Ghost Talkers (10 page)

If he did that, then he would be gone truly. No. No—tremors shook Ginger's body and pulled her attention from the circle. She bit her tongue, trying to focus enough to stay steady in the spirit realm. The bed shifted under her as Mrs. Richardson slid closer, so that the warmth of her body was pressed against Ginger. Waves of compassion poured through their connection.

Ben turned from Lady Penfold, and his brow creased. “Maybe you should go out of the room, Ginger. There are two mediums here now.”

“No.”

“It is distressing you.”

“The fact that you are a ghost is distressing.” Even to her own ears, her laugh was utterly unconvincing. “Conversation about how to deal with that fact is not. I will be fine.”

“Well.” Lady Penfold frowned. “Well. It seems to me that the first thing we must do is to speak to Brigadier-General Davies while Ben is still a coherent entity. I'm terribly sorry, dear, but you do know what will happen to your memory, and I only mention it hoping that you will reconsider whether or not you might be able to rest.”

“It's not a choice.” He held up his hands. “Not that I'm being stubborn, but … the idea just makes me restless. Like … like I itch all over.”

Lt. Plumber cleared his throat. “Begging your pardon, ma'am, but it's occurred to me that until we see who it is that Capt. Harford suspected, maybe we shouldn't go telling anyone. Just in case it's the wrong anyone.”

“Are you suggesting that it might be Brigadier-General Davies? I've played bridge with him and his wife once a week, when we are all in Town, for the past two decades.” Lady Penfold sniffed. “Utter nonsense. I refuse to believe he's a traitor.”

Ginger nodded. “And he was here. When Ben was … he's been here the whole time.”

“They aren't working alone—” The frustration still flashed across Ben's aura, the oranges deepening in places to bloodred anger. “Brilliant. I know that much, but not who specifically. I can't say that I approve of my facilities as a ghost.”

“I can't say that I approve of you being a ghost.” The gallows humour came reflexively from months of working with the dead, though she felt anything but witty.

More than one traitor. Of course there must be, disheartening as it was. Thinking that in the entire British Army there was only one person who could be seduced by promises of money or power would have been hopelessly naive. Of course, before the war, Ginger would not have been able to believe, seriously, that anyone could betray their country.

Ben's aura jagged suddenly into darkness, then flashed back to red.

Ginger sat up. “What is it?”

“Lady Penfold … how did you know I was dead?”

“I was having tea with Mrs. Davies. There! Aha. There you have it. The brigadier-general himself came to the house to tell me, thinking my niece might need comforting. By his aura, he was quite shaken by it, which I think suggests that he could not be involved.”

“Damn. I'm regretting that I reported in.” He grimaced and shook his head. “Not that I had much choice—and it's damned strange, I'll tell you that. Like being sucked into one of those vacuum things. But the point—the point is, the fact that I reported in has already made its way to … well.”

Lady Penfold tossed her head. “You need not be coy. It has made its way to the biggest gossip in the Army. My dear, I know my reputation, and I know that it is earned, but I am in fact capable of keeping a secret when necessary. If you tell me not to share that you have reported in, then I won't.”

Ginger said, “Well, my behaviour was hardly discreet. I think the news would circulate among the Spirit Corps and the intelligence department regardless.”

“When you write the report, you have to say I didn't see anything, but that I thought it was a German.” Ben seemed to expand, looming over the group. “And, particularly, you must not tell anyone that I am still around.”

“Why?” Helen asked.

A wave of understanding and fear rolled out from Lt. Plumber. “Because … if whoever killed him knows that there are now eight living witnesses to the captain's murder, then we're all in danger.”

 

Chapter Eight

The bounds of propriety, even in wartime, meant that Ginger had never been to Ben's room before. She had not even been certain where he stayed in town. Ben lived—had lived—on the third floor of a private home, owned by an elderly Frenchman. He let the rooms out to different British officers and their soldier-servants. When Ben passed into his room at Ginger's side, he rippled with grief.

“Are you all right?”

“I think it just hit me.” He held up his hand and passed it through a small desk set under the window. “This isn't a game.”

“No.”

He sighed and then laughed, wiping his face. “I'm not certain why I keep sighing. I'm fairly certain I'm not breathing.”

“It's very common. Sighing, I mean.” He was a collection of memories, including the physical ones.

“Well … well, I've fantasized about inviting you here, although in my dreams it was rather tidier.”

The room was small, and likely had once been a servant's quarters. A narrow bed sat in the far corner next to a tall bookshelf. The shelves were crowded with books and stacks of paper tied into bundles. The desk was similarly buried beneath papers.

“I have, in fact, been plagued with curiosity about your life as a bachelor.”

The door to the room's wardrobe hung open. His uniforms hung neatly pressed, but the bottom of the wardrobe was covered in unwashed clothing, and a sock lay upon the ground.

“Perhaps it would be better not to satisfy that curiosity.”

Ginger picked up the sock and stuck her finger through the hole in the toe. “Please tell me that this is not the usual state of your socks.”

“Well … sometimes they've been soaked in invisible ink.”

“Invisible ink?”

He nodded and stood over the desk looking at it. “It's a death sentence to be caught with a bottle of invisible ink, because then you're clearly a spy. So we soak our socks in it and then extract it in water at the other end.”

“That seems remarkably clever. And I thought our cipher was good.”

“Book ciphers are one of the better ones. Unbreakable without the book. There's a whole set of ways to pass information. Ciphers like ours, advertisements in the newspapers…”

“Holes in socks?”

“Heh. Not quite. Though…” He cocked his head to the side and stared into the distance. “I wonder if that would work.”

