The Ghost and Miss Demure

by Melanie Jackson

  They took a seat on a stone bench held aloft by two pairs of scantily clad nymphs that looked to Karo like a quartet of cross-dressing Mr. Universes doing the clean and jerk. While the ugly cherubs were far too muscular for modern taste, all that concerned Karo was that they were quite capable of supporting the combined weight of any four humans on their fat ankles and bulky arms.

  She inhaled deeply of the perfumed air. It was as potent and intoxicating as modeler’s glue. There were roses still blooming in the dappled shade. Autumn Damasks, the shrub roses of ancient Rome. Rosa Gallica, emblem of the Persians some three thousand years before. Moss roses from China, their thick pink blossoms drenched in scent. Albas, Bourbons, Musks, Rugosas, and arching sprays of the red ramblers that had attached themselves to the south side of the house.

  “I’m glad they didn’t spoil it,” Karo said softly, so as to not disturb several nearby droning bees.

  Tristam’s arm settled casually around her waist. It was the first touch he had allowed himself since that morning. “It is a bit like the Secret Garden isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Or some other fairy tale.” Despite her best intentions, she allowed her head to rest lightly against Tristam’s dusty shoulder. Her eyes closed. Her tired brain went to lunch.

  “Better, I think.” His neck bent, and his soft lips brushed over her mouth. “Sweet.”

  “Vanilla,” she agreed before returning his delicate kiss.

  It was their first real kiss, and everything felt exactly right to Karo. Her ambivalence faded. The arms that had been so rough the night before, dream or not, were now as gentle as the afternoon sun. They coaxed her closer, and his mouth continued its light, magical seduction.

  Tristam’s golden hair felt like silk beneath her fingers, and he was warmer than the late afternoon light reflecting off the marble bench. The knot of tension that had been clenched tight against the memory of their dream released its clutch and Karo relaxed completely into his embrace; the rich scent of vanilla and rose musk overcame any objection her brain might have raised.

  There was a soft breeze that followed Tristam’s fingertips as they walked the length of her arms with a butterfly touch. Karo shivered and moved deeper into his arms. Her own hands stayed buried in his golden hair as she returned his kisses with growing fervor.

  Heat was blossoming inside of her, a slow unfolding of red desire that was new and yet strangely familiar. It made her skin prickle. She wanted to put her hands inside his shirt and touch his golden flesh, which flexed beneath her fingers. She wanted to press an open mouth against the pulse in his throat and taste his skin as she had the night before. She wanted to…

  He stopped. Slowly he pulled away from her lips. Only an inch of space separated them, yet Karo felt like her skin had been peeled back, leaving her body naked and chilled in the failing light. The lovely heat that had flooded her body folded back in on itself and disappeared with an inaudible whimper. She moaned in soft protest and leaned forward. Tristam’s arms tightened briefly in comfort but again he set her away from him.

  “Why?” she asked, shivering.

  “It’s getting late, and the mosquitoes are out.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You would in the morning.” Tristam stood and helped her to her feet. “Anyway, it’s for the best that we stop this now.”

  “It is? I don’t think it is,” she grumbled.

  Tristam put his arm around her and guided their steps toward the house. Karo resisted the urge to sneak a hand under his shirt and play with the downy hair covering the small of his back, but it was hard to do so—much harder than she liked to admit.

  “No? Well, perhaps I am thinking more clearly than you. There are two very good reasons for being sensible.”

  “I can’t think of a one.”

  He chuckled. “That is indeed flattery.”

  “If you turn into a typical male pig I’ll belt you,” Karo warned.

  “I believe you, love, and I wouldn’t dream of being a typical male anything. For that reason, I am going to respect your wish about an on-the-job romance for a while longer.”

  “You are?” Karo could hear the dismay in her voice and made an effort to pull herself out the sensual miasma that had coated her brain. Was all this heat from arousal, or was there another cause? She was distressed to find that she couldn’t tell. She just knew she was acting different than usual.

