The Highland Dragon's Lady (5 page)

Bed was a mixed blessing.

Reggie was glad to be alone. Rather, she was glad to get away from the scene downstairs. After the first rush of action and catastrophe, waiting had kept everyone’s nerves trembling on edge. When Dr. Brant had emerged from the drawing room, wiping off arms that were bloody to the elbow, and announced that Mrs. Osbourne should be all right with time and care, the frail structure of calm had collapsed. So had Miss Heselton, literally, falling into the nearest set of male arms and having hysterics.

In deference to the woman’s surprising competence and the events of the evening, Reggie made herself consider it possible that the hysterics were real and that Edmund being the first man at hand was sheer coincidence. Mr. Heselton, after all, had been engaged in comforting Miss Browne, who’d been looking all of three steps from the grave herself, and Colin was not the sort of chap who made one think of comfort.

Nonetheless, for a moment their eyes had met, and Reggie had considered going over to him, as little as they knew each other. His presence had been calming and refreshing earlier, unless that had just been the brandy. For a moment, she’d thought he might come to her.

But she didn’t know him, she didn’t want to presume that one rash act on a balcony and his unthinking response gave her the right to drape herself over the man whenever she pleased, and she had things to do. There were servants to talk to, while Pater paid the doctor and Mater got the guests off to bed. There were orders to give about breakfast the next day and trays to be taken up to Mrs. Osbourne and Miss Browne. Emma was to come off her general housemaid’s duties and keep an eye on the night’s casualty, and someone had to clean up the ruins of the chandelier. Moreover, Reggie had to explain what had happened, and sound calm and unconcerned when she talked about the “accident.”

She thought she managed all right. Woefully inadequate as she might be in society, she was her mother’s daughter in some ways. She answered questions, neither lying nor giving too much information. She smiled, she said that she was certain everything would be all right, and she didn’t think the servants looked too worried.

Then again, they hadn’t been at the séance, and they hadn’t heard Colin talk about the ghost’s possible power.

If the spirit had wanted to kill her, Reggie told herself as she went upstairs, it could have done so any time in the last two years. It hadn’t hung about in the drawing room and done more damage, so either it didn’t want to or, for some reason, it couldn’t. She was very probably safe that night.

“Very probably” and “safe” were not words that went well together, but she didn’t have the energy to worry. Talking to the servants had used the last of her strength. She practically pulled herself up the stairs, careless of the damage to her gown, and let Jane undress her in numb almost-silence.

“Your hand,” the other woman said as Reggie raised it to push back the heavy mass of her hair. She’d sponged the cut off, and it really wasn’t bad enough to need a bandage—not much more than a scratch, but obvious. “What happened?”

“Chandelier.”

“I’d heard,” said Jane, and she fixed Reggie with a knowing look and a thin smile. “At least you’re tired enough to stay in tonight.”

“It could be worse,” said Reggie, managing a smile of her own. “We could be in London. I get less sleep there.”

“Don’t I know it? This was supposed to be a
rest
for you, Miss Regina.”

“The world is so infrequently what it should be,” Reggie said. She slipped between her sheets, feeling her body sink into the mattress. A yawn cracked her face. “Ask Mr. Heselton about it sometime. I think the subject’s in his line of work.”

Sleep claimed her almost as soon as Jane left. Even as she slid down into darkness, though, Reggie felt a sense of unease, as if she already knew that the night to come would bring anything but peace and calm.

* * *

The dream began with screaming.

There was no beginning to it, no end, no words: only endless sound and the rage behind it, coming at Reggie in high, piercing waves. Only she and the sound existed at first.

Then she could see again, though not well and not steadily. The small space around her was featureless and blurred, and she couldn’t make out what was shadow and what was casting it. The walls came together in odd ways, bulging and squashing and not quite meeting up properly—or the same way every time she looked. Her vision was wrong somehow.

Or was her eyesight to blame?

The thought that she might be seeing just fine, that the blurring shiftiness of the room might just be how things were, gave Reggie a dull, nauseous feeling. She closed her eyes to get away from it, and the screaming around her grew louder, angrier.

About to snap her eyes open again, she stopped.

Did she really want to make a disembodied screaming thing happier? It might have been the one to put her in this…place?…or it might not, but it didn’t sound like a gentle and considerate host. Dashed if making it angry might not be the way forward, assuming that “forward” had any meaning here.

