Lady of Hay (34 page)

Sam leaned back in his chair. He was gently swirling his Scotch around in his glass. “You really want me to help you?” His voice had softened slightly. “I can, Nick. But you’ll have to trust me. Have you ever considered,” he said thoughtfully, “that Jo might not be the only one among us who is living again?”

Nick snorted. “You’re not suggesting I am the reincarnation of her husband, or something?”

“No, I am not suggesting that. But I think it possible that you were perhaps someone close to her in the past.”

Nick stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“Perfectly.”

“Oh, come on! Don’t hand me that crap. Jo might have been persuaded by all this. In fact, she actually asked me if I thought I’d lived before—”

“Perhaps she recognized you.”

“No! Oh, no, I don’t believe it. I’ve got enough problems in this life, and I’d have thought you’d have more sense than to encourage her. You of all people who saw the danger right from the start!”

“I saw the danger.” Sam swung his feet up onto the coffee table. “But as Jo would not sidestep it, neither can we.”

Nick glanced at him sharply. “What do you mean exactly?”

Sam had closed his eyes. “There is one easy way of finding out whether you were involved in her past, Nick,” he said.

“How?” Nick paused. “Oh, no! You think I’m going to Bennet to let him try his regression on me?”

“There’s no need.” Sam took a sip from his glass. “I can do it if you’ll let me.”

Nick’s mouth dropped open. “Are you suggesting that I let you hypnotize me?” he said incredulously.

“Why not? I can do it, Nick. And I have a feeling you might be surprised by what we find out.” Sam smiled gently. “Have you ever wondered why Jo and you were so instantly attracted when you first met? Could it not have been that you were lovers once before? Is it not possible that the Richard she loved so much was your alter ego, eight hundred years ago?” He was watching Nick’s expression closely. “It might be fun to find out,” he went on persuasively. “It couldn’t do any harm, and it might explain a lot of your ambivalence toward Jo now.”

Nick sat down on the edge of a table, one foot on the carpet, the other swinging slowly back and forth. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this. You actually think I am the reincarnation of Richard de Clare?”

Sam shrugged. “When dealing with anything like this, Nick, I keep an open mind. I think for Jo’s sake you ought to as well. You owe it to her, if only to find out why you attacked her.” His eyes narrowed.

“But why,” Nick said slowly, “if I was Richard de Clare, would I be so jealous of him?”

Sam smiled. “Good question. Shall we find out?”

“You are serious?”

“Perfectly. If you don’t regress, fair enough. Not everyone does by any means. At least we will have tried. If you do, it will be interesting.”

“I don’t know that I do trust you!” Nick looked at him suspiciously. “After what happened to Jo.”

“What happened to Jo? She is a deep trance subject, Nick; you are not. The experience would not be the same for you.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Nick said coolly. “There are one or two things you never explained, Sam.” His knuckles tightened on his glass. “Like why it was necessary for Jo to take off her clothes the other night when you regressed her.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Is that what she said happened?”

“That is what she said.” Nick was watching him closely.

Sam smiled. “She experiences the trances so vividly she finds it hard to differentiate between that state and reality, at least for a time, as I told you.”

“It was reality, Sam, that I found her clothes that night, hidden in the living room—”

“Perhaps she put them there before I came.” Sam crossed one knee over the other, his whole body relaxed. “I’m not sure what you are implying, Nicholas, but may I remind you that it is you who raped Jo, not I. It is you who asked for help, and I can give it because I’m a doctor. And I think you need to try hypnosis.”

Still uncertain, Nick hesitated. “I suppose it would do no harm to try. And I’d rather you did it than Bennet,” he said at last, reluctantly. “But I hate the idea. And I doubt if it would work on me, anyway.”

“Why don’t we try?” Sam sat up slowly. “In fact, why don’t we have a go now? You’re worried. You’re tired. If nothing else, I can help you to relax.” He smiled. “Come and sit down over here, little brother. That’s right, facing the window. Now. Relax. Put the glass down, please. You’re clutching it like a lifebelt! Now, let’s see whether you can do one or two little experiments for me. We’ll start with the lamp.” Sam leaned forward and switched on the lamp at Nick’s elbow. “No, don’t look at the light. I want you to look past it, into the corner of the room.”

