The Ghost and Jacob Moorhead

by Jeanne Savery

  After a moment the emaciated man looked up. “You have the lists.”

  The slave nodded. “I have dispatched men to check at each friend’s estate for her presence.”

  “Unnecessary. She will have gone to her father. It is what a woman does.”

  “You’ve forgotten that her father died. She cannot be with him, so why would she visit the estate of a dead man?”

  The lounger frowned. “Still…”

  “I will put it on the second list. The one listing less likely destinations.”

  The thin man jerked to a sitting position. “She’ll not have left the country? She cannot sail without our knowing?”

  “We’ve agents everywhere. If she shows her face in any port in the whole of the island we will be informed. And we will learn the name of the ship and the captain and his ports of call. But I do not think she will leave England. She feels safe here.”

  “Why did she even leave her home?”

  The second man shrugged. “Boredom?”

  The first frowned. “This boredom. It is something I do not understand… I do not like it when I do not understand.”

  The English word had come into their conversation in the past. That time too, it roused the master’s interest—and his anger when a satisfying definition was not forthcoming.

  “It is, I think,” said the second man who also had difficulty with the concept, “much like a child fretting for something to do, a game or perhaps merely the attention of an attendant.”

  The slave had put a great deal of time into forming that response. He didn’t want to rouse even the least emotion in his master. Especially not his anger. One never knew what orders a user of opium would give when angry. The slave held his breath during the following silence but relaxed when his master nodded, accepting the notion.

  “I have,” the slave began more than a trifle hesitantly, “never understood why we do not merely kill her. Be done with it. Go home where we belong.” He missed the climate, the food he knew, particularly the fruit and, most of all—although no one knew of their existence and he could visit them only very occasionally and only briefly—he missed his little family… “Would you not like to go home?”

  The thin man ignored that last question, answering only the first. “Our king has given orders. You needn’t understand. You merely obey.”

  The cold voice sent a shudder up the slave’s spine and he bowed his head. “Many apologies spill from this inadequate mouth,” he said in their native tongue.

  “So they should. Bring an ember from the fire. Put it on the water pipe. I would smoke…”

  The slave shuddered again, this time at the thought of what the opium did to one who abused it as his master did—but he nevertheless obeyed with alacrity. Any other reaction would have led to a beating, or worse.

  But worst of all, his whole dependence was on his master. What, he wondered, will I do if he dies? He thought about that and, with more than a touch of despair, changed the phrasing. When he dies? What will become of me?

  * * * * *

  Jacob stepped over the low sill of the salon’s tall window and onto the terrace. Beyond it, in the rose garden, Verity cut long stems and laid them into a shallow basket. He joined her. “I’ll hold the basket for you if you’ll allow it,” he said softly.

  Softly, yes, but unexpectedly, and she straightened, swinging around, the shears held at a dangerous angle.

  His brows climbed up his forehead, his astonishment at her reaction unhidden.

  Verity blushed and turned away. “Where I grew up an unexpected male voice could mean… Oh, the devil. Never mind.”

  “Your parents must have been very lax to have allowed you to be in any situation in which you’d have been accosted in the manner to which you did not quite refer.” He removed the basket from her hand.

  “My parents…” Verity straightened, the shears in one hand and the rose she’d just cut in the other.

  She stared off over the top of the bush into some memory Jacob wished he could coax her to reveal. “What is it, love?” he asked gently.

  “Yes. Love,” she said, misinterpreting his endearment for a question. “My parents were so deeply, wondrously, in love, even after all those years, they’d little time for anyone else. Not even their children. We reared ourselves, I suppose you’d say, making our own rules.”

  “No governess? No servants to watch over you?”

  She shrugged. “A governess, yes. And we learned from her.” She laid the rose in the basket and bent to cut another. “When she was sober,” she added softly.

  “Poor dear,” he murmured.

  “Do not think it,” she said, a tinge of frost in her voice. She continued in a more reminiscent tone. “Our governess wasn’t so…bad when we were young. We learned. A lot. It was only as we got older she…”

  “She became more lax about seeing to you when she felt the need for a nip or two?”

  Verity hid a grin. “That is one way to put it. But by then we were old enough to explore. The place in which we lived, a large village on the shores of Lake Como, you know, was safe enough, but strangers often passed through on their way to villas to the north or south to Milano. Everyone who lived there knew us, protected us and most of them indulged us.” She smiled at a happy memory. “Ah, the food I’ve eaten!”

  “Peasant food?”

  “The very best in all the world,” she said, nodding. “Plain, yes, but fresh and prepared with love and herbs.” She shrugged and moved on to another bush, inspected one or two blossoms and moved to still another.

  He followed. “Did you by chance learn from these wonderful cooks?”

  She grinned. “I could prepare you a truly excellent meal if only I could find the ingredients.”

  “Would that be so difficult?”

  She nodded. “Everything is…different here.”

  “So you ran wild?”

  “I suppose high sticklers would say so.” She smiled a secret smile.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Of the time I managed to stow away in the carter’s cart to Milano. I stayed a full week before going home again.”

  “Good heavens. How old were you?”

  “Hm? Oh, thirteen, I think. Fourteen? Perhaps.”

  He straightened. “And how did you, a young girl, live for a week in Milan at the age of thirteen?”

  “Quite easily, actually. My governess had talked of her brother the priest. Often. I went to him, explained I felt it necessary to tell him of his sister’s bad health and could he find a place for me to stay until the carter returned to our village in a week’s time. He was appalled by the whole, his sister, me, the carter—but he put me in the care of an indulgent nun who took me all over Milano to see the sights, including a night at the opera which I’ll never forget, and then she saw me into the care of the carter for the return home.”

  “Intrepid of you. What if the priest had been another sort? What if he’d not cared a jot for his sister and had left you to your own devices?”

  “It didn’t happen.”

  “That is all you can say? Can you not see how foolish you were?”

  “I’d hoped something could be done for Miletta,” she said, her mouth set in a stubborn line.

  “And was it?”

  She paused in her work and again looked off into her memories.

  “Was something done?” he repeated.

  “No,” she said softly. “Except the brother promised to say prayers for her.” Verity sighed. “Not exactly what I’d hoped but then I hadn’t realized a priest had less freedom than I did, really. And less money. I suppose I was a trifle naïve.”

  “Naïve to the point of idiocy, I’d say. Do you realize that there are brothels that specialize in young girls? Do you realize there are women, madams they are called, on the lookout for such girls? Do you have the least notion what could have happened to you?”

  Verity turned and stared at him. “You are angry. Why?”

  He g
rowled. “You would drive a saint to anger.”

  “Why? I am nothing to you, so why?”

  He opened his mouth to retort…and closed it. “I don’t know,” he said with a frown. “I don’t know why I’m angry. Obviously nothing happened to you. You are here and were not harmed by your adventure…” His look sharpened. “Were you?”

  “Not at all. It went so smoothly it led to more.” Her lids lowered over her eyes and she silently challenged him to object or scold or even to ask questions. “That nun and I got to know each other very well.” For another long moment they eyed each other. She waited but still he said nothing and, shrugging, she took the basket from him. “I’ve vases to fill. These roses are the last flowers I’ll need. Good day, Mr. Moorhead.” She brushed by him and headed for the back of the house and a door that, going down a few steps, led into a workroom where flowers were arranged for the house.

  She glanced around when the sun, spilling in the open door, dimmed. She frowned. “Oh, go away. I do ever-so much better if not distracted.” She hunched a shoulder at him and reached for the first vase. A moment later it was taken from her hand, set down and she was swung around. She glared at him.

  “If I ever hear of you pulling another such stunt I will lock you in a room at the top of the house, feed you on bread and water and not let you go until you promise you’ll never ever again frighten your aunt, as you would do, by going off on some dangerous adventure.”

  She tipped her head. “I think you mean that.”

  “Try me.”

  One of Verity’s brows arched. “I will never knowingly do anything to frighten my aunt. Surely that is obvious.”

  “But you didn’t mind frightening your parents?”

  The other brow arched as well. “My parents. But I have told you. They paid us no attention. I doubt they ever knew I was gone.”

  “Your sister? Your governess? No one told them?”

  “Well, you see,” she said gently, “we all knew they’d not hear anything they didn’t wish to hear, so why bother?”

  “They’d not care their daughter was off doing heaven only knew what or where?”

  “No.”

  “Were they so totally irresponsible?”

  “No, of course not. We were fed, housed, clothed and, in our odd fashion, educated.”

  He swallowed and his gaze softened. “I pit—”

  Her hand covered his mouth. “Do not dare to pity me. I enjoyed my life a great deal…until their deaths. Excepting our few visits here, of course.” Her mouth distorted, briefly, into a moue.

  He frowned. “I loved my granduncle.”

  “I did not.”

  “Why?”

  She gave him a look that said it should be obvious. When he continued to wait for her response she sighed. “Because,” she said, “he never accepted my mother.”

  “A mother who didn’t behave much as a mother should?”

  “A mother who loved a father to the point the rest of the world didn’t exist,” said Verity softly. “A love so remarkably unselfish she could give up all she knew for him, follow him to the ends of the earth. And he felt the same for her.”

  After a moment, Jacob sighed. “You wish for the same sort of love.”

  “I do. I’ll not wed without it.”

  “You’d become a spinster in this society? You haven’t a notion of what you’d suffer.”

  She grinned a lopsided grin. “Oh, not here. There are many families in Italy in need of an English governess. Wealthy Milanese, for instance, where I know the city, know the life, know who would pay exceedingly well for such as I to come to them and teach their daughters English and the ways of an English maiden.”

  “And could you?” There was a bite to that.

  “Teach them English propriety, you mean? Of course.” Her voice turned dry. “And enough logic, to say nothing of a dollop of cynicism, so the young ladies would not grow up seeing the world through rosy-colored spectacles. I would make them competent to weed the false from the true.”

  “Cynic.”

  “I am, of course. Are not you?”

  He grinned a quickly suppressed grin. “A bit of one, I suppose. It is proper to the male of the species but not, of course, to the female.”

  “That sort of hypocrisy is why I’d teach my charges to see and understand what is rather than what should be.”

  He laughed, backed away and bowed. “Your point, I think.” Then he paused. “May I have that lovely pale pink rose?”

  “Why?”

  “I wish to take it to Jenna-mine of course.”

  She eyed him. “Why?”

  “Because I like her?”

  Verity reached for not only the pink rose but a white one as well and then some greenery. With a deft twist, a cut, a bow…suddenly she held a sweet little posy. She looked up at him. “Because I like her too,” she said and handed it to him.

  She didn’t see the warmth that grew in his eyes as he looked at the back she turned on him. Nor the softening of his expression. Or the odd little double nod of his head as if he’d finally accepted something he’d not yet understood—or not wished to understand.

  But she heard him depart by way of the house and almost, but not quite, wished he’d not gone.

  * * * * *

  “Nowhere. She can’t be nowhere.”

  The voice had risen with each word and was shrill enough at the last to hurt the slave’s ears. He winced—then hoped his master had not noticed. Not that the man noticed much of anything these days. “She isn’t where we’ve looked so far. I have handed out the second list. That will be checked in less than a week.”

  “We have lost her. She is nowhere. Nowhere.” The emaciated opium-eater bent his head into his hands and rocked from one side to the other, repeating the word over and over as he did so.

  “We will find her.”

  “She is nowhere. Oh me, oh my. I am lost. Lost. He will have my head. He will cut off my fingers one by one. He will—” A sob launched another series of the litany. “Nowhere. She is nowhere…”

  The slave backed from the room, moving slowly, carefully, silently. It didn’t do to attract attention. Not these days. Not when the master was somnolent under the influence of the drug or, if not drowsing in a drugged dream, then too easily irritated and irrational with it.

  The slave frowned, staring through the narrowing crack of the door he closed as carefully and slowly as he could manage.

  “Nowhere…nowhere…”

  He shook his head. It couldn’t be much longer before death claimed his master. Then what? What could he do? What should he do? Worry fretted him as he returned to the tiny room he used as an office and stared around it. There was no heat and it was cold.

  He shuddered. “Will I never be warm again? I want to go home,” he said softly, sadly.

  Chapter Seven

  Verity looked up. She felt a sudden warmth welling up inside her at the sight of Jacob standing in the doorway and—automatically denying it was caused by his unexpected appearance—she frowned. “What do you want?”

  “You have worked long enough. Cousin Mary wishes you to join her in a nuncheon.”

  “I’ve work to do.”

  “There is nothing you have to do. Or there are others who will do it if you tell them what is to be done. Besides, isn’t there an under-housekeeper whose duty it is to see to things if the housekeeper is incapacitated? Allow the woman to do her job.”

  “She cannot deal with the accounts. Not if you want them to balance. And that must be done if you do not want chaos. Nor can she deal with servant problems. She knows the work and she can tell the maids what to do and when, but any sort of crisis and she is lost. And why do I bother to explain?”

  “You are cross. One becomes cross when hungry. Come to the small dining room and keep your aunt company. She has things she wishes to discuss with you.” He held open the door and, after another moment’s hesitation, Verity threw down her pen. Ink spattered over the page and, q
uietly, she cursed.

  Jacob chuckled. “You truly did receive a rather interesting education, did you not?” he asked, referring to what she’d told him a few days previously in the rose garden. “I doubt very much your mother, or even your father, would approve that vocabulary if they could know of it.”

  Verity closed her mouth into a tight line. She glared at Jacob as she rose from her chair and rounded the end of the huge desk her aunt had had brought into her office next to the housekeeper’s rooms. “My education is not your business.”

  “No. But I like it that you’ve had a rather eclectic upbringing. You are not boring. Ever.”

  “It is not,” she said, “my purpose to entertain you.” At some level, she knew she lied and that knowledge made Verity still angrier. She hadn’t a notion why she should find this particular man, of all men, far more attractive than any other. That she did irked her. She’d no business wishing for his company, his conversation, his… Verity felt a blush rising up her chest and into her neck and blessed the fact she’d put on a dress that morning with a high collar and a ruffle of lace that framed her face. With any luck he’d not notice her blush…and, noticing, wonder why…

  “Come,” he said, offering his arm.

  Reluctantly, Verity laid the tips of her fingers on his wrist and walked beside him down the hall. Soon they approached the room where the family dined. She could think of nothing to say and the silence seemed overly loud to her. She glanced up and instantly faced forward. He was looking down at her, smiling at her, a look in his eyes she couldn’t interpret. It wasn’t the sort of look she’d occasionally seen in a man’s eyes. She wasn’t pretty enough or properly womanly enough to rouse lust in many men, but the occasional male had looked at her in a hot knowing way she disliked intensely—and that sort of heat wasn’t what she’d seen in that moment’s clash of glances.

  She’d seen warmth—a warmth she didn’t understand. A warmth that must mean something. Verity told herself she didn’t wish to know what. But knowing she lied to herself, she dropped her hand to her side and stepped forward at a slightly faster pace.