Phantom Bride

by Cach, Lisa

  His eyelids closed.

  Alex, she said more loudly, a wren’s wing beat of air.

  No response.

  “Alex!” she said, and this time her voice was a swan taking flight. She heard it vibrating through the air, reflecting off the walls and floor. It was a much different sound from the snow-forest muffling she usually heard when she spoke, in the plane of the dead.

  His eyes came wide open, and he sprang to a sitting position, up against the headboard. “Hello, what?”

  “Alex,” she said again, and her voice settled into the right range, a pheasant or a hawk, clearly heard but not overloud. “Did you have a pleasant bath?”

  He looked slightly away from her, as if watching from the corner of his eye. “What?”

  “Did you have a pleasant bath?” she repeated carefully. She had grown used to listening to the modem way of speech, but her own words formed themselves as they always had, her vowels stretching and shaping in a manner that must sound foreign to him.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said, his eyes still wide.

  “That is good.” She sat in silence, trying to think of something else to say. Everything that came to mind seemed inane, although perhaps no more so than breaking centuries of silence with an inquiry about a man’s bath.

  “Are you Serena?” Woding asked, perfectly motionless, as if moving might bring her down upon him.

  “I am Serena Clerenbold,” she confirmed slowly, enunciating each syllable with pride. She felt her eyes sting, to say her full name, and hear it echo in the air. “I am the fourth child of the warrior Robert Clerenbold, and his only daughter. I had four brothers, each of whom were as gifted with the sword as my father, and only one of whom survived the Great Mortality.”

  “The Great Mortality? Do you mean the Black Death?”

  “The Pestilence,” she said, her mind going instantly back to those dark days. How could speaking of it have the power to carry her there so swiftly? “It destroyed without favor. My family. Our peasants. The sheep, cattle, chickens, even the dogs lay dead in the fields, black and corrupted. The scavengers themselves would not touch the corpses, so foul and reeking of evil they were.”

  “But you survived it?”

  “Aye, I survived. And Thomas, my younger brother. We were all that was left.”

  “What happened to you? Why do you haunt the castle?”

  “I was murdered!” she said, speaking loudly again. “Murdered by that filthy brute le Gayne. The lying, thieving, stinking bastard, may he rot in hell.”

  “The legend says that you killed him.”

  “Lies!” she exclaimed, and crawled across the bed to him. A muscle in his face twitched. “Do you see me?” she asked, leaning close.

  “Barely.”

  “Do you see my face?”

  “I cannot distinguish it.”

  She sat back on her heels, relieved on that score. “Le Gayne murdered me upon our wedding night, and stole our lands from my brother, who was foolish enough to believe such a trickster’s words.”

  “Is that why you became a ghost, because you were murdered?”

  She did not answer.

  “Serena?” he said.

  “I do not know,” she at last replied.

  “Isn’t there something you want, like justice or revenge? Or maybe that the truth be known? There must be some reason you haunt this castle.”

  “I do not know! All I know is that I want to be alone again. This is my home, and you have invaded it. I want you to go, you and all the rest.”

  He leaned forward and reached behind himself to rearrange the pillows, making a comfortable support for sitting up. He straightened the blankets and coverlet, then leaned back and looked toward her.

  “Why did le Gayne kill you?”

  “I do not wish to speak of it.”

  He was quiet a moment. She could see that he was thinking of what next to say. The startled look had gone from his eyes, although she thought his relaxed pose was a lie.

  “What became of Thomas?” he asked at last.

  She sighed and moved back to her place at the foot of the bed, leaning against the post. “Thomas went to fight under the Black Prince. He came home four years later, and was told that I had run off to join a nunnery, but that I had died on the road and been buried in an unmarked grave. Le Gayne invited him to spend the night, which he did, not yet knowing that le Gayne had stolen all his land while he was gone.”

  Alex listened, astonished by what was happening here within the confines of his bed, and as Serena spoke he began to realize that he could see her, faintly, in the center of his vision. The more she talked, the clearer she became. On impulse he reached over to the bed curtains, pulling them shut. Her image grew clearer in the darkness, glowing faintly in contrast.

  She was transparent, and her colors palely luminous, yet he could see that she was the same woman as in his dreams, with the same strangely beautiful face. She sat leaning against the bedpost, her long, tangled hair draping her shoulders and coiling on the coverlet.

  “I woke Thomas in the night,” she was saying. “I showed myself to him, and told him I had been murdered the very night he had ridden off to war. I bade him to flee, and come back with an army to wreak his vengeance, but he would not wait. He set fire to the castle that very night. When le Gayne came running out from the fire, Thomas handed him a sword and offered to fight to the death, to right the wrong that had been done.

  “Thomas killed le Gayne for me, but not before himself receiving a wound that shortly proved his own mortality. I saw him fall, and be hacked to bits by le Gayne’s men-at-arms, the castle burning down around them, casting a bloody glow upon it all.”

  “Good God,” Alex said. He saw that she was looking at her hands, lying palms-up in her lap. Then she raised her gaze, looking at him, her irises black as night.

