Singled Out (32 page)

‘No, we’ll be a-haunting. I’ve told the Breams and Mr Shakespeare about Betsy’s midnight runner and the haunted rose garden and they’re all agog’

‘I didn’t agree to do Betsy!’

‘But I thought you were going to do anything I wanted?’ he said. ‘Though I’ll let you off nude: I’ve put some floaty white ghost clothes on your bed that should look pretty effective. You can run down the corridor looking as if you’re silently screaming and terrified.’

If he carried on looking at me like that I might be
loudly
screaming and terrified.

‘I only start my slavery at midnight.’ I pointed out.

‘But you could stretch a point and get changed and in position for midnight? Then you can do it again tomorrow, but I’ll let you off on Sunday,’ he offered.

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘I half-expected Jason to insist on coming here tonight as well as tomorrow to protect you from my wicked wiles. Are you losing your charms?’

‘I don’t think I’ve got any to lose, and Jason’s busy tonight. If he does turn up at all tomorrow I don’t think he will make much of a fuss, because Orla’ s managed to distract him with her new singing telegram outfit. You’ll see it tomorrow.’

He’ll see most of
Orla
tomorrow, too.

‘Will I?’

‘Yes, because it’s Mr Bream’s birthday, and his wife has hired Orla to come here, and Rosetta says we’re all invited for cake and stuff at four tomorrow in the big sitting room. But Mrs Bream thinks she’s getting Marilyn Monroe.’

‘And in fact she’s getting—?’

‘Wait and see,’ I said darkly. ‘Where are Rosetta and Eddie?’

‘They said something about an early night because of cooking all those breakfasts tomorrow, and left me to it.’

‘Yes…’ I said slowly, looking at Dante’s dark and shadowed face. ‘I think Rosetta’s finding the weekend a bit more exhausting than she thought. But then, she didn’t bank on your ex-mother-in-law coming along, and everyone wanting meals on trays and birthday teas, and all the rest of it.’

Dante rose to his feet and said abruptly: ‘Come on.

‘Where?’

‘Back to the lonely west wing, I’ve got something I want to show you. Bring your glass, and I’ll take another bottle.’

‘I think you’ve had quite enough,’ I said severely. ‘And what do you want to show me?’

‘Wait and see.’

I went, although not without certain nervous qualms, but he led me straight to his study, where he had now ranged the diaries in date order and typed up the first as Chapter One. There was a title page, too: ‘Travelling to Alaska’.

‘What do you think? Is it set out right?’

I was quite touched that he’d used my suggested title. Picking up the chapter, I flicked through it, then went back and started to read from the beginning.

… my New York hotel bedroom at first seemed a far remove from the earth-floored dark hut I shared with Paul for so many months of our captivity. Yet in a way it still seemed to cage me from the urban jungle outside with its different dangers …

When I looked up from the last page of the chapter I realised that I’d sat down with it at some point. Dante was sitting opposite me on one of the old armchairs, quietly and intently watching me.

He raised one black brow. ‘So you’re back?’

‘Sorry – it’s gripping stuff. I’m dying to read the whole thing when you’ve finished it.’

‘So you think this way of writing it is going to work, then?’

‘Work? It’s brilliant!’ I said enthusiastically. ‘I couldn’t put it down, you must have seen that?’

‘Well, I couldn’t put
Lover, Come Back To Me
down, if it comes to that,’ he replied. ‘But for entirely different reasons. I kept wondering if any of the characters were based on real ones – especially Vladimir, who this Keturah seems to find so very attractive but scary.’

‘Oh, no, I make them all up,’ I said hastily. Which I do, I only borrow aspects of people I find interesting and jumble them up with some invented bits to make a new character.

‘You don’t find
me
attractive but scary, by any chance?’ he asked with interest. ‘Just wondered.’

‘No, not at all,’ I said firmly. ‘I made Vlad’s character up entirely. And it’s Keturah who felt that, she’s such a wimp! Or she started out as a wimp, until she took a turn for the worse and got more interesting.’

‘Interesting? I suppose that’s one word for it!’

‘Well, interesting to me.’

‘You know, it’s a pretty disturbing book, especially if you happen to have both a house and an ancestor with starring roles in it. The ending, particularly, was
deeply
worrying.’

