Accursed (6 page)

“And the sense of decorum,” Byron muttered.

Tamara could not help laughing aloud at that.

“Now, see here!” William shouted.

She could imagine her brother’s bluster as he protested helplessly. With a sigh, Tamara took a robe from its hook and slipped it on. She glanced at the ghost of Lord Byron, who gazed at her curiously from beneath those dark curls.

“I’m certain I know what this is all about,” she whispered.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” the poet said, and he began to fade away once more, his body becoming ever more transparent, seeming to flicker with the lamplight until at last he was gone.

Tamara firmly tied the sash of her robe and pulled open the door that led to her sitting room. Her brother was already dressed for the dinner party, looking smart in a dark jacket, with a red-and-gray-patterned waistcoat beneath. He stood by the window and gazed out at the night, trying as best he could to make it seem as if he hadn’t been shouting at the closed door to her bedroom only moments ago.

“William,” she said.

He took a long breath, then turned to face her. His expression was serious, but the gravity of it did not reach his eyes, which held a certain sadness. That was ever the way he slipped past her defenses. Much as they might argue, it was his eyes that always gave away the truth of what he was feeling, and reminded her that he was the brother she loved.

Though she knew he had come to chastise her, she saw that he hated having to do so for the sake of his affections for Sophia.

Tamara disliked the girl all the more for it. She spoke to break the silence.

“If you don’t allow me to finish dressing, we shall arrive in Mayfair at an hour the Wintertons will no doubt consider unconscionably rude.”

William nodded. “Well, it’s helpful, I’m sure, to have a ghostly valet to help you choose your attire. Has Martha taken ill?”

“I gave her the evening’s liberty. I thought you might help me with my corset.”

Once more he nodded, his gaze searching the room for anything else he might study instead of her face. At last he looked upon her again.

“Sophia visited Threadneedle Street today. She tells me that you were less than polite at tea this afternoon,” William said. “Had I known you would behave so churlishly, I might have suggested she spend her time at some East End tavern. At least there she would have known to expect harsh treatment and loose talk.”

Tamara only stared at him as he spoke. When he finished, he waited for her response, and she let half a minute go by as they glared at each other.

“Are you through playing the lovestruck fool for a moment, then?” she asked.

William stood up straighter, his back rigid. “Excuse me?”

“I will not!” Tamara snapped. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, and then tightened her robe. “You are in love with the girl, Will. In light of that I allow for a certain amount of idiocy. It comes with the territory. But I won’t have you treating me like the villain when it’s your sweet Sophia whom you ought to be admonishing. She was distant at best upon her arrival for tea. I might go so far as to say petulant. She made no effort to be pleasant to my friends, then proceeded to insult each and every one of them, calling them nothing short of whores, and myself chief among them, apparently.”

William raised an eyebrow, considering her words. “I’ve overheard a conversation or two that you’ve shared with Victoria and the rest of that crowd. Not very ladylike, at times.”

“And that’s to our credit, I’d think. We have minds of our own, and if we care to exercise them, whether with social debate or a bit of naughty humor, you should be thrilled that we do so among ourselves, behind closed doors, and not in public.”

His mouth opened in a little
O
of surprise. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

William sighed. “You’ll apologize, of course.”

Tamara crossed her arms. “I’ll do no such thing. Sophia is the one who owes an apology.”

He frowned deeply, and when he spoke again his voice had lowered an octave. “Perhaps you ought to stay home this evening, then. Without a chaperone, it might not be proper for you to attend, in any case. I’ll make your excuses to the Wintertons.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” she said, laughing derisively. “And how
dare
you?”

“There’s a simple solution to this. Just promise that you’ll apologize.”

“I will
not.
And you will push this conversation no farther, or I might have to take this party as the perfect opportunity to declare the true identity of T. L. Fleet. I’m certain the Wintertons and their guests would be
thrilled
to discover that they have a celebrated man of letters in their midst.”

That brought him up short. William was used to his sister’s independent thinking, and even her stubbornness, but Tamara knew that the revelation of her writing career would embarrass him unendingly. Not that William himself disapproved of her authorial efforts, but there were far too many who would. If she were to write something that might be considered more appropriate for her sex, it might still send tongues wagging, but she would be thought of as merely eccentric, rather than altogether scandalous.

“Tamara, just . . . please,” William said, waving one hand in the air. “Try to get along with Sophia. For
my
sake?”

For several moments she only looked at him. Finally, she nodded slowly. “All right. But you’ll need to have the same chat with her, if you want my efforts to bear fruit. Now go on, and leave me to dress. You’ll have Farris bring the carriage ’round?”

“Twenty minutes?” William asked.

Tamara considered her unruly hair and how quickly she could tame it. “Best make it thirty. We don’t want to offend our hosts, but I’d like to look in on Father before we go.”

William hesitated as though he had more to say, then seemed to think better of it.

“Thirty minutes, then.”

A
FTER HER FRUSTRATING
argument with William, Tamara had been even more determined to follow Byron’s suggestion. As promised, she wore her most daring dress, a deep saffron with a bodice that cut low across her bosom such that her every breath might draw the eye. It was a lovely dress. Tamara had purchased it while shopping with Victoria Markham one afternoon the previous year, but she had never had the temerity to wear it. Now that she had at last put it on, she found it a bit heavy, the domed skirt spreading broadly around her. It certainly had not been created for comfort.

