Bespelling Jane Austen

Introduction

Dear Reader,

Paranormal literature is something I read, not something I write. And so I told Colleen, Janet and Susan when they asked me to contribute a story to this anthology. But I loved the concept and really wished I could drum up a vampire or a dragon or a werewolf or two in my writer’s imagination.

Susan was not willing to take no for an answer. I mentioned to her that the only paranormal topic I could handle, since it is something in which I believe, was reincarnation. That would be good enough, she said, and I realized (with some terror) that I had talked myself into being a part of this very exciting project. Of course, I still feel like a fraud when I compare my story with the other three! But you must be the judge.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion has always been my cofavorite with Pride and Prejudice. There is something very poignant about Anne Elliot, who rejected the man she loved as a young, hopeful girl because her family opposed the match and her late mother’s best friend, whom she respected and trusted implicitly, advised against a marriage that could not promise her financial security or the social position suited to her upbringing. And so Anne had to wait many years for Captain Wentworth to return as a successful man, though this time all her hopes, if not her dreams, were long dead.

My story does not use the same characters. But the situation is similar. And I asked myself what if love had found my heroine many times, over numerous lifetimes, but each time she had lost it because she had not trusted her heart more than the advice and persuasions of her loved ones? What if that lesson is still to be learned and yet again she has a chance to learn it—or be persuaded yet again to reject it?

I hope you enjoy my slightly paranormal story based upon the same premise as Jane Austen’s classic but with a totally different twist.

Mary Balogh

Chapter 1

MISS JANE EVERETT, MIDDLE DAUGHTER OF SIR Horace Everett of Goodrich Hall in Hampshire, did not call as often as she ought at the vicarage in the village nearby. She called everywhere else—on tenants and laborers and others, on those who were sick or elderly or in need of any sort. She took her duties very seriously.

Mrs. Mitford—the elder Mrs. Mitford, that was, great-aunt of the vicar—was definitely in need since severe rheumatics prevented her from going much farther from the vicarage than the garden, and even that was a great effort on most days. And she liked company. Perhaps she would have liked more of Jane’s.

Louisa, Jane’s elder sister, called at the vicarage far more often, though her visits elsewhere were rare and were always accompanied by such condescending pomp that Jane doubted anyone regretted their infrequency. But she went to the vicarage to see the younger Mrs. Mitford, the vicar’s wife. Amelia Mitford was quite happy to pay obsequious homage to the eldest daughter of a baronet, and since Louisa was always delighted to be worshiped and adored, it was in many ways a friendship made in heaven.

Edna, Jane’s younger sister, almost never called at the vicarage or anywhere else unless it was to attend an evening party that promised lively entertainment, preferably dancing. Social calls were nothing but a dead bore, she always declared, when they must perforce be made on the same people, who invariably talked on and on about the same old things. Charitable calls were even more tedious because all the recipients wanted to talk about was their health, or rather their ill health.

Edna positively lived for the day when she would be married and have her own home and could expect other people to call upon her. However, the only really eligible gentleman in the neighborhood was William Burton, eldest son of Mr. Edward Burton of Highfield House, and William was far more interested in Jane than in Edna. He would not, of course, even consider Louisa since Sir Horace had always made it plain that he expected his eldest daughter to ally herself with no gentleman lower on the social scale than a baron. Louisa herself aspired to an earl at the least.

On this particular August afternoon, however, all three sisters were on their way to the vicarage, squeezed together on the seat of the gig. Jane would have preferred to walk, but she was outvoted by her sisters, the elder of whom did not wish to arrive with a reddened complexion and bedraggled hem, the younger of whom conveniently fancied that she had turned her ankle while strolling down by the lily pond the previous afternoon.

Jane sat in the middle, the least preferred seat, her arms pinioned against her sides. They were on their way to offer formal congratulations to elderly Mrs. Mitford on the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday.

It was strange, Jane reflected as the carriage bowled along the driveway between sweeping lawns of the park, how the events of seventeen years ago could still embarrass her and make her reluctant either to call at the vicarage or to come face-to-face with elderly Mrs. Mitford.

She had been only four years old at the time.

Her mother, now deceased, had been returning an afternoon call made upon her two days before, and she was taking Louisa and Jane with her. Mrs. Mitford had been recently widowed, though she had remained at the vicarage, her husband’s living having been granted to his son. She was a tragic figure nevertheless, Jane had overheard her mother tell her father before they left home, having suffered a great deal of trouble and loss in her life.

Jane’s father had just succeeded to his title on the passing of his uncle. They had moved to Goodrich Hall only a week earlier, in fact. Jane had never seen either the vicarage or Mrs. Mitford before that afternoon. Though she was to disgrace herself horribly over both when she finally did see them.

She could remember it clearly now, though she had been very young then—and had tried her best ever since to block the memory from her mind.

She did not, after all, want to burn as a witch. Or be snatched away by gypsies.

“Oh, look,” she had cried to her mother and Louisa, pointing excitedly at the vicarage as they approached in the carriage. “I used to live there.”

Louisa had tutted and tossed her glance at the roof of the carriage.

“You are strange, Jane,” she had said. “Why would you even want to live there?”

“You are mistaken, Jane,” her mother had said kindly but firmly. “Of course we have never lived in such a small cottage. You really must learn to confine your imagination to the nursery and your dolls.”

Jane had forever been suffering scolds for the vividness of her imaginings, which at the time she had called real and her father had called falsehoods and her mother had called inappropriate. Her nurse had occasionally made her stand in a corner to reflect upon her fibs.

After the housekeeper had admitted them to the house, Jane had looked about at the familiar scene with wide-eyed interest, noticing what was still the same and what had changed. And then, before she could say anything about her observations to her mother, a straight-backed, sweet-faced but sad-looking lady dressed all in black had stepped into the hallway to greet them. Jane had smiled brightly at her and committed the horrible social error of speaking up before any of the adults had had a chance to do so and before anyone had spoken to her.

“Oh!” she had cried—and she had laughed aloud with glee. “You used to be my mother.”

Mrs. Mitford had looked mystified, Jane’s mother had looked mortified and Louisa had smirked, because she was behaving with perfect six-year-old manners.

Jane had made matters worse before anyone could stop her.

“I fell in the river and drowneded,” she had said, eager to explain. “The water wasn’t terribly deep, and it wasn’t terribly cold, either. But it took me by surprise and I drowneded. You need not have been dreadfully unhappy, though, and I would have told you so afterward if I could, but I couldn’t. I went down and down into the water until I came to the light, and it was the most lovely light in the world. And he called me with his hands and I went and everything was—oh, so lovely that I didn’t really want to come back after all. Not just then, anyway. But you can see now that you need not have worried. Here I am, safe and sound.”

She had been beaming with happiness, her arms outspread, waiting to be recognized and embraced, when Mrs. Mitford crumpled into an insensible heap on the floor.

Back at Goodrich Hall a short time later, Jane had spent a few hours alone in the nursery, seated on a hard chair, before being fetched down to her father in the library and informed in a long speech, most of which she did not understand, what it meant to be Miss Jane Everett of Goodrich Hall, daughter of Sir Horace Everett, upon whose head she must never ever again bring down such shame. If she persisted in her wicked untruths, it was altogether probable the gypsies would come one night and take her away.

And back in the nursery she had faced what had seemed worse to her—her mother’s sorrow. She had shed a few tears as she questioned Jane about how she knew the story of Mary Mitford, who had been abandoned by her lover and had then thrown herself into the river to drown. Though the official version was that she had slipped and fallen in and drowned by accident. Only so could she be granted Christian burial in the churchyard where her father was vicar.

“But it really was an accident, Mama,” Jane had whispered. “I did not mean to fall in, and I did not mean to drown. Maybe I could have fought harder, but the light was so lovely. And he was there waiting for me, calling me with his hands. And then I was very happy. I had been sad before that.”

Her mother had looked more troubled than convinced. She had taken Jane’s hands and held them tightly while entreating her to curb her imagination in future.

Jane had promised. By then she was thoroughly frightened and did not wish to keep having the memories everyone called lies. She was afraid gypsies really would come for her one night when she was all alone in her bed and nurse far away in the next room.

That was not quite the end of the matter. The following day Jane’s father had made mention of the burning of witches, whose numbers included those who lied and pretended to be dead people come back to life.

Her memories could not be memories, Jane had told herself, if everyone said they were not. The vicarage must look like a house she had once made up in her imagination. Mrs. Mitford must look like a mother she had invented for one of her games. She must have overheard some of the servants talking about the poor dead Mary Mitford, though she certainly could not remember doing so and she had only been at Goodrich for a week. Her mother said that was what must have happened, though.

And so Jane had suppressed all memories from that time on—or all memories that were unlike everyone else’s anyway. She became a quiet, solemn, obedient child.

Her sisters had been talking all the way to the vicarage while Jane was lost in uncomfortable reverie.

“I do not know why our father could not spare the carriage,” Edna was saying when Jane took notice. “There is not enough room in the gig. If Jane would move her arms forward instead of insisting upon keeping them at her sides, there would be more room for the rest of us, but it is ever her way to be selfish. I daresay I shall have a sore side all the rest of the day.”

“I wonder,” Louisa said, “if Captain Mitford has arrived at the vicarage yet. He is expected this week, according to Amelia, and it would be a courtesy to arrive on his great-aunt’s birthday, would it not?”

“Who is Captain Mitford?” Edna asked, all sudden interest.

Louisa looked triumphant. She was fully aware, of course, that they did not know of whom she spoke.

“The Reverend Mitford’s brother is coming to stay for a few weeks,” she said. “He was in India with his regiment, but he was wounded a year or two ago and has only recently been well enough to come home to England to finish recuperating before rejoining his regiment in Portugal. I daresay he will be fighting the forces of that dreadful monster Napoleon Bonaparte before the winter is over.”

“The Reverend Mitford’s younger brother?” Edna asked hopefully.

“No,” Louisa said. “He is the elder. And do not, pray, Edna, proceed to ask me if he is also handsome. I do not know the answer and would not be interested if I did. Rank and fortune are of far more lasting significance than good looks. The Mitfords are not a wealthy family nor a distinguished one. It is said they were in trade until two or three generations ago. It would not do for a Miss Everett of Goodrich Hall, even a younger sister, to fall in love with Captain Mitford.”

“Oh,” Edna said crossly, “you say that, Louisa, only because you intend to fall in love with him yourself.”

Louisa’s eyebrows arched upward.

“I have a better sense of my own worth,” she said, “than to consider falling in love of any importance when I turn my mind to matrimony, Edna.”

While the two of them argued, Jane looked ahead along the village street to the church and the vicarage beyond it. There was some activity outside the latter. Two gentlemen, one of them the vicar, were dismounting from horseback and handing the horses over to a servant’s care. The other gentleman was young, too, and taller than the vicar. He took a cane from the servant’s hand and leaned his weight on it, his back to the approaching gig.

But her sisters had seen the gentlemen, too, and both of them leaned forward, releasing the pressure on Jane’s arms but completely blocking her view ahead.

There was a chorus of greetings as the vicar handed first Louisa and then Edna out of the gig. At the same time he introduced them to Captain Mitford, his brother, and they exchanged bows and curtsies.

Then the vicar turned and extended a hand for Jane’s.

“And Miss Jane,” he said. “Last but by no means least.”

He helped her down. The door of the house was opening to reveal Amelia Mitford. She curtsied and beamed at Louisa, who swept through the gateway toward her, followed by Edna.

“Miss Jane,” the vicar said as they moved out of the way, “may I have the pleasure of presenting my brother, Captain Mitford? Miss Jane Everett, Robert.”

As Jane had her first look at the captain, she prepared to curtsy and murmur what was proper to the occasion.

She forgot to do either.

She had never set eyes upon him before. Of that she was quite certain. And yet she knew just as certainly that she knew him. Deeply. Intimately. Her breath caught. Her stomach muscles clenched. Her knees turned weak.

Had she been able to think rationally, she would have assured herself that her temporary paralysis was not occasioned by his looks, though he was certainly a handsome man. He was tall with dark hair and smiling blue eyes and a sun-bronzed complexion. He was broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, his long, shapely legs accentuated by the close fit of his riding breeches and supple leather boots. He was also leaning upon his cane as if he needed it to support his weight.

