Shadows in Scarlet (13 page)

What if he'd arranged the wig, the shoe, and the watch, then jumped from the bottom tread and thrashed around to make noise? But he wasn't asking her to come home with him and soothe his brow.

She grimaced. It wasn't light work hauling Wayne down the slipping and sliding gravel of the walk. He wasn't faking his ankle, that was for sure, any more than he was faking the scrape on his knee. Even if the fall had started out as a stunt, he really was hurt.

At last they had Wayne at his car. Roy offered to drive. Wayne wouldn't hear of it. Rolling his eyes, Roy climbed into the passenger seat. “I'll call the Benedettos and let them know my car's still out here,” he told Amanda. “I'll catch a ride with Carrie tomorrow."

"I'll bring you myself.” Wayne offered Amanda a jaunty grin missing only Indiana Jones's old hat. The engine roared and the car pulled out, scattering gravel.

Amanda was too short of breath to call good-bye. She stood panting, her lungs filled with the odors of auto exhaust, Wayne's after shave, and sweat. Her shadow stretched out before her, pointing to the gardens.
Gardens,
she thought.

Tomorrow the garden club was holding its monthly luncheon in the dining room, one of the many perks Cynthia had retained when she donated Melrose to CW. Thank goodness Carrie would be here. She doubted Wayne would be. She saw him mummified in adhesive tape and painted with iodine, laid out on a Williamsburg Collection reproduction settee, Cynthia feeding him chicken soup from a demitasse spoon. Maybe, she thought, he was trying to get attention not from her but from his mother.

If they gave out Oscars for most irritating person, today Wayne would've won hands down. But he had so many redeeming features, reaming him out wouldn't be one bit satisfying. Which was even more irritating.

Amanda stalked back into the house feeling like a lathered horse. She spent a long time doing aquatic aerobics in the shower. Then she fed Lafayette, who had of course finished his rounds and was ready for dinner well before she'd even thought about hers. By the time she'd gone through the grounds and around the house it was almost dark.

Turning on all the lights in the upstairs and downstairs halls, she checked out the top of the staircase. She found no kinks in the carpet, no lost pencils, nothing to have made Wayne fall. Sally's painted eyes looked impassively down from her portrait, offering no help.

All right, Amanda told herself, so there was nothing here for Wayne to have tripped over. That didn't mean her crazy theory was right. His fall had been an accident. It was surprising more accidents didn't happen, with the interpreters running around in unfamiliar clothing. He'd snagged his shoe buckle against his opposite ankle or something. Just because he was playing the situation for all it was worth didn't mean he was guilty of...

Whoa.
Amanda stopped dead on the fourth step from the bottom. What if Wayne had seen James? Just a glint of scarlet in the shadows, maybe, enough to startle him and make him miss the first step? That would explain the edge in his voice—he wasn't sure he'd seen anything at all, let alone a ghostly figure. Better to be called a klutz than nuts. But it'd been full daylight, which made that scenario, too, unlikely.

She made a mental note to ask Wayne. It'd be sort of comforting to know someone else had seen James, however briefly.

Back in her apartment Amanda gathered sandwich fixings from the refrigerator and tucked the telephone between her shoulder and cheek. “Hello, Mrs. Chancellor? This is Amanda Witham at Melrose. I was just checking to see how Wayne is doing."

"Why, how nice of you to call,” replied Cynthia's candied voice. “He's resting comfortably, thank you. A bit of a sprained ankle, some bruises, nothing too bad. The doctor suggested he stay home tomorrow.” Wayne's voice bellowed in the background, then was muffled as Cynthia either closed a door or pressed a pillow over his face. “Can you and Carrie handle the visitors all alone? Of course, you'll have the ‘servants', and the caterers for the luncheon, and I'll be there with the garden club, if there's anything I can do to help. I'll try to have Wayne back out there on Saturday, he'll be limping, but we'll just have to pretend Page has gout or something. Thank you again for calling, you're so sweet to think of us. Good night."

"Good ni...” The line was already dead. Amanda set the phone down on the cabinet, wondering how Cynthia had learned to speak entire paragraphs without breathing.