  “Yes,” he admitted unhappily. “Much as I’ll suffer for it.”

  Karo sighed and mentally chided herself. It wasn’t fair to make Tristam be the sole guardian of her rules. Still…“Well! What a time to decide to do things my way. Why weren’t you this agreeable about my suggestions about the Limoges?” she demanded as they started walking and her higher brain functions returned.

  That struck just the right chord and made them both laugh.

  As soon as the house was in sight, Tristam dropped his arm from her shoulders. He scanned the windows, as though expecting to find someone watching them.

  “Respect of my request—is that the only reason for this newfound nobility?” she asked. She had her own suspicions about his sudden reluctance to make love and could understand them. Telling Tristam over the course of the morning about Vellacourt’s several appearances since her arrival had made the incidents sound appalling, and now that the specter had taken an interest in their love life…

  “No,” he admitted, proving her correct. “It’s that damned ghoul.”

  “Ghost,” she corrected. “Let’s not make him any worse than he is.”

  “He’s a bloody albatross. I can practically feel him peeking through the bushes and licking his chops.”

  Karo knew what he meant. She felt the ghost’s presence far more keenly than she imagined Tristam did. The only difference was, while Tristam was kissing her, she’d been far too wrapped up in the moment to know if her feelings were pure lust or some manifestation of Hugh and his will. Tristam had obviously been less distracted by the experience.

  She tried not to scowl at the unwelcome thought. When a man kissed her, she preferred to be the only thing on his mind.

  “In fact…” Tristam continued, making a sudden hard right. His right arm flew out to tug her along in his wake, pulling her like a string at the end of a high-performance kite.

  “Where are we going?” Karo asked, but it was a pointless question. She could guess where they were headed. The only thing at this end of the property was the family graveyard. There was a slave’s cemetery somewhere else, but it had boasted only wooden crosses that had rotted away, and now the location was forgotten.

  “To find the old reprobate’s mausoleum,” Tristam answered. “I want to leave some garlic on his tomb.”

  “Hawthorne,” she corrected him again. “Garlic is for vampires.”

  Tristam thrust open the iron gate that separated the living and the dead. It should have squealed but the Campions had been busy in there as well. The old stones and Gothic temples no longer looked eerie now that the creepers had been shorn back and the headstones pushed straight. Things looked better, but there was yet some proof that weeds had been at work for decades, pushing their way into every crack in every headstone and marker. Karo chose not to dwell on the fact that plants in the cemetery were better fed than the rest of the garden—except in one corner.

  “Where is he?” Tristam growled, prowling among the stones.

  Karo called his name worriedly, looking about for snakes and spiders before following. “You aren’t really thinking of doing anything, are you? I mean, we can’t go around desecrating graves or anything like that.”

  “Who said anything about desecration? I just want to give the pervert a taste of his own medicine. Maybe it’ll teach him some respect if we take a peek at his naked bones. Maybe I’ll take them hostage as an assurance of good behavior.”

  “Don’t say that!” she pleaded, hurrying after him. “That’s a horrible thought.”

  “Well, at the very least I want to see that
he actually has some bones to peek at. That’s the main cause of classical hauntings, don’t you know. Missing bones.”

  “You have a point, I suppose,” she conceded unhappily. His explanation felt correct on a visceral level. “But let’s not do anything drastic. We don’t want to piss him off.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Tristam retorted. “But maybe he wants his bones back. We could be doing him a favor. There’s Valperga.” Her employer pointed. “What a hideous angel! It looks just like the pilaster on the second floor. Is it crying because it’s stuck on her grave until kingdom come?”

  Karo stared at the ill-favored cherub. It did bare a strong resemblance to the gargoyles clinging to the parapets of Notre Dame, only not so noble of brow. She remarked, “Bad taste should be carried to the grave but no further. I wouldn’t want that squatting on my grave for all eternity.”

