Memory and Desire (12 page)

At quitting time Claire had only a few stitches left, so she went on working as the house emptied. When at last she cut off the last bit of yarn and finished filling in the chart, Somerstowe Hall was so quiet her own heartbeat thudded in her ears. The gallery seemed even draftier than it had this morning. Shivering, she switched off the lights and turned to go.

Thin rays of sun shone through the windows, illuminating blocks of the slightly undulating floor. And there was that reflection through the windows of the great chamber next door ... The hair rose on the back of Claire's neck. Something shimmered through the shadows between the blocks of light, followed by a swirl of dust particles as though long skirts brushed them up from the floorboards. Elizabeth.

The—
ghost,
Claire articulated—passed out the far door of the gallery. Claire's torso twisted toward the main staircase and the mundane outside world. Her feet, though, carried her in the opposite direction, so that she sidled along like a crab and slipped sideways out the door.

There was the shimmer-shape, gliding silently along the corridor and up a narrow set of stairs. Curiosity killed the cat, Claire reminded herself. And yet the uncanny shape, the quasi-physical memory of a life ended too soon, called her to follow. Melinda would've followed in a New York minute.

Claire tiptoed up the staircase, each step squeaking gently beneath her athletic shoes, and emerged in another hallway. This one was smaller and darker than the one downstairs. Servant's territory, she thought. Where Elizabeth had lived.

There she was, the skirts and the sleeves of her dress glowing faintly in the gloom like a supernatural wedding gown. Now Claire could see the curled hair, the cap, the wide collar. And Elizabeth's molded porcelain face, small nose, full lips, blue eyes glancing inquisitively over her shoulder.
Whether the ghost can see you back again ...
Claire stopped dead at the top of the stairs, not wanting Elizabeth to acknowledge her presence. What do you say to a ghost?
Haunted anyplace interesting lately?

Elizabeth glided into a room at the end of the hall. Taking a deep breath of the cold, musty air, Claire followed. And reached the door just in time to see the ghost walk right through a wall.

Well, they were supposed to do that, weren't they? Claire crept forward. No, it wasn't a wall. It was a closed door next to the massive brick side of a fireplace. A cupboard, probably.

With an almost audible pop the chill in the air dissipated. Claire looked around, at the window scummed with dust and yet still admitting light, at the wide equally dusty floorboards of the bare room. A row of smeared footprints led diagonally through the dust from the door to the cupboard, edged on either side by the small paw prints of a cat.

So ghostly feet made paths, Claire told herself. Or were some of the feet that'd made that path very human? She couldn't have been the only person ever to follow Elizabeth. Maybe some of the prints were Melinda's. Maybe Melinda was...

Oh my God.
Claire sprinted across the floor and threw open the door of the cupboard. Nothing was inside the small room, little more than a cell, except dust and cobwebs.

For a long moment she leaned against the doorframe, her knees shaking, her heart doing aerobatics inside her chest. Come on, she told herself, some of those prints were made a lot more recently than last year. Melinda might have come here alive, yes, but she wasn't—here now. As for who had been here.... Well, it was time to tackle Richard again. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Something vibrated almost subliminally in the wood against Claire's shoulder. A purr. A cat's purr. Strange, how soothing that was.

Slowly the purr faded away. Claire's knees firmed up and her heart landed safely behind her breastbone. She made her way back to the door wondering why Elizabeth would walk into a closet. Had that once been the door into another room? Fine, but that didn't explain the prints of living feet. Unless everyone who worked in the house had to follow the ghost, like some sort of hazing ritual.

She'd have to ask Richard. Try to ask Richard, depending on whether he'd gotten over yesterday's letter-and-stamp episode, whatever that was all about. She could segue cleverly from Elizabeth to Melinda.
She took a lot of notes for her book, didn't she? Was she at the cast party?

Claire retraced her—Elizabeth's—path back to the gallery and then headed outside. Her steps rang hollowly across the entrance hall. The cellars, she thought, were an obvious place for Blake and his men to have looked. She sure wasn't going to tackle them.

