The Ghost and Miss Demure

by Melanie Jackson

  Lost in her reverie, Karo paused just inside the kitchen door. ’Stein checked her pulse and then began to revive her by licking her ankles. The cat’s tongue was rough enough to finally rouse her to reluctant action.

  Chapter Eleven

  One need not be a chamber to be haunted,

  One need not be a house;

  The brain has corridors surpassing

  Material place.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Tristam found her later that afternoon, weight-lifting her way to fashionable thinness in the stuffy atmosphere of the library. Karo was almost finished shelving the classics, D through H. She had a fondness for Restoration era poets, and for some Victorian novelists, but she had never acquired a taste for Defoe or Hawthorne. It seemed on par for the day that there would be lots of both to be shelved.

  She had warning of his approach, first by the heaviness of his tread—it was more of a stomp, really—and then, secondarily, by the manner in which he opened the dwarf door with unnecessary force and allowed it to bang against the wall. If there was any doubt lingering in her mind about Tristam’s mood, it vanished when he closed the door with equal strength and failed to make a cheery salutation.

  Karo gave him a brief glance as he leaned his long, lean frame against the nearby wall and stared at her with what he imagined to be enigmatic eyes. The doorway was the classic place for such a pose, but it was far too short for him. He was stuck with the dusty wall.

  No, Karo wasn’t fooled by the cool expression. She had come to know him well during the last few weeks. He might be trying for lordly calm, but Tristam was annoyed enough to rip the pockets out of his slacks with his balled fists.

  “Did you have a nice, private chin-wag?” she asked.

  “We did. It was quite tactful of you to give us time alone,” he replied, unclenching his jaw.

  Karo turned her back on him and stuffed one of the last Defoes back on its shelf with an unintentionally brusque hand. She didn’t trust herself to answer equally politely.

  “Half an hour would have sufficed, though,” he continued. “There was no need to abandon me to the hydra for the entire morning.”

  “Really? I couldn’t tell. If you wanted me, you could have said something.” Karo paused to see if she could hear his teeth grind. Maybe this would lead him to reconsider his thoughts on dental insurance.

  “I might have…if I could have found you. You weren’t here earlier. I looked. Several times,” he said pointedly.

  “No. I was in the garret, shelving some of the books we decided against displaying to the public.” She brushed her sleeve, cleaning some imaginary dust. “You’ll be relieved to hear that Hugh was nowhere around. I think the funeral worked. Oh, and I found another Valperga masterpiece. It’s by the fireplace. In fact, it was only by a supreme act of will that I didn’t put the painting in it.”

  “I was in your room just now,” Tristam went on, ignoring her alternative conversational offering.

  “Hm?” That seemed safer than any other reply that came to mind.

  “I notice that you’ve wasted no time in packing.”

  “I’m trying to plan ahead these days,” she answered, making an effort not to quail at the arctic drop in temperature that followed her glib words. Part of her could not believe that they were actually having this fight. It was so stupid. But the part of her that had been hurt before was in no mood to be reasonable or forgiving.

  “Aren’t you rather hasty to race to a conclusion? And a wrong one, I might add.”

  “Am I?” she asked. She began rearranging books on the desk. Her heart was thudding.

  “You know, I truly prefer when you show some rudiments of intelligence,” he growled nastily. “I’ve had quite enough of stupid women for one afternoon. I would take it as a great personal favor if you controlled your paranoia for the remainder of the day. And you can go unpack your bloody bags while you’re at it.”

  She heard Tristam push himself away from the wall and start in her direction. Turning quickly, she pointed a finger at the middle of his oncoming chest but it didn’t seem to do any good.

  “You can just stop right there,” she snapped. “Don’t lay a hand or lip on me. I want to talk.”

  “Talk? Talk is for reasonable people. You want to run away, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you.”

  He was right, so Karo picked up a second volume of collected Defoe and heaved it at his head. Tristam dodged it easily and kept advancing.

