Joan Smith (4 page)

He was tall and dark-haired and wickedly handsome. The air caught in my lungs at the sight of him, appearing so unexpectedly. There was a hint of the rake in his sparkling, black-diamond eyes, which studied me with the gaze of a connoisseur studying a painting. That look spoke of admiration bestowed by one who was qualified to judge. I felt that from his infinite knowledge of women, he was awarding me the golden apple. His full lips lifted in pleasure, or excitement. His skin looked swarthy, though it was difficult to be certain at night. I could see that his features were regular, with a strongly arched nose and a firm chin. Just the sort of hero you see on dust covers.

Adding to this fictional effect was his outfit, for he was dressed in some sort of historical costume, with a white cravat rising high above the lapels of a jacket not seen since the nineteenth century. The intricate folds of his immaculate cravat contrasted dramatically with his dark skin. His trousers were roughly the cut of riding jodhpurs; high black leather boots rose to just below his knees.

My first thought was that I was having a hallucination; then the absurd idea took hold that I was seeing a ghost. Finally the truth dawned on me. He was an actor in the video that was being shot at Chêne Bay. Looking like a hero, and looking at a woman as if he loved her, were his stock in trade. That carefully barbered hair was probably held in place by buckets of hairspray. Perhaps his long lashes were even cosmetically enhanced. While we stared at each other without saying a word, his first spontaneous show of admiration dwindled to a scowl.

“I’m trespassing,” I said. My voice was breathless. He didn’t answer, but just continued to glare. “I’ve rented Chêne Mow,” I said, gesturing toward it. “My name is—”

“I know who you are, and why you’re here,” he said, with an impatient gesture of his elegant hands.

“Are you in the video?” I asked.

His curt snort was full of contempt. “Do I look like one of those yahoos, with ladies’ jewelry rattling about them like a tinker man?”

“No, you don’t. Is there a masquerade party going on? That looks like a costume from the last century”

He glanced down at his jacket. “It was a come-as-you-are party,” he said, with a cynical smile.

Was he saying he always dressed up like this? England is famous for its eccentrics. It is a part of its allure for Americans. We are infatuated by a people who really don’t care what others think of them. The man looked at me so impatiently, I thought I should leave, before I was hinted away.

“Well, it’s late. I should be going.”

“What is time to
us?”
he asked softly That “us” had a burr of intimacy to it, as if we two were set apart in some manner from the rest of mankind. He put his hand on my wrist, with a touch so light, I hardly felt it. His fingers were long and graceful. On the small finger of his left hand he wore an engraved emerald ring. “Come, let us go,” he said, looking up toward Chêne Bay. The waltz music sounded louder. “They are playing Gardel’s
Dansomanie.
Remember it? We shall have a waltz, just you and I.”

There must have been a madness in the air, because I felt a strong inclination to go with him, but common sense won out. To go to a punk rocker’s house alone with a strange man at this hour was asking for trouble. This matinee idol probably expected me to fall into his bed. Besides, I was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t been indulging in some illegal substance. There was a distracted air about him.

“It’s much too late! I must go,” I said, sliding easily from his grasp.

“Still a coward, Belle?” he taunted.

“I am not a coward! And how did you know my name?” He didn’t deign to answer my question. In fact, he looked surprised that I had asked it. Perhaps he had learned it from the owner of Chêne Bay. Mollie might have notified Ivan the Terrible, although it seemed unlikely Ivan would have bothered to discuss me with his guests. “Who told you my name?”

He smiled tolerantly. “What else would such a
belle fille
be called?”

“I’m twenty-six years old, not exactly a girl.”

“A bit long in the tooth to be sure,” he laughed, “but you will always be sweet sixteen to
me,
Belle. Why did you come here tonight?”

“I was looking for Arabella.”

“Surely that is redundant! I hoped you were looking for me.”

“How should I know you’d be here?”

He adopted a playful manner, as though we were sharing a joke. “Oh, I am often in the neighborhood, also looking for Arabella.”

“Who are you, a ghost hunter?”

He stared as if I had struck him. “Good God, don’t you recognize me?”

