by Mary Balogh
“There is no veil,” she said. “And I have had no glimpse beyond something that does not even exist.”
“How did you know the story of Mary Mitford?” he asked her.
“As I said, I must have heard the servants at Goodrich Hall talking,” she told him.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“Four,” she said. “I went with my mother to meet Mrs. Mitford, and I was delighted to announce that I had used to live at the vicarage and that she used to be my mother. I expected everyone to rejoice with me.”
“And instead,” he said, “they all persuaded you that your words were the product of an overactive imagination, fueled by something overheard from the servants.”
“And they were right,” she said firmly.
He curled his fingers about the palms of her hands and moved them down to rest against their sides. He laced his fingers with hers. He could feel her thighs warm against his. He could feel the tips of her breasts brush lightly against his coat. He could smell the slightly floral scent of her soap. He breathed it in, the essence of her human form.
His mind was still trying to cope with the reality of it all. He had found her. He knew it was not wishful thinking. She was the one.
“There is nothing to fear, Jane,” he said, lowering his head to featherlight kisses along her jaw. “Life cannot harm us. Nothing can. We are immortal beings, encased in flesh for the purpose of educating ourselves and learning to saturate ourselves with the wisdom of love. Even if—yet again—we do not get this specific lesson right this time, we will have another chance. Endless chances. The spirit world is eternally patient.”
“I am not afraid,” she protested.
But he knew she was. He had had many months to accustom himself to the knowledge that had revealed itself to him in India through long sessions of meditation and counseling by his guru. She had had a lifetime—since the age of four, anyway—to shut down and deny the intuitive knowledge of eternity that had somehow come with her through the passage of forgetfulness to her birth. She had been frightened into forgetting, and now she was frightened at being forced to remember.
The spirit world had endless patience. He was of that world. He must be patient, too.
He released one of her hands, took a step back and smiled at her.
“We are strangers, then,” he said. He clasped her hand a little more tightly. “Or rather we are new acquaintances who are strangely attracted to each other. Are you willing to grant this much, Jane?”
“Y-yes,” she said hesitantly.
“Then let us walk down closer to the water and admire the view,” he said. “Let us talk about anything that comes to mind, shall we, except eternity?”
“Yes,” she said a little more firmly.
They went to stand on the bank of the lake, below the level of the pavilion, and she pointed out to him the house—Goodrich Hall—just visible on the far side of the water among the trees, and the jetty, where the boats from the boathouse would be moored if they were ever allowed to be taken out. She showed him the little island in the lake, where she could remember picnicking with her mother, though not since her mother’s death.
“Your father does not enjoy the outdoors?” he asked.
“It would coarsen his complexion and ours,” she said. “But I believe a coarsened complexion is a risk worth taking when the alternative is to remain indoors on a sunny day.”
“You are encouraged to step out only when it rains, then?” he asked.
“Then we will ruin our clothes,” she said with a chuckle, “and redden our complexions and give ourselves the ague. Perversely, I like walking in the rain. I am not a very dutiful daughter, am I?”
He was not conceiving a particularly favorable impression of Sir Horace Everett.
“Is the water very deep here?” he asked.
“It is,” she said. “At the far end it is shallow, so that one could bathe if one were allowed to do so.”
“I suppose,” he said, “you do not swim, and I have not done so since before my injuries. We had better not dive in. We will have to sit sedately on the bank and dangle our feet in the water instead.”
Her head turned quickly toward his.
“Are you serious?” she asked him. “We would have to remove our shoes and stockings.”
“They would get horribly wet if we did not,” he said.
She was blushing rosily, he could see. She was prim. She was also charming. It was still a dizzying thought that he knew her so little and yet knew her intimately to the depths of her soul.
He sat down and tugged off his boots. After a short hesitation, she sat beside him, her legs folded neatly to one side of her and completely covered by her skirt.
He reached out a hand.
“One foot, please,” he said.
“It would be very improper,” she said, but he could see desire and hesitation war within her.
“And very pleasant on a hot day,” he said. “One foot, please.”
“I can remove my own shoe and stocking,” she said, but she did not put up any fight when he took her foot in his palm, removed her shoe and then slowly edged down her stocking until he could pull it off.
Her bare foot was small and prettily shaped and sat on the palm of his hand, soft and warm. He set it on the grass and held out his hand for the other.
“This is very improper,” she said again when he was finished, but her eyes were laughing when he looked into her face.
Suddenly, she looked vividly, startlingly pretty.
He grinned back at her and removed his own stockings. Apart from the faded scars about his right ankle, his foot was not too unsightly. His leg was another matter, but that was well hidden beneath his riding breeches.
When she set first one foot and then the other in the water, she laughed out loud—a happy, girlish sound.
“Oh,” she said, “it is cold.”
It was. It also felt delicious against his heated flesh.
