HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1918
I could not believe I was dying. The
good Dr. Burke knew it, and at first I didn’t believe him. I was
absolutely certain he was wrong, because fate could not be that
cruel, I decided, even though I had every reason to know that fate
is not paying attention on that scale. But as the days passed it
was impossible not to recognize that my lungs were deteriorating
rather than improving. I had died of tuberculosis before; I knew
how it went. And this time my lungs were already ravaged by gas. I
was perhaps the person in the world least afraid of dying, but this
time I could not stand it.
There had been so many lives I had been happy to
leave, even if painfully. So many times I had been eager to start
again, to see where a new life would lead with the hope that it
would lead me back to Sophia. And now I had her and couldn’t
stay.
How would I find her again? Fate might eventually
drop her in my lap again, but at what pace? Five hundred years? I
couldn’t do it again.
I had the power to bring an end to my life. That
was wrong, maybe, but I did. Why couldn’t I live if I wanted to? I
should have been able to. That’s what I thought. I wanted to live.
I’d never asked my body for that before. All the stuff I knew, my
head packed so full of things, it should have made some difference.
I could speak Euskara. I could play the fucking harpsichord. That
should have bought me something. But it didn’t. My body didn’t
care.
I knew Sophia could leave me behind. She could
disappear for whole centuries, never knowing I even existed. I did
the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the
forgetting. I hated to be the one to leave her. I held on to those
seventeen days as hard as I’ve ever held on to anything.
All I could think to do was love her. That’s all a
person can do.
SOPHIA MUST HAVE known, too. She had a sorrowful,
questioning look in her eyes when she came into my room that
evening. As if to say, You’re not really going, are
you?
The two other occupants of my room were gone, one
released from his life and the other to a facility close to his
family in Sussex. I can’t say that I missed them. It gave our
meetings, Sophia’s and mine, a different feel.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she asked, looking
around the room.
“Please.”
“This was my bedroom.”
I sat back against the pillow. “This was your
bedroom?” I glanced at the yellow walls, the tall windows
with the flowered draperies, the bookshelves along the wall. It was
true that it didn’t exactly have the feel of a hospital. “How can
that be?”
“Before it was requisitioned.”
“Really. You lived here?” It was clear from her
accent and her manners that she was well born, but I hadn’t
realized quite how well. I considered this. “So I have been
sleeping in your bedroom.”
She nodded a little mischievously.
“I like that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Very much. Where do you live now?”
“In one of the cottages by the river.”
“Do you mind it?”
“Not at all. I’d be happy to stay, even after the
war.”
“But you’ll move back here?”
“I suppose we will. If it ever ends.”
“You don’t want to?”
She shrugged. “It’s not cheerful here anymore. It’s
far too big for just my father and me, and the gardens are all
grown over.”
The thought of her being born in this grand house
made my claims on her seem a bit far-fetched to me. She was
probably Lady Constance. She was back to being the magistrate’s
wife, and I was the barefoot orphan.
Once I knew her relationship to the house, it
started to fascinate me. It was an old house and full of old
things. Because I was dying, she brought me some clothes from a
grandfather or great uncle and discreetly vanished while I
struggled to put them on. Because I was dying, she agreed to take
me on a walk through the upper floors and pointed out places where
famous men and women had slept, sometimes together.
The next afternoon she brought me books from the
vast library.
“If you’ve lived as long as you say, you’ve
probably read all of these.”
I studied the spines. “Most of them.” I pointed to
the Ovid. “I read this in Latin. And the Aristotle in Greek.”
“So you read Latin and Greek, do you?” She could
tell by my accent and my rank that I was not a product of public
school. She had that challenging look, but it had a few parts of
affection in it, too.
“How could I not, being around so long?”
“What other languages do you know?”
I shrugged. “A lot of them.”
“Which ones?”
“Ask me one and I’ll tell you.”
“Arabic?”
“Yes.”
“Russian?”
“Not the modern way, but yes.”
Her nod was dubious but amused. “Right. And
German?”
“Of course.”
“Japanese?”
“No. Well, a little bit.”
“French?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “Are you being honest with
me?”
“Absolutely. Always.” My face was more serious than
hers.
“It’s hard to believe what you say.”
I touched the curling ends of her hair, and she let
me. I was happy. “Why don’t you search your library. Try to find a
book in a language I can’t read.”
She seemed to like the challenge. That night she
brought me eight books in eight languages, all of which I read
parts of and translated for her. She was able to test me a bit in
Latin and Greek, and she knew enough Italian, French, and Spanish
to be convinced.
