Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Lily threw her head back and laughed. “That’s the way to get kids to read Shakespeare. Tell them they can’t.” She rose, dusting off her hands. “Are you coming in?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  With a shrug, she flitted up the stairs in Ben’s wake.

  I leaned back against the wall, watching the moonlight play in the trees. Tristan and Isolde, she’d said, likening us to guilty lovers eager to proclaim their innocence with a symbol no one could mistake, laying a sword between them on the bed just before spies burst into their love nest. The reference attested to some fine schooling, probably private and outrageously pricey, but as for Ben and me, the kid was so far off base it was laughable. Epic lovers didn’t let oceans or deadly feuds, or even death, come between them. Ben and I had let the small twists and tugs of two careers pull us apart.

  An American freelance theater director with a specialty in Shakespeare and a home base in London, I went wherever the jobs were—and in the wake of finding Cardenio, they were scattered all over the globe. As for Ben, it wasn’t easy to explain what he did, especially since the word “mercenary” made him snort in derision. Before we’d met, he’d left whatever special-ops part of the British military or secret service had trained him and formed a private security company whose bread and butter was protection of the sort he was probably discussing with Lady Nairn. But he also had a quiet side-specialty in missions too delicate or dicey for politicians to stomach. Missions that, being his own commander in chief, he could accept or decline at will. I thought of him as a modern-day Drake or raleigh. “You think I’m a pirate?” he’d asked, his voice cracking in amusement, when I’d told him that once, as we lay in bed one rainy afternoon.

  “Not a pirate. A privateer.”

  He’d shrugged off the distinction. “What’s a swash? Perhaps I should know, in case I ever need to buckle one.”

  “I like you unbuckled, thank you very much,” I’d said. He’d risen over me, naked and beautiful, and I’d sunk back into the sheets, laughing. A week later, he had disappeared, and I had not known where he was—or whether he was still alive, for that matter—for two months.

  In atonement, he’d arranged a week in a cottage in Ireland, overlooking the sea: just the two of us, he promised, some friendly horses, and a long unspoiled stretch of beach. And then I’d had a call from my agent.

  “Coriolanus?” Ben had said in disbelief when I phoned to cancel the trip. “In Saint Petersburg? Nobody even likes Coriolanus.”

  And so it went, growing increasingly hard to make time for each other, and increasingly easy to chafe at the other’s absence. In the calendar year and a half that we’d been together, I figured that we’d actually been in each other’s company for two months. Three, tops.

  Then, on a bright morning in June, I’d walked to Ben’s flat through showers of birdsong to find him staring absently out the big front window overlooking the Thames. He was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt that made his eyes look like a malachite sea.

  “Do you want this?” At first I’d thought he was talking about breakfast. “us,” he’d specified in a voice that canceled my hunger.

  “Of course,” I’d said, swallowing hard. “Look, about last night, I’m sorry. But I’m not the only one to—”

  “God knows I’m no model of steady presence. But I miss one date for every three times you stand me up.” It wasn’t an accusation, just a fact stated with a flat calm that I found far more frightening than recrimination or clever retort.

  “At least you know where I am.” I’d tried for insouciance, but it came out with a peevishness that made me wince.

  “Not here.” He’d given me a wry smile. “But I’m starting to get really interesting work,” I protested. “Chances that won’t come around twice. In a few years, I might be more established. Able to line more things up in advance.” Able to say no to the stray, wind-borne chance. I’d left that last thought unsaid.

  He’d watched the sunlight rippling like scales of gold on the river. “What you and I have, Kate, it’s…unusual. I’ll wait, at least for a while, if you can tell me that you’ll be there at the end of this tunnel—if you can tell me that there’ll be an end.”

  But I could not give him a date, and I would not make up the false specter of one. In truth, I wasn’t even sure I wanted one to exist. In perverse stubbornness, I stood mute, and in the silence, something snapped, sending a million invisible cracks spidering across the sky.

  It was an amicable, if bittersweet, parting. Very adult. I walked home in a small gray shroud.