Tonight the cozy apartment was too small and too warm. Amanda wrapped her sandwich in a napkin, turned off the floodlights, and stepped out into the night. She sat down on a bench beside the front walk. The trees, the lawn, the river were sketched in shades of gray beneath a lucid Prussian blue sky. Between bites of sandwich she watched a glow on the eastern horizon swell into the rising moon. Just past the full, it made a bronze oval like the badge on James's scabbard. In the pale light the shadows of the trees darkened to inky black.
Is this romantic or what?
Amanda asked herself. She might as well be at the multiplex wallowing in some vivid fantasy.

A cold breeze lifted her hair, but not one leaf rustled. Gooseflesh rose on her skin. She spun around. Speaking of fantasy....

James was seated comfortably next to her, one arm and hand resting on his lap, the other crooked over the back of the bench. He glowed faintly in the darkness, shadowless. “Good evening, Miss Witham."

"Erk...” She gulped down a mouthful of ham and cheese. “Good evening, Captain Grant."

"Please, continue with your repast. I—I have already supped.” James's eyes fell and he frowned, as though trying to remember something. Like the menu of a meal eaten two hundred years ago.

Amanda nibbled at the crust of the bread. But she didn't want the sandwich any more, not when she had such a feast for her senses.

James seemed every bit as concrete as he'd been the night before. The planes and angles of his profile were cut flawlessly against the moonlit night. His lashes concealed his downcast eyes. His hand on the tartan fabric was lean and strong, the nails neatly pared. The topic of eighteenth-century fingernails wasn't on Amanda's agenda, but she suspected James's should have been dirty.

Was it his wealth that had kept him and his uniform spiffy after two years’ slogging around the southern colonies? Or was she seeing him not as he had actually looked at his time of death, but how he imagined himself to look? If he were generating his own image, though, he'd have his sword. And the scabbard at his side was still empty.

Maybe this was how she wanted him to look, attractive not only physically but conceptually, the ultimate mysterious stranger.

He raised his head and smiled at her. The bread turned to dust in her mouth. Her analysis burned to ash in the light of his eyes.

This guy is good. Really good.
And he knew it. She put the rest of the sandwich down on the low wall behind the bench. Having him watch her eat was like having him watch her change clothes, rushing things a bit for a—what? Second date?

He tilted his head to the side like a bird contemplating a worm. “Your color is high, Miss Witham. I trust you are not succumbing to the sickness of these warm climates, that which is caused by the putrefaction of vegetable matter and the unhealthy night air. Perhaps we should retire inside."

"No problem,” she said. “Very few people around here get mal—the sweating sickness—any more."

"Indeed? How fortunate."

"I—er.... “Well, this wasn't a date, was it? Weather, a celebrity scandal, the latest movie—those topics weren't going to cut it. But James, like most people, liked to talk about himself. If she got him going on what to him was contemporary color, she could use the details to punch up her thesis. As long as she remembered all the suitable academic qualifiers. James was definitely a source she'd have to keep secret. Not Deep Throat, but Deep Kilt. “Tell me more about London. I've never been there."

"Ah, London. New squares and new streets rise up every day in such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world can equal it except old Rome in Trajan's time, perhaps. But Rome today is sadly decayed, as are its monuments, and London has been built afresh since the great fire of the last century. Mr. Wren's churches are famous for their handsome steeples, and the mighty dome of St. Paul's rises over all, the equal of St. Peter's without a doubt."

"You've been to Rome, too?"

"Certainly. A gentleman must have a proper education, mustn't he?"

"I imagine you've been properly educated,” Amanda said dryly.

James grinned, taking her meaning. His hand slipped away from his lap and took hers. Funny how someone who hadn't the least concept of electricity could send electric sparks through her body. Doubly funny, that though she wasn't really touching him, she could feel him the way she could feel a breeze on her cheek or water trickling down her back.

"It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night,” James murmured, “Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear."

Those lines from
Romeo and Juliet
weren't nearly as moldy an oldie in 1781, Amanda told herself. In James's slightly ironic voice the phone book would seem profound. She cleared her throat. “What about ‘My love is like a red, red rose'?"

His eyebrow quirked. “A colonial verse?"

