Mesmerized

by Candace Camp

  She would have to tell Stephen, of course, about the results of Tom’s search or, rather, the lack of them. But she thought surely that task could be put off until tomorrow. She simply could not face him today—not after that bizarre, licentious dream she had had last night.

  It was bad enough that she had fallen asleep in Stephen’s study. It was not the sort of thing ladies were supposed to do. Besides, it was embarrassing. Had he thought her rude and uncouth? Had her hair been mussed? Had she talked in her sleep? Worse yet, what if she had snored?

  But none of that was as bad as the dream she had had. She had once again dreamed of the medieval woman and man whom she had seen in her dream the other afternoon, the very same woman whom she and Stephen had seen in the great hall. She supposed that was natural enough, as her head had been filled with the woman and the earlier dream, but it still disturbed her to have seen her again. At first it had been like the other dream, as if she were watching a play, and then it had seemed somehow as if she herself was the woman—Alys, he called her—who was speaking and looking at the knight. They had started kissing, and she had felt the onrush of desire, the throbbing hunger that centered in her loins and radiated out through her body.

  And then, somehow, she was no longer the medieval lady but herself again, and the man was not the medieval knight, but Stephen. And the heat and passion had been even more intense. She had been alive with sensation, every inch of her tingling and aware. She had ached for him, thrilled to his kiss…his touch…. Even thinking about it the next day brought a flush of heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with desire.

  The passion had grown so strong, the sensations so intense, that finally she had jolted out of her dream and sat straight up, the heavy book in her lap sliding down to the floor with a bang. She had stared at Stephen, dazed and astonished, unable for an instant to separate reality from dream, her loins still heavy with desire.

  Then he had raised his head and looked straight at her, and his face had been slack with passion, his eyes hungry and hot. And she had been certain in that instant that he knew exactly what she had been dreaming. Stunned, all she had been able to do was run away.

  And she had continued doing so all day long.

  She knew, of course, that it was impossible for him to have known what she was dreaming. He wouldn’t even have seen her face as she dreamed or heard her say anything revealing, for he obviously had been asleep also, his head resting on his arm on his desk.

  But she could not forget the look of passion on his face or the way his eyes had bored into hers. In that moment she had been certain he had seen everything inside her, had felt the blood coursing wildly through her veins, heard the breath coming sharp and fast in her throat, that he had known what lay in her heart and mind.

  Since what lay inside her was lust for him, she was humiliated, sure that he must think her forward, licentious, foolish. And no matter how many times she reminded herself that he could not possibly have known, still she could not bring herself to look him in the eyes.

  Olivia knew it would be rude to excuse herself from supper altogether unless she were ill, but fortunately, it was impossible for Stephen to actually hold a conversation with her there. Afterward, however, he managed to catch her as she left the room.

  “Olivia…”

  She glanced at him briefly, then away. He looked frowning and serious, and it made her stomach churn with anxiety. “I, um, you must excuse me,” she said quickly. “I have a bit of a headache, so I’m going to retire early tonight.”

  “But—”

  She smiled stiffly, still not looking into his eyes. “I’m sorry. Really. Another time. Excuse me.”

  She turned and walked away quickly, and short of grabbing her by the arm, he could not keep her there. She was almost to her room when she heard quick footsteps behind her.

  “Lady Olivia.” It was Pamela’s voice.

  Olivia turned, surprised. Roderick’s widow had hardly spoken to her the whole time she had been here, other than to not-so-subtly insult her family. But there was a smile on her porcelain-doll face now as she walked up to Olivia.

  “I trust you are not feeling ill, are you?” Pamela said, a hint of concern on her face.

  “It’s nothing. Just a touch of headache, that’s all,” Olivia assured her.

  “Good. I saw Stephen try to talk to you—” She hesitated, then went on. “I trust you will not think me a busybody, but I have noticed that you avoided Lord St. Leger all day.”

