‘That’s true, to a degree. Men and women do view the world from different standpoints, but social pressures create some of the differences. We’re taught to repress a large portion of our psyche in favor of boosting another. It’s crippling and unnatural.’
Valerie didn’t give much attention to this profound utterance. Her attention was on her own experiences. She smiled coyly. ‘You must admit, I haven’t always been a monster.’
‘Certainly not.’ Tom thought, with amusement of a particularly risqué sortie into seventeenth-century Vienna, and the total contrast of a Buddhist monastery somewhere in French Indo-China. ‘Since the satisfaction of curiosity is only part of your answer, what’s the remainder – or need I ask? You want to put things right this time around. Isn’t that it?’
‘Yes. I’ve already explained. I want to redress the karmic balance.’
‘Then, what are you doing about it?’
She looked confused. ‘Doing?’
‘How are you going to achieve this result? What changes are you making in your attitudes and habits? How can you know what you must do to alter the karmic pattern?’
‘I’m working on it.’
Her face had closed and he sensed quite a lot of hostility in her. Debating whether to continue pushing, he decided he must. He’d do it on her ground, on the premise that her regressions were true experiences relived.
‘Valerie, you’re wasting time, yours and mine. I have other patients with urgent needs, and while I’m quite prepared to keep on working with you, you must co-operate. It’s not progressing to keep on discovering and reliving past lives. The pattern has become clear. You know what it is that has pursued you through life after life, and it would be very dangerous for you to go on alone.’
She had turned her back on him. He thought, from her withdrawn attitude that she wasn’t going to take up his challenge. Then she said, ‘You’re reneging on our agreement. You promised to help me.’
‘I have helped you. Phil has helped you. We’ve given hours of our free time, resuscitated you, supported you in every way we can think of. Now it’s your turn. We can’t do any more.’
‘I don’t want to discuss it just now.’
‘Then, when? It can’t be put off much longer.’ Tom let impatience color his voice. He had made his decision and he would stand on it.
He now appreciated the mind set of a person accustomed to receiving unquestioning obedience. For forty years Valerie’s whims had been paramount. Armored in privilege, like the beautifully scaled sea-serpent, she had swished across the surface of life, leaving nothing but a few ripples behind her. He didn’t believe she knew the depths. Because she was unable to form strong attachments, her failed marriages had damaged her pride more than her heart.
All the same, she knew loneliness and the lack of real direction. These things had driven her to him. Already she’d admitted her need to change her lifestyle. But would she do it?
Tom suspected she was hovering on the edge of decision right now. A part of her needed to deny the meaning behind all the happening of the past few weeks, wanted to bury it and continue along her hedonistic path. But buried secrets had a habit of finding alternative routes to the surface. There would be pain, whichever way she went. If she’d only understand what great rewards could come from change. He wanted to see what Valerie could become. He wanted her to make the intelligent decision.
He put a hand on her shoulder and turned her to face him. Understanding and empathy had replaced the impatience. ‘Valerie, you’ve come a long way and learned a lot about yourself. As you have said, the pattern has been shown to you. Now you can choose to go on as you are, and pay the price of continually meeting the challenge in different and more taxing forms, slipping down the ladder of progress a little further each lifetime. Or you can take a hold on things, use your free will to alter the shape, structure and perspective of your personal blueprint – to make it what you want. That’s the opportunity within your grasp. For myself, I refuse to believe that a person of your courage and ability will let it slide. Grasp it, Valerie! Make life work for you!’
‘Do you really think I’m courageous?’ She seemed startled, her aggressive edge turned by the small compliment. ‘No one has ever said that about me.’
Tom blessed whatever guidance had put that word in his mouth. She looked like a child savoring a new idea, pleased, yet not wholly believing.
His smile, that had warmed and comforted so many, underlined the genuineness of his words. ‘It will take all you have to make the change, but you can do it. There is a talent in you for loving and caring. It just needs to be released and put to use.’