“I can darn them for you…” Not that it mattered what his socks were like now.

Ben cleared his throat. “I don't think that would make a difference in how the ink works. It all comes out in the wash.”

“Have you ever really washed anything?”

“Merrow does. If not for him, the room would be in even worse shape.” Ben crouched next to the bookshelf, his head tilted to the side to read the titles.

“Anything coming back?” Though his notebook had been with him in the field, there was the possibility that familiar surroundings would help.

“Nothing useful. My mind has offered me a few lines of poetry, which is not at all helpful.
Down the blue night the unending columns press
.” He put his hand on a book, and it passed through. Ben cursed under his breath. He crouched there, with his head bent and his aura bright with fury. But then he turned and smiled at her. “Could I ask you to pull this out for me?”

“Of course.” She knelt and pulled out a small volume of Rupert Brooke's poems. She opened the book and thumbed through the pages. “Is this important?”

“No … But it is bothering me that I can remember part of the poem and not the whole thing. I won a badge with it at speech day back at Uppingham School.”

“I see how handily you slipped in that boast on your oratory.” Shivering, Ginger turned back to the table of contents. Brooke had not written the poems until he was at war, which was a good ten years after Ben had attended Uppingham. His memory was already starting to blend events. “Which poem?”

“‘Clouds.'”

She flipped back to poem and held the book open for Ben to see it. He went amber with satisfaction. “‘
Down the blue night the unending columns press / In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow, / Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow / Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.'
Thank you. It was going to bother me that I couldn't remember that, and I don't need more unfinished business to keep me here.”

“Finding out who—who killed you is quite enough.”

Ben shook his head. “It's more than that. Whoever killed me probably did so because I was close to figuring out who was targeting the Spirit Corps. I need to stop him.”

Ginger walked over to the desk and picked up a piece of paper. It was a bill for groceries. “If we work through the question, perhaps we can rebuild your line of thought. You were at the same camp that had the explosion. Might you have stumbled upon the saboteur instead?”

He steepled his fingers together and tapped them on his lips. “Perhaps … either way, we know it was an officer with light hair.”

Ginger closed her eyes, trying to think of the man. “I can't recall seeing his uniform clearly enough to tell rank.”

“No. But I felt braid on his cuffs when I was trying to pull his hands free.”

“Shall we presume that he survived the explosion?” She sorted through the papers on the desk, looking for anything useful.

Ben nodded. “I think we have to. Which means we need to look at the roster to see who survived and is a fit for the description.”

“Will hair colour be listed?”

“On their enlistment cards…” Orange frustration obscured him for a moment. “But I do not know how you will convince command to let you look at them or the roster.”

“I could ask Brigadier-General Davies … if you are certain that it's not him.”

“I'm not.” He gripped his head and grimaced. “It seems as though it gets fuzzier all the time.”

“You said you wrote it down.” Ginger pulled open a drawer. “Where would your notebook be?”

“It would be with … with my body. I keep feeling like I can go back. To my body, I mean. Like this is temporary.”

A flicker of hope caught Ginger. “Is there a chance that you aren't … might you have simply lost consciousness and come unmoored?”

“No.”

“But it might explain the feeling that this is temporary.”

Ben greyed with sorrow. “No, darling. Do not … I am—I am quite certain.”

She nodded and bent her head. Her eyes burned as her vision blurred. She picked up a packet of envelopes, without seeing it clearly. When she blinked her eyes clear, the handwriting on the envelopes was her own. “You saved my letters?”

“All of them.” With a rakish grin, he cocked his head. “Am I to understand by your surprise, Miss Stuyvesant, that you did not save mine?”

“Don't be absurd. Of course I did.” Ginger wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The sense he had described of being sucked toward the nexus at Potter's Field … it was designed to catch their soldiers on the verge of death, so it was, in theory, possible that his body had recovered from the strangulation. She flipped through the letters. “The last few are missing.”

“Nothing sinister. I carried them to the front with me. They'll be … they'll be in my breast pocket.”

“It sounds as though we should go to the front.”

“No!” His image stuttered, flashing between standing by her and huddling in a crouch. Black fear swirled around him. “It's not safe.”

“But since your notebook is there—”

“No. You can't. No. No. No.” He shook his head, which was almost lost in the darkness surrounding him. “You can't go. You can't. No. No. Nonononoo—”

“I would be careful.”

“Don't. No. No, don't.” Without a body to anchor him, dread distorted Ben's form. He sank into a crouch under the weight of fear. Great black sheets of it spread out from him, waving like seaweed at the bottom of the sea.

“Sh … sh…” The tendrils of fear stretched out and brushed against her. So cold. Ginger's heart raced. She swallowed, trying to catch her breath. “Ben—Ben, look. I am going to read you some poetry.”

He stared at her without comprehension. The temperature in the room dropped until Ginger could see her own breath.

“I am—I am going to read. What shall I read?” Shaking, she fumbled as she picked up the book of Brooke's poetry. “Shall I read the poem you memorized?”

“Yes.” The fear receded a little, but Ben still crouched as if sheltering from a bomb. “Yes. That would be good.”

She sank onto the bed and pulled his rough wool blanket around her. “Here. Listen.”

DOWN the blue night the unending columns press

In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,

Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow

Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.

Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,

And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,

As who would pray good for the world, but know

Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain

Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.

I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,

In wise majestic melancholy train,

And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,

And men, coming and going on the earth.

She finished that poem and moved on to the next, and the next. As she read, Ben gradually calmed down, until he came to sit on the bed beside her. Outside, the sun had set. Ginger became aware again of her ever-present fatigue. She yawned until her jaw popped.