Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Outside the apartment night thickened. Fed once again, Lafayette settled down in his chair. Amanda turned on the light in the kitchen and the one on her desk. She forced herself to sit down at the computer, but after she’d checked her e-mail found herself seeing not what was on the screen but what was reflected in it. Maybe if she put on some music. Would Smashing Pumpkins or Radiohead scare him away?

  A chill tightened her nape and shoulders, as though ice slid down her spine. She bolted to her feet just in time to see James Grant appear literally out of thin air.

  Lafayette bristled, his claws snagging the cushion. The drones of the computer and the fans were an undercurrent to the drum roll of Amanda’s pulse. She closed her eyes and opened them again. James was still there, blinking dazedly as though suddenly awakened from sleep.

  His eyes focused on the cat. He scowled, taking an abrupt step forward. Lafayette hissed and dived for the door. The cat flap banged back and forth, slowed, then stopped.

  James turned toward Amanda, one hand on the scabbard, the other extended. His scowl disappeared so quickly Amanda wondered if she’d seen it, consumed by the brilliance of his smile. “Good evening, Miss Witham. It seems as though the wee beast does not care for me.”

  “No accounting for tastes.” She’d look ludicrous curtseying in shorts, so she nodded. “Good evening, Captain Grant.”

  He cocked his brows. His hand remained extended, palm up, fingers inviting. She stepped forward and placed her hand in his. Electricity tingled in her skin. This time instead of bending over her hand he raised it to his lips, so that she felt not only the kiss but the full impact of those smoky blue-gray eyes. Her face grew so warm she knew she’d flushed scarlet—way to go—even though her fingers were cool and dry. The room was no longer cold, but tropical.

  She reclaimed her hand. James’s lips, still parted, went lopsided. His brows tightened. He looked around him with the part cautious, part suspicious air of the children Amanda lectured on chamber pots and feather beds.

  She looked at him—a military historian or re-enactor would give his eyeteeth for this close a look at an authentic uniform.

  James seemed less indefinite now, in manner and physical appearance both. His body only hinted at translucence. She couldn’t see the lamp beside the computer through it, let alone any of the furniture. His clean-cut face was defined as clearly as the intricacies of his clothing. The white ruffles at his throat and wrist shivered as though to a pulse. Buttons, fittings, and epaulette gleamed against his scarlet jacket and its white facings. His waistcoat, revealed by the turned-back skirts of the jacket, was also white. His sporran, the equivalent of a pants pocket, was sleek fur and dangling tassels.

  He wasn’t, unfortunately, wearing the old-fashioned great kilt, several yards of wool pleated and belted around the waist with the rest billowing artistically upward and pinned at the shoulder. While the belted plaid was the classic Highland garment—in the Scottish climate wearing a blanket was a good idea—by the time James joined the army the powers-that-be had recognized that in battle it was a burden. No longer was it feasible for the soldiers to throw off the plaid and run into combat in their shirts the way the old Highlanders had done.

  So James was wearing the small kilt, the lower half of the belted plaid, somewhat fewer yards of blue-green Government tartan pleated and pinned around his waist. While it wasn’t the modern kilt, it was definitely a step in its evolution.

  That the entire outfit with its heavy, multi-layered fabrics was hopelessly impractical for Virginia’s climate, Amanda told herself, didn’t detract one bit from its splendor.

  Despite the detail, however, James wasn’t quite there. Something was odd about his appearance, something was weird, in the truest sense of the word… . That was it. In light of the lamp, every object in the room cast dark shadows. But the pleats of James’s kilt, the deep lapels of his coat, the scabbard against his side cast no shadows at all. He stood on the rag rug with Amanda’s shadow lapping his feet, but he himself didn’t have one. It was like his body, his clothing—his image—were lit from within by a memory of light.

  James looked around. With an effort Amanda didn’t duck.

  “This place is Melrose Hall?” he asked.

  “Yes. The servant’s quarters, more or less.”

  “You are no maidservant.”

  “No. I’m kind of an actress.”

