In the warm sunlight of the spring afternoon, Victoria Winters walked alone up the path to Eagle Hill Cemetery. Collinwood's new governess had had little time to be alone of late, though in one sense she felt she had always been alone. The graveyard, however, was a place she went to think, a place in which she could easily lose the troubles of the present in a contemplation of the past.

It consoled her, thinking of the past. Somehow the simpler lives led by the people of those bygone centuries both compelled and fascinated her, and to walk between the headstones was, in its way, a small journey into that history. She lost herself in wonder at each age-worn inscription. What sights had this man witnessed in the Collinsport of 1750? Had he known this woman? This child?

Had their lives been pleasant, or merely a mundane existence? Or, like so many of the Collins family about whom she'd been told, had they perhaps been dark and full of tragedy? She would probably never know, and in some strange indelible way that made the mystery even more intriguing.

During her three weeks of employ at the Collins estate she had visited Eagle Hill twice, always alone and always without encountering anyone en route to or near the cemetery. Today, having assumed that it would be no different, she was startled to find someone else standing amid the tombstones.

He'd seen her before she had time to turn and go, and though she would have preferred solitude, propriety demanded she at least return a civil smile in response to his "hello." He didn't leave it at that, however. Why did she have the peculiar sensation that he'd known she would be here? That he might, in fact, have been waiting for her?

Silly thought. She tried to dismiss it, but for some reason it wouldn't quite go away.

"Hello," he said again, and that look of anxious expectation was all the more apparent in his eyes.  He had known she was coming here. "Did I startle you?"

"Well yes... a little."

"I'm sorry. I didn't intend to."

"It's all right. I guess I just didn't expect to find anyone up here."

Why was he dressed so oddly? In a loose, white linen shirt tucked into close-fitting pants that ended just inside his leather boots. She'd never seen anyone in Collinsport dressed that way before.

"You could say I come here often," he was saying in response to her statement. "Just as you do.  Perhaps even for the same reason.

He looked at her so strangely. As though he knew her; as though she ought to know him.
"You've seen me here before?"

"I suppose that sounds as though I've spied on you. I never meant to. I just.. couldn't help but see you."

"You... You must be a caretaker here."

He smiled; a sad, little-boy kind of smile, "In a way, yes."

"How odd that I never noticed you. My mind must have been a thousand miles away."

He began walking slowly through the randomly-placed headstones, and Vicki, no longer
uncomfortable in his presence, followed beside him.

"I've seen you look at them," he said as they walked. "And It was just as though I could read your thought. You wondered who they were, and what kind of lives they led."

Surprised, she stopped to study a small granite monument. "Was I that obvious? All right, I
confess to being an incurable romantic. The unpleasant truth of it is, I know most of them
probably lived remarkably uninteresting lives and died equally uninteresting deaths. That's a
sad comment, though, all by itself. To have lived out all their years only to end them here.
Forgotten, with nothing hut a block of granite to remind the world they ever existed at all." She sighed, shaking her head. "There, you see? I told you I was incurable."

He had reached out to touch the weathered granite of the stone, fingers tracing the nearly-illegible inscription. It read, "CHARLES EZRA FOURT, 1727 - 1789."

"Not all their lives were uninteresting," he said. "This one was a seaman. The captain of the Lady Maine. He had a penchant for strong drink, loose women and barroom brawls, right up to the night that too much of all three of them killed him."

"How do you know all of that?"

"I know about all of them. Do you want to hear more? Who about?" He walked again, reading names as he passed them. "Bartholomew Sewell... Elizabeth Anne Sewell... Agatha Durningham... Jeremiah Collins."

She stopped him there. "Do you know very much about the Collins family?"

"I told you. I know about everyone here."

"What sort of man was Jeremiah?"

"A very unhappy one, I'm afraid. He made the unfortunate error of eloping with his nephew's fiancee... and he died for it. So did she, for that matter, not long after, off the cliffs of Widow 's Hill. A suicide. She's here, beside him. Josette DuPres..."

He told her of fleeting moments in the lives of a hundred more as they walked and the sun
stretched longer overhead, creating shadows behind each headstone. And he seemed to enjoy recalling what he knew of each and every name; James August Vernon, Nathan Forbes, Margaret Ellison-Howell... until they reached the humble grave of one whose name the years had nearly worn away.

"How sad." Vicki knelt beside the wind-smoothed stone to pull weeds back from its face. "The inscription is almost gone. There's an .E... and an R..."

"Peter," her companion said quietly, and he, too, knelt beside the grave. "His name is... was ... Peter Bradford."

He grabbed more of the encroaching weeds in his own hand, tugging them loose from the soil with an expression that seemed to marvel at his talent for so simple an act. On the stone, where the tall grass had hidden it, the dates were still readable. 1774 - 1796.

"Twenty-two years. He died so very young," Vicki noted. "Do you know about his life too? What he did for a living. ..who he married?"

"Married?" A despondent look had come into his eyes. "No, he never married. But he loved
someone. So much that he swore he'd overcome Heaven, Earth... even death... in order to find her again."

"And did he?"

His voice, suddenly, had fallen into tones so hushed that she could scarcely hear him. "He's still searching for a way," he murmured, "But he's going to find it.., soon."

"You've told me so much of all the things I wanted to know about the past ... and I don't even know your name."

"But you do."

His hand had come out to take hold of hers, and in that moment Vicki found herself overwhelmed by the feeling that she did know this man; had, in fact, much more then known him. Somewhere, somehow, she had once been in love with him, and he with her...

"You'll come back to me one day soon, Vicki. And I'll treasure the few days we have together.  But I'm going to find a way to be with you again. A better way than this. A way that's forever."

"I don't... " She found she could barely form the words. "I don't understand"

"I love you Vicki. And I'll make a way for us to be together. I promise you I will."

Gently, endearingly, he drew her closer to him. It was a soft and lingering kiss. To Vicki, it
became a tiny piece of forever; a moment stolen out of time.

The hand that held hers slipped away. Or was it that it grew in some way less substantial, like the lips that had so lightly touched her own?

A breeze whispered through the grass around her, and Victoria Winters opened her eyes.
Forlornly alone in the afternoon sun, the uneven rows of tombstones stretched before her, silent sentries that stood guard over nothing at all. Had she fallen asleep somehow, kneeling here among the graves? How unlike her... And to daydream so vividly of a young man in the simple dress of another era. A young man who'd said that he loved her.

"You really are a hopeless romantic, Victoria Winters," she said aloud to herself, and rose slowly to her feet to look down at the faded old tombstone. "Good-bye, Peter Bradford. Maybe someday I will see you again. Even if it's only in a dream."

She turned to head home once more, reflecting how odd It was that she'd already begun to think of Collinwood as home.

Behind her, the grass over Peter Bradford's grave was wafted by a new and stronger breeze that sighed past the lonely rows of granite.

It sounded pleased.