DISCLAIMER: Dark Shadows and its canon characters are the property of Dan Curtis Productions; no copyright infringement is intended.

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I'm glad you don't have my looks, child. My coloring. Even in the cradle, that's obvious...and I saw disappointment, for a moment, in your father's eyes.

But he's still happy you're a girl.

If you resembled me, you would also resemble her. The lost love of his youth...the woman whose ghost has hovered over our marriage bed these twenty years.

Would I have married him, if I had known? Can't say... I had never seen her picture. Didn't have a clue, till the years altered my appearance. By the time I was thirty I no longer reminded him of her. And then I began to realize he had never loved me at all.

I learned too late why he haunts Widow's Hill. She should have died there before she did...should have atoned for that disastrous marriage by leaping from the cliff after her husband's death. Widow's Hill claimed her, horribly, in the end...

But he refuses to let her go. Must even give you, child, her name. It wouldn't surprise me if he had a half-dozen bastards somewhere, all bearing that sainted name.

Yes, I'm glad you don't have my looks. Her looks. I won't have to smother you as I did the others, the ones who might have been her reincarnation. I am sorry about the name...but I'll insist on a different nickname. You'll never know you were named for her.

Named for a common servant... My sister, the sister I never knew. Twenty years older, disowned by our family after she eloped with that immigrant fisherman.

A servant! And...the one love of Jamison's life.

Elizabeth Ashby Chavez.





(The End)