‘Oh, I always have a surprise ending – a twist in the tail.’

‘It certainly surprised
me,
’ he agreed. ‘Especially what you did to Sylvanus. Doesn’t your lover find it a bit unsettling, the stuff that’s going on in your mind?’

‘I haven’t got a lover, I told you: I’ve finished with Max.’

‘That’s not what he thinks. He told me how you’ve loved each other for all these years, and that you’re going to get married once you are over your upset feelings about Rosemary’s letter.’

‘He said? When did he say?’ I demanded, startled.

‘When he phoned me up to warn me to mind my manners while you were here,’ he said amiably. ‘Said he’d just spoken to you, and you were worried about coming here in case I made a pass at you, and so he wanted to tell me not to lay a finger on you, or else.’

I stared at him: ‘Doesn’t he ever listen to a word I say? I finally finished with him when Jane’s husband told me he’d been having an affair with some physical fitness instructor over there.’

I told him about Kyra and a push too far. ‘And I told you even before that that I’d decided it was over. Not that it’s any of your business,’ I added tartly. ‘I’m going to my room.’

I got up and laid the manuscript on the table. ‘When do you want me?’

He raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘When do you want me for the
haunting,
’ I qualified. ‘I didn’t actually sign up for anything else.’

Come to think of it, I didn’t even sign up for that.

‘How about just before midnight, so we can get you into place well beforehand?’

‘All right, but how will I get away afterwards without being seen? If I hide in one of the rooms they might catch me.’

‘I’ve discovered a secret stair at the end of the hall, and I’ll be waiting for you. Actually, it wasn’t that secret since it’s in the house documents, but it isn’t in the haunted house books, so the Spectrologists won’t know about it.’

‘It will be a waste of time if they don’t watch me – or manage to catch me!’

‘I’ve told them they will only see the ghost from the balcony at the end, because if anyone’s in the Long Gallery she doesn’t appear. By the time they get down from there you’ll be long gone.’

‘Like the wine: that’s long gone, too,’ I said tartly. ‘You’d better not drink any more tonight.’

His eyes glittered like chips of ice floe, and he pushed his black hair back off his bony face with both hands, like he wanted to study me in detail.

‘If there are going to be any resurrections it might have to be the
brandy
again,’ he said. ‘And aren’t I supposed to be the one giving orders?’

I gave him a look and went to my room, locking the door firmly behind me, but I think that might have been to keep myself in rather than him out, since Dante in his black T-shirt and leather trousers brings the words ‘moth’ and ‘candle-flame’ strongly into my mind.

I did not go quite so far as to toss the key out of the window, though, because when I turned around something white and gauzy stirred and whispered within the open wardrobe.

It was a white dress. A white Ghost ghost dress, to be exact … expensive and quite beautiful, a long gossamer concoction.

I’ve never been the Woman in White … and absolutely
nothing
could have stopped me wearing that dress tonight.

It was a strange but fortunate coincidence that although only the more frivolous items of my underwear are white, I seemed to have packed them along with the sensible everyday black things …

I tried the dress on, and I looked like someone else. I felt like someone else. And if I accidentally stood in front of a light. I’d be nearly fully exposed to everyone else.

That would be pretty authentic for Blind Betsy. Which reminds me, I can’t remember what she was running from or to, but she must have known the house well if she was doing a headlong streak down the Long Gallery. Must ask Dante later if he knows.

If he expects me to flit round the garden in this outfit afterwards I’ll catch my death even with all that wine inside me.

I wonder if Dr Amulet Bone always wears white?

… chained to the bed he saw her coming slowly towards him, a glimmer of white in the darkness. Then he heard the soft susurration of her long skirts against the cold stone floor and began uncontrollably to shiver …

*   *   *

As the clock sonorously struck midnight somewhere down in the dark depths of the house, I ran barefoot down the carpeted hall, my gauzy draperies streaming behind me.

My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight coming from the tall windows down one side, but as I reached the dark, blank panelling at the end where the gallery turned, a dank waft of air touched my face and then something – or someone – snatched me into cold, muffling blackness.

