Languish (6 page)

Lady Jasper opened her mouth to speak but my head started
to burn. My psychical abilities weren't entirely healed. My hand drifted to my brow. Tabitha looked at me sharply, expectantly. I gave a tiny shake of my head and widened my eyes in Lady Ashburnham's direction.

“Was he very handsome?” Tabitha pressed.

“Yes.” Lady Ashburnham smiled. “He was rather dashing, though I do say it myself. He had a small scar at the side of his mouth and the girls all swooned over it. They still go to his grave to pray for luck with their sweethearts.”

A scar at the side of his mouth.

Lady Jasper sent cold creeping over the coin, but Lady Ashburnham didn't notice. She was too busy wiping her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “I'm sorry, my dears. I don't know why I told you all of that.”

I thought of the way the horses had bolted with the carriage; of the icy hooves the day Lord Jasper was nearly thrown, and again just now, by the stables.

Rob Steele, the former Lord Ashburnham, was back.

And he was the Lonely Lord.

I knew why I felt so queer, so full of jagged unused energy. I'd felt like this before: around Rowena, when a spirit came at me from the pond, when the old woman tried to claim Colin for her own.

It was the cold, desperate feeling of a spirit pushing too close.

“I have to find Colin,” I said abruptly. I remembered the feel of the spirits trying to force us apart. They'd been protecting me. “
Now
. He's in danger.” I shot a glance at the coin, dropping
my voice. “From Rob.”

“I've seen the way Colin looks at you.” Tabitha shook her head. “He'll find
you
.”

Tabitha was right.

Colin found me.

I went to the cemetery, because I didn't know where else to go. I had a vague plan to find Rob's grave and fill it with salt. Colin was already there, waiting for me. He looked angry and arrogant, spoiling for a fight. His sleeves were rolled up to reveal muscled forearms, his hands tucked in his pockets.

“Colin,” I said as he stalked toward me. “Are you—.”

I'd been about to ask him if he was all right.

But he wasn't.

There was no teasing glint to his eyes, only hunger. I lifted my fistful of salt. His fingers closed around my wrist, bending it back until the salt scattered harmlessly down my dress.

“You have to listen to me,” I said, wincing at the press of his thumb on my skin.

He tossed his black hair off his face, eyes glinting. His smile was cocky. “Don't you think we've done enough talking?”

And then he was pressing me against the stone angel and his mouth was on mine and it was difficult to think, to do anything other than feel. Our tongues touched, our hands tangled. He crowded against me or I crowded against him, I couldn't be sure anymore. The kiss took up everything until we shimmered with it.

Shimmered.

I jerked back, breaking the kiss.

Colin was shimmering. There was an unnatural glow to his skin and the air was frosting. It wasn't fire between us anymore, but ice.

And with Lady Jasper's stone angel digging into my back, I could see why she'd tripped me. She'd been warning me, just like all the others spirits. If I'd looked up, sprawled on her grave, I would have seen the stone inscribed Rob Steele, Beloved Son.

Colin had been standing right there, right over Rob's bones after I'd stomped about demanding the spirits wake up.

It was my fault.

He smirked, leaning closer, his eyes still on my lips. Colin's blue irises went black in the twilight shadows. Black as Rob's eyes had been. I struggled to free myself. His hands tightened, crushed my sleeves between his fingers. “Don't be like that, love.”

I yanked sideways, pulling him with me. We stumbled into the iron fence, the gate rattling loudly. Colin didn't react like the spirits had; he didn't even pause.

Iron wasn't working.

“I'm too strong for that,” he drawled, caging me. His hand closed slowly and deliberately around the iron rail.

“You're not Colin,” I said, steadily. “You're Rob.”

He clenched his jaw. “I was a lot of things,” he said darkly. “Until Marie.”

His thumbs dug into my arms, painfully. He was too close,
too big, too wild.

But I was accustomed to stories of earls with too much money and too little responsibility. Like my father, who refused to acknowledge me. For all he knew or cared, I was shivering in rags, sifting through the stinking mud of the Thames with the mudlarks for buttons and broken baubles to sell.

“You are just a spoiled child,” I snapped back. “Losing yourself in your own pain, blind to others. Your mother needed you, you prat. She still misses you. And Marie
died.
”

“Then why can't I find her?” he asked, his voice breaking. “Why do lovers insist on walking past my grave, holding hands? Why do you get your kisses with the gardener right over my bones and I can never find my Marie?”

“Maybe you don't deserve her,” I returned calmly.

He started as if I'd slapped him.

“Still, she's waiting for you,” I whispered, catching sight of a hazy glow coalescing into the shape of a girl. She looked both annoyed and happy. “Can't you see her? She's been waiting for so long. Just as long as you have.”

“Stop that,” he snapped, his voice no longer familiar. “I know what you're doing. You and that old Lady Jasper, always closing me back into my grave. Turning the others against me so I was trapped, even when the lads came for luck with their sweethearts.”

“How many other lovers have you tried to break apart?”

“I was only searching for Marie.”

“You couldn't see her because you were too obsessed with your own pain. And you won't see her now, not until you leave
Colin's body. He can't see ghosts.”

There was just enough salt caught in the petals of the rose brooch on my dress. I twisted away, letting my hair fall forward to block me. He let me, since there was nowhere for me to go. The black fence blocked all hope of retreat.

