Love lines Read online

  Love lines

  By Diana Nixon

  Printed edition details

  ISBN-13: 978-1475073317

  ISBN-10: 1475073313

  Copyright © 2012 Diana Nixon

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1. Fate (Eileen)

  Chapter 2. Dever (Christian)

  Chapter 3. The letter (Eileen)

  Chapter 4. In expectation of the meeting (Christian)

  Chapter 5. First impressions (Eileen)

  Chapter 6. Dreams (Christian)

  Chapter 7. New sensations (Eileen)

  Chapter 8. The history of the founding families (Eileen)

  Chapter 9. The grief (Christian)

  Chapter 10. The message (Eileen)

  Chapter 11. The lake (Christian)

  Chapter 12. Golden radiance (Eileen)

  Chapter 13. Gloster (Christian)

  Chapter 14. The power of water (Eileen)

  Chapter 15. Book archives (Christian)

  Chapter 16. Forces of elements (Eileen)

  Chapter 17. The Quarrel (Christian)

  Chapter 18. Diaries of Camilla Steward (Eileen)

  Chapter 19. First answers (Christian)

  Chapter 20. Vulnerary plants (Eileen)

  Chapter 21. What do eyes speak about?.. (Christian)

  Chapter 22. Hidden photograph (Eileen)

  Chapter 23. The Festival (Christian)

  Chapter 24. Guest list (Eileen)

  Chapter 25. Council’s day (Christian)

  Chapter 26. Dinner-party (Eileen)

  Chapter 27. Tests and puzzles (Christian)

  Chapter 28. Eighteenth birthday (Eileen)

  Chapter 29. The power of magic (Christian)

  Chapter 30. Dream thief (Eileen)

  About the author

  Acknowledgements

  To my husband Alexander.

  Thank you for a lifetime of love and happiness

  that you brought into my word.

  The best and most beautiful things in the world

  cannot be seen or even touched.

  They must be felt with the heart…

  Helen Keller

  Chapter 1. Fate (Eileen)

  On an early Sunday morning I was awakened by a phone call from Amanda.

  “How long do you think I should wait for you, Eileen?” my best friend’s angry voice came in through the handset. “Do not tell me you're still sleeping! I've been stuck in this godforsaken cafe for an hour already! Do you think that I have nothing better to do at seven o'clock on Sunday?”

  “Good morning to you too,” I said in a sleepy voice, answering all her questions at once. However, in less than five seconds, my legs carried me to the bathroom, smashing on their way a heavy stack of books on the history of ancient Greece, which I didn’t have the time to pack yesterday. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes, I promise!” I snapped.

  How could I have forgotten about the meeting with Amanda? It was me who made her wake up so early on our last, as it seemed, day off in this life. I say the last because exactly in three days we are leaving our home-town Norfield, in south-west Britain, for the University of Sheffield - one of the best universities in the United Kingdom.

  Two months ago my best friend Amanda Jane Caitlyn Fairey and I graduated from high school; after long and painful hours of writing essays and filling out application forms, we are finally going to Sheffield. By the way, Amanda couldn’t stand being called by her full name, it sounded too pompous. We’ve been as thick as thieves since childhood. We both wanted to go to a prestigious university, get a good education, find a prince, fall in love and live happily ever after just like in fairy tales.

  Speaking of the prince, that reminds me of something…

  For several nights I have had the same dream. I'm standing on the shore of a huge lake and it seems to be so pure that the tiny grains of sand on its bottom can be seen through the crystal clear water. I want to touch the crystal surface, so I sit down and put my hand on it, watching a wonderful golden picture of complicated lace lines appear in front of me. It seems to be floating across the boundless lake, further and further away from my hand. I’m looking at it, mesmerized, until I notice another hand next to mine, a stranger’s hand. This hand touches the water surface together with my own and begins to draw its own picture on top of mine, and though at first it seems as if drawing a different from my own, I soon notice that the picture is identical to mine. And the lines of my pattern that have already found their reflection in the stranger’s picture begin to shine and sparkle with thousands of colors, creating an illusion of endless sunlight and warmth. But when I look up in the direction of the person standing next to me, I wake up with my heart beating wild and an odd tingling on my right shoulder. I get up, walk over to the mirror, trying to see what could be wrong with my shoulder, but can’t see anything unusual.

  I have been having this dream for seven nights now. Hardly anyone would think that such things could be a mere coincidence, and neither would I. That's why I decided to tell Amanda everything.

  “We have to do something about it Eileen! Immediately! I am sure, it's a sign. But the sign of what, I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Thank you, darling, for being helpful,” I muttered.

  “Hey! I would ask you to spare me your sarcasm! By the way, this is my great-great-great, well, it doesn’t matter, my grandmother was a clairvoyant. So I know that such things do not just happen,” she said irritably.

  “How long ago have you inherited this uh, the gift of clairvoyance from your grandmother? I didn’t even know that you are a hereditary witch,” I chuckled.

  “No. I'm not a witch,” Amanda said aggrievedly, pursing her lips. “I just want to say that my intuition has never failed, if you remember.”