She would also have told herself that she had not fallen instantly in love with him. She had never been in love, and she was far too sensible to fall for a complete stranger even if he was a splendid figure of a man. She would even have said that it was not any real attraction that had bowled her over. Attraction ought never to be a purely physical thing. It was something that must grow gradually between a man and a woman as they became familiar with each other’s character.

She did not know Captain Mitford’s character.

She did not know Captain Mitford.

And yet she knew him. In the depths of her being she knew him.

As if she had known him for all eternity.

As the real world fell into place about her again and she completed her curtsy and her polite “How do you do, sir?” she did not know how long had passed. Probably not even half a minute. Although he had raised his eyebrows, no one else seemed to show any awareness that the world had stopped on its axis for some indeterminate length of time before lurching into motion again.

She felt disoriented and inexplicably frightened.

“Miss Jane Everett,” he said in a voice that was unfamiliar to her ears, though it rang a familiar chord somewhere in the region of her heart. “My pleasure. Shall we follow the others indoors?”

She might as well have walked after all. She felt breathless.

CAPTAIN ROBERT MITFORD looked at the neat little figure of Miss Jane Everett as she preceded him into the vicarage and tried to imagine that he knew her, that somewhere deep inside him there was a spark of recognition.

There was none.

Which did not necessarily mean that she was not the one.

The thing was that his soul mate never looked the same in any two lifetimes. He had seen that with some fascination when revisiting some of those lifetimes under the guidance of his guru in India. In one lifetime she had been a lean, dark-complexioned washerwoman for a noble family in ancient Egypt, and he had been a priest at one of the royal temples—far above her in station. In another life she had been the lithe, black-haired daughter of an aboriginal chief in the Americas, and he had been a captive from another tribe. She had been the daughter of a Russian landowner once, he a serf on the man’s land. And she had been a nun in medieval Italy, he a papal guard. It had been a forbidden love that time.

There had always been some impediment, of course—and always a chance to overcome that impediment, to conquer all with the power of their love for each other.

They had never made that conquest.

Not yet. But they would.

And so they were fated to meet again and again through countless lifetimes until they found the courage to choose love above all the forces, petty or otherwise, that so often appeared of more importance. This particular lesson related to romantic love, but there was more awaiting them once they had mastered it. If they could learn to choose love in its romantic guise, they could eventually learn—together—to choose it in all its many guises and to move beyond any guise to an understanding of the vast, unending breadth and height and depth of love itself.

Of the one love.

Of the one.

It had all seemed perfectly clear to Robert while he was in India recovering from his wounds. He had been able to see other lifetimes and how each time courage had failed him, or her, or both of them. He had been able to see the spirit world between lifetimes and what he and she together had discussed, with the help of their spirit guides, what they had planned and hoped to accomplish during their next incarnation.

In India he had come to understand that each time its purpose was to meet his soul mate again and try once more to unite in perfect love with her.

The catch was, though, that he had never been allowed any glimpse into the future. He had been given no clue as to the identity of his soul mate in this lifetime or how he would recognize her when he met her. Forgetfulness was a condition of human life—forgetfulness of all that had passed before physical birth. He was one of the privileged few in that he had been allowed glimpses into the vast past he had forgotten when he was born Robert Vaughan Mitford twenty-seven years ago.

But the privilege extended only so far.

Although he had had a healthy interest in women since about the age of sixteen, Robert had never really looked upon any of them as the potential one-and-only love of his life. He had certainly never thought of any as a possible soul mate. He would have laughed at the very idea with a mingling of derision and embarrassment if anyone had mentioned such a thing before his battle wounds changed his life.

He found himself now looking closely at every woman who was even vaguely eligible.

Inside the vicarage the three Everett sisters paid their respects to Great-Aunt Dinah and took their seats while Amelia sat behind the tea tray and poured the tea.

Robert observed each sister in turn. Miss Louisa Everett was beautiful with her perfect posture, dark, glossy hair and flawless complexion. She inclined her head graciously to his great-aunt and looked as if she expected some obeisance in return. She was an arrogant young lady, he decided. Not very likable. Which might be an unfair judgment since he did not really know her at all.

He hoped she was not the one.

Miss Edna Everett was pretty in a youthful, rosy-cheeked, flighty sort of way. She bobbed a curtsy to his great-aunt, spoke a few words and took a seat as far away as she could. There was a hint of petulance about her mouth. Surely she was not the one.

And then there was Miss Jane Everett. Who had inexplicably frozen into immobility for a few seconds after Gerald had introduced him to her. And who had thus caught his attention more than her sisters had done.

She was small and slender, fair-haired and blue-eyed. She was pretty without being beautiful and bore herself proudly but without arrogance. She was neatly but unostentatiously dressed in a high-waisted gown of sprigged muslin and a straw bonnet that looked as if it had survived a rain shower or two in its time. She curtsied to his great-aunt, bade her a happy birthday, hesitated and then hurried closer to draw her into a hug. Great-Aunt Dinah looked a little startled and then pleased. She smiled as she took Miss Jane’s hand in her gnarled, arthritic fingers, and drew her to sit on the chair beside her own. The younger woman smiled sweetly and bent her head closer to listen to what Great-Aunt Dinah was saying.

She was attractive in an understated way, Robert thought. No! She was attractive plain and simple. He must be careful not to give in to wishful thinking, though, and convince himself that she was the one. She looked nothing like the Egyptian washerwoman or the Indian maiden or the Russian noblewoman or any of the others. But they had not looked anything like one another, either.

How he wished he could know!

Miss Louisa talked almost exclusively with Amelia. Miss Edna spoke mainly of her health. It was generally poor, Robert learned, though she never complained and no one ever took notice of her ailments anyway. She looked perfectly healthy to him.

Miss Jane gave most of her attention to Great-Aunt Dinah, who still held her hand and gazed at her with eyes that seemed filled with affection. But Miss Jane, alone among her sisters, made an effort to be agreeable to everyone else, too. She commended Gerald on last Sunday’s sermon and Amelia on the tastiness of the little cakes that were served with tea. And eventually she spoke to Robert, her cheeks coloring slightly as she did so.

“I trust, Captain Mitford,” she said, “you have recovered from your wounds.”

“Thank you.” He inclined his head. “I must not complain. An army surgeon wanted to saw off my leg and assured me when I refused that I would never walk again. I have hopes of casting aside my cane before the summer is out. Perhaps even of dancing a jig.”

He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

“You must have great fortitude, then,” she said. “You are to be congratulated.”

“Thank you,” he said again.

Why had she paused so significantly outside the gate when she first set eyes on him, rather as if she had seen a ghost?

The visit had not yet lasted half an hour, but it was over. Miss Louisa, doing nothing to hide her impatience to be gone, was on her feet.

“Amelia is coming to Goodrich Hall with me for an hour or two,” she said, addressing her sisters. “She will need a seat in the gig, but there is not room for all four of us. One of you must walk.”

“Well, it cannot be me, Louisa,” Miss Edna cried. “You know I turned my ankle yesterday and it is worse today because I felt obliged to dance at the Burtons’ soiree last evening. It will have to be Jane.”

Robert glanced at that young lady, who did not look at all chagrined, as she might well have done.

“I do not mind walking,” she said. “Indeed, I would prefer to walk than to ride on such a lovely day.”

“If you will permit me,” Robert said impulsively, “I will walk with you, Miss Jane.”

“Oh, that is quite unnecessary,” she said, turning her eyes on him again. “But if you would welcome some exercise on your own account, I will be pleased with your company.”

“You will be able to escort Amelia home later, Rob,” Gerald said, rubbing his hands together and looking pleased.

“And it is only right that a young lady have an escort,” Great-Aunt Dinah added.

Miss Jane smiled sweetly at her.

“You will all come to Goodrich Hall tomorrow evening,” Miss Louisa said. It was a command more than an invitation. “Father and I will honor Mrs. Mitford’s birthday with a gathering of our neighbors.”

She looked about her with condescension as though she were conferring a great honor—as, Robert supposed, she was. Her mother must be dead, since there had been no mention of her. Miss Louisa, then, was mistress of the hall, and her father was a baronet. She was a great lady.

So was Miss Jane Everett.

And he was a mere army captain. It would quite possibly put something of a strain upon his father’s purse to secure his promotion to major, though his father was quite insistent that it must be done.

Ah. Robert had a sudden thought and smiled inwardly. There was an impediment. Miss Jane Everett was his social superior, and if the father was anything like the eldest daughter, that fact would be of some significance.

Perhaps she really was the one.

Gerald bowed Miss Louisa Everett out of the house. Amelia followed, looking rather pathetically gratified, and Miss Edna Everett followed her, looking aggrieved that she had not been given due precedence.

“Shall we?” Robert asked Miss Jane Everett, and she turned to hug his great-aunt once more before stepping out of the cottage ahead of him.

Could this possibly be she, he wondered as they walked along the street past the church. The one he had loved and lost through life after life? The one he had loved through an eternity of between-lives? The one he must learn to love without condition through a human lifetime so that they could return to the between-time with their souls one significant step closer to the union of perfect love?

It seemed impossible. That was so grandiose an idea. She was just a quiet slip of a woman.

Whom he found curiously attractive.

But surely if she were the one, he would have known it instantly. How could he have known her and loved her through eternity and numerous lives and not recognize her immediately now?

How could he possibly not know?

“I beg your pardon,” she said as the gig bowled by and Amelia waved to him, “but is it possible, Captain Mitford, that we have met before? I am quite sure we have not, but you seem so familiar to me that I feel I must have seen you somewhere.”

Ah.

He turned his head sharply to look at her, and she turned hers to look at him.

The breath caught in his throat.

Was this she?

“I do beg your pardon,” she said again, flushing. “Of course we have never met. How could we? The Reverend Mitford has been here only three years, and I know you have not visited him in that time.”

“Your instinct is right and your logic is wrong, Miss Everett,” he said. “We have known each other for a lifetime or ten. For an eternity, in fact.”

His voice sounded breathless to his own ears. But he managed to smile and speak lightly, as though jokingly.

Could this be she?

“We have never met, have we?” she said, laughing.

“Not until today,” he said. “Will you take my arm?”

She hesitated for a moment, but then placed her hand lightly through his arm and rested it in the crook of his elbow.

His breath seemed suspended altogether.

He was so suffused with familiarity that he felt quite dizzy. He knew that touch.

He made more deliberate use of his cane for a few steps until he had recovered his wits and his equilibrium.

They were together again, then.

It began again.

They were to have yet another chance at love.

The dizziness threatened to overwhelm him.

Could this be?

Chapter 2

JANE FELT FOOLISH FOR ASKING THAT QUESTION out loud when she knew perfectly well that they had never met. He would think she was flirting with him.

Though he had been kind enough to make a joke of it.

We have known each other for a lifetime or ten. For an eternity, in fact.

His eyes crinkled attractively at the corners when he smiled.

The visit to the vicarage had been a little strange altogether. Because elderly Mrs. Mitford had been dressed in her Sunday best and had been looking bright and happy to have visitors on her birthday, and because both Louisa and Edna had virtually ignored her after speaking the obligatory greetings, Jane had done something she had never done before. She had stepped close to Mrs. Mitford and hugged her, and instead of recoiling, the lady had caught hold of her hand and held it tightly all the time they sat together.

Did she still remember that long-ago afternoon when Jane was four? Clearly, she did not bear a grudge if she did. But why would she? Jane had been little more than a baby.

But Jane had remembered.

She had once been absolutely convinced, with no shadow of doubt, that Mrs. Mitford had once been her mother. With her child’s logic, she had not stopped to ask herself when that might have been or how she could possibly have two mothers.

All she could remember now was that it had been a powerful conviction.

This afternoon she had sat hand-in-hand with Mrs. Mitford. And she had felt a strange welling of affection, bordering upon grief.

As if Mrs. Mitford really had been her mother once upon a time.

Perhaps she ought to try remembering more of what she had so ruthlessly suppressed all those years ago.

Or perhaps not.

At this precise moment all her attention was focused upon the man with whom she walked. She wished she had not taken his arm. She had walked thus with any number of gentlemen, but she had never before felt this…this awareness, this heat, this difficulty in breathing normally, this frantic need to say something to break the terrible tension which no doubt she was the only one feeling.

She did not like the feeling at all. She could actually hear her heart beating, as if it were lodged in her eardrums.

“It is a lovely day,” she said with bright cheerfulness as they passed between the gates into the park.

