It was all her idea, not that anyone would ever believe it. Not Jean Randall, that good girl, practical and clever and always obedient to her parents' wishes. Jean was a regular attendant at Sacred Heart, sitting demurely beside her parents every week at mass, never a strand of hair out of place. Surely she would never do something so blasphemous.
And yet, sitting in the backseat of Christopher's father's car, her legs still wrapped firmly around his waist, her head pillowed on his shoulder, it was Jean who suggested they give it a try. It was her eighteenth birthday, and so far she had celebrated in a grand - if terribly naughty - fashion. She'd smoked a cigarette and drunk whiskey from Christopher's hip flask and made love to him in the backseat of the car, nestled beneath a copse of trees on the edge of town bearing silent witness to her sins. She felt wild, and free, and alive; today was the day everything would change, and she couldn't wait another moment longer.
Father Walker said it was a sin. According to him - and to the church - God had a plan for everyone's life, and to put that plan to the test, to rush things along, was a direct affront to him. You must be patient, as the Lord your God is patient, Father Walker had told her Sunday School class, the morning he came to speak to them about the marking. The subject at hand was so sacrosanct that the old priest would not trust anyone else to come and speak to the young ladies of Jean's class about it, and so he had come to tell them himself.
The marking begins for each of us on our eighteenth birthday, when we are finally mature enough to accept the plan that God has in store for our lives, he'd told them in his quivering voice. From that day forward, every wound inflicted on your body will be echoed in the body of your beloved, a symbol that we must share our burdens, and carry one another through the pains of this life. By this marking you will know your beloved, and he will know you, and you can rest assured that your union has been blessed by God. His eyes had shone, as he spoke, and for a moment Jean had wondered if Father Walker had ever experienced a marking, if he had a soulmate out there, somewhere, a woman he had forsaken in order to follow his calling as a priest. She couldn't quite imagine it somehow, someone falling in love Father Walker, with his foggy eyes and his jowly neck and his stooped shoulders. Some of you may think to mark yourselves on purpose, as a test of your love. This is a grievous sin, my dears. You must wait, and in time your beloved will be revealed to you, when God has deemed you worthy.
Jean Randall was many things, but patient had never been one of them. Today was her eighteenth birthday, the day she entered adulthood, the day her marking would begin, and she was in love with this boy who currently rested within the cradle of her thighs, smiling his devilish smile, his dark curls tumbling all around his face. What could it hurt, she asked herself as she ran her fingers through those curls, if she decided to cut herself on purpose, just to see what happened? Some of the other girls had done it, she knew; she'd heard them whispering, sobbing when they discovered that their boyfriend wasn't the one for them. Wouldn't it be better, she asked herself, to know for sure, rather than waste another moment with someone who wasn't her soulmate?
For some there is no marking, Father Walker had told them all, his voice taking a melancholy turn. Some of us are not meant to be husbands or wives, and there is no shame in this. And for some there may be more than one; a beloved found early in life, lost to death, may one day be replaced by another. And there is no shame in this, either. It is all a part of God's plan.
There was a very small, very frightened piece of Jean's heart that worried she might be one of those unlucky few for whom there was no other half, no joy, no love. It seemed to her to be a most dreadful fate, to know that one was doomed to live out one's life without a partner. Jean wanted a partner, a hand to hold, strong arms to cradle her close and protect her from the darkness of the world. She wanted to love and be loved, wanted to travel the world with her soulmate by her side, and the thought of spending all her days alone was a daunting one. Yes, she decided, it would be better to know.
"Are you sure?" Christopher asked her, his blue eyes hooded and satisfied in the wake of their love making. This too was a sin, Jean knew, to give her body to a boy who was not her husband, who had not even proposed to her, but it was the best kind of sin, the kind that left her tingling and full of hope, the kind she could not help but commit time and time again. Something else to confess, the next time, wondering what Father Walker must think of her.
"I want to know," Jean said fiercely. "I love you, but I want to know for sure."
"All right, then," Christopher shrugged. He shuffled around beneath her, caught his trousers with his foot and brought them up so he could root through his pockets in search of the small knife he always carried with him. He held it out to her, and her fingers trembled as she took it from him.
This was the moment when everything would change. Her whole life seemed to hang in the balance as she stared down at Christopher's little knife. If she cut herself, and no mark appeared on his body, she knew she would be devastated; she had given everything to Christopher, spent nights dreaming about where they would go, what they would do, what sort of life they would have, far away from Ballarat. He was always talking about leaving, about taking her on a grand adventure, and Jean couldn't wait for that adventure to start. If he was not the one for her, those plans would all be doomed. And yet, if he was the one, then she would know, would no longer worry about the sinfulness of being with him like this, when they were destined to be together. She could leave her parents' house and their expectations far behind and join her life to Christopher's, the way she so desperately longed to.
