by Eris Adderly
There had been knockings at the door, perhaps more than once, but he’d never been awake enough to do anything more about them other than retaining a vague memory of their sound and wishing they would go away.
He swallowed. There had to be water in this room. A pitcher, a washbasin, anything. Blinking again, he let his head fall to the side to look around.
Like lightning, he went from lying prone and stiff to pressing himself in terror into the corner of the room that framed the mattress. His heels scrabbled against the linens in their attempt to push him as far away as possible from the figure waiting for him at the foot of the bed.
Judith Barlow stood smiling at him.
No!
“What in the nine Hells! Be gone, demon!”
He shook his head in an effort to fling away the effects of drink and dreams, but still the viper remained. And now she rose up, impossibly, away from the floor, and in his sudden sobriety he saw her form was not as material as he’d first imagined. Where she began and the room ended was indistinct, and he could now see traces of the walls and door through her body.
“Hello, Rowland.”
Hair stood up on his arms and the back of his neck, and even his scrotum went tight against his body when the apparition spoke. This was wrong. All wrong.
“Get out!” he croaked, the words rattling in his still-dry throat. “Leave me, ghost! Your time here is ended!” His hands fisted into the pillow and sheet like those of a frightened boy, every muscle tense now, and heart racing. This was impossible.
Abandoning reason, he yanked off one of his shoes and threw it at her. It sailed straight through her body and did nothing to disturb its outline. She laughed in a low, satisfied ripple and the room became cold as a mid-winter’s day.
“Oh no, my love. My time here has just begun. You took my life on Hallowtide, foolish man. There are no barriers that night between your world and mine. My soul can roam as I wish it now, and as before, I wish for you.”
The look of triumph in her smile made him shrink even further into the corner, if that were possible.
“No. No, this is a nightmare! I will awaken! Be gone!” He rubbed at his eyes, willing the spectre before him away, but still she remained.
“What are you?” he demanded. The spirit chuckled at him again.
“I am what remains of Judith Barlow, my fine young doctor. Your own hands caused the death of my body on the Hallowed Eve, and now you are bound to me. My preference would have been to have you while I was alive, but this will do in its stead.”
Bound to him?
A thought slapped at him then, and he gave it voice.
“But what of Elinor? Did I not …? That is, is it not my fault that …?” He could not bring himself to say the words.
Monster.
“Oh, no, dear Rowland,” the infuriating ghost said, shimmering away from the end of the bed to appear instead directly before him. “Elinor was a good girl. An innocent. There is no haunting and binding for her. Why, I imagine she’s singing with the angels at this very moment.”
The thing that claimed to be Judith Barlow looked very pleased, but Rowland could not have been more compact in his corner. The last thing he wanted was for the spectre to touch him.
“You’re a passionate man,” she continued, looking down at him, “I do enjoy that. But it would have been better, had you listened to reason instead while I was still alive. I assure you, I was, and am, more suited to your nature than my sister ever was. I suppose now I have much longer to prove it to you. You will see, in time.”
Rowland didn’t have the eternal patience the spirit appeared to possess, and saw now she would not leave him, at least not before he had time to discover some means to force her away. In a childish defence against having to look at her, he snatched at the bed sheets and yanked them up over his head, huddling down on his side in the corner.
“Ah, Rowland.” He heard her glassy voice still, and a chill line traced over his arm through the sheet, as though the ghost tried to comfort him. “I will hide myself for a time and let you rest, but you’ll not be rid of me. And thank you”—she dropped her tone to a mischievous whisper—“for that gift of flesh in the carriage. You were superb, my love. It was no wonder my sister couldn’t be persuaded away from you.”
He ground his teeth at her final taunt, but as the room grew dark for the evening and he heard no more from the cursed mouth, he managed to uncurl himself and peer out from under the sheet.
The space appeared to be empty. It was also quiet. He must have given over a hefty amount of coin to the innkeep for them to have left him undisturbed for so long.
The foot wearing the stocking alone touched the wood of the floor first, followed by the other, still in its shoe. On wobbly legs he rose and began to feel his way about the darkened room. It was not water, but when his hand closed over the neck of the bottle, he suspected it would be for the best.
He lifted the drink to his lips and hoped it would burn away memory and ghosts the same way it burned down his throat. If Elinor Barlow had gone to Heaven, then it was most certain that Rowland Graves had arrived in Hell.
The bottle clunked to the floor and rolled in half a circle. He was gone again.
* * * *
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1692
“Look there. That one leaving the dressmaker’s shop could be made into a fine match for you.”