  “How long is ‘a while’?” Athenaide had asked when I reported the rift.

  I didn’t know. I’d thrown myself into my work, which was thankfully plentiful all through the summer. I’d had no more than a few days of downtime when I’d had to fend off the foreboding that I’d made a terrible mistake.

  Until now.

  I rose and went upstairs to dress.

  Laid out on my bed was a deeply V’d halter dress in silk of peacock blue. I very nearly turned around and went down to dinner in my grass-stained khakis. Only the notion of trying to explain why I’d done so made me shed them and slip the dress over my head. Pulling on the black heels I’d worn the night before, I smoothed down my hair and glanced in the mirror.

  I was no majestic beauty like Ellen Terry, but given the afternoon I’d had, I was fairly presentable. In my mind’s eye, though, the image that floated up to cloud the mirror wasn’t the mermaid painting of a ferocious queen, but a girl with flame-red hair and a red slash across her throat, naked and bound beneath a fall of blue silk.

  Tossing a bathrobe over the mirror, I went downstairs to dinner.

  The crowd had filtered into the dining room, but people were still milling about, finding their places. At the door, Lady Nairn introduced me to Effie Summers, the white-haired lady who’d protested when Lily quoted the play. Effie’s eyes widened. She looked from side to side, as if my presence might make someone else burst into dangerous quotation, and scuttled away.

  The table, set for well over twenty, was a Victorian fantasy of china and crystal, with a pyramid of sugared fruit as a centerpiece. Before each plate a small enameled bird held a card with a name in its beak. I found mine in the beak of a swan near the center of the table; Jason was to my right. Eircheard was down at the end of the table, near a mutely sullen Lily. So much for learning to toast in Gaelic from Eircheard; I’d be toasting in Australian instead.

  “Where am I to sit?” Sybilla asked with a pout.

  Lady Nairn motioned to a still vacant place across from me. Frowning, Sybilla picked up the bird—a raven—with the card in its beak, turning it around so the whole table could read the neat black lettering:

  HAL BERRIDGE.

  “Who’s Hal Berridge?” asked Jason.

  Down near the end of the table, Effie Summers rose. “The boy,” she gasped, clutching at her throat, finding the cross that hung on her necklace. “The boy who died.”

  7

  A CRY OF surprise rose and then died over the table.

  “The first Lady M,” said Effie, her voice edging near hysteria. Lady Nairn had been staring at Sybilla’s card in consternation, but eyeing Effie’s panic, she cut in briskly. “He was a boy actor with Shakespeare’s company, when women were banned from the stage and boys played all the female roles. The night before the premiere in front of the king at Hampton Court, he took ill and died.”

  Effie leaned across the table toward Sybilla, her eyes wide and dark. “Mere hours before the show was to start, this was. Only one other actor knew the role well enough to step into it: Shakespeare.” Her hands scrabbled like claws across the table. “Don’t you see? The death of Hal Berridge is what started the curse. It’s a warning.”

  Still holding the raven with the offending place card in its beak, Sybilla was within a breath of tossing it into the fire and making a grand, irrecoverable exit.

  “Who put it there?” asked a slightly amused Jason P
ierce. No one answered.

  With a sigh, I put down my napkin and rose. “I’m sorry to have to disagree with Ms. Summers, but that tale is—and was—no more than a hoax.”

  All eyes swiveled to me. Even Lady Nairn looked confused. “I have no idea who’s to blame for its appearance tonight,” I went on, “but the name Hal Berridge was first dreamed up at the end of the nineteenth century, by a theater critic named Max Beerbohm.”

  “The cartoonist?” asked Lady Nairn, her face pinched with concentration.

  I nodded. “Caricaturist, critic, novelist, man-about-town. A satirist at heart and a brilliant wit. More in demand to liven up London dinner parties than Oscar Wilde. Shakespeare bored him. One night, he balked at picking apart a production he disliked and devoted most of his review to anecdotes about Shakespeare. Including Hal Berridge. Larded the whole thing with quotations from obscure historical sources, which made it convincing. So convincing that his stories were swallowed whole by generations of actors, unchallenged by scholars. Problem is, he made them all up.”