“It is,” he agreed.

“It has been a lovely summer.”

“It has.”

“I suppose,” she said desperately, “it does not compare favorably to India, though.”

“If you refer merely to degree of temperature,” he said, “you are quite right. I love India, but there is nothing lovelier than a fine summer day in England. It is where my heart belongs, for this lifetime at least.”

“You are expecting more than one lifetime, then?” she asked him, relieved to feel amusement.

“Oh, certainly,” he said, sounding equally amused. “How else are we to learn all there is to learn from life? And how else can life be fair, as we all feel it ought to be but as it seems so often to be decidedly not?”

“These are strange beliefs,” she said, “for a man whose brother is a clergyman.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “they can remain our secret.”

They both laughed.

She could feel the warmth of his arm through the sleeve of his coat. She could smell his cologne. She felt ever so slightly dizzy.

Surely she knew him.

But how could she?

“This appears to be a lovely park,” he said as they proceeded along the wooded driveway.

“It is,” she agreed.

“I daresay,” he said, “it is at its loveliest now at the height of summer.”

“It is,” she said and could think of nothing else to say to prolong the conversation.

“It will be a long and tedious walk to the hall, Miss Everett,” he said, “if we maintain such a polite, lovely conversation.”

“Is the walk too far for you?” she asked half chagrined, half hopeful. “Please do not feel obliged to accompany me all the way if you would rather return to the vicarage. I walk alone in the park all the time.”

“I have neither the wish nor the need to return so soon,” he said. “It is, as we have agreed, both a lovely day and a lovely park. What is the very loveliest part of it?”

“The lake,” she said. “But my favorite feature is the small summer pavilion. It has a wooden bench outside it overhung with roses. There I can sit and saturate my senses with beauty. Or simply dream.”

“You enjoy solitude, then?” he asked her.

“And company, too,” she said. “I like people who are genuinely cheerful and kind. I like them even better if they have interesting conversation and informed opinions on matters of general concern. But yes, I enjoy my own company, too.”

“Because you are genuinely cheerful and kind and interesting and informed?” he said.

She laughed.

“Are you imagining,” she said, “that the pavilion and bench are close enough to the water that I can gaze admiringly down at my own reflection as I sit there?”

“Perhaps,” he said, “you will take me there, Miss Everett, so that we may sit together on that bench, which you have made sound so idyllic. And perhaps I may be permitted to gaze upon you even if the water is not close enough to throw back your reflection.”

She darted a startled glance at him.

“Now?” she asked.

“It may be raining tomorrow,” he said.

“We would have to walk across the lawn,” she said, “or through these trees and then along a rough, narrow path around the far side of the lake.”

“Is it too rough for you?” he asked her. “Should I carry you?”

She answered his smile with one of her own.

Louisa and Edna would wonder what had become of her. But no, of course they would not. They would not even miss her. Neither would her father. And if Amelia Mitford missed her, it would surely be with some gratification, as Jane’s absence with Captain Mitford would give her more time to spend at Goodrich with Louisa.

Suddenly Jane wanted very much to take Captain Mitford to the summer pavilion, to prolong this time with him. She was…Oh, of course she was not falling in love with him. That would be more than absurd. But she was very much attracted to him. It was such an unfamiliar feeling that she felt quite dizzy again.

“It is quicker to go through the trees,” she said. “But it is rougher.”

He turned them off the driveway without further ado, and they were soon deep in the shade of tall, ancient trees. The silence and seclusion seemed deeper here than on the driveway.

“Tell me about Miss Jane Everett,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “there is no question better designed to tie my tongue. What can I tell you about myself? I am the middle sister of three—but you already know that. We are not close, alas, even though I believe we have a sisterly regard for one another. Louisa is interested more than anything else in rank and fortune and what is her due as the eldest daughter of a baronet. Edna is interested more than anything else in making a good marriage and achieving the sort of importance it will give her in society.”

“And Miss Jane Everett?” he said as they drew clear of the trees and the lake water sparkled below them, at the foot of a sloping lawn. “What interests her more than anything else? Neither fortune nor marriage?”

“Any sensible lady has a regard for both,” she said as she drew him in the direction of the south side of the lake. It was wooded to the bank and was scarcely used, despite the existence of the summer pavilion. “But either or both in themselves would not bring total satisfaction or happiness. Not to me, anyway.”

“What would, then?” he asked, stopping for a moment to admire the view. “Love?”

“It is a word that has so many uses and so many of them trivial,” she said, “that it has become largely meaningless. And it is a sentiment at which men tend to scoff, I know.”

“I am to be lumped in with all men, then?” he said. “Are you sure you do not do me an injustice, Miss Everett?”

“I long for…meaning in my life,” she said. “For something that will make it worth living. Something like spending my life in search of a great pearl and knowing that there can be no true happiness until I have found it. Except that it is not a pearl for which I seek or indeed any material possession. I do not know what it is. Love, perhaps? But I do not really know what that means.”

“The search,” he said softly, “is always about love.”

It should have sounded absurd but did not. Somehow it sent shivers along her spine and made her feel weak at the knees. It caught at her breath.

“We must go single file from here. Captain Mitford,” she said, sliding her hand free of his arm. “The path is narrow.”

She walked ahead of him, and they no longer talked.

The search is always about love.

What did he mean? The words had not been trivially spoken—or flirtatiously.

And yet she felt somehow caressed.

What was happening to her?

She turned her attention determinedly to her surroundings. She loved this place. She had come here a number of times with her mother, and had continued to come after her death, at first to remember her, and then mostly to sit and dream. This was almost the only place where she allowed her imagination to roam—that imagination that really had nothing to do with making up stories for her dolls in the nursery. Here she dreamed of two lovers—one of them herself—meeting and loving. And parting. It was the inevitable ending, try as she would to give the story a happy conclusion. But hope always brought her back to dream again of those lovers.

Who always seemed very real.

As did the ending of their story.

Which needed to be changed.

“This is lovely,” Captain Mitford said as they came up to the pavilion and stepped around to the front of it. He laughed. “That word again. There ought to be more words to describe extraordinary beauty. This scene is…well, it is lovely. And it is you.”

“Me?” she said, her eyebrows raised.

“Small and secluded and peaceful and mysterious and lovely beyond words,” he said.

“Then it is certainly not me,” she said with a laugh, though the outrageous compliment pleased her.

…lovely beyond words.

“You do not see yourself through my eyes, it would seem, Miss Everett,” he said.

She felt herself blushing and turned her back in order to sit on the wooden bench to one side of the door of the little house. The walls were covered with ivy. Pink roses grew in an arch over the lintel and over a trellis above the bench. Their fragrance filled the air.

“In what way am I mysterious?” she asked as he seated himself beside her and propped his cane against the end of the bench.

“Only in that you are quiet and reserved,” he said, “and I wonder who you are. I wonder if you are who I believe you very well might be.”

She turned her head and looked at him for some time in silence. She was not sure she wanted to ask the obvious question. She felt a little afraid again. This was all quite beyond anything she had experienced before.

She felt as if floodgates were about to be opened on her life, ones she had kept determinedly closed for a long time. Or perhaps it was merely that she had met a handsome man and was falling into a foolish infatuation.

“You know who I am,” she said.

He rubbed his leg absently and gazed out over the lake.

“Was it very badly injured?” she asked him.

“My leg?” He stopped rubbing. “Most of my injuries came from a sword and a dagger when two enemy soldiers attacked me in battle, one from the front and one from the rear. According to the army surgeon, any one of those wounds ought to have killed me. But I also had the misfortune to fall from my horse and land on my head. My horse crashed down on my leg and crushed it beneath his body until I was rescued an hour or two later. My concussion should have killed me. So should my leg, especially after I refused to have it off.”

“The army surgeon must have been very skilled,” she said, “despite his gloomy predictions.”

“The army had to move on,” he said. “I was far too badly hurt to go with it. I had to be left behind in the care of an Indian family who were related to my batman. It was they who nursed me back to health. I was with them for longer than a year. Despite all the fever and pain, it was in many ways the happiest year of my life.”

“But you did not want to stay forever?” she asked.

“I was not meant to remain there,” he said, “though I believe I could have been happy there. I was meant to return here.”

“By your family?” she asked. “Your regiment?”

“Those, too, I suppose,” he said. “But I meant by life. This is where I am intended to live my life.”

“In England?” she asked. “But to what purpose? What is it you need to find here?”

He hesitated a moment.

“Do you believe,” he asked her, “in soul mates?”

He turned on the bench to look directly into her face as he asked the question. His eyes looked very intense and very blue.

Jane felt a sudden coldness in the head as though she were going to faint. The floodgates creaked.

“Soul mates?” she asked, almost in a whisper. She had never heard the term, and yet she knew.

“Two souls that were created to belong with each other from eternity to eternity,” he said. “Two souls that seek each other out lifetime after lifetime until the time is right for them and they can love each other totally and unconditionally and move onward together to the next phase of their eternal growth.”

“From eternity to eternity?” she said. “Do our souls not begin with human birth and proceed to a permanent eternal home after human death? It is what our religion teaches.”

“Do you really believe that?” he asked her. “Why should a human man and a human woman have the power to give birth to an eternal soul when they have a child? Is it not far more believable that the soul in a human body comes from eternity and returns to eternity at death?”

“Is this,” she asked him, “what you learned in India?”

“Part of what I learned there, yes,” he said.

“That we all have a soul mate?” she asked him. “And you have come home from India to find yours?”

“Yes,” He had not removed his eyes from hers, and she found it impossible to look away. There was a buzzing in her ears. This should all sound utterly alien to her. And surely it did.

And bone-weakeningly familiar. Where had she heard it before? How did she know it?

“And have you found her?” she asked. She forgot to breathe.

“I believe so,” he said, still gazing directly at her.

She opened her mouth to speak, found words impossible, licked her lips and turned her head jerkily to gaze sightlessly at the lake.

“Me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe so, Jane.”

She got abruptly to her feet, her hands grasping the sides of her dress.

“May I ask you something?” he said. He did not wait for her permission. “When Gerald handed you down from the gig outside the vicarage earlier and introduced us, you paused before curtsying and speaking to me. Why did you pause?”

“I…I thought I knew you,” she said.

“You asked me as we were leaving the vicarage,” he said, “if we had met before. By then you must have known beyond all doubt that we had not. Why did you still believe that somehow you knew me?”

“I do not know,” she said.

“Jane,” he said softly, “are you afraid?”

“I am not afraid,” she said quickly. “Why would I be?”

“Jane,” he said again.

He ought not to be calling her that. She had not granted him permission. He was a stranger. Three hours ago she had not even met him.

But he had always known her by name. She had always known him.

“Yes, I am afraid,” she said, whirling on him. “I am afraid because if you speak the truth, then the last time we met I was the daughter of your great-aunt and you were the son of a duke, who had come to visit with her son, my brother. And you left me because your rank would not permit you to marry the daughter of a mere country vicar. You left me brokenhearted. And then a mere two weeks later you died when you crashed your curricle and I died a few days afterward when I cast myself into the river in a despairing search for oblivion.”

“Jane—” He reached out a hand toward her, his face pale and troubled.

She took a step back from him. She had never spoken those details aloud until now. She had not even realized she remembered them.

Remembered?

He was on his feet now, too, supporting himself on his cane.

“I have upset you,” he said. “I am so sorry. In India I saw a number of lives in which we loved and lost each other because we would not reach out across the barriers that held us apart. But I did not see that particular life, the last. It was not imagination, though, Jane. All that really did happen to my great-aunt’s daughter and the man who deserted her.”

“I must have overheard the servants talk,” she said. “Servants do talk.”

“Forgive me,” he said, reaching out a hand for hers. “I have upset you.”

He had. She, who never suffered from the vapors, felt very close to fainting now.

She looked at his hand and drew a few calming breaths before setting her own in it. She watched his fingers close about hers and felt his touch all the way down through her body to her toes.

And it felt so very right, this stranger’s touch.

“Was that you?” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Was it really you?”

“I believe so,” he said, his voice low. “Miserable coward that I was.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. Oh, he was so handsome. And he was a stranger. Except for his eyes. If she kept gazing into his eyes, she could see all the way to…

“And there were other times?” she asked him. “Other lives?”

He nodded.

“We have known each other for a long, long time, then?” she said. “Forever?”