Nick laughed suddenly. “It’s like having the ‘fluence’ put on you by someone at school. Why don’t you use a watch and chain?”

“It may have escaped your notice, Nicholas, but I don’t wear a watch and chain.” Sam moved silently from his chair and gently put his thumb and forefinger on Nick’s eyelids. “Now, look toward the lamp again and start counting slowly backward from one hundred.”

Several minutes later Sam stood up. He was smiling. He walked toward the window and threw it open, staring out for a minute up the narrow street opposite toward the traffic in Park Lane. Then he turned to Nick, who was lying back in his chair, his eyes closed.

“Comfortable, little brother?” he said softly. “No, don’t try to answer me. You can’t. I don’t want you to speak at all. I want you to listen.”

19

Janet knocked on Jo’s door as she was undressing late that night. Pushing it open, she hovered for a moment, staring at Jo, who, wearing only her bra and briefs, was sitting on the edge of her bed.

“God, I’m sorry! I didn’t think—shall I come back?” Flustered, Janet backed away. “I brought us some cocoa. I thought you might like to chat a bit. Old Welsh custom!”

Jo laughed. “Come in.” She reached for her thin silk bathrobe hastily and drew it around her.

Janet sat down on the stool in front of the kidney-shaped dressing table, maneuvering her heavy body with difficulty. “Jo, I wanted to apologize for David. He can be a bit belligerent at times. He shouldn’t have given you the third degree like that. He tends to think all Welsh history is his special province and he almost resents anyone else who is interested in it, besides which, as you can’t have failed to gather, he is a rabid nationalist—”

“Quite apart from thinking that I am completely mad anyway.” Jo smiled wearily. “He could be right at that. I’m glad he didn’t order me out of your house. I really did want to know about Matilda, though—his Moll Walbee.” She reached for the mug and sipped it slowly. “It was so odd to hear him talk about her with such knowledge. He knew so much more about her than I do, and yet at the same time he didn’t know her at all.”

Janet gave a rueful laugh. “That could apply to David on a lot of subjects.” She was silent a moment, watching as Jo sipped again from her mug. The pale-blue silk of Jo’s sleeve had slipped back to her elbow, showing clearly the livid bruising around her wrist and the long curved gash on her arm. “Jo,” she said tentatively. “I couldn’t help noticing—the bruises and that awful cut—” She colored slightly. “Tell me if it’s none of my business, but, well…you sounded in such a state when you called this morning.” She groaned slightly, her hand to her back. “There is more to this sudden trip than just research, isn’t there?”

Jo set down the mug and pulled her sash more tightly around her waist.

“A bit of man trouble,” she admitted reluctantly at last.

“And he did that to you?”

Jo sighed. “He was drunk—far more I think than I realized. I’ve never seen Nick like that before.”

“Nick?”

Jo laughed wryly. “The man in my life. Correction, the man who was in my life. We’d been having lots of fights and we split up a couple of times, then we got back together and I thought everything was going to be all right. Then suddenly—” She paused in midsentence. “It was to do with my regressions. He doesn’t approve of my doing it and he became a bit uptight about a lover I—Matilda—had had in the past…”

“Richard de Clare?” Janet nodded. “I remember him from the article. He sounded really rather a dish. Every woman’s fantasy man!” She broke off with an exclamation. “You mean this Nick knocked you about because you talked about a lover in a previous life while you were being hypnotized?”

Jo lay back on the bed, her arm across her face. “I think that was what it was about. The awful thing was, I think I wanted to tell him about Richard. I wanted him to know.”

“And this is the man you mentioned earlier, the one you said had been behaving so strangely you wondered if he had lived before too?”

Jo nodded. She rolled over so that she could see Janet’s face. “Isn’t it strange? You and I used to talk in school about how it would be. You were the one who was never going to marry or have kids. Now look at you. Elephantine! And I was going to be a woman alone, without men.”

“I always thought that was a stupid idea,” Janet put in humorously. “One has to have men. Lovers.”

