Chapter 7: Past Life Regression, Normandy

Normandy, 1183

Cherise Montegue enters the giant hall. Towards the center there is an immense hearth with a lit fire that is big enough for her to walk into. It's arched, made from stone, and like the manor house she calls home, it's very old and performs its function well, in this case to provide heat and the means for cooking meals for the manor's occupants.
The planked wooden floor is painted in a black and white checkered pattern that leads off to the distant windows. All around, there are upright timber beams leading to the rafters, above. There are vines hanging from these rafters; at first Cherise thought they were grapes, but soon after coming here she realized they were herbs and other growing things used for cooking.

She thinks it a very elegant room, with a simple kind of rusticity.

On that day she wears a lovely a reddish velvet dress with bell sleeves and gold trim. There is a rounded neckline, and it fits her snugly to the waist, tapering gently below in keeping with the style. It is a dress which suits her well, setting off the glow of her gently flushed complexion as well as the red of her burnished-honey hair, which today she wears in a long tail.  She is quite comfortable in her attire, though it at times it still seems new to her, as well as her surroundings.

Her eyes twinkle with merriment over something, and those around her take enjoyment in this. They consider her very beautiful. At the juncture of this writing she is 28 years old, and to the servants who call her mistress, very young at heart. 

Though she is at home in this manor, it wasn't always that way. At first she thought it an intimidating place. It was far different than the warm little home she was born into several leagues from here. Where her father, a squire, and she led a quiet and peaceful life. 

A servant shuffle through the doorway, her head bowed low. Cherise can't who it is as she is dressed in a robe which covers her face, but she knows it is Mary from her particular scuttling type walk. The fact that the servants always have their heads covered unsettles Cherise. The effect is very monastic and, she thinks, disquieting in an inequitable way.

There are others around as well, but they do not make themselves known. As servants they are supposed to be unseen.  Occasionally, she sees their faces as they meet her eyes for a briefest moment, but mostly they keep a respectful distance. She has come to accept this, as they have come to accept her. Though they are always accommodating, for Cherise there is an extra layer of warmth in appreciation of her youthfulness and her kindness.

Cherise is still in the hall. She stares at the large windows at the end, arched, with a crossed inner frame. They look like giant cathedral windows to her, minus the colored glass.  The checkered floor is gleaming from its perpetual polishing, although it's warped from several generations of use.

In the middle of the room there's a large wooden staircase, and this she ascends now. 

Near the top, she perceives a strong light coming from a room ahead. She moves closer, and peers in.

The room contains a four-poster bed.  He's in the bed. She halts.

Suddenly, she turns her face and giggles. She can't see his face because she's hiding her face behind her hands. She opens her fingers.

He emits a golden, delighted chuckle, and looks. 

Drake lays across the bed, one foot propped on a bended knee. He pops a grape into his mouth, acting nonchalant.

He's attractive, exceptionally so. As always, when he is around her, her heart picks up its pace.

Though he's acting like his thoughts are elsewhere, he's intently watching her. There's nothing casual about the look which burns into her, as much as he pretends to hide it.

"One, two, threee...how many grapes can I fit in my mouth? Fow, fiw, seex..." he chews, exaggeratedly.

He's got a smallish frame, like hers. His dark hair is long and rakish, and his goatee adds to his raffish appeal.

"So, my love has decided finally to pay her husband a visit. Well, then, perhaps I will just act like she is not here and go in on eating my grapes and daydreaming about what I would do if I had a wife who was interested I spending time with me!"

At this she rushes to the bed and he tumbles over her. They roll around, tussling with one another. In a moment he has her pinned, defying her to break free, which she does. He grabs her about the waist, swinging her back to him, both of them laughing with enjoyment. Then, she is below him, facing up. The look of him burns into her heart.

"I love you beyond endurance, he says, and he takes in the flush to her fair cheeks, the swell of her bodice, and her splayed out honey hair with its reddish tints.

"And yours inflames me with desire!"

"Where is my blushing little damsel of a few years ago?" he teases. "Where has she gone?"