I studied his handsome face in the mist. There was something oddly familiar about it, but it was only an inkling, a tantalizing echo from the past. Was he a well-known movie star? Some of the videos hired actors for guest shots. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

He struck his breast in a melodramatic gesture. “Wounded to the quick!” Then he laughed again. “Liar!” he taunted softly, as his arms reached confidently for me.

“Perhaps if you gave me a clue..."

A reckless light gleamed in his wicked eyes. “That might be best,” he agreed, and swept me into his arms.

It was at that moment I realized I was hallucinating. His arms were not flesh-and-blood arms. There was no flesh, no sinew, no muscle to them; they were only the comfortable warmth I had been feeling earlier. His lips pressed mine, but with a phantom kiss that generated a longing they could not satisfy, almost as though he were an image projected on a screen. The very archetype of the romantic lover held me in his arms, the handsome stranger women have been dreaming of for centuries. He carried on his shoulders the mystery of past ages when ladies rode pedestals, and gentlemen performed heroic deeds to win their favors. He was ideal, infinite man. He was the hero of
Rebel Heart!
I had found him! He had sprung from the depths of my subconscious, complete in every detail, lacking only physical substance.

These ideas reeled in my head while I was held in thrall by the magical warmth of his phantom embrace. As the kiss deepened, the hunger grew inexorably, and I learned the meaning of the word
frustration.
It was the thirsting man's mirage of water in the desert, the starving man’s dream of food that vanished on its way to his lips, the philosopher’s hunger for the truth.

“Who are you?” I gasped, drawing back from him. His hand, fading now to an insubstantial shadow, lifted my fingers to his lips for a ghost kiss, as fleeting as the brush of a moth’s wing. “Ah, Belle,” he said, with such a sad look that my heart was wrenched.

Then he was gone, taking the warmth with
him,
and I was left alone in the fog by the weir, bewildered and ineffably saddened.

Chapter Five

I have to this day no memory of returning from the weir that night. I awoke the next morning in the blue room that I had spurned the day before as being too cold. My objection seemed foolish now. Perhaps the room had been a little chilly, but in the light of a new spring morning, it was fine.

I lay in bed awhile, nursing a woolen tongue and a hangover from the cheap red wine, thinking about the séance, and the “occurrence” that had disrupted it. I knew I must have been quite drunk when I got home, because I couldn’t remember coming upstairs, and if I had been sober, I would have slept in the yellow room. I remembered a strangely vivid dream about meeting a handsome, strange man in the park by the weir. My dreams usually fade as soon as I get up, but that one stayed with me while I washed and dressed in jeans and a fleecy shirt.

His image was as sharp as if he were still with me while I brewed coffee in an antique metal pot with a little glass bubble in the lid. I toasted whole wheat bread and peeled a perfect pear. I made some tentative plans for my day while I ate. In the morning I’d work on the hero of
Rebel Heart,
get the stranger from the weir down on paper while the image was still fresh. And in the afternoon I’d try to get hold of Mollie to clarify a few details of the séance, in case I ever wrote about it. I wanted to speak to some of the others as well. One viewpoint wasn’t enough. Emily was the oldest, and most experienced. She’d invited me to call on her.

I put my portable typewriter on the deal table in the kitchen as it provided the closest thing to a desk. It was hard to concentrate with sunlight streaming in at the window and that untended garden begging for attention. The image of the dream stranger was still so sharp in my mind that it seemed redundant to write a description of him. The word
redundant
sounded a familiar echo.
Surely that is redundant!
I could almost hear someone say it—a man’s voice. I shook the thought away and continued my work.

My editor, Anne Morrissey, had begun hounding me about
Rebel Heart,
but what I really wanted to write was Arabella’s story. It intrigued me, which is odd, for it was not my special period, and there was really not much to it. Just the tale of a young woman who had jilted her lover, or refused to become the man’s lover, or something, and been murdered by him. Perhaps it tweaked my interest because of the unrequited romance and the ghost.

It would still be a historical novel, but set in the early nineteenth century instead of the seventeenth. The Regency period, Emily had called it. I was familiar with Byron and Austen, but I’d have to buy or beg more books from the period to get the zeitgeist and terminology. Anachronisms were anathema to readers of historical fiction.