Jo stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “We were so idealistic, so naive! Do you know, I found out through Matilda what it was like to be forced to marry a man you hated. Forced, by a father who doted on you yet who, by custom, because you were a mere woman, had to hand you and your inheritance on to another man. I became a man’s property, Janet. He could do what he wanted with me. Threaten me, lock me up, treat me like a slave, and order me into his bed and expect me to obey him. It’s been like that for women for centuries and only now are we fighting for liberation. It’s unbelievable.” She sat up. “The only way I—I mean Matilda—could keep him out of her bed was to tell him when she was pregnant that a witch had foretold doom for the baby if he touched her.”

Janet chuckled. “I’d like to see Dave’s face if I tried that one. Mind you, I like him to touch me. Imagine, in my condition!” She patted her stomach affectionately, then she glanced up. “Did you—did Matilda have the baby?”

Jo nodded. “Do you want to hear the gory details of medieval obstetrics? Perhaps it’s not tactful at the moment. The entire range of facilities were available to me—no expense spared. A pile of straw to soak up the blood, a midwife who stank of ale and had all her front teeth missing—I imagine kicked out by a previous client—and I was given a rosary to hold. I broke it, which was considered an ill omen, and I had a magic stone tied on a thong around my neck. I was naked, of course, and the labor went on for a day and a night and most of the next day.”

Janet shuddered. “Spare me. I’m going to have an epidural. Did it hurt terribly?”

Jo nodded. “I was too tired by the end to know what was going on properly. Then afterward, in real life, I began to produce milk for that poor scrap of a baby who was only a dream!”

“You’re not serious.” Janet looked shocked.

“Oh, it only lasted a day or two, thank God, but it was rather disgusting at the time.”

Janet was staring at her. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

“No.”

“And your Nick. Did he know about all this?”

“Oh, yes. He was, you might say, present at the birth. He was watching while I was describing it all under hypnosis.”

“Then I’m not surprised he’s a bit rattled.” Janet shivered again. “The poor man must really feel weird. I’ll tell you one thing. If all that had happened to me, I’d never let myself be hypnotized again as long as I lived. Never!” She shuddered theatrically.

“You wouldn’t want to know what happened?”

“But you do know what happened, Jo. David showed you, in that book. She died. Horribly.”

Jo drew her knees up to her chin and hugged them. “She died in about 1211. The events I am describing happened around 1176. That’s thirty-five years later.”

“And you’re going to relive thirty-five years of her life?” Janet’s expression dissolved suddenly into her irrepressible smile. “I take it this is a fairly long project, Jo?” The smile faded abruptly. “I think you’re mad. Nothing on earth would make me go through with that deliberately. Didn’t Dave say she had six children? Are you going to go through another five pregnancies and deliveries like that first one? I’m prepared to bet real money they still hadn’t even invented morphine by the turn of the thirteenth century.”

Jo grinned tolerantly. “Perhaps you’re right. And it is a pretty thankless task, with no baby at the end of it…” She blinked rapidly, aware of a sudden lump in her throat.

Janet heaved herself to her feet and came and put her arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Jo. I didn’t mean to upset you—”

“You haven’t.” Jo pulled away from her and stood up. “Besides, if I’m honest I have a particular reason for wanting to go back. Not just to see Will, though I want to hold him so much sometimes it hurts.” She gave an embarrassed smile. “I have to go back to see Richard again. I need him, Janet. He’s gotten under my skin. To me he is completely real.”

“Supposing Matilda never saw him again?” Janet said thoughtfully after a moment.

“Then I’ll have to learn to live without him. But until I know for sure, I have a feeling I shall go back. Come on.” She reached for the bedcover and pulled it down. “I need my beauty sleep, even if you don’t. Tomorrow I am going to Hay and Brecon and places to see if I can lay Matilda’s ghost. If I can, then there will be no more regressions. No more Richard. Just an article in
Women in Action
that will be of passing interest to some and total boredom to others and then it will all be forgotten.”

She climbed into bed and lay back tensely after Janet had gone, staring up at the ceiling in the dark, half afraid that all the talk of babies might once more conjure up the sound of crying in the echoing chambers of that distant castle, but she heard nothing but the gentle sighing of the wind.

Outside the window the clouds streamed across the moon and shadowed silver played over the ruins. If Seisyll’s ghost walked, she did not see him. Within minutes she was asleep.