  “Oh! Oh, no!” Olivia replied, a flush stealing up into her cheeks. “I wasn’t avoiding him. I was merely, um…”

  Pamela let out a light laugh. “It’s all right. I am sure no one noticed but me. I, you see, have some experience in that area.”

  Olivia looked at her blankly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve known Lord St. Leger for some time. I have seen him at work before. He is a terrible flirt. A charming man, of course, but it’s dangerous to take him seriously.”

  Olivia flushed even more. “Oh, no, you mustn’t think—I am sure Lord St. Leger has not been flirting with me.”

  Pamela gave her a knowing look. “Well, consider it a forewarning, then. He has trifled with the affections of more than one young lady.”

  Olivia stared at her. Admittedly, she was a novice in the affairs of men and women, but she had trouble believing that. Stephen simply did not seem like the sort of man who indulged himself in flirtations and toying with the affections of naive young women. And why was Pamela suddenly so concerned about her feelings?

  Pamela apparently saw Olivia’s disbelief on her face, for she went on. “I speak from experience. You see, I fell in love with Stephen many years ago, before I had even met Roderick. Stephen broke my heart. Left me and sailed off for America. Thank heavens, Roddy was there to help mend it. I suppose I should be grateful to Stephen, for without his hurting me, Roderick would never have sought me out to try to apologize for his brother.”

  “What?” Olivia could not imagine Stephen being so callous.

  Pamela quirked an eyebrow and said with some irritation, “It’s the truth. Why on earth would I make up something like that? It scarcely reflects well on me.”

  “Yes, of course. I did not mean to imply…” Olivia trailed off to a self-conscious halt.

  “Merely a word to the wise,” Pamela said, then turned and walked back down the hall.

  Olivia, with a sigh, went into her room and shut the door. She felt suddenly sad, as if she wanted to weep. Had she been so wrong about Stephen? Was he really as Pamela said, an accomplished, coldhearted flirt?

  She would not have said that he had flirted with her. Of course, there had been that kiss…Certainly she was no expert on flirtation. And Pamela was right—Pamela wouldn’t pretend to have been rejected by someone; it would be an embarrassing thing to admit, certainly not the sort of thing she would make up. Olivia had noticed the coolness that lay between Stephen and his brother’s widow, and Pamela’s story would explain it.

  Perhaps Stephen really was as Pamela had said, a hardened flirt. Perhaps he had broken Pamela’s heart and the hearts of other girls, as well. If it were true, then his kiss the other day had certainly meant nothing.

  She had already told herself that it had not, of course. But it was a bitter pill to swallow to have the fact confirmed. If he had rejected a woman as beautiful as Pamela, there was little hope he had any real interest in her. Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked them back angrily. It should not matter to her that Stephen did not want her, she knew. Unfortunately, whatever her mind might say, in her heart she knew what Stephen St. Leger wanted was beginning to matter to her very much.

  7

  When Olivia awoke the next morning, she refused the dress that Joan offered and instead put on the only one of her dresses she had brought that Kyria and her maid had not altered, a plain brown frock with no ornamentation. She also turned down Joan’s services as a hairdresser, pulling her hair back
into the tight, simple knot in which she had worn it for years.

  She was through trying to dress herself up, she decided. She was here purely for business, and the only thing she needed to appear was businesslike.

  She marched downstairs to breakfast, determined to put her relationship with Lord St. Leger back on the correct footing. They were colleagues. Working partners. Whatever emotion he might have seen on her face the other night, it was impossible for him to have known what she had been dreaming about. And she would behave in such a way that he would realize that whatever he thought he had seen, he had been wrong.

  Her determination lasted until she had finished eating breakfast, when one of the footmen handed her a note from Stephen requesting her presence in his study as soon as possible. She felt suddenly as if her stomach had dropped to her feet, and it took all her willpower to force her feet to turn to the study.

  She knocked on the door, and when he called to her to enter, she wavered for a moment, then drew a deep breath and went inside.

