I had managed to read almost one whole year of the Pepys diary before my own weariness had defeated me. When I woke, it was late afternoon, and through the half-open window the air smelled gloriously clean and fresh. My clothes, newly washed and pressed by Mrs. Pearce, lay spread across a nearby chair like a waiting playmate. I rose, bathed, and went downstairs in search of my brother.

I found him on the long patio at the back of the house, absently chewing the end of his pencil while he sat, lost in thought, staring with unseeing eyes out over the wide, manicured lawn. Surfacing at the sound of my approaching footsteps, he looked up with a smile, removing the pencil from his mouth and setting it on top of the open notebook on the small table beside him.

'Well, you're certainly looking better,' he greeted me. 'Maybe you ought to stay on a couple of days, get yourself rested up.'

'Thanks, but no.' I took a brightly cushioned chair, facing him. 'I have to go back tomorrow. What are you working on?'

He tilted the notebook, letting me see the heavily scribbled pages. 'Sermon. You're good with words, as I recall. What's another word for "spontaneous"?'

'Extemporaneous?'

'Perfect.' He made a few more illegible marks with the pencil and set the notebook aside a second time. 'Did you manage to read any of the Pepys?'

'Mmm.' I leaned back, crossing my leg and swinging one foot in a lazy motion. 'I read nearly all of the plague-year bit. Sixteen sixty-five, by the way. Pretty horrific stuff.'

As nearly as I had been able to make out, the plague had started slowly, crossing over from Holland on the merchant vessels that freely sailed the waters of the English Channel, from Amsterdam to London and back again. Having once taken hold, it had caught and festered like a dripping wound, spreading through the overcrowded suburbs with deadly purpose until it reached the City itself. It was with a sadness born of twentieth-century hindsight that I read how the Londoners had, in their superstitious ignorance, quickly slaughtered all the dogs and cats that they could find, animals that might have been able to curb the rising population of plague-carrying rats. Even today, with all our modern medicine, an outbreak of bubonic plague would be a terrifying spectacle. To the people of the seventeenth century, it must have seemed like the very apocalypse.

'Find anything of interest?' Tom asked. 'Several things. Do you remember my telling you that I'd dreamed of two comets? Well, it turns out there actually were two comets seen over London, one in December of 1664 and the second in the spring of the plague year. Made quite a stir, according to Pepys. Very portentous.'

'Yes, I can imagine.' Tom nodded. 'Comets were seen as signs of impending doom, in those days. Not without cause, really. The Bayeux tapestry shows a comet appearing when poor old Harold was crowned king, just before William the Conqueror plowed the English army into the ground and put an arrow through Harold's eye.'

'Did not,' I contradicted him. 'You've had the wrong history teacher, love. The chap on the tapestry with the arrow through his eye isn't Harold. Harold gets hewn down with a broadsword, or something, a little further on.'

'Whatever. The point is, comets always meant bad luck. The historical antithesis of your bloody starlings, if you like. Did anything else in the diary sound familiar?'

'Not really.' I shook my head. 'There were a few things he mentioned, early on in the year, that rang off bells in my brain, but when he writes about the summer months, with people dropping like flies in the streets, I don't feel anything.'

My brother smiled at me, that particularly self-satisfied smile that usually meant he was about to be clever. 'Well, you wouldn't, would you?'

'What do you mean?'

'Assuming that you were, in some former lifetime, this Mariana person, then you could hardly be expected to remember what London was like at the height of the plague. You'd been sent out of London by that time, hadn't you? To the country.'

'To Exbury,' I mused. I caught myself and smiled a little ruefully. 'It all sounds rather far-fetched, doesn't it? Shades of the penny dreadful.'

'Oh, I don't know.' Tom shrugged. 'It sounds rather fascinating, to me. I've set our local librarian on the scent, by the way, so we'll have to wait and see what he manages to dig Up on the subject of reincarnation.'

I smiled at him. 'He didn't think it an odd topic for the local vicar to be researching?'

'Heavens, no.' Tom brushed off the suggestion. 'I told him I needed the information for an upcoming sermon.'

Which was, I decided upon reflection, a wholly logical and plausible excuse. Tom's sermons were notoriously unorthodox, and when he stood in the pulpit he was as likely to discuss cricket as he was to quote biblical texts. No doubt his parishioners had grown used to his eccentricities, and accepted them now without question.

'I'll have to dig out some of my old textbooks on comparative religions,' my brother had continued. 'There should be some information on reincarnation in there. Both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths believe in it, I know that much.'

'Well, I'm not sure that I'm entirely convinced, myself,' I told him. 'But whatever is happening, it's definitely connected to my house.'

'And you're certain you want to go back?'

I thought of my beautiful sunlit study; of the companionable atmosphere of the Red Lion pub, with Ned perpetually reading his paper at the end of the bar; of Geoffrey de Mornay, and the way his eyes darkened when he smiled ...