Phantom Bride

by Cach, Lisa

  The aimless chatter grew quickly boring, and Serena’s mind began to wander. Sophie seemed a harmless enough sort, but she felt sorry for Blandamour, who would be listening to her for the next few decades. She was contemplating whether to stay for the sake of watching Woding, or go to preserve her sanity, when Woding spoke, drawing her attention back to what was being said.

  “You were a fool to hire that gypsy woman, Sophie, and you had no right to bring her to my home.”

  “She comes very highly recommended.”

  “She comes recommended by imbeciles. The woman is without question a charlatan, and the only feat she will accomplish is bilking you out of several pounds. Good lord, Sophie, when are you going to grow up and start acting as if you had an ounce of sense in your head?”

  “That isn’t fair, Alex,” Sophie said, her voice trembling. “I was only trying to help.”

  “You wanted to entertain yourself, and without giving a thought to how your actions might affect others.”

  “But Beth is certain the house is haunted—”

  “What if it is? Do you think a ghost would take kindly to having someone like Madame Zousa here? All that hiring a fake like her will succeed in doing is making matters worse.”

  “Madame Zousa’s not a fake,” Sophie tried again, obviously hurt. “She can talk to Serena and find out what it is that has trapped her here on this mortal plane. Once she knows that, she will have the power to send her on to her final rest, and your castle will be haunted no more. It will be like an exorcism—only much more humane.”

  “From the glee you’ve shown at the thought that the castle is haunted, I should have thought you would want it to remain so,” Alex said.

  “ ’Twould not be Christian to know a soul was suffering in such awful torment and not try to help it onward, isn’t that right, Mr. Blandamour?” Sophie said, turning to her fiancé for support.

  “Surely the greatest hell is to be held away from God’s love,” Blandamour agreed.

  Serena rolled her eyes and heard Woding give a snort. She saw him glance over at her before addressing his sister again.

  “Perhaps Serena does not wish to go. She may not be feeling particularly tormented by the absence of God’s love.”

  Sophie laughed, the sound slightly teary. “You’re teasing me now.” She gave a quivering smile, evidently deciding that her brother could not be as angry as he seemed. “Beth told me you insisted it was a prankster causing all the fuss. Perhaps Madame Zousa will be able to locate him, if she fails in her search for Serena. I did not tell her Serena’s name, by the by, or even that it is a female ghost with which we are concerned. I am not a complete fool, you know. When she discovers the information on her own, we will know for certain that she is not taking advantage of our trusting natures.”

  Woding shook his head, apparently abandoning hope of making an impression on his younger sister. “Speaking of Beth, when I received your letter I asked her and Rhys to join us for dinner tonight”—he was interrupted by a shriek of delight from Sophie—“knowing how much you two enjoy one another’s company.”

  After another ten minutes of prattle from Sophie, the young couple left to freshen up and change for dinner. Woding then surprised Serena by addressing her.

  “Would you be so kind as to follow me to my study?” he asked in a low voice, glancing about to be sure no one was listening.

  “Most happily,” Serena said in the voice he could hear, and then mentally berated herself for not just saying yes. She should not let him know how eager she was to speak with him again. One’s enemies should never know where one’s heart lay.

  When they reached his tower study he closed the door, then went to lean against the edge of his desk. Serena sat in the window embrasure, there being no other chairs than the one behind his desk. She did like to stick to the conventions of being a living person, subject to gravity. Nonexistent chairs were to be used only in times of distress.

  “I want to ask you a favor,” Woding said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sure you know as well as I do that that gypsy woman is a fraud, and intent only on putting on a convincing performance to earn herself a few coins.”

  “She walked right past me without so much as blinking an eye,” Serena confirmed. Really, the woman should have learned a bit of her trade. It was insulting to be passed by in such a manner.

  “There, you see? She is undoubtedly harmless, her only threat being to the silver, which I am certain Underhill has already locked away. What I ask is that you refrain from doing anything to improve the gypsy’s performance, and most especially that you do not do anything to frighten or harm Sophie.”