"She is banished forever.  In her place is a desperate wanton lady, who wants nothing more than her husband's love."

"That you have forever," he promises.

"As you have mine."

He kisses her fiercely, and soon they are lost in the force of their passion.

It has always been this strong between them, this love, since first laying sight on each other as he came for the tithe from her father's fiefdom.

She had just turned eighteen, and had known immediately.

It was him.

It was very extraordinary, the feeling that surged between them like gush of a rain-filled river. She felt the strange intensity of love, and it has not wavered since.

He was a lord of the principality then, though before their wedding he became a viscount, by dint of his sworn military allegiance to Henry, their King.

 She hadn't know exactly what viscount was, only that it was  something important. She thought him too young for a king, or an earl or a count, for despite her inexperience, she perceived that there was too little worldliness in him--only some, a very little. Though he wasn't a count yet, she believed he would be one day.  She knew that viscount brought a lot of power, and that it was militarily oriented.

After his first visit he came within days to visit her father's home again, just to catch sight of her. Their ardent glances proved their devotion.  He asked for her hand at once. Her father was glad to further his daughter's happiness. They wed in mere weeks.

Her new home, she learned, was a stately manor that stood atop a great hill. She was to have servants at her disposal, though she scarcely knew what to do with them. To be with Drake was her great passion. He set up work in the parlor room which adjoined to their bedroom, so as to not be apart from her. She watched him as he poured over books and papers, hungry to know what these writings entailed, but knowing her place as his Lady did not include inquisitiveness.

Cherise was very fulfilled being loved by him. He was like a boy, really, in the body of a rigorous, red-blooded man. He was audacious, at times, bold, devil-may-care, and even wild, but he was always completely tender with her.

He was the dominant one, and while she was not completely submissive, she was very feminine, and enjoyed being so. He never made her feel inferior for it, but took pleasure in the girlishness of her nature.

He looked up from the great tome he is reading, and she could see that it had to do with his military work, though she was unsure of exactly how.

He sees where she is looking. She has gathered a little  about what he is doing from the offhand things he has said.  There is trouble in the King's lands, and a brewing fight with the King of France, for which he will be called into service.

"Tell me how your day was," he offers, closing the book. When she blushes and refrains from answering, he calls her charming.

"Then," he suggests, "how about we discuss some new dresses? We will call in the seamstress." She looks away, but her glance returns to the book he was pouring over.

He doesn't wish to worry her, and returns the book to its shelf. It is a great, archaic tome, that has been in his family for many generations. The way she doesn't want to trouble him with household trivialities, he doesn't talk to her about burdensome issues.

"I don't want clothes or girlish things," she admits to him with more fervor than she intends. "Though I enjoy the clothes you have made for me..."

"Well darling," he asks with that gleam to his eye, "what can I get for my beautiful wife?"

She doesn't answer.

What she wants is the book he reads so much. She wants to learn what he is absorbed in. She wants to be close him. But she doesn't reveal this, for fear of stepping out of her place.

She cups his face in her hands and kisses him.

"All you can get me is you."

They share a profound connection. 

They are  more honest with each other than most couples, though there are the things he keeps from her and she keeps from him. It's nothing important. It's because they think the other's not going to be interested because it's too trivial, or too weighty to bother the other with.  It's quite noble on both their parts.

They both know this and accept it. She wants to know more, but she doesn't want to step out of the bounds of what's right for who she is. So she makes a decision. She is going to study secretly. She's going to learn about war, to be closer to him.

She would never, ever lie to him. She hopes that what she is doing is not untruthful.

The next time he is gone, she pulls the great book from its shelf and with great effort and care brings it to his desk.

His desk. It feels smooth to the touch. Familiar, like him.

She touches the book's worn leather cover. It is enormous and very old. It's pages are as thin as the skin of an onion, and it's filled with hundreds of drawings. The drawings are of war.  Bloody battles.  Gruesome images of horror. A turbaned man holding up a shorn head, one foot on a decapitated body. It is horrible, these images, and they sink into her soul. Yet she can not help looking. She is filled with a sort of despair, to see the sorts of things men do to one another. She turns page after page.

