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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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“Why shouldn't I?” Wycherly said easily. “It isn't as if actors are the most stable people in the world—you're in the business; surely you've figured that out? Now tell your Uncle Wycherly what seems to be the problem, and he'll recommend a nice clinic for you.”
Sinah stared at him, not sure how to interpret what she was hearing.
“Oh, come on,” Wycherly said. “You've just told me you're leaving normal. It's only fair for you to tell me why.”
“Well …” Sinah said, drawing out the word.
Wycherly always surprised her. There was kindness in him—in some ways, Sinah knew him better than he knew himself—but the combination of privilege and illness had caused him to dispense with empty conversational pleasantries a long time ago.
She hovered on the verge of telling him everything, realizing that she'd never told the whole real truth to anyone in her entire life—not even Jason or Ellis, the two men she'd felt closest to. She twisted the frames of her glasses, a tiny part of her mind hoping she wouldn't break them. That would be an embarrassing show of stress. Grace under pressure was the only dignity she had.
“Sometimes I think I'm other people.” There! The statement—bald and inaccurate though it was—was made.
“Okay.” Wycherly showed no surprise—nor felt any, as far as Sinah could tell. “I take it this is more than preparation for a role?”
“It's—” Sinah pressed her free hand over her heart, and
felt the buckskin pouch inside its bag crackle beneath her fingers. A prized possession—but hers or Athanais'?
“I can't control it. It's like drowning.”
Now she felt him recoil, though she didn't see him move. Sinah felt a rushing spectral coldness through the portal of her attenuated gift, and for a moment it was as if she was sinking into turbid water that rose higher and higher, over her chest, her
face
… .
“Tell me about it,” Wycherly heard his own words with a strange sense of detachment, as though a strong, sure hand were placed over his own, guiding his actions through the tumult of rushing water that suddenly, vividly, filled his imagination.
To drown, to sleep …
“This isn't the first time it's happened, is it?” he added.
She looked up at him with—gratitude?—and Wycherly felt something in his chest twist. He concentrated on breathing evenly, slowly, revealing nothing.
Be calm,
he told himself.
Don't even be here.
And this time, as distinct from all the failures in his life, it worked.
“Ever since I got here—to Morton's Fork—I've been feeling … watched,” Sinah said. “I knew Wildwood was there; I'd been on the grounds, but I'd never gone up to the sanatorium until that day I found you. And while I was there …”
She stopped, obviously uncertain of how to go on.
“You had a vision,” Wycherly suggested. Beneath his calm, a new worry asserted itself. Did he have competition for whatever nebulous resource Wildwood Sanatorium represented?
Sinah shrugged. “I know all the arguments—self-delusion—self-hypnosis—false memories are easy enough to create under stress—because I wanted to find my family, naturally this vision would concern them. Isn't that what a trained professional would say? But it wasn't my family I wanted to find as much as the reason I—the reason I'm the
way I am. I didn't want to be the reincarnation of Bridie Murphy!”
Wycherly had actually heard of the Bridie Murphy case, where a young woman had claimed to be the reincarnation of a murdered Irish maid from almost a hundred years before. Her testimony about her previous life was unshakable and contained things no one but the dead woman herself could possibly know. To this day the Bridie Murphy case was the one case that professional scoffers and debunkers could not find any way to dismiss.
“And who is it you think you might be?” Wycherly asked. He relaxed. Sinah was obsessed with herself, with her own problems. She hadn't mentioned Quentin Blackburn. Maybe she hadn't seen him. But there was something else she was hiding—you didn't need to be able to read minds to hear that in the hesitations in her voice.
Sinah sighed, and seemed to surrender all at once. “Marie Athanais Jocasta de Courcy de Lyon, Lady Belchamber. That's who I—she—is.”
“Impressive name,” Wycherly said blandly.
Sinah looked at him, smiling crookedly. “Doesn't anything bother you?”
“Are you holding a gun on me? Are you trying to get me into a strait-jacket? No? Then I'm not sure what I've got to be upset about.” Wycherly studied her clinically. Her scarf had slipped off to form a bright collar around her throat, and the tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses were in her hands. She looked young, vulnerable, innocent—he had the sudden suspicion that he could hurt her quite badly if she came to trust him. The confusion the idea made him feel was disturbing.
“I guess you're what they call the original cool customer,” Sinah said, after the silence had stretched too long.
A new awareness was added to the other—that he could have her, and that he wanted to have her.
To do with as he would.
“You've been touring in
Guys and Dolls
too long, Sinah. A simple sense of diminished affect is my only talent, so
it would flatter me if you'd cherish it as it deserves,” he answered.
Sinah smiled at him and reached out to take his hand. Wycherly closed his own over it, wondering at how easy this was. A few kind words, some snappy comebacks, and she was willing to be more than kind. So she thought she was channeling a dead ancestress—so what? The locals thought he was Doctor Strange.
“So tell me about Marie,” Wycherly said.
Sinah got up from her chair and came to stand behind him, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. He didn't mind her being out of sight—he was closer to the cabin door than she was, and the book was safely hidden. He could feel the heat of her body against his back, even through the heat of the day. Her hands were shaking.
And Wycherly did not need a drink, did not want a drink, would not take one if it were offered. It was so easy. All you had to do was to want something else more.
A lot more.
“She thinks—she was called Athanais. She was involved in Monmouth's Rebellion and transported to the New World,” Sinah said.
“How do you know?” Wycherly asked with interest. His school days were far behind him, but he remembered enough to place Monmouth's Rebellion in the England of 1685.
“I had a dream,” Sinah said, and managed a shaky laugh. “Several, actually. She's like an unpleasant houseguest who just barges through the door and settles in. I know her … and I don't like her very much.”
“Well, that makes a change from all those airheads channelling Queen Comeasyouwere. But someone must have liked her—it looks like the name survived in the family. It was an Athanais who burned down the sanatorium.”
“Was supposed to have burned it down,” Sinah corrected absently. She bent, and leaned her cheek against the top of
Wycherly's head in a quick caress. “What am I going to do?” she added plaintively.
“Threaten her, make her go away, the usual things. If she's a ghost, get an exorcist,” Wycherly said offhandedly.
“Yes,” Sinah began, on a note of relief.
She was unprepared for the toxic bolt of fury that seemed to swarm up out of her very bones, raging through her like a whipcrack of fury and loathing. The mind of Athanais, an English countess adopted into a Tutelo tribe and forced by their customs to take the place—live the
life
—of a dead woman.
Never surrender! Never surrender! Hate, and hate, and hate … .
“Just stay there. Don't try to move,” she heard a voice say. Her body revolted and Sinah rolled onto her stomach, bringing up the contents of her stomach in a convulsive heave and then continuing to gag, to choke, as if she were futilely attempting to purge her system of a mortal poison.
As she lay on the ground outside the cabin, too weak to move, she felt Wycherly's arm under her ribs, pulling her to her knees. With the brisk impersonal efficiency of a nurse, he swabbed her face with a wet rag and then pulled her back into a sitting position.
“I'm all right now,” Sinah said unconvincingly. Her body ached with the violence of her sickness.
“Sure you are,” Wycherly's tone was faintly derisive. “There's beer and there's lemonade. Which one does it for you?”
“I … beg your pardon?” She found the scarf around her throat and unknotted it. Miraculously, it was still clean, and she wiped her damp and sweating face. If she'd come down here to impress and beguile Wycherly Musgrave, she'd done a spectacularly poor job of it so far.
No. Not beguile. That was one of Athanais' words, the words of a woman who had sought to prevail through cleverness and trickery … and discovered that blind brute force would always win out in the end. She'd ended her days as
a Tutelo Indian captive, stitching her European jewels into tribal ornaments and bearing the sachem's daughters.
“I
have
lost my mind,” Sinah said flatly.
“You need to get something down you to settle your stomach,” Wycherly responded, as if he were answering her. “So would you rather be tipsy or jittering off on a sugar jag? Lemonade or beer?”
“Tea,” Sinah said faintly, and Wycherly went inside.
Sinah got shakily to her feet, moving as far away as possible from the disgusting puddle she'd left. What must he think of her now?
What had he thought of her before?
an unhelpful inner voice responded. She was Sinah Dellon, after all—the telepath, the girl who knew exactly what everyone else was thinking so well she didn't even have a life to call her own. The girl who'd never had a lasting relationship because she knew how they'd end before they started. Eavesdropper. Outsider.
Pariah.
But now that was changing, because Sinah had found the one permanent role-of-a-lifetime to play out till the end of her days.
Only it wasn't her.
Sinah gazed blearily out at the trees. Memories seeped up through the bedrock of her mind like toxic waste. Athanais de Lyon's memories—the memories of a woman who became, almost three centuries later, Athanais Dellon.
Her mother.
Sinah pulled the straight chair over closer to the door and sat down in it. The same woman? No. Just the same name, carried down through history. Different women, different lives, but always the taint, the legacy of evil that made her neighbors shun her and her descendants to the last drop of blood.
There was no hope for Sinah here in Morton's Fork, and no answers. She knew that now. She was the last of her line.
“Here you are. Tea and biscuits. Very civilized.”
Wycherly came out, carrying a box of Lorna Doones and a steaming mug from which a tag fluttered. He held them out to Sinah.
“Fortunately Luned thinks I need one of everything the general store sells, or you'd be drinking bad coffee instead. You look like hell, you know,” he added conversationally. “Drink your tea.”
“Don't bully me.” She took a careful sip and made a face. “Yuck. It's way too sweet.”
“You need the sugar. You're too thin, anyway. You look like a boy.”
Sinah took another sip. “The camera adds weight,” she protested feebly.
“Oh come on, you don't really think you're going back to that?” Wycherly said.
Sinah stared at him in surprise. He was standing next to her, and she could feel anger and something like fear coming from him—but she could not read the internal monologue that would have explained his feelings.
Crippled. Her power lost just when she needed it most.
“Look. You just finished a big movie, and are you in La La Land doing yourself any good? No. You've run away to hide. Fine. Maybe your career arc can support an early infusion of Garbo. But in the past few days I've seen you have any number of fits, you've come down here to tell me you're possessed by your umpty-great grandmother, and while you're doing that you fall down and give a pretty good impression of somebody having a seizure. Now you tell me if that adds up to a picture of anyone who's going to be going back to work any time soon?” Wycherly asked.
“No.” Sinah took a large gulp of the vile tea and forced herself to swallow.
The heat, the caffeine, and the sugar were starting to have some effect; she felt steadier, more in control. But not in control enough to try to deny the truth of Wycherly's s words. She couldn't even think about working in her current condition.
How much money did she have in the bank? She'd spent
most of what she had on the house, but she'd been serenely certain she could always get work, even if she had to stage a tactical retreat to New York.

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