When confronted about leaving our home, Tracy had been somewhat flippant. Her response was without emotion, something I had witnessed from her on occasion also. It was almost like she was so disconnected emotionally that she really did not care. When Stephen spoke to her about leaving, she had actually laughed saying, “as usual, I have to be friends with the wives, if I want to be friends with their husbands”. Then in a later conversation, she had admitted to him that she was not sure how far she would have been willing to go in their relationship to get what she wanted, which was essentially financial support.
There was a vacancy in some of her responses that was disconcerting and to be honest, a little chilling. After the whole situation came to a head, Stephen’s relationship with her at school changed rapidly. While he had been undecided about continuing with school, the decision was made that he would finish the course as he had already invested so much. She very quickly aligned herself with others in the class and almost used them as protection and attack against Stephen. The atmosphere was pretty uncomfortable for him, as it was for our daughter.
I was still trying to process everything that had happened and the details of our past life story was only beginning to reveal itself. To be honest, I felt uncomfortable with him going to school with her every night. But again, it was in our vulnerability that we found connection—he was willing to share how the uncomfortable atmosphere at school made him feel and I shared with him my reservations about her proximity.
So at this point, we are aware that I had lived in the 1500s in France (Dominique) and my daughter (Nicole) was reincarnated in this lifetime as Tracy. We knew that Stephen (Henri) had also lived in that lifetime and had some sort of relationship with Nicole but we had not discovered exactly what that relationship was. While understanding that I had been her mother was kind of mind-blowing, it really explained a lot about why I reacted towards her as I did. On one hand, I felt very threatened by this woman, yet on the other hand, I was sending her dinners with Stephen as he went to school each day! My reaction, while clearly steeped in denial which was an effort to passively control the situation, was also a soul response towards a woman who had been my child in a previous lifetime.
Just like Dominique, I have always had a way of quietly manipulating situations to my benefit. It was certainly not entirely conscious and definitely not malicious manipulation but I need to own it. As the story unfolded, I could connect with Dominique on so many levels, not the least of which was how she created structure around her that worked in her favor—making sure that she stayed on Marguerite’s good side, using Nicole’s existence to establish their life outside the convent and keeping the Abbot at arm’s length by continuing to perform with the Confraternity and enjoy his protection without giving him too much access to their lives. While her manipulations were not as overt as the Abbot’s had been, she certainly worked those around her to her benefit. The difference between their actions and manipulations was intention.
Coming to an acceptable definition of what our idea of evil was proved to occupy many of our discussions. While I was quicker to interpret Nicole’s actions as pure evil, Stephen took a more metered approach taking into consideration circumstances that might explain those actions. As the story was revealed, we were being shown a side of Nicole that could certainly be interpreted as evil. To this day, we are not sure about the notion of “evil”—was evil an outside force or was it the effect of ego on our spiritual selves? Perhaps what we were shown happening to Nicole was a kind of possession but we eventually saw it as a surrender to ego and our baser, more faithless, instincts like fear and doubt rather than an actual spiritual possession by an entity outside of her soul. After the fall from the wagon Nicole behaved very differently. It was shown to us as an event, an actual turning point in her life. Where she had the usual familial conflicts with her mother before, after the incident falling off the wagon, she was dominated and dictated by hatred, all of which she hid beneath a sweet smile.
It was the same smile we had both witnessed on Tracy’s face.