My scream must have been cut off by the closing of the secret panel behind me, and was probably most effective, but as I drew breath for another mighty shriek, a large hand covered my mouth.

‘Shh! It’s only me – you’re safe!’ hissed Dante. He must have felt me shaking uncontrollably, because he gave an exclamation and, wrapping his arms around me said apologetically: ‘Sorry, Cass – I was so made up with finding this stair and the panelling that I forgot about the cupboard effect. And it isn’t a cupboard, because there’s a way out.’

I rested my head against his broad chest : déjà vu again.

‘If you ever do anything like that to me again, I’ll kill you, Dante Chase,’ I promised, waiting for my heart to stop pounding away.

‘It must have looked pretty authentic to our spectrologists, though – they were up on the balcony when you ran from under it, bang on the stroke of midnight. Come on,’ he added, switching on a small torch and pointing it down some shallow, twisting steps. My Chinese shoes sat sedately side by side on the top one. ‘It’s the rose garden now.’

I noticed that he was wearing his ruffled shirt and breeches again.

‘You’re going to do some haunting too?’

‘
We’re
going to do some haunting, as the doomed lovers who walk the rose garden.’

‘We are? I don’t remember hearing about those.’

‘Probably not, since I took a leaf out of your book and made it up. However, it’s a sad and tragic tale. Come on.’

We emerged on the kitchen floor through what looked like a china cupboard, and leaving the house by a side door, sneaked around to the rose garden.

Dante took my hand in a lover-like fashion, but when I shivered he put his arm around me instead, which was much warmer and equally authentic. As we strolled through the formal pathways I wondered how many of the visitors had read Dante’s thoughtfully printed hand-out and were even now observing us through the windows.

It can’t have been very exciting.

When I said so, Dante suddenly suggested he add some reality to an unconvincing performance and kissed me.

It would not have been in character to struggle, but when I could speak again my mouth said: ‘Call that a convincing performance?’ without asking my brain’s permission first. I knew drinking in Dante’s company was a bad idea.

He was already breathing a trifle heavily for a ghost, but this put him on his mettle, and things might then have got a trifle out of hand had not the scrunch of gravel alerted us to the fact that one or more of the visitors were creeping up on us.

Hand in hand we fled down the rose garden, crept along the far side of the overgrown yew hedge and into the side door of the west wing, which Dante locked behind us before we collapsed in a breathless heap.

Chapter 22: Family Party

After reading Cass Leigh’s last novel,
Grave Concerns,
I swore I’d never read another. Why, then, did I buy her latest one,
Nocturnally Yours,
then spend the week after reading it too afraid to put the lights out at night?

The Fiction Review

‘You can let go of my hand now, there’s no one here to see us,’ I said firmly, for once we were back in the brightly lit west wing sanity had returned.

At least, I
think
it was sanity. Certainly I’d suddenly recalled that Dante was probably still a bit piqued with me, as men can be for no particular reason that a sensible woman can see, and that seducing me might be his way of punishing me.

Not exactly my idea of a fate worse than death, but still, I’d been seduced once before and look where that got me. I’ve no intention of making a mess of my life again.

No ties, and a nice dog, that’s what I need, not another quick fling with something darkly Byronic.

Dante released me, looking at me in the sad, hungry way that made me think of big dark jungle cats sizing up dinner, and suggested we have a drink in his room. But I’ve been there, done that, and we all know what happened last time … or we would if we’d been sober enough to remember it all. Anyway, duty called.

‘No thanks, I’m going to go back to my room to do some work,’ I said with resolution. ‘If you don’t need me any more tonight, that is?’

‘Not in your slave capacity,’ he agreed. ‘But I thought we could get to know each other a bit better?’

‘And I thought you’d already discovered everything there was to know about my subconscious from my books, and didn’t find it very attractive?’

‘Haven’t I made it clear that I find the
rest
of you attractive? Maybe your psyche will grow on me, and mine on you. I never meant to frighten you,’ he added unexpectedly.

‘Oh, I’m not scared of you any more,’ I assured him. But actually, even now there are moments … Or then again, perhaps it’s me I’m so scared of? ‘I mean, I never was really: you just looked so big and sort of grim-looking the first time we met, and then there was all that guilt.’