  “I’d been having an emotional red letter day, in spite of Clarice’s interruption. Until about five minutes ago.” He added furiously, “How dare you lump me in with every other weak mind you’ve ever met! Let me warn you now that in future I will expect a little more faith from the woman I love. And I do love you. Someday I will even tell you why.” He reached for her with quick hands, and Karo found herself blinking up at him as he hauled her close enough for them to touch noses.

  “You might have mentioned that you loved me this morning,” she said with reproach, pulling back a more comfortable six inches that let her eyes focus on his face without crossing. “You babbled on about everything else under the sun. Why not tell me what you were feeling?”

  “I might have thrown out a trite phrase or two, if I could have thought of something sufficiently poetic, but it just didn’t seem the sort of thing to blurt out for the first time with Clarice pounding on the door and you looking like you’d seen a gho—”

  Tristam clamped down on the forbidden word and rolled his eyes heavenward. Karo wondered if he was beseeching the Lord for patience or having some sort of fit.

  He continued speaking. “I should have guessed that you’d be indulging in an orgy of self-flagellation for giving in and making us both happy, and busily leaping to all the wrong conclusions. Maugham was right! Give a woman an opportunity and she’ll martyr herself. Where would we be if I was so self-indulgent?” he demanded indignantly of the room at large and then grabbed her by the wrists and forced her against the wall where he gave a fair performance of a pirate ravaging a maiden. Unwilling to be completely dominated, she pushed him backward until he encountered the desk and sat abruptly. He let her wild kiss rock them back onto the piles of paper, scattering them on the floor. He pretended to be overpowered.

  He was a bigger drama queen than she was! Karo felt her lips twitch against his as she fought unsuccessfully to hold back a smile. She finally gave up and laughed. “You know something? I really hate you when you’re right.”

  “Oh? And what about the rest of the time?” he asked, beginning to relax as his better nature reasserted itself. His hands went from shoulders to waist and began to caress her.

  “I don’t think I should tell you.” Karo buried her face in his shirt and inhaled deeply. “You’re already far too cocky.”

  “Now isn’t the time to be reticent,” he informed her with a small shake and then sat up. He was careful not to spill her onto the floor as they regained their feet. “I’m feeling fragile. I need an immediate declaration of intent from you—and if it’s not the right one, I’m going to drag you up to the garret and find a pair of Hugh’s handcuffs.”

  “You, fragile? That’ll be the day. I know rhinos that don’t have hides as thick as yours.”

  “You wound me!” Tristam dropped to his knees and clasped his hands to his chest. “My heart bleeds from your cruel barbs. My life is shattered. You are la belle dame sans merci—”

  “Okay. Enough with the theatrics. You look ridiculous.” But Karo had to take a deep breath before she could say the words he wanted. Fortunately, a lungful of vanilla pheromones helped steady her nerves long enough to do so. “I love you, too, Tristam. I…I have for quite a while now. Maybe even from the very beginning, and against my better judgment.”

  “Good. It’s a relief to have that settled.” His wringing hands unclasped themselves. He rose to his feet and dusted off his knees with a grimace of distaste. He was himself again.

  “The cleanup crew com
es tomorrow,” she consoled him.

  “That will be extremely pleasant. I have grown quite weary of living in decades of squalor. In the meanwhile, come away with me while I set some things to right now that we are alone again.”

  “The hydra’s left?”

  “Yes, thank all the gods.”

  She was curious. “Okay. What did you have in mind?”

  “Let’s go fetch a blanket,” he said, abandoning his poetic fancy in favor of plain English. “The Campions are gone for the day. It’s too early for mosquitoes, and I’ve been having a fantasy about you and the rose garden.”

  Karo laughed. “I guess great minds think alike. I’ve been fantasizing about the garden, too.”

  “What are you doing in the library?” Tristam asked, finally picking up Valperga’s painting. He grimaced and then quoted from Richard III: “ ‘I’ve lately had two spiders/crawling upon my startled hopes—/Now though thy friendly hand has brushed ’em from me,/Yet still they crawl offensive to mine eyes:/I would have some kind friend to tread upon ’em.’ ”

  “Oh, dusting, looking.” Sulking, but she would never admit it.