Much as she loved her brother, there had always been a certain friction between them. By his very nature he was cautious, relying too much upon logic and too little on instinct. Tamara was his opposite in so many ways. Like her grandfather, she had many passions and loved to indulge her imagination. In the absence of a mother—for theirs had died quite young—William had taken it upon himself to watch over his younger sister, and she had bristled with his every attempt to subject her to his own claustrophobic sense of propriety. He was a kind and decent man and a good brother, but Tamara knew that they would never quite understand each other.

The house was disturbingly silent now as she made her way up the stairs to the third floor. There were only three rooms on this floor: the music room, the nursery, and the bedroom that had once belonged to the governess who had looked after William and Tamara when they were very young.

Until the previous fall, all three of the rooms had been empty for years. Now a constant din arose from the nursery—the one farthest from the main hall of the household. Mad screams could be heard echoing through Ludlow House at all hours of the day and evening.

Her boot heels scuffed the stairs as she trod upward, a bowl of cold soup in her hands, her reticule dangling from her left wrist. A pair of lamps were mounted in sconces on the wall at the top of the steps, but they offered only a very little light. In truth, the darkness always seemed deeper up here, as though no matter how brightly the fire might burn it could push the shadows back only so far.

Each time she strode down this hallway she felt ice form along her spine, and her throat went dry. Her eyes burned with tears she would not allow herself to shed. They would be wasted should she allow them to fall, and Tamara was stronger than that.

There would come another time for tears, of that she was certain. For now, however, there was life to be lived and a war to be fought. A war against the darkness. And if she could not yet win the battle against the fiend that was locked in the room there at the top of the house, well, she had not surrendered hope.

Nor would she ever, as long as she drew breath.

In the gloom of the hallway she had to narrow her eyes to see the figure standing in front of the door of the nursery. Only as Tamara grew nearer could she make out the image, more like the suggestion of a presence. If she turned her head slightly the form would disappear, but from a certain angle the image of the specter was clear.

Had she still been of flesh and blood, the ghost would have been the tallest woman Tamara had ever seen, taller even than most men she had known. Her red hair was a wild tangle that fell down around her shoulders all the way to her perfectly rounded breasts. Sigils of magic and warfare were painted on her naked form, and she clutched a spear that was taller than she was. The shadows seemed to cling to her, but rather than lend her a modesty she did not possess, they instead made the sight of her all the more sensual.

Yet the sight of her was also a reminder of the pain she had endured while she lived. A fierce warrior—the queen of a savage tribe and a fearsome army—she had fought to drive the invading Roman soldiers away from the shores of Albion in a time so long ago that to most she was merely a legend. There had been sorcerers among the Roman forces, and they had allied themselves with demons. The queen’s two daughters had been raped and murdered by one such creature, a demon-beast called Oblis. She had turned to magic herself, to spellcraft that required those symbols to be painted on her flesh. They had been painted in blood.

And while she was naked, in the midst of performing the ritual, the Romans had caught her off guard. She had died that way, unclothed, and so she remained in the afterlife, though by choice. Her nudity caused William to look away, but Tamara admired the ghost for her stubbornness. Queen Bodicea would never allow herself to appear vulnerable, whether covered in armor or bare to any blade that might cut her.

Though none would do so, ever again.

“Good evening, Tamara,” said the spectral queen.

“And to you, Bodicea. He’s been awfully quiet, hasn’t he?”

The ghost shimmered, there in the half-light of the corridor. The substance of her form glowed darkly within, as though some night-black flame burned inside her. And perhaps it did, a fire of hatred. Bodicea glanced over her shoulder at the door, and then focused once more on Tamara.

“If he is quiet, it is only that he is thinking. He has interrupted his torment of the household to consider other ways in which he might cause anguish. The demon does not rest, Tamara. I know you realize that it is not your father inside this room, but it is difficult to see a human face and not ascribe to it at least some human qualities. Shed from your heart any tenderness you carry, for Oblis will recognize it, and exploit it.”

Tamara nodded once. The demon had been trapped here long enough that she did not need Bodicea’s warning, but she knew the specter could not resist the urge to offer it. Just as William and Tamara were haunted every moment by their father’s fate, so was the ancient queen seared by the memory of the defilement and murder of her daughters. It was cruel irony that the two tragedies would be so entwined.

There was always a guard for the room at the top of Ludlow House. Some of the other ghosts would go inside, to stand sentry over Tamara’s father, as would the Swifts’ friend Nigel Townsend, when he took his turn. But Bodicea never entered that room, and perhaps that was for the best.

Otherwise Tamara might fear for her father’s life.

The soup bowl felt suddenly heavy in her hands. She took a deep breath and met the ghost’s gaze straight on, unnerved as always by the translucence of Bodicea’s eyes. Tamara always felt that, if she could only catch a glimpse of those eyes without their transparency, their dark glow might provide a window onto eternal night, into the afterlife. Into eternity.

Then she glanced away. If such a sight were possible, she was far from certain she would welcome it.

“I’ll be wary,” she promised. “But if he
is
up to something, I want to know what it is.”

The ethereal flesh of the ghost seemed to churn, and rather than stepping away from the door, she
flowed.

Tamara balanced the cold soup bowl in one hand and with the other reached for the doorknob. Bodicea whispered her name, and she glanced back at the specter.

“You look lovely,” said the queen, her voice another sort of ghost, as if the observation pained her. Her faded eyes spoke of loss.

“Thank you,” Tamara replied.

But as she opened the door and stepped into the darkened room—with only the dim moonglow to light her way—she felt vaguely absurd. Coming here, dressed this way. She knew now that she ought to have looked in on Father before dressing for the party. The very idea of a party, of any kind of celebration, seemed somehow
wrong
now.