He took her hand as they bathed their feet, and they talked with an ease usually indicative of a long acquaintance. They talked about school and books and childhood and religion and music and dancing and… Well, Robert did not keep tally of the subjects they covered during the half hour or so they sat there.
And eventually they fell silent, and that was most remarkable of all. Because there was no element of strain in it. They sat as though they were a couple long acquainted and thoroughly comfortable with each other.
He felt as though he had loved her forever. As, of course, he had.
He released her hand and lay back on the grass, his feet still in the water, one arm draped over his eyes to protect them from the sun. He sighed deeply.
“Do you ever feel so thoroughly happy,” he asked, “that you might well burst with it?”
“Is that how you feel now?” she asked, laughing softly.
“Yes.” He removed his arm, turned his head and squinted up at her.
She gazed gravely back down at him.
“So do I,” she said.
He reached up one hand to tuck an errant curl of hair behind her ear, and cupped the side of her face lightly with his palm. She leaned her cheek against it.
She was all warm and soft and human. And feminine.
She was part of himself.
“Come,” he said softly and wondered if he was just being impatient again, if he was pushing her too hard.
But she leaned over him and lowered her face until her lips were against his.
They were soft and warm and ever so slightly parted. He cupped her face with both palms and kissed her softly, parting his lips over hers, touching them with his tongue, curling it up to stroke the tender, moist flesh within, and then pressing it slowly past her teeth into the warm cavity beyond.
His mind burst into a happiness too intense for words.
And he wanted her. Wanted her in every way there was to want.
But he must not rush her.
He lifted her face awa
y from his and held it above him while he gazed up at her with half-closed lids and smiling lips. Her own lips looked full and rosy. Her eyes were a deep, dark blue in the shade of her bonnet brim. Her hands were splayed across his chest for balance.
“This is very improper,” she said—predictably.
“Must I know you for two eternities, then,” he asked her, “before I can venture to embrace you?”
“We agreed not to talk of eternity,” she said.
“And so we did,” he conceded. “And why should we? For now this lifetime is enough, Jane. This moment is enough. I am in love with you—head over heels.”
It was true, too.
“But you have known me only a few hours,” she protested.
“If you will.” He smiled more fully, to lessen the tension she was feeling. “But I have fallen in love with you anyway. Deeply and irretrievably. Marry me.”
“Do you always offer marriage to women you have known for three or four hours?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “Only to those with whom I fall irrevocably in love. And that has happened only once in my life. Now, in fact.”
“You are absurd.” She sat up and proceeded to dry her feet on the hem of her dress. “When you fell from your horse, you must have addled your brain.”
“I fear you are right,” he said meekly.
She looked at him suspiciously before turning away to pull on first one stocking and then the other.
“Do you really believe all that nonsense about being born again and again into different lives?” she asked.
“Reincarnation,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
“But why, if it is true,” she asked him, “do we not remember? It makes no sense unless we remember.”
“We easily fall into the trap of habit,” he said. “It is very difficult within one lifetime to change the course of our ways. We make progress and we make mistakes. We need the chance to carry the progress forward and put right those mistakes without the baggage of memory. We need to start again with a clean slate. A new life with no memory of the ones before is a brilliant answer.”
“Is it?” She sounded unconvinced. “Let us suppose for one moment that it is true. What if you had decided not to come to stay with your brother? What if I had not come to the vicarage with my sisters? What if we had simply greeted each other and gone our separate ways?”
“We would have met again some other time or in some other place,” he said. “We would have been given other chances. Life recognizes the unpredictability of our movements in any given life. Somehow we would have met, Jane. We were determined that it would be so before we entered this life.”
She got abruptly to her feet while he was still pulling on his boots, and brushed grass and creases from her skirt with quick, nervous-looking hands. He watched her when he was on his feet again, leaning on his cane.
“It is all absurd,” she said breathlessly. “But I would be less than truthful if I did not confess that I am infected, just as you are. I have fallen in love, too, this afternoon.”
Her eyes did not waver as they looked into his, but her cheeks flamed.
“But not because of any other imagined lifetimes,” she said. “Because of this one. This is all we need. Why can we not meet for the very first time and fall in love all within one afternoon? It can surely happen. It has happened.”
He smiled at her. For two pins he would snatch her up and spin her around in circles until they were both dizzy and pitched into the water. Or his leg would collapse ignominiously before he had completed even half a rotation.
“Your brother called you Robert?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I have fallen in love with you, Robert,” she said with quiet gravity. “And it seems quite mad and rather improper and certainly indiscreet and will doubtless appear all three to me by tomorrow.”
And she turned without another word to lead the way back up to the summer pavilion and around the side of it to the narrow path back to the lawn and the house.
He watched her go for a few moments before going after her.
This time, he vowed silently, he would get things right. They would. This time they would love for a lifetime. Happily ever after—with the emphasis on the ever after.
This time they would be together and remain together for all eternity.
