Of Midnight Born (8 page)

“Daniel Padgett quit today,” Underhill said as he set down the supper tray.

“He could not be induced to stay?” Alex asked, looking up from where he was translating his star-chart notes into coordinates. It was a cloudy night with a hint of rain on the breeze coming through the tower room window, and he had resigned himself to an evening indoors.

“This time his bucket was hanging from the chandelier above his head. No one could have put it there without his noticing. They would have had to put a ladder right over him.”

“He could have done it himself.”

“I do not see what the point could have been, to keep these pranks up for so long,” Underhill said.

“It may be that he is trying to drive up his wages,” Alex suggested. “Although I would not have credited him with the cleverness for such a scheme, and indeed it makes no sense for him to quit now if that is so. It continues to be a puzzle.”

Underhill mumbled something.

“What was that?”

“I was saying, sir, that there
is
one simple explanation for it all.”

“I don’t want to hear any talk of ghosts!” Alex said. It had become a sore point, his entire staff convinced that Serena stalked them. They were unwilling to listen to reason, and failed to notice that not a one of them had a mark upon their body to show for her supposed efforts. Even if there were a ghost, she was more a nuisance than a danger.

“Nevertheless, Padgett has quit. Sommer refuses to bring the horses through the tunnel. John Flury will work only at his grandfather’s side, in the garden. Dickie, likewise, has glued himself to Leboff, and will not so much as cross a hall without his company. There is no one to do the laundry, to serve, to clean. We are going to have to hire at least two new staff.”

Alex sighed. “Then do so. And be sure they are made of sterner stuff than this lot.”

“Should I let Dickie go?”

“No, not yet. If Leboff can find enough for him to do, let him stay. Maybe he’ll rediscover his backbone, given a little time.”

After Underhill left, Alex leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. This sojourn in the castle was not turning out the way he had expected. Yes, he was spending his nights as he wished, but his fantasy of a peaceful household was not being realized. They were almost worse than women, these skittish men.

A low, rumbling growl came from the corner where Otto lay on his blanket. Otto’s head came up; then he gave a loud bark, scrambled to his feet, and leaped across the room. Whatever he was after evaded him, and Otto turned and galloped back, barking madly at something on Alex’s desk.

“Otto! Hush, boy!”

The dog watched something go from the desk to his blanket, where he pounced, snapping his jaws closed on empty air.

“Otto! Stop it!”

The dog spun and ran at the desk again, crouching down this time and trying to fit his nose under the drawers to one side, his rump in the air, barking all the while. Then all of a sudden the barking stopped, and Otto’s head came up, his ears flattening, his eyes going round and white as he stared at the doorway. A soft whine crept from his throat.

The skin at Alex’s nape began to rise. He, too, stared at the doorway, and his eyes widened as a vague, transparent white form moved through the space between door and frame. It stopped just across the threshold, as if watching him. Otto inched his way into the well of the desk, bumping aside Alex’s legs.

The white shape started to fade from his vision, as if he had lost his focus on it, and in moments was no longer visible, but he still felt a presence in the room with him.

“Will you tell me what it is you want?” he asked aloud. The room remained silent but for Otto’s whimpering, yet he knew there was something listening. “You’ve done a good job of frightening my staff, innocent people who mean you no harm. It does seem that you are seeking something from us.”

He was glad Underhill was nowhere near, to hear him talking to an empty room like this. As the seconds stretched into minutes with no reply, he began to wonder at his own foolishness. He was as bad as the rest of them, certain he was being watched.

“Perhaps you’re a coward, and afraid to speak,” he said, picking up his pen to go back to work. It was jerked from his fingertips and thrown across the room. His desk started to shake, papers and weights vibrating, then was just as suddenly motionless. A touch brushed through his hair, directly over the scar.

He was surprised into silence for a moment after it ended, but then his annoyance at the petty display and all the mischief this ghost had caused came alive. “You
are
a coward, terrorizing the simple and the innocent—even animals, for God’s sake. You’re a coward and you’re cruel, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said, as if scolding a naughty child. “You might succeed in frightening my staff, but you will not frighten me. I’ll be damned before I’ll see you chase me out of my own home with your silly tricks.”

He pulled his supper tray over in front of him, gave a last, disapproving stare to where he felt the presence to be, then began to eat.

Serena gaped at Woding, so calmly forking into his cold kidney pie. She had come to his tower room to spy on him and learn what she could of his astrology work, yet once again he had immediately known she was there.

And what had he done? He had called her a coward, and then lectured her! How dared he talk to her like that? How dared he? He had no idea what she had been through, what reserves of bravery she had had to call upon during her life. She had had to fight to survive, and she had fought for what she wanted. And what she wanted now was for Woding to move out, he and his staff of men.

How dared he lecture her! She wanted them gone, every last one of them.

And she wasn’t going to be nice about it any longer.

Woding’s staff were at the breaking point—after tonight they’d all be leaving, and then, when he was alone and vulnerable, it would be his turn. The only cowardice she was guilty of was hacking at the arms and legs of the beast that was this household, rather than the head. She’d finish her hacking tonight; then woe to Woding!

Serena moved quickly through the house. Entering the room that was her destination, she grabbed Dickie by the feet and pulled him off his bed. He woke up at the same time he hit the floor, the sound making Leboff stir. Still holding his feet, she began to drag him across the floor.

“Leboff! Leboff!” Dickie screamed. “Aaaa! Leboff!”

The big man came awake, sitting up in bed, staring blindly round the dark room. “Dickie! What is it? What’s happening?”

Dickie was struggling against her, so she dropped his feet and pounced onto his chest, her form solid but invisible as
she crouched on his rib cage. She lightly poked her fingertips all over his face, in his mouth, his ears, plugging his nose. He started to make bleating sounds.

A hand walloped her from behind, knocking her off Dickie. She went for Leboff’s bare leg, biting down on the rounded calf. He bellowed, and she scampered out of the way of his fists and kicking legs.

She went formless and let herself drift halfway up the wall. Then, going against habit, she let herself be seen as a transparent, glowing form. When Leboff’s eyes went round as fried quail’s eggs, she began to float toward him. He backed away, his head shaking from side to side. He grabbed the candlestick from beside his bed and stabbed it at her.

“Lord Jesus Christ, protect me!” he cried, and she rushed him. He passed out just before she reached him, falling to the floor with a board-shaking thud.

Dickie, weeping, managed to get to his hands and knees and crawl to the door. Serena left him clawing at the handle, too weak and uncoordinated with fear to open it.

She went next to the kitchen, taking every knife she could lay hand to and stabbing them into the plaster of the high, vaulted ceiling. She found flour and dusted it over every horizontal surface, then put a single floury handprint on the black back of the fireplace. It was a pity she didn’t know how to write, that she might scrawl something suitably threatening.

Sommer was sleeping down in the stables: too far for her to go. The end of the tunnel was her limit. The Flurys slept in the village. Daniel Padgett was already gone. That left Underhill.

She flew through the halls and up the stairs, getting into the rhythm of destruction, for the moment loving that she was a ghost and not human, and able to do the unnatural. She was a fighter, a warrior, and she would fight until the last of them was gone.

With each act of destruction, the rage in her grew, and as it grew she became more distant from thought and caution. She knew she was expending energies that would cost her dearly, but she was too wrought up to care. It mattered only that there was another to attack, a fresh target for her wrath.

She stopped outside Underhill’s door and pounded the heels of her hands on the wood, softly at first, then steadily louder. She used her fury to funnel energy into her noisemaking—the sound pounding, pounding, pounding, the whole hallway shaking with the force of it as it grew still louder, like the thudding footsteps of a gigantic beast.

The door down the hall opened, and Underhill dashed out in his nightshirt. Tricky devil, he’d escaped through Woding’s room.

Serena pounded after him, following, and saw that he was headed for the tower. She flashed ahead of him, using the noise of her hands to herd him back toward the main stairs. He ran down them, and she followed, chasing him through the rooms of the castle, then out into the courtyard.

She continued the pounding out in the open, blocking Underhill when he tried to make for the garden or the lower wall. She wanted him in the tunnel.

He seemed to sense where she was sending him, and tried to escape to the left or right like a frightened sheep, but she kept him in line, coming up right behind him with a noise that he must have felt reverberating in every tissue of his thin body.

The black mouth of the tunnel gaped ahead, and Underhill finally flung himself inside with a howl of surrender. Serena quit the pounding, standing listening as Underhill screamed his way through the turns of the tunnel, alone now with his terror. She doubted either he or Sommer would be coming back through that passage anytime soon.

A deep tiredness began to overcome her as Underhill’s echoing cries died away. The thrill of the attack was still
with her, still pumping the blood through her bodiless veins, but underneath it she could feel exhaustion seeping out from her marrow. She turned toward the garden and stumbled. She was more tired than she had realized.

A fluttering panic rose in her breast. How much of her precious energy had she used? As the blood lust faded under the pressure of exhaustion, the voice of reason began to chide her for her wastefulness. Never had she expended so much at one time. Never had she allowed herself to get so carried away. She would need to spend several days in the unconscious oblivion that was her only form of rest, to recoup.

She dragged herself into the garden, then allowed herself to float, too tired to go through the motions of footsteps. Her cherry tree was silhouetted against the dark sky, clear to her night-seeing eyes.

Were those leaves there curling, drying out? She came closer, reaching out to touch them. The leaves crumbled under her insubstantial touch. She brushed her hands along the whole branch, feeling the drained wood. It was only where the limb joined the trunk of the tree that she felt life again.

Oh, God.
She had killed an entire branch with her stunts tonight. She wrapped her arms around the trunk, tears slipping down her cheeks to soak into the cracks of the bark. For nearly five centuries this tree had been her key to maintaining an echo of life. Without it, death would take all of her.

Once again, if she were not careful, her efforts to live as she pleased would bring about her own destruction.

“Leboff quit, and Underhill will sleep only in the stable quarters with Sommer,” Alex said, stepping around a sheep. “Dickie, who’s had the worst of it, remains in the castle. Underhill hired Dickie’s sweetheart, Marcy, as a maid, and I think Dickie is afraid she’ll lose all respect for him if he leaves.”

“We heard you’d started hiring women,” Rhys said, climbing over a stile into the next of his pastures. “The word is, no man in his right mind would spend the night at Maiden Castle.” He cast a smart grin over his shoulder. “So much for your plan to live in a bachelor’s haven, free from the repressive presence of women.”

Alex followed Rhys over the stile, and they followed the sheep path down to the bank of the river, where it ran alongside the water into the cool shade of the trees. “I begin to think an all-male house was a foolish idea. Look at Dickie: he puts on a much stronger front with Marcy there. And Leboff could have learned a thing or two from Daisy Hutchins, the young widow woman we found for the kitchens. Do you know of her?”

“I’ve met her at church. A more stolid, unimaginative person you will not find.”

“Leboff might have stayed if she were there to begin with, shaming him with her good sense,” Alex said, pausing to look into the darkened river for trout.

“I hear there were actual teeth marks on his leg.”

Alex grimaced. “So that part got out as well? Then it’s no wonder only women were willing to hire on. I’m assuming
they all believe the part of the legend that says it is only men Serena dislikes.”

“There’s an element of competition to it now,” Rhys said, tossing twigs into the water. “Every woman for ten miles is using Marcy and Daisy as her proof that when push comes to shove, women have more backbone than men. They are even laying bets on it.”

“I can only hope, for the sake of my clean shirts, that they win those bets.”

Rhys stopped his twig tossing and looked at Alex, his brows drawn together. “Did Leboff truly have bite marks on his leg?”

Alex shrugged and resumed walking along the wooded path. “Yes, but in the chaos of the dark, I think it just as likely that Dickie bit him as that a ghost did.”

“You’re still trying to explain things away. God, Alex! I should think it plain even to you by now that something is wrong at that castle.”

“There have been no disturbances since that night.”

“Most likely because Serena got what she wanted. The only males who will sleep there now are a frightened boy and you. Have you seen nothing unusual yourself?”

“Nothing I would swear to.” He could not be certain he had seen that white mist, after all, and in the light of day he could make himself doubt that his desk had shaken, or his pen been pulled from his hand. An experience was not necessarily proof.

Rhys narrowed his eyes at him. “Don’t play word games with me. I didn’t ask if you would be willing to tell the tale to a judge.”

Alex shrugged. “I’ve done my share of imagining, along with the rest. I’m not willing to completely believe any of it, though.”

“You should leave that place. There are other houses with good views. There’s no reason to stay.”

“I won’t be chased out of my home by something that might not exist. Maybe there is something going on up there—but I don’t know what, and I cannot be absolutely certain there is a ghost. There is no evidence.”

“What more do you need?” Rhys demanded.

They came out of the woods, walking back up the sloping pasture. Alex stopped, looking over the green fields and up at the soft, hazy blue sky. “I don’t know what would convince me. Perhaps being led to a previously unknown tomb, or an ancient goblet appearing out of thin air. Something concrete and unknown. I can’t let myself believe in the supernatural, while there yet remain other explanations, however far-fetched.”

Rhys slapped Alex on the shoulder. “You are one stubborn bastard. Serena could sit on your lap and give you a kiss, and you still wouldn’t believe.”

Alex grimaced. “Let us hope it never comes to that.”

The clock was striking two
A.M.
when Alex finally lifted his eyes from the pages of
Ivanhoe,
turning the book over on his leg to hold the place while he rubbed his eyes and pushed himself up straight in his chair, feeling the ache in his neck from holding the same position for too long. He yawned, and then as he looked around the library he felt the hairs slowly rise on the back of his neck.

She
—or
it
—was in the room.

It was not so strong a sensation as he had had before, else he most likely would have been stirred from his reading, but the sensation was definitely there.

The last time he had spoken to her, or whatever it was, his staff had had a night of hell. Beth’s theory that Serena was lonely and simply wanted attention was obviously flawed.

Tonight he would try a far saner course than speaking to the invisible: he would not acknowledge the sensed presence
in any way. He would not look toward it; he would not speak to it. This way he might even teach his own imaginative psyche that there was nothing there.

He was privately worried that the more he let himself even think about the possibility of there being a ghost, the more likely he would come to believe it to be true, whether or not there were facts to support the conclusion. He had seen the same thing happen too often with acquaintances who, like him, were interested in the sciences. Their own thoughts became more real to them than the physical world they were trying to study, and they became incapable of seeing evidence that contradicted their theories.

Clearly, the best course was to ignore any strange sensations he had of being watched. There was no purpose in doing otherwise. If Serena existed, she would have to write him a letter saying so, as well as draw a map pointing to the location of her moldering bones.

With that thought in mind, he rolled his head to work the kinks out of his neck and then rose, taking the lamp and book with him up to his bedroom and thence to his bathroom, making a conscious effort to ignore the sense of something following him. It was much like trying not to think of a blue zebra, once someone has suggested that you not let the image enter your mind.

He stopped in front of the door to the water closet, his resolve to act and think as if he were alone faltering at the idea of tending to private needs with the presence in attendance. A dim remembrance of a childhood fear of monsters in the privy flitted to mind.

Serena stood a few feet from Woding, watching as he stepped into the water closet. She couldn’t bring herself to follow. She hadn’t even followed Briggs into that small chamber, remembering too well how her own brothers had made a joke of trying to disrupt and embarrass her at similar
times. She’d dosed William’s food with enough tansy to send him to the garderobe for a day and a half, in revenge for one particularly humiliating episode.

Her haunting of Woding’s staff, although draining, was proving reasonably successful. Unfortunately, there were always more workers willing to be hired, a fact that had become abundantly clear when Marcy and Mrs. Hutchins showed up. Serena had eavesdropped on a few of their conversations, hearing their boasts that they would prove the men cowards. Knowing that, she was even less likely to want to disturb the women in any way.

It was best, therefore, that she direct her efforts to where they should have been all along: to Woding. His awareness of her presence had given her a devastatingly simple idea for how to wear him down. She would be by his side day and night. Minute by minute, hour by hour, this man who appeared to value solitude almost as much as she did would have to endure her constant company. He would feel her standing behind his shoulder, sitting across from him at dinner, leaning against the parapet of his tower, and even lying beside him in his bed. Day in, day out. It would drive him mad.

And the beauty of the plan was that she would not drain energy from her tree. She could haunt him this way for half a century, and it would be nearly effortless. She’d had centuries of learning patience, and could endure the pain of being in such close contact with the living. Woding would break long before she would.

She went and sat on the edge of the tub. It was white and perfectly smooth, and she wished she could know what it felt like to step into such a bath. She knew there would be no danger of finding a splinter in one’s backside while one wallowed about in the steaming water.

She swung her feet over the edge and slid down into it. She was a tall woman, but the tub was long and deep, and
with the back of her neck on the edge of the tub she didn’t even need to bend her knees, her feet just reaching the end. She lay there, pretending to be covered in water, then slid down deeper, pretending to hear the water fill her ears, and to feel it close over her face.

She heard Woding come out of the water closet; then after a few moments he appeared beside the tub. She looked up at him as he looked down, faint flickers of emotion dancing in the muscles across his face. It was his habit to bathe in the evening, and she wondered if he was reluctant to do so now. It was likely he had some sense that she was in his tub.

Whatever internal debate Woding had been waging while he looked down into the tub, he settled it. His jaw tight, he reached over and twisted the cock to let in hot water.

Serena shrieked, pulling back her feet, then snorted at her own foolishness, sticking her feet back under the pouring water. It ran right through her ankles.

Woding splashed his hand under the gurgling stream, testing the temperature, then took the rubber plug and bent down to stopper the drain. Serena spread her feet apart to avoid his touch. He moved away, and she heard cloth on cloth, and uneven steps: the sounds of a man undressing.

She scooted up and peered over the edge of the tub, her one previous view of his buttocks still vivid in her mind. She had persuaded herself that spying on him at his bath was necessary to her purpose, and had little to do with her own curiosity about his body.

He had his back to her now, bent over as he stood on one foot, peeling off a stocking. All he wore was a pair of white drawers, his shirt and other garments lying over a chair. She watched the flexing of muscles in his legs and back as he balanced on one foot, then tossed the stocking atop his shirt, standing straight again.

His hands went to the waistband of his drawers. Her own
hands gripped the edge of the tub. He seemed to hesitate; then, from the flexing and angle of his arms, she knew he was at work on the buttons. He slid them off, stepped out of them, and placed them on top of his other linens.

For a long moment he stood motionless, long enough for Serena to feel a blush in her own cheeks. He knew she was watching him. The thought of being known as a voyeur embarrassed her, but not enough to stop looking. As long as he didn’t acknowledge her presence, she thought she could stand the shame.

He turned around. Her lips parted as her eyes roved over his firm body. She could see every flex and ripple of his muscles as he walked toward the tub. Dark hair spread across the top of his chest, then tapered to a single faint line down his abdomen. His forearms and lower legs were dusted with dark hair, but the rest of his skin was bare, somewhat pale from lack of sun, but free of a single mark or blemish.

He looked like the statue in the castle chapel of a naked, alabaster Saint George, standing with spear in hand atop the writhing serpent. Her eyes went to his manhood, staying there as he came closer, and she found herself unable to look away from the dusky form. It was longer and thicker than Briggs’s, surrounded by dark hair, and the sight of it stirred some unnameable hunger deep within her. He stopped at the edge of the tub, that strangely entrancing organ mere inches from her face.

She looked up at him. His cheeks had gone pink, and he was staring determinedly at the wall, but a moment later he stepped into the tub. She scooted back toward the water cock, giving him room. The water sloshed as he sat, his face wincing at the temperature. He stretched out his legs, forcing her to climb up to the edge of the tub, out of his way. She took off her leather shoes and let her feet dangle in the water she could not feel, her toes inches from his ankles.

She sat, and she watched.

Alex had to fight the urge to don a nightshirt after his bath. The sense not only of a presence, but of an intensely observant one, had persisted all through his bath, setting his nerves on edge. It had been a battle just to ignore it, and then once he had accepted his inability to do so, a battle to accept the sensation and to try to carry on regardless.

His home growing up had been one where the male anatomy was neither seen nor spoken of. Even the lapdogs had all been female, so his sisters would not have to cast their eyes on the embarrassing evidence of male gender.

Holidays with Rhys and his few years in boarding school had loosened him up, but he still did not have the easy comfort with nudity that many of his male friends did, who when among each other seemed not to have ever heard of the concept of modesty.

His one place of freedom from his own bashfulness was his private quarters, and he was determined not to give that up to an imagined ghost. Or a real ghost, for that matter. His habit was to sleep nude, and sleep nude he would.

He had to fight not to cover his privates as he walked to his bed, feeling every bounce and swing. He slid beneath the covers with a sigh of relief, and blew out the oil lamp, sinking deeper into concealing darkness and body-hiding sheets, lying on his side facing out, the bed curtains open.

He closed his eyes and immediately felt the presence come to the side of the bed, standing for a moment near his head. It was as if he could see it in his mind’s eye, a darker shadow in the dark, pausing there, then going around the foot of the bed and thence to the other side. A tingle of awareness crept up his spine as the presence climbed onto the bed and lay down beside him, just behind him.

He opened his eyes and rolled onto his back, trying to check from the corner of his eye whether there was indeed something darker on the pillow next to his. He could see
nothing, but still, awareness tingled all down his right side.