She did not know whether she wanted him to say yes or no. Terror warred with exultation.

He did not say, either. He looked at her with those fathomless, blue eyes.

“And how will it end this time?” she asked.

“That,” he said, “is up to us.”

And he raised her hand and held it against his lips.

She closed her eyes, and with a rush of sensation she felt an overwhelming sense of homecoming.

And terror.

And exultation.

ROBERT TURNED HER HAND and rested it, palm in, against his heart. He rubbed his own hand over the back of it and gazed into her eyes.

This really was she.

She looked so very different from what he had expected, though he did not know what he had expected. Not this dainty, pretty lady, certainly, with her light muslin dress and straw bonnet. Yet here she was, known consciously for the first time in human form.

His soul mate from eternity to eternity.

He took her other hand in his, raised it briefly to his lips, and held it against the right side of his chest.

He sought out her mouth with his own, touched his lips to hers, and gave himself to the kiss. For the moment there was no sexual passion, only a yearning gratitude that he had found her at last, that they had the rest of a lifetime to be together if they chose, the rest of a lifetime in which to love.

Her lips trembled against his and then withdrew. She took half a step back, though her hands remained spread over his chest.

“This is madness,” she said. “We are strangers. A few hours ago we had not even met.”

“Yes, we had,” he said.

“But that is absurd,” she said, her eyes searching his. “It has to be. This is England in the nineteenth century. The land of sanity. The age of reason. This talk of soul mates seeking each other out over centuries of lives is nothing more than insanity. A century or two ago we would have been burned at the stake for such talk.”

“Perhaps that is why,” he said, “we were not allowed a glimpse beyond the veil until now. Why is it we have both been given that glimpse this time if it is not true? And why the coincidence of our both doing so and then meeting today if it was not meant to be, if we do not belong together?”

“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 away 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 dressing. 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.

It was strange how yesterday seemed to have obliterated seventeen years of awkwardness—on Jane’s side, anyway. She felt a welling of fondness for Mrs. Mitford.

“Thank you, my dear,” that lady said as Jane positioned a stool for her feet. “You are kindness itself. I have looked forward to seeing you again this evening.”

Jane sat down beside her.

Her father and Louisa were greeting Mr. and Mrs. Burton with their eldest son and their two eldest daughters. Edna was telling Amelia that she was suffering from a sore side today after having been forced to ride three abreast in the gig yesterday when it was a conveyance intended to seat only two. Not that Mrs. Mitford had taken more than her fair share of the seat on the way home, but Jane certainly had on the way to the vicarage. Edna was not complaining, of course. That was not her way, and no one paid her ailments any attention anyway, so there was no point in complaining, was there?

Captain Mitford was standing with his brother.

“Robert admires you greatly,” Mrs. Mitford said, patting her hand as if she sensed Jane’s awareness.

“That is very kind of him,” Jane said, and finally she risked a glance in his direction. He and the vicar were speaking with Mr. Burton and William—and he was looking at her with a very direct gaze.

She looked hastily away. But not before her stomach turned a complete somersault—or felt as if it did—and her heart leaped into her throat. She had held his hand yesterday, their fingers laced together. She had kissed him. She had listened to his protestations of love. She had fallen in love with him.

He had asked her to marry him.

She glanced at him again. Could all that possibly have happened? He was gazing just as directly at her as before. He smiled slowly—a private, almost intimate smile.

Jane turned sharply away to say something to Mrs. Mitford, hoping that her cheeks did not look as hot as they felt.

“He has always been a favorite with me,” Mrs. Mitford said, making it obvious that she had seen. “As have you, Miss Jane.”

Jane felt ashamed. She had always kept as much distance between herself and Mrs. Mitford as possible, even though they lived in the same village and attended much the same social events.

Edna spoke up loudly for dancing. But Sir Horace Everett of Goodrich Hall was far too genteel to allow an informal dance in his drawing room with a mere pianoforte for music. After half an hour of conversation following everyone’s arrival, the card tables were set up and everyone was assigned a partner and a group. Except, that was, for one person, since the group was not divisible by four. Jane was quite happy to be assigned to play the pianoforte instead.

She wondered as she played if their neighbors were as excited by the infrequent invitations to Goodrich Hall as her father and Louisa always believed they were. Or did they sigh and search about in their heads for some excuse to avoid the inevitable?

The playing of cards was serious business to her father, who did not encourage conversation during the games. Jane looked about several times during the next two hours but could see no real sign of enjoyment on any of the faces of the players, with the possible exception of elderly Mrs. Mitford, who enjoyed company but had all too little of it.

Captain Mitford had Helena Burton for a partner and was giving her his undivided attention. Helena was clearly smitten by his attentions.

Jane was not jealous. Gracious heaven!

Finally, Louisa rose, signaling the end of play and the arrival of the tea tray. Jane folded her music and rose to her feet.

And discovered that Captain Mitford was standing at her shoulder.

“Alas,” he said. “I am too late to turn the pages of your music.”

“You are indeed,” she said. “Did you win your games?”

“All but half of them,” he said.

She laughed and gathered enough courage to look fully into his eyes at last. They were smiling back into hers. She felt that knee-weakening sense of familiarity and attraction again. Oh, why did she feel so strongly that she knew him? His own explanation could not possibly be true.

“Is it permitted,” he asked her, “to seek out cooler air by walking outside on the terrace?”

“It is warm in here, is it not?” she said, and she turned toward the French windows, opened them back and stepped through ahead of him without stopping to fetch a shawl or consult anyone else. She had to be alone with him for just a little while. Oh, she had to. She would have died if he had not come tonight—or if he had come and made no move to seek out her exclusive company.

“I hope,” she said, “you enjoy playing cards.”

“I do,” he said, “when there is good music to listen to. You play well.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I lay no claim to anything greater than competence at the keyboard.”

She turned her head to smile at him. He was walking with his cane, but she could tell that he was making an effort not to limp too noticeably.

“Great-Aunt Dinah is fond of you,” he said, “though she did remark yesterday after I returned to the vicarage that she fears she frightened you away a long time ago when you were a small child, after something you said caused her to faint. She wishes now she had had the courage to come and see you a day or two after. I suppose she was referring to the incident you mentioned yesterday.”

“Yes,” she said. “I shall start calling upon her more often. I—Well, even if she was not once as dear to me as my own mother, I still feel a fondness for her. And she just told me that I have always been a favorite of hers. I felt very ashamed that I have always avoided being close to her.”

“There is always time to make up for lost opportunities,” he said.

“In the next life if not in this?” she said, smiling.

“Or in the life after that.” He chuckled softly.

They had crossed the wide, cobbled terrace and stood for a few silent moments at the top of the flight of stone steps that led down to the formal parterre gardens. Moonlight bathed everything below them in soft light.

They turned their heads to look at each other again.

“Lovely,” they both said together and laughed like a couple of old friends—or lovers—who were so familiar with each other that they even thought and spoke alike.

It was all very disconcerting—and quite breathtaking.

Was it possible after all…

“I would have found some excuse to call upon you earlier today,” he said, “if I had not been coming this evening. The day has seemed endless.”

Yes. Ah, yes, it had.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we ought to forget about the strange events of yesterday afternoon. They really were quite…bizarre.”

“Agreed,” he said, still gazing into her eyes. “It is bizarre to sit beneath a trellis of roses on a summer afternoon and gaze through trees and across a lake and feel one’s senses almost overwhelmed by the intense beauty of it all. It is certainly bizarre to enjoy dipping one’s feet in the cool water of a lake on a hot afternoon. And to enjoy the company of someone similarly employed. Yes, we must forget. It is already done on my part. What is it I am not to remember?”

She smiled down at the garden. It had been a foolish suggestion on her part. She knew she would always treasure her memories of yesterday afternoon. It had been the most wonderful of her life so far.

She was in love.

There was a swell of voices and laughter behind them, and Jane turned her head to see Caroline Burton standing between the open French windows with Edna and William.

“Shall we stroll through the parterres?” Captain Mitford suggested, offering her his free arm.

She ought to refuse. She ought to suggest joining the others so that they could all converse and enjoy the air together. It was what Jane Everett would normally do.

Instead, she slipped her hand beneath his elbow and descended the steps with him. They walked silently between neatly clipped box hedges in the garden below as if they both feared drawing the attention of the young people above if they spoke.

He broke the silence first.

“I love you,” he said softly.

They were surely the most magical words in the English language, Jane thought, closing her eyes briefly and reveling in their after-echo in her heart.

“You do not know me, Captain Mitford,” she said. “How can you love me? And please do not talk about other lifetimes and forever. Consider only this lifetime, which in reality is all we have. You cannot possibly love me. If it is attraction you feel, I am flattered. But it cannot be more than that. You cannot possibly know if attraction will bloom into something deeper.”

But I love you, too.

“And yet yesterday,” he said, “you spoke the same words to me. You told me you had fallen in love with me.”

“I must have been affected by the sun,” she protested.

“Or by genuine emotion,” he said.

“Emotion,” she told him, “is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.”

“There you are wrong,” he said. “Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rule our hearts.”

She did not believe it. She had always been taught otherwise. She had always believed otherwise. Though she wished he could be proved right. She had always been ruled by reason and common sense. Her life had never been exciting—until yesterday when she had been infected by very unreasonable emotion.

“Emotion is our human weakness,” she said, “reason our strength.”

“And love,” he said, “is our destiny.”

It was a non sequitur. It did not settle the argument.

Except that it did. It seemed somehow like a great truth that answered all the questions of existence.

Love is our destiny.

“Is that another lake down there?” he asked when they arrived at the east side of the parterre gardens. “I did not notice it yesterday.”

“Merely a lily pond,” she said, “with a wrought-iron seat beneath a weeping willow tree. I like to sit there in the daytime with a book.”

He led her down the sloping lawn toward the pond and she made no protest, though perhaps it was not quite the thing to wander so far from the house when the drawing room was filled with guests.

Ah, but how could she resist? She was twenty-one years old and had never had a beau. She had never met any man whose courtship she wished to encourage, though she hoped for marriage and children one day and a home of her own. She had always hoped for affection and companionship in marriage and an equality of mind and temperament. She had never dared dream of love.

Oh, she had, of course. But she had always told herself she must not expect it.

She was in love now, and it surpassed all dreams.

They sat on the seat, the overhanging branches of the willow hiding them from view and shading them from the moonlight, which gleamed on the water between the lily pads.

“Let us forget reason and emotion,” he said.

“Very well,” she agreed.

“Let us simply love,” he said.

She did not answer, but when he took her hand, she willingly laced her fingers with his and allowed him to rest their hands on one of his thighs.

She closed her eyes again. Surely, oh, surely she had known him longer than a few hours yesterday and a short while this evening. She knew the feel of him, the warmth of him, the male smell of him.

Surely she had always known him, always loved him.

But such thoughts were too dizzying.

“Tell me about India,” she said softly.

He did, enchanting her with his descriptions of the land and the people. It was very obvious to her that he had been happy there.

“What are your very fondest memories?” he asked her when he was finished.

“My mother,” she said.

“Tell me.”

And she told him stories of her mother and things they had done together.

Their conversation, or their twin monologues, felt very like speaking to and listening to her own heart, she thought. She had never felt this comfortable with any other human being, male or female.

“I wish I had known Lady Everett,” he told her.

“And I wish I knew your family in India,” she said.

“But we know each other,” he said, “and we are partly a product of our times with them.”

She might have protested yet again that they did not know each other, that their acquaintance was still such a recent thing that they were virtually strangers. But somewhere at the heart level she knew that was not true.

She had never known anyone as well as she knew him.

He had lifted their clasped hands and was holding the back of hers against his lips. And then he released it and set his arm about her shoulders. He half turned on the seat, lifted her chin and kissed her.

She turned on the seat so that she could slide one arm behind his back and cup the other hand about the side of his face. She slid her fingers into the warmth of his hair. He drew her closer, wrapping both arms around her.

Jane had never felt desire, except for some vague, undefined yearnings on those nights when she could not sleep. She felt desire now like a raging furnace within. She opened her mouth to him and sucked his tongue deep. She pressed her bosom to his coat and reveled in the feel of his hand against the side of one breast and then moving in to her waist, out to the flair of her hip, and behind to spread over her buttocks.

What should have been shocking had her longing for more and pressing closer to him, her legs spreading on either side of one of his.

