Timeless (27 page)

I looked at him, amused. Hadn’t I found his
old-fashioned ways charming last night?

“Surely you’ve seen other girls in the last
week, Damien…This can’t be that much of a surprise to you,” I
said.

“Yes, but Emmeline, I’m not going to marry
any of those girls,” he explained. “It isn’t…” He searched for a
word that wouldn’t hurt my feelings.

“Let’s go in,” I answered, halting the flow
of his thoughts. “There’s a lot we need to talk about.”

He followed me up the stairs, and we entered
the front door, which opened to a spectacular cathedral ceiling and
a large, central winding staircase. I’d remembered how it looked,
of course, but I still stood in awe, gazing up at the massive
chandelier’s rows of iridescent, cascading crystals.

“It’s rather small,” he apologized. Was he
serious?

“Small?” I asked. It was huge. On the other
hand, he’d been used to living in a castle, so I guess, compared to
that, it was small.

I laughed again, giddy just to be with him.
He took my hand and led me from the main entrance to a smaller,
more intimate sitting room. On the opposite side of the room,
French doors led off to the veranda, and light filled every space.
We sat down beside each other on a settee adjacent to the
fireplace. The room was filled with antiques, some of them rare and
priceless. Mr. Ramsey had been known for his antiques almost as
well as he had for the miles of landscaped gardens surrounding the
estate. I wondered where he was now.

“How did you manage to have him sell the
house with all the furniture?” I asked.

“As I said before, Conrad can be very
persuasive. I left everything to him,” Damien said, seemingly
unfazed by all that surrounded him. I wondered how it looked to his
eyes. These pieces were old, but not eight hundred years old. And
décor had definitely changed over the centuries.

I was interested to meet this Conrad,
grateful he’d taken such good care of Damien, but I knew it would
have to wait.

I knew we needed to get started learning
about each other in this new life we’d found together—Damien’s
comments about my dress, or lack of it, was just a small sign of
how far we had to go. But where should we start? There was so much
for him to learn. I looked down at my hands, not knowing where to
begin.

Damien started.

“Emmeline, you said before that you’d died.
So how are you here? Were you able to work an enchantment before
she killed you?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Damien, I’m a different person.
Well no, that’s not entirely true, I am the same person you knew,
but I was reborn in a different time and place. Here I am Emily St.
Clair—the girl you found—but that’s not a fake name. I am Emily St.
Clair.”

“No, you’re Emmeline de Vere,” he protested,
not understanding.

“Yes, I know who I was. But I died, Damien.
Lamia threw me into the water, and I drowned. There was no magic
then, no spells. Emmeline de Vere died that day.”

I could tell it was taking a moment for this
to sink in.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

This was going to be the tricky part.

“Damien, you know that I’m a witch.”

He looked stern at this but didn’t let go of
holding my hand.

“So what you are saying is that you
were…reincarnated?” he asked slowly, not quite taking my
meaning.

“Yes. I started having dreams several months
ago, nightmares about what had happened but also happy visions of
us, of you. That’s what began this. I thought you were contacting
me.”

I gave him the basic outline of what had
happened, watching his expressions carefully. When I’d finished, he
stared off into the distance, not speaking.

“What are you thinking?” I asked
nervously.

He remained quiet for awhile, and I didn’t
push him. It would be hard for anyone to take in.

“I’m thinking,” he began, “that I don’t know
who Emily St. Clair is, but I want to get to know her,” he said,
smiling.

He took me in his arms, and I felt intense
relief that he hadn’t rejected me outright. I was not the Emmeline
he’d loved before, not exactly, but the essence of that girl was
still with me. Even if he hadn’t consciously called to Emily, he’d
called out my name under torture, and it had been enough to reach
across time.