  “Do you mean to say that the curse—the whole history of it—is based on a lie?” asked Sybilla.

  “A jest.” I smiled. “I don’t discount that some productions have been dogged by terrible luck. My personal favorite involves Charlton Heston’s tights. But the bad luck did not have its origins in the demise of Hal Berridge.”

  It was a strange prank, I thought as I spoke. Not in good taste, for starters—mean-spirited, really. But obscure as well. So obscure that it failed the first test of a good joke: that its audience should get it without reference to footnotes. The jester had surely been counting on someone to explain the joke, but in which direction? Effie’s superstition or my skepticism?

  The small enameled bird trembled in Sybilla’s hand. She was not yet ready to give up her grand scene.

  Ben walked over and plucked the card from the raven’s beak. Pulling a pen from his pocket, he turned it over, scrawled HM the Scottish Queen across the back, and tucked it back into the bird’s mouth. “Your Majesty,” he said to Sybilla with a little bow, holding out his arm.

  Thank you, I mouthed.

  She gave him a smile of such radiance that I winced. And then she reached up and ran a hand down the side of his face. “Thank you, darling,” she said in a voice purring with satisfaction and promise.

  Darling?

  Small details of the past few days floated loose from their moorings and fell back down to earth in a new arrangement. I heard Lady Nairn’s voice, as if in an echo chamber: She’s the one who’s already got someone new on the line. And Ben—he’d tried to talk to me, but I’d refused to listen and then ducked behind Lily.

  Bit Tristan and Isolde, she’d said, peering at the tableau of the two of us separated by the knife. Had she known? Had everyone known but me?

  I felt myself flush and looked down. If I could have, I would have fled to upper Siberia, to cool off in the permafrost. But I was hemmed in by the ritual of a formal dinner. If I left, I’d only make the scene worse, and my part in it more pathetic.

  “So what happened to Charlton Heston’s tights?” asked Lily from the far end of the table.

  “Somebody doused them with kerosene,” I heard myself say, as if from far away. “He was in an outdoor production that involved riding a horse. It can’t have been very far, but the combination of friction and horse sweat heated up the tights to the point that Heston had to dash offstage crying, ‘Get them off me, get them off…. ’ Not very nice for Heston, I suppose, but it makes for a mental picture that sticks.”

  There was some laughter, and blessedly the focus drifted elsewhere. Normally, the nervous chatter about strange happenings during Macbeth productions would have fascinated me, but tonight the various Macbeths who’d accidentally stabbed Macduffs, and vice versa, the Lady Macbeths who’d taken tumbles during the sleepwalking scene—even the patron who’d committed suicide by diving headfirst from the balcony of the Met during a performance of Verdi’s Scottish Opera—it all sounded dull as dust. At one point, Jason—not the world’s most sensitive man—leaned over and asked whether I felt all right.

  I could not look at Ben, but I couldn’t keep myself from stealing the occasional glance at Sybilla. She had eyes only for Ben, whom she proceeded to monopolize all the way through dinner, without once acknowledging Jason’s existence.

  Or mine, for that matter.

  I excused myself at the first possible moment, stumbling blindly down the corridor, finding myself in the deserted drawing room. I stood there for I don’t know how long, numb and hollow, the very air scraping my skin raw. After a while, I heard voices approaching. Footsteps and laughter. The company coming back in for after-dinner coffee, no doubt.

  I wanted neither coffee nor company. A small door near the front of the room led to a steep spiral staircase. I took it. It wound up and up through what I supposed must be one of the corner towers to a cramped landing and from there into a circular room. I stopped just inside. The whole room seemed to be singing. Directly across, a large window perfectly framed the hill. To the right, another window was open to the night, hung with wind chimes that gave the room its voice, from a high silvery ring to a rich dark bass. A wall fountain added the quiet laughter of water. Before a small fireplace stood two comfortable armchairs and a small table, and an antique carved chest sat beneath the hill-filled window. Other than that, the room was empty of furniture.