  “Indeed? Have you performed the plays of Mr. Sheridan? When I was last in London his work had earned such plaudits I was obliged to attend School for Scandal three times.”

  “Not that kind of actress.” She shrugged aside the cognitive dissonance of talking to someone who’d seen Sheridan in the original. “I’m like a teacher, acting out lessons.”

  He eyed her clothing. “You astonish me. But then, much of what I’ve seen in the colonies I’ve found astonishing.”

  “How so?”

  “The American militiamen will not fight a proper battle. We charge at them and they run away like dogs. We’ve captured some who have no uniforms, but are garbed in buckskin, like red savages.”

  “Shocking,” said Amanda.

  “Williamsburg Town,” he went on, “might be considered a pleasant village in England, but for the misery of the summer heat, of course.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But I am, Miss Witham.” He stepped closer. “Charlestown, now, is well-favored enough. However, the customs of the country are exceedingly strange. Colonel Lindsay of Balcarres—our commanding officer, a gentleman of fine family and good connections—himself remarked upon the Negro slaves waiting upon table in homes almost as fine as any in Europe.”

  “Most of us think that’s pretty strange, too,” Amanda returned dryly. Lindsay of Balcarres, Charleston—she already knew those names from her research. But she wasn’t about to cut him off in mid-flow. “You’ve been to Charleston?”

  “I regret to say that many good men died at the hands of the rebels in South Carolina, although not so many as died of the sweating sickness.”

  Malaria. “Are all your men from Scotland?”

  “A goodly number are Gaelic speakers from the Highlands, a superstitious lot, but fierce fighters and docile in camp, ever mindful that a good report be made of them to their relatives. Many more will die here in Virginia, I’ll warrant, before we crush this rebellion.”

  “Do you think you’ll win?” Amanda asked with a quickly suppressed grin.

  “If I were obliged to give the orders, and not Lord Cornwallis, I should march our troops onto our ships and return home before another dawn rises in the east. If these poor fools of colonists allow themselves to be misled by the lies of France and Spain, and are bold enough to rebel against His Majesty’s government, then I say let them go, and be damned to them… .” James grimaced and bowed. “I beg your pardon, Miss Witham, I know not where your sympathies lie. With the master of the house, I daresay.”

  Amanda didn’t ask him whether his own relatives had donned the white cockade of Bonnie Prince Charlie and rebelled against His Majesty’s government not long before he was born. “Page Armstrong’s loyalty to—er—the Continental Congress is well-known.”

  “Indeed,” James said graciously, with another bow. “I should now present myself to Earl Balcarres, I suppose, but I do not, I cannot …” He sent a long, dubious look at the computer by the window, shook his head, set his jaw, and turned away.

  Here was a man deep in denial. He knew where he was, but his surroundings weren’t quite right. Amanda’s clothing alone must have thrown him for a heck of a loop. But his pride kept him from betraying his confusion, just as honor made him treat her like a lady even though her clothes sure didn’t make her look like one.

  What should she do? Ask him whether he knew he himself had died in Virginia? Whether he remembered the blow to his chest that had been a shot through his heart? Tell him that two hundred years had passed him by? But as much as she was—figuratively—dying to know why he’d been buried in
the Melrose gardens, asking a ghost about his death had to be the ultimate in bad manners.

  James peered into the dim interior of the bedroom. His left hand continued to rest on the top of the scabbard, his fingers cupping the oval with the family crest. His right hand smoothed the fall of hair from his forehead into the auburn ponytail that curled down his neck. The soldiers of his time had greased their hair, hosting colonies of fleas and lice. Amanda wasn’t sure whether the gentry had been any tidier, but James’s hair, oddly lit as it was, seemed quite clean. She was glad he wasn’t wearing the precious white wig of his portrait.

  His accent was barely recognizable as British—it was a lot flatter than the rounded tones of today’s BBC announcer. And Amanda heard no trace in his voice of the burred Rs and glottal stops of the Scottish dialect. But Robert Burns—James’s contemporary—had raised a few brows by writing in everyday Scots. Aristocrats like James spoke “proper” English.