She did not have to believe it. She only had to love him for the rest of this lifetime. She would learn the glorious truth when it was over.
CHAPTER 3
BY THE NEXT DAY JANE DID INDEED WONDER WHAT on earth had come over her the day before. She had wandered alone to the lake with a strange gentleman. She had sat with him, dangling her bare feet in the lake water. She had let him kiss her. No, she had kissed him. She had told him she loved him. She had used his given name—Robert. She had allowed him to call her Jane without reprimanding him for such familiarity.
And she had been almost convinced by his strange, alien theory of reincarnation. She had almost believed that they had lived and loved before—numerous times. She had almost believed that in their last lifetime together they had been Mary Mitford and her faithless lover.
She felt incredulous now, embarrassed.
Doubtful.
Very doubtful.
And yet it felt as if the floodgates of memory really had creaked ajar. She kept remembering a girl and a young man sitting by the lake where she had sat with Captain Mitford. Lying there, their arms wrapped about each other, talking, laughing, loving. And it was as if she was that girl. She could feel what it was like to love that young man.
Who was not Robert Mitford, and yet was.
Just as the girl was not Jane Everett, but was.
And she kept knowing something about the two of them apart from the fact that if they were Mary Mitford and her lover, then they were trespassing on Goodrich land. She kept knowing something that contradicted what her mother had told her all those years ago and she had mistaken for memory ever since.
The trouble was, though, that just when that knowledge was nipping at the edges of her consciousness, it slipped free like water through cupped hands and she could not recapture it.
She kept hoping he would call during the day, and hoping he would not. She kept hoping he would come with his family to the evening entertainment, and hoping he would not.
She was not at all her usual calm, sensible self.
Lady Percy was the first guest to arrive, for the simple reason that she alone had been invited to dine. All the other guests were deemed worthy enough to take tea and play a hand or two of cards in the drawing room during the evening, but not nearly grand enough to take their places around the dining-room table with Sir Horace Everett.
“They would not expect such a distinction,” he said when Jane suggested that at least Mrs. Mitford and the vicar and his wife might have been invited to dine since the whole evening had been planned in honor of Mrs. Mitford’s birthday.
She did not mention Captain Mitford.
“And they would merely be uncomfortable if we did invite them,” Louisa added. “They never serve more than five courses at the vicarage.”
And so only Lady Percy joined them for dinner—as she often did. The widow of a baronet of considerable means, she had moved to a manor nearby after the early death of her husband in order to be near her dearest friend, Lady Everett, Jane’s mother. After the passing of that lady, she had become a close friend and advisor to Jane, of whom she was inordinately fond. Jane alone of her sisters, according to Lady Percy, had the superior qualities of mind and character that her mother had possessed. Her family was quite unworthy of her, in fact, fond as Lady Percy was of them all. They were, after all, her only real social equals for miles around.
Social position was of some importance to Lady Percy.
Jane longed to tell her what had happened the day before. But for some reason she could not pluck up the courage to do so when they were alone together before dinner while her father and sisters were still dre
ssing. Lady Percy would surely think she had taken leave of her senses. And she might be right.
Jane might have said something after dinner if by then Lady Percy had not already leveled a sort of criticism upon Captain Mitford, though she had not met him.
Edna had mentioned him during dinner and had waxed mildly enthusiastic about his good looks and distinguished bearing.
“Though he does limp,” she had added. “And he must be thirty years old. He is sadly old.”
“I have heard,” Lady Percy had said, “that his limp was acquired when he was fighting bravely with his regiment in India, Edna. And the vicar mentioned last week that his brother is two years his senior. The Reverend Mitford is twenty-five. I daresay the captain’s severe wounds have aged him prematurely.”
“He does have an engaging smile,” Edna had conceded with a sigh. “But he turned it upon Jane more than upon either Louisa or me. And he walked home with her from the vicarage because Louisa insisted that a seat be found in the gig for Amelia Mitford. They were ages getting home. They must have walked very slowly indeed.”
“If you were to walk a little more often,” Lady Percy had said, “you would discover, Edna, that it takes far longer to walk two miles than it does to travel the same distance in the gig. Jane would be far too sensible to loiter unnecessarily with a gentleman who is quite ineligible.”
Quite ineligible?
Lady Percy did not explain her meaning or pursue the subject further, and Jane did not question her judgment. But she hesitated after dinner about telling her mother’s friend of that walk home yesterday, when she had indeed loitered. And been considerably less than sensible.
Captain Mitford—Robert—came.
When his party was announced at the drawing-room door, he had elderly Mrs. Mitford leaning heavily upon his arm. The vicar and his wife were behind them.
Jane smiled at Mrs. Mitford while her father and Louisa greeted them with their characteristic pomp and condescension. Mrs. Mitford returned her look and her smile and Jane stepped forward to take her hand and lead her to a comfortable chair close to the fireplace.
Like a gauche girl, she had not been able to summon the courage to look at the captain.