‘I hope so.’ She spoke humbly. ‘Tom, would you help me just a little more? Have dinner with me tonight at my place, and talk to me about how I tackle this thing. Please, Tom.’
He wavered. It meant cutting short his time with Karen. But he did owe it to Valerie to finish the job, and that meant seeing her feet set on the new road. She had to be weaned
from the habit of regression, and this new compliant mood should be reinforced and used. Hiding his regrets, he agreed.
When told that the session had been postponed indefinitely, Phil reacted with disappointment. ‘We’re nowhere near finished, yet. What’s the idea?’
‘It’s time for a change of direction, Phil. I feel Valerie’s gone as far as she’s able. Now she should put to use what she’s learned.’
‘Not in my book.’ Phil rounded on Valerie. ‘What made you decide to stop? I thought you were fascinated. You loved trying out all those different roles. Was it your idea, or Tom’s, to wind up the sessions?’
‘Mine,’ Tom interjected. ‘Stop bullying, Phil, and let me explain.’
‘I don’t want your explanations. You’ve been against this right from the start, haven’t you? And now you’re running scared. You’re afraid of what you might discover if you go on. You’re thinking of the publicity and the fact that you might have to admit your change of values to a community still bound up in Victorian hide. Valerie’s the greatest thing that’s happened in this line since Guirdham’s investigations of the seventies, but you don’t want to let anyone else in on her.’
‘His work was discredited in the end,’ Tom interjected. He’d read the English psychiatrist’s publication, The Cathars and Reincarnation, and been impressed by the detail and complexity of the work. Guirdham’s subject had seemed perfectly genuine, and uncannily correct in her reportage of her life as a Cathar in thirteenth-century France, and her horrifying death in the massacre of these people at Montsegur. But for Tom the whole analysis was nullified by a later claim that Guirdham himself had been a Cathar involved with his subject at that very time. This seemed an obvious development of the usual patient fixation on her therapist. He’d thrown the book down in disgust.
Phil ground his teeth. ‘Don’t you see? You idiot! With Valerie you’ve got the chance to go one better, with lifetime after lifetime through the eyes of one person. You’ve only got to go on long enough and there’ll be a whole book of life experiences we can check – dates, names, places. But no, not you, with your feet in cold water and your mind set firmly in scientific cement. Well, keep your precious privacy, and your fears. I’m through with it. Carla and I can move on. There are plenty of places we want to visit before going home.’ He flung out of the room, then hung in the doorway to vent his sarcasm. ‘It’s been a great experience, pal. I’ve learned a lot.’
Tom stood, stunned. None of this was true, except perhaps his early unwillingness to continue with the regressions. But that had changed. His interest had been every bit as strong as Phil’s, with the added incentive of a longing to believe. He was so close to grasping it. So close. Yet he knew the final step had to come from pressure within – not from watching Valerie’s gyrations through her personal past.
Sadly he started to lock up for the night. Valerie had slipped away, he noted. Just as well. He really felt too tired to cope with anything more, not without a
couple of hours’ break.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Karen saw Amanda off in the early morning. Frost had turned the ground iron hard, and the horses’ hooves rang like hammers on an anvil. Snorting steam, they shivered and pranced, causing the coach to sway uncomfortably as Amanda mounted the step.
Leaning from the window she kissed Karen and whispered, ‘See what may be done. I shall pray for your safety, and his. Whatever course you take, it must be with the greatest care.’
She drew back. From the portico Karen waved as rugs were twitched from the horses’ backs and the postilions sprang up. The coach rocked forward, and they were away.
Karen shut herself in the library and thought what action she could take to warn Antony. Charles would be back from London very soon. He would know how to send a message by the shortest route. Meanwhile, she must show a calm face before Lord Edward and Chloe, burying her own need to be doing something, anything at all but wait in growing fear for justification of Amanda’s warnings.
Alone in her studio that evening, Karen had a visitor. Hearing the faint click of the door-latch, she looked up to see Sybilla standing watching her. Something within her lurched, as though she’d missed her footing on the stairs. She put a hand on her work table to steady herself.
