Page 44 of Giving Up The Ghost
“Perhaps he’s forgotten.”
“Charlotte!” I shot to my feet. “I’m sorry, Simeon, we must be going. This has been a lovely visit and I hope you have a nice rest today.”
“When the first one died,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken, “I thought it was murder. I’d had a dream, you see. I always dream of the dead. That’s how it works for me. Right, Michel?”
His gaze pulled me in.He knows,I realized.He knows I’m not my grandfather. What the hell is he doing?“Yes,” I murmured. “I suppose so.”
“The others came, too. I was never one of the special ones Violet liked best, eh? No, she liked her circle to be afraid of her. To be easy, simple. Dreams. Those weren’t her forte. So, I was never in their number. Which is probably why I’m still here, hm?” His gaze slid to Charlotte, who had gone very still, expression avid and open. “How is the house, Michel? Is it still safe? Quiet?”
“Ah. Yes. Yes, it is,” I murmured.
He nodded, closing his eyes. “I should rest now, I promised Alice I’d dream of her again. I miss her. Been twenty years and it’s just like yesterday.”
Charlotte finally stood, but reluctantly. The carer moved into view in the doorway, her smile polite but firm. “It’s time,” she said softly. “Mr. Greely really does need his rest.”
Charlotte looked as if she might argue, but finally nodded and let us be led out into the front entry. “He doesn’t get many visitors,” the carer said as she opened the door for us. “Spends most of the day talking to himself or people who aren’t there. I can’t say how much longer he has with us, just that he’s a lonely old man. If you can come by again…” She trailed off.
Charlotte smiled. “I certainly will.”
I just nodded, tight-lipped, and followed Charlotte to her car. She was scowling when I got in and buckled my seatbelt. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem is you didn’t eventryto get him to talk! I’ve visited him three times, and every time, he’s asking for Michel, where’s Michel… You look enough like him that I hoped he’d finally open up, but you scotched it! It’s like you’re trying to keep me from finding out the secret!” Squeezing her eyes shut, she took several deep, shuddering breaths before letting out a growled invective between clenched teeth, fingers tight on the steering wheel. Almost like she wished it was my throat. I pressed back against the door, wondering how fast I could get out, how far I could run before she caught up to me. Would the carer let me back in the house? Could I get as far as the next cottage before Charlotte caught me?
She stopped suddenly, took a deep, shaking breath, and smiled. “There. That is out of my system. Okay. Okay.” She started the engineer and took another deep breath. “Now. This has been a flop, yes? You did not understand. I cannot be mad at you. It’s the fault of those two you hang about with. They’ve dulled your senses. Made you oblivious, yes? Simeon Greely was close to your grandfather.”
“And you, what, thought he could give you some arcane occult secrets?” I asked, disbelief clear in my tone.
Well, I say clear. Charlotte seemed not to pick up on it at all. “Yes! Talk to him, let him think you are Michel! Ugh!” She threw up her hands and called me a few choice epithets in French before pulling out into the lane. “It is fine. It is fine. We’ll come back tomorrow, maybe the day after, yes? Now that you know the score, as they say. Now! Something truly wonderful. I have been keeping a secret from you, Oscar. But I think it is time to see it.”
“A secret?” That can’t be good. “What is it?”
“Ah, wait and see! As soon as we get back, yes? You will think it is wonderful!”
Jesus. Maybe Ezra was right, and we should’ve stayed in London after all.
* * *
Julian and Ezrawere quiet when we returned, the only sound was a murmur of music from Ezra’s room. There were signs they’d been out and about though—a teacup on the drain that hadn’t been there when we’d left, one of Ezra’s earbuds on the kitchen table. If Charlotte noticed, she didn’t say a thing. She strode towards the cellar door, a lilt in her step that made it almost a skip. Her entire mood had changed seemingly overnight, from anxious and strange to almost perky, murmuring to herself as she fussed with the door, giving a giggle as she bowed me through ahead of her. “Wait for me here, d’accord? I need to get this from the office.”
She darted for the old office at the end of the hall, a small cube of a room that had, at one time, been a large storage cupboard that was later repurposed into the office for the housekeeper in the early 1900s and then, much later, a sort of catch-all room my grandmother referred to as the office despite never using it as such. I hesitated, but when she didn’t come back immediately, decided to head down the steps. The cellar lights were on, bright white and glaring. The boxes had been pulled away from the wall at the far end, set in a neat stack on the floor just this side of the silvery stone line inlaid into the flooring. Hesitating at the foot of the stairs, I called out softly, “I’m back. Hello. Let’s try to be civil today, shall we?”
“Here we are,” Charlotte sang out, clutching a sturdy, flat box to her chest as she made her way carefully down the steps. “Sit, sit!” She waved me towards the low wooden bench that ran along the wall, exposed now that the boxes were moved. She hurried ahead of me, choosing a particular spot with great deliberation and setting the box down beside her. I took up a seat on the other side of the box. “This is the only one of its kind,” she murmured, stroking the box lovingly. “It took a great deal of effort and trouble to not only procure this, but also to get it out of France.”
“I feel like you’re about to offer me uncut coke here. What is it?”
With a wiggle of excitement, she lifted the lid to the box and set it aside. “Ta da!”
The fragile manuscript was in a thick, dark hand that was nearly impossible for me to read.
No, it wasn’t the writing that made it difficult to discern—it was the language. “That’s… medieval French?”
“Not quite medieval. Twelve hundreds,” she breathed. “This is our ancestor Clothilde. She spoke with angels, according to the testimony here. She was touched by God after falling from a great height. Though some accounts,” she carefully lifted the topmost page to reveal another beneath, in a slightly less fancy script but the same style. “Some accounts, she did not fall. She simply spoke to them as a matter of course. Her father was a man named William Fellowes, who had come from what’s now Southern England to France as a squire to a knight who’d died in some skirmish or other.”
“She spoke with angels,” I murmured. “But it wasn’t angels, was it?”
“Of course not,” Charlotte scoffed. “Angels! Pah! No, she spoke with the dead. Many became devoted to her.” Another sheet, this one smaller than the others, less grand. “Her greatest sin wasn’t the ability to speak with the dead but rather, the fact people loved her so much she developed a rather cult-like following. She was executed by hanging on September 1, 1227.”
“And the others,” I pointed to the boxes down the way, the earliest ones. “They were persecuted too. And were like me.”