She wanted him. The startling thought presented itself with crystal clarity to her mind. And the meeting of mouths and the press of hands was not quite enough. She wanted him there, where she was throbbing and aching.

She had had him once upon a time. They had been together. It had been heaven.

It would be heaven again.

Someone was making sounds of longing, and it struck her that it must be she.

“Ah, my love,” he murmured against her lips.

“Robert,” she whispered back.

She could scarcely see him, but she knew that he smiled.

“Jane,” he said, “you must tell me that—”

But he stopped abruptly and turned his head to one side, listening. She looked beyond him. She had heard it, too, the sound of carriage wheels crunching on the cobbles of the terrace. The party was ending. The carriages had been summoned. The guests were leaving.

They both stood up, and he took hold of his cane while she brushed her hands over her skirt.

“I hope for your sake,” he said, “our long absence has not been remarked upon.”

She clasped her hands behind her and walked beside him up the lawn to the terrace and along it to join the chattering throng of guests who were finding their carriages and bidding one another goodnight and calling thanks to Jane’s father and Louisa, who were standing side by side in the doorway. No one seemed to notice Jane come up with Captain Mitford, who stepped forward to help his great-aunt into the carriage that Sir Horace had sent to bring her from the vicarage.

She looked through the open door at Jane when she was seated.

“I hope, my dear,” she said, “you will not catch your death of cold from being outside without a shawl. But blood runs warm in the veins of the young.”

Her eyes twinkled and turned to include Robert in her remark.

“It is a warm night,” Jane told her as Robert handed in his sister-in-law. He climbed in after them and was followed by the vicar.

And the carriage was on its way, as were all the others except Lady Percy’s.

He had said only a quick good-night. He had said nothing about tomorrow.

“It is after ten o’clock,” her father said from the doorway behind her. “I daresay everyone was most gratified to remain so long.”

“No one will talk of anything else for a week,” Louisa added.

“I am quite sure,” Lady Percy said, “Mrs. Mitford will remember this birthday for the rest of her life. It was kind of you to distinguish her in such a way, Sir Horace.”

“This night air will cause the ague,” he said. “You must be on your way without further delay, Lady Percy. I will not keep you any longer. “

“Jane will see me on my way,” she said. “You must not feel obliged to stand there any longer. Go on inside, Sir Horace. And you, too, Louisa.”

Her coachman handed her into the carriage as the front door closed.

“Did you have a pleasant evening, Jane?” she asked. “Captain Mitford seems a personable young man.”

“He has interesting conversation,” Jane said, thankful that the darkness hid her blush. Yet again she found herself unable simply to blurt out that she was in love.

“I shall see you soon,” Lady Percy said, arranging her skirts about her. “Good night, Jane.”

The coachman shut the door and climbed up onto the box, and Lady Percy and Jane waved to each other as the carriage rocked into motion.

Jane stood on the terrace for a few minutes before going back inside the house. She was in love. She wanted to throw back her head and shout it at the moon. It far surpassed her wildest dreams. She could never have foreseen anything as beautifully…carnal as the reality.

Or anything nearly as exhilarating.

She could still smell traces of his cologne on her skin. She could still taste him on her tongue and on her lips. She could still feel his hand tracing her curves, his knee and thigh wedged between her legs. She could still hear his voice—ah, my love.

Would he come tomorrow?

What would she do if he did not? If he never came again?

How would she live on?

But for tonight she was going to relive the memories of the past hour. One hour could have all the power of eternity.

Oh, she was in love.

She adored him.

And of course he would come tomorrow. He loved her, too.

Chapter 4

“I TOLD YOU,” MRS. MITFORD SAID THE NEXT morning while she and Robert were sipping tea out in the little flower garden behind the vicarage, “that something Miss Jane said when she was a child made me faint. I did not tell you what she said, did I?”

“No,” he said. “But she did.”

“Then she does remember,” she said. “She was so very happy, Robert. Her little face was beaming with pleasure. She was not just out to make mischief, though that is what I thought at first. She really believed what she said.”

“About your daughter,” he said.

She sighed audibly and watched the progress of a bee as it visited several flowers with a businesslike buzz.

“She did not just speak of poor Mary,” she said. “She spoke as her. It is absurd, I suppose, what comfort I took from her words days after she had spoken them. She told me that she—that Mary had fallen into the river, that she had not deliberately thrown herself in. A child said that. Do you believe it is possible she was right, Robert?”

“I do,” he said.

She reached out to squeeze his hand.

“And she spoke of a lovely light that drew Mary into the darkness and made her death quite painless,” she said. “She told me he was beckoning her to the light. I suppose she meant the Marquess of Wigham. He died before she did, you know. I like to believe the story, foolish as it seems. I was fond of that young man. It hurt me deeply when he so callously abandoned Mary and broke her heart.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “the story Miss Jane Everett told was not foolish.”

“I wish you had known Mary,” she said. “She was a warm and lovely girl. Strangely, Miss Jane reminds me of her, though she looks nothing like her. And you remind me of the marquess—Peter, his name was—though I do not know why. He was very blond and only of medium height. Perhaps it is the smile and the blue eyes. Perhaps I watch the growing attachment between you and Miss Jane because I can dream that you are Mary and her Peter having a second chance at love.”

“I would like to think, though,” he said, “that I could never be as heartless and cowardly as Wigham was.”

“I deeply resented him for a long, long time,” she said. “I was even glad that he was dead. And of course I blamed him for Mary’s death. But it is not in my nature to hate indefinitely. We all have reasons for what we do. I suppose he had reasons that made sense to him. And perhaps he regretted them before he died. Perhaps Mary did not kill herself. I wish I could know that for sure. It would make such a difference.”

“Did she love you?” he asked.

“I believe so,” she said. “Well, of course I know so. She was an affectionate girl and we enjoyed a close relationship.”

“Then,” he said, “I do not believe she would have done that to you, Aunt Dinah. She would have understood how killing herself would hurt you.”

“You are a good, kind boy,” she said, patting his hand. “And look who has come.”

Her face lit up with pleasure as she looked toward the back door, through which someone had just stepped.

Jane.

She was looking pink-cheeked and self-conscious. She also looked as pretty as any picture dressed in white muslin liberally embroidered with pink flowers and a straw hat trimmed with the same flowers and pink ribbons. Her eyes darted to Robert before she looked fully at his great-aunt and smiled.

“I have been calling upon Mrs. Hancock,” she explained. “She is recovering very well from her confinement, and the baby is thriving. And since I was in the village anyway, I thought I would call here to return your handkerchief, Mrs. Mitford. You left it at the hall last evening.”

“And so I did,” Aunt Dinah said as Jane bent over her chair to set a cheek against hers while she handed her a folded handkerchief. “I missed it last night after we arrived home. I thought someone might be kind enough to bring it to church for me on Sunday.”

But there was a certain twinkle in her eye that made Robert suspect that it had been done deliberately. Great-Aunt Dinah was playing matchmaker.

He drew forward a chair for Jane.

“Oh,” she said, darting him another look, “I must not stay.”

“Do have a cup of tea,” his aunt said. “And then perhaps Robert will walk you home. You did walk into the village, I suppose?”

“I did,” she said, the color deepening in her cheeks, and she sat and allowed Robert to pour her a cup of tea. “Actually, everything else was an excuse to bring me here. I need to tell you something. I can say it before Captain Mitford because he knows what happened all those years ago. Did I hurt you dreadfully on that occasion? I suppose I ought not to have waited seventeen years to ask, ought I?”

“When you told me I had once been your mother?” the older lady asked. “You shocked me by knowing so much about Mary’s death when you were only three or four years old and it had happened long before your birth. And you shocked me by speaking of it as though it had happened to you. But hurt me? No, my dear. If anything, I took comfort from what you said. I chose to believe as much as I could. I liked to think that she was happy as she passed over, and even that she was reunited with that faithless lover of hers. Perhaps he treated her better in the afterlife.”

Jane’s cup rattled against the saucer as she set both down on the table, her tea untouched.

“Forgive me,” she said, “if I am about to shock you again or reopen old wounds. I have wrestled with myself all morning, trying to decide if I should tell you or not. But I think I ought. Something has been trying to grab at my memory for the last couple of days—since your birthday, in fact. And it came to me suddenly in the middle of last night. I woke up knowing it, though tantalizingly only part of it. And memory is perhaps the wrong word. Everyone used to say it was merely an overvivid imagination.”

Robert wished he could lean across the table and take both her hands in his. She was pale and agitated. Something, he knew, had started for her when he came into her life two days ago—or come back into her life. And it was something she could not stop.

“Tell me, Miss Jane,” his aunt said.

“I was told,” Jane said, frowning, “that he abandoned me. I am sorry—that he abandoned your daughter. I cannot even remember—I do not even know his name.”

“The Marquess of Wigham,” Aunt Dinah said. “Peter. He was the eldest son of a duke.”

“Peter.” Jane closed her eyes briefly. “I think it was my mother who told me that he abandoned me—her. I suppose it was what everyone believed, even you. But it is not true. I remembered that last night. He left without me, but he was coming back. He was going to speak with his father, and then he was coming back for me. But he died.”

Robert glanced quickly at his great-aunt. Her mouth was formed into an O, but she said nothing.

“Perhaps,” Robert said, “he was talked out of coming back. Perhaps his father—”

But she was shaking her head slowly, still frowning.

“It was not the misery of abandonment I was feeling,” she said. “It was grief pure and simple. I fell into the river because I was blinded by my tears. I tried to fight the coldness and the weight of my clothes, but then there was the light and the sight of him—Peter—beckoning.”

She spread her hands over her face.

“Perhaps it was a form of suicide, after all,” she said. “I could not lose him again. Oh, but I did not want to die. I wanted to come home to you, Moth— I am sorry. I am so very sorry. I ought not to have said any of this. Mama was right all those years ago. I should have confined my imagination to nursery games. This cannot be real. And now I have shocked and hurt you all over again.”

She got abruptly to her feet and Robert scrambled to his. His aunt, he could see, was gazing at her fixedly.

“Is it possible, Jane?” she asked. “Is it really possible? Are you my Mary?”

“No.” Jane shook her head. “I am Jane Everett. But I think I was once Mary Mitford. I believe we are the same soul.”

She bit her lower lip.

Robert took one of her cold hands in his, and his great-aunt’s eyes moved to him.

“And are you Peter?” she asked. “Were you?”

“I have no memories of him, Aunt Dinah,” he said gently. “But I have lived other lifetimes with Jane. I have seen them in a sort of trance an Indian guru was able to induce in me. We belong together. We always have and always will.”

She looked from one to the other of them, tears brightening her eyes.

“I am glad,” she said and got slowly to her feet, waving off the help Robert would have given her. “I am going inside now to lie down. You must not worry that you have said the wrong thing, Miss Jane. You have said the right thing. I think I may at long last be able to stop grieving for my daughter.”

Robert and Jane watched her make her slow way indoors.

“Why is all this happening?” Jane asked when they were alone together. “What if the things I have just said are all imaginary? What if there is no truth in them at all?”

“You know,” he said, “that there is.”

“And she is happy,” she said. “I could not make up my mind whether it was best to tell her or not.”

“You did the right thing,” he said. “She is happy.”

Jane smiled rather wanly.

ROBERT DID, OF COURSE, walk home with her. She had come into the village to see Mrs. Hancock and bring her some baked goods from the hall. More important, she had come to tell Mrs. Mitford what she had remembered last night—if remembered was the right word.

And overriding both motives for coming was her need to see Robert again. She ought to have waited for him to call upon her, as he surely would have done at a more seemly hour of the afternoon. But, armed with two perfectly good excuses, she had come in search of him.

It was something the usual Jane Everett would never do. She was not a schemer. And she never ran after gentlemen. Not that she had ever before known one she would wish to run after.

As soon as they had left the village behind them and were walking along the secluded shade of the driveway inside the park, he set an arm about her shoulders.

“I love you,” he said.

She had always believed men found it difficult, even impossible, to say those words. But Robert Mitford was not as other men were.

Jane rested the side of her head on his shoulder.

“Do you not find all this as dizzying as I do?” she asked.

“At least that much,” he said. “We need something to clear out our heads. Let’s go swimming.”

“What?” She raised her head again and laughed.

“You told me yesterday,” he said, “about the shallow end of the lake. I could not see it from the summer pavilion. It must be well out of sight of the house or anyone taking a stroll in the inner park, then. It must be quite private, in other words.”