An image depicts a men holding a cross while others engage in a gory battle around him. In another men pierce each other through the heart with swords. A man victoriously holds up entrails. Women are carried off flailing their limbs. Damsels being defiled. More women, and children also, viciously slain. A baby is cut open! It is too much to bear.

She finds these discoveries deeply unsettling.  But they're enlightening. She returns to the book again and again when he is not there.

The sense of war and killing is not just horrific.  It's  very, arrogant, seemingly done for no reason. It's senselessly aggressive, she comes to realize. Yet despite it's disturbing nature, it is also helps her understanding. The beginnings of a decision creep over her. 

There are passages in the book having to do with strategy. Means of formations involving topography. Yes, she finds as she reads, the strategy's very interesting.

There are other books dealing with geography, and recent books which tell her of the Norman kings, and papers which detail the coming fight. These she learns by heart.

But the main draw to her studies is the fascination about learning strategy. There is also the lure of how  gory, and completely awful war is.  It's a ghoulish fascination.  

But the strategy's different. It's absorbing and challenging. It enthralls her. 

She takes out her paper and pens. She is going to figure out strategy for him, create plans and drawings. 

Soon she is soon working out strategy herself. It is rudimentary, she knows, but she feels she is doing something for him. She sketches out some of her ideas, using topography as a basis.

She is too excited to share what she has learned to keep it from him. She makes a determination to reveal what she has been doing, hoping fervently that he will not be angry. She does not know how she will survive if not in his favor.

But she is not going to tell him about a different decision that she has made, though it effects both of them. This one has to do with the household, and her own person.

"Cherise," Drake queries, immediately detecting her excitement, "what is it?"

Though she is greatly nervous about telling him, she reveals what she has been doing by handing over her drawings. She is wearing a beautiful blue brocade dress that day, one of his favorites. Her hair is loose, and she knows he finds it fetching.

His face betrays confusion and he wordlessly lays the papers upon his desk, looking over them in silence.

The suspense is almost too much to bear. She waits for his reaction. If he is angry with her she just knows she will die.

At last his curiosity is satisfied and he looks toward her with a lowered glance. She waits for him to meet her eyes, trembling.

But no, she sees, he's not angry. He pulls her to him, and swings her around. He's pleased, astonished! Delighted with what she's done.

He kisses her deeply. He is not exhibiting raw passion at this moment, instead it is something more thoughtful. What she has done has touched him deeply. He looks at her with something new. She sees what it is. Pride. Not in her appearance, her charm, or her girlishness, but it's pride in her. Her heart leaps in understanding.

He returns to her drawings, amused, and utterly absorbed. He asks her questions. He looks up with a twinkle in his eye.  Yes, it may be rudimentary, but there is something else: he loves her more. 

Time passes, and her beloved Drake has gone away, forced to by his duty to the king. A cloud of depression settles upon the manor. Then news reaches Cherise of her father's death, and the destruction of his lands. Some of the servants lose family and the homes they have come from. They hear that Villages are being razed, children murdered where they sleep. The servants stop wearing their hoods at this time, and Cherise grows close to them, especially the motherly Mary. They become tied to each other in a way that turns into deep feeling.

There is something new between them as well: fear. Tales reach Cherise through Mary of increasing tragedies, villages set to flame, of dark invaders who bear grudge against the Normans.

Then, invasion comes to the Manor. Black riders storm the home. With no one to protect them, Cherise and the servants are defenseless.

She is running, running, running...

She has no awareness of what she is running to or from. She comes to in a dark wood, wearing a dark covering over her head.  She's dressed in dark clothes.  She must have anticipated what was happening, anticipated flight. she has no memory of what occurred.

What happened to Mary, to the other servants? Her heart wrenches, not knowing.

She realizes that she's searching. She's looking for something, someone. She doesn't know what.  She only knows that she's alone, that it's dark and she's running from something fearful.