"Here we go," she said, trembling just a little as she steeled herself for the pain. For a moment she considered simply pricking her finger, just a little jab; it wouldn't take much, to make her point. But she wanted something bigger, something grander, something she and Christopher could proudly show their friends and families. She wanted proof.
She closed her eyes, and sliced the knife across her palm, hissing at the sting. It wasn't deep, but it hurt.
For a moment she hung in suspense, her eyes still closed, her heart pounding madly in her chest. All the answers she sought were right there for the taking, but she was so frightened of losing Christopher that she could not bear to look.
"Oh, Jeannie," Christopher breathed.
Her eyes flew open at once, and she gazed upon him in sheer terror. To her immense relief, however, Christopher was smiling. He held up his hand, and laughed when her eyes went wide as saucers.
There on his palm, fresh and bloodless and undeniable, was a small cut, matching hers exactly.
She squealed in sheer delight and flung her arms around his neck, pulling him to her for an exuberant kiss. It might have been a sin, but nothing in her life had ever felt as wonderful as this. Christopher was hers, the other half of her soul, the one she was meant to spend the rest of her life with, and she could not wait for the rest of her life to begin.
As the sun went down on Ballarat it was rising on Edinburgh, and Lucien Blake was tangled up with a local girl, seriously considering lying out of work and spending the rest of the day in her bed. Surely the hospital wouldn't mind, he told himself as his companion absent-mindedly ran her fingertips over the back of his hand, staring up at him through thick eyelashes. They could survive a day without him. Soon they would have to survive a lot more than that; Lucien had decided to join the Army as a surgeon, and his time in Scotland was nearly through. Surely it wouldn't make that much of a difference, if he found other, more interesting ways to entertain himself.
He opened his mouth to ask his charming bedfellow if she had a telephone he could use when she turned his hand over, and gasped.
"Oh, Lucien," she sighed dreamily, holding up his left palm for his inspection. "Look."
He stared at his own hand in a state of shock. Across his skin a mark had risen, a long, thin laceration that most definitely had not been there only moments before. He knew what this was, had seen it a thousand times at the hospital; it was a marking. And Lucien wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that; he had yet to meet a woman he was interested in settling down with, and the thought that somewhere out there was a girl chosen for him by fate rankled. He would much rather have made that choice himself. In point of fact, given that he was twenty-four years old and had yet to experience a mark, he had been certain that he had dodged that particular bullet, that there was no hypothetical woman out there quietly chiding him for his carelessness. Oh, his friends had teased him, had said maybe she was a careful girl, or a young one, not yet eighteen and not yet old enough for the marking to begin, but he had not truly believed, before this moment, that he would ever tie himself to anyone. He had seen what misery love had brought his parents, and he wanted no part of it.
"How about that, eh?" he said faintly. The girl beside him flopped onto her back, misty-eyed.
"It's so romantic," she breathed. "You have a soulmate, Lucien. I wonder who she is?"
"I wonder where she is," Lucien mumbled under his breath.
"Back home in Australia?" the girl suggested.
Lucien just shook his head, thinking of Monica. He had tested that relationship himself, had cut his thumb and watched her closely, and when he realized that she was not the one for him, he'd left forthwith, not even bothering to say goodbye to her. Monica would have been devastated, to learn what he'd done; she was a good girl, and she always did whatever Father Walker said. For his part, Lucien had never put much stock in the old priest's ramblings, and he was glad he'd cut himself before he made the grievous error of proposing to her. He shuddered to think what might have happened, if he'd gone through with it.
"Well, we know it's not me," the girl said, laughing. Most of the girls he knew whispered about the marking in awed voices too soft for him to hear, treated it as if it were holy, the way Father Walker said it was. That this girl should be so untroubled by the fact that she shared her bed with a man who belonged to another came as a bit of a shock to him, but not an altogether unpleasant one. Wherever she was, he was certain that he hadn't met his soulmate yet, and he didn't feel particularly guilty about keeping company with someone else for the time being.
But even as he rolled over and began to kiss his way down his giggling lover's body, he found his thoughts drifting back to the mark on his palm, and the woman who'd put it there. What would she be like, this girl he was meant to find? When would he find her? Where? Would they be happy together? Wherever she was, he hoped that she was well, and that she would be more careful in the future; he imagined she'd be rather disapproving of some of the choices he'd made, and he didn't fancy the thought of carrying a constant reminder of her - and her displeasure - with him everywhere he went.