  “You asked to see me?” she said on a note of inquiry, proud that she was able to keep her voice light and cool. She could not, however, quite look him in the face, so she chose a point just over his shoulder at which to gaze.

  “Uh, yes. Please, sit down.” Stephen’s voice sounded not quite as usual, either.

  Olivia stole a quick peek at him. He looked—could it be nervous?

  “We, um, never had a chance to speak yesterday. I thought you might want to know about the—” he paused and cleared his throat “—research I did.”

  “Oh?” Perhaps he had not realized what she had been dreaming about, Olivia thought, for the first time looking him full in the face. There was certainly no leering knowledge there. He looked, if anything, rather ill at ease. “What sort of research?”

  “Well, I—” He stopped and looked at her searchingly for a moment. “Olivia…I…I dreamed the other night when I fell asleep at my desk.”

  It was such an abrupt change of subject that for a moment Olivia could only stare. “Excuse me?”

  “The other night. When we were looking through the books, you fell asleep, and I sat here at my desk, reading, and I drifted off, also. I dreamed. When I woke up, I—it seemed to me that you had been dreaming, too.”

  Olivia felt heat flooding up her throat and into her cheeks. “Yes.”

  “I dreamed about the woman whom we had seen earlier. The vision.”

  “You did?” Olivia was startled from her embarrassment.

  “Yes. I dreamed about her and a man, someone dressed as a knight. She called him Sir John, and he called her Alys. They were in some place with barrels all over—”

  Olivia went cold to the bone. “What?” She took a step closer to him. “You saw them in a storage house?”

  He nodded. “Yes. In a castle. In the courtyard, I mean. Then they went down through a trapdoor into a cellar.”

  Olivia’s stomach went hot, and her feet and hands were like blocks of ice. She swayed a little, and Stephen leaped forward to take her by the arms and guide her into a chair.

  “Here. Sit down. You look as if you’re about to faint.” He pushed her head down, squatting beside her.

  “I think I was.” Olivia looked at her hands; they were trembling. She would not have been surprised if she had been trembling all over. “I dreamed the same dream.”

  “Sweet Christ!” There was a long silence. Stephen stood back up. “I thought—my first thought was that you had known what I had been dreaming.”

  “That is what I thought, too.” Olivia stared at him. “But it was impossible.”

  “That is what I kept telling myself all day yesterday. I wanted to talk to you about it, but I could not find you. Did they talk about her husband? Did he ask her about a bruise on her cheek?”

  “Yes! He asked her if Sir Raymond had done it to her!”

  “Sir Raymond. That is what I heard him say, too.” Stephen pushed his hands back into his hair, his expression a little wild. “And then they—”

  “Yes,” Olivia replied in a strangled voice, blushing to the roots of her hairline as she remembered the couple’s embrace and the way the participants had changed into herself and Stephen.

  She saw embarrassment in his face, too, but she saw more—a flame that lit his gray eyes and set up an answering heat inside her. Olivia’s mouth went suddenly dry, and she didn’t know where to look. Just sitting here, she could feel again the passion that had flooded through her; she could taste his kiss…his skin.

  Olivia wrapped her arms around herself and stepped away. “It’s impossible. How could we dream the same dream?”

  “Yet we did.”

  “Madame Valenskaya could not have done this,” she said positively. “No one could. How could anyone make us see exactly the same people do the same things in a dream?”

  “If an expert mesmerist gave one the suggestion in a trance, said that one would dream about this scene…”

  “But to arrange us dreaming it at the same time! I cannot believe anyone is that skillful, let alone Madame Valenskaya. She has no subtlety about her, no dexterity. Why, I have heard her accent slip more than once.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t Madame Valenskaya. Maybe Babington is the mesmerist and Madame Valenskaya is just his tool.”

  Olivia frowned, unconvinced. “Whoever it is, how could he implant a suggestion that you and I would see the same thing?”