‘What are you doing here?’
Sybilla smiled, and Karen wished she hadn’t. There was a quality to her expression that couldn’t be defined, more a suggestion of anticipation, like the cat’s stillness as it listens at a mouse hole.
‘I am paying a long overdue call, Caro. I have a debt I owe, and this is settling day.
‘What do you mean?’ The words were mechanical, a holding off while her brain leapt ahead, conning possibilities.
‘Exactly what you think I mean, sweet coz. You have proved uncommonly difficult to kill, but now your measure is run. You may give my greetings to Antony when you meet.’
Karen felt the blood draining away from her head. She leaned over the table, clutching the edge, willing her mind to clear. Sybilla waited. Clearly she was savoring every triumphant second of this meeting, happy for it to be prolonged.
Karen raised her face and said simply, ‘What have you done?’ She’d never before seen anyone actually wet her lips in expectation of a delicacy to come.
‘He is in deadly peril, your beloved Antony. Even now he is being stalked by his enemies. Very soon they will kill him. I have arranged it.’ Her smugness dissolved and she added, with more irritability than venom, ‘He should not have repulsed me. ‘Tis his own fault that this fate has come upon him.’
‘You’ve betrayed him! I thought you loved him.’
‘I hate him! He should have been mine. I was promised. As my husband, he should have suffered the most unique torments, until I tired of the game. But it has gone awry.’ Sybilla’s voice had risen as her emotions began to push through the assumed calmness of manner. ‘First he wed that puling Jenny. Then you, with your gaudy beauty. The man has no discernment.’ She was working up a fresh load of anger to vent on her victim.
Karen faced her with dignity, hiding her grief. ‘Tell me something, Sybilla. You were behind Jenny’s death, weren’t you? You set the fire and trapped her in the tower?’
She had succeeded in arresting the tirade. Sybilla’s expression was her answer – a mingling of cunning and shock.
‘How did you know that?’
‘Because I am Jenny. My spirit re-entered the body of Caroline Marchmont when she died at the foot of the stairs – your work, also. I know what you have done, and you will pay a terrible price in the end, Sybilla.’
Sybilla reared back, but recovered quickly. ‘What is this nonsense? Do you take me for a fool?’ The black eyes that had widened in an instant’s terror, now narrowed in concentration. ‘You seek to turn me from my purpose, but I am not so easily cozened. Had you been that mealy-mouthed mouse you would have exposed me long ago; and Antony would have killed me with his own hands.’
‘I didn’t tell him. He has enough to bear. But I will tell you… On that hot summer’s afternoon I was playing with Chloe in the nursery. Feathers became disturbed and I let him out. He must have gone downstairs and found you, and for that you bludgeoned him almost to death. He has been simple ever since, but he knows his enemy, doesn’t he?
‘When I discovered the fire, I carried Chloe up the tower stairs to the roof. It was a journey of torment, Sybilla. I died many times on those stairs, and I will not forget, ever.’
Sybilla stood immobile, arrested by her accuser’s chilling lack of emotion. The calm voice went on.
‘When you killed me, you killed my unborn baby, too. For that alone, you’re damned. Chloe was saved, and I’ve known the great joy of being reunited with my child and my husband. But now you want to destroy me once again. You are too evil to live. There’s a strain of twisted ugliness in you that can’t bear to see the happiness of others. What will become of you?’
Sybilla laughed. The raucous sound split the air and assaulted the ears, finally dying away. Watching, Karen saw the personality shift, the turning inside-out to reveal something not quite human in place of the woman she knew.
‘Tittle-tattle. Any number of persons could have told you that tale.’
Karen’s voice dropped to a whisper. She felt too drained to argue further. ‘How many, do you suppose, knew of the letter you sent – the vicious outpourings of a mind brimming with hatred and lust? I found the letter that afternoon, slipped under the nursery door. I told no one about it, not even Antony. Only I knew of its existence. And, of course, it was destroyed in the fire.’