“I do not swim,” she protested. “Besides, it would be very improper.”

“Your favorite word,” he said with a chuckle. He looked down into her face. “You are afraid of water?”

She was about to deny it. But it was true and had been all her life. She also realized the significance of both his question and his searching look.

Mary Mitford had died of drowning.

“Yes,” she said. “I am. And that is not about to change. I do not want it to change.”

“Coward!” He grinned at her and suddenly looked very boyish and hopelessly attractive. “I will hold your hand and not allow you to go even nearly out of your depth. I will show you what fun it can be to frolic in the water.”

“Fun!” she said derisively and then surprised herself by laughing. “Swimming has never been allowed.”

“How old are you?” he asked her. “Five?”

“Besides,” she said, “we have no towels.”

He grinned again and said nothing.

“Oh, very well, then,” she said because she desperately wanted to prolong her time with him and to spend it doing something wild and carefree. “But it will not be fun at all.”

He laughed aloud, took his arm from about her shoulders and laced his fingers with hers as they turned among the trees to find the short route to the lake.

Her father and Louisa had gone twenty miles into town in order to shop and dine at the finest hotel. Edna was spending the day with the Burton sisters. No one would miss her, Jane thought. They would not even if they were all at home. They considered her an oddity, uninterested as she was in appearance and fashion and gossip. They had become accustomed to her frequent absences visiting neighbors or simply tramping alone about the park. They rarely asked her whereabouts.

What would they wear into the lake? Oh, dear, this was all very… Well, improper.

Robert was moving at a smart pace despite his cane. She found herself laughing as they dodged trees. He turned a grinning face to hers, and suddenly she felt happier than she could ever remember feeling before.

It was a feeling that gave way to apprehension, though, when they reached the far bank of the lake and she looked across the wide expanse of water, sparkling in the sunshine.

“Perhaps,” she said as he dropped his cane to the grass and began peeling off his coat without further ado, “I’ll sit here and watch you this time.”

“And perhaps next time,” he said, “you can stand at the edge and watch me.”

“Y-yes.” She looked at him suspiciously.

“You have two minutes,” he said, “to remove your dress and your shoes and stockings. After that you go in, ready or not.”

She laughed nervously. And for the moment the water was forgotten. He expected her to undress in front of him? His coat and waistcoat were already on the grass, on top of his cane. He was pulling his shirt free of the waistband of his pantaloons.

But she could not go into the water fully clothed. Out of sheer vanity she had worn her favorite dress today to call at the vicarage. And her new silk stockings.

She kicked off her shoes.

Two minutes later she felt very naked, even though her shift covered her almost decently from above her bosom to her knees. He was wearing only a pair of drawers, which sat on his slim hips and just revealed his knees. Her eyes were drawn for a moment to the terrible scars that marred his right leg, but only for a moment. A bare male chest, well-muscled and dusted with dark hair, was a powerful distraction. The sun had surely grown hotter.

He reached out a hand for hers.

“We will wade in,” he said, “and enjoy the coolness of the water. I promise not to take you out of your depth or let you fall in. Trust me?”

“I will,” she said, smiling ruefully, and they stepped together into the water, which was a safe ankle-deep by the bank.

“Oh!” they both exclaimed together and danced from one foot to the other as they accustomed themselves to the coolness of the water.

They walked and then waded deeper, until the water reached almost to her shoulders and to his chest. It was beginning to feel warmer—and Jane was beginning to feel more fearful.

He stopped and turned to her and held her firmly by the waist with both hands. They were warmer than the water. So were his lips when he set them against hers.

She must be growing into a wanton. She was becoming accustomed to this—and to the rush of hot desire that came with the kiss. She wrapped her arms about his neck and then, when the kiss had ended, she braced her hands on his shoulders and jumped up and down a few times because she had too much energy simply to stand still.

He jumped with her, and after a minute or two they were both laughing helplessly as water splashed over their shoulders and up into their faces.

“Hold your breath,” he said, “and duck your head under. You will be quite safe.”

“No,” she said.

“Watch,” he said, and he did it himself without letting go of her waist.

He came up looking sleek with his hair plastered to his head and water streaming off his face and shoulders.

“I am an incurable coward,” she told him.

“And with good reason,” he said. “But this is a different lifetime, Jane. Let’s do it together. Keep your hands on my shoulders.”

She would regret her loss of courage tonight if she did not do it now, she knew.

She gripped his shoulders more firmly, sucked in a deep breath, shut her eyes tightly, and allowed herself to go under with him until she could feel the water closing over the top of her head and shutting her into a different world. A world without air. She shot back to the surface and gasped for air and scrunched her eyes more tightly closed. She was probably gripping Robert’s shoulders hard enough to leave bruises.

“My brave Jane,” he said, laughing and squeezing her waist.

She opened her eyes and smiled. Her coiffure, over which she had labored with far more that usual care today, must be sadly ruined.

“Try it again,” he said. “But open your eyes this time.”

Now he was asking the absolute impossible. But she did it again, and when they were below the surface, she opened her eyes and did not experience the terrible pain she had been expecting.

She was looking at him beneath the water, and his eyes looked back into hers with warm admiration as his hair waved in a halo about his head.

And then they were back up on their feet again, the sky stretching blue from horizon to horizon above their heads, the sun beaming down brightly on them, the lake floor firm beneath their feet, the air sweet and fresh. Back in the world.

But something had changed.

Everything.

She turned to wade back to the bank, and he came after her, no longer touching her.

“I am sorry,” he said as they neared the bank. “I broke my promise and frightened you.”

“No,” she said. “You did not take me out of my depth, and if I was frightened, I also knew I was perfectly safe, Robert.” She stopped walking, and they stood facing each other. She reached out one hand to cup the side of his face. “It is you. It really is. But this time, instead of beckoning me deeper into the light beyond death, you were warm and human and brought me up into the light of the sun. Oh, Robert, you are human. We both are. It is a wonderful thing to be. Love can be experienced so much more… Well, so much more when one is in human form.”

She blinked her eyes. It was not the lake water that was blurring her vision, she realized. She turned away from him and stumbled onward, coming to a stop only when she reached the heap of their clothing on the grass. She fell to her knees beside her dress.

Robert Mitford looked nothing like Peter, Marquess of Wigham. But she had known there beneath the water that they were one and the same nevertheless and that she loved Robert with all her heart and soul, as she had loved Peter and all his other incarnations back through the ages.

Loved and lost each time, if Robert was to be believed.

And this time?

He was on his knees behind her, drying her arms and shoulders with his waistcoat, squeezing out the ruined knot of her coiffure before removing the pins and letting her hair fall about her shoulders.

“I love you with everything that is myself,” he said, his voice deep and warm. “I always have, and I always will.”

And she turned on her knees, and they wrapped their arms tightly about each other and pressed their faces to each other’s shoulder for long moments before raising their heads and gazing into the depths of each other’s eyes.

He kissed her. And she kissed him back with equal ardor.

He was no longer a stranger. He never had been. This was no longer improper, wrong, immoral. He was the man she had loved from all eternity and would love to all eternity.

“Jane.” His mouth was hot against her throat. His hands had pushed up under her shift to cup her buttocks and follow the flare of her hips to the curve of her waist and the firm weight of her breasts.

She raised her arms, and he lifted off the shift and dropped it to the grass beside them.

She felt curiously unembarrassed as his hands came back to her breasts, supporting them from beneath as one thumb pressed against a nipple, and his mouth came down to suckle the other.

She twined her fingers in the warm wetness of his hair and then lowered both hands to move along his thighs, spread on either side of hers.

He raised his head to pull his coat closer and spread it on the grass, and then he lowered her to lie on it while he peeled off his drawers. She sucked in her breath at the sight of him. She had never… Oh, it did not matter. She wanted him. She needed him. And this was right.

Nothing in her life had ever been more right than this.

He parted her thighs with his knees, came down onto her, slid his hands beneath her and came inside her, all long and hard and hot and hurting. And then not hurting at all, but hard and lovely.

Shockingly lovely.

He was her lover, the completion of her soul, and they had these bodies so that they could enjoy their love with all the carnality of their human senses and with the rhythmic give-and-take of this lovely act of ultimate intimacy.

She did not know how to make love. She did not know how to accept a loving. Yet she knew it all at the deepest core of herself, and she moved with him as he loved her and wanted it to go on and on forever and forever.

The one disadvantage of the human condition, of course, was that nothing was forever. Passion strove toward the crest, hovered for a moment upon the very peak of longing and pain, and then swooped into the lovely flowering of pain that turned out not to be pain after all but an exhilarating sort of peace.

A contradiction in terms.

And yet not.

Like all the dualities of human life.

“Robert,” she murmured against his ear.

“My love.”

She wondered as she sank deeper into lethargy if she would be sorry for this. Sanity was bound to reassert itself soon, surely.

But not yet.

Ah, not yet.

He raised his head, and they kissed each other with warm languor. She wrapped both arms about his neck.

He was warmly, deliciously human.

They were still joined at the core.

Chapter 5

THEIR CLOTHES HAD DRIED IN THE HEAT OF THE sun while they dozed side by side. But they were both awake again. Their hands were clasped on the grass between them.

That was something he had not intended to do, Robert thought, and ought not to have done. But he could not feel as sorry as perhaps he should. There had been an inevitability about it.

“Marry me?” he asked, squeezing her hand a little more tightly.

And then it struck him that it was hardly a memorable way in which to ask such a momentous question, though it was just the way he had asked two days ago. He turned his head toward her. She was looking back, and she was smiling. Her hair, half-dry, was a tangled mess. It somehow made her look more beautiful than ever.

“Yes,” she said.

Just like that? Was it to be easy after all, then, during this lifetime?

“I ought to have spoken with your father first,” he said. “Will he give his blessing?”

From what he had seen of Sir Horace Everett, the man was vain and arrogant. He also seemed almost unaware of the existence of his two younger daughters.

“I do not know,” she said.

“But you are of age,” he reminded her.

“Yes.”

“Will you marry me even if he disapproves?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I cannot offer you a great deal, Jane,” he said. “A captain’s pay is no fortune, and following the drum is not always comfortable, even for an officer’s wife. But my parents are kind, hospitable people, and would give you a perfectly comfortable home if you should choose not to travel with me. Eventually, of course, my father’s property will be mine, though I cannot hope that will be soon. My grandmother’s modest fortune will be divided among Gerald, our sister and me when she passes, but I also hope that will not be soon. I am scarcely a dazzling match for you.”

“I do not want a dazzling match,” she said. “Only a decent, sensible one that promises to bring me more happiness than I ever dreamed possible.”

“Now that,” he said, smiling, “I can bring you in abundance.”

“I know,” she said as she came into his arms.

And that was that. It seemed almost too easy.

“I will call on Sir Horace tomorrow morning,” he said as he walked with her back to the house later. “Will that be a suitable time, do you suppose?”

“I will talk to him this evening,” she said, “and prepare him.”

He set an arm about her shoulders and she wrapped one about his waist.

“I ought to apologize,” he said. “I ought not—”

“Don’t,” she said, touching a finger to his lips. “Please don’t regret it. I will not. I will always remember our one perfect afternoon.”

Her words sounded a faint note of foreboding. Their one perfect afternoon? There would surely be others, and perfect mornings and nights, too. There would surely be a perfect lifetime together and a perfect forever.

He turned her to him just before the hall came into sight and kissed her slowly and deeply.

“I will see you tomorrow, then,” he said, “after I have talked with your father. We will be officially betrothed, Jane, and soon we will be married and beginning our happily-ever-after.”

“I will wait for you,” she said, “down by the lily pond. Provided rain is not tipping down.”

“Tomorrow.” He kissed her again, and when they arrived outside the stable block, he turned down the driveway while she continued on to the house.

It struck him after he had seen her reach the front doors and turn to wave to him that, though he was using his cane, he did not really need it for every step any longer. He was healing, recovering. Soon he would be able to think about getting back to his regiment.

With a wife to comfort his days and warm his nights.

SIR HORACE EVERETT WAS very upset indeed that a daughter of his would consider besmirching the name of Everett by marrying a cavalry captain of no social significance whatsoever. It was even said that the family’s very modest fortune had been made a few generations ago in trade.