Somehow, she doesn't feel that Drake is dead. She only knows she is no longer allowed where she lives. 

She looks upward, back toward the road which led from the manor where it sat high upon a crest.

The manor is engulfed in flames.

She attains some understanding. They have taken the home over and destroyed all that was in it, including Mary and all those living there. How she got out with her life, slipping away in the seconds before, grapping a cloak and rushing out must have been spurred only by the purest instinct to survive. For him. She had to stay alive for him.

That's all she knows.

She's wandering aimlessly again. Then she's walking. Her thoughts are circling deliriously.  All she knows is she can't go back to where she lives. She left it because something went terribly wrong there. 

And he's gone. He's gone.

She stumbles down an embankment, toward a river. It's a snowy river, with a little stream emptying into it.  There's a cave-like hole alongside, and she nestles into it. But she has to keep moving.  It's not safe to stay.

She's still looking for something, but she doesn't know what. She needs to keep going.

She's not making an escape, she's already done that. She needs to keep going, keep herself moving because she has no other choice. 

She has no place to go, and she's all alone. 

She looks back in the direction of what used to be her home. She doesn't know what happened to her servants or anybody else who lived there. She knows she got out on her own accord, the invaders didn't let her out. 

Then a macabre sort of feeling creeps over her.

She is childless at this point because it was deliberate. She had decided not to have a child because she didn't know what was going happen to him or them.  In learning about the war, she realized it was not safe to have a child.  Not yet.  So, she took herbs. Now, at least, no children got destroyed.   She thanks God for that, and for the fact that her husband was somewhere far away their home burned down. 

More time passes.

She's in a small cottage now, and it's very modest.  It belongs to a servant related to Mary. She's a distant relation, but it's a connection of some sort. She takes Cherise in because of who she is, the viscountess. When Cherise becomes better they work together side by side. She lives with the servant for some time, surviving, eking out a sustenance as best they can.

Then, the door flies open. Drake rushes in. He is older, thinner, and gaunt.

Cherise is relieved, overcome! She rushes to him, throwing her arms about him elatedly.

"You're  not dead! You're not dead!"    

But the look on his face is not welcoming. He shoves her aside angrily. 

What's happening?  What's happened?

He's furious with Cherise.  He hits her, hard, and she falls. The servant intercedes, and he hits her as well. He is vicious, brutal. 

Cherise doesn’t know why he's acting so harshly. She just can't understand it.

"Why are you doing this?" she cries.

His eyes blaze with fury. She's shocked, stunned.  She's never seen him this way.

Then, absorbing the fever in his eyes, she knows why. 

He didn't know where she was. 

He's like a madman then, throwing things around the tiny room, breaking vessels, whatever furniture was there.

"Searching! House by house!" He was filled with recrimination. "Village by village! To get news, word! No word. You weren't anywhere!"

She cries out to him, distraught. "I was searching in the woods for something, I thought for a way out or a direction. I was looking for you! But you weren't there. I knew you weren't there!" She was crying now, beside herself. "I just pressed on. I didn't know what else to do." 

"Everyone in the manor, our home, perished." His brow lowers, and she can see that he's more than just mean and angry. Madness has gone right through him. War has done him damage. 

They have been apart for such along while, at least two years. She's 32 now, thirty when she last saw him. 

But seeing him this way, now that they're finally reunited, is not the same. He's hard, cold, and mean.  She feels continuously alienated by him, and afraid.

"I love you so, Drake." She says this several hours after his arrival.

His eyes fill with blackness. He is angry at this too.

Is there love in his heart still, she wonders, or is it just harder to find? 

"I rue the day that I was ever brought to that hell!"

The servant huddles in a corner, for fear of his blows.

Cherise peers into his face. He's vengeful, but she can see that there's love there. 

Then, he falls to his knees before her. She cradles his head as he moans. "I thought you were dead. I didn't know..."

He's like a little baby inside.

"Cherise, I did so many terrible things. Things I will never be forgiven for."