  It was the chest that riveted my attention. Centered atop it sat an immense silver bowl, flanked on one side by a small rectangular standing mirror in an ornate carved frame, the glass spotted and dim with age. On the other side lay a knife with a black hilt and strange undulating whorls running through the steel of the blade. From even a short distance, it looked exactly like the knife I’d found on the hill. Had Ben given it to Lady Nairn?

  I stepped through the room and bent close. Only then could I see that this knife had no runes running down the blade, and its edge was rounded and smooth. Oddly thick, too. It had never been honed.

  “You’ve found my inner sanctum,” said Lady Nairn over my shoulder, and I jumped. “The pieces at the heart of our collection. Cauldron, mirror, and blade. The inspiration for the production, too. The cauldron is Iron Age Celtic. At least the original is—dug up out of a bog in the Highlands in the eighteenth century. Too fragile for use, though, so what you see is a reproduction. The mirror is Elizabethan. Said to have belonged to the King’s Men.”

  “And the knife?” I asked, my breath tight in my throat.

  “A modern copy.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of one found on the hill.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  She was watching me as if she could see through me to the past and maybe also the future. “I had it made for the stage—”

  “The original.”

  Crossing to the chest, she set it in my hand and motioned me to one of the armchairs by the little fireplace. Turning to sit, I saw on a hook by the door a shimmering length of blue silk, scaled like a dragon. Knife in hand, I stared at it as if at a ghost.

  “Ellen Terry’s Lady M costume,” said Lady Nairn with some amusement. “Or an approximation thereof. Made of silk embroidered with beetle wings. How perfect is that, for a queen who was a witch in all but name? Though perhaps the beetles would disagree.”

  I was still staring at it, openmouthed, remembering the peculiar dry pattering sound of the gown over the body on the hill, when she started her tale. The knife had been found at the end of the eighteenth century, she said, during the first archaeological dig on the hill. It had not turned up in a spadeful of earth, though. Instead, it had been plucked, early one morning, from the grass, where it lay gleaming in the weak sun. How it got there was never discovered. Even to amateur eyes, though, it was clearly ancient, fitted with a black hilt and etched with letters no one could read.

  “What happened to it?” I asked, my mouth dry. “Evil rumors gathered around it—mostly whispers
that it was the blade that had killed Macbeth. The real one. Grim, but it made it valuable. For nearly fifty years, it passed from father to son, as one of the great treasures of the house. Then it was sold to pay a gambling debt. Soon after that, the family very nearly lost the entire estate.”

  She cleared her throat. “Coincidence, no doubt, though not everyone thought so. By the time a son of the house tried to trace the knife, however, it had passed beyond reach. Then, in 1857, William Nairn, my husband’s great-great-grandfather and the paterfamilias at the time, claimed to have found it, once again, just lying in the grass on the hilltop. This raised some eyebrows—not least his wife’s—even at the time, but he never wavered in his story.

  “However he came by the knife, thereafter he would not let it out of his sight. By the following summer, when his son—my husband’s great-grandfather—was born, the knife seemed to have taken an uncanny hold over him that not even a new child could shake. He spent his days watching the play of light across the blade. At night, he grew restless, walking the battlements at all hours, knife in hand, looking toward the hill. His wife began to wonder whether the thing had bewitched him.

  “On the eve of Samhuinn in 1859, he disappeared in a gale. A young servant girl later claimed she had seen him struggling up the hill, though how she could have seen through the lashing rain that night put her story in some doubt. In any case, neither William Nairn nor his knife was ever seen again.

  “To the end of her days, his wife believed that he had been taken by the Good folk, who had reclaimed the knife as theirs and had taken him along in the bargain.”

  The tale faded slowly, lingering long after her voice had stilled. “It was William’s grandson who met the dark fairy on the hill,” she said presently.