Jane had sought him out in the library, where he retreated most evenings after dinner in order to enjoy his port. He was sitting by the fire, his handkerchief in one hand, his feet on a stool, a general air of distress and injured consequence about his person.

“His brother is our vicar,” he said rather as if that fact set the Mitfords on a social par with the Everett boot boy.

“Mr. Mitford senior has a comfortable fortune, Papa,” Jane explained. “And Captain Mitford is his elder son. Besides, Captain Mitford has distinguished himself in battle and has even been mentioned by name in dispatches. He is well-bred and well-educated.”

And I love him.

“And a cripple,” he said with clear distaste. He reached for the bottle of smelling salts on the table beside him and wafted it beneath his nostrils. “You will not do this, Jane. A Miss Everett of Goodrich Hall can do far better than a crippled army captain. You cannot aspire to a title, perhaps, as Louisa can, but you can expect a husband with £6,000 a year at the very least. No, Jane, I will not hear of such a match for you. Send the young man a letter and tell him he need not come here tomorrow. It would be too much for my nerves to receive him.”

“Papa,” she said, “I love him.”

He looked repulsed, even shocked.

“Love?” he said. “Is a daughter of mine to behave like the vulgar masses and talk of love?”

“I wish to marry him,” she said, clasping her hands at her waist. She had not been invited to sit down.

“You may wish again, miss,” he said. “You always were a trial to me from your childhood on. Sometimes I wonder how you can possibly be mine. I wish your mother had survived. She would have talked sense into you.”

“I wish she had lived, too,” Jane said.

He waved the salts beneath his nose again before setting them aside.

“I will have to send for Lady Percy,” he said. “She must come after breakfast tomorrow morning before this dreadful young man puts in an appearance demanding to speak with me. Lady Percy will advise you. She will support me. She will speak to this soldier and put him in his place. Such insolence! And to think that I condescended to receive him at Goodrich Hall just last evening.”

“This soldier is Captain Mitford,” Jane said softly.

“Write to Lady Percy,” her father said. “Tell her she must come as soon after breakfast as she can. Tell her she must have an early breakfast. And tell her I will send my carriage. It is an embarrassment to have that ancient coach she rides about in seen outside my front doors. Go, Jane, but before you do pour me a glass of brandy. I am feeling quite faint. I must advise the vicar to send his brother away without further ado. I daresay he is a distraction. I did not think last Sunday’s sermon quite up to the vicar’s usual standard.”

Jane did not point out that Captain Mitford had not even been at the vicarage last Sunday—or that her father had snored through the sermon, as he always did. She poured the brandy without another word, set it in her father’s hand and left the room to carry out his instructions.

Lady Percy was her dearest friend despite the twenty-year gap in their ages. And she was sensible and intelligent and diplomatic. She had always been able to soothe Sir Horace’s vapors. She would soothe them now and plead Jane’s case with him. She would make him see that marriage to a cavalry captain, eldest son of a gentleman of modest means, was really not a dreadfully degrading match for the middle daughter of a baronet.

She wrote a fairly lengthy letter, explaining how she and Captain Mitford had met and fallen deeply in love, and how he had proposed marriage to her this afternoon and she had accepted. She described her father’s reaction and her own reasons for holding firm. She sent the letter with a servant and imposed patience on herself until morning.

LADY PERCY ARRIVED AT GOODRICH soon after Jane had eaten breakfast. Not that she had eaten a great deal. She was feeling too agitated. Her father was still in bed. So were her sisters.

Lady Percy came hurrying into the morning room on the heels of the butler. Jane went to meet her and felt the reassurance of setting her hands in the older woman’s outstretched ones. Lady Percy had stood in place of her mother since the latter’s death when Jane was fifteen. It was an enormous relief that she had come promptly and had arrived before Robert.

“Jane, my dear girl,” she said, “whatever is all this about? Has Captain Mitford been presumptuous and set his sights upon a daughter of Lady Everett? Oh, how unpardonable of him! And have you fallen prey to his charm, poor dear? I might have guessed that you would. You are young and impressionable and meet far too few eligible young gentlemen. That must change, and I shall tell Sir Horace so in no uncertain terms as soon as I see him.”

It felt to Jane as if her heart had slipped downward in the direction of her slippers. And she remembered Lady Percy’s saying just a few days ago that Robert was ineligible.

“I think,” she said, smiling, “it is as much a case of me setting my sights upon a military hero. It is very presumptuous of me. But we love each other, you see, and nothing can make us happy except marriage to each other.”

“Oh, my poor love.” Lady Percy released her hands in order to set one arm about her shoulders and seat them both on a sofa. “I can remember falling in love once, too, when I was young. It was a delightful feeling, but of course it was not one upon which a steady future or lasting happiness might have been built. There were other far more important considerations, as there are in your case. You are such a sensible, mature young lady, Jane, that I sometimes forget you are only twenty-one. You need to be married. Oh, indeed you do, and I shall be quite firm with your father on the subject. Whenever he goes up to London for a few weeks, he thinks to take only Louisa with him. It is unpardonable when you are all of marriageable age.”

Jane’s heart, in the soles of her slippers, felt leaden.

“Why is Captain Mitford ineligible?” she asked. “He is a gentleman.”

“And you, Jane,” Lady Percy said, squeezing her shoulder, “are the daughter of Sir Horace Everett of Goodrich. It is an old, illustrious title and an old, illustrious family.”

“He is only a baronet,” Jane said. “He was not even the son of the last baronet, but a nephew. I am his middle daughter.”

“Jane.” Lady Percy took her arm from about Jane’s shoulders and held her hands in a firm grasp again. “It is far more than that. You are very different from most other young ladies of my acquaintance. You are superior to them all. Certainly you are better than your sisters, even Louisa. You have a superior mind. You must not throw it away by becoming a soldier’s wife and following the drum. You would be desperately unhappy once the glow of romance had faded from the relationship. And fade it would, Jane. I assure you of that. Oh, I hate to see you hurt, and there is a hurt look in your eyes now, but I must plead with you to listen to an older and a wiser mind. Listen to me as though I were your dear mother. She would hate to see you being led astray like this by an infatuation. It would break her heart.”

Jane got to her feet, but before she could make any answer, the door opened to admit her father.

“Ah, Lady Percy,” he said, “you have come. And not before time. I had not a wink of sleep last night and feel quite haggard this morning. It took my valet twice as long as usual to make me presentable. You have talked Jane out of her madness, I hope?”

“Oh, not madness, Sir Horace,” she said, smiling. “But I believe I have convinced her to be her usual rational, sensible self again and listen to advice. She is so lovely. Lady Everett would have been proud of her. I need to talk to you about taking Jane and Edna, as well as Louisa, of course, to London with you next spring. They need to attend some of the entertainments of the Season. They need to meet eligible young gentlemen. They need to make the brilliant matches they are surely destined to make as your daughters.”

“It would be a severe strain upon my nerves,” he said with a sigh.

“Nevertheless,” she said. “Imagine how you will be admired as the father of three such—”

Jane did not wait to hear more. Robert would surely be here soon, and she did not want to see him when he arrived. She hurried from the house without stopping to fetch a shawl or bonnet despite the fact that it was cooler outside today than it had been for the past week.

She half ran down to the lily pond so that she could sit hidden from view on the seat beneath the willow tree.

Her heart pounded in her chest, in her ears, against her temples.

She would hate to see you being led astray like this by an infatuation. It would break her heart.

Would her mother, too, have opposed this match if she had lived? Oh, surely not. But Lady Percy had been her dearest friend. They had thought alike on most issues. As she lay dying, Mama had begged Jane always to listen to Lady Percy, always to go to her for advice and comfort.

But Lady Percy did not know all the facts.

What would she say if she did?

If she knew that Jane had recognized Robert as soon as she met him as someone she had known and loved in a previous lifetime? That he had been searching for the soul mate he had loved and lost through countless lifetimes? That they had found each other and fallen passionately in love and knew beyond all doubt that they belonged together in this lifetime and for all eternity beyond it? That yesterday afternoon they had acted on their love for each other and made love on the grass by the lake?

What if Lady Percy knew those things?

She would look at Jane with considerable alarm. She would think she really had gone mad.

It did sound like madness.

Was it?

Had she been led astray by infatuation?

ROBERT STEPPED OUT OF Goodrich Hall an hour later. He looked up at the sky and saw without surprise that clouds had moved over while he was indoors. The breeze was cool. It looked as if it might rain later.

He was not worried about Sir Horace Everett’s opposition to his marriage to Jane. The man was weak and vain and vaporish, and Jane had said yesterday that she would marry Robert even if her father disapproved.

It was Lady Percy who concerned him. She was sensible and well-bred. She had been Lady Everett’s friend and had promised that she would always watch over Jane as she would her own daughter. She had advised and would continue to advise Jane to refuse his offer. Sir Horace would take her to London next spring, and she, Lady Percy, would go, too, and Jane would find a husband suited to her temperament and station in life.

Robert did not like Lady Percy, and it was clear to him that she did not like him. He worried about her influence.

It was a relief to see as he walked down the sloping lawn to the lily pond that someone with a yellow dress was sitting beneath the willow tree. At least she had come.

She did not lift her head as he approached, though. She looked down at her hands, which were tightly clasped in her lap. She was not wearing a shawl or anything warmer. He could see goose bumps on her arms.

“Jane?” he said.

She looked up then with calm, opaque eyes, and he knew that all was lost.

“At first,” she said, “I thought that if I told them everything, they would understand and gladly give their blessing. But I did not tell them. They would have thought I was mad. And perhaps they would have been right.”

“Perhaps?” He made no move to join her on the seat.

She spread her hands across her lap and looked down at them again.

“They would be right,” she said. “Lady Percy says I have not met enough gentlemen, and she does have a point. I have not met any except the neighbors with whom I grew up. It is understandable that I fell in love with you, and that I justified the intensity of my emotions by convincing myself that we have always loved. Through eternity. I am only sorry that in allowing myself to be so deluded I led you astray. I hope I have not hurt you too deeply. But perhaps it is conceited to think I might.”

How right he had been to fear Lady Percy’s influence.

“Jane,” he said, “you know it is not delusion. And even if it were… Well, socially we are not so very far apart. And if it is my nomadic existence as an army officer that is the chief impediment, I will sell out and settle down in one place and make a home for you and our children. We will never be destitute or even poor. And we will always have something of infinitely greater value than any fortune. We love each other.”

“I must listen to those who are older and wiser than I,” she said. “And I am convinced my mother would have counseled me to refuse you. She was the most important person in my life.”

“More important than I am?” he said.

She looked at him again, her eyes troubled.

“My mind is clouded by emotion,” she said. “I must listen to those who can think clearly. Perhaps at some time in the future…”

“I will come back?” he said when she did not complete the thought. He could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “Perhaps I will capture a fortune in spoils at some battle. Perhaps my grandmother will turn out to be far wealthier than I suppose. Perhaps my father—”

“Please,” she said, lifting a staying hand. “Please don’t be angry, Robert.”

“Perhaps I will come back,” he said. “My brother lives here, after all. Perhaps my circumstances will have changed by then. Perhaps your mind will have changed. Perhaps we will find that we still love each other. Perhaps we will marry and live happily after a few wasted years. But there are too many perhapses there, Jane, to provide any sort of comfort. Life is too full of uncertainties for us to be sure that there will be a second chance to do what we ought to do now.”

She lowered her arm.

“I need time to think,” she said.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that it is when you have time to think, Jane, that you allow doubts to cloud your judgment. Your heart is clear on what you feel, what you want, what you know will bring you fulfillment and happiness for a lifetime and beyond. Your head, your thoughts, bring doubt because what you have experienced during the past few days does not appear to make rational sense.”

“It does not,” she agreed.

“Jane,” he said, “look at me and tell me you are prepared to give up everything I represent for you just because your father and your mother’s friend are opposed. Tell me that you truly believe your heart should be subordinate to your head—or rather to the heads of others.”

She did look at him, and frowned.

“I need time,” she said again.

But something had snapped in him. He could feel panic bunch like a cold, iron fist low in his abdomen, and he understood again the main frustration of the human condition with all its dualities. They were one soul, he and Jane, but here in this human form they were two, and it took two to restore the unity he craved. In the last lifetime he had forsaken her. In this lifetime it was the other way around.