****

We spent the rest of the day discussing my
life. He wanted to know everything about me—my childhood, my likes
and dislikes, my experiences. One question he did not ask me was
whether or not I’d had a boyfriend. Girls in the thirteenth century
didn’t have them since their parents arranged their marriages.
Damien and I had been unique. I didn’t want to ruin our perfect day
by bringing up Ben. We would have time for that later, and I knew
it would be difficult to explain it to him.

He was disturbed that Aunt Jo and I lived on
our own, not understanding how two women could live without a male
relative to protect them.

“Much has changed, Damien, since the 1200’s,”
I said, laughing.

“Yes,” he said sadly, “it has.”

I could tell that, for him, it was a total
shift of perspective. He would have to learn how to be modern, and
I knew it would take time, perhaps all our lives.

We moved on from my personal history to a
more general history of the world. I had been prepared for this and
brought my history book with me. It was woefully inadequate, but I
was confident I could drop by the library on my way home and pick
up more books.

He was horrified to learn that the Holy Land
hadn’t been taken from the “infidel.”

“But Damien,” I protested, “the Crusades were
very wrong.”

He looked at me in horror.

“Emmeline, how can you say that?” he asked,
outraged.

I had to remember that it had been every
knight’s dream to make a pilgrimage at least once in his life to
the Holy Land or to fight in a crusade. My father, in my past life,
had done it before I’d been born, traveling with King Richard the
Lionheart’s army before he’d married my mother. Damien had planned
on it as well. The Crusades were a rite of passage for many trained
knights, anxious to serve their God and King in momentous battles
for Christendom.

“Damien, it’s a different world,” I
explained.“For one thing, the world is a much bigger place than the
one you, that is, we, grew up in.”

I could read regret in his eyes.

“I’m not sure I like this new world,
Emmeline,” he said quietly.

I tried my best to defend it.

“We’re trying to recognize and appreciate
differences across cultures and religions, to end wars and promote
peace. At least, most civilized countries aim for this,” I said,
thinking about the bombs, attacks, and wars they reported every
night on the evening news. I wasn’t so sure I actually believed
what I was saying. Was it really a better world than it had
been?

He looked thoughtful at what I’d said.

“Yes, I can see the merit of that,” he
finally said, conceding that peace was preferable to war.

He was willing to allow for the logic of my
argument, but I could tell I hadn’t changed his mind entirely. It
was too ingrained in what he’d trained to do his entire life. A
week ago, he’d been practicing in the field. Today, he was sitting
in a plantation house built several hundred years after he’d been
born discussing twenty-first century world politics with me.

He was more excited by the scientific
advances that had been made. Electricity had seemed like magic to
him, and the television, he said, had scared him when he first saw
it through a store window in London. How could those tiny people
get into the box, he wondered? I laughingly tried to explain how TV
worked, realizing that actually I didn’t know the technicalities
myself. I supposed it was a little like magic.

I wrote down his questions and promised to
research them in the library for him. He was shocked to learn that
I could read and write. Women weren’t educated in the thirteenth
century beyond the domestic arts, and he was very proud of my
learning.

I blushed. I was not the brightest student at
school.

“I can still sew,” I boasted, and he
laughed.

“Don’t you remember? You really hated that,”
he said.

“Did I?” I could hardly believe it.

How strange that I was drawn to something now
that I’d disliked earlier. Except for my power, it was likely one
of the only connections to my past life.

“Emmeline,” he began, a serious tone to his
voice now, “there is something you should know. When I came
through, I didn’t come alone.”

I caught my breath.

“Lamia,” I whispered, not wanting to speak
her name aloud for fear that I might conjure her before us.

“When that strange man found me, he said two
other girls had come out of the woods. I didn’t think about it at
the time, but now I wonder…” He let his sentence trail.

I knew this was a possibility. Ramona had
warned me that curses could follow time travelers. I thought then
that the man who’d rescued us must have thought it was a strange
morning to have found three lost souls wandering around in the
early morning hours. Perhaps that was why he acted so strangely.
Something wasn’t adding up, though.

