Sister Emily's Lightship (11 page)

The Abbot had, of course, sworn Elias to secrecy concerning Uncle Finn and the bottle, and the two of them had replaced the Bordeaux 79 on the wine cellar racks without the cellarer's knowledge. But Elias, after a week in a room smelling strongly of tipple, returned to his old ways, and after that his vow of secrecy mattered little, for no one would have believed a word he had to say. As for the Abbot, after a year of the most flagrant misrule, he was sent by the pope on a crusade against the infidels from which he did not return, though there were frequent rumors that he had become a sheikh in a distant emirate and had banned all peris and jinn from his borders.

That left Uncle Finn corked up in his bottle on a back shelf in a cellar of a once-haunted Abbey, marked as a wine so degraded and unpopular that it would never be taken by any knowledgeable person from the shelf. And we were afraid he would remain so forever.

But one day, as I sat reading in my father's library, which is well stocked with books of the past, present, and future, I came upon a volume in section A. A for Archaeology, Astronomy, Ancestry, and Aphorisms. It was a splendid piece of serendipity, for the book told about the Americas, where, in some distant year, a man rich in coins but lacking in wisdom would take Kilkenny Abbey stone by stone over the great waters, a feat even a Merlin might envy. And—as one of the Aphorists wrote in another volume in that section, since Americans would have no wine before its time, surely the magical words “Bordeaux 79” will reek of such time. Uncle Finn, oh Uncle Finn, you will have before you an entire continent to convert, and proselytes beyond counting, for a land that saves its saviors in plaster and seeds the heavens with saucers should have no trouble at all accepting a bottle saint.

T
HERE IS AN ASH
tree in the middle of our forest on which my brother Dusty has carved the runes of his loves. Like the rings of its heartwood, the tree's age can be told by the number of carvings on its bark.
Dusty loves…
begins the legend high up under the first branches. Then the litany runs like an old tale down to the tops of the roots. Dusty has had many many loves, for he is the romantic sort. It is only in taste that he is wanting.

If he had stuck to the fey, his own kind, at least part of the time, Mother and Father would not have been so upset. But he had a passion for princesses and milkmaids, that sort of thing. The worst, though, was the time he fell in love with the ghost of a suicide at Miller's Cross.
That
is a story indeed.

It began quite innocently, of course. All of Dusty's love affairs do. He was piping in the woods at dawn, practicing his solo for the Solstice. Mother and Father prefer that he does his scales and runs as far from our pavilion as possible, for his notes excite the local wood doves, and the place is stained quite enough as it is. Ever dutiful, Dusty packed his pipes and a cress sandwich and made for a Lonely Place. Our forest has many such: dells silvered with dew, winding streams bedecked with morning mist, paths twisting between blood-red trilliums—all the accoutrements of Faerie. And when they are not cluttered with bad poets, they are really quite nice. But Dusty preferred human highways and byways, saying that such busy places were, somehow, the loneliest places of all. Dusty always had a touch of the poet himself, though his rhymes were, at best, slant.

He had just reached Miller's Cross and perched himself atop a standing stone, one leg dangling across the Anglo-Saxon inscription, when he heard the sound of human sobbing. There was no mistaking it. Though we fey are marvelous at banshee wails and the low-throbbing threnodies of ghosts, we have not the ability to give forth that half gulp, half cry that is so peculiar to humankind, along with the heaving bosom and the wetted cheek.

Straining to see through the early-morning fog, Dusty could just make out an informal procession heading down the road toward him. So he held his breath—which, of course, made him invisible, though it never works for long—and leaned forward to get a better view.

There were ten men and women in the group, six of them carrying a coffin. In front of the coffin was a priest in his somber robes, an iron cross dangling from a chain. The iron made Dusty sneeze, for he is allergic and he became visible for a moment until he could catch his breath again. But such was the weeping and carryings-on below him, no one even noticed.