  “You know I would not harm a woman!” Serena cried, offended.

  The corner of his mouth jerked in a quick smile. “I wanted to be certain you had not changed your mind, after hearing Sophie wanted to have you exorcised. That could be perceived as a direct provocation.”

  “She’s a foolish girl,” Serena said. “Neither she nor that gypsy woman are any danger to me.”

  “Then you will stay away from Madame Zousa’s performance tonight?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “The last thing I need is for one of them to somehow catch a glimpse of you during it, or for you to go touching someone’s hair again.”

  Serena clasped her guilty hands together, holding them against her stomach. “No one will see me. And I have no need to touch women’s hair.”

  He looked doubtful, but let her protestations pass, changing the subject. “I had wondered where you had been these last few days. I thought you might have gone.”

  “I won’t be so easy to get rid of as that, Woding,” she said haughtily. “I was thinking about our conversation, is all. I told you much about myself. It occurs to me that there is much I would like to have you explain about yourself, in turn,” she said, gesturing slightly with one finger toward the many-armed brass contraption.

  His eyes followed the small movement, and he turned to look at where she pointed. The wily scoundrel! It was as she had feared! “The devil take thy guts!” she cried. “You lied to me, Woding! You see me much more clearly than you claimed!” She hopped off the embrasure, stalking toward him, her hands fisted at her sides.

  He stood up, facing her as she approached.

  “Forsooth, how much of me do you see?” she asked, horrified at the thought that he could see the scar that blazed its deep pink trail across her face.

  “I see you as a transparent woman, with your own illumination, as if glowing from a candle within.”

  “What else?”

  “I see the faint colors of your dress, and of your hair. You wear a girdle of some fashion. Your hair reaches to your thighs. I do not know the color of your eyes, or”—he hesitated, and she got the feeling he was changing what he was about to say—“or if you have wrinkles ’round your eyes. I cannot see you that well.”

  “In truth?”

  “Do you have wrinkles?”

  “Marry, I would not tell you if so.” She pursed her lips a moment, then backed off. If he was lying, he would not admit it. She could best judge the truth of his statements by his behavior. If he could see her scar, he would not long have an interest in her. She had no control over it one way or the other, a realization that made her stomach roil. She stared at him for several long moments, digesting that, then changed the subject. “Why do you humor your sister, letting her play her foolish games?”

  “Because they are just games,” he said, going toward the door. “I save my strength for the battles worth fighting.”

  And with that he left, leaving her to wonder if he referred to her.

  “Silence!” Madame Zousa said. “We must have total silence!”

  “The ghosties have fragile nerves,” Rhys said to Alex in a stage whisper. “They need their quiet.” Both Beth and Sophie hushed him with furious hisses.

  “If she thinks that, she knows nothing of our Serena,” Alex whispered back.<
br />
  “Alex!” Sophie said in a hiss.

  “So sorry.”

  Alex leaned back in his overstuffed seat in the blue drawing room, watching with some amusement as Madame Zousa set up her paraphernalia. The gaslights and candles were all out save for a single fat candle in a dish, set in the center of a swath of black silk on the floor.

  At least the cloth saved him from having to look at the marquetry.

  Madame Zousa dumped the contents of a charm-bedecked cloth bag onto the edge of the cloth, revealing what looked to be a pile of barely clean chicken bones, with bits of dried brown flesh still clinging in a few spots. A shriveled chicken head and one withered claw emerged from one of Madame Zousa’s pockets, and then a small pouch, contents unknown.

  Alex wondered if these were the usual tools of her trade, or if instead she was making good use of last night’s supper.

  A familiar pale illumination caught his eye as Serena came into the room, an appearance that brought him a conflict of emotion. She came directly to his side, then knelt down on the floor, her eyes on Madame Zousa.

  When he had first seen her on the stairs after her three-day absence, he had been both dismayed and relieved. Dismayed because it meant he had not somehow effected a cure for the insanity of thinking he had talked with a ghost. Relieved because as inharmonious as their acquaintance was, it was obsessively fascinating.