“Go away, Judith,” Rowland said under his breath. He moved along the busy market street, ignoring the blonde the disembodied voice had pointed out. She would only appear to him when he was alone, but her voice followed him everywhere.
“Oh, hush. I know what you need, if you’d only listen. She could be your precious Elinor, at the right angle.” His fallen angel’s name curled from Judith’s immaterial tongue like a sneer, and he strode on as if he could outpace it.
He never could.
Ignoring her didn’t help either and, to his creeping, exhausted horror, she was beginning to wear at him.
“I was prepared to be anything you wanted, Rowland Graves, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“And I won’t now, either.” He kept his eyes forward
“I’ll still help you, my love. I’ll help you get it all back. Look. Look at her.”
With a low growl, he wrenched his head around to see who she was going on about. The young woman was walking in the same direction, on the opposite side of the street, and appeared to be chattering away with what was likely her mother or an aunt.
She did look a bit like Elinor, he admitted to himself. From the side at least. And the way she carried herself, light on her feet, her steps bouncing in the early winter light …
“Do you see it, Rowland? She’s a likely one. She could come to love you, and call your name the way you remember. You only need show her the way. I will help you. And if she’s not the one, we’ll find some other.”
The voice was seductive in his ear, but he ignored it and marched on to his appointment. There was a new doctor in Amsterdam, and he had a reputation to build. He had no time for madness, or spirit voices, or lost loves.
The pain was so very, very real, though, and ever present. Though Judith haunted his steps, it was words between him and Elinor that cut into his core.
I love you, Rowland.
And I love you.
He passed under several more hanging signs from shops and inns, his longing tightly in check. But then his feet were taking him to the other side of the street as all the while his splintering mind denied what he did. Blonde curls under a silk hat bounced in front of him, and Rowland Graves followed, both numb and strangely eager, along behind.
“Yes, Love,” Judith purred, “let me show you.”
* * * *
The first three or four were failures, each a further gruesome severance of his soul from humanity. He’d been ready to end his own wretched life each time as he saw what he was becoming and fought against it. And each time, Judith was there, picking him up, dusting him
off, wiping tears and blood away with her voice.
She would always tell him she loved him, and at first the words were a curling poison in his ears. But these other women never managed to say it, where for Elinor it had been so easy. Effortless. And Judith continued to profess her love, even while, at the very same time, he did unforgivable things. Rowland almost began to believe it was as she said: that no one else could love him but her. Moreover, she pushed him, convinced he could have earthly perfection again if he would only do as she suggested.
He didn’t know at what point he gave over the reins, or whether he’d given them over at all or, to his great shame, began agreeing about where his interests lay. Sometimes she appeared to him, and other times only spoke, but the spirit of Judith Barlow had become his only companion, his one guide.
By perhaps the seventh he was no longer afraid. Though it was a stress that he was still convinced none of them would ever be what Judith promised, he found himself beginning to look forward to the challenge.
Amsterdam only lasted a few months, as he was careless in the early days. By the time he left there, however, he had a second trusted companion: Doctor Ellery’s scalpel.
Brussels, Orleans, Salzburg … they all danced by along with months and soon years. Those and more, at Judith’s occasional suggestion and his own new drive, which began to build like a cold flame.
They were always blonde, and at first always innocent, though over time these things grew to matter less. Sometimes he would pursue one for months, years even, learning languages and politicking his way into society to be near his current object of pursuit. Other periods would pass where he was impatient and unwilling to go to such measures and would settle for whores: one after another in a rapid, destructive string of flashing medical tools and disappointment.
None of them were ever the One. But their screams and their pleas loved him, for a little while at least, even if he could not make them love him in fact.
And Judith would help him, when he lost his way. It seemed that Rowland Graves lost his way more and more often, these days.
* * * *
VI
The One
Bristol, England, 1716
“You’ve not taken care of yourself, Brother,” Jonathan Graves said as he slid a stack of papers to one side of the massive, polished desk.
Rowland smirked at him from the opposite chair, one ankle resting atop the other knee, his age-worn hands laced together in his lap. He’d seen a mirror. He knew what he looked like.
“The years haven’t forgotten you, either, Brother.” His bite in return was idle, with no true sting in it. Both men wore silver in their hair now, though the man behind the desk had the lion’s share.
“Perhaps,” the Harbourmaster said, “but at least I have meat on my bones, and a coat that was made some time in this decade. I’m not tripping from port to port, with nowhere to call home.”
This list of flaws was true, Rowland allowed, but there were more important things in his dark little world than coats and estates. He inclined his head to his older brother and retained his smile. Insults like these had been passed about between them since they were boys; they didn’t rattle him now.