The procession stopped just beneath his perch, and Dusty gathered up his strength and leaped down, landing to the rear of the group. At the moment his feet touched the ground, the priest had—fortuitously—intoned, “Dig!” The men had set the coffin on the ground and begun. They were fast diggers, and the ground around the stone was soft from spring rains. Six men and six spades make even a deep grave easy work, though it was hardly a pretty sight, and far from the proper angles. And all the while they were digging, a plump lady in gray worsted, who looked upholstered rather than dressed, kept trying to fling herself into the hole. Only the brawny arms of her daughters on either side and the rather rigid stays of her undergarments kept her from accomplishing her gruesome task.

At last the grave was finished, and the six men lowered the coffin in while the priest sprinkled a few unkind words over the box, words that fell on the ears with the same thudding foreboding as the clods of earth upon the box. Then they closed the grave and dragged the weeping women down the road toward the town.

Now Dusty, being the curious sort, decided to stay. He let out his breath once the mourners had turned their backs on him, and leaped up onto his perch again. Then he began to practice his scales with renewed vigor, and had even gotten a good hold on the second portion of “Puck's Sarabande” when the moon rose. Of course, the laws of the incorporeal world being what they are, the ghost of the suicide rose, too. And that was when Dusty fell in love.

She was unlike her sisters, being petite and dark where they had been large and fair. She had two dimples, one that could be seen when she frowned and one when she smiled. Her hair was plaited with white velvet ribands and tied off with white baby's breath, which, if she had not been dead and a ghost, would certainly with have been wilted by then. There was a fringe of dark hair almost obscuring the delicate arch of her eyebrows. Her winding sheet became her.

Dusty jumped down and bowed low. She was so new at being a ghost, she was startled by him. Though he is tall for an elf, he is small compared to most humans and rarely startles anyone. It is the ears, of course, that give him away. That, and the fact that, like most male feys, he is rather well endowed. The fig leaf was invented for human vanity. The solitary broad-leafed ginko was made for the fey. She covered her eyes with her hands, which, of course, did not help, since she could see right through her palms, bones and all.

“What are you?” she whispered. And then she added plaintively, “What am I?”

“You are dead,” Dusty said. “And I am in love,” foreplay being a word found only in human dictionaries.

But the ghost turned from him and began to weep. “Alas,” she cried, “then it was all for naught, for where is my sweet Roman?”

Dusty tried again. “I will play Roman for you. Or even Greek.” He will promise anything when he is in the early throes of love.

But the ghost only wept the dry tears of the dead, crying, “Roman is the name of the man I love. Where is he?”

“Obviously alive and well and pursuing other maidens,” said Dusty, his forthright nature getting in the way of his wooing. “For if he were dead, he would be here with you. But
I
am here.”

He tried to enfold her in his arms, but she slipped away as easily as mist.

“Are you, then, dead?” she asked.

“I am of the fey,” he said.

But if she listened, it was not apparent, for she continued as if answers were not a part of conversation. “He must be dead. I saw him die. It is why
I
died. To be with him.”

That, of course, decided Dusty. He was always a fool for lost causes. And I must say, from my readings of history, that I knew we would all have to watch him carefully in the 1780s, the 1860s, and the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s.

“Tell me, gracious lady,” he said, careful to speak the elfin equivalent of the Shouting Voice, which is to say, well modulated. At that level the voice could bring milk from a maiden's breast, cause graybeards to dance, and stir love in even the coldest heart.

But the suicide's ghost seemed immune. She wrung her hands into vapor, but did not step an inch closer to Dusty's outstretched arms. Sometimes the voice works, and sometimes it does not.

So, shrugging away his disappointment, Dusty tried again, this time in a more natural tone. “Start from the beginning. I may have missed something important, coming in the middle like this.”

The ghost settled herself daintily some three feet above the ground, crossed her ankles prettily, and offered him her smiling dimple. “My name is…or was…oh, how
do
these things work in the afterlife?”

“Do not worry about niceties,” Dusty said, patting her hand and the air beneath it at the same time. “Just begin already.” I do believe it was this moment he began falling out of love. But he will never admit to that.

