For Deader or Worse

by Sheri Cobb South

  She stirred in his arms, making a little snuffling noise which gave him to understand that she was already asleep. And perhaps, he thought, it was just as well. Maybe it was better not to ask questions for which he might not like the answers.

  * * *

  Pickett did not sleep soundly that night, due in large part to his determination to wean himself off the laudanum that had been his constant companion since the night of his injury. Had he taken another dose before retiring to bed, as Julia had urged, he probably would not have heard the noise at all. But having at last drifted off without narcotic aid, he was abruptly awakened by a faint click. His eyes flew open but, as some instinct warned him to keep still, he made no movement but for the slightest turn of his head to ensure that his lady still slept. His gaze darted about the unfamiliar room in search of the sound’s source, but even as he told himself without conviction that he must have dreamt it, the noise was repeated and the door began, ever so slowly, to open.

  As the hammering in his heart began to subside, his ire increased. He was prepared to make a great many allowances as far as his in-laws were concerned; in fact, knowing himself to be no one’s ideal candidate for their daughter’s hand, he was not without a certain amount of sympathy for them. Still, certain things were sacred, or ought to be, and the privacy of the marriage bed was one of them.

  His mind made up, he threw back the covers and, sliding his arm gently from beneath his wife’s head, he slipped out of bed and crept slowly across the unfamiliar room, taking particular care to avoid barking his shins against the furniture in the dark. Upon reaching the door, he grasped the knob and flung it wide—and found himself staring into an empty corridor. He stepped out of the room and looked up and down the passage in both directions, but saw nothing, not even the faint glow of a candle disappearing in the distance. He sniffed the air, but detected no acrid scent of a light recently extinguished.

  A dream, he decided, no doubt the result of a guilty conscience. Surely it could not be right to exercise his conjugal rights under the very roof of his wife’s disapproving parents. He thought of that fellow whom Lady Runyon had mentioned at dinner, the lord who under different circumstances would have been his brother-in-law, and who had just returned from his wedding trip; he hoped his lordship’s honeymoon had been more satisfying than his own promised to be.

  Heaving a sigh, he padded back across the room and slid beneath the covers.

  Chapter Three

  Which Tells of a Girl and a Ghost

  May 1796

  Somersetshire

  Jamie strode down the stairs and across the hall with Claudia in his arms, then kicked the front door open and carried his precious burden around the north end of the house to the stables beyond.

  “Higgins!” he bellowed for the groom. “Higgins! Where are you?”

  A lanky young man very nearly Jamie’s own age came out of the farthest stall, his eyes goggling at the sight of the mistress in the arms of the vicar’s son, whose horse he’d just unsaddled.

  “Tom! Where is Higgins?” It occurred to Jamie that the absence of the groom might be a good thing; the stable hand Tom, having less responsibility and substantially smaller wages, might feel less of an obligation to report the incident to his lordship, particularly if Jamie made it worth his while to hold his tongue. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Saddle up my horse, and her ladyship’s mare, too.”

  Claudia made a faint noise of protest. “Jamie, no—I can’t—”

  “It’s all right, Claudia,” he said soothingly. “I don’t expect you to ride.”

  He turned back to the stable hand, who was still staring slack-jawed. “You can tie the mare’s rein to my saddle. Get going, man, don’t just stand there!”

  The stable lad tugged his forelock in acknowledgment, then set about his task.

  When Tom had finished, Jamie set Claudia on her feet and bracketed her waist with his hands. “I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt.”

  She gave him a brave little smile. “I don’t mind.”

  He lifted her onto his own horse, noting her sharp intake of breath, and then swung himself up into the saddle behind her.

  “Now,” he said, reaching into his pockets for a handful of coins and tossing them down to the stable hand, “I suggest you forget everything you’ve seen here today.”

  “I don’t remember nothing, sir,” Tom replied promptly, stooping to pick up a silver shilling that had slipped through his fingers.

  “Good man!” said Jamie, and urged his mount forward.

