Cameras; children; everywhere people staring; people laughing; people talking; people only superficially aware of the ghosts that walked around them. Hitching her bag up higher onto her shoulder, Jo stared up at the vast bulge of the gray walls. High above, rippling from the flagpole, was a flag. She felt her stomach tighten as she stared up, half expecting to see again the snarling leopards of John’s standard against the stormy sky. Her mind made a tentative shadowy probe toward the dream, rejected it, and drew back. It was not John’s standard. She could see the brash red, white, and blue now of the Union Jack with, behind it, wisps of high summer cloud and sunlight.
Slowly her hands unclenched in the pockets of her skin as she walked around the castle perimeter, expecting nothing now, the moment past, the ancient stones absolved of her particular nightmare.
It was after five when she got home. She threw down the keys on the table and went straight to the phone.
“Jane? Is Nick there? It’s Jo.”
Over the line she could hear the sound of laughter from the office. Suddenly she felt cut off and very lonely.
Jane came back on the line in seconds. “Sorry, Jo. You’ve just missed him, but he was only going to the apartment. You’ll catch him there.”
Jo sat still for a moment feeling strangely let down. He had promised to return to her. She wanted to tell him what she had done. She wanted to tell him what had happened.
She leaned forward slowly and flipped her notebook open. “Matilda and her son were sent to a dungeon at Windsor…” Jo picked up her pen and crossed out Windsor and wrote Corfe.
Half an hour later she redialed Nick’s number. It rang for several seconds before it was picked up.
“Hello?” It was not Nick’s voice that answered.
Jo felt herself tense nervously. The receiver slipped slightly in her hand as perspiration started out all over her palm.
“Sam?” Her voice was husky.
“Hello, Jo. How are you?”
She couldn’t reply for a moment. Neither could she put down the phone.
“I thought you’d gone back to Scotland,” she managed to say at last.
“I’m on my way.” She could hear the amusement in his voice. “Nick and I had a long talk about things on Tuesday and we agreed that perhaps I should go home.”
Jo found she was pressing the receiver closer and closer against her ear. “I want to talk to Nick.”
“He’s not back yet, but I’m expecting him any second.” His voice was very calm.
“I see. Look, Sam, I’ll call back in a few minutes.”
“There’s no need, Jo,” he said slowly. “He’ll be back very soon. Talk to me instead.”
“I don’t want to, Sam,” she replied in a panic.
“You do want to. You’ve been wanting to speak to me for days; you’ve been needing to speak to me, Jo.” His voice sunk a semitone. “That was why you called, because you realized how much you needed to see me, because of your headaches, Jo. I want you to listen to me very carefully now. Can you hear me, Jo?” He paused for a second. “When you speak to Nicholas he is going to ask you to come to his office party. You are going to tell him you are too tired. You have a headache and you don’t want to see him. You don’t want to see him at all tonight, do you, Jo? You are going to sit down quietly at home and watch television, and later this evening I shall come to you and make your headache better. You do have a headache, don’t you, Jo?”
“Yes.” Her whispered answer was barely audible.
“Then you need me, Jo.”
She stared at the phone for several minutes after she had hung up, a puzzled frown on her face. Why had she talked to him? Why had she listened to him for even a single second? She never wanted to see Sam again, and yet it was true, she did have a headache. It would do no harm, surely, if he came, just for a few minutes, to help her relax…
When Nick called her she was firm and slightly distant. Her headache was worse, like a blinding ligature around her eyes, throbbing incessantly as she tried to focus her thoughts. “I’ll be all right, Nick, really. I just need an early night.” She hadn’t congratulated him on the signing of the contracts with Mike Desmond. That was the reason for the party. She groped for the right words, painfully conscious that the room was beginning to spin.
“You are sure you’ll be okay?” His voice came from far away. “Jo, I’ll look in later. If you’re asleep I won’t disturb you. Take care, my darling…” Darling. He had never called her that before. Smiling in spite of her pain, Jo felt her way almost blindly to the television and turned it on, then she sank onto the sofa in front of it and sat back, her eyes closed, letting the waves of crushing agony beat one by one against the back of her eyelids.
Sam came sometime after seven, inserting in the lock of the street door a shiny, newly cut key. It stuck slightly, then it turned and the heavy door swung open. The second key fitted perfectly. He held his breath slightly as he turned it, wondering if she had bolted the door, but it swung open silently and admitted him to the quiet apartment.
He listened. Yes, the TV was on softly, as he had known it would be. After closing the door carefully he slid the bolt home and slotted in the chain. Then he turned into the living room and stood looking down at Jo. She was lying back against the cushions on the sofa, her face white, her eyes closed, oblivious of the violent fistfight between two men going on on the screen before her. Her body was taut with pain.
“Hello, Jo.” Quietly he walked into the room.
She opened her eyes wearily and gave him a faint smile. There was a quick shiver of apprehension, then it was gone. “Are you going to make my headache better?”
Sam nodded. He stood between her and the TV. “You know what I’m going to have to do, Jo.”
“You’re going to hypnotize me again.”
Sam smiled. “Isn’t that what you want?”
She nodded slowly. “But I don’t want to go back into the past, Sam. I don’t want to regress any more…”
She wanted to stand up, but her limbs were too heavy. They would not obey her. She looked up at him helplessly.
“Were you really William?” she asked slowly. “Or did you just choose him?”
Was there a hint of a smile behind his eyes? Sam was feeling in his pocket. He produced a cassette and, moving across to the stereo, he inserted it into the player. The soft strains of the flute cut across the muted wail of a police siren on the screen in the corner.
“We do not choose our destinies, Joanna. They are given to us,” he said. He folded his arms. “It’s time to take you back. You shake your head. Poor Jo. You are already halfway there. You hear the music? You cannot resist the music, Jo. It takes you into the past. It takes you back to John. It takes you back to the king who has ordered you to be shackled like a common criminal and brought before him on your knees…”
38
John was sitting by the fire in one of the side chambers above the hall when the prisoners, still ragged and damp from the sea and the rain, were brought before him.
He turned in his chair without comment as the three women and Will, reunited at last, stood before him and their guards fell back. Matilda raised her head and looked the king full in the eye for a moment, then proudly, without lowering her head, she knelt before him. The others followed suit, and she could hear, with a sudden snap of irritation, that Mattie had begun to sniff again. No one spoke.
The king held his hands out to the fire and began to rub them slowly together, not taking his eyes from Matilda’s face. “So,” he said at last. “We meet again.”
She was the first, eventually, to look away, dropping her gaze to the border of his mantle, which brushed gently in the rushes around his chair. He stood up so abruptly she had to force herself to remain still and not flinch backward as he came to stand above her. He was so close she could smell the oil of lavender in his hair. The room
