'Try me.'
I gave him a long, measuring look, heaved another unsteady sigh, and started talking. I began at the beginning, from the moment I'd first seen the man on the gray horse, through the incident in Blackfriars Lane, to my discovery of Mariana Farr's headstone in the churchyard and my waking dream of last night. Mrs. Pearce drifted noiselessly in and out of the room, depositing pots of tea and plates of biscuits and whisking the remains away without once interrupting the course of my narrative, while my brother sat quietly in his chair, listening. When I had finished, he leaned back and lowered his eyebrows in contemplation.
'These ... experiences,' he said finally, 'do they come on suddenly, or do you have any warning?'
I tried hard to think back. My first inclination would have been to say that there was no warning whatsoever, but ... 'I sometimes hear a ringing in my ears," I told him, 'or I feel a little dizzy. Or both.'
'And you're definitely a participant in the action. It doesn't feel like you're in the audience watching a play?'
'Definitely not. I don't even feel like a cast member, come to that. Cast members have scripts, but I never have the slightest idea what's going to happen next. It's just like real life ... just like this! I spread my hands, palms upward, in a gesture that encompassed the room and the two of us. 'Even the time and space they occupy is real. I obviously move around, since I started off outside the house last night and ended up in the studio this morning.'
Tom thought about this. 'And when you have these experiences, you don't remember anything about being Julia Beckett?' I shook my head. 'But when you come out of it again, you can remember clearly being this other woman?'
'I remember everything.'
'Setting aside the insanity theory, for the moment,' he said slowly, 'what do you think is happening?' 'I suppose ... I suppose it could be the ghost.'
"This Green Lady that everyone talks about, you mean?'
I nodded. 'The dress I was wearing last night, when I was her ... when I was Mariana ... was green. I don't know. Could a ghost take possession of a living person, do you think?'
'I'm hardly an authority on the subject,' Tom admitted. 'I suppose it's possible, but in your case I wouldn't think it likely. Not unless the ghost followed you to London last weekend.' He frowned. 'There is one possibility that you haven't considered, yet.'
'Which is?'
He raised his head and looked at me. 'That everything you're seeing, everything you're experiencing, may actually come from your own memory. That you may, in fact, be Mariana.'
'You can't be serious.'
'Why not? Reincarnation is an accepted phenomenon in lots of cultures. There are even a few distinguished Church of England types I could name who support the theory.'
'And what do you believe?' I challenged him.
"Well." He smiled. 'It's one of the requirements of my job that I believe in the eternal life of the human soul. And where that soul goes after death is a question that only the dead can answer.'
'So you think I may have lived in that house in some sort of past life?' It sounded ridiculous, but Tom's expression was serious.
'I think it's an idea worth exploring, yes. After all, if you feel like you've been somewhere before, the logical explanation usually is that you have been there before.'
I frowned. 'It could explain why I was drawn to the house, I suppose.'
'And why you knew where the old garden had been. And why you chose to make your studio in that tiny back room, instead of using one of the better rooms at the front.’
As he spoke the words, an image rose swimming in front of my eyes, of the mover's young assistant holding my bedroom chair and asking, in a puzzled voice, 'Are you sure you meant the first room on the right ... ?'
I shook myself back to the present. 'Good Lord,' I said flatly.
'I could try to find out more about the subject for you,' Tom offered. 'We've got a wonderfully eccentric librarian here who delights in ferreting out odd bits of information.'
'You honestly believe that past lives are possible?' I asked him, and he shrugged.
'The Lord moves in ways mysterious,' he told me, smiling.
'Oh, that reminds me,' I said, sitting upright. 'Have you ever heard a biblical passage that starts, "Blow the trumpet in Zion," or something like that? I don't recall the rest of it, something about people trembling and the day of judgment.'
Tom rolled his eyes. 'Sounds like one of the doom-and-gloom Old Testament chaps,' he speculated. 'Micah, maybe, or Joel.' Rising from his chair, he crossed to his desk and picked up a well-thumbed copy of the King James Bible. For several minutes he silently leafed through the pages, and I was on the verge of telling him that it wasn't that important, after all, when he suddenly jabbed one page with a triumphant finger. 'Aha! It was Joel. Chapter two, verse one. Here you go.'
He passed the Bible to me, open, and pointed to the place. As I read the brief, cheerless passage, Tom sat down again, scratching his forehead idly. 'My former curate used to love reading texts from Joel,' he recalled. 'Real hell-and-damnation stuff, hardly inspiring for the congregation. Though I seem to remember that old Joel was writing during a plague of locusts, so I suppose he had a right to be dismal.'
Plague ... the word struck a sudden chord in my memory, and I lifted my eyes from the page. 'When was the Great Plague in London, do you know?' 'There were several, I think,' Tom replied. 'There was the Black Death, of course, in the 1300V