by Joan Wolf
Tracy’s attention was instantly caught. “What white horses? Lipizzaners?”
“No.” Meg laughed. “I mean figures of horses that are carved into a chalk hillside. We have a number of them in Wiltshire, and they’re super.”
“Oh yes, I’ve seen pictures,” Tracy said enthusiastically. “I’d love to see them.”
“Okay,” Meg said. “I’ll be the navigator.”
They had a delightful day, eating dinner out as well. Meg balked a bit at the suggestion of another meal, but when Tracy and Gail professed themselves to be starving, she went along. She only ordered a bowl of soup, however, and did not finish it.
Gail delivered Meg and Tracy back to Silverbridge at eight o’clock. “Oh, before I forget,” Gail said, as Tracy opened the car door. “I spoke to Mel late last night. He’s sending you a script he wants you to consider.”
“Who is Mel?” Meg asked from the back seat.
“My agent,” Tracy replied, and turned to Gail. “Who is the writer?”
“Seth Nagle.” Gail named the screenwriter of one of Tracy’s most successful movies. “And Harrison Ford is interested.”
“He’s old,” the voice from the backseat pronounced.
Tracy laughed. “I’ll look at the script,” she told Gail, “but I’ve talked to Mel about the sameness of my last few roles, and he agreed to try to find me something different. Seth Nagle is more of the same.”
“The movie you’re doing now is different,” Gail pointed out.
“I know,” Tracy said. “And I love it.”
“What time are you called for tomorrow?” Gail asked.
“I have to be in makeup at ten o’clock.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in your dressing room after that.”
“Good.” Tracy slid out of the car, and Meg did likewise. They both gave Gail a wave as she drove off.
Then Tracy turned to Meg. “I think I’ll go down to the stable and walk off my dinner.”
“Okay,” Meg said. “I’m going upstairs. One of my favorite shows is coming on the telly.”
Tracy was pleased not to have company and set briskly off in the direction of the stable path. She had changed after breakfast from her dress into wool slacks and a deep lavender cashmere sweater set, which had been warm enough during the day but felt a little thin in the chilly evening air. She did not run back toward the house, however, but kept walking in the direction of the burned-down stable.
Harry was there, as she had hoped, leaning on a paddock railing and watching the horses as they munched on the hay that he had put out for them. Millie and Marshal were with him. Tracy counted the number of horses in the three paddocks as she approached.
“Hi,” she said as she came up beside him.
“Hello,” he returned, giving her a quick glance before returning his eyes to the horses.
Tracy crossed her arms against the evening breeze. “I see your two strays have been returned.”
“Yes. Martin Chubb, one of my tenant farmers, found them eating in his hay pasture. He brought them back this afternoon.”
Tracy regarded the ten horses, which were spread among the three paddocks according to sex. They all wore their turnout blankets, and their manes and tails had obviously been brushed. They seemed perfectly peaceful as they dipped their muzzles into their own individual hay piles, then lifted their heads to chew and look calmly around.
“Thank goodness it’s a nice evening,” Tracy said. “If they had to be out in the rain, they wouldn’t be half as content.”
“I know.” His voice sounded preoccupied. “There’s a horse show going on near Winchester today, and I managed to arrange for the company that they rented their portable stalls from to bring ten of them here tomorrow.”
“That’s great. You’ll be more comfortable with them indoors.”
All the while that she had been conducting this perfectly rational conversation, something completely irrational had been going on inside Tracy. Harry was standing at least two feet away from her, the sleeve of his jacket hadn’t even brushed her arm, and yet she had never been more physically aware of a man in her entire life. Every nerve in her body was attuned to him: the slight stirring of his hair with the evening breeze, the flicker of his eyelashes, the tendons in his left hand as he rested it on the fence; all these affected her in a profound and disturbing way.
He asked abruptly, “Did Meg eat anything today?”
“A little. She had some pasta salad at lunch and a half a bowl of soup at dinner.”
“That’s good.” He glanced over Tracy’s shoulder as if he expected someone to be there. “Where is she? I thought she was your shadow.”
“She wanted to watch a TV show.”
“No, she didn’t.” He sounded very weary. “She wanted to go to her room to exercise off all of those calories she consumed today.”
Tracy asked cautiously, “Just how dangerous is her physical condition?”
He rested his arm against the paddock fence and turned to face her. “It’s not necessary for her to go into hospital—at least not yet. In fact, when I spoke to her therapist yesterday, she said that she saw some improvement. Evidently this movie has caught her interest, and one of the problems with anorexics is that they become so inner-directed that they lose interest in everything else. The therapist also told me that she feels Meg has developed a tie to you.”
Tracy looked into his brown eyes, and a shiver ran up and down her spine. She cleared her throat and said, “If there is anything at all I can do to help, please let me know. Anorexia is a terrible disease, and I know it is difficult to treat.”
“Thank you. I would ask you to continue to befriend her, if that wouldn’t be too much of a burden. She trusts very few people, which is one of the problems that triggered this disorder.”
“Of course I will continue to be her friend. It’s not a burden at all; I like Meg.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
For the first time she noticed that he had a raw, ugly burn on the back of his hand.
