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“Carolina.”

I knew the voice, and wanted to see its owner, but my eyes wouldn’t open. “Carolina.”

I managed to see him, now, on the edge of the bed. The guy with the intense brown eyes. He had familiar hands that were trying to wake me. He shook me, pulled me into a sitting position. I sank onto my side.

“Carolina.” The guy sounded alarmed. He moved my hair away from my face.

Was I dreaming about Carolina? Or was I her? She was lying on her side. The guy was talking on the phone. He was telling people to come quick. Because he couldn’t wake his girlfriend.

***

I knew it was a dream, but the drawing room and the garden path outside the window seemed real as my house in Venice with the morning glories clinging to the trellis and dead sunflowers in the yard. I was aware of being Carolina Whitson and Charlotte Wilson at the same time. More to the point, my headache was gone.

The woman named Rebecca sat sewing, and I scrutinized her as if I’d never seen her before. Small and neat except for the curlicues that escaped from her cap. Soft hazel eyes that took in every smirk and whisper that passed between the other servants. I was dying to ask her why they hated me.

I knew them by now. The footman with the big Adam’s apple, who sometimes fell asleep on his feet, was Charles Rogers. The other, Henry Dumpson, took nips from the liquor cabinet when no one was around. He’d once whispered an obscenity to me in a hallway.

Dumpson was from a farm in Suffolk. Strangely, I remembered having lived on a farm once. Even more strangely, I’d worked in a seamstress shop as a small child. That was one of the reasons these servants hated me, I now realized. I’d once been a member of their class, at least marginally. And then things had changed. They saw me as a traitor. They were watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake.

“Come, dear,” Rebecca put her mending down. “’Tis time to visit your poor mother.”

Mother? Aha! At last I would see this mother people had mentioned in my other dream. I followed Rebecca down a hallway.

Passing a window, I glimpsed an imposing manor across a green lawn and realized I was in a cottage on the grounds of a large estate. Inside, at the end of a dark, narrow hall was a room containing only a bed, a small chair and a chest with a cracked basin and ewer. In the bed lay an old woman.

“Missus Wilson,” Rebecca said. “Your girl is here to visit with you.”

I took a seat in the chair. The old woman, it seemed, was always lying in the bed.

Slowly, my dream-mother opened her yellowed eyes.

***

We’d changed places, somehow. I was in the bed, my mother in the chair. She’d become a redhead in her forties, wearing jeans; the chamber with the cracked basin was a hospital room in the 1970’s with venetian blinds, a phone on a bedside table. She held my hand and seemed worried, with little lines between her eyes. I knew something was very wrong because she smelled of cigarettes, something that only happened in a crisis. Someone else lurked in the shadows.

But the shadowy figure was a nurse.

“The doctor told him to go home for a while,” my mother said. “He was upset and making a nuisance of himself.”

“I want to see him.” I tried to sit up but couldn’t.

Receding footsteps told me the nurse had gone.

“Carolina,” Mom whispered. “Before I say more, are you serious about marrying Buckley?”

I knew getting married would be a terrible idea. On the other hand I wanted to counter the vibes coming from Mom. Where she was hoping to hear I’d told him we should try living separately for a while and maybe start seeing other people.

“I can’t talk about it right now,” I somehow managed. “I have a headache.”

“That’s not surprising. They think you have meningitis.”

I remembered Buckley saying, “I should marry you. Then you wouldn’t dare do this shit.”

 

“A powerful book.”

–Ellen Michika, educator, mom and grandmom.

 

“The characters are well done and engaging and likeable, Buckley in spite of himself.”

–William Brasse, author of The Sound of Sirens and The Needle in the Camel’s Eye

 

“Trafalgar is a golden egg!”

–Larry Fricano, retired substance abuse counselor and weirdo artist

 

“The Other Desperado,” a short story excerpted from this book, was published in The MacGuffin. “Richard Woodbridge,” also excerpted from Trafalgar, has appeared in Whistling Shade.

 

 

 

Trafalgar: A Cold War Love Story will soon be available on Kindle Direct.