  They walked on slowly. They were running out of possible sites where Hugh’s remains could be resting, and Karo found herself growing every bit as anxious as Tristam to find Vellacourt’s tomb and make sure his bones were where they ought to be. The thought of Hugh’s remains going astray made her uncomfortable.

  They reached the end of the wrought-iron enclosure and a grim-faced Tristam slowly turned her way. He pointed to a heap of white rubble that had collapsed in an untidy pile. There was a great deal of it, enough to build a wall. Or a mausoleum. And nothing grew there. It was as though the earth had been sewn with salt. It did not cheer Karo to find that the ground around it was laced with cypress roots and rocks and was obviously unseeded by any subterranean graves: Hugh had been buried aboveground.

  “He’s not here. Maybe his marker was here…”

  “No. There isn’t so much as a trace of a name on this stone.” Tristam added to himself, “This has to be it, though. Why isn’t he here anymore? This is where they buried him, I’m certain. Where else could he be?”

  “Maybe the grave was moved when the mausoleum collapsed. It was over three hundred years old.”

  “This is most irregular, though. I have no notes of his being moved from his mausoleum—or of its collapse. Some mention should be made in some document.”

  “Uh-oh. It kind of looks like lightning hit the grave.” Karo stared at the pile of shattered stone and felt the small hairs on the back of her neck rising. She had seen similar scorch marks on the road after the lightning strike. She spun around and began reviewing headstones. “Where’s Eustacie’s grave? Shouldn’t she be here, too?”

  “Eustacie La Belle?”

  “Maybe that’s what Hugh wants,” Karo continued. “Eustacie. Remember that story of the lovers’ graves parted by the mother-in-law tree? Maybe they only moved his bones.”

  The two of them stared at each other. It was a famous ghost story of the Tidewater region. According to it, parted lovers could sometimes lead to hauntings.

  “I don’t have any records of her being buried here. She was a lot younger than Vellacourt. She might have married after he was gone.”

  “But he’d have wanted her here, wouldn’t he? In spite of some mere husband or his own children’s objections. He would have made arrangements for her burial.”

  “Would Valperga have respected them? I confess to skepticism,” Tristam pointed out.

  “She’s isn’t here. Tristam, I’ve been having a—”

  “Maybe she’s in the slave cemetery. Frankly, I’m a lot more worried about Hugh’s remains. If he has gone missing…This is Valperga’s doing, I’ll bet. She really hated the old man. She’d have gladly booted them both out of the family crypt.”

  “And separated them.”

  “And maybe knocked the whole thing down.” Tristam kicked at a white stone. It didn’t budge. The fallen blocks were too heavy to move casually. No, Valperga couldn’t have done this. Only a tornado or a tractor could have. Or maybe repeated lightning strikes, if they were very, very powerful. Could Hugh, in the midst of a temper tantrum, have done it himself?

  “Not to sound melodramatic, but do you suppose she had the slaves rebury him at a crossroads or dump him in unhallowed ground?” Karo shivered with sudden cold.

  “Very likely. That or quicklime. Damn and blast! Now what the devil are we going to do? If we can’t find his bones, we’ll never be rid of him!”

  “No,” Karo agreed. “And I wouldn’t count on Hugh being so obliging as to show us where he’s buried. I think he’s quite happy as he is and not anxious to see the hereafter.”

  “We’ll just see about that. There are ways to compel spirits to talk…” Tristam’s jaw thrust out belligerently. “Come on. Back to the library. We are going to take that room apart. I want to know exactly what the old bat was up to. There must be rec ords somewhere.”

  “The Malleus Maleficarum,” Karo reminded him. “We haven’t found that yet, and I bet you it’s at fault one way or another. It probably gave Valperga the idea of moving him. It might be key to figuring this whole thing out. In fact, I’ve heard of spirits being bound to objects rather than houses. Maybe she decided to try her hand at magic.”