“You should have a bandage on that so it won’t get infected.” And, without thinking, she reached for his hand, as if she would examine the burn more closely.
The moment she touched him, his hand turned and his fingers captured hers. In a rough voice he said, “That was a dangerous thing to do.”
She yielded as soon as his lips touched hers, her whole body surrendering to him, relinquishing herself to his strength. All thought ceased. Everything was feeling: the taste of his mouth; the heady smell of his shaving lotion; the feel of his body against hers, a feeling that was wildly erotic, yet strangely safe. Tracy experienced all these things so intensely that she was dizzy with sensation and had to cling to him even more tightly to keep from falling.
At long last he lifted his head, but he didn’t let her go. Instead he guided her head to his shoulder and buried his mouth in her hair. “Tracy,” he said in a voice that sounded profoundly shaken.
She stretched her arms around his waist and held him tightly. For a moment out of time, they stood there in silence, locked in each other’s arms.
They flew apart as soon as they heard the sound of the camera clicking. Tracy was horrified to see Jason Counes standing about twenty feet away, his camera pointed in their direction.
Harry cursed and started toward him. Counes turned and fled. Harry went after him, and they both disappeared into the trees.
Tracy’s heart was pounding. That horrible, horrible man. She wanted to kill him, and she was afraid that Harry felt the same way. She said out loud, “For God’s sake, Harry, don’t hurt him.”
She shuddered to think what the newspapers would say if Jason got beaten up.
At last Harry came into view, walking out of the woods. There was a camera in his hands. She went to meet him.
“I got the little weasel’s camera,” he said when she reached him. He was white with fury. “I also told him what I’d do if I caught him trespassing on my land again. I hope
he listened, because I meant it.”
“That’s the man who’s been stalking me,” Tracy said.
He nodded, glanced at his watch, and said curtly, “We should be getting back to the house. It will be dark shortly.”
The incident with the camera had transformed him from lover into wary stranger. Tracy didn’t know whether to be angry or sad. Without replying, she accompanied him back up the stable path. It was at the place where the road to the woods branched off that the dogs began to growl.
“What is it?” Harry said with a mixture of puzzlement and incipient alarm.
Tracy looked at the dogs, both of which were crouched into attack positions, hackles raised, their eyes fixed on a single spot. The deep growling noise they were making was hair-raising.
“What can they be seeing?” Harry asked, looking where the dogs were looking.
Tracy looked likewise, and on the path she saw a man and a woman locked in a passionate embrace. The man’s hair was a lighter color than Harry’s and the woman’s a darker color than hers. Everything about their pose screamed desperation.
“You don’t see anything?” she asked Harry cautiously.
“No, do you?” When she didn’t reply, he turned to the dogs. “Easy, Marshal. Easy, Millie. It’s all right. There’s nothing there.”
Marshal gave a single sharp, threatening bark and moved forward. The bark caught Tracy’s attention and she looked away from the couple on the path. Marshal’s black-and-white spaniel body and raised floppy ears looked astonishingly wolflike. Then, between one moment and the next, he relaxed.
Instantly Tracy looked back to the spot where she had seen Charles and Isabel. No one was there.
Harry said, “There must have been an animal in the undergrowth, although they usually don’t react so ferociously to prowling wildlife.”
He didn’t see them. Tracy looked at Harry in amazement as she realized that his eyes were sealed to the visions. In the same way, Charles’s and Isabel’s eyes evidently were sealed to the time period they had infringed upon.
Tracy was the only one able to see into both worlds.
The time barrier must be like one of those windows that functions as a real window on one side and a mirror on the other, she thought. I am the only one on the window side. Everyone else sees only the mirrored reflection of their own world.
“They seem fine now,” Harry said, and started up the path again. She moved to join him, and together, yet apart, they continued toward the house.
Tracy went right to her room, closing the door and going to stand at the window, her forehead pressed against the glass.
Scotty, she thought. What is happening to me? Why am I feeling this way about this particular man?
She knew that if Harry had asked to come to her room, she would have said yes, and the possibility of that yes had turned her world upside down. The fact of the matter was, in this age where sex was regarded as free entertainment rather than a sign of commitment, Tracy had never slept with anyone in her life except Scotty.
Her Hollywood friends couldn’t believe her prudery, and over the years she had developed an assortment of reasons to explain her behavior, both to others and to herself. She didn’t want to get a sexually transmitted disease; she didn’t want to get pregnant and no birth control method was foolproof; her Church taught that sex without marriage was a sin. All of these reasons she presented as perfectly legitimate motives to explain and justify her failing to fulfill what her friends called “her sexual needs.”
The actual truth underlying her behavior was very simple: She hadn’t been tempted.
Tracy had loved Scotty and had loved making love with him. They had laughed and loved and been intimate in every way possible, physically as well as emotionally. Every man she had met since his death had seemed a stranger, and she just could not bring herself to do with a stranger the things that she had done with Scotty.
Then this man had come along. And he was pushing Scotty aside.
She felt tears sting her eyes. I don’t even have your picture in my bedroom anymore.