  “Your soldiers are Gaelic-speakers,” she said. “You can speak Gaelic, then?”

  “Yes, I have the Gaelic. A curious tongue.” He turned back toward Amanda. “Have you seen my sword, Miss Witham?”

  Back to that. “No, I haven’t. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe it was broken.”

  “Fine Stirling steel it is, a weapon I’d be loath to lose. Why, when I applied it to Melrose’s banister it cut deeply into the wood but took no damage itself.” Again he smiled. “My most humble apologies for that, Miss Witham. I was impetuous, even rash, but circumstances demanded action.”

  The legend was true, then. So much for historical cynicism. She could just see him charging up the stairs, rousing his fellows to do battle, like a character in a PBS costume drama. Except for him it was real.

  There was one question she had to ask. “Did you meet Sally Armstrong when you were—ah—here before?”

  “Miss Armstrong,” he said, eyes glinting. “So fair a nymph to spring from the loins of the old Roman, her father. She set her cap at me, she did, but my dolt of a cousin, Archibald, offended her by his forwardness. It was late yesterday evening the Armstrongs left Melrose, to stop with relatives until His Majesty’s troops move onward.” His gleam dulled into uncertainty. He was probably trying to form a definition of “yesterday.”

  That settled that, thought Amanda. Sally really had been attracted to James, Page or no Page. But then, any woman who wasn’t seriously hormone-impaired would be attracted to him. “Archibald Grant is your cousin?” she asked.

  James didn’t answer. He slumped, as though the weight of vulnerability and doubt had gotten too heavy. The odd flat illumination of his face made him look younger than his twenty-odd years. Considerably younger than his two hundred years. He said slowly and thickly, “May I wait upon you again, Miss Witham?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she returned, and caught herself. “Yes, if you please.”

  “Most excellent.” He reached toward her. But his eyes went empty, like a man lapsing into unconsciousness, and he disappeared. Not even the scent of whiskey lingered in the air.

  Amanda fell back against the edge of the desk and held on with both hands. I’m never going to get used to that.

  She was going to have to get used to James’s sudden appearances and departures. She’d asked him back, hadn’t she? Using the excuse of research was all well and good, but it wasn’t the historical details that made her knees weak and sent her corpuscles into somersaults.

  That was what did make relationships, she thought. An intellectual, emotional, physical connection… . What sort of future she’d find in romancing a ghost she couldn’t begin to guess.

  Chapter Eight

  She made quite a picture, Amanda told herself, standing there in her colonial-era gown with a phone pressed to her ear. But since she had a window of only half an hour between the time Carrie arrived at the library and Melrose Hall opened for business, she’d dressed before making her call.

  “Carrie Shaffer,” said the slightly out of breath voice in her ear.

  “Hi, it’s Amanda. You must have just walked in the door. Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize—the sprint for the phone got my blood pumping. What can I do for you?”

  “Tell me if those records have come in from London, yet.”

  “No, what I got was a note saying the personnel files of the Scottish Regiments are at the Scottish United Services Museum in Edinburgh.”

  “Go figure,” said Amanda with a groan.

  “I’ll fax them this morning. What else have you found out about the 71st Highlanders?”

  Between James’ narration of what to him were current events and her late-night net surfing, Amanda was on top of it. “Fraser’s Highlanders. Raised in 1775 by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. His father was the Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, who holds the dubious distinction of having been the last peer of the realm to be beheaded. On Tower Hill, yet.”

  “One of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s cohorts during the Jacobite Rebellion?” Carrie asked.

  “That, plus he was a real scoundrel. In his eighties when it all caught up with him. Anyway, his son went around Scotland raising regiments trying to get back in the good graces of King George. The wee, wee German lairdie.” Amanda sang the refrain of the derisive Jacobite song. “The first Fraser’s Highlanders fought in the French and Indian War in the 1760’s. Our 71st Regiment is the second. They landed in South Carolina in 1779 and were darn near wiped out by malaria. Commander was one Colonel Alexander Lindsay, Lord Balcarres.”

