But I find humor everywhere and I didn’t have to look very hard to see the idea of my praying for a soul mate as quite amusing. My mother impressed on me that good little girls prayed only for world peace.
Anyway, good girl aside, if I’d prayed for a soul mate I would have been afraid I’d receive some hairy LA guy who swore he was a producer and could make me a star. I assured Nora I had not been praying for a soul mate.
So here’s where Nora shocked me. We always believe our minds are our own private territory, unassailable, but then a psychic comes along and tells you what you’ve been thinking and dreaming for the last three years.
She calls it praying but I prefer to call it wishing. I have been wishing I could find the man who’d suit me more than any other man. I remember rather fiercely thinking, There must be one man for me. One man who is better than the others. A man I could love as hard as I wanted to love and he’d love me as much in return. I wanted a man I wouldn’t have to play games with and pretend I didn’t care when he hurt me. I wished for a man I could yell at yet he’d still love me. I wanted a man who made me feel safe. I wanted a man who I deep down inside knew loved me. Not because he told me he did but because I felt it, because just his existence made something deep within me vibrate.
Nor
a said that my books were blueprints for this man.
Nora told me all of this, making my face turn red at having my most private thoughts seen. People who knew me thought I was cynical; my sarcastic humor proved that. No one saw that inside I was mush.
What else Nora pointed out to me was that I’d said I’d take this man in any size, any shape.
It took me a while to remember what she meant. There was one night when I was all alone and I’d had a healthy gin and tonic that I remember with deep embarrassment. Sometimes loneliness and despair can drive a person to new lows. That night I “wished” very hard for this one man and I especially remember thinking that since I was a writer and could travel I’d take him from any country, any state of health, any anything.
So after Nora had told me all this and I felt that I understood it, I felt a little hope. Where was this soul mate of mine? How did I find him? Put an ad in the paper?
Unfortunately, once again, Nora gave me a look of despair. She told me my “spirit guides” had led me to come to her so she could tell me the bad news. Well, actually, Nora said it was good news. I was slated to be given my soul mate three lifetimes from now.
It was all I could do to keep from screaming. Did any part of this woman’s brain live in the real world? There was no such thing as past lives and there sure as hell weren’t any “spirit guides.”
Her obstinacy, her unflappability made me grit my teeth. “I want Jamie and I want him in this lifetime,” I said. “I am an American and I want instant gratification!”
She did laugh at that. “You could have him if you could change the past,” she said, smiling. “But if you met him this afternoon you wouldn’t love him, you’d hate him. You’d hate him at first sight. You’d hate him so much you would never want to see him again.”
I just sat there as she told me that our time was up long ago and she had other clients coming. “Why don’t you find the real Lady de Grey? There must have been more than one of them.”
“Yes,” I muttered, collecting my things and heading for the door. All of this wasn’t real so I might as well do some more research. For all that Rachel de Grey was a nice lady, she wasn’t heroine material. I needed to find a feisty woman who was a match for my Jamie.
I headed for the library, grabbing a hot dog from a street vendor on the way there. No more arrogance, I thought. This time the digging was for real.
5
Once I calmed down and conquered my own ego, I was able to see right away that Rachel couldn’t have been the Fabergé Lady de Grey. Even in terms of personality, Rachel seemed too dedicated to her husband to truly care about perpetuating the art of a great man like Fabergé.
Okay, so now that I’d found out that Rachel wasn’t “me” I could indulge in a little sour grapes. “My” Lady de Grey wasn’t a frivolous woman who spent too much, she was a “patron of the arts.”
Since the Lady de Grey I was looking for did not have the good fortune to be married to a famous man, she was quite difficult to find. It is a disgusting but true fact that women were fairly insignificant unless attached to the coattails of a man. On the other hand, to be fair, there were some famous women whose husbands are not remembered. But, to be even more fair and honest, most famous women never got married, so they didn’t have to ask a man’s permission to do whatever it was they wanted to do.
Anyway, my Lady de Grey was indeed difficult to find. Her name was Hortense but I couldn’t find a birth date on her because in the Edwardian times it was considered impolite to tell a woman’s age, even in a book on the family history. Personally, I wish a little of these manners could extend to the present age. Especially to People magazine. They are incapable of writing about anyone without putting the age of that person beside them, as though age were everything. (I began to hate this custom on the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday.)
When they announced the closing of the library, I was still searching for anything about her. All I could find were the basic facts. She had married Rachel’s son, Adam, in 1904 and had died in 1907, four years after Rachel died.
According to the information I had found, both Hortense and her husband died on June 8, 1907, so I wondered if they had both been killed in an accident and made a note to look up the date of the sinking of the Titanic. After Adam’s death, the title was retired, since there was no one to inherit.
By the time I got home, I felt sad. Writing romances and spending as much time as I do with my nose in history books, I know how important an heir is. As I listened to the divine voice of Frederica von Stade on the stereo, I thought of the great tragedy of this young earl and his countess not producing a son to carry on the family name.
I know this is absurd, but I began to feel guilty about this because I just knew it was my fault. I’d never told anyone this but about ten years ago I’d had a boyfriend who I’d thought was the one, so, feeling it was an okay thing to do, I’d not used any birth control for a whole year. I’d not become pregnant and I think that was a contributing factor in ending that almost-union.
Maybe if what Nora said was true and character did stay the same, I wonder if a woman stayed barren over the centuries? After all, she, Hortense, and her husband were married three whole years but had no kids. And it couldn’t have been any problem with Adam. As every romance writer and reader knows, there are virile names and there are nonvirile names. There are even virile letters of the alphabet. There’s a reason you aren’t going to find too many heroes with names beginning with the letter O.L is also difficult. The best letters for heroes are R, S, and T. However, Adam and Alexander are good names, and every romance writer has at some time named her hero Nicholas.
Anyway, I knew that with a good virile name like Adam, it couldn’t be his fault; it was Hortense’s fault that the title had died out from the lack of an heir.
The next morning I was at the library early. During the night I’d had a brainstorm: If one of the other patrons of Fabergé was Queen Alexandra, maybe I could find my Lady de Grey in books about her.
All in all, I wish I’d never had such a good idea. I found Hortense in books on what was called the Marlborough Set. The house where the Prince of Wales lived, the man who was later to become Edward VII, was called Marlborough House, and the wild, fast people who frequented it were called the Marlborough Set.