She sniffled angelically and pouted, showing him the other dimple. “My name is Julie. And I was in love…am in love…oh, dear!” She began to cry anew.

Dusty offered a webkerchief to her. She reached for it, and it fell between them, for, of course, she could no more touch it then Dusty could touch her. She wiped her nose, instead, on the winding sheet.

“Go on,” Dusty said, blushing when she looked at him with gratitude. He often mistook such human emotions as gratitude, sympathy, and curiosity for love.

“My own true love is Roman. It is a family name, but I like it.”

“A fine name,” Dusty agreed hastily, having bitten back the response that children should be named after natural things like sunshine, dust, and rainbows, not unnatures like cities, countries, and empires.

Warming to her tale, Julie the ghost began to catalog her own true love's charms, an adolescent litany of cheeks, hair, muscles, and thews that anyone but another adolescent would have found unbearable. As it was, Dusty was as busy listing Julie's charms. They were certainly a pair.

The families, it seems, were feuding. Something about a pig and a poke. Dusty never did get it straight. But the upshot was that Roman's parents would not let him marry Julie, and Julie's parents would not let her marry Roman. Such are the judicious settlements of humankind.

So the two, instead of finding a sensible solution—like moving to Verona, changing their names, or buying both sets of parents new pigs and new pokes—decided on suicide as the answer. Answer! They had not even discovered the right question.

But of course, Dusty agreed with her. Even the fey have hormonal imbalances, which is all that measures the difference between adolescent and adult.

“What you need now,” Dusty said in his sensible voice, “is to reunite with your own true love.”

Julie began another cascade of tears. “But that is impossible. He is alive. And I am…I am…”

“Not alive,” Dusty said, being as tactful as could be under the circumstances.

“Dead!” Julie finished unhappily, the cascade having become a torrent.

“But you thought he was dead,” Dusty said.

“I found him lying in a pool of blood,” she answered. “There was blood on his hands and on his face and on his coat and on his…” She blushed prettily and hid her face with her hands again.

Dusty admired her sly smile through the transparent bones.

“Everywhere!” she finished.

“Did you look for a wound?” Dusty asked.

“Blood makes me urpy,” she admitted.

“Urpy?” If her giddiness had not already begun to change his mind, her vocabulary certainly would.
“Urpy?”

“You know—throw-uppins.”

He nodded, looking a bit throw-uppins himself. “So you did not look.”

“No. I ran to my nurse and told her I had a headache. A very bad headache. And borrowed a powder. A very strong powder. And…”

“And lay down by Roman's side, having drunk the powder in a tisane. Folding your hands over your pretty bosom and spreading your skirts about you like a scallop shell.”

She made a moue. “How did you know! Did you see us?”

He sighed. “My sister told me the story. She read it in one of our father's books. His library is vast and has tomes from the past and the future as well. Only, I'd better tell you the rest. Roman is not dead.”

“Not dead?” She said it with less surprise than before. “How?”

“Who knows? Animal's blood or tomato sauce or spilled wine. Who knows?”

“Roman knows,”
she said vehemently. Then she stopped. “Why are you laughing?”

How could he explain it to her? Humor is difficult enough between consenting adults. It is impossible intraspecies. Dolphins do not trade laughs with wolves, nor butterflies joke with whales. Puns have a life span half the length of a pratfall. He fell out of love abruptly. But there was still enough attraction left for him to want to help her out.

“You must convince Roman to die,” he said. “Only then can he join you.”

“How?”

“Haunt him.”

And so the haunting began.

Dusty was right, of course. Roman had already begun looking for alternatives. He had a passion for slatterns and sculleries, an interest that had apparently begun long before his dalliance with Julie. She would have been disappointed in him within the course of a normal year—that is, if she had not found him basted like a beef on a platter. Perhaps he had guessed it and had knowingly provoked her into death. If so, Dusty was right about the haunting.

But Julie forgave him, for spirits are so set in their ways. They long for what lingered last. She believed in Roman despite the evidence of her ears and eyes. It led, of course, to a spectacular single-minded haunting.