  “Looking for what?”

  “A satanic contract signed in blood,” she muttered. Then, at Tristam’s horrified look she added: “I’m kidding. I was just enjoying being around the books.”

  “Don’t kid,” he said and then kissed her. He put the painting down and muttered, “Horrid woman. Fearing God can have a revolting effect on some people.”

  “Not fearing God can do the same.”

  “So what did Clarice really want?” Karo asked a while later, as they strolled hand in hand in the direction of a cascading Himalayan rose bush that still had enough blooms to make a bower. Tristam carried a quilt on his other arm, and she simply had a bottle of sweet Zinfandel in her right hand. Tristam had said that they were going to reenact some of The Rubiayat of Omar Kayam, and in the spirit of the passages about “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou” Karo didn’t think that their particular jug of wine required any fancy stemware.

  “Nothing,” he said in disgust. “She was just fishing for details about our ghost. She didn’t come out and ask if we’d been having any particular trouble, just made vague references to unpleasant atmospheres and colorful histories and so on.”

  “So, did you give her a prize for her trouble?”

  “I made not so much as a nibble. I am quite vexed with her. Not only did she fail to warn me about the old Peeping Tom, she quite ruined the best morning of my life.”

  “Well, live and let live.” Karo was prepared to forgive Clarice now that the woman was on her way back to Florida. After the way Tristam made it up to her, she quite believed there was nothing between them—and never would be. “You can’t blame her for holding out about the family haunt. I mean, who would believe her if she came clean? They’d just think she was another Vellacourt loony tunes. There have obviously been others. No one has lived here for years. Decades, right?”

  Tristam nodded. “I suppose you have a point. I just haven’t achieved sufficient distance that I can be magnanimous about the situation.”

  “I’ll forgive for you. You can owe me.” She smiled. “I just wish we’d found out where Eustacie was buried. I still think it would have been nice to put the old guy and his lover together.” Karo was a bit embarrassed, because she knew she sounded wistful, but she was a bit grateful to her time here: she had found her beloved, and had opened herself up to better things. Old Vellacourt deserved some credit for that.

  Tristam’s reply didn’t help her self-consciousness. “Why? That has to be one of romance’s more idiotic themes: Let us die together and be buried in a single grave!”

  “You don’t want to be buried with me?” she demanded.

  “Oh, certainly!” he sneered. “I’ll prepare the ancestral tomb at once. You don’t mind being shipped to England, do you? I’m afraid that’s the only vault I own. Of course, it is rather roomy by American standards—and immediately available.”

  Karo pretended to glare. “I don’t know why I love you. You have no poetry in your soul. You don’t even like the Limoges.”

  “Here we are, man and woman, clasped in the bosom of a sensual Eden, but if you start in about that damned china, I’m leaving! What are the oddest fantasies you have, anyway? They must be kinkier than anything Hugh dreamed up—and anything you and I have tried—if they involve fine china.”

  “You need to broaden your horizons. You can do lots of things with fine china.” Karo pointed at a shady spot overhung with crimson blossoms. “How about over there? Check for ants first.”

  He gave her a look. “And you say I have no poetry in my soul. What of the nobility of Nature? Don’t you read Emerson?”

  “Not if I can help it. And I bet Emerson checked for ants, too.”

  Tristam shook his head sadly at her alleged lack of spontaneity and then spread out their blanket on the new sod. He tugged the corners smooth and flung himself at the dead center. He patted the quilt invitingly. The bright pink fabric looked cheerful on the living green velvet, and so did Tristam.

  “Join me. I’ll whisper some sweet nothings in your shelllike ears.” He didn’t wait for her to agree. His hand pulled her to her knees and her body onto his chest. The Zinfandel was set aside for later. Much later. “Ah! This is much better.”

  Karo looked at her smudged hands. Plain soap and water hadn’t rid them of the previous day’s stains. Oh, well. Love looked not with the eyes but with the heart, or something like that.