  Those three days without her, his mind had gone again and again to their encounter: to what she had told him; to the medieval accent of her voice, which he thought he could gladly listen to for days; to how she had looked, so eerily similar to what he had dreamed; and most of all to how strangely human she seemed, her emotions rich in her voice, her gestures and movements no different from those of a living woman except in their intensity.

  He had gotten next to nothing done with his star charts, his mind had been so filled with Serena and with worrying—absurdly!—that she might not come back. He was tempted to blame her for draining him of his intellectual energies; only honesty forced him to admit it was his own lack of mental self-discipline that was the culprit.

  But then, what did it matter if he let his mind dwell on her for a few days? He had no deadlines under which to work. Why shouldn’t he allow himself a minor obsession, especially one so intriguing and unusual?

  The days of unwashed clothing and lunatic ranting were obviously fast approaching. He could see it now, mothers telling their children to beware of Mad Woding of Maiden Castle, who conversed with spirits. His sisters would have him crated off to the asylum—or worse yet, Bath.

  Ah, well. He glanced at Serena, at her profile, so clear to him in this near-dark. The candlelight had the odd effect of making each place it reached on her slightly more transparent, leaving the back of her head more clearly defined than her face. It was as if her own light struggled to complete with light from other sources.

  What did she make of these goings-on?

  Madame Zousa arranged her chicken bones in a star pattern on the cloth, then cast her dark-eyed gaze on each of the guests in turn. They all sat in separate chairs around the cloth, too far from each other to touch. Alex wondered if that, and the dark, were meant to increase their unease and susceptibility to Madame Zousa’s tricks. The candle on the floor underlit their faces, making the familiar eerie. Sophie herself looked ghoulishly sinister, with the dim orange glow touching under her chin, nose, and eye sockets, her normally rounded cheeks deeply shadowed beneath her eyes.

  Serena was the only one of the lot who looked almost normal. Madame Zousa was positively troll-like in contrast, her black hair hanging loose and wild. God only knew what the woman had in mind, or of what she was capable. Sophie, when pressed, had admitted to having hired her through a friend of a friend, who claimed the woman lived in the woods.

  “A harpsichord should be playing off-key,” Rhys said. “To complete the mood.”

  Madame Zousa pointed a bony finger, and gave a glare that silenced him. He looked over at Alex with raised eyebrows, his fingertips to his pursed mouth like an old woman caught gossiping. Alex smothered a smile.

  “The spirits,” Madame Zousa said, her voice low and portentous, “are everywhere.” She waved her hands over her chicken-bone star, and started speaking in what he assumed to be her native Romany tongue, rolling her eyes up into her head, the whites glimmering beneath her half-closed lids. She rose up on her knees, swaying back and forth, her chanting guttural and loud.

  The swaying slowed, and Madame Zousa’s eyes rolled back and forth. Her voice lowered to a soft, childish tone, and she switched back to English.

  “Spirits, hear my call,” she said, then rolled her head on her neck, her eyes unfocused, staring into the dark. “Spirits, come to me. Tell me who haunts this house, and what deeds he has done. Tell me what holds him from the world beyond.”

  Despite himself, Alex felt a shiver go through him, the dark room alive now with anticipation. He glanced at Serena, who was watching the display intently but otherwise seemed unmoved.

  “Spirits, move through me,” she said. She opened the small pouch and upended it over the pattern of chicken bones. A matted clump of orange-brown chicken feathers landed on the bones with a poof, breaking apart like a poorly packed snowball. “Spirits, move through air.” The feathers stirred, as if touched by an unseen hand. Alex saw Serena’s eyes widen, and she crossed herself. She glanced up at him, as if for reassurance.

  For heaven’s sake, what was he supposed to do? If anything, he should be asking her for protection. This was her realm, not his.

  Madame Zousa held her arms out wide in front of her, as if waiting to embrace someone. She leaned back, kneeling, her knees spread wide under her skirt. It looked as if she were expecting the spirits to come to her in more than one sense.