  “Well, perhaps we didn’t see exactly the same people.”

  “A man with light brown hair, tall and well muscled? His eyes green, with a scar along this cheek, low.” She grazed her left cheek with a fingernail.

  “I’m not sure how he looked. I felt as if—as if I were he. I saw the bailey, the castle, the woman, everything, through his eyes.”

  Olivia remembered how toward the end of the dream she had somehow become the woman. Her voice trembled as she said, “This is absurd.”

  “It surpasses all logic that I know,” Stephen admitted.

  “I have never seen, never heard of, any mesmerist this skilled. I don’t know of any trick that comes remotely close to this.”

  “But how else could it have happened?”

  Olivia simply looked at him. There was nothing that could have accounted for their shared dream or for the earlier vision of the woman in the great hall.

  “There is another thing,” Stephen said after a moment. “I—I think I have dreamed about these people before.”

  “What!”

  “While I was still in London, I had a dream. In it, I felt as if I were the same man, as if I were seeing through his eyes. But it was in an old castle. The steps were stone and curved around and up to a tower room. It was no place I’d ever seen before, but in the dream I knew it. It was home. I was fighting—for my life, the way it felt. I held a sword, not a light sword or a fencing foil, but a broadsword. I was dressed in chain mail. And behind me was a woman. I didn’t see her—I could not look back, because I was fighting—but I could sense her there, and I knew her. She was—I think she was the lady of the castle and I was sworn to protect her. But there was something more—a deeper emotion, something beyond duty and loyalty. It was the same couple. I am sure of it. I felt as if I were the same man, if that makes any sense.” He paused and glanced at Olivia. She looked stunned. “You probably think I am mad.”

  “No. No, I don’t.” Olivia stood up. “I dreamed of them before, too. I recognized that woman when we saw her in the hall. I had dreamed about her the day before—her and the man. She was drying her hair in front of the fire in my room—only it wasn’t my room, but another room, with rushes on the floor and a bigger fireplace. Then he came in and knelt beside her. It was Sir John. At first I thought she was there, that I was actually lying there looking at her, but then I awoke and realized it had been a dream. When we saw her walk across the room, I knew it was the same woman.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I was afraid you would think I was in
sane!” Olivia retorted. “It was so bizarre, and everyone half believes we Morelands are all mad, anyway. I didn’t want you to look at me as if I should be locked away.”

  “I don’t think you’re mad. I don’t think I’m mad. I just cannot explain, in a rational manner anything that has happened.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know. I did some research today. I went to Belinda and asked her about that paper her tutor had her write. She went up to the nursery and dug out the books she had used for it. And I found a chap named Sir Raymond.”

  Olivia gaped at him. “Here? At Blackhope?”

  “He owned Blackhope long before the St. Legers took over. He was an ancestor of the Lord Scorhill who lost the place to Henry VIII. Sir Raymond lived here during the reign of Henry II.”

  Olivia felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach.

  Stephen, watching her, nodded. “I know. I had the same reaction.”

  “Then these people we saw really existed? They lived here in the twelfth century?”

  “I don’t know. I saw no mention of Sir Raymond’s wife or of anyone named Sir John. But it would be unlikely that either of them would be in a history. He was merely the captain of Sir Raymond’s men.”

  “And wives are rarely mentioned,” Olivia finished somewhat caustically. “I know.”

  “However, it was this Sir Raymond that Belinda was talking about at supper the other night. The one during whose ownership the estate got its name of Blackhope.”

  “The man who shut himself up in the house because his wife died?”

  “The very same. That, of course, was put down as legend. But it is fact that this same Sir Raymond rebuilt Blackhope. Apparently at some point, the original Norman keep was destroyed—or mostly so—during a siege. Sir Raymond built the present house almost directly on the ruins of the original.”

  “A siege?” Olivia looked at him questioningly. “Such as the battle in your dream?”