  Well, about the intuition she was definitely right. Amanda has always surprised me with a strange ability to guess the questions that she got correct on the tests, which is why she spent much less time to prepare for them, remembering only the answers to certain questions. She could as easily guess the weather for the next weekend, when we were planning another sally into a Big City. We called so our trips to London, as compared to Norfield it seemed to be a whole separate country, where you could always go on tour.

  “So, Miss Intuition, what should I do with all these dreams and signs?” I asked. “If this craziness goes on, and I have even one more sleepless night, you will have to go to Sheffield without me, as not even you will be able to pull me out of bed,” I added gloomily.

  “No way!” Amanda cried. “Of course, I can’t allow this to happen, I’ll think something up,” she said optimistically.

  And she really did…

  That's why now, running around the house and knocking down everything on my way, I tried to keep my promise of twenty minutes, and meet my friend at the named place. Nothing better than a haunting with a fortune-teller Amanda, unfortunately, couldn’t come up with. But in the absence of other ideas for ridding myself of insomnia, I agreed.

  The area where we had a meeting with the fortune-teller wasn’t one of the best places in our town. Except, perhaps, for the only cafe, where Amanda and I agreed to meet. Although the cafe itself, according to the malicious tirade, which my friend shouted out in the morning, also couldn’t have fallen into a category of the most attractive places of the district.

  So here I am, with my hair still wet after the shower and a terribly annoying pain in my leg after running into the stack of books, sitting in my maroon Mercedes heading for the godforsaken cafe on the outskirts of Norfield.

  As I had been expecting, my prudent and devastatingly coward friend was not waiting for me in a cafe at all, she was in her brand new sky-blue BMW. Only Amanda would have chosen
that color for a car. She locked all the doors and windows, and eagerly peered into the mirror, waiting for me. I even smiled at how ridiculous and out of place her polished car looked among the endless piles of rubbish in front of the unfortunate cafe. I dropped off my car, went to Amanda’s BMW and knocked on the passenger window, raising my eyebrows questioningly.

  “What?” she asked nervously, when I got in her car. “Do you think it’s so cool to sit in this poky hole of a place, and wait for someone to rob and steal my so long expected gift for eighteenth birthday? Far from it! I had to sell my soul for it to my beloved brother. Besides, Christian said that for such a gift I’ll have to grant all his wishes for the next ten years! Well, he may have it his way. I don’t care anymore,” she said much happier this time, stroking the leather steering wheel. And then, more seriously, she added: “You owe me a lot more for being almost an hour and a half late! And now I don’t even know whether Nora will agree to see us, after such a delay.”

  “Nora?” I asked turning to her wonderingly.

  “Exactly. The fortune-teller. Remember? A friend of mine recommended her,” she snapped at me.

  “Excuse me. Did you say ‘a friend of yours’? What kind of a friend is not familiar to me?” I groaned.

  “It doesn’t matter, just trust me.”

  And so I did. However, I always did so, as there was no doubt about Amanda’s talents. She has always been like a sister for me, who I never had. And she treated me the same way. Although she had an elder brother Christian, but certainly he wouldn’t discuss a movie starring another popular handsome guy, or help her to choose a dress for a party. That's why she needed me so much. In addition, Amanda and I were always on the same wave and, oddly enough, always knew when the other one felt bad. In such cases she, of course, referred to her unreal intuition, and my ability to apprehend troubles was always called a simple coincidence.

  To be honest, I couldn’t even remember a single time when I had any serious quarrel with Amanda. Of course, there were times of misunderstanding, but, since neither of us could stay angry very long, after a few silent hours, we were best friends again.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, when I returned from my memories, I noticed that we had stopped at a low gray house, which looked more like an old barn than a house.

  “Does she live here?” I asked, not having the slightest desire to hear an affirmative answer to my question.

  “At least, this is what my note says,” answered Amanda after a little pause, reading once again what was written in a very nice handwriting that obviously didn’t belong to her. I took the note from her hand to make sure that the address was correct. And suddenly I felt that same tingle on my shoulder, which always went along with the end of my dreams.

  “Are you okay?” Amanda asked concerned.

  “Yes, it's just…”

  She cut me off.

  “What’s wrong? Eileen, for heaven's sake, don’t scare me! Being here is already too creepy, so don’t scare me even more than I already am!”

  I think I finally stopped to listen to what Amanda had been saying, because she had to call my name for several times before I came to myself again.

  “It’s all right, I'm sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little nervous about this stupid meeting.”

  During the second touch to the note the very same picture from my dreams began to appear in my head, but I decided to hide the memory. “I’m just all nerves,” I thought to myself.

  “Shall we go then?” Amanda asked.

  It was raining. Which is normal for Norfield. Despite the fact that the grass in our area is green all year round, snow is rare and when it does snow it lasts no more than a week, rain is common for all seasons. But in this case, it made that miserable place look even worse.

  The path to the house was paved with small stones and the heels of Amanda’s shoes constantly stuck in between them.

  “If I knew that we had to get over so many barriers I would put on something else,” she said indignantly.

  The door wasn’t locked and opened quietly inward when my hand rested on it to knock.

