Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine (reading an ebook TXT) 📕

seem to prefer the name Matilda, which is, I grant, more euphonious, but nevertheless she was, I think, more often known as Maude. "

He poured a glass of sherry for his wife, and pushing open the hatch into the kitchen, passed it through to her. Janet, a plastic apron over her dress, was chopping parsley. She looked slightly flustered as she dropped the knife and took the glass from him. "Shut up about that now, David, " she said in an undertone, glancing at Jo.

"No. " Jo had seen the challenge in David's eyes. "No, don't shut up. I'm interested. If you know about her I want to hear it. I can see you're skeptical, and I don't blame you. You're a historian, I believe?"

He snorted. "I teach history at a local school. That doesn't make me a historian, but I have read a bit about the history of the Welsh Marches. The Braose family made a name for themselves around here. And Maude is something of a legend. Moll is a corruption of Mailt, the Welsh for Maude, of course. Walbee, I surmise, comes from St. Valerie, which was her father's name. "

Jo grinned. "That at least I know. Reginald. "

He nodded. "Or it could, I suppose, be a corruption of de la Haie—from her association with Hay-on-Wye, but there must be dozens of parishes up and down the borders that claim stories about her. She was reputed to be a witch, you know. "

Jo raised an eyebrow. "I didn't know. " She leaned forward and took the bottle out of his hand, refilling his glass and then her own. "I'm not a historian, David. I know nothing about her save what I remember from my"—she hesitated, seeing the disbelief in his face—"my dreams, if you like to call them that. I looked her up in the Dictionary of National Biography, but I didn't look at any books on Welsh history. Perhaps I should. "

Janet appeared with a saucer of peanuts, which she put on the arm of David's chair. "My husband is a bit of an expert on local legend, " she said almost apologetically. "We must shut him up about it, because if he starts, he'll go on all night. "

"No, I won't. " He frowned at her. "All I said was that Joanna does not look like her. She was reputed to have been a giant. She is said to have stood in the churchyard at Hay and, finding a stone in her shoe, thrown it across the Wye, where it landed at Llowes. " He grinned. "The stone is about ten feet long! And of course she built Hay Castle single-handed in a night. And she was Mailt y Nos, who you can see riding across the mountains with the hounds of hell in the wild of a storm. " He laughed out loud at the expression on Jo's face. "She must have been a fearsome lady, Jo. Overpowering, Amazonian even, who kept old William in terror of his life. Or that is the way the story goes. "

Jo said nothing for a moment. Then slowly she began to pace up and down the carpet. "I don't think she was especially tall, " she said reflectively. "Taller than William, yes. And taller than a lot of the Welsh, but then they are a short people—" She broke off in embarrassment, looking at her host.

He roared with laughter. "I'm five foot four, girl, and proud of it. It's power not height that counts in the rugby scrum, and don't you forget it!"

Smiling, Jo helped herself to peanuts. "It's hard to explain what it's like being someone else, even if only as a vivid dream. She doesn't inhabit my skin. I find myself in hers. I think and speak and feel as her. But I don't know her future any more than she would have known it. Now, talking to you, I know roughly what happened to her, but in the regressions I know no more than we know now what will happen to us tomorrow. If in later life she was called Moll Walbee, I don't know it yet. If later she came to dominate William, I have no clue. As a young woman only a year or so married she was afraid of him. And her only defense against him was disdain. "

There was a moment's silence. Janet had seated herself on the arm of a chair near the kitchen door. "Do you really believe you are her reincarnation?" she asked at last, awed. "Really, in your heart of hearts?"

Jo nodded slowly. "I think I am beginning to wonder, yes. "

"And are you going to go on being hypnotized to see what happened?"

This time Jo shrugged. "I'm not too happy about being hypnotized, to be honest. Sometimes I think I must, other times I'm too scared and I swear I'll never go back. I tried to get the hypnotherapist to make me forget her, but it didn't work, so now I don't know what I'll do. "

"Well, that's honest at least. " David had wandered across to his bookshelves. He picked out a heavy tome. "People who are capable of regression usually, if not invariably, regress into several previous lives, " he said thoughtfully. "I don't think I've ever read of a case where just one life was picked out like this. " He smiled at her quizzically. "It is most intriguing. Do you think that anyone else from Maude's lifetime has returned with her?"

Jo hesitated. "It is as much as I can do to believe in myself, " she said slowly, "but sometimes I wonder... " Nick's face suddenly rose before her eyes. A Nick she had never known. A Nick, his face contorted with jealousy and anger, who had pinned her to the bed and raped her, and behind his face another, a face with red-gold hair and beard—the man who had tried to strangle her.

"Jo, what is it?" Janet's whisper brought her