Sybilla was quiet, now, musing. ‘It must be fate. To think that I rid myself of you once, and in killing another rival I brought you back to life. How strange. How very ridiculous. Well, no matter. If I cannot become a Countess I can be the sister of an Earl. Basil will be the heir within days, and Earl of Roth soon enough. And you… you will have a noble headstone, my dear.’ She took a step forward and Karen saw the tiny pistol in her first. It looked like a toy, winking silver in the lamplight.
She stared at it stupidly. Her mind seemed to be working very slowly, like machinery clogged in oil. The situation was too unreal. She didn’t quite believe in her own danger. The remembrance of Antony’s peril swamped her and, with it, a terrible feeling of impotence. She was going to die, and so would he. They would lose each other again. With no guarantee of a time or place to meet in the future.
Sybilla pulled back the hammer.
Karen reacted automatically and instantly. Her hand swept the table top, grasped the turpentine bottle full of brushes, and flung it at Sybilla.
With a scream, she dropped the pistol to claw at her face. But she’d warded off the bottle, and only a little of the contents had splashed her eyes… just enough to fuel her madness. The pistol had spun away towards the door. Even as Karen leapt for it, Sybilla had it in her grasp. They both crouched like animals, ready to spring.
Karen had come to her senses, too late.
Sybilla wiped her inflamed eyes on her sleeve. ‘Bitch! Now you are sped.’ She took careful aim at Karen’s head, just as the door opened and struck her in the back, flinging her aside.
‘Good God! What is happening here?’ Charles took in the scene, his gaze finally resting on Sybilla. She was an unlovely sight, her hair down about her shoulders, dripping with turpentine, her face mottled with temper, her pistol once more directed at Karen.
‘You can see what’s happening.’ Karen’s voice creaked – an aftermath of shock, she supposed. ‘Sybilla came to taunt me with the knowledge that Antony is going to die –and to kill me.’ She wanted to move. Her muscles ached with the strain of remaining utterly still. But the pistol was held steady. Sybilla’s attention had not altered a fraction.
Charles stiffened. ‘This must be arrant nonsense. Give me that pistol. I can scarcely credit that any woman…’ He took a step forward, then stopped, seeing the pistol lined up on his own heart.
‘Do not
move!’ snapped Sybilla. ‘Be damned to you for a chicken-hearted ninny, Charles Hastings.’ She glanced swiftly at Karen. ‘Here is your betrayer. He is the one so mad for money to wed his inamorata that he would sell his friend and benefactor. Regard him! Judas Iscariot himself!’
He winced under her contemptuous tongue, but all his attention was on Karen.
Her tightened muscles had gone limp, the adrenalin-induced energy evaporated as she stared at him, seeing a complete stranger. ‘Charles? You?’
He made an obvious effort to hold her gaze. ‘Wait. I will tell you all. But first, what did you mean: “Antony will die”? Did Sybilla tell you that?’
When Karen nodded, he said with some force, ‘He is to be taken prisoner, yes. But I have been assured that he will come to no harm. It is an express condition –’
Sybilla snorted. ‘Bah!’ ’Tis easily seen you’re not cut out for intrigue. I altered the message, of course, promising the Frenchmen greater prizes if they followed Antony and disposed of all their enemies in one blow. He will lead them to his fellow conspirators and they will all die. And the cream of it is, should any person incur censure ‘twill be you, alone.’
The room had grown quiet. Karen felt detached from the scene she’d witnessed. She might have been watching a play for all the involvement she felt. Charles’ face, slack and gray, looked like a lump of badly molded china clay; his shoulders sagged. But his suffering failed to move her. He was a lay figure, a representation of that standard character in drama, the betrayer revealed.
Sybilla she saw as the classic archetype, the bringer of destruction. And she, herself, was the watcher on the sidelines, aware but apart.
Then, with the impact of a bomb burst, the static scene blew apart. Charles let out a groan of agony. ‘Witch! I was mad to throw in my lot with you and your brother. But I have come to my senses.’
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