  He did not set off down the long tree-lined drive which eventually gave out onto the main road, for he dared not run the risk of encountering anyone who might report their flight to his lordship. Instead, he took a less-traveled path that skirted the home wood before crossing the meadow where a flock of sheep grazed, oblivious to human suffering.

  As the distance between themselves and his lordship’s magnificent Palladian mansion increased, Claudia began to relax against Jamie’s shoulder. When at last they descended the ridge that hid the house from view, she never looked back.

  * * *

  March 1809

  Somersetshire

  “I thought I would show John about the house and gardens today,” Julia told her parents at breakfast the next morning. “That is, if you have no objection, Mama.”

  “None at all,” Lady Runyon assured her, taking what comfort she could in the fact that the evil hour in which her lowborn son-in-law would be thrust upon the unsuspecting neighborhood would be delayed, and with it the public knowledge of her daughter’s precipitous descent in the eyes of the world.

  The foursome exchanged labored platitudes for the next twenty minutes, until at last Julia turned to Pickett. “If you are finished, John, I shall take you upstairs and show you the schoolroom, where Claudia and I used to plague our governess.”

  “I’m sure Claudia never did any such thing,” protested Lady Runyon, “She was always such a well-behaved child.”

  “You notice that Mama makes no such claims about me, however,” Julia said, forcing herself to smile. In the thirteen years since her sister’s death, Claudia had grown more and more saintly in her mother’s eyes. Julia had loved Claudia deeply, but if her sister had been half the paragon their mama claimed, Julia was quite certain she would have detested her.

  As Pickett rose to follow his bride from the table, Sir Thaddeus cleared his throat. “A word with you first, Mr. Pickett, if you will.”

  Pickett agreed, albeit without enthusiasm. He had not forgotten that door creaking open in the night, and he still thought Sir Thaddeus was the most likely culprit. He gave the slightest of reassuring nods to Julia’s questioning look, and allowed Sir Thaddeus to lead the way to his study.

  “Look here, Mr. Pickett,” said the squire, closing the door against any curious eavesdroppers, “if you’re going to be one of the family, you might as well make yourself useful.”

  It was not the opening Pickett was expecting, but he was not about to let pass the opportunity to redeem himself, if possible, in his father-in-law’s eyes—provided, of course, that the means did not impinge upon the sanctity of the marriage bed. “If there is anything I can do, sir—”

  “I believe there may be. It’s my wife, you see. She’s got the idea the house must be haunted.”

  “Haunted?” Pickett echoed. “Begging your pardon, sir, but what would have put such an idea into her head?”

  “She claims she heard footsteps walking about the house last night.” Sir Thaddeus hesitated as a possible explanation for this phenomenon occurred to him. “I don’t suppose you, or Julia—?”

  “No, sir.” Recalling the bedroom door opening in the wee hours, he asked, “I gather you weren’t wandering the hallways, either?”

  Sir Thaddeus shook his head.

  “Did you hear any such footsteps?” Pickett continued.

  “Didn’t hear a sound.” The squire looked a bit sheepish. “Had more than a drop of brandy befo
re I retired, and slept like a babe newborn.”

  Pickett nodded in understanding. What the squire meant, of course, was that the news of his daughter’s disastrous marriage had driven him to the bottle. But at least he could acquit his father-in-law of spying.

  Supernatural occurrences were outside his purview, but Pickett suspected the explanation for Lady Runyon’s mysterious footsteps was rather more mundane. Based on his own brief experience working incognito in the servants’ hall of a Yorkshire manor house, he thought it very likely that some footman or chambermaid had recalled a duty left undone, and had sought to rectify the omission before it could be discovered in the morning. Pickett considered it a professional courtesy, of a sort, to protect the unknown domestic who had, after all, meant no harm, and whose own interrupted sleep would probably be punishment enough to render a repeat performance unlikely.

