The Dreamer (33 page)

Mallory and I married in a small, intimate ceremony, though, without our knowledge, Lady Alistair organized a dinner party that night with the town’s elite. Despite our initial chagrin, the gathering turned out to be incredibly advantageous. There, Mallory secured connections that would lead to his rise in city government.

His first post wasn’t lofty or prestigious, but it introduced him into politics, and it turned out to be just what was needed to start the resurrection of the town. He cut spending, making a lot of enemies, and strong-armed the council to reduce corruption, relieving the burden on the poor, making more enemies. But Mallory was hardly concerned. None of these men carried knives and guns. They weren’t criminals and trained killers. Angry stares are nothing, he often tells me, well aware those were my words from years ago.

There he slowly made his way up the political ladder, thanks to his unyielding strength, singleness of purpose and an adoring public. His triumph over the famed, villainous Duke of Norfolk, and his willingness to lawfully return the treasure, had given him recognition in high places and aided in his ascent. As he predicted, the subsequent loss of the gold did not obliterate the rest. He is affectionately known as “The Captain,” not a little due to the fact that it is how I, almost exclusively, refer to him.

His fevers still come, but rarely. Better sanitation, a more stable and secure lifestyle, and quite frankly, blissful happiness and an exceptional woman at the helm, are all due to this.

We live in a small but lovely home in an adequate district and have two children: John who is four, and William who is two. The fact that our eldest isn’t named after his father has nothing to do with me. I begged for a Mallory, Jr., but his father utterly refused. I think his first name had given him more trouble than even I realized. So we compromised by giving our first born the name of the man to whom we both owe everything. They are precocious, maddening, dark-headed children who I constantly chase after and scold, but fiercely and infinitely adore. We are expecting our third in two months, and nothing, simply nothing, supersedes raising and teaching and loving them. My children will never be called to suffer what I suffered as long as I am breathing.

It is easy to forget that life was not always like this. It sometimes comes as a surprise to me when I remember that this is not my original home, that these loved ones who surround me and know me best are quite new to me and know nothing of the life I lived not all that long ago.

And sometimes I cannot help but marvel at the woman I have become, who gave up the pursuit of fame for love and family. At first I tried to return to my work, but it was impossible with so much to do for Mallory, his career and our home, and especially once our first child came and needed me so. There was no time for it. So, tenderly, I put it all away.

I thought women like me were weak. But it takes all my strength and courage to put my children and husband before myself. I know I won’t be read about in textbooks and newspapers. I know I will live and die in general obscurity. Mallory will be read about perhaps, but not me. My children might become famed and acclaimed, but not me. They will be the ones the world sees and acknowledges, to alter policies, to experiment and invent and be given the credit for changing history. And the record keepers may never know my name or how I worked or what I sacrificed or what is my due.

But without me, these, my loved ones, would be lost. Somehow I am the adhesive that binds us together as one, and I have often pondered in awe of my power. My words are their words, my kindness or cruelty, theirs. Their voices seem to be the echo of my own.

So why should I care if strangers don’t know my name or what I’ve done? God knows. And I am everything to those who love me. I can raise my loved ones above the stars or crush them utterly. So I ask you, knowing this, how can I turn away from them when they call for me? For the sake of indifferent strangers? I stand proudly in my chosen place and make no apology for what I have become.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, as much as John gave his life so that I may live, I do the same for my loved ones every day. As John said, those things that defy reason matter most: that to lose your life is to save it. So that one day, I may hope to keep my promise to John and see him again at the gates. I still wear his cross.

These revelations came to me slowly, one by one as I lived my life and wondered at it. And just recently was the fullness of my epiphany.

A short time ago I went in search of these, my notes and records, and found them buried in a trunk under toys and winter clothes. With them were the leather pads I had collected from the pharaoh’s treasure just before it was lost.

I had forgotten them, and I pulled the pads onto my lap. There was a question that had never been answered, and I touched the leather pads reverently.

Billy cried, and I set it all down to go to him. He had gotten his plump arm caught between the slats of his new headboard. We are trying to get him used to his new bed before the baby comes and takes his crib. It has been difficult for him.

One thing after another followed, and it wasn’t until almost ten o’clock that night when I could return to the records.

I gingerly removed the dry, cracked leather ring that held it all together and unrolled it on my lap. A single candle burned beside me, and I heard Mallory stir in our bed. I tilted the pad towards the light to read it. It was written in modern shorthand. It was barely legible.

I had a dream once that I flew.

I gasped and dropped the pad and the candle blew out.

“Rachel?” Mallory asked sleepily. And then more sharply, “Rachel?” He sat up.

“I’m here,” I whispered.

“What are you doing?”

“N-nothing important,” I said after a slight hesitation.

“Come to bed then,” he mumbled sulkily and lay back down.

I smiled. How much he can sound like our two year old sometimes.

I couldn’t get to the ancient documents until the next day when Billy was napping and Jonnie was visiting the neighbor. With eager hands, I unrolled it. And there it was again. I hadn’t imagined it.

I had a dream once that I flew.

The document was worn and faded and impossible to read in places. But I studied it absolutely absorbed for hours.

It told of a woman named Serena Metcalfe. She had been born in 1952. And at the age of 25, in the middle of her doctorate, she threw herself off the Empire State Building.