This time when she knocked at the Lodge door Richard didn't appear like a genie out of a bottle. She was about to give up and go back to the Hall to look for him when he at last opened the door. Only his brows slanting up his forehead betrayed his surprise. Claire could imagine what he was seeing with those guarded eyes—her hair curling every direction at once, no lipstick, only a perfunctory dab of mascara. Melinda wouldn't have gone out to get the newspaper looking like this.

Now that was annoying, to care what she looked like to him. Claire said briskly, “Thank you for the lamp."

“The anglepoise?” replied Richard. “Turned the trick, did it?"

“I can see to work better now."

“Good.” They looked at each other, actors without scripts. “Ah, I was just off on my afternoon recce.” Richard vanished into the interior of the house leaving Claire on the doorstep.

That was probably a dismissal. But she hadn't asked him about the cupboard yet, let alone Melinda, and at the moment he wasn't openly hostile. If she could just get her brain to stop emitting white noise whenever she was around him.

Tightening her jaw—Claire suspected that after the last couple of days her teeth were beginning to squeeze out of shape—she stepped inside. A long table filled one side of the hallway, so heavily layered with papers it looked like an archaeological mound. Two volumes of Pevsner's
Buildings of England,
a spiral-bound sketchbook, and an assortment of pencils perched on top.

When Richard emerged from the living room armed with his clipboard, Claire asked, “May I join you?"

After a long searching look, he replied, “If you like."

They jockeyed for the door and, in avoiding each other, brushed against the table. Papers and books avalanched onto the floor. “Sorry,” said Claire.

“My fault,” Richard said.

She started to retrieve lists, letters, and the odd grocery receipt. The pencils emerged from the pile like pungee sticks. Several pages of the sketchbook were creased. Claire tried to smooth them out and saw that some of the sketches were expert line drawings of the Hall and the church. Two depicted a vaulted room stacked with coffins. “The crypt beneath the church?” she asked. “Where Elizabeth Spenser was supposedly buried?"

“Yes.” Richard held out his hand for the book.

Claire flipped to the next page. And there was Melinda in her seventeenth-century gown, unbuttoned, so that the collar slipped provocatively off her shoulders. Her splayed fingers pressed the gathered material of the bodice against her breasts. Her head was tilted back, so that she was looking at the viewer—at the artist—from beneath her eyelashes. Her half-smile was an engraved invitation. And yet the drawing also caught perfectly Melinda's edge of irony, the way she mocked her actions even as she acted.

Claire looked around at Richard. His extended hand froze in mid-air. Nothing else on his body moved, not his eyes, not his mouth, not even the usually animated strands of his hair.

Then, all in a rush, he snatched the sketchbook, shuffled it into a pile of papers, and wedged them all back beneath the books. “If you're coming, come along then."

She was tempted to say sarcastically,
Only if you promise not to talk my ear off,
but that wouldn't help. She whisked out behind him as he shut the door, wondering whether Melinda's sitting for him had ended as she obviously planned, with her lying down for him. Whatever, something had gone wrong. Not that wrong meant murder.

And here she was walking off with him.... There was Derek Nair, strolling across the forecourt carrying a pair of rollerblades. There were a couple of volunteers taking pictures on the lawn. Claire waved at them all—
look, I'm with Richard.
He didn't seem to notice.

The clouds were giant gray puffballs sailing through a blue sky. The sun peeked out, hid, then peeked out again, each shaft of light drawing sparkles from grass and stone. The windows of the Hall winked inscrutably. Richard, Claire at his heels, took a path around the side of the house.

Clipboard at the ready, he eyed the progress of the mortar-and-stone squad. He sighted toward the roof, considered the angle of a chimney, and then took off through the gardens, noting flowerbeds, stone walls, trees, and hedges. At the end of a long stretch of greensward, just beside the gate into the walled rose garden, stood a mound of building stones the same soft honey color as the house. Crowning it was a hand-lettered sign reading No Tipping “What does that mean?” asked Claire.

“This is not a rubbish tip. Throw your litter someplace else."

“Oh. Of course. For a minute there I thought it meant you weren't allowed to tip the masons. You know, give them a few extra coins or a pint of beer or something."

Richard shot her a mildly exasperated glance, as though wondering why she had to complicate matters by having a sense of humor. She hadn't meant that as a joke, but if he took it that way, fine, it defused the tension.