“But I didn’t see anyone, and I would have
felt Lamia on the train station, even if her appearance had
altered... witches can do that,” I explained. Though I preferred
the name “wise woman” to witch, I wasn’t sure it would’ve made a
difference to Damien. Even a good witch was still a witch. We
hadn’t yet discussed my power. Tomorrow would be time enough for
that.

I thought back to the morning after I’d cast
the spell, which was still slightly blurry. I’d been terribly
upset. I tried to piece together the events leading up to my
departure.

“I took the 10:30 train, and you took the
12:00.The station wasn’t very big…” I began, trying to imagine how
we could have missed her…unless she didn’t want us to know that she
came through.

“Damien, did you see her at the ruins?”

“No. Should I have?”

“She should have come through at the same
place and time with you. Tell me the last memory you had before
waking up.”

He looked at me, pain filling his eyes. I
caressed the side of his face and kissed him lightly.

“I know it’s painful, but this might be
important,” I said softly.

He looked down, too proud for me to see him
struggle with the memory. After a moment, he began.

“She had been standing over me, directing one
of her henchman to pick up the tongs. That was to be her next
instrument,” he said in a controlled voice.

I held my breath.

“So she was right beside you?” I asked
quietly, not wanting to prolong this if I could help it.

“Yes, the last I remember she was.”

“Yet she wasn’t when you awoke?”

“No.”

This was a mystery. Could she have come
through earlier or later? But it couldn’t have been later since the
strange woodsman had seen her after helping me but before he’d
found Damien. The window of time was not long, either. He must have
found her right after he discovered me.

Then I remembered. She had the power to
bewitch others, to take them over completely so that their will
coincided with hers. Had she cast some sort of spell over the man
in the woods? It seemed like a ridiculous, farfetched idea. But
then, everything in my life in the last six months had been
unbelievable, to say the least.

I could see that Damien didn’t want to talk
about Lamia any more than I did. For now, we could shelve it. I
didn’t want to spend our first real day together talking about her
anyway.

“Emmeline,” he began, “I want to know what
happened. Everything—who you are, what you are,” he said, looking
intently into my eyes. So it was to be today, then.

“You know what I am,” I replied, not meeting
his eyes. “But it’s not what you think,” I continued.

“Then tell me. I’ll believe you,” he said
gently.

“I can’t explain it myself. It’s something
born within me, though I’m not like Lamia. Ramona said that we all
have powers, but some of us choose to use it for good; those are
the wise women, like me, like her. Others, like Lamia, use their
power to harm others, to control them.”

He looked thoughtful, as though he wanted to
say something but didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

“What is it? What are you thinking?” I
prodded.

He opened the first few buttons of his shirt.
Beneath, he wore a small metal cross with a sapphire in the center.
I recognized it as having belonged to my father. It was strange,
knowing I had two lives, two sets of parents, two selves. In my
past life, which had become my present, my father had given him the
cross at the feast celebrating his knighthood. Damien had not taken
it off since that day.

He looked longingly at it, memory filling his
eyes, and then took it off. He drew me close to him and kissed me
once, solemnly. Placing the cross over my head, he took my hands
into his and made the sign of the cross.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus
Sancti, Amen,” he said. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit.

I felt a curious shiver run through me, one
filled with recognition and holiness. I’d never heard those Latin
words uttered in this life, but I knew them from long ago. They
seemed to cover me as a shield, an antidote to the curse Lamia cast
over me so long ago.

“Amen,” I echoed, awed by the sacredness of
the moment. I did indeed have my protector with me.

“…sed libera nos a malo,” he murmured.
Deliver us from evil.

I could feel the tears slide down my face. I
hadn’t thought I was very religious, but in my past life, I had
been and so had Damien. Vows were taken seriously then; to break a
vow was to imperil your immortal soul. I wondered if Damien thought
my soul was in danger. Witches were damned for all time by the
church.