"Robert Burns."

The other brow rose.

"You've been spending too much time in London and not enough in Edinburgh."

"Edinburgh,” he said. “The tenements crowded together above the dark depths of the loch and the castle frowning over all like a specter of ancient and weary Time. And yet I am told there are plans afoot to build a fine new city in the best model of London."

"Some Scot you are, singing the praises of London."

"And why not, Madame, when such interchanges make a beneficial mixture of manners and render our union more complete? Scotland's union with England, that is to say.” His amendment only emphasized the double meaning of his earlier words. His thumb caressed the hills and valleys of her knuckles, considering the possibility of other, more private, hills and valleys.

Amanda was caught between amusement and lust.
I can't really touch him,
she reminded herself. Then why was the flirting of his thumb across her knuckles so exciting?

Amanda raised her free hand and set it against James's chest, on the silver buckle of the shoulder belt. The buckle she'd seen tarnished and dirty, and which now lay in the box in the entrance hall, still stained with age. Beneath her fingertips it gleamed like myth—Laurian silver or Tolkien's mithril—there, she could sling around literary references just as well as he could.

She sensed pressure, and coolness, and the faintest, most distant vibration, as though a heart beat in the chest beneath the belt and the scarlet coat. But it was only an illusion of a heartbeat, wasn't it?

She dropped her left hand, retrieved her right, and stood up. The man wasn't real—yes he was, he was a real ghost—he was as real as she wanted him to be and as he wanted himself to be. This place was real. This time was real. Why couldn't her fantasy be real, too?

The moonlight shimmered on the river and spangled every leaf and branch as though the Virginia landscape, too, wore silver fittings. A footstep crunched on the gravel walk. He was standing behind her. Every follicle on the back of her neck tightened to the quick cool stirring of—his breath, he had breath, or a memory of breath.

"Amanda?” James asked. “If I may presume to address you so familiarly."

"Yes,” she replied.

"Be not melancholy. The war will soon end. All will be well, in one way or the other."

"Yes.” She turned around. No surprise James was close behind her. She found herself nose to chin with him. The ruffle at his throat and the kilt at his knee were subtle tickles against her chin and her thigh. His arms closed around her, leaving her hands spread on the fragile resonance that was his scarlet coat and his chest beneath.
Go for it.
Wreathed in the smoky sweet aroma of whiskey, she opened her lips for his and shuddered in delight at his kiss.

It was a teasing hint of a kiss, a delicate merging of lips and tongues, more a tension in her skin and a melting warmth in her stomach. And yet his body was undeniable beneath her hands and mouth, leaning insistently into hers,
there.
She'd never felt anything like it before. She wasn't just turned on, she was flying high.

After several long and gratifying minutes Amanda came up for air. She hung onto James until her knees stopped bending backwards, like a giraffe's, and then looked into his eyes.

At a distance of only a few inches they were no less vivid, crinkled with pleasure. Pleasure, not triumph. Sally Armstrong would have slapped his face for an embrace and a kiss a lot less invasive than that one. She would have had the vapors for days worrying it would tarnish her reputation. To Amanda the kiss was only the overture and the curtain going up.
On what?

James spoke first. “If I have offended your delicate nature, Amanda, I apologize. But your beauty overwhelms me."

If she responded with a crass twenty-first century retort, would he vanish? She didn't want to find out. She didn't know what she wanted. She didn't know what he wanted, for that matter—he had his name back, didn't he?

As a man of his time, he might want an evening's recreation from her. As a man out of his time, he might want comfort from a living woman. Or he might be repeating the pattern imprinted on him before his death—Melrose and a woman. “What do you want, James?” she asked.

He blinked. Uncertainty moved like a wave up and down his face. His eyes looked somewhere beyond Amanda, beyond the moon and the night. “I want my sword,” he said.

Duh.
She should've figured that one out for herself. And just how symbolic was his sword anyway, especially now? But James Grant had, thank goodness, lived long before Freudian theory. “What if I find your sword for you?"

"Then, then...."

She'd done it now. His body thinned, so that she could see the dimly lit windows of her apartment through his chest. Even though she could see her hands and arms embracing him, she could no longer feel him.