  But it would not do for him to appear too cavalier in dismissing Lady Runyon’s concerns. “I believe it is not unusual for stately old houses like this one to claim restless spirits,” he observed. “As I understand it, some families are actually quite proud of them. Have there been no rumors of hauntings before?”

  “No, none at all.” Sir Thaddeus appeared to struggle with himself, and when he spoke again, it was as if the words were dragged from his unwilling throat. “Oh, the devil! In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose. If you must know, Lady Runyon is persuaded she knows the identity of this particular spirit.”

  “Does she?” Pickett asked, but even before Sir Thaddeus answered, he knew what was coming.

  The older man sighed. “My wife believes she heard the ghost of Claudia, our elder daughter.”

  * * *

  The words still rang in Pickett’s head a short time later as he stood with his bride in the third-floor schoolroom, a rather barren apartment whose utilitarian furnishings of table, chairs, bookcase, and globes were brightened by a number of colorful if inexpert watercolors pinned to the walls.

  “That one is Claudia’s, as are most of the better ones,” Julia said, gesturing toward a large landscape of Runyon Hall and its grounds executed in the brilliant greens of springtime. Seeing him pause before a slightly lopsided charcoal portrait of a young woman whose chin was propped in hands with short, stubby fingers, she added, “I always preferred drawing people to scenery, but my governess complained that I could never get the hands right. As you see, she was quite correct.”

  It was not his wife’s artistic ability, however, that interested Pickett at the moment. “You never told me you had a sister.”

  “The subject never arose,” she pointed out. “If you have any siblings, you’ve never mentioned them, either.”

  “I believe my father could be a very charming man when it suited his purposes. For all I know, I may have half-siblings scattered all over London. But no, I have no brothers or sisters that I’m aware of. Tell me about Claudia, though—that was her name, was it not?”

  Julia nodded. “She was older than me by six years, and I adored her. And pray do not believe everything Mama says about her, for she was not at all the paragon of perfection that Mama tries to make her out to be!”

  “How did she die?”

  A shadow crossed Julia’s face. “I don’t know all the details, for I was only fourteen years old at the time, and no one would tell me anything! I do think it is a mistake to keep children in the dark, for their imagination only makes things worse than if they had been given an honest answer, do you not think so? But to answer your question, I don’t believe anyone knows for sure, not really. She was Lady Buckleigh by then, for she had married Lord Buckleigh two years earlier, when she was eighteen. One day she went out riding in the Mendips, and her horse came back without her.”

  She walked slowly across the room to gaze out the window toward the Mendip Hills away to the east, as if still watching for her sister’s return. “Lord Buckleigh organized an extensive search, in which Papa naturally took part, but Claudia’s body was never found. As I said, neither Mama nor Papa would answer my questions, but from little things they let drop, and from things the servants said, I gather the searchers found her shawl clinging to a bush in a gorge deep in the hills. There was a great deal of blood on it, as well as on the ground nearby, by which they assume—” Her voice cracked on the words. “—they assume a wild animal must have got her.”

  “A terrible way to die,” Pickett noted sympathetically.

  Julia sighed. “Yes, and there is more, although I set no store by ugly rumors.”

  “Rumors?”

  Julia forced herself to say the hateful words. “It is known that Jamie Pennington, the vicar’s son, was expected to tea that afternoon, and in fact tea things for two people were found scattered all over the drawing room floor. And the following day, Jamie did not return to Oxford as planned, but ran off and joined the army. The next we heard from him, he was in the Low Countries with the seventh cavalry.”

  “And the rumors suggest that he killed her?”

  She arched her left eyebrow. “Who wants to know? John Pickett my husband, or John Pickett the Bow Street Runner?”

  “Maybe a bit of both,” he acknowledged. “I don’t like unsolved mysteries, particularly unsolved mysteries that trouble the woman I love.”

  He punctuated this statement by putting his hands on her shoulders and kissing her gently but firmly on the lips. She allowed herself the luxury of leaning into him for a moment before taking up the thread of her narrative.