  Serena was reminded of how she must have looked to le Gayne, at the stream, inviting his attentions. The thought seemed to call to some unseen spirit, and she heard, as if from a distance, a female voice begin to sing:

  “There were three ravens sat on a tree,

  They were as black as they might be.

  With a down, derry, derry, derry, down, down.”

  A frisson went up the back of her neck, and she shifted slightly closer to Woding, suddenly not so certain that Madame Zousa was a complete charlatan.

  “Aaaaa,” Madame Zousa groaned, and undulated her arms and shoulders in a rippling wave, as if they were a snake. “Aaaaa …” She let her hands drop down to her groin, clasping herself there. “I feel you,” she said.

  Beth and Sophie gasped, and Rhys and Blandamour let out grunts of surprise. Serena’s muscles tensed, but she saw that Woding just watched, his eyes narrowing in the look she knew meant he was suspicious.

  The thought that he doubted was almost a comfort, but then she saw it, a shadow in the dark, a shapeless form, rising above the candle and then moving toward Madame Zousa.

  “Then one of them said to his mate,

  ‘Where shall we our breakfast take?’ ”

  The female voice sang again out of the darkness. The others seemed not to hear it.

  Serena scrambled to her feet, her eyes on the black cloud. Everyone else’s eyes were on Madame Zousa. Was she the only one who could see it? She could feel evil coming off the shadow, deep and corrupted, as foul as the corpses of the Pestilence. It moved toward Madame Zousa, then covered her.

  Madame Zousa groaned again, her hips jerking forward in a rhythmic motion, as if she were being held and mounted by a man. Her eyes turned to Serena, focusing on her for the first time, and in their depths Serena saw both fear and a desperate plea, her body continuing to jerk under the thrusts of the assault.

  “Stop him,” Serena said in a hiss near Woding’s ear.

  All the others were staring with fascinated eyes at the groaning Madame Zousa, writhing on the floor.

  He looked up at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Stop him!” Serena repeated, trying to keep her voice low, but feeling it rising w
ith her panic. “Don’t you see what he’s doing to her?”

  “Who?” Woding asked.

  He didn’t see the shape, didn’t feel the evil.

  Oh, God, that poor woman. She couldn’t just stand there and watch.

  She did the only thing she could think of, leaping to the center of the black cloth and kicking the chicken bones apart. The shadow dropped Madame Zousa, who collapsed to the floor like a boiled cabbage, and then it turned to Serena and began expanding, filling her vision in a claustrophobic cloud of evil.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Serena recited desperately in Latin, her voice loud and audible in the room of silent observers, her heart thudding. “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen!”

  The black shape gave a shuddering bellow that vibrated down to her bones, calling forth the memory of le Gayne’s howls on their wedding night. She continued quickly through her rosary, her muscles weak with terror, and the shadow began to fade away, dissipating with each word she spoke, and then it was gone.

  Serena dropped to her knees beside Madame Zousa, her hands fluttering helplessly over the woman’s slack face. She looked imploringly to Woding, whose expression of confused anger changed to one of deep concern as he finally understood that something had gone wrong, and Madame Zousa’s collapse was not part of the performance.

  “Rhys, get some light in here!” he ordered, lurching from his chair and coming to kneel beside Serena. He pulled Madame Zousa’s upper body onto his lap, cradling her head in his arm, lightly patting her cheeks. “Madame Zousa!” he said. “Madame Zousa!” And then, to Sophie, “Smelling salts! Do you have any?”

  “What? Salts?”

  Beth took Sophie’s reticule from her, and started digging through it, coming up moments later with the salts. She gave them to Woding, who opened them and waved them under Madame Zousa’s nose.

  Sophie was still flustered. “What’s happened? I don’t understand. She was in a trance, wasn’t she? Isn’t she all right?” Blandamour came and put his arm around her, half lifting her from the settee and forcing her to accompany him from the room.