Other people interviewed for the book said that when they had seen an angel, or several angels together, they had felt themselves filling with joy, bursting with happiness; some said they had filled with sudden laughter.
The section on ghosts came next, and I read that they were the spirits of the dead, and always took their own form when they materialized. The idea that ghosts did exist was apparently found in every country and culture, and that in general most people agreed on how they actually looked. They were misty, cloudy, transparent, and floating.
Usually, ghosts came to help their loved ones, according to the book. They brought messages of hope and love and frequently materialized in order to tell us that everything was all right. Seemingly, ghosts were attached to the physical world, our world, by their longing for those they had left behind.
The book said there were also bad ghosts, evil spirits who could do harm and who sometimes took demonic possession of a person. I began to read about the Roman Catholic church's attitude toward evil spirits, and the exorcisms which were performed by priests. I found this a bit frightening and closed the book. I did not want to know about evil spirits. I had experienced enough evil to last me a lifetime.
After returning the book to its place on the shelf, I went and sat in front of the mullioned window, staring out at the moors. They were a peculiar blue-black color at this twilight hour, rain-swept and formidable, and a shiver ran through me as I thought of being out on them in this weather tonight.
And yet, curiously, I had been close to Andrew up there this afternoon in the storm, closer than ever, and at one moment I had felt his presence most acutely.
Was this because he had always loved storms? Because he had wanted to go out in them when he was a boy, had wanted to become at one with his ancestors riding out to fight their enemies?
I smiled inwardly, thinking of him with such love. My heart was full of him. Unexpectedly, I experienced a feeling of great calmness. It was flowing through me, suffusing my entire being; it was the kind of calmness I had forgotten existed.
I sat there for a long time, looking out the window, thinking about Andrew's words to me today. My birthday. Had he spoken to me because it was my birthday?
I sighed to myself. I was still not sure what had happened out there this afternoon, whether his voice had been real or simply inside me, conjured up because of my yearning for him.
"Here's to you, darling," Diana said, touching her glass of white wine to mine. "I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we can spend your birthday together."
"So am I, Diana."
Placing her goblet on the coffee table, she picked up the small gift-wrapped package she had brought into the library with her a few minutes ago. Handing it to me with a smile, she said, "This is for you, and it comes with all of my love."
"Thank you," I answered, taking it from her and unwrapping it. The small black leather box I held in my hands was worn, a bit rubbed on one side, and when I opened it, I let out a little gasp. Lying on the black velvet was an antique cameo, one of the most exquisite I had ever seen. "It's beautiful, Diana, thank you so much."
Rising, I went over to the sofa and kissed her on the cheek, and then I pinned the cameo onto the lapel of my jacket.
"My mother-in-law gave it to me years ago, for one of my birthdays," Diana explained. "I thought it was a nice idea to pass it on to you, since it's a Keswick heirloom."
"You're always so thoughtful, so loving," I murmured, going back to the chair and sitting down. "You spoil me."
"There's something else I want to talk to you about," Diana went on. "And now is as good a time as any."
She sounded suddenly rather serious, and I looked at her questioningly. "Yes, of course."
"It's about this house, Mal."
"What do you mean?"
"You're my heir now…" She paused for a moment, and I saw the emotion crossing her face. But she recovered herself immediately. "My only heir, and I just wanted you to know that I have had my will redrawn. I've left Kilgram Chase to you, and everything else I own, actually."
"Oh, Diana, I don't know what to say… thank you, of course…" I was at a sudden loss and couldn't find the right words to express myself.
Diana said, "You're young, Mal, only thirty-four today, and much of your life is still ahead of you. And one day I'm sure you'll remarry, perhaps even have children again, and I like to think of you being here with them."
I gaped at her. I was aghast. "No!" I exclaimed. "I won't remarry-"
"You don't know what's going to happen," she said, interrupting me. "I know how you feel at this moment, and perhaps I was wrong to bring the subject up tonight. So I'm not going to continue this conversation. Certainly not now. However, I do want to say one thing, and it is this, Mal darling. You must go on. We must all go on. Life is for the living, you know."
I had a strange affinity with Lettice Keswick.
I felt curiously drawn to her, and yet she had been an ancestor not of mine, but of Andrew's. Nonetheless, I did feel oddly close to this seventeenth-century Yorkshire-woman, dead now for several hundred years though she had been.
I had grown to know Lettice through her writing-those two diaries covering two years of her life in Stuart England, her cookbook full of recipes for food and wine, and her enchanting, illustrated garden book.
As I sat in the library at Kilgram Chase this morning, leafing through those various books again, I could not help thinking that Lettice had been a lot like me, in many ways. A homemaker, a cook, a gardener, a painter, a woman interested in furnishings and all those things which made a home beautiful. And she had been a devoted mother and an adoring wife, just as I had.
Basically that was my problem. I had not known anything else after college; certainly a few months in an ad agency didn't count. And without my husband and my children, I had no focus, no purpose. Certainly I had nothing to do, and that was not good, not good at all, as Diana kept pointing out. A job was essential.
But what kind of job?
That old question came back to nag me, as it had for some months.
Sighing under my breath, feeling suddenly impatient with myself, even irritated, I pushed back my chair and went outside. I also felt the need for some air before lunch.
I found my steps were leading me toward the walled rose garden, always a favorite spot of mine. But perhaps more so of late, since I knew it had been designed almost three hundred years ago by Lettice. It was exactly the same today as it had been then.
Opening the oak door which led into the garden, I walked down the three steps and stood looking around for a moment or two. It was not a large garden, but it had a special kind of charm, due in no small measure to its ancient stone walls and paths covered with moss and chamomile, two sundials, and various wooden garden seats placed here and there.
Lettice's design was simplicity itself, but that was the reason it worked. There were hedges of shrub roses, ramblers climbing the ancient walls, rectangular beds of floribundas, and circular beds of hybrid tea roses. My favorites were the Old-Fashioned roses, a variety raised before the twentieth century; I liked to think these resembled the roses planted by Lettice so long ago.
It was late May, and since most of the roses currently planted bloomed in June, the garden was not as beautiful or as colorful as it would be then and through the rest of the summer. But because the walls gave the garden shelter and the sun shone on it in the afternoons, a few of the June roses were already starting to flower.
I sat down on one of the garden seats, my mind still focused on a job. I had no idea what I could do or what I wanted to do. I had decided weeks ago that I did not want to work in an office, and of course that limited my choices.
Last weekend, when my father and Gwenny had come to stay with us, he had been in favor of my going to work with Diana at her antique shop in London. And she herself was all for it, was waiting for an answer, in fact.