  “Good morning, ladies,” said the melodious voice behind us. However, in spite of its melodies, Amanda and I jumped as though being scalded like a child, and we were frightened by our own shouting.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m Nora, and you must be Eileen and Amanda?” she asked with a slight smile on her face.

  Still being in complete immobility of the recent terror, we didn’t realize that the gray-haired woman with the incredibly warm blue eyes turned to us. And that was Nora, the very same Nora! The fortune-teller! None of this made any sense at the sight of this woman. Well, at least, certainly not the gray hair and cerulean eyes!

  “We, uh,” I stumbled, “yes, we’ve made an appointment with you,” I said at last, hardly forming my words in intelligible sentence. Nora smiled mysteriously in response and nodded, inviting us into the house.

  To our surprise, the inside the house was very comfortable, with lots of flowers and decorations. Nora gestured for us to sit down at a small double sofa on the opposite side of the fireplace, and she sat on a chair on my right hand.

  “So, what brought you here, young ladies in this rainy August morning?”

  “First of all, we would like to apologize for being late,” Amanda said, slightly blushing.

  “Oh, dear, time is a relative term,” Nora replied smiling. “It’s not always as significant as it seems.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but finally I decided to discuss the meaning of our appointment.

  “We have a very unusual question for you,” I started with an as serious expression as I could manage without looking scared. “I don’t even know if you can help us,” I added unsure.

  “Unusual questions this is my specialty,” she said, with the same warm smile on her face. Without saying anything else, Nora took my right hand, turning it palm up, and began to examine it carefully. Then I remembered that reading palms was the fortune-teller's usual way to predict well, futures.

  “I think you didn’t understand me,” I said frowning. “I don’t want you to tell me my fortune.”

  “Tell your fortune?” Nora repeated in surprise. “Oh, you must have mistaken me for a fortune-teller!” she added with a big smile. “No, I'm not a fortune-teller, I am Feta.”

  “Feta? What’s a Feta?” I asked, wonderingly.

  “Yes, I’m a Feta. It means I’m a fate reader. I read people’s destinies by the lines on their palms. It does look similar to what fortune-tellers do, but none of them can tell you what I can read.”

  Feeling even more awkward from offending this nice woman, I decided to keep quiet and started watching her. At first she only touched my hand lightly, following the line shapes on it with her fingers. Then she pulled out a bottle of light blue liquid of her dress and she poured a few drops onto my palm. In the places where the drops fell, my skin began to tingle. But the most surprising part started a few minutes later, when the drops began to spread on the palm of my hand, filling the lines on it. Nora took my hand once again and began to stroke the lines.

  “I see, Eileen, you have been having very strange dreams recently. And what you see in these dreams scares you. But don’t be afraid of your own destiny, my dear. This is what we are born with. Speaking of which, you were born to be a part of the Fairey family.”

  “What? No, my name’s Clark. Fairey is Amanda’s name. You must be wrong,” I said slightly confused.

  “I'm never wrong, Eileen,” Nora said quietly. “I always say what I see, what is written on the lines of your hand and, it’s fate. And you, my dear, are a Fairey, a Fairey bird. You are marked by the fire and your wings are shining in the sunlight. Don’t be afraid, darling, fate itself will help you find your way in this life.”

  After all this, Nora let my hand go, and the blue water drops disappeared as if by magic, as well as the tingling on my palm.

  On the way home I was replayi
ng Nora’s words in my head for the hundredth time, trying to find at least some sense in all the things she had said. After that weird meeting Amanda took me to the cafe, where I had left my car and said she had to hurry, something about some urgent task, and was gone. Later I realized that during the conversation with Nora she hadn’t said a word, and then behaved quite suspiciously.

  As you can see, strange occurrences have become an essential part of my everyday life.

  Stopping at the entrance to my house, I couldn’t help but think that, except for Amanda, who was currently solving her strange business, I had no one else to share my impressions about the meeting I had just had. When I said that Amanda had replaced a sister that never existed, I think I forgot to mention that she also had replaced a family that never existed either.

  My parents were never married. My father, according to my mom, left us long before I was born and disappeared without a trace. Since then she had been getting married so many different men, that I finally stopped counting her official spouses. I don’t think that she is a featherbrained and irresponsible person; she is just a very peculiar woman. As my beloved grandmother, Stephanie Mitchell says, my mom is a thin, vulnerable nature. That's why each of her next husbands seemed to be a lot more understanding and sympathetic than the previous one. The funny part was that she always swore to love each of them, trying to convince them and herself of her faithfulness with endless wedding vows.

  “He is the best man that I’ve ever met, Eileen,” she said every time, standing on the threshold of another marriage.

  In addition to the frequent change of spouses, Catherine Clark had a passion for endless traveling, so I usually learned about the place she was staying at from the postcards that she sent me in incredible amounts from each new place she lived in at the moment. And now, opening the mailbox, I knew that I would find one more card there. This time my mom and her new husband Kyle, Carl, or whatever his name was, were standing against the background of a dozen kangaroos somewhere in Australia. On the flip side, as always, was a brief message: