Shadows in Scarlet (16 page)

"He's just scared of you,” Amanda said, and added to herself,
I bet you're more than a little scared of him, too.
James wasn't so far removed from the days when cats were thought to be witch's familiars. And it was only in the last few decades that fox hunting had become politically incorrect.

He was looking at her, and cats and horses weren't what was on his mind.

She scrambled for words. “Thank you for not frightening anyone at the garden club lunch today."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The women in the dining room today, who were calling your name. Thank you for putting the candlestick back down again. It's not a good idea to play with fire—though of course you know that."

He stared at her as though she wasn't speaking English.

"You didn't hear anyone calling your name today?"

"No, I did not. I'm very sorry, Miss Witham, Amanda, if I could have been of assistance to you and yet failed to be so."

"Where do you go when you're not with m...” She stopped abruptly.

Too late. His puzzled expression crumpled into outright confusion. “Why, nowhere, but to sleep and to dream—in faith, this night has lasted a prodigious length of time, until the light of day seems but a dream itself.” He grimaced fiercely, shrugging not just his shoulders but his entire body, rejecting her question, his answer, and the implications of both.

That hadn't been a fair question, she told herself. And yet she'd confirmed her hunch that he was truly aware only when he was focussed in physical form. Flattering, to think he was only conscious when he was with her, and that the moving objects were nothing but left over scraps of energy. Of potency, she thought. Of virility.

James stepped toward her, hands outstretched, palms up. “Are you frightened of me?"

"Oh no, not at all.” She raised her hands and placed them in his grasp.

"Aren't you the saucy one? Perhaps you should be frightened of me, Amanda.” He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

She was ready for him. She fingered his coat and his belt, pressing herself against his body as insistently he pressed against her, hanging on his mouth and tongue—
oh yeah.
She could sense him in every fiber, every nerve ending. Maybe it was all a delicate equation of matter and energy, of relativity in defiance of time and death. She didn't care. For someone with no physicality he was sure physical.

Would he be able to take off his clothes or were they permanently part of his image—if rumor was correct he wasn't wearing anything under his kilt anyway....
Whoa.
She pulled away to catch her breath. She'd never raced from the starting gate to the finish line this fast, but then, she'd never been afraid a guy would disappear in the backstretch, either.

He followed so eagerly they did a quick dance step across the floor and kissed again. His hands were beneath her T-shirt, like butterflies on her ribs, climbing upward.
Oh yeah.
She wondered whether he could deal with hooks and eyes and zippers. But he was awfully good at this. He'd probably known all about the lacings of petticoats and stays. As a bachelor, an officer, and a gentleman he'd had every chance to get it on with....

Whoa,
she thought again, and stiffened. If James thought he was still alive, then he thought he was engaged to Isabel. His engagement was the reason he'd resisted Sally's advances. But if Isabel was marriage material, listed in the “respectable” category of womanhood and therefore strictly unavailable, then all-too-available Amanda was most definitely not respectable.

Like she hadn't already known that? But now it was in her face. And now she knew she didn't want to play the whore for James any more than she did for any man. Even with him, there had to be more to it than academic curiosity and biomechanics.

"Hey, slow down, things are going too fast here.” She pushed him away and stood wheezing, as hot and humid as the breeze that rattled the venetian blinds.

James was kind of pink in the face himself. He drew himself up, standing to attention, and fixed Amanda with a gaze that was remarkably tolerant, considering. “I beg your pardon, I am too impetuous. But your beauty...."

"I get the message,” she said.

He frowned. “What can I say to you, Sweeting, to reassure you?"

Sweeting? That was a good one. Smiling wryly, she took another step away from him before her own senses sucked her back into his arms. Once you start necking, she thought, you stop talking, as though a relationship could have only one dimension at a time. Dealing with James's weird dimension was difficult enough without throwing out all the other ones.

"I think,” she said, “I may know where your sword is."

"Indeed?"

"Earl Balcarres sent it back to Dundreggan."

"He sent it—why should he do that?"

"You were injured,” Amanda said carefully. “He sent your sword to Lady Isabel Seaton, as a memento."

"Fearing I would die.” The pink drained from his face. “Isabel. Yes, I remember Isabel. A lightsome lass, with a smile much as yours, Amanda; a smile that opened the gillyflowers like the rays of Phoebus himself. It has been long indeed since I last saw Isabel.” James's image wavered on the air like the smoke from Cynthia's extinguished candle.

Amanda winced. Once again she'd forced him to look out of himself, away from the moment. She'd hurt him. She wasn't sure whether she'd done it to learn about him or to make sexual points against him.

"Isabel, and the garden at Dundreggan—it seems naught but a pleasant dream. I remember much better the evil dream of Charlestown and sickness and death. And death.” James's form solidified again, but he was still pale. His brow was furrowed and his lips tight. “Amanda, I am fair embrangled, all is strange around me, I know not where I am—Melrose—Virginia—and yet.... “He reached toward her.

Damn it all anyway, Amanda thought. It was just human instinct to reassure yourself by hanging onto someone else. And it wasn't like he was aroused any more—she'd taken care of that as surely as if she'd thrown cold water on him.

She hugged him and laid her cheek against his shoulder. It was like holding the wind. She ached for him, for the poor lost soul, neither living nor dead. No matter what he might have thought of her when he was alive, now he was dead. Now he was vulnerable and he needed her. Their relationship—whatever it was—was unique.

With a whiskey-soft sigh, James wrapped Amanda close to his chest. “Death,” he said, so quietly she could hardly hear him. “The thought of death confounds me. I think of death and I think of Archibald, my cousin, all the deadly sins wrapped in the figure of a man."

"The seven deadly sins? Like sloth and lust?"

"Lust, greed, envy—so is Archibald, a serpent in my bosom. I saw him and Isabel laughing together in the garden—in the garden where we had plighted our troth. When they saw me they stopped laughing and turned away, shamefaced. I donned the scarlet coat that night, and the next day I departed my homeland. But Archibald came later, after Charlestown, bearing letters from Isabel, letters that were proper enough, and yet—and yet were cold."

A shiver slipped like an ice cube down Amanda's back.

James was becoming thinner and thinner. She wasn't holding him any more. She groped through the air.

His voice was distant but still crisp and clear. “Archibald is holding a pistol, a cocked pistol, and the muzzle of the pistol points at me. He smiles a smile that has in it no humor, no affection, nothing but malice. A flash of light—I am blinded and struck all aback—oh God, what is this, what does this mean? No!"

An invisible movement. A rush in the air. A drinking glass sitting on the kitchen counter leaped against the wall and shattered.

"James!” Amanda called. But he was gone, leaving nothing behind but the tang of whiskey in her nose and mouth and the moist glow deep in her abdomen.

"James?” She sank to the floor next to the shards of glass as though kneeling over a sprawled body. But that body had been thrust abruptly from life into death two hundred years ago.

Warily she collected the broken bits of glass. They chimed like a tolling bell. So now she knew. As Hewitt said, James had died by homicide. And what a tidy little murder it had been, done in the midst of battle. James had been betrayed by his own cousin and, by extension, his fiancée. No wonder his shade couldn't rest.

If he wanted comfort, Amanda thought, she was his, semantics be damned. If he wanted revenge, even after all this time, then she'd help him get it. Maybe she was playing with fire herself.... No. Fire was dangerous, true, but it also meant warmth and light. “James?"

He was gone.

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Amanda opened the front door, admitting a burst of sunshine. Lafayette whisked by her skirts and paced off along the top of a brick wall, his tail straight up in the air like an exclamation point. He'd never come back to the apartment last night. Neither had James. Amanda felt bad about the cat, but not as bad as she felt about the man.

Way to go,
she told herself. According to one theory, as soon as a ghost realized it was no longer alive, it would disappear. She could only hope that James's desire either for her or for revenge was stronger than a minor detail such as death.

Now she understood why he was trapped between this life and the next, alone and lost. It must be precious little comfort to him that Archibald hadn't shot him in the back. James's personal honor and that of the Grant family had been violated.

Amanda turned back into the entrance hall. She found a cloth in the sideboard, started polishing the fingerprints from the Lucite boxes in James's display, and considered the evidence against Cousin Archibald.

Means. Even if Archibald hadn't been carrying a pistol since he left Scotland, he'd have found any number of firearms in the British camp. Had poor James tried to fend him off with his sword? Even the primitive pistol of the day would have the advantage of a sword—especially a pistol in the hand of a trusted relative.

Motive. What if Archibald, as Balcarres's aide-de-camp, had intercepted the letter telling James about his brother's death? He'd realize he was the heir. Although wanting Isabel might have been motive enough to get rid of James. That was one way to make her fall into his arms, to comfort her on her loss. Or he and Isabel may have already had some agreement—her letters were cold.... Amanda shook her head. She was veering into speculation.

What wasn't speculation was Archibald's opportunity. In the midst of battle, with men shouting, horses galloping, cannons firing, all Archibald had to do was point and shoot. The murder would've taken a minute. Less.

And then that rat Archibald returned James's sword to Balcarres—
here sir, just as I plucked it from his lifeless hand
—and finagled himself a discharge. He'd probably cried crocodile tears over the devastated folks at home. Who really must have been devastated, Amanda thought. James's parents lost two sons in less than a year. And Isabel, whether she'd been unfaithful to James or not, must've felt something when James's sword returned from the wars in Archibald's hand. No telling what sort of line Archibald had used on her to turn her away from James.

All right!
Amanda congratulated herself and sent silent thanks to Carrie and old Malcolm Grant. It all worked, it all fit together, except for the one thing that had baffled everyone, from herself to Hewitt, all along. Why was James buried at Melrose?

There. The boxes were clean. Amanda blew a kiss toward the one that held James's portrait, made a face at herself, and put away the polishing cloth. She stepped out the door onto the porch.

The river was a sheet of glare in the morning sun, a boat on its surface almost invisible. The lawn shone emerald green. Amanda could actually smell the heat, a combination of warm grass and stone and a distant whiff of fish. July in Virginia was bright, no doubt about it.

Bright daylight.
James had seen the flash of Archibald's pistol. Even if the battle had been fought on a cloudy day, the flashes of the guns would've been invisible. James had been killed at night.

Amanda brought her fist down on the railing. That was it! Archibald had ambushed James in the garden the night before the battle and bundled his body into a makeshift grave. As Balcarres's aide Archibald would have known the battle was coming—the British had provoked it. All he had to do was act innocent until the regiment was mopping up afterwards, say that James had been killed in action, and trot out the sword.

The scabbard must have been bent when James fell on it. He'd died with his sword in his hand, otherwise it would have been bent, too.... Well, it might be bent, Amanda didn't know. It was enough that Archibald had taken the sword and left the scabbard. James never said he'd run up the stairs, slashing at the banisters, the morning of Greensprings Farm. It was much more likely the soldiers had moved out the night before. Who would notice the odd pistol shot in the dark when a camp was breaking for battle?

With the British troops falling back on Yorktown Balcarres wouldn't have had time to ask questions or view the body, even if he'd doubted Archibald's word. And why should he? It showed what respect the Colonel had had for James's family, if not for the man himself, that he'd taken the time to write—or at least dictate—the letter.

Maybe, in one final excruciating irony, he'd dictated the letter to Archibald.

Amanda pirouetted up and down the steps feeling like a
Jeopardy
grand champion. Not only did her theory fit all the facts, it could pretty much be extrapolated from the physical and written evidence. She could tell Carrie about it without giving away anything she'd learned from James personally.

She stopped, winded. And what James wanted, personally, was revenge. Although Archibald Grant was beyond the reach of any earthly jury. Surely, in the afterlife, he'd been turned away from the Pearly Gates and appropriately judged—vengeance being His, sayeth the Lord. But that wasn't enough for James. Even at this late date he could achieve something symbolic by revealing the truth. And that was where Amanda came in.