He clambered up on the pile of stone and turned to survey if not his realm, at least the realm he was responsible for. Without waiting for an invitation, Claire followed and promptly stumbled over a loose rock. Only Richard's lunge and grab kept her from falling. His firm hand held her forearm until she was balanced beside him, then dropped it like a hot potato.

Her forearm tingled. And just why did
he
have to complicate matters? She said, “Thank you,” and looked out over the countryside.

Behind the rose garden the land sloped away into a green and gray quilt tufted with sheep. Just opposite was a hillside. On it stood a circle of ancient megaliths, all but one of them lying face down in the grass like worshippers prostrating themselves before a religious image. And yet there was no image there, only the solitary tall stone and the hillside leading the eye up to the sky. Claire was reminded of the steeple of the church pointing heavenward. Interesting, how the church was built as far away from the stones as possible, playing tug-of-war with the village.

“Derbyshire was one of the last strongholds of the Druids,” Richard said behind her. “Phillip Lacey called his games Druidic rituals, even though they were nothing of the sort. Elizabeth Spenser's accusers were expressing some long-held prejudices against non-Christians."

“I imagine her accusers were also expressing some long-held prejudices against independent women.” Claire turned around.

Richard's brows were at neutral. His windblown hair softened the angles of his face. “Elizabeth had no family. Which seems to me less like independence than loneliness."

“True. I mean, you could make a feminist tract out of the story, but historical revisionism only goes so far."

He blinked, as though he'd expected her to come out fighting. Melinda would have. Melinda would've asked him about that sketch. If Claire had learned anything at all the last couple of days, though, it was that getting in Richard's face was counter-productive.

He picked his way down from the pile of stones. At its foot he turned and extended his hand, but Claire made it safely down by herself. Side by side they walked back toward the house, if not companionably at least mutually tiptoeing around any minefields. The bracing air and the cool vistas of the countryside did have a mellowing effect, Claire thought. She wished she could bottle them for the library.

When they arrived at the back door of the house Claire defaulted to her original topic. “Ah, I found something interesting a little while ago."

“Yes?"

“Diana and Alec were telling me the house is haunted. By Elizabeth Spenser, who else? I think I've—er—seen something myself a time or two."

“I should think you have done,” Richard returned matter-of-factly. “Most old buildings have a ghost of some sort, ranging from apparitions that look quite real to, well, a ripple in space and time. Like music, or the memory of music. Susan Zielinski once saw Elizabeth completely manifested, although most people see the cat."

He was holding the door open, but Claire stalled out on the threshold. “Oh. I didn't think you'd—I mean, I didn't know..."

There went his brows again, one down, one up, repeating the angle of his mouth. “You followed her from the gallery to the little room upstairs, I take it? No, you've not gone crackers. I'll show you."

Okay.
Exhaling, Claire waited while Richard locked the door and then followed as his long legs took the stairs to the top floor. He walked right across to the cupboard and threw open the door, then turned to the wall that paralleled the side of the fireplace, did some sort of hocus-pocus, and slid a wood panel jerking and scraping to the side.

“Voila!” he announced. “A secret room. It's fitted in between the back of this chimney stack and the one on the other side. If you try matching the windows with the floor plan you'll find there's one unaccounted for."

“Cool,” said Claire, and stepped through the wooden frame into the room.

The walls to her right and left were brick. Straight ahead, the wall was a crumbling lathe-and-plaster lined stone. Its narrow window was no doubt hidden on the outside by a decorative figure—well, hidden to everyone except Richard with his sharp eyes. Ceiling beams slanted close overhead. The room was warm, suffused by year after year of English summer sun and rain, roses and mold. Something about the light filtering through the uneven but polished glass of the window reminded Claire of Alec's eyes.

A polished window? And the floorboards were swept clean, even though traces of silvery dust lingered in the cracks between them. A spotless nineteenth century Shaker-style bench sat to one side. Below the window stood a long, narrow table, of wood so old and dry it looked like paper mache. Atop the table lay a rolled piece of cloth, somewhat squashed and hollowed in the shape of a sleeping cat.