Mariana (9 page)

My uncle stared after him a long moment, then said something to himself and lifted my box lightly onto his shoulder, impressing me again with his great size and strength. I heard the kitchen door slam below me and lifted my eyes, intending to come away from the window, but my attention was caught by a shadow under the large oak in the hollow at the edge of the field. A shadow that shifted and became a man, a dark man on a gray horse, staring boldly up at my chamber window.
As I stood there watching, the landscape shifted subtly, becoming fluid, the colors running into one another like paints upon an artist's palette, and then the entire picture began to vibrate and I found myself clutching desperately at the windowsill as the world went black.

Nine

As a child, I always kept my eyes screwed tightly shut when I woke from a nightmare, afraid that if I opened them I might find some truly terrible apparition beside my bed. The same childish instinct made me keep my eyes shut now
.
I lay still as the dead, curled to the wall, and the blood sang loudly in my ears as I reached out beside me with a tentative hand.

My searching fingers touched the cool, faintly textured surface of a wooden floorboard, skimmed across an abrasive wool carpet, and came to rest on a reassuringly familiar bit of cold tubular steel. Either my drawing board had somehow transported itself back in time, I reasoned, or I was lying on the floor of my studio. Gambling on the latter, I cautiously opened my eyes, blinking a few times to focus.

The room quivered once, and then stood still, and with a rush of relief I saw the solid twentieth-century clutter surrounding me—packing crates and papers and paintbrushes scattered untidily across the floor. Lifting my head a fraction, I craned my neck for a better look round, then sank back onto the hardwood with a ragged sigh.

I had fallen on a clear patch of floor directly beneath the bare west window, which accounted for the cool draft I felt
on my face and neck. Outside, the first faint rays of daylight illuminated a sky so pale that it appeared almost colorless. I was still wearing the same clothes I had worn to Vivien's the night before, my cotton sweater and skirt crumpled and creased as though I had slept in them.

I was alone in the room.

I pushed myself slowly to a sitting position, paused for breath, and rose carefully to my feet, leaning on the drawing board for support. I felt as dazed and disoriented as Ebenezer Scrooge must have done, when he finally awoke on that famous fictional Christmas morning. There was the corner where my bed had been, I thought, looking around; there the place where I had undressed and laid away my dusty green gown; there the doorway where the girl Rachel had stood, smiling her quick, shy smile.

Wandering into the hallway, I descended the stairs on unsteady legs. The kitchen seemed smaller than I remembered, and I stood frowning a moment until the explanation struck me—the kitchen I had been in last night had had no pantry. My kitchen had probably not been divided in two until Victorian times, if the pantry's cabinets and wood trim were anything to go by.

I moved into the pantry for a closer look, and stopped to run a hand over the north wall. There were no windows here, and the plaster felt rough and uneven, as if it had been slapped on over some existing architectural feature. An open hearth, perhaps ...

'What is happening to me?' I barely whispered the words, but they echoed in the silent space.

Feeling suddenly suffocated, I stumbled back into the kitchen and yanked open the back door, nearly falling into the yard in my rush to get out of the house. A short distance away from the building I stopped, wrapping my arms around my shivering body and taking deep, sobbing breaths of the damp morning air.

Even before the hair lifted along the nape of my neck, I knew that I was being watched. I wheeled to face the oak
tree in the hollow, and the dark rider on the gray horse that I knew would be there. A sudden tide of anger, blind and furious, swelled within me.

'Go away!' I shouted at him. 'Go away and leave me alone. I don't want you here!'

Slowly, reluctantly, horse and rider retreated a few paces, and the gray morning mist rose up to fill the place where they had been. Still shaking with the force of my emotions, I hugged myself tighter and lowered my eyes.

Beneath my feet, a sprinkling of delicate blue wildflowers, wet with dew, nestled in the long grass. The ground was level here, and firm, and it was simple enough to see the slight depression where, long ago, someone had once planted a garden....