My attention strayed back to the dream stranger. He needed a name, something gallant and dashing, yet with a touch of class. I was just going to the fridge to scrounge for lunch when there was a tap at the door. I opened it to see Mollie. Her gleaming eyes told me she was up to some new mischief.

“It’s been confirmed,” she announced, stepping in. She wore another of her wildly flowered balloons, with the same pink spike-heeled shoes. “We did raise a spirit last night. I’ve been around to Emily’s place. Her candle burned blue, too. Did I tell you mine did?”

“No. Does that mean there’s a spirit abroad?”

“Of course!”

I led her to the kitchen and poured her a cup of coffee. She ladled in an unconscionable quantity of sugar and cream, stirred distractedly, and continued chattering.

“I lit my candle the minute I got home. There was definitely a presence. I felt it even before the candle burned blue.” She leaned toward me, green eyes sparkling. “It was in a wicked temper, Belle. It tossed the candle right onto the floor and darn near burned the house down. I was worried about you, here so close to the meadow where she roams.”

“You think it was Arabella?”

“That’s what Emily thinks. Of course, it was Arabella who was murdered, and disturbed spirits do walk. But so do evil spirits. I’m quite sure this one was a man.”

“Why do you think that? Does the candle burn differently for a man?”

“No, but I sense a woman’s presence in the head and heart. I feel a male in the loins. The sensation was so strong that I know my spirit was a rake. You didn’t experience anything, you being so close to Chêne Bay?”

“No, I didn’t.”

She looked disappointed.

I said, “But I had a really weird dream about a man. He was dressed in the costume of the Regency period. I suppose all that talk at Thorndyke’s place filled my head with ideas.”

She asked eagerly, “What did he look like?”

I closed my eyes, and the image of him returned, clear and vivid. “He was tall, with black hair, handsome. He asked me what I was doing at the weir, and when I said I was looking for Arabella, he said he was looking for her, too.”

“That sounds like Vanejul.”

“The man who killed her?”

“That’s right. He was her lover, whatever Sappho may say. She always has to be different. Mind you, a lover in those days might mean no more than a boyfriend. He was a handsome rascal, to go by the pictures. Or it could have been the other man in her life, the one she was engaged to.”

“As I said, it was only a dream, but a vivid one.”

‘You’re sure it was a dream?” she asked archly. “Are you sure you’re not fooling yourself? A state of denial is quite common on a person’s first encounter with the spirit world. Same as when you catch a fatal disease.”

“I’m sure. How did Vanejul murder Arabella?”

“According to the legend, he drowned her in the weir when she jilted him. They never found her body, but someone saw him do it. The books say Arabella got an offer from some man she liked better and gave Vanejul the boot. I don’t know how she had the heart to do it, for he was fascinating. Perhaps it was just a dream you had. Vanejul would have no reason to come back. He wasn’t murdered.”

“What did happen to him?”

“He died of a fever in Greece years after Arabella’s death. His body was sent home. It’s buried at Oldstead Abbey, about ten miles north of here. The Raventhorpes still live there. His real name was Baron Raventhorpe. Vanejul was his nom de plume. He wrote poetry.”

“Did he ever go to trial?”

“Devil a bit of it. He drowned poor Arabella, then ran off and caught the first ship out of England before they could find him. According to the writings that came out after his death, he went straight to the bad, whoring around Europe with anything in a skirt. Mind you, he left some wonderful poetry for posterity.”

“I’ve heard of Vanejul. He wasn’t one of the major romantic poets, though. Not like Wordsworth or Byron. I read a few of his poems when I was in college. They were a little cynical for my taste, although his first few love poems were tender and romantic.”

“That’d be the stuff he wrote before he went to Greece. There are all kinds of books about him in the local shops, if you’re interested. This is Vanejul territory.”

“Vanejul—that’s an anagram for Juvenal, isn’t it? Some famous Englishman used that pen name for a column he used to write in the journals, to hide his identity. Sydney Smith, they think it was.”

“I don’t know about that, but around here everybody knows Raventhorpe as Vanejul.”