"You did what you had to," she comforts, "You did what you had to."

But hours later, in the still of the morning, the truth dawns on her. He was the aggressor. She senses it in him.

As she realizes that he was the antagonist, she knows that the burning down of their home and whatever other things the enemy has done were not committed in retaliation, but in reaction. To teach them a lesson.

It was not to invade.

"It wasn't vengeful, the burning of the house, the houses in the village, everything they burnt down!" she explains to him, imploring him to understand. She knew it was important for him to know this, if he was to change. "It was a lesson: if you are going to invade and conquer, then this is what is going to happen to your home and your loved ones!" She was distraught, knowing that what had happened was somehow his fault.

He doesn't want to think about it or talk about it. He pushes Cherise aside and leaves the house. 

So he was an aggressor. She can see the justice of it all, in a sense.  Yet, she loves him unconditionally. She goes to him, pulling him back inside.

The servant gives them her bed, and leaves the house. 

When they come together, it's two souls joining.  She's his sustenance. He knows it. He admits it, in the moments of intimacy between them. These moments are profoundly gratifying and reassuring. But it's temporary. He's soon rough and mean again, treating her harshly.

She realizes then that she's the stronger of the two, despite his warfare. She is coming into her own in terms of moral character and inner strength. She's turned the tide.  Before she was a girl in red robes. Now she's a woman. 

Meanwhile, he is 40, and while he gives a very strong impression of virility and strength, inside, he's weak and frightened. 

He spends hours  standing in the doorway or outside the cottage, staring off into the distance. And, despite their coming together and what war has done to him, she realizes something else. He is wanting to go back out there, to get more of the same.

"I hate it," Drake says. "It is like a black sickness curling inside me, eating my entrails!" Yet he looks out over the horizon with a look of intense yearning. It has replaced the way he used to look at her.

Even as he professes to hate it, he wants to go back! She realizes, he is going back. 

"If you do that," Cherise warns, "Then expect your just desserts." 

"I want you here and I need you to be here," he demands. He says he will return to her in three months. 

"By then what will have happened to you, and to them?" She is desperate for him not to go. She knows what will happen if he does.

They are intimate again. But her heart is not in it. The prospect of him leaving infuriates and saddens her. It's tormenting.  

It renders her impotent as a woman, and unable to freely return his love. His bloodlust is not rational, and it's a dragging force on both of them. 

"If you go back, if you go there…" she wants to tell him that she may not be there when he comes back. She'd like to add that it's wrong to kill people, but she knows he can no longer understand this. War is part of his makeup now. He knows it's wrong on some level, but it's what men do. 

The best she can do is threaten to not be there when he gets back.

She tells him that if he goes she is going away too. 

And he goes. 

But she doesn't go away. She stays, and is tormented.

She throws a fit in the cottage three months later, when he doesn't come back.  He's killed a year or so afterward. 

The servant and Cherise grow old at heart and of body, and become impoverished. 

Cherise gives something a tremendous amount of thought throughout the years, giving it study and contemplation.  She feels not that war is bad, that it is necessary, but what is needed is a very clear strategy where people are not unnecessarily killed. 

No peace. 

No peace...

Her life exists in ripples and rolls, until it recedes.

She feels anger and resentment, though not as badly as before. She resents that he couldn't get over his bestial nature and be the human being that he was and should have, could have been.

He should have risen above it. He was good enough to rise above it. But he let his base instincts give way to bloodthirst.

"I would tell you now, Drake, if you were here to listen, about the meaning of human life."

She speaks to him as if her were there with her, lying in the bed with their arms around each other, now, as her life force falls away.

I would explain to you the value of it, of our love. If war is going to be waged, it must be done in the most honorable, respectful way. And if someone loves you more than her life itself and you love her equally in return it is best not to throw it aside. 

Cherise closes her eyes and the servant folds her hands, then makes the sign of the cross.

"I love you eternally," Cherise whispers. "But I may never, ever forgive you."

With that, she dies.