I had no intention of retreating.

Not while Colin needed saving.

I tucked the salt grains inside my lower lip and then turned back, pretending to be frightened, to gasp after bewildered breath. Colin was so near, his breath touched my cheek. I didn't move, only looked at him with wide eyes.

“I'll stay,” he said, his eyes flickering. “We'll find Marie, and she and I will finally be together. I was only waiting for the right couple to visit my grave.” He kissed me again, urgently.

I smiled against his mouth as the salt dissolved.

He jerked back as if he'd been prodded with the tip of a sword. At the same time, Marie drifted closer, reaching out glowing, trembling fingers to touch Rob's shoulder. Light poured out of her, like the moon caught in a mirror. It flashed off the black iron, off the stones, my tin rose, and finally, right through Colin. He slumped against the fence, gasping. We stared at each other. “Bollocks.” He panted, his Irish accent thick as leaves on the summer solstice.

I grinned, only a little hysterically. “I missed you.”

Beside us, Rob floated over the grass, pale as pollen. Marie drifted away, pulling him by the hand. He was smiling. The light flashed once, burning into my head, and then we were left alone in the soft blue light of a summer night.

“When I promised to haunt you,” Colin murmured, “this wasn't what I meant.”

I touched his face, trailing over his cheekbones. “I know. How do you feel?”

“Hungry.”

“Let's see if there's any pineapple cake left in the pantry.”

“Food can wait,” he said, drawing me closer. He kissed me long and sweet as the scent of lavender enveloped us. I pulled back slightly, narrowing my eyes at the spirit of Lady Jasper, flickering like a candle's flame.

“You'd think we'd learn not to kiss in graveyards,” I muttered.

Colin looked over his shoulder suspiciously. “Who now?”

“Lady Jasper,” I told him. “Is Rob well and truly gone?” I asked her, clenching my teeth as I tried to force her to stay in focus. She nodded. “And Lord Jasper was never in any danger, was he?”

She shook her head. Then she smiled and came apart; the mist of her turning into white moths and flying away. I didn't think we'd see her again.

“She's gone,” I whispered to Colin.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be,” I replied as the cooling wind brought the loud song of frogs in a nearby pond. The moon touched the little church, and the headstones, and gleamed in Colin's eyes.

His voice was smooth but his fingers were work roughened when they tangled with mine. “Let's go home.”

A
lady does not dance more than two dances with the same gentleman.

The daughter of an earl precedes the wife of the youngest son of a marquis but not the wife of the youngest son of a duke.

And I was the daughter of a Spiritualist medium lately from Cheapside.

I was used to simple rules:
don't get caught.

I went back to memorizing the many intricate and involved rules of the British aristocracy, because as convoluted and boring as they were, it was still preferable to talking to my mother.

A lady eats what she is served at dinner without comment.

I was usually hungry enough to eat what I was given without comment, but if the earl served boiled tongue or calves' foot jelly, I fully intended to wrap it in my napkin and hide it in the nearest umbrella stand.

A well-bred lady always removes her gloves at dinner but never at a ball. She should also travel with two sets of silk gloves and one of kid.

Never mind that I had only two pairs of gloves to my name to begin with, I wasn't a well-bred lady. I might look the part in my secondhand dresses with the added silk ruchings and delicate embroidery, but I'd done all that work myself, sewing until my fingers bled, to have them ready for this journey.

It was all a pretense.

And it might work well enough in our London parlor for an hour or two, but this trip was a different matter altogether. I'd never dined with earls or dowager countesses or even wealthy tradesmen. Frankly, I'd rather walk alone on the outskirts of Whitechapel. At least I knew what I was about there; I knew what the dangers were and how to avoid them.

An earl's country estate might as well be deepest India.

When the train reached the next station, I slipped onto the platform before my mother could start another lecture on regal bearing under the cover of the noise of the crowds and the steam engine.

I knew I shouldn't venture out into the crowd unaccompanied, but I needed a few moments away from my mother and the starched and proper aristocrats with whom we shared the car. They knew we didn't belong there.
I
knew we didn't belong there. Only my mother seemed determined to ignore that fact with sniffs of disdain and complaints about the violent rocking of the train and what it was doing to her delicate sensibilities.

Mother was delicate the way badgers were delicate.

Since this was likely to be my last moment to myself until later in the evening when we reached Lord Jasper's estate in
Hampshire, I rushed out, accidentally bumping into a countess with a tiered bustle that took up the space of three people. I didn't even stop to apologize properly.

Because if I had to be shut up in that box for another minute, I'd run mad.

Mother would say it was frightfully ungrateful of me, but it was true nonetheless. She'd been hours without her glass of medicinal sherry and that alone was enough to make her cross, never mind the fine ladies looking down their noses at us.

We were situated in the first-class car, which was far and above the most luxurious place I'd ever seen. It was set with chandeliers hanging from the decorated ceiling, carved mahogany tables, and blue silk cushions and was better appointed than the parlor in our house. The movement might have rattled my teeth alarmingly, but I didn't care. I did, however, feel rather bad for Colin and Marjorie stuck in the last car, with no walls to shield them from the elements or the dust and no seats to speak of. At least it wasn't raining.