Still, she’d open diplomatic relations.

“Now I say,” she began, shouting so that she could hear herself, “what’s the point of all this noise?”

She got no answer except for more screaming. Reggie hugged herself and tried again. “I don’t suppose we could talk about this? You quiet down a bit, and I’ll take the thorn out of your paw or your beard out of the stump or whatnot?”

After another moment of shrieking, she decided that diplomacy was a wash. Unfolding her arms, she stepped forward and reached out toward one of the walls. There had to be a door
somewhere
, and maybe her vision really was to blame. Her fingers touched nothing, so she took another step forward.

What she touched was not a wall.

Skin stretched beneath her fingertips: warm, living skin. Reggie could feel it moving too, although she couldn’t feel bones or muscles, only a rippling half-solid mass.

She couldn’t help opening her eyes, and when she did, a face stared back from the wall. It was gray and vaguely human-shaped, but more like a tragedy mask than anything with features. A vague rise in the middle of its face roughly indicated where a nose should be, and instead of eyes, it had oversized gray pits, completely blank and yet angry at the same time. As Reggie watched, the mouth opened, wider and wider, far beyond what a human’s could have managed.

“
MINE!
” it shrieked, and Reggie screamed and stumbled backward into the center of the “room.” Now she could see other faces, copies of the first, bubbling out of the walls all around her. They shrieked in chorus from the lipless black voids of their mouths.

She flung up her hands to guard herself and saw blood running down from her nails, or from where her nails should have been. There were no nails now. Her fingers had no tips to them, only blood and the ends of bone.

She didn’t feel pain.

She didn’t feel anything.

Reggie stared from the mutilated ends of her fingers to the faces protruding from the walls. The muscles in her mouth and throat worked, but nothing happened. The strength had all vanished from her arms and legs. It was as though her muscles themselves knew that there was nothing further to be done here, that fighting was useless and talking worse, that there was nowhere for her even to run or to hide. Her mind could not accept any of those things. Her body already had.

She slumped to the floor and felt nothing against her legs or her buttocks, any more than she felt pain from her hands. She’d touched the face; maybe that was all she could manage. It didn’t make any sense, but what did?

Perhaps she should try to figure that out.

Carefully, leading with her palm, she reached down toward her leg. She saw her hand come to rest against the white cotton of her nightgown, but she felt neither cloth nor the body beneath it.

Out of the corner of her eye, Reggie saw a flicker. It wasn’t quite movement, but more as if something had snapped into place, though when she looked up, she couldn’t tell what.

Behind the screaming, dimly, she heard another noise.

It might have been flowing water.

It might have been someone sobbing.

“Who are you?” she asked, but the screaming faces drowned her out.

“
Who
are
you?
” she yelled, and the force of it sent unexpected pain down her throat and through her whole chest. She doubled over, coughing, and heard the screaming around her take on a new tone, a mocking note. Reggie would have said a few words about that, but she was coughing too hard, and she kept coughing harder and harder, until blood sprayed from her mouth and stippled her nightgown.

She tried to push herself up but her legs gave out under her, spilling her back to the floor. This time it hurt. Everything hurt, intensely and all at once. If Reggie could have drawn breath without coughing, she’d have screamed.

“No,” she said, looking up. “No, please.”

The faces only shrieked down at her. Reggie shut her eyes and twisted helplessly away—and then woke in her own bed, gasping for breath, her nightgown soaked with sweat.

At first the dream still lay firmly over reality. Reggie touched her own face, then grasped the rungs of the bed frame. She could still feel. She was in her own room, where nothing was screaming at her and the darkness held no threat.

“Nightmare,” she said to the air, as if by speaking the word, by naming what had frightened her, she could push it away and lock some door behind it. “Small wonder. Oof.”

Now the bed was too hot and her nightgown unpleasantly clammy. Reggie sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed, and crossed over to her window. Some air would do her a world of good, she thought as she drew back the drapes.

There she stopped, hand outstretched, and stared.

After that first second, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the view. A waning moon still bathed the back lawn in plenty of light. The grass was a sea of silver; the hedges and trees were dark shadows above it. The whole effect was very pretty, and Reggie had seen it a dozen times before.

And yet…

In the second when the curtains had parted, Reggie had seen—or thought she’d seen—a glimpse of something else: something very pale and shaped vaguely like a human face.