  “He was dead before they put the first blade to him. I saw him standing beside me, looking down on his body. He turned to me and smiled, taking my face in his hands. He kissed me once, with such gentleness as I had never known from him. And then he was gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “So that is how I know it is not vengeance that keeps me here, or a search for justice. I have had that.”

  “Why did you stay on the mountaintop, while your brother was able to leave?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I do not know!”

  “You must have some idea,” he said.

  “No more than you, or any other.”

  “But you’re dead!” he said, exasperated. “How can you not know what happens when someone dies?”

  “Do you know where your soul came from?” she asked.

  “What? No—”

  “How can you not know that, and yet live?”

  He opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. She had him there. “Will you remain a ghost forever?” he asked, expecting the same answer she’d been giving to every other question: “I don’t know.”

  “Why are you not married, Woding?” she asked instead. “You are well past the age when you should have been.”

  “I was once,” he said. Her change of topic had caught him off guard.

  “What happened?”

  “You are avoiding my question,” he accused.

  “She must have died. Did you love her?”

  “I am not going to talk about Frances with you.”

  “You would have me tell you of my life. Why can I not hear of yours?”

  “Why do you not show yourself, instead of coming as a voice out of the darkness?” he challenged back, knowing she was unaware he could see her quite as well as he did. “Why do you hide? What are you afraid I’ll see?”

  “I no longer wish to speak with you,” she said sharply, and vanished.

  Alex blinked, looking at where she had been. The sense of her presence was gone, as well. It was as if she had never been there at all: not even the bed curtains w
avered at her passing.

  He blew out his breath in a noisy, horse-blowing sound, and sank loosely into the pillows. He flopped his hand onto his forehead, holding it while he shook his head back and forth.

  She looked like a ghost. She moved like a ghost. She talked like a woman Geoffrey Chaucer would have met on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. So was she a ghost? Or was he out of his mind?

  He very well might be stark, raving mad. Crazier than a bedbug. ’Round the bend. Crackers. He admittedly felt a few buttons short of fully dressed—but he was in bed, after all.

  He gave a shout of incredulous laughter. The deuce of it all was that she had told him nothing that he could use to prove to himself they’d had their conversation. She had not told him where she was buried, and had revealed no secret passageways leading to long-forgotten dungeons. For all the information he had gleaned from her descriptions of being dead, he might as well have been talking to himself. “I do not know,” she had said. Again and again.

  His heart had quit beating when she first spoke his name. It was a miracle that he’d survived the shock of it. Actually hearing a voice was a step beyond vague anxieties and seeing a figure in the corner of one’s eye.

  He pulled his constraining nightshirt off over his head, flinging it to the foot of the bed. Whether she was real or not, she was gone. His bath had been particularly enjoyable, since he’d known there was no one spying upon him, although he would admit there was a very small, extremely vain part of him that had taken a certain pleasure in her interest.

  On the other hand, sometimes a man wanted to scratch himself in ungentlemanly places.

  If he was a lunatic, at least he seemed to have found a way to gain some control over his delusions. If he were being completely reasonable, he would do the wise thing and move to Bath with his sisters, and surround himself with the company of others with their feet firmly upon the ground of reality. He would watch stars from a townhouse rooftop, and for only a few hours of the night. He would go back to hands-on management of the mills, he would attend the rounds of house parties, he would seek out a new wife and have children, and he would forget he had ever thought he had conversed with a beautiful ghost sitting at the foot of his bed.

  He thought of the gruesome tales Serena had told of her brother’s demise, and of the Black Death. They were gruesome tales, yet fascinating.

  He thought of Bath, and of the elegant assemblies his sisters adored. Elegant, and stupefying.

  He grinned into the dark. He might be mad, but he was miles from being bored.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Now who was this arriving? Serena wondered, looking down on the courtyard from an upstairs window of the castle. It had been over a week since Woding had seen any visitors.

  The rattling carriage drew to a halt; the door was opened and the step lowered. A man got out first, dressed in somber colors, then turned to give a hand to a woman. Her hat was bedecked in feathers and fake flowers, all flattening in the wind of the gusty, unseasonably drizzly day. A second woman climbed out after the first, dressed more simply, and then a third, this one wearing no hat at all. Her gown, even from such a distance, looked cheap, garish, and well-worn.

  As the small group went inside, Serena left the window, heading for the main staircase. She had been avoiding Woding for the past few days, feeling as though she had presented herself as an utter idiot in their conversation, being either unable or unwilling to answer any of his questions to his satisfaction. She felt as well that she had revealed too much that was personal about herself, speaking of Thomas’s death as she had. Then his prodding for her to show herself—and her scarred face—had panicked her, and she had fled.

  She had lost the knack of talking with another human being.

  She had been practicing what she would say the next time, for she knew there had to be one. Her mind had been going nonstop, and she’d been mulling over every word they had exchanged, choosing words that would have been better, grimacing at those she had actually said. Their conversation, even as poorly as it had gone, had been like the first bite of food taken after a day of fasting. She couldn’t stop now. She was only surprised she had not approached him again already.