“But these are easy,” I protested. “These are all
Romance languages. Bring me Hungarian; bring me Aramaic.”
The look of teasing was gone from her face. “How do
you do this?” she asked in a low voice. “You are beginning to
frighten me.”
OVER THE NEXT several nights she brought me
artifacts from the house. Our second challenge after books and
languages was musical instruments. Her great-grandfather had been a
collector. And I was able to explain the origins of all of them and
play most of them. I played an aulos made of bone and a panpipe
rubbed with ancient wax, and blew into a buccina of a type I
actually played at two points in my military career in Anatolia.
They were too old to get a true sound out of, but at least I could
demonstrate.
She could only bring the ones she could carry, but
one night she led me out of her old bedroom, I dressed in her
grandfather’s riding breeches, to the harpsichord in the music room
to play for her, which I did, and joyfully. My fingers were rusty
and did not possess a great deal of talent to begin with, but the
girl and the moment and my memory carried me.
Afterward, I wanted to kiss her so badly.
“You are extraordinary,” she said. “How do you do
it?”
“You wouldn’t think I was extraordinary if you knew
how many years I’d played. These fingers I have now can’t quite
keep up with me.”
“You say that like you’ve had other fingers.”
“I have. Hundreds. You need to develop the muscles
and to have certain physical gifts to play really well.”
She looked away, and I was scared I had gone too
far with my hundreds of fingers. I came down from my high and
realized I was tired and out of breath and felt frustrated by my
stupid failing body. How was I ever going to kiss her?
“I honestly don’t know how you can be so young and
do so many things,” she said softly.
“And nearly all of them are quite worthless, aren’t
they?”
“How can you say that?”
“What good does it do me to play an aulos or a
panpipe? They are extinct. You have no idea how much time I wasted
on each of those instruments. It doesn’t add up to anything
anymore.”
“It wasn’t a waste,” she said passionately.
I couldn’t help smiling at her warm, pink face.
“You’re right. They gave me a chance to try to impress you.”
She regarded her ten fingers and then looked at me
thoughtfully. “Didn’t it give you pleasure to learn them?” she
asked. “Didn’t you like being able to play?”
“It was a long time ago, but yes, I loved being
able to play,” I answered.
“Then that’s the good of them.”
OUR THIRD CHALLENGE was nautical instruments.
Another of her ancestors had been a collector, so she tried me on
those. Not only did I know how to work each of them, but they were
tremendously rich in memories. Each one suggested a story to me.
Sailing the Cape of Good Hope in a storm, navigating the straits of
fire under a providential ceiling of stars. I told her about
massive typhoons, terrifying landfalls, pirate invasions, and many
drownings, two of which were my own. She loved to hear about
sailing in and out of Venice, and I told her about Nestor the dog.
She took off her shoes and sat on my bed with her feet tucked
under, listening for as long as I could talk. She leaned her head
against my knee, and I prayed she wouldn’t move it.
She sighed when the last lights blinked off in the
hallway and she knew she had to leave. “How did a boy from
Nottingham get so terribly clever at telling stories?”
“I am a boy from a lot of places. I’m just telling
you things I remember.”
She looked at me critically. “I am struggling
against believing you. That was no trouble at first, but now it’s
become difficult.” She studied my face carefully. “There is
something about you that’s not like any person I’ve met. You have a
strange kind of confidence. Like you really are a man who knows the
entire world. Or at least believes it.”
I laughed, just happy that she let me hold her hand
so long. “It’s both, I suppose.”
“Why aren’t you famous? Why aren’t the writers
writing about you and the photographers taking your picture?”
I felt hurt, and I didn’t hide it. “No one knows
these things about me. I don’t tell anyone. I don’t want to be
famous. And why would anyone believe me?”
“Because you can do extraordinary things.”
“And so can many others.”
“Not like you.”
I touched the bandages on my ribs. “I want to live
my life as serenely as possible. I don’t want to be thought of as
mad. I don’t want to be thrown into the lunatic bin, where the
other people with old memories go. I don’t tell anyone these
things.”
“But you told me.”
I turned to her. I felt grave, and I couldn’t act
otherwise. “God, Sophia. You aren’t anyone. Haven’t you heard
anything I’ve said to you? You might think I’m another pathetic boy
in your care, and I am. But you are everything to me.”
I was sitting up and flushed, and so determined I
could barely feel my lungs or any other part of me. Sophia had
dropped my hand, and she looked as though she was going to
cry.
“Please try to believe me,” I said. “This didn’t
happen by accident. You have been with me from the very first life.
You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my
lives. It’s you who makes me a person.”