It might have been nothing. It might have been the reflection of the moonlight or a passing owl or a leaf blowing by on the night breeze. After a dream like Reggie’d had, she knew she’d be likely to turn anything she saw sinister, no matter how innocent its origins.

She stood for a few more seconds, staring out the window. Whatever had been there was gone now.

Still, she thought perhaps she wouldn’t open the window after all.

Come breakfast time, the assembled company was still dazed. The Browne-Osbourne contingent, of course, remained above stairs, under the ministrations of Emma the maid. Everyone else confronted the silver breakfast trays as if they were complicated new mechanisms from some inventor’s mad dreams, and once they’d managed to reach the food, most of the guests were singularly unenthused about it.

Colin, more ravenous than troubled, made himself go along for the sake of appearances, but felt like the proverbial toad beneath the harrow. Poking at eggs he would rather have savored, he sighed. When faced with the prospect of acting listless over a rather remarkable kipper, he silently cursed mortals and gave up the pretense.

Mrs. Osbourne was alive.
He
was alive. That was enough to be going on with, and as for danger, the world was full of that. Brooding over it would scarcely lessen the risk.

Humans rarely grasped that fact—even more rarely these days than they had in his youth, which Colin had always thought strange. The world held much more danger for them, and even the most fortunate was a century or two closer to death than he was. And yet, because of an angry ghost and a hurled table, they moped and picked at their food.

He didn’t understand. Some decades ago, he’d given up trying.

Now he poured another cup of tea, glanced out the window at the pouring rain, and then looked back to see Reggie come through the door, wearing rose-colored muslin that she’d probably picked to make her look more awake. It didn’t work, not when she moved like she still wasn’t sure what purpose feet served, or when she swallowed an entire cup of tea before trusting herself with a knife and fork.

Like those around her, she might have been brooding—but given the symptoms, Colin thought it likely that she was also used to city hours, or possibly that she’d settled her nerves the night before with something stronger than tea and more substantial than the few sips she’d had of his brandy.

When Mr. Talbot-Jones cleared his throat, Colin saw Reggie wince.

“I spoke to Emma this morning,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones, “and she told me that Mrs. Osbourne is recovering as well as we might expect. She has no fever, and she evidently passed the night peacefully enough.”

Laudanum probably had a fair bit to do with the latter, Colin thought. Still, he joined the rest of the table in smiling. There was no harm in optimism, and the woman’s injuries were the sort that responded well to rest and time: sundry cuts, three broken ribs, and an arm that had fractured in several places. Nasty stuff, true, but not likely to be permanent or fatal—not in this time.

In his youth, there had been no such guarantees.

“The doctor will look in again after lunch,” Mr. Talbot-Jones added. “Meanwhile, we’ll do everything in our power to make her comfortable. As for”—he glanced around, saw that the servants were out of the room, and continued—“the events of last night, I confess that they caught me very much off guard. You all have my most sincere apologies.”

More murmurs went around the room. These were of the pray-don’t-mention-it and quite-all-right variety, enthusiastic whatever their degree of sincerity might really have been.

Mr. Talbot-Jones smiled. “Quite kind of you all. I admit, as well, that I have no solid notion of how to proceed.”

“I do,” said Mr. Heselton, flushing even as he spoke. “Though I’m not certain how it will be received. Last night convinced me. Whether a ghost or not, there’s certainly a presence here that belongs to no living man. That makes my duty clear. After breakfast, I’ll be posting a letter to my bishop, and I’ll ask him to send me a rite of exorcism.”

Awkward silence descended, and Mrs. Talbot-Jones stepped forward to meet it like a good hostess. “I didn’t know there was one,” she said conversationally.

“It’s not at all commonly used,” said Mr. Heselton. “For obvious reasons. I’d only heard of it in passing before.”

“Good show, then,” said Edmund, surfacing from his toast. “Anything we can get for you? Bell, book, candle? We’ve got plenty of ’em around.”

“I don’t know. I can only assume that my superiors will tell me—or they’ll send someone more senior to perform the rite who will bring the necessary implements himself. If they approve the process at all, that is.”

“And if they don’t?” Colin asked.

Mr. Heselton straightened his shoulders. “Then I’ll try again to convince them.” With less conviction, he added, “Or perhaps we’ll find another way to lay the spirit, or whatever it is, to rest.”