  The group of visitors had congregated at the foot of the stairs, in the entry hall between the library and the blue drawing room. Serena stopped at the landing halfway down the stairs, under the rose window. She could see now that the young woman in the feathered hat was Sophie, Woding’s younger sister—Serena remembered her from her first visit here, with Woding’s other sister, Philippa. She could only suppose that the man with her was her intended, the vicar. She had heard about him from the staff. He looked an earnest, fairly foolish young man, all long limbs and buggy eyes, obviously entranced by his dark-haired, dark-eyed fiancee.

  She heard Woding coming along the upper hallway, and met his eyes as he stopped at the top of the staircase, noticing her presence. For a moment she had the sensation that he could see her much more clearly than he had let on, but she dismissed the idea. No one had been able to see her clearly without her either being in great distress or intending to be seen.

  He nodded to her, then gave a slightly pained smile and looked over the rail at the group below. She didn’t know if the pain was for her or for them. Perhaps both, given his solitary ways.

  “Alex!” Sophie cried, looking up and seeing him. She dashed to the bottom of the stairs, waiting as he came slowly down them.

  Serena watched him as he reached his sister and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Sophie,” he said. “I hope your journey was pleasant.”

  “I hardly noticed, I was so eager to get here. I wanted to come last week, as soon as I received Beth’s letter about your ghost actually touching her, but Philippa would not allow it. She insisted I complete my dress fittings first. Dress fittings! When we have proof there are spirits abroad in your castle!”

  Woding shook the man’s hand, calling him Mr. Blandamour, and greeted the older woman in plain dress, Miss Silverlock, whom Serena guessed must be a nurse or chaperon to young Sophie, who was continuing to talk. “Of course I knew there were ghosts here the moment I saw the place. There is such an air of brooding, so many dark rooms that quite give one a chill. I know I am more sensitive than most to the energies of the other side, but surely you too have felt the presence of those who lived here before.”

  “Josiah Briggs, you mean?” Woding asked. “I feel his presence in every molding, every carving, every bit of black marble and fragment of stained glass.”

  Sophie made a pouty face. “You’re making fun of me.

  “Do forgive me. I fully recognize this is an ancient structure, with walls dating all the way back to the 1820s.”

  “Al-ex.” Sophie groaned.

  “You have not introduced me to your companion,” he said, nodding toward the woman in garish clothing.

  Sophie gave a smile like all of sunlight. “This,” she said, going to the woman and leading her forward, “is Madame Zousa.”

  “How do you do, sir?” Madame Zousa said, giving a shallow curtsy while looking at the floor. She was of an indeterminate age, her coarse black hair peppered with gray that could have come at thirty-five or sixty-five. Her face was brownish and lined, but whether from age or sun Serena could not tell. Her expression revealed nothing of what she thought or felt.

  “How do you do, madame,” Woding said to the woman.

  “Madame Zousa is a gypsy,” Sophie said in a loud whisper, as if it were a secret the woman did not already know. “She is going to help us to contact the ghost.”

  “Is she now?” Woding did not sound amused.

  “I tried to talk her out of it,” Blandamour complained, “but she was intent on bringing her.”

  Miss Silverlock nodded her head in distressed agreement. “She was not to be dissuaded. There will be trouble when Mrs. Stearne hears of it, I have no doubt.”

  “Oh, pish,” Sophie said. “Philippa makes a fuss no matter what I do. I can hardly wait to
be married and in charge of myself.”

  Serena saw the eyebrow Woding raised toward Blandamour, but the man was gazing cow-eyed at his fiancée, obviously no threat to her independence.

  Underhill appeared, and soon was ushering Madame Zousa and Miss Silverlock up the stairs to their rooms, his pursed mouth indicative of his disapproval of the gypsy. The threesome passed right by her, but the gypsy did not so much as flick an eyelid in her direction.

  Huh, Serena thought. So much for the gypsy’s supposed powers.

  She descended the remaining stairs and followed Woding, Sophie, and Mr. Blandamour into the blue drawing room, so named for the powder blue velvet upholstery on all the chairs and settees. The floor was an eye-crossing geometrical design of five different woods, the walls above the wainscoting covered in gilded paper, and the fireplace a black marble beast surmounted by a mirror, which in turn was topped by carvings of Gothic arches and the figures of saints. As with most of the other rooms, the view from the windows was the only place an eye could find peace and joy.

  Unless one were a Sophie or a Briggs. Serena listened in disbelief as the young woman sighed over the details of the room, declaring to Blandamour that she should very much like to have a similar room in the vicarage.

  Sophie sat at the end of a settee, untying her hat and setting it next to her. Serena went and sat several inches away from the girl on the same settee, wanting to get a better look at this bit of frippery that shared blood with Woding. She looked closely at the features of the girl’s face, assessing the lines of brow and nose, then looked back at Woding.

  He was staring at her, a bit of white showing round his irises. She gave a little shrug of apology, and moved away from his sister. She got a minuscule nod of his head in thanks, and she wondered once again just how well he could see her.

  Sophie continued to chatter on, seemingly needing no more than an occasional murmur from her male companions to keep going. She had the same hair as Woding, and there was a similarity about the nose and mouth, but that was all the resemblance Serena could see. Certainly the effect of those features was much different when the lips would not stop moving than when they held still, as did Woding’s much of the time.