Free Someone to Love by Jude Deveraux

much had changed except for the furniture. One owner had filled the house with chrome and glass and black leather. In the bottom of the box was a booklet about haunted houses in England and Priory House rated a long paragraph. He read how the ghost of Barbara Caswell, the lady highwayman, had often been seen. Among other things, she lit candles in the tower window and rode her horse around the inside of the house.
    “But her husband had no idea what was going on,” Jace said as he tossed the booklet into the box.
    He leaned back against the pillows on the bed and looked about the room. The ceiling was undecorated, but it was plaster. The walls had old oak paneling halfway up and the floor was oak parquet. “Wonder what the room used to look like?” he whispered just before he fell asleep.
    Instantly, he began to dream. He dreamed he was in the bedroom, standing where the bed was, but he could see a narrow bed on the opposite wall. He looked down at his legs and realized his left leg was inside a big wardrobe. Startled, he stepped to the right, out of the cabinet. Curious, he put his hand through the wardrobe, then through a chair beside it. He knew he was dreaming, so he was enjoying the sensation. He walked toward the fireplace, stepping through a big green ottoman, and smiled as he went through an upholstered wing chair.
    At the fireplace, Jace tried to pick up ornaments but his hand passed through them. What a wonderful dream, he thought, enjoying the magic sensation of seeing but not being there. And what a marvelous room his mind had created. Victorian wasn’t what he would have thought he would have chosen though. If he’d guessed he would have said he’d choose Priory House when it was a monastery.
    This room belonged to a woman, he thought as he kept walking, pausing to run his hands through the pretty bottles on a little dressing table, then looked at the titles of the books jammed into a tall, skinny bookcase. They were mostly children’s books, but there were some nature books as well. “Birds,” he said, but he couldn’t hear his own voice. “She likes birds.” When he heard no sound, he thought, Like a silent movie, this is a silent dream.
    He wasn’t up on his history of antiques, but he guessed the room was from about the time of the American Civil War.
    When Jace had fully circled the room, he stopped by the wardrobe. To his left, the door into the hall opened. As Jace had thought, the other two doors, the ones into the master bedroom and the bath, weren’t there. Those were later changes.
    Even though he knew he was dreaming and knew that what he was seeing wasn’t real, when he heard voices, his heart nearly stopped.
    Two women came into the room. One was tall and slim and had her hair pulled back to the nape of her neck. Jace recognized her as the woman who’d blown the spider onto Mrs. Browne. His impulse was to say hello, but he so wanted to see what would happen that he inched his way into the wardrobe, disappearing into the side of it. His view was darker, as though he was wearing sunglasses indoors, but he could see them and wondered if they could see him.
    The second woman was shorter and plumper. She had a beautiful face, even if her eyebrows were unplucked, and she wore little makeup. By twenty-first-century standards she was on the heavy side. However, Jace marveled at what she’d done to her body. For all that the top and bottom of her were rather large, her waist was small enough that he could have spanned it with his hands. In a way she looked great, but in another way, he thought that if you cut the straps to her corset, she might expand into a blimp.
    He thought the taller woman would probably look great in a bikini.
    “Ann, it’s beautiful,” the plump woman said. She was wearing what had to be fifty pounds of green silk and probably a hundred yards of fringe and braid.
    The thinner woman, Ann, was holding up a pretty dress of pale yellow silk. It had half the yardage and