“Perhaps if we could talk to it,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones. “I know we tried last night, and that went…well,
very
badly”—he tugged at his beard—“but the ghost might not be as wholly opposed to us as it seems.”

“It tried to kill us, sir,” said Miss Heselton. “I was never so frightened in all my life,” she added, pressing a slim hand to her white throat and widening her eyes. She glanced toward Edmund, but he’d turned back to his breakfast. “Even thinking of it now—”

“She has a point, Pater,” said Reggie, a weary and amused counterpoint to Miss Heselton’s fluttering. “As a rule, when a fellow tries to hit me with a table, I take it that he doesn’t want a deeper acquaintance.”

“‘As a rule’?” Colin asked.

“I live a very exciting life,” she said with a grin and then, at her mother’s alarmed look, added, “No, not really. But trying to kill Mrs. Osbourne is a fair sign of hostility.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Edmund. “A trapped animal, or a hurt one, might bite you out of fear and be quite loyal with the proper care.”

“A ghost’s not an animal,” said Reggie.

“We don’t know what a ghost is, really,” Mrs. Talbot-Jones said and frowned, tapping one finger against her teacup. “And last night was the first real act of violence we’ve seen, or we never would have stayed here, much less invited all of you. Perhaps we did disturb or frighten it, and it wouldn’t have wanted to hurt us otherwise.”

“Or perhaps it just
couldn’t
,” said Colin, “until we opened a clear path between its world and ours.”

Miss Heselton gasped.

“Would that path still be there now? If we did?” Reggie asked.

“I don’t know,” said Colin. He would probably have to get used to saying that. “There must be an obstacle or two to harming us, if only in the creature’s own mind. If it had no limits on either means or motive, we’d not be sitting here now. But as for what those obstacles are, or whether the séance last night lessened them at all, I could say no more than any of you.”

Reggie closed her eyes. “And the only person who
might
be able to say is upstairs and in no condition to talk. I could almost be jealous,” she added under her breath. “Due respect, Pater, but I don’t think we should try striking up a conversation with the ghost on our own. Wouldn’t even know how to start, for one.”

“Neither would I, Regina,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones, and gave his daughter a mildly reproving scholar’s look, as if she’d flubbed her French lesson. “But while we wait for more skilled authorities, we can perform our own sort of investigation. There are many stories where simply finding out who a ghost is and what it wants will solve the problem quite handily.”

“Blood, it said,” Reggie pointed out. “If it wants a virgin sacrifice—”

“Regina Elizabeth!” said Mrs. Talbot-Jones in a voice like very quiet thunder.

“Sorry, Mater. Classical allusion.” Reggie smiled an apology, though not a very downcast one. Watching the curve of her lower lip, Colin wondered if she’d been about to speak to her own qualifications—and what those might be.

“I don’t propose sacrificing anyone,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones, interrupting this promising train of thought, “or anything. The ghost didn’t speak clearly. It might have been referring to blood spilled in the past—”

“Or bloodlines,” said Edmund. “We’re not its relations.”

“And we’ve arrived nicely at my point: we can’t know unless we learn more,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones.

“Even if the spirit’s hostile,” Colin said, reluctantly pulling his mind further away from Reggie’s possible past, “knowing more about it might help. If we could find something it owned in life, that might give us power over it. Or its name.”

“Like Rumpelstiltskin?” Mrs. Talbot-Jones asked, smiling.

“Aye, in a way. There’s truth in a lot of those old tales, if you know how to look for it. Names are magic. And the more you know about something, the more you can make it do as you wish.” He took a sip of his tea and glanced over toward Reggie. “Something—or someone.”

By the abrupt way Reggie gulped her tea, Colin knew he’d hit a target.

“You know a dashed lot about magic, from the way you talk,” she replied, recovering enough to sound casually curious. “Merlin in disguise, what?”

“Oh, I take a bit of an interest between fits of idleness, but that’s neither here nor there. The real question is this: if we wanted to learn more about this ghost, how would we do it?”

“We could talk to the servants,” said Mrs. Talbot-Jones. “At least the ones who didn’t come from London with us.”

“We could ask in the village too,” said Mr. Heselton, and he glanced toward the window, where the rain continued unabated. “Though that might wait a day.”

“And there are the attics,” said Reggie, grinning suddenly. “Miles of ’em, and I don’t think anyone’s been there in years. A little exploring sounds like it might be just the thing for a rainy afternoon.”