With a wince, I thought of my bedroom in New York with powder all over the top of my dressing table, Horchow Home catalogs falling off the dresser, a box of clothes I’d been meaning to send my sister in one corner.
“Catherine?” the girl said. “Are you all right?”
Turning, I gave the girl what I hoped was a wan smile. I’d better get this over with. As soon as I spoke, she was going to know I was an imposter. “I’m not feeling well,” I said and for the first time actually heard myself. I had an English accent. To test myself I said, “Castle, tomato, and bath.” They came out as “Cahstle, tomahto, and bahth.” I don’t want to go into it, but when I first came to New York, I had an editor say to me, “I just saw a movie about your life.” “Oh? And what was that?” I asked. “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
I can tell you that now I was thrilled to hear myself sounding like Princess Diana.
The girl sat down on the edge of the chaise and glared at me. “If you’re concocting another of your stories, I’ll not help you this time. My brother is very angry with me.”
Before I thought, I said, “Who is your brother?” but even as I said it, I knew. This girl was my sister-in-law, she was sixteen years old, and she desperately, frantically wanted a husband.
The girl gave a grimace. “I know you hate him, but I don’t. If you’d just give him a chance, he—”
“Chance!” I heard myself say. “Your brother deserves no more chances. I have done everything to make my marriage work but what can I do when he refuses to…Refuses to…”
Refuses to what? I thought, then felt a distinct pain in my temples as I tried to read the thoughts inside my head. But then this head wasn’t mine, it belonged to someone else. Does that make sense to anyone besides me?
“Catherine,” the girl said impatiently, “what is wrong with you?”
I would have loved to take a deep breath but my “loosened” stays still allowed my waist to be only about twenty inches in diameter. “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t remember what?”
“I don’t remember what I don’t remember,” I said, smiling.
“One of your riddles! Oh, Catherine, can’t you ever be serious?”
I frowned at that. I hadn’t expected to travel a hundred years into the past and hear the same complaints about my character I’d heard all my life.
The girl got up and began to pace about the room. “You don’t know how serious this is. Tavey is really angry at you this time.” She turned to glare at me. “He’s planning to divorce you!”
At that statement I knew that the woman cowering inside me did know that her husband planned to divorce her. Was that what she was afraid of? Scandal? Come on, wasn’t she—I—made of sterner stuff than that? “Why?”
The girl put her face in her hands and began to cry.
With difficulty, since the middle of me did not flex, I got up and went to the child. “Ellen,” I said softly when the name came to me. “Everything has changed now. There will be no divorce. Your brother…Tavey and I will make up and everything will be fine.” I tried not to be too smug when I smiled. Ellen had no way of knowing that she was not talking to an innocent Edwardian lady, sheltered and protected all her life, but to a thirty-nine-year-old woman who’d seen some of life. And, also, I knew so much more than Lady de Grey did. I knew that this man, my husband, was my soul mate, the one person who was most perfect for me on all the earth. Lady de Grey had never known that.
Ellen pushed me away. “Not this time. This time you’ve gone too far. Tavey knows about…about him.”
At that my eyes widened and I tried to get the spirit of Lady de Grey who was cowering inside my own mind to own up to what she had done, but I couldn’t get a peep out of her. “It will be all right,” I said, trying to reassure the girl.
“It must be all right. It has to be! You promised.”
Instantly, I knew that I had sworn to get Ellen a husband. “I will keep my promise.” Heaven only knows how, I thought. Buy one? Three Fabergé eggs for one husband?
“You know how Tavey hates marriage. He says I’m better off unmarried. But I must, must, must get married!!”
At that I took Ellen’s hand in my own. “Are you…in the family way?” I asked softly.
She was aghast. “Do you mean, am I going to have a baby? You know I’m not married, so how could I be going to have a baby?”
I did not laugh at that. I wasn’t going to allow myself to laugh at Ellen’s innocence. When I was a kid I thought that going to Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday morning was how you made a baby. Looking back on it, it made perfect sense. Every Sunday, my mother came home from church and said, “George, if that oldest Bales girl doesn’t stop going to Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday morning instead of attending church, she’s going to get into trouble.” Then one day came the big, big scandal when it was found out that the oldest Bales girl was going to have a baby but she had no husband. I put two and two together and realized that “getting into trouble” meant “having a baby without having a husband.” And this came about by going to Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday morning. The bad time came when my mother stopped at the drugstore after church and asked me to go in and pick up her prescription. I was paralyzed with fear.
In the end, though, my fear of my mother won over my terror of what happened in Mr. Lloyd’s drugstore on Sunday mornings.
So now I wasn’t about to laugh at Ellen, but she sensed that something was wrong, or at least that something was different about me. She grabbed my arm, showing an extraordinary amount of strength for one so young. But then I remembered that upper-class Edwardian girls often spent their lives on horses, so maybe her strength wasn’t unusual.
She stared into my eyes. “If you betray me, I’ll…I’ll…I don’t know what I’ll do to you but you must not break your promise.”