I nodded.
'Well, then.' She spread her hands in an expressive gesture. 'It seems to me you're doing fine all on your own. You must be patient, Julia, and trust the process. You will have your answers soon enough, and without my help.' 'I bought something last weekend,' I told her, running a finger along the rim of my cup. 'A sort of box.'
'The lap desk. Yes.'
I raised my head. 'It was inscribed with a letter HI
She tilted her head, birdlike, and studied me. 'The H, of course, is for Howard. You knew that, didn't you?'
'Yes. But
'Which one? Well, I don't suppose I can do any harm by telling you that much.' Her eyes slid away from mine. 'It belonged to John Howard.'
'John?' I turned the name over in my head. 'John? Caroline's baby, John?' I thought of the tiny, red-faced baby, and then of the faded bracelet set carefully away in the lap desk's secret drawer. 'But how did he ... ?'
She cut me off with a shake of her head. 'That is for you to find out,' she told me. 'And you will. Would you like another biscuit?'
She passed me the plate and I took a chocolate wafer, feeling a little dazed. It was strange, I thought, to be sitting here in a perfectly ordinary, cozy kitchen, discussing reincarnation with a witch. In these normal, plain, everyday surroundings our conversation seemed oddly surreal, like people discussing dress patterns at a funeral. And yet, here I was, placidly munching my biscuit and sitting not three feet away from a woman who could read my thoughts as easily as I might read a printed page. She was reading me now, I could tell by the way her eyes met mine....
'I'm sorry if it disturbs you,' she said quietly. 'My knowing things that you don't. But I'm not an old woman for nothing. I've seen a good deal of time, and I've watched it passing, and if I've learned nothing else, I've learned that fate works to a schedule of its own making.' She sat back in her chair and faced me, philosophically. 'It's all rather like a circle, you know,' she went on, 'life is. You start off in one place, and choose your path, and when you finish up you find you're right back where you started from. And that's what you're doing now, with Mariana's life. When you've gone all the way round, when you've closed the circle, then and only then will the purpose of your journey become clear to you.'
'And you're absolutely sure,' I asked her, 'that I'm her ... I mean, that she's ... that Mariana Farr and I are the same person?'
'Oh, yes.' Her eyes were gentle. 'I recognized you at once.'
'Recognized me?'
'I'd seen you before,' she explained. 'Not you as you are now, of course, but you, all the same.'
'Of course,' I said, remembering. 'The Green Lady.'
'And the woman in the Cavalier bedroom upstairs,' she added. 'Mariana haunted both places, for a long time.'
I frowned. 'But I thought that the ghost upstairs was still in residence. It's impossible, isn't it, for a soul to be in two places at once?'
Alfreda Hutherson shook her head patiently. 'There is no ghost upstairs,' she told me. 'Not anymore. What you felt up there was simply the aura of what had been. She left that in the room, you see, much as a person casts a shadow on a wall.'
I was silent for a moment, thinking.
'I see a man, sometimes,' I said slowly. 'A man on a gray horse.
'Richard.' She nodded. 'He is a kind of shadow, too, when you see him like that. Under the old oak tree in the hollow, isn't it? Yes, he spent a good deal of time there. It's natural that something of him should linger. Part of it, you must understand, is a projection of your own mind. When you stare at the sun too long, you see it everywhere.'
Then my instincts were correct, I thought. If Richard de Mornay was not a ghost, then he, like Mariana, could be alive and well and living in Exbury. He could even, I postulated, be living at Crofton Hall. What was it that Tom had told me before? That people who chose to be born into new lives tended to surround themselves with people from their previous lives. We were all of us connected, somehow. Vivien and Iain and Geoff and I ... and perhaps even ...
'Have you and I ever met?' I asked Mrs. Hutherson, suddenly curious. 'Before, I mean. Were you someone I knew?'
She smiled at that, but it seemed to me a sad little smile, and her eyes, when they met mine, had a faraway look in them. 'Ah, well,' she said, turning her gaze away toward the window, 'we were all somebody, once.' She cocked her head, listening. 'That'll be Vivien,' she said, in a decided tone. 'I'd best put the kettle on for a fresh pot of tea.'
I myself could hear nothing but the wind and a faint twittering of birds, but I wasn't in the least surprised a moment later to see Vivien come bounding through the kitchen door as the kettle came shrieking to a boil on the stove.
*-*-*-*
That night I dreamed of my mother. I dreamed I was a small child again, with skinned knees and pigtails, playing in the yard of our home in Oxford, while my mother sat on the lawn beside me, reading. In my dream, my mother's eyes were blue. She is very dark, like me, and I remember thinking how very odd that was, that her eyes should have suddenly turned blue in place of their normal brown, but when I asked her about it, she merely smiled, and kissed me, and sent me off to play.
Our backyard was actually quite small, but as I walked toward the fence, the boundary seemed to recede before me, until I found myself walking in a field of waving flowers, with the sunshine warm upon my shoulders and the air alive with the humming of contented insects. If I reached out a hand and brushed the tops of the flowers, I could smell the sweet and sudden release of their fragrance.