  “Yeah, Martin, be right there,” Carrie said. “Sorry, Amanda, I’ve got a council of war. Overdue book policies. The sweet rolls and coffee are more tempting than the actual meeting, you understand, but I need to go.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Amanda told her with a laugh. “Enough is enough already. Just one more thing. When you fax Edinburgh, see if they know what happened to James Grant’s sword.”

  “That’s a pretty long shot, but I’ll ask. Oh, and Cynthia was in here last night checking out a couple of prints. I suspect she and they will be appearing on your doorstep any minute now.”

  “Much as I’d like to go raise the drawbridge, I guess I’d be better off lowering it. Thanks, Carrie. See you tomorrow.” Amanda turned off the phone and replaced it on its cradle.

  Funny, she’d never been all that interested in military history before. But then, it’d never been so up close and personal before. She’d tossed and turned all night, remembering James’s smooth baritone voice, the bewilderment and pride mingled in his face, the blue-gray eyes opening onto another world. Lafayette, disgruntled, had spent the night on the living room chair and departed through the cat flap as soon as he’d had his breakfast.

  Amanda started her morning round by pausing in front of the portrait of Page in the library. “The old Roman,” James had said. A good description. Page’s granite jaw could have buttressed the Coliseum. No surprise James was intimidated. Even though—or especially since—it had been Sally who had thrown herself at him.

  But, Amanda thought as she turned on the lights over the entrance hall display, James himself had given Page an alibi. Both Armstrongs left Melrose “yesterday evening”—in other words, on the evening before the day James died. Unless Page had sneaked back to erase a blot on his daughter’s reputation.

  James had said something, though, about his dolt of a cousin offending Sally. So why wasn’t Archibald in Page’s gun sights? For a moment Amanda considered James heroically taking a bullet for his cousin. But no. While the enraged-father-as-murderer scenario explained why James had been buried in the garden, it made assumptions about Page Armstrong Amanda simply couldn’t justify.

  She unlocked the front door and walked out into the sunlight just as Wayne arrived at the foot of the steps. “Greetings!” he called. “Look what Mother got from the library, since the miniature of Grant is only from the waist up.” He indicated two framed prints beneath his arm.

  They found space for the pictures at one side of the display flats. “Cool,” Amanda said,
and added to herself, an engraving, no matter how prettily hand-colored, wasn’t nearly as cool as the genuine article.

  “That one’s an officer with the Black Watch,” said Wayne. “Not the right regiment, but the right time period. The other one’s from the right regiment, but from twenty years later, during the Napoleonic wars. At least he gets to wear pants.”

  The soldier’s tartan trousers looked to Amanda like something her father would have worn in the sixties, except they weren’t bell-bottoms. “Kilts are really sexy,” she retorted.

  Wayne guffawed and made a limp-wristed gesture.

  Amanda shot a pointed glance at his knee breeches and silk stockings.

  “Look at those hats,” Wayne went on, oblivious. “Whoa.”

  Both soldiers wore Kilmarnock bonnets, blue woolen cylinders banded by red, green and white checks and adorned with feathers. Maybe it was just as well that while James had died with his shoes and socks on, he’d crossed into another dimension without his hat. “Fashion doesn’t take any prisoners, does it?” Amanda said. “But the Highland soldiers were outstanding fighters, no matter how they dressed.”

  “I’d like to see them tackle an Abrams tank.”

  “Yeah, right.” Amanda turned toward the door.

  Wayne pulled her back again, clasped her shoulders, and bent his face close to hers. “We need to talk, Amanda. Before the others get here.”

  “What else can I possibly say to you, Wayne?” She tried to shrug him off but his hands stayed firm, if very gentle. It was like confronting a giant teddy bear.

  “We’re friends, right?” he asked.

  “Most of the time.”

  “But, you know, that’s a good place to start a relationship, between friends.”