  “I was supposed to be clean and wearing white chiffon when we did this again,” she murmured into his neck. The rest matched her fantasy rather closely. Well, she didn’t really need Clarice to walk in on them.

  “I beg your pardon? I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “Never mind.” Karo pushed his collar aside and kissed the pulse point beneath his chin. “Tristam?”

  “Mmhm?”

  “If we’re going to share the same grave, does that mean that we’re going to get married?”

  He laughed. “Oh, you’re taking me up on that? All right then—and I sincerely hope so. There’d be such a scandal at the churchyard otherwise. My family is very traditional.”

  “Can we do it here? In the rose garden?”

  “Certainly. As long as we do it soon.” He rolled onto his side so that he could see her face. “We have a new job lined up for December.”

  “We do?” She stopped nibbling on his chin. “Where? When?”

  “California. It seems that we’re finally going to open up the Youngbird Mansion in Humboldt County. DeWitt Youngbird has decided that it’s time to share his Native American art collection with the world.”

  “Oh, my!” Karo’s eyes began to shine. “That’s a great house.”

  “We should have just enough time to pop over to the isle and see Mum and Jeremy. They are dying to meet you.”

  “They are? Why? I mean…why would they be?” she asked, surprised into partial incoherence.

  “I told them days ago that I had finally met the girl of my dreams.” He rubbed at a small streak of dust on her nose with delicate fingers.

  “Really?” Karo could feel an idiot grin spreading over her face.

  “Really.” Tristam was also smiling. “They had some doubts as did I that there existed any woman with the right blend of intelligence, beauty and sense of adventure.”

  “What is your mom like?” Karo asked, nervously picturing a woman with a bust like the prow of a ship and a tiara perched in her iron gray hair.

  “She collects stray animals, knits endless jumpers I refuse to wear, skis Saint Moritz in January and likes Farrelley Brothers films.”

  Karo blinked. “My parents will love her for her work with animals.” She added hurriedly: “I will, too.”

  Tristam grinned. “So, when do I get to meet your parents? I’ve been absolutely dying to ask your father for a ride in his biplane.”

  “Ah-ha!” Karo shook
her head in mock annoyance. “I knew you had ulterior motives for seducing me.”

  “You get to play with the Vellacourt family china, I get to ride in your father’s plane.” Tristam laughed even as he rolled her under him and distracted her with a long kiss. “I have to admit, you’re the best-tasting dust bunny I’ve ever met. The loveliest, too.”

  “I wonder if my hands will be gray forever.”

  “It adds distinction,” he assured her and kissed her again.

  “Actually,” she told him some blissful minutes later, panting in pleasure. “You might get your wish. Dad will probably fly one of his death traps out for the wedding, if Mom can’t talk her way out of it.”

  “Excellent. Then we needn’t wait for them to book a commercial flight. Let’s call Reverend Tibbetts in the morning and see how quickly we can get this matter in hand. Now that we’ve made up our minds, I’m ready to drop into the depths and swim for the beautiful shore.”

  She was surprised but not displeased. “Fine. But I get to use the Limoges for the wedding brunch.”

  “Brunch? You’re thinking of a morning wedding? How about Saturday after next, then? Is that too soon? What about this Saturday? I think we could be ready by then. I’ve talked to my uncle at the embassy and there are no legal difficulties. Actually, I’m ready now. Are you? Are you ready to—as you Yanks say—put your money where your mouth is?” His eyes glowed with cheerful lust. Karo knew that all time for rational discussion was running out.

  “Saturday morning, week after next,” she decided. “Our parents need time to get here. There’ll be fewer mosquitoes. And…damn. I hope it doesn’t rain. This red mud would never come out of a dress and veil. And I have to get one…”

  “How long does it take to get a dress and fripperies?” His tone was uneasy as he considered this potential new bar to his happiness.

  “Not very,” she assured him. “Mom will scare up something. She’s big on planning my social life, and right now, I have to say I don’t mind. She probably has had a wedding dress all put away for me since I graduated college. If not, I’ll do without.”