Haunt Me Still Read Online Free PDF Page B

years later. But we don’t know that he ever knew her in person. We don’t know anything at all about him in 1589, actually, beyond the fact that he was alive. That’s right in the middle of what’s called his lost years. No record of his whereabouts whatsoever.”
    “unless he was here. You might at least be gracious enough to admit it’s suggestive,” she said reproachfully. “As it happens, it also dovetails with my family legends.” She looked out at the night. “I am descended, in a direct mother-to-daughter line, from Elizabeth Stewart. From Lady Macbeth.”
    I must have been gaping in disbelief, because she shot me a wry smile. “My husband found my heritage quite alluring. Lily, on the other hand, doesn’t know, and I’d like to keep it that way. It’s not information that’s necessarily… useful to a fifteen-year-old.”
    “You have family legends about her?” I asked, feeling a little faint.
    “Elizabeth Stewart didn’t consort with witches. She was one. Not a devil-worshipping crone but a serious student of magic. As my mother and grandmother would have it, the Bard once saw her at work and later put his recollections—quite accurately—in a play. It was not easy to dissuade him from performing it, but it was done. And the manuscript made to disappear.”
    I groped my way to a chair, my mind reeling. “You can make of the witchcraft whatever you like, Kate. It’s not the magic I’m trying to interest you in,” she said patiently. “It’s the manuscript.” She drew the archival folder off the desk, holding it out to me. “Three days ago, shuffled among Angus’s papers, I found this.”
    I opened the folder. Inside were a postcard and a single sheet of heavy ivory notepaper. The postcard was a copy of one of my favorite paintings in Britain, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. Terry had been one of the three or four all-time great Lady Macbeths. The last before Janet Douglas. Sargent had somehow made her gown shimmer between blue and green. With her long red braids, a gleam of gold low on her waist, and the blue-green gown accentuating the curve of her hips and then narrowing as it cascaded toward the floor, I’d always thought she looked more like a mermaid than a queen.
    Behind the card, the notepaper was covered with writing in a large looping hand of confidence and passion, and something stubbornly childlike, too. I glanced at the signature. Nell, it read, with a long tail like a comet.
    The pet name used among family and friends for Ellen Terry. I glanced up.
    “As much as can be discerned from a fax, both signature and letter are genuine,” said Lady Nairn. She turned to look out the window. “read it. Take your time.”
    It was dated 1911. “My dear Monsieur Superbe Homme,” it began. My dear Superb Man. My dear Superman.
    My dear Monsieur Superbe Homme,
    I am forwarding to you a curious letter I have recently received from a fellow denizen of the drama whose personal tale is as tragic as any role she might encharacter on the stage. Indeed, I am not at all certain that her long woes have not in the end loosened her hold upon sanity. As you will see, she believes, poor soul, not only that Mr. Shakespeare first circulated a version of Macbeth substantially different from the one that has come down to us, but that this earlier version has survived (!)—and that she is the guardian of its whereabouts.
    “Surely you don’t bel—”
    “I think my husband believed that his grandfather’s mysterious old lady and Ellen’s ‘poor soul’ were one and the same.”
    Our eyes locked in silence. “Go on,” she said presently. I looked back down.
    I would conclude out of hand that she is lunatic, were it not for the enclosure which she gave to me along with her tale, and which I now send on to you. I think the book queer enough, but it is the letter inside that you will find most curious. Unfortunately, all it conveys about the nature of this supposed