  “To answer your question, yes, there were rumors that Jamie had killed her, but I don’t believe them. Why, he adored Claudia! On his school holidays, he would come to visit and the three of us would go out riding together.” She smiled at a half-forgotten memory. “He used to give me tuppence to ride ahead so that he might be alone with her.”

  “He must have taken it hard when she married this Lord—Buckleigh, was it?”

  She nodded. “I daresay he did not know about it until well after the vows were said, for he was away at Oxford at the time. He was only a year older than she, and so was not yet old enough to support a wife, although nineteen seemed quite grown up to me at the time.” She frowned at him. “If you are subscribing to the popular theory and thinking he killed her in a fit of jealousy, let me assure you that he could not have done so! Jamie wouldn’t harm a fly!”

  “Far be it from me to argue with you, my lady, but if he has seen action on the Continent as you say, it is safe to assume that he has harmed much more than flies.”

  “Yes, but this is not at all the same thing. Why, Jamie was almost like family! I was only twelve years old, but I was so certain he and Claudia were meant to be together that I was quite annoyed with her for accepting Buckleigh’s suit. I was persuaded she should wait until Jamie came of age, and marry him instead.” She grimaced. “Then again, given my own choice of husband, perhaps she was right to ignore me.”

  “That’s put me in my place,” said Pickett with deceptive meekness.

  “John, how can you?” Julia exclaimed, trying not to laugh. “I was speaking of Frederick, and you know it!”

  “I rather hoped you were,” Pickett confessed, and gave himself up to the pleasant task of allowing her to soothe his supposedly wounded feelings.

  Still, her recollections had given him sufficient food for thought. Granted, when he had met her, Lord Fieldhurst already lay dead at her feet—but what if fate, or destiny, or a mischievous Providence had brought them together earlier? It was bad enough believing, as he had then, that he could never have her, but at least he had been spared the agony of knowing she belonged to another man. Was it possible that after two years of seeing the woman he’d hoped to marry as Lord Buckleigh’s wife, Jamie Pennington had finally cracked under the strain?

  No, Pickett thought, he could not believe it any more than Julia did. Under similar circumstances, he might have thought longingly of killing Lord Fieldhurst, especially given the fact that his lordship had made his viscountess’s life a misery. But P
ickett could not imagine any situation that would have induced him to lay violent hands upon the woman he loved.

  “John?” asked Julia, regarding him with a puzzled expression. “What are you thinking?”

  He smiled tenderly down at her. “I was just thinking that I concede Jamie’s innocence.”

  After they left the schoolroom, Julia pointed out rooms as they traversed the corridor. “That room belonged to my governess, Miss Milliken. She still lives in the village. I must take you to meet her someday. And this—” She hesitated before the door at the end of the passage. “—this is the nursery,” she said, and pushed the door open.

  It seemed like a harmless little room; certainly there was nothing in it to put that stricken expression on her face, or to make her hand tremble on the doorknob.

  “My lady?” Pickett asked softly, seeing her distress.

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing, it’s only—the cradle there—” She nodded toward the opposite wall, where a small wooden bed on rockers held pride of place, its frame elaborately carved with cherubs which, presumably, would appear to watch over any infant who lay therein. “It was commissioned by my grandparents when Mama was born, and Claudia and I each slept there in our turn. It was always understood that Claudia and Buckleigh’s child would use it someday, or mine and Fieldhurst’s.” She gave a sad little sigh. “Poor Mama.”

  Pickett suspected that it was not her mother she was thinking of. He said nothing, but put his arm about her and gave her shoulder a little squeeze.

  Her next words proved him correct. “John—” She turned within his arm to look up at him with solemn eyes. “—you know, don’t you, that there will be no children for us?”

  He knew. For himself, he considered it a small price to pay to have her for his wife, but he also knew she would not see it that way. “Have you considered that maybe it’s better that way?” he pointed out gently. “With a viscountess for a mother and a Bow Street Runner for a father, the poor child would be neither fish nor fowl.”