Jonathan pulled one thin sheet of parchment from the rest and pinched it between his fingers, fixing Rowland with a serious glare from across the desk.
“This will be the last time I pluck you away from danger, Little Brother. I thought never to see your face again after that disaster twenty-five years ago.”
“Twenty-six,” he said in correction. It seemed Rowland could keep track of time when he wanted to, after all.
“Regardless,” Jonathan ground on, “I will do this final thing for you, but I assure you it will be the last. Mother and Father are too old for this sort of upset. I won’t even be telling them you’ve been back to Bristol.”
“You won’t be telling anyone anything.” He arched a warning brow at his brother. The only reason Rowland was able to buy this favour at all was that the Harbourmaster of Bristol Port wasn’t interested in his contemporaries knowing what sort of things he got up to on his knees in front of the alderman with the ginger hair.
With a grimace, his brother looked back down at the paper, his eyes skimming along. “The captain of The Devil’s Luck has agreed to take you on as a surgeon,” he said, appearing to draw information from whatever it was he read.
“The Devil’s Luck?” Rowland’s eyes glittered. Interesting.
“I see you know the name. Then you also know what sort of men these are, Doctor Graves, so I’d suggest you not trifle with them.”
“And when does she sail?”
The sooner, the better, he thought, considering one of those whores had managed to wriggle out of his grasp this time.
“I’ve received word that the ship’s here now, and won’t be for long, as you might imagine. I suggest you head down the quay and see yourself aboard. Give this to the captain, when you meet him.” Jonathan handed him the paper and Rowland folded it and slid it inside his coat without reading.
“My thanks again, Brother,” he said, rising from the chair and sketching a mockery of a respectful bow.
The man behind the desk held his gaze with sombre eyes for a long moment. “I don’t know what you’ve become, Brother,” he said, “and I don’t want to know. But it’s time you put this city at your back for good. I expect you never to darken my doorway again.”
“And I expect much of the same. By your leave, Brother.”
Johnathan Graves tipped him a grim, single nod, and Rowland turned and let himself out of the Harbourmaster’s offices into the damp air of the grey morning.
As he stepped out into the street, a blonde woman was emerging from an inn across the crowded avenue with a plump maid in tow. At once, the presence awoke, a stretching beast after a long winter.
Judith was with him again.
“Oooh, Rowland. Look at that one, my love.” The long-familiar voice was a caress at his ear. Though he wasn’t sure any more whether it was always her when he heard it, or if it might not be a product of what was left of his rational mind after all these years. Either way, he would listen.
He did look, strolling along in the same direction as the pair of women, distracted for the moment from his other goal of finding The Devil’s Luck.
“She’s perfect,” Judith chimed away, unseen. “This is the One, Love, I’m sure of it. If you can only lay hold of her, my dearest, I can feel it. She will be the one who can be what you need. She’ll release you from the pain. No more searching and running about, I promise.”
The woman was a fine prize, he allowed that much, but if he wanted her he’d have to separate her from that dour looking maid, or else take them both. And Judith had made such promises so many times before, and none of them ever meant any real end.
“Look at her, Rowland,” his ghostly companion said, her voice persuasive, hungry. “She only needs but a little guidance from you. A sense of direction.”
He watched the blonde wander in and out of shops, and he followed casually along, the fire of challenge and want kindling low in his belly again. The tilt of her chin and the turn of her wrist were movements in a dance she didn’t know she did, stirring him further as he went. Perhaps it was time to stop settling for broken whores in stinking alleys.
Perhaps Judith was right. Maybe this was the One.
Yes.
There was a current in the air that made him believe. Some unidentifiable hum. This one could set him free.
“So be it,” he muttered, keeping what he hoped would be the last of them in his sights as he walked, “And you’d better be right, Judith, because we’ll be at sea for quite some time after today.”
The spirit was silent.
“Judith?”
Again, nothing.
Judith Barlow seemed to come and go on a whim, though he wondered, as he often did, whether it was his lost Elinor’s sister murmuring in his ear at all, after all this time, or whether it had
become his own madness.
No matter. He would guide this little dove himself. She would love him. She would beg to love him.
* * * *
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About Eris
Eris writes for the reader who’d like to take a vacation from their daily reality, whether through impossibly lusty scenarios, or other places and times entirely. She loves historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and anything that bends a little askew from expectations.
When she’s not staying up until the wee hours writing, Eris also likes to read, baby-talk her cats, exasperate her husband, and obsess about writing some more. Somewhere in the middle, there will be some OCD flailing and nitpickery and much sleeping until noon on the weekends.
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