracelet. 'I'll see to it myself, this afternoon. The goldsmith is a decent man, and will offer me good trade, I think. I would not see you lose a thing you treasure so.'
My heart swelled with love unspoken. I yearned to tell him that, of the gifts Richard had given me, I treasured him above all ... but the words would not, could not, form themselves. 'You take good care of me, John,' I said.

'We take care of each other.'

They had been good years, I reflected, lean but peaceful, and filled with roses more than rain. The house that had once held me prisoner had come to be my home, its angry shadows gentled by the passing years. We were just the two of us, now. Caroline had lasted seven winters, but she had not the will to live for long, and her passing was as that of a shadow upon the wall, when the lamps are all extinguished.

Together John and I had worked the land and kept the house, and through it all I'd watched him grow to manhood.

The manor had not fared so well. Arthur de Mornay had plundered the house of all its riches, and let the rest fall into ruin while he diced and whored and played at cards. I had been glad to see him sell the Hall. But I was gladder still to know Navarre was not among the things he sold.

The great gray horse had languished after Richard's death. When I had returned to Exbury in the spring, after giving birth to John, I had chanced to see Navarre afield, and the change in the beast had shattered me. He had looked gaunt and close to death, his noble head bent low and listless, his great legs weighted to the ground.

I had tried, in my own way, to comfort him, braving a charge of trespass by visiting the stables of the manor house, when the stableboy was gone. I had brought treats for the ailing stallion, and talked to him, and done my best to cheer him, but though he recognized me he had no will to change, his dull, sad eyes compounding my own grief.

And then one day, while I was visiting the stables, both horse and I heard someone whistling outside, and even as I started guiltily I knew the whistle was familiar....

And Evan Gilroy had come boldly round the stable
door. As recognition flashed between us, he had raised a warning finger to his lips. 'Take care, mistress,' he murmured softly. I would not have known him but for the eyes, and his voice. He was completely transfigured, with fashionable whiskers and a periwig that cascaded to his deliberately stooped shoulders. 'I've come to collect Navarre,' he told me, in a voice both plain and firm. His eyes moved past me to the horse, and I watched his expression change. 'Oh, Christ,' he said, softly, 'what have they done to you?'

I understood his meaning. Navarre had been so nearly an extension of his handsome owner, that it seemed a brutal desecration of Richard himself, that his animal should be so used after his death.

Evan moved past me to stroke the stallion's neck. At the touch, Navarre's ears had twitched, turning to catch the familiar voice. The liquid eyes had shown a glimmer of something akin to hope, and a faint tremor of excitement rippled through the horse's muscles, beneath my calming hand. I almost sobbed aloud, to see the transformation.

And so it was done. Our parting had been a brief one, with little time for talk.

'What news of Rachel?' I had asked him. 'Is she with you?"

'She is not. I left her safely with my people, north of Bristol. We have been married these eight months.'

'Oh, Evan,' I could not keep the pleasure from my voice. 'I am glad.'

'Would you could share our happiness,' he said, gently. 'You know he loved you,'

'Yes.'

'He meant to marry you.'

'I know.'

He had smiled at me then, a small tight smile that pained him. 'Rachel and I are bound for the north,' he told me. 'For Scotland. We think to make a new start there, away from all the shades that haunt us here.'

I had forced a smile, and wished him well, though my
heart had ached within me. And then he had left, upon the great gray stallion, and I thought I saw some remnant of the old pride in the horse's gait.

The theft was soon discovered, but the thief was never found. While Arthur de Mornay's men had searched the local road, Navarre was galloping free upon the highway to Bristol, bearing Evan Gilroy upon his back, and with him, my love to Rachel. I would not see them again.

The recollection made me smile sadly, and close by my shoulder I heard John give a heavy sigh. I turned to face him, and found him looking down at me with mingled wonder and frustration.

'You are a riddle, cousin, that I one day would unravel.' He bent and kissed my cheek. 'You will not work too hard, while I am in the village? You seem to tire easily, these days.'

'The curse of age.' My smile deepened. 'But for your sake, I will not overtire myself. I would but stand a little longer, and watch the fields awhile.'

John looked at me again, hesitating as if he would say something, or ask a question, but then the moment passed. Smiling, he turned and left me, and I swung my gaze back over the wide, rolling carpet of gold and green, blaming the dazzling sunlight for the sudden misting of my vision....

Sharply, intrusively, the loud and brutal ringing broke the silence. I blinked, and was no longer Mariana, but Julia again, with the shrill voice of the telephone calling me through the open kitchen door. It seemed to take a very great effort to move my feet from the spot on which they stood, as though I had somehow taken root there and could not be shifted. The phone went on ringing while I walked slowly back to answer it.

'You took your time,' my brother's voice teased, and I slumped against the wall, rubbing my forehead with tired fingers.

'Yes, well,' I answered. 'I was busy.'

'Gardening, again?'
'Something like that.'

'Are you all right?' His tone sharpened. 'Your voice sounds queer.' And then before I could reply, 'You've been back again, haven't you? What's happened now?'

'I'll tell you all about it, Tom, I promise. Only not now. I don't want to talk about anything, now. I just want to go to bed, and sleep.'

'Do you need company? I could shuffle my sermons a little, and come down. Or maybe Vivien—'

'No.' The flat refusal sounded rude, but I couldn't help it. 'I don't want anyone, Tom. Really I don't. I just want to be alone.'

'But Julia—'

'Oh, Tommy, please!' I lost my patience, briefly. 'Just leave it, can't you?'

He left it, and rang off with an apology. 'Ring me when you're feeling better, love,' he invited, and I felt like an ungrateful shrew as I replaced the receiver.

I wandered back into the kitchen and stood looking out the window at the place where I had been standing, there in the garden where a sad young woman had stood and watched and grown old, waiting for a lover who never came.

Or perhaps, I thought, he had returned to her after all, as he had come to me in the beginning—a tall, silent figure on a gray horse, slipping in and out of the shadows beneath the sheltering oak, tantalizingly near yet ever out of reach.

How many seasons had passed, how many snows had come and gone, and flowers bloomed to die beneath the summer sun, while Mariana and her Richard had waited, locked helplessly in time ... waited for that one moment when their souls could come together once again in an ecstasy of earthly love?

And
now
that moment had arrived, and I could find
no
pleasure in it, no resolution, only a dull sense of disappointment and the weariness of wasted effort.
Turning from the window, I made my way upstairs with dragging steps and fell upon the bed fully clothed. There, in the semidarkness of the silent room, sleep came to me at last-—a dark, deep sleep, deep as an abyss, with no dreams in it. The time for dreams was past.