“This is all the time you have,” he said, and he could hear the change in his voice. Instead of being warm and pleading as it had been thus far, it had fallen flat. “This moment. I cannot promise the future. Neither can you. The future does not exist. You must decide now.”

He could see an answering flash of anger in her eyes before she lowered them to her lap again.

“Then I have decided,” she said. “The answer is no. Good bye, Captain Mitford.”

He did not even say goodbye. He turned on his heel and strode away in the direction of the driveway. He did not realize for a while that he was carrying his cane at his side, not using it.

JANE SAT WHERE SHE WAS for a long time, oblivious to the chill of the air and the passing of time.

She stared sightlessly at the water until at last she realized she could no longer see it clearly. She wiped away her tears with the heels of her hands, but she was sobbing too now, and the tears were coursing down her cheeks too fast to be dried with her bare hands.

She wept helplessly and painfully for several minutes before fumbling for a handkerchief in a side pocket of her dress. There was none there. She got to her feet and stumbled the few steps to the edge of the pond. She would wash off her face and dry it with the hem of her dress. Her complexion must be all red and blotched. It would not do to be seen thus when she went back to the house.

She almost lost her balance at the edge of the pond and tumbled in headfirst. She took a hasty step back to safety.

And something shifted inside her.

That had happened before. Then, too, she had been half-blinded by tears and distraught with grief. Except that then she had not been able to regain her balance but had fallen in. And the water had been swollen by heavy rains and was cold and fast-moving. She had drowned.

But before that, before she fell in, there had been a tree.

Jane turned sharply to look at the willow. But it had not been a willow tree. It had been something far more monumental. An oak. A great spreading tree with hidden clefts and hollows. And one in particular. It was why she had come there. She had had to see it again. And it had deepened her grief to such a wretched degree that she had cried until there were no more tears but only an unbearable pain in her chest as she continued to sob. She had wanted her mother. She had wanted to pour everything out to her at last. She had yearned for her mother’s arms. But she must not go back looking like this. She must wash her face, smooth back her hair…

What was it in the tree?

Jane frowned in concentration.

And then remembered…

“Oh, God,” she said aloud. “Oh, dear God.”

And what was more, she knew which tree. There was only one oak like that one. It stood alone on the riverbank just outside the village, not far from the smithy.

She picked up the sides of her skirts and ran, forgetting all about her appearance and the chill breeze and the darkening clouds overhead.

Oh, why had she defied memory all these years?

And when memory had begun to return this week, and she might have redeemed herself, she had lost faith again. She had taken fright.

When she had been sent Robert, the completion of her own soul, she had recognized him, gloried in the recognition and loved him passionately and recklessly—and then denied the knowledge and sent him away.

She had made reason and common sense her gods.

She had allowed people who did not know what she knew or understand what she understood to be her mentors.

SHE CONTINUED TO RUN even when her breath came in labored gasps.

But when she reached the river and the ancient oak tree, she almost lost courage again. How absurd to believe that it might still be here. She was twenty-one years old. She had been born fourteen or fifteen years after Mary Mitford’s death. That had happened thirty-five years ago or more.

Could one box survive that long hidden in a tree? Assuming no one had found it and tossed it on a rubbish heap in the meanwhile, of course.

She stood beneath the tree, catching her breath and closing her eyes and trying to concentrate. Trying to remember.

She lifted her right arm. Waist level? Above her head? Stretched upward as she stood on her toes? Perhaps she had had to climb up into the branches.

And then she held her arm at shoulder level and knew it felt right.

The great trunk divided into several huge branches at that point. There were clefts galore into which one might push something reasonably small to hide it. And, over there was an actual hollow, a hole that might stretch down all the way to the ground. It would be too deep to reach into.

Jane reached across the branches anyway and set her hand into the hollow and felt about. At first she thought there was nothing there, but then she felt it—the edge of a metal object wedged underneath the branch, where it would be hidden from view and sheltered from the weather.

She was breathless again by the time she had pulled it out. It was rusty and half-corroded, but it was unmistakably a metal box. She could still see traces of the remembered roses painted on its lid.

It was locked. But even if she had had the key she would surely not have been able to open it.

Besides, it was not hers to open.

She clutched the box to her bosom and hurried off in the direction of the vicarage.

Chapter 6

JANE WAS FORCED TO PAUSE A MOMENT AFTER SHE had passed the smithy. She had a stitch in her side and pressed a hand to it as she half doubled over and tried desperately to suck air into her lungs. The box was heavy.

She was hatless and breathless and doubtless red-faced and disheveled. Miss Jane Everett never stepped outdoors looking less than immaculate, even when she intended to remain in the park and did not expect that anyone would see her.

She hurried onward, past the gates that would have taken her back into the privacy of the park, and looked ahead to the church and the vicarage beyond it. There was a flurry of activity outside the latter, just as there had been a few days ago when she had approached it in the gig with her sisters. Except that this time there was only one horse and one horseman—who had just swung himself up into the saddle and was riding away. Three people stood in the gateway, their hands raised in farewell, though he did not turn back to see them or return the gesture.

The vicar and his wife and elderly Mrs. Mitford were the people in the gateway.

The rider was Robert. And he was leaving.

“Stop!” Jane cried and broke into a run.

Her voice was breathless and not nearly as loud as she could have wished. But the three people at the gate turned their heads, as did Mrs. Pickering on the opposite side of the street as she pegged wet clothes on her line.

Horse and rider proceeded on their way.

“Stop!” Jane cried again, standing still and pressing one hand to her side. “Robert!”

And somehow—it seemed impossible that he could have heard her—he turned in the saddle, and then the horse turned about and stood still in the middle of the road.

Jane started running again, heedless of how she must look. She paused for a moment outside the vicarage to set the box down by the gate. Then she ran on.

Robert dismounted and stood watching her for a moment before abandoning his mount and striding and then running toward her. His arms opened as the gap between them lessened, and she ran into them, raising her own to clasp about his neck. He hugged her tightly as though to fold her right into himself.

She breathed in the warm comfort of him.

“Jane,” he was murmuring against her ear, and there was a world of pain in his voice. “My love, my love.”

She tipped back her head to look into his eyes.

“You did not abandon me,” she said. “You did not leave me. You were coming back. You were. You did not leave me.”

She had already told both him and Mrs. Mitford that. But she could see from the deepening light of his eyes that he knew she could offer more proof than just the words this time.

He was the only one in her whole life who had ever fully understood her. How could she have doubted even for a single moment? How could she have allowed herself to be almost persuaded to give him up?

To give up her whole happiness, her very reason for being?

To give up love, the mightiest of all forces?

And in exchange for what? Duty to her elders? Cold logic? Common sense that really was not sensible at all?

“I did not abandon you?” he said, and he smiled at her before he looked beyond her, aware of his brother and sister-in-law and great-aunt still at the vicarage gate.

Jane turned to look at them, too, and he set an arm about her shoulders.

Elderly Mrs. Mitford was bent over the box, wailing.

“It is Mary’s,” she cried. “Oh, it is Mary’s. I searched everywhere for it and never found it. The key was about her neck, and it has been about mine ever since they found her.”

She touched the chain about her neck and looked up at Jane as she approached with Robert.

“You found it, Miss Jane?” she asked. “You found it?”

“It was in a hollow of the oak tree down by the river,” Jane explained.

“But what made you look there, Miss Jane?” young Mrs. Mitford asked. “And—” She looked from Jane to Robert in some bewilderment.

“I believe, Amelia,” the vicar said, “Robert may be staying here after all. I doubt that key will turn in the lock, Aunt Dinah. We will have to break it open.”

“Let me try,” Robert said, and he took the key from his aunt’s trembling hand and worked it into the rusty lock.

It seemed very unlikely that it would turn, but with some persuasion it did. Robert pried open the lid and held the box out to his aunt.

She peered half fearfully inside and took out a browned and curled piece of parchment from the top. She looked beneath it.

“Her journal,” she said. “And a handkerchief. His. You see? You can still make out the W embroidered on one corner.”

“And the parchment?” Jane asked. She was almost holding her breath. She knew what it was, but even now she was not quite sure she could trust her memory not to have deceived her. This was no ordinary memory, after all. This was memory stretching back into another lifetime.

Mrs. Mitford looked at it. Her lips moved but no sound came out. She handed it to Robert and he read it.

“It is a marriage certificate,” he said quietly. “They were married, Mary and the Marquess of Wigham. By special license.”

“Two weeks before his death,” Mrs. Mitford said. “Less than three before hers.”

“Mary Mitford was the Marchioness of Wigham?” Amelia Mitford said. “Oh! Wait until I tell Miss Louisa.”

“I am glad for your sake, Aunt Dinah,” the vicar said. “At least they were married.”

She was smiling—with tears in her eyes. She raised both gnarled hands and cupped Jane’s face with them and gazed into her eyes.

“My dear,” she said. “Oh, my dear. Thank you. For everything. Now I can die in peace when my time comes.”

“This,” the vicar said, “is all very public. We should step inside the house. Will you join us, Miss Jane? I am afraid I understand very little of what had gone on today.”

“Miss Jane and Robert,” Mrs. Mitford said, “need to talk in private, Gerald. They must go around to the flower garden, where they may be private together. But you must take my shawl, Miss Jane. It is not as warm today as it has been.”

They did as they were told. Robert wrapped the shawl about Jane’s shoulders as they went. They sat down on adjacent chairs in the back garden, and he took both her hands in his.

“You remembered?” he asked her.

“When I was standing by the lily pond after you left, I was about to wash my face because I had been weeping,” she said, “and I almost fell in. I would have got uncomfortably wet if I had, but nothing worse. Unlike the last time, when I drowned. But I remembered that before falling in that time I had been looking through my box of treasures that I kept in the hollow of the oak tree. I had been looking at our marriage papers, which you had left with me.”

“Why did I go?” he asked her.

“After we married,” she said, “I think we both took fright. I did not know how to tell my mother and father, and you were quite sure your father would be furious and would cast you off even though he could not disinherit you. We must have decided—I cannot really remember—that it would be better for you to go alone to explain to him and then come back for me. We had probably decided, too, that in the meanwhile I would break the news to my mother and father. My father would not have been pleased with our marriage by special license when he was the vicar here. I think you must have got killed when you were hastening back to me.”

“Jane.” He kissed her hand. “We almost made it through, then, in our last lifetime. But a little cowardice sent me off without you and I was never able to come back.”

“Yes.” She clung to his hands. “It will not happen again, Robert. I will not wait on the chance that you will come back in a few years’ time and circumstances will be more conducive to our marrying. I will not wait a day longer. I want to marry you now—if you will still have me.”

“If I will still have you.” He carried both her hands to his lips and his eyes glowed with the intensity of love. “Gerald is going to make us wait a whole month while the banns are read, though.”

“Oh, bother,” she said.

“In the meantime,” he said, “I will not willingly allow you out of my sight.”

“Or I you,” she assured him.

“I suppose,” he said, “we were allowed the great privilege of a glimpse beyond the veil this lifetime, Jane, because we came so close last time.”

“Yes,” she said.

They sat gazing into each other’s eyes for a long while, their hands clasped.

“It is really you,” he said, smiling slowly.

“It really is.” She smiled back.

“It is a little overwhelming, is it not?” he said.

“More than a little.”

He got to his feet and drew her up with him, and they wrapped their arms about each other again and clung tightly as if daring the world or eternity to part them.

Nothing could or would.

Her father would not like it, Jane thought, but he would grow accustomed to it. Soon, no doubt, he would be slipping my son-in-law, Captain Mitford, the hero from India into his conversations.

Lady Percy would not like it. But she genuinely loved Jane, and she would soon come to see that Jane was happier than she had ever been, and she would relent.

Perhaps Robert’s family would not like it, but they would grow accustomed to her. She had always been able to make people love her. She would not fail with them.

But even if the whole world was against them, it would not matter. They were together—again. And this time they would remain together. Until death did them part and—of course—long after that.

Forever.

“Robert.” She drew back her head and gazed into his eyes. She could see her reflection in them, and she knew he was seeing his in her eyes.

Two souls.

One.

Soul mates.

Was there a lovelier word in the language?

“I love you,” she said.

“I know.”

And he tightened his arms about her waist and lifted her off her feet and spun her about in a full circle, whooping as he did so.

And without the aid of his cane.

Jane threw back her head and laughed out loud as the sun drew clear of the clouds overhead and beamed down upon them.