  “I suspect you are correct. There must be a clause in the will about keeping the book here at Belle Ange—perpetual torture. I should have seen it before. There has to be a good reason why Clarice won’t let that book out of the house if we find it. She’s usually as avaricious and unsentimental as I am. If she could, she’d sell it in a minute.”

  “I notice that she doesn’t live here. Did she ever? Do you think she knows about him?” A locust began to chirp. Other night sounds were beginning, too.

  He paused, thinking. “I’m certain she does. But it’s nice to think that we might be able to escape the old ghoul by moving to Florida.”

  “Would she conspire to do something so cruel, keep a spirit from its rest?”

  “Maybe,” he mused. “Clarice likes money. If it was a condition of inheritance, sure, she might very well go along with it. And she might not know that there’s anything she could do to lay a ghost. It isn’t a normal kind of pest control problem.”

  Tristam’s words were reasonable, but Karo was suddenly pretty sure that she didn’t like Clarice Vellacourt. “Maybe the Maleficarum is the only thing holding Hugh to this part of the world. Maybe the book has to stay or he escapes.” Karo was appalled at the suppositions that were popping into her brain—and what it meant if she were right and someone removed the tome. The vision of eternal pursuit by a bored Hugh Vella-court was all too easy to imagine.

  Tristam seemed to feel the same. “Hell and damnation, you’ve got the pitch. Without it he might be able travel without let or hindrance. Irish banshees certainly do, at least in repute. They can supposedly even visit the New World by traveling over the land bridge.”

  Karo had a sudden thought. “I wonder if we’re misjudging Valperga. Maybe it was some kind of affection that made her keep him around. They were family after all.” Karo slapped at a mosquito. They were growing in number as the light died.

  “If it was her idea,” Tristam said, as he again took her arm, “I think we can count on it being something else entirely than affection. Self-defense. Revenge, even. I can just see her chortling over a gory plan to imprison Vellacourt at Belle Ange for all eternity. She’s probably still laughing somewhere in the beyond.”

  “Maybe. I just wish I knew if Hugh has a plan of his own.”

  “What?”

  “A plan. For us. For himself.”

  “Can ghosts have plans?” Tristam looked appalled but Karo didn’t notice. She was busy taking a long look around the wooded estate and remembered the way she had felt on the day of her arrival. There had been a great deal of anticipation in the air before the lightning strike, and a feeling of guidance, of being lured. Had she been enticed from her car for a specific reason? Hugh said he wanted to talk to her, but why? “I just wonder who’s really having the last laugh here,” Karo added softly. “Valperga might have thought chaining a spirit was punishment, but I don’t think Hugh minds. Maybe, if she didn’t
do it out of affection…I wonder if he manipulated her into doing it.”

  “I’m going to pray to every god in every pantheon that you are wrong. If he’s that clever, we’re in terrible trouble.”

  Chapter Nine

  We shall die in darkness and be buried in the rain.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay from

  “Justice Denied in Massachusetts”

  “We must find that book, and the only place we haven’t looked is the basement,” Tristam said as Karo set the grocery bag on the counter. In need of comfort, she had borrowed his car and immediately gone to the local market. It was small by most grocer standards, but they stocked all the legal perversions. Karo had returned with wine, donuts and potato chips.

  “But…” She glanced at the window. The light was nearly gone. Her reasons for not wanting to search for the book at night would sound silly, given that Hugh had manifested more often during the day, but she was very reluctant to attempt anything once the sun was down. The dream had been one heck of a big manifestation.

  “No, we won’t do it tonight,” Tristam assured her, sensing her fear. “The basement goes on forever and it hasn’t much in the way of light. The Campions have been setting up some outdoor lights along the driveway. We’ll get them to run something external down into the basement.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to gloss over all of the reasons,” Karo said unhappily, thinking of the outside world’s response to Hugh.

  “Gloss? Not even marine varnish would make this look shiny. No, this is something we keep to ourselves to our dying day. Every bloody bit of it. We’ll just tell the Campions that we’re looking for old wine bottles or something. They are fairly incurious as a rule.”