She found herself in Egypt 2361BC.

I read entranced as she explained how the Maharahi Tomb, instead of mysteriously empty — as it was when I had studied it — had actually been ransacked and utterly destroyed when she had been studying it in 1977. Things had not just been stolen, but the entire site had been destroyed.

She had actually changed history! The pharaoh’s tomb had been
ransacked
when she studied it. And yet, when I had been studying it, it had merely been empty, utterly void.

And now … I’d changed it again. His tomb was now at the bottom of the ocean. That is how it would be studied from now on.

I continued reading.

It was a very brief history. She explained that her jump back in time was for one purpose only, to ensure the safety of a precious stone and eventually to save the tomb site so that thousands of years in the future archeologists could unearth it whole and unmolested and study it. “The quest,” she explained, “being all important.”

But when she met the man who would one day be pharaoh, whose possessions she had determined to protect, she fell in love with him, and he married her. And he married no one else, despite the culture permitting and expecting multiple wives.

They had many children, and eventually the pharaoh died. His cousin hated him. She explained about her husband’s great belief in his gods, and how he lived in fear that his tomb would be disturbed by his vicious and vindictive cousin, preventing him from ultimate peace in the next life. Serena vowed to him that it would never happen.

After his death, the ceremonies were carried out. But the night before the tomb was sealed, she told her son to take his father and his treasury far away. The bitter cousin was determined to destroy the tomb, only to disrupt the peace of the pharaoh. He would search and search. So the pharaoh must be taken far across the desert and into the sea. She knew of a place. And she drew a map.

But to ensure that if the map ever got into the wrong hands, it would still be illegible, she made a key … in a language she knew only herself and her children could read. She had taught them shorthand.

She wrote these records because she had to. She wrote because she was a writer. But she wrote in a language illegible to all, and placed the writings in the tomb, expecting that it would never be read.

The son must have done as he was asked. But for one thing. He didn’t destroy the key, as she had asked him. I pondered how the map and key had survived all these years. The throne was overtaken by another branch of the Maharahi family … perhaps this hated cousin, not long after the pharaoh’s death.

Serena died soon after the pharaoh. Maybe her son, ousted from his kingdom, his mother gone, had saved the map and key against her wishes for sentimental reasons. And from there they were passed down from generation to generation, even copied when the originals disintegrated. A lover’s story attached to them, perhaps. “Your great-great-great grandmother loved the pharaoh so much that ….”

I re-read the last words. “I came to ensure the stone for myself, and the treasure would be found intact. And instead, I ensured it would never be found at all. It was what he wanted. And I loved him.”

Last night Mallory and I hosted a dinner, including among our guests powerful politicians and magistrates in honor of Mallory’s latest post: he was entering Parliament.

I watched him interact with men of power and their wives. He was poised and at ease. Our youngest catapulted down the stairs and attached himself to Mallory’s leg. He lifted the child and introduced him to the crowd with exaggerated seriousness and prestige, as though he were a lofty ambassador. People bowed good-naturedly and shook the boy’s chubby hand.

I approached and collected my child and took him back to Bess, who was coming in search of him. An image flashed in my mind of that first day in the shop all those years ago when Mallory shouted at the shopkeeper and slammed his hand on the counter, frightening the young girls.

On my way back to the gathering, Mallory came to meet me, lacing my arm through his. I looked at him and nearly froze.

It was then that I knew … I knew why it all had happened.

That I had a dream once that I flew.

I smiled, my feet naturally following his, and I could feel the glow radiating from my face as I watched his profile. I had been born far away from him, led a life utterly from his reach, and I had a dream. A dream that consumed me, consumed my whole life, and I gave up everything I had to attain it.

I had a dream once that I flew.

I thought I had come to transform the world, a great calling and mission to do something enormous to change the course of history. And then the treasure exploded and disappeared, and I thought everything had changed. And that was exactly right. Just … not in the way I had anticipated.

I had come for
him
.

A single man. A sole person.
He
was my purpose.

I had been dropped into the ocean, practically straight onto his ship, thrusting us fatally and inexorably together. Stumbling in search of my objective, I upset and toppled his austere, unhappy existence and offered him escape. I didn’t fear him, even when I had good reason to, so consumed was I with irrelevant things. I counseled and lectured him and, quite unconsciously, had shown him the path from cruelty and loneliness to safety and security … the life for which he longed. No one else in the world could have done what I did.

And because of my influence, he might change the world. Because of what
I
have done.

If it hadn’t been for me, he would most likely be out there still floating on the deep blue sea and into the endless horizon that goes on and on until there’s nothing left, sailing without purpose, with men he hated, simply because the sea was all he knew.

I did that.

And I –I alone – held this delicious secret.

Not only of the miraculous and phenomenal truth of my appearance on his ship, but why I came and what I had done – and am still doing – for all mankind.

I smiled at him.

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

I paused, and then looked ahead of me, nodding to a tipsy Marchioness. “We received a package today,” I murmured.

“From whom?”

“Do I need to remind you that our third child is due soon?”

He stopped and looked at me, understanding dawning on his face. “Fredrick, blast him,” he said with comical doom. “How on earth does he always
know
? What’s in it this time?”

“A priceless diamond. Red. The rarest in all the world and the most beautiful thing I have ever beheld. At least twenty karats.”