*-*-*-*

The rectory
at
Elderwel, Hampshire, was a solid Victorian building of deep-red brick, set close to the road, facing the graceful fifteenth-century church of St. Stephen's. Ivy had gained a foothold on the north side of the house, and the twisted tangle of vines, bursting into leaf, climbed with a steady purpose almost to the sills of the upper windows. Beyond the ivy's reach, the gabled windows in the steeply sloping roof gazed out over the village like kind, benevolent eyes.

Inside, the rectory was a rabbit warren of narrow, dark rooms, designed to accommodate the large families of the previous century. Since my brother Tom was unmarried, he contented himself with the main floor of the rambling house and gave the upper stories over to the use of his curate, and the occasional guest or homeless parishioner. Most of the housework he did himself, but on Mondays his cleaner, Mrs. Pearce, came in to do a proper job.

It was Mrs. Pearce, duster in hand, who answered my knock at the door that morning and showed me through to the comfortably masculine study. Mrs. Pearce, I marveled, had a remarkable amount of tact. I looked like hell, and
knew it. I'll never know how I made that drive from Exbury to Elderwel without damaging myself or the car, but when I reached the rectory it was fully an hour before breakfast time.

By now the shock was beginning to wear off, and I was shaking so badly I could scarcely control it, but if Mrs. Pearce noticed, she made no comment. She opened the curtains, saw me settled in Tom's favourite armchair, and withdrew in her quiet, efficient way to put the kettle on.

Tom arrived a few minutes later, still buttoning his shirt. He had, no doubt, intended to make some joke about my early-morning invasion of his sanctum sanctorum, but when he first caught sight of me the mocking smile died on his lips.

'What's wrong?' he asked quickly.

My last tenuous thread of control snapped, and I burst into tears. I later wished that I'd had a camera with me, to record the expression on Tom's face—I doubt whether his look of pure, unmitigated horror had been equaled anywhere other than in silent films.

His reaction, though comic, was wholly understandable. I never cried. I rarely even whimpered. The last time Tom had seen me in tears was almost twenty years earlier, when he'd accidentally slammed the car door on my hand. Even then, the flood had been modest, nothing like the terrifying outburst of great, soul-wrenching sobs he was witnessing now.

'Julia?' His tone was uncertain. It was several minutes before I could recover myself sufficiently to answer him.

'I'm fine, really,' I told him between sniffles. 'I'm just losing my mind.'

Tom took a seat opposite me, frowning. 'What?'

'Going insane,' I elaborated. 'Cracking up. There's no other explanation for it.'

'You've lost me.'

The tears had subsided now, and I took a deep, shaky
breath, wiping the dampness from my face with the heel of my hand. 'You wouldn't believe me if I told you,' I said.

'Try me.'

I gave him a long, measuring look, heaved another unsteady sigh, and started talking. I began at the beginning, from the moment I'd first seen the man on the gray horse, through the incident in Blackfriars Lane, to my discovery of Mariana Farr's headstone in the churchyard and my waking dream of last night. Mrs. Pearce drifted noiselessly in and out of the room, depositing pots of tea and plates of biscuits and whisking the remains away without once interrupting the course of my narrative, while my brother sat quietly in his chair, listening. When I had finished, he leaned back and lowered his eyebrows in contemplation.

'These ... experiences,' he said finally, 'do they come on suddenly, or do you have any warning?'

I tried hard
to
think back. My first inclination would have been to say that there was no warning whatsoever, but ... 'I sometimes hear a ringing in my ears," I told him, 'or I feel a little dizzy. Or both.'

'And you're definitely a participant in the action. It doesn't feel like you're in the audience watching a play?'

'Definitely not. I don't even feel like a cast member, come to that. Cast members have scripts, but I never have the slightest idea what's going to happen next. It's just like real life ... just like
this!
I spread my hands, palms upward, in a gesture that encompassed the room and the two of us. 'Even the time and space they occupy is real. I obviously move around, since I started off outside the house last night and ended up in the studio this morning.'

Tom thought about this. 'And when you have these experiences, you don't remember anything about being Julia Beckett?' I shook my head. 'But when you come out of it again, you can remember clearly being this other woman?'

