will be kind to her.”
Matilda forced herself to smile. She nodded. “You are right, of course, Archdeacon.” She felt his eyes probing hers and immediately her wary fear returned that he could read her thoughts; that he might even suspect that Tilly wasn’t William’s child. Desperately she tried to distract him, suddenly very afraid.
“Tell me, Archdeacon, do you intend to write a book about your trip around Wales with His Grace, the Archbishop?” she asked quietly. “It would make a fascinating account, I feel sure. You could include that shameful scene in the churchyard at St. Mary’s this afternoon.” She smiled and saw at once that the bait was taken. His eyes lit up and he was leaning toward her, his face intense with excitement.
Surreptitiously she glanced back toward her eldest daughter’s table. Sure enough, the huge gray eyes were once more focused on her mother’s face. This time Matilda saw not indifference in the child’s face, but fear and-was it longing?
The candlelight was flickering in her eyes. Angrily she raised her hand to her face, shielding it as she turned back to Gerald, but he wasn’t there. A figure was kneeling before her in the sunlight, camera raised. She blinked.
“Tim?”
“Welcome back.” He took another picture and then reluctantly lowered the camera.
“How long have I been sitting here?”
“About an hour.”
“I was at dinner…”
“With Giraldus Cambrensis. I am very impressed with your friends.”
Jo stared at him. “How do you know?”
“I asked you where you were. You seemed to hear me quite clearly. You talked very logically, describing what happened here in the churchyard-the riot and the way the archbishop had to race back to the castle, and the incident where a man tried to get through the gate to give his oath to take up the cross and only made it at the cost of losing his trousers-” He chuckled. “You know of course that Gerald took your advice. He wrote an account of his trip through Wales-the
“And you photographed me?”
“That is what I’m here for, Jo.”
She bit her lip. “It makes me feel so vulnerable.”
“Only your expression.”
“Did I talk about my daughter?”
“You did.” Tim stood up abruptly, dusting the grass from his knees. “The child who made a cuckold of de Braose.”
Jo started visibly. “I said that?”
“You must have, love, mustn’t you?” His voice was very dry. “Imagine little Tilly going to marry a Welsh prince.”
“If she did.” Jo rose stiffly from her uncomfortable seat on the old tombstone. “My grandfather reckoned the Cliffords were descended from a Welsh prince, Tim. Perhaps that is how it happened. Perhaps after all, Matilda was an ancestor of mine. Matilda and Richard de Clare!” She paused for a moment, savoring the thought.
Tim smiled almost wistfully. “And you are pleased that you can still go back into the past?”
She nodded. “I have to find out what happened. Whether Tilly married Rhys’s son. In a way I hope she did. I’m beginning to feel rather pro-Welsh-I like the idea that I could be descended from a prince. Perhaps I could call David Pugh and ask him to look it up in his books. I promised I would call them while we were down here. But dear God! To sacrifice such a child to dynastic ambition. It was cruel.”
“You said she was a strange little girl?”
Jo nodded. “She was distant. Cold. Self-possessed. Not like the boys who romped around like puppies. Yet not like Richard either.” She glanced up at him with a rueful little smile.
“Did William ever find out she wasn’t his?”
Jo shrugged. “I can’t see into the future, Tim. It doesn’t say so in the books that I know of, but I can’t believe that he didn’t guess. She was so different from the others. So fair.”
“And Richard was fair?”
Jo nodded. “Fairish.”
“And you are still fond of him?”
“Matilda, you mean? She still loved him.” Her voice betrayed sudden pain. “That was why Tilly was so special.” She picked a stem of soft creamy meadowsweet from the long grass near her, twisting it between her fingers.
Tim was watching her with half-closed eyes. “Where does Nick fit into all this, Jo?” he asked suddenly.
She stared at him. “Nick? He has nothing to do with it.”
“Are you sure?” He began to lead the way slowly through the grass toward the wrought-iron gates that led out of the churchyard into the road. “I think he is involved-I think he is also living again. As I am, Jo.”
She stopped dead. “Is that why you went to see Bill Walton? To see if you had lived at the same time as me?”
Tim nodded slowly.
“But you said it didn’t work.”
“That wasn’t quite true, Jo. I didn’t go into a full-blown regression like you, but something did happen. It’s not the first time, you see. I’ve had a feeling for a long time that I’ve lived before. Not just once, but many times. I’ve read a lot about it-particularly about Buddhism-and I’ve been taught to meditate and to try to contact my past incarnations through meditation. The Tim Heacham no one knows!” His smile did not quite reach his eyes. “I thought it might help me to come to terms with the present if I could find myself in the past. I went to see Bill to see if he could make things a bit clearer.”
“And did he?” Jo whispered.
He shook his head. “I went back twice after I went with you, hoping he could sort me out. But my alter egos or whatever you like to call them were too angry, too unforgiving, to emerge peacefully.” He snapped off a frond from a sweeping branch of yew as they walked slowly past it. “My previous incarnations were full of anguish, Jo. Full of failure and betrayal.”
“But who were you?” Jo was staring at him. “Why don’t I recognize you?”
Tim grinned bitterly. “Perhaps because we were not destined to play a part together. Then or now.”
“And you think Nick is?”
Tim eyed her silently. Then he nodded.
Jo swallowed nervously. “Nick’s been behaving very strangely. I wonder if he suspects.”
“He would have to be very unimaginative not to.”
“Who was he, Tim?”
Tim shrugged. “You have the cast list, not me. The only thing we both know is that you don’t seem to resemble Matilda physically all that much. You’re not her double or anything-at least, not as far as you know, are you?”
Jo smiled. “Well, I’m not eight feet tall, as David said she was!”
“But your hair, your eyes. If you were in a film, would you and she be played by the same actress?”
“I don’t know. I’m darker, I think. Matilda’s hair was much brighter-almost auburn. I don’t know about her eyes. I don’t remember ever staring at myself in a mirror for long-the mirrors weren’t very good, anyway. They were metal, not glass. You’d have to ask someone.”
“Richard de Clare?” He smiled gravely.
She laughed. “Well, not William, that’s for sure. Oh, Tim, I’m not the right person for this to happen to! I’ve no sense of destiny. I think karma and kismet and things like that are a load of bullshit. Easy ways out. ‘If it’s destiny, then there’s nothing I can do about it.’ That’s a copout. Not for me.”
“And, of course, you have never had the feeling that you’ve been here before.”
“Never! I don’t believe in sentiment and woolly romanticism, Tim. I’m Jo Clifford, remember?”
“How could I forget?” He rumpled her hair affectionately. “So you mean to fight destiny if it dares to rear its