In fact, the Westport photography studio had kept the negatives of her wedding and had promised to make up a new picture and send it to her. But in the turmoil of emotion that was besetting her, all she could think of was that she wanted to look at Scotty at that moment, and she couldn’t.
Could it be possible that there is a link between Harry and me that goes back in time?
But if that were so, if the visions were connected in some way to her and Harry, why did she see them and he did not?
Perhaps it was because she was more receptive to them, she thought. She remembered vividly the scoffing way he had treated her inquiries about ghosts, and thought that perhaps his own skepticism was acting as a barrier between him and whatever message Charles and Isabel were meant to convey.
She knocked on the bathroom door, to make certain that Meg wasn’t there, and then she took a shower, blow-dried her hair, and put on her ivory satin pajamas. When she came out of the bathroom, she went to the window. She had just pushed aside the curtain to look out at the moonlit night, when her eye was caught by a shadowy figure walking around the corner of the house.
She threw up the window and leaned out in an effort to see who it was, but in the brief moment it took to do this, the figure had disappeared.
Tracy’s heart began to dram. What was that all about? Is someone sneaking around in the dark, planning another act of sabotage?
Without further thought, she ran down the hall to the morning room to see if Harry was there. He was, and she blurted out what she had seen and what she feared.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll go look.”
She went to the front window and looked out, and in a few moments she saw Harry come around the corner of the building. He was holding a flashlight, which he swiveled around the lawn, searching for anything that looked out of place. Apparently he found nothing, because he turned and started back in the direction of the side entrance. It was not long before Tracy heard his feet on the staircase.
“No sign of anyone,” he said as he came into the room. “Perhaps you imagined it.”
“I don’t think so,” Tracy said. She had left the front window and was standing in the middle of the morning room floor, her hands clasped together anxiously.
Harry’s brown eyes moved from her mouth, to her breasts, to her hips. “Pretty pajamas,” he said.
Tracy suddenly realized that he thought she had planned this scene in order to seduce him. Fury flooded through her. “I am so sorry I troubled you, my lord,” she said in an acid voice. “I won’t take any more of your precious time.”
In order to get to the door she had to pass him, which she prepared to do with chin up and body rigid.
“Tracy,” he said and reached a hand toward her satin-clad arm.
She wrenched it away from him. “Good night!” she said angrily, and then she was past him and on the way to the safety of her room.
15
When Tracy woke in the morning, her anger was gone and what was left was a determination to find out more about Charles and Isabel.
I need to see them again. I need to understand why they are appearing to me.
Perhaps the apparitions were simply to let her know about some previous link between her and Harry. Perhaps their purpose was to alert her to the fact that he was her destiny.
Her lips curved in a wry smile. Destiny. How Scotty would laugh at me.
She glanced at the alarm clock on her bedside table and saw that it wasn’t due to ring for another hour. She debated about whether or not to stay in bed, and decided she was wide-awake and wouldn’t get any more sleep. She stretched her arms over her head, yawned, turned off the alarm, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom.
It was while she was dressing that the idea occurred to her that she use the extra hour to explore the rest of the house. The apparitions seemed to appear in the same places where the initial action had occurred almo
st a century ago, and Tracy thought, It’s highly unlikely that Charles would have met the governess in the bedroom wing of the house. That is probably why I have never seen them in any of the rooms of the family apartment. I need to go into the public rooms—like the upstairs drawing room, where I once saw them.
She zipped up her jeans, thrust her feet into leather moccasins, and checked the corridor to see if it was clear. It was, and she went purposefully to the door that connected the apartment to the upstairs drawing room, pushed it open, and went in.
This time the room was empty. Tracy crossed to a set of beautifully molded double doors, pushed them open, and for the first time she stepped into the part of Silverbridge where Charles had lived and that today was viewed only by the public two months out of the year.
A large, picture-lined foyer showed off a magnificently carved staircase that descended to the lower level. Tracy went downstairs slowly, glancing up once to admire the splendid crystal chandelier that hung over the staircase well.
On a later visit she would marvel at the collection of paintings that hung on the walls of Silverbridge: the set of four history paintings by Angelica Kauffmann in the staircase hall, the two Van Dykes in the library, the large Constable in one of the drawing rooms, the two Claude landscapes in the dining room, the Titian and the three Velazquez portraits in one salon, the two Turners in a second and in another the full-length picture by Reynolds over the fireplace which showed the Athenian courtesan Thais urging Alexander the Great to burn the Persian royal palace at Persepolis. On a later visit she would marvel at the ceilings by Joseph Rose and Antonio Zucchi, the chimneypieces by Thomas Carter and the hundred-year-old carpets by Aubusson. She would admire the Chippendale furniture, the armorial trophies on the walls of the entrance hall, the elegant frieze in the staircase hall. But for the moment, the house was secondary in her thoughts. She was searching for Charles.
She found him in the library, standing in front of a beautiful chimneypiece, which boasted two inset carved marble panels. The woman with him was not Isabel, however. She was older, with pale hair cut in the short feathery style of the Regency, and she was wearing a long blue empire-style dress. She was standing in front of Charles, and the rigid set of her shoulders spoke of anger.