'I remember everything.'

'Setting aside the insanity theory, for the moment,' he said slowly, 'what do
you
think is happening?'
'I suppose ... I suppose it could be the ghost.'

"This Green Lady that everyone talks about, you mean?'

I nodded. 'The dress I was wearing last night, when I was her ... when I was Mariana ... was green. I don't know. Could a ghost take possession of a living person, do you think?'

'I'm hardly an authority on the subject,' Tom admitted. 'I suppose it's possible, but in your case I wouldn't think it likely. Not unless the ghost followed you to London last weekend.' He frowned. 'There is one possibility that you haven't considered, yet.'

'Which is?'

He raised his head and looked at me. 'That everything you're seeing, everything you're experiencing, may actually come from your own memory. That you may, in fact,
be
Mariana.'

'You can't be serious.'

'Why not? Reincarnation is an accepted phenomenon in lots of cultures. There are even a few distinguished Church of England types I could name who support the theory.'

'And what do you believe?' I challenged him.

"Well." He smiled. 'It's one of the requirements of my job that I believe in the eternal life of the human soul. And where that soul goes after death is a question that only the dead can answer.'

'So you think I may have lived in that house in some sort of past life?' It sounded ridiculous, but Tom's expression was serious.

'I think it's an idea worth exploring, yes. After all, if you feel like you've been somewhere before, the logical explanation usually is that you
have
been there before.'

I frowned. 'It could explain why I was drawn to the house, I suppose.'

'And why you knew where the old garden had been. And why you chose to make your studio in that tiny back room, instead of using one of the better rooms at the front.’

As he spoke the words, an image rose swimming in
front of my eyes, of the mover's young assistant holding my bedroom chair and asking, in a puzzled voice, 'Are you sure you meant
the first
room on the right ... ?'

I shook myself back to the present. 'Good Lord,' I said flatly.

'I could try to find out more about the subject for you,' Tom offered. 'We've got a wonderfully eccentric librarian here who delights in ferreting out odd bits of information.'

'You honestly believe that past lives are possible?' I asked him, and he shrugged.

'The Lord moves in ways mysterious,' he told me, smiling.

'Oh, that reminds me,' I said, sitting upright. 'Have you ever heard a biblical passage that starts, "Blow the trumpet in Zion," or something like that? I don't recall the rest of it, something about people trembling and the day of judgment.'

Tom rolled his eyes. 'Sounds like one of the doom-and-gloom Old Testament chaps,' he speculated. 'Micah, maybe, or Joel.' Rising from his chair, he crossed to his desk and picked up a well-thumbed copy of the King James Bible. For several minutes he silently leafed through the pages, and I was on the verge of telling him that it wasn't that important, after all, when he suddenly jabbed one page with a triumphant finger. 'Aha! It
was
Joel. Chapter two, verse one. Here you go.'

He passed the Bible to me, open, and pointed to the place. As I read the brief, cheerless passage, Tom sat down again, scratching his forehead idly. 'My former curate used to love reading texts from Joel,' he recalled. 'Real hell-and-damnation stuff, hardly inspiring for the congregation. Though I seem to remember that old Joel was writing during a plague of locusts, so I suppose he had a right to be dismal.'

Plague ... the word struck a sudden chord in my memory, and I lifted my eyes from the page. 'When was the Great Plague in London, do you know?'
'There were several, I think,' Tom replied. 'There was the Black Death, of course, in the 1300V

I half closed my eyes, replaying the scenes in my mind, trying to focus on the clothes that people were wearing, the style of their hair, the furniture in the house ...

'No.' I shook my head. "The plague I'm thinking of was later than that.'

'There was a big one in the mid-seventeenth century, then, just before the Great Fire.'

'That's the one.' I wasn't sure how or why I knew, but I knew.

'What would you like to know about it?'

'Everything.' I lifted my shoulders expansively. 'I don't know much about the history of that period. And that's the time in which Mariana lived, I'm sure of it. Her mother died of the plague.'