***

The breezes of Sussex were gentle after the frosty mornings of the west and the trees were still heavy with leaves as yet untouched by frost. As Matilda’s long procession slowly traveled the last miles to Bramber, she could see from far away the tall keep of the castle, standing sentinel on its height above the River Adur. They rode slowly down the long causeway into the small village that clung among the saltings around the foot of the castle hill. The parish church and the castle looked out across the marshes and the deep angle of the river toward the sea. The tide was in and the deep moat full of water as they clattered across the drawbridge, with gulls swooping and wheeling around them and diving into the slate-colored ripples below.

Her beloved nurse Jeanne greeted them outside the towering gatehouse with tears of joy, but she had news of death.

“What is it, Jeanne, dear? Is it the old lord?” Matilda gazed around as she slipped from her horse, dreading suddenly any visitation of sickness that might come near her son. He was so little and vulnerable. She ached sometimes with love for the little boy and with the terrible fear of what might become of him.

“It’s Sir William’s mother, the Lady Bertha.” Jeanne’s wrinkled old face was suddenly solemn. “She slipped on the stairs and broke her thigh two months since. She lived on for weeks in terrible pain, poor soul, and then she died at last a week ago, God rest her. The bones were too old to knot properly.” The old woman crossed herself and then looked up shrewdly under her heavy eyelids. “I wonder you didn’t meet the messengers we sent after Sir William. You’ll be mistress of your own now,
ma p’tite.
I’m glad for you.”

Secretly Matilda felt no sorrow for the domineering old woman, but she felt a moment’s regret for William, who had cared for his mother in an embarrassed way.

William had left Gloucester with the king, taking with him most of his fighting men, save her escort, after a brief, futile inquiry into the murder of the three missing knights. It would be some time before he returned to Bramber.

Matilda suppressed the smile of relief that kept wanting to come. It might not be seemly, but a great weight had been lifted from her mind. She had dreaded her meeting with Bertha. The old woman’s bitter tongue would not have spared her a lashing for her impropriety and disobedience in leaving Bramber the year before, nor would she have allowed Matilda to continue ordering her husband’s household. She glanced around at Bernard, who was sitting slackly on his roan gelding behind her, apparently lost in thought. He would have lost all his respect for her if he’d heard Bertha. Now there was no danger. Bramber was hers. Breathing a silent prayer of gratitude, she raised her arm in a signal and the tired procession of horses and wagons moved slowly under the gatehouse into the steeply cobbled bailey within.

After dismounting once more, Matilda followed Jeanne into the cool dimness of the great hall and looked around with a quiet sigh of satisfaction at the beautiful arched windows, trimmed with delicately carved flintstone borders, and the intricate carving that adorned pillars and doorways. Bramber was beautiful compared with Brecknock. Beautiful, civilized, and safe.

She forced herself to go at once to look at the recumbent body of her father-in-law. It was because he still lived that Bertha had remained mistress of Bramber. Had he died as God, she was sure, had intended, Bertha would have gone to her dower lands and left Matilda in charge of the castle. It was because he still lived too that William was in such a strange position, a baron in all but title. She looked down at old William’s face. He had changed not at all since she had left Bramber. The skin was perhaps more shrunken, the eye sockets more hollow as his dimmed eyes still gazed sightlessly at the ceiling. The only sign of life was the clawed hand that grasped incessantly at the sheet drawn up over the old man’s chest. Dutifully she dropped a light kiss on the papery skin of his brown cheek. He gave no sign of recognition, and after a moment she left his bedside.

In the privacy of her own solar she hugged Jeanne again. After taking Will from his nurse, she unwrapped him herself and presented him for the old woman’s inspection. Jeanne examined the baby’s sleeping face. Then to Matilda’s relief she nodded and smiled. “A fine boy,” she commented. “He does you credit,
ma p’tite
, but then I’d expect you to have bonny children.” She glanced sideways at Matilda. “I can see you’re going to have another too. That is good. This time I shall be near to watch over you.”

Matilda smiled. She had suspected that she was pregnant again, though outwardly her slim waist hadn’t thickened an inch, so she wondered how Jeanne could tell so easily. But she was happy. This time she would stay at Bramber. Nothing would induce her to travel after William as she had done before. There was to be no possibility of the evil eye being directed at her unborn child. She took Jeanne’s hands and kissed the old woman again on the cheek. The black mist-covered mountains of Wales and their unhappy memories seemed very far away.