Page 7 of Haunted
“Not all of them. But you are right. I am wary of contempt.”
She looked gratifyingly startled. “Do you deserve it?”
“My friends would say not.” From the corner of his eye, some movement distracted him, but when he glanced around, there was nothing there but the flickering candles. He felt again the shiver of memory, of an old, long-buried sensitivity.
“Someone walked over your grave,” she observed. “A peculiar English saying.”
“It is,” he agreed, and began a humorous debate on the derivation of the phrase. It made her laugh, as he intended, andfor a little they happily compared English, Latin, and modern Italian oddities.
Inevitably, the conversation broadened and led down unexpected paths that were both intriguing and fun. Until he realized there had been no thunder for an hour and the rain had receded. He rose with strange reluctance and bowed.
“Once again, my thanks for your kindness and for your company this evening. I will bid you goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she responded, standing with him. “But if there was any kindness on my part, I believe you have repaid it.”
“I wish I could.” He wanted to take her hand and kiss it, but in the circumstances, it would have been highly inappropriate. Even less appropriate than imposing on her hospitality unchaperoned.
Since there was nothing else to do, he walked away and crossed the hall to the stairs, where he lit one of the small candles and found his way back to the bedchamber in which he had changed.
A fire had been lit there, taking the chill off the wet autumn evening, an additional thoughtfulness he had not expected from the ancient manservant. Wondering about her life here, about her son and her talented late husband, he prepared for bed.
Only as he was about to blow out the final candle and lay his head on the pillow did he become aware of the tension within the room.
George was sensitive to what he thought of as “atmosphere,” stemming from his childhood, when he had so often failed to understand people or the expressions behind their words. Instead, he had relied on undercurrents that he could not name, until he had found his way back to the safety of his own comfortable space.
Only much later had he come to understand that the safety lay not in the physical room but in himself. Curiosity hadoutweighed fear and false duty, enabling him to consider many more thoughts and actions and begin to live as he always should have. However, some atmospheres were still best avoided—like the raucous inn—because they jangled his nerves in acute discomfort.
There was no noise in the bedchamber except his own breathing, the rustling of the bedclothes, the occasional gentle movement of the glowing coal in the guarded fireplace. And yet there was hostility here. Like his father’s when he was disappointed. Like Nurse when she could not get her gin, or his brother Hugh when the numbers did not go as he wanted them to. And yet there was no one but George in the room.
So who was angry with him?
His skin prickled. Was someone else in the room? One of the two servants? Mark?
No. No one had come in—the door creaked, and he would have heard. He was alone.
But he did sensesomething: a presence, an emotion, perhaps? Strong emotion.
A breeze blew over his skin, raising the hair on his arms and his head. He almost leapt out of bed, except that he could see from the glow of the coal there was no one else in the room.
Old houses were drafty.
He closed his eyes and tried to relax. He could hear music. A violin, playing something wild yet elegant. Vivaldi? He smiled because it must have been Francesca, even though her favored instrument was not the violin but the pianoforte.
His eyes flew open. Francesca had gone to her own chamber. He had heard her footsteps on the stairs and the passage, the closing of her bedroom door. The music was not loud, but it did not come from the room below,orfrom a room along the passage. It sounded too close, too intimate, in this very room…
Or perhaps just in his head. Was he as mad as his father had claimed?
The music was beautiful, the playing exquisite, and yet it came with some kind of threat. Anger. A warning. He stared toward the glow in the fireplace.
“Percival,” he murmured.
The fire flared into a single flame that quickly died. And just for an instant, a man’s figure seemed to form in the darkness, wispy and insubstantial.
“I won’t hurt her,” George said. “I won’t hurt either of them.”
Abruptly, the atmosphere eased, and the imagined figure vanished as though it had never been—which it probably hadn’t. George was alone in a warm, comfortable room. Even the wind no longer howled outside, and the rain was gentle, intermittent against the windowpanes.
He felt foolish, talking to an imaginary ghost. And yet in some ways it made sense that something of Percival lingered in this house, watching over his wife and child. It was as if Percival had identified himself to George with the music—however that was even possible—and made his warning plain. If George had intended any action against anyone in the house, he would undoubtedly have dropped it.
