The Dead of Haggard Hall

by Marie Treanor

  I listened to the beat of my own heart, could almost imagine Rose’s beating with it for the same man. “Is that what happened to you?” I whispered.

  “He hurt me; I hurt him; he hurt me… Love in the world is a destructive cycle. Don’t hurt him; don’t anger him.”

  “I’m afraid my very existence angers him.”

  There was a pause. “You’re strong,” she said sadly. “And rare… You upset me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly, flooded suddenly with her sadness. “I want to understand what happened to you, to Martin.”

  “I can’t be here.” With a wrench, she fled from me, and once more I was no wiser about the things I needed to know. She didn’t care about events in the world. She cared about feeling, about Patrick. Probably much as Gideon cared still for me, in a vacuum of memory quite apart from their current existence.

  But there had been no anger in her for Patrick, no talk of forgiveness. I hung on to that as I prepared slowly for bed and went to sleep.

  * * * * *

  It had rained during the night, so the ground was damp beneath my boots, the air fresh and sweet in my nostrils as I walked through the formal gardens towards the summer house. After a lot of soul searching and thinking, I had decided that I would meet Patrick, but on my own terms. I was happy to walk and talk, but I would not go into the summer house with him.

  And if I was wrong, if his only wish was to silence me—well, I needed to know, and I was not entirely unprotected.

  There was no sign of him as I approached the summer house from the circular path, around which tiny lamps had been set into the ground, ready to be lit tonight. The summer house was already decorated for those who might prefer less of a crush than the ballroom, but the doors which ran the length of the little structure, were firmly closed. If Patrick was inside, watching me…

  My spine tingled. I tilted my chin, smoothed my brow for his benefit; and kept walking in a brisk manner, as if this were my morning constitutional, for the benefit of any watchers from the Hall. But I saw no face at the summer house window, and no one slipped through the doors to join me.

  I felt a wry smile form on my lips. He’d made the assignation just to see if I’d come. He was probably watching me with great amusement from his bedroom window, or somewhere else in the house. I didn’t know if I was more relieved or disappointed.

  I kept walking in front of the summer house until I had covered its entire length, then veered around the corner onto a lesser-used path which led around the side of the building. From there, one could walk across a semi-cultivated meadow of wildflowers to the woods. It was a pleasant walk, but I’d make it quick and short.

  I was so distracted by my own wrestling emotions that I almost failed to pick it up: a presence exuding fiercely controlled excitement with an undercurrent of smouldering desire. I was only just able to say, “Good morning, Mr. Haggard,” as I passed the end of the building and kept walking.

  I saw him, though, looking almost entirely disreputable, leaning one shoulder against the back of the summer house. His hair was tangled and unbrushed, his overcoat open to reveal that beneath it he wore only an open-necked shirt and trousers, without tie or coat or waistcoat. And yet even that glimpse of him, like that, waiting for me, set my pulses racing. It wasn’t even fear.

  Footsteps brushed against the gravel behind the summer house, thudded softly in the grass, and then he strode along beside me. At once, he adjusted his pace to mine, making me very aware of his every easy and yet controlled movement, like a tiger stalking its prey, reining in its huge strength in order to achieve its goals.

  And yet he didn’t exude any immediate threat. Perhaps the danger came from me, from my own physical reactions to him. Even now, his presence beside me brought a sweet, insidious excitement. It wasn’t just the brisk exercise that made my heart beat faster.

  “Good morning,” he said at last. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “I didn’t think you would.” With conscious courage, I turned my head and gazed at him. As if he’d risen in a hurry, dark stubble still clung to his lean jaw and chin. In all, he looked a little rough, and yet the impression was not displeasing to me. Not remotely. It spoke of intimacy, of the way he’d look when first getting out of bed in the morning, all rumpled and sleepy…and satisfied after making love to—

  Oh no, wrong direction, I told myself with a hint of panic, hastily squashed as I stared determinedly ahead towards the wood.

  “Why would I not come when I invited you?” he asked.

  “Was it an invitation?” I marvelled. “I wasn’t even sure I’d understood you. Which explains my walking in this direction from curiosity.”

  “I see,” he said gravely. “I wanted some privacy to clear the air between us.” His lips curved upwards. He turned his head towards me. “I suspect curiosity motivates a lot of your actions, even your coming to the Hall.”

  “True, although indigence helped there, as you know.” I held his gaze, although he showed no signs of wishing to look anywhere but at me.

  “And you do know that I think no less of you because you work for your living?”

  I curled my lip. “But you do presume to judge the work I do, because you’ve already judged the work my mother does.”

  “Your mother doesn’t work. She’s an unprincipled charlatan taking advantage of silly women like Lady Fairford.”

  His blatancy took my breath away. “Do you know how many misjudgments you made in that one statement?” I demanded. “For your information, my mother is only half charlatan!”

  He blinked. “How can you be half a charlatan?”

  It was a good question, and I almost regretted saying it. However, all my instincts told me only honesty would work between us, although I was a trifle hazy on the purpose of that work.

  “Aren’t we all?” I retorted. “What’s the point of having talents we can use to earn a living if we don’t display them to best advantage? Have you never written something you don’t altogether believe, just to get work, or to prove to someone you can do it?”

  A frown formed and deepened between his brows. His eyes searched mine. “Is that what she does?”

  “My mother can talk to the dead,” I said flatly. “They don’t always want to talk to her, so she does her homework, her research, so that if she needs to, she can make things up.”

  “Is that how she knew my name?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  He blinked. “Don’t you know?”

  “No. My mother and I never discussed you. She didn’t invite you; she didn’t know who you were. I didn’t know who you were until you turned up here. Why—”

  “Guess,” he interrupted. “How did she know my name?”

  Somewhere, I was secretly glad it had bothered him all this time. I said, “I would guess a spirit told her. There were swarms of them there that night, and I suspect some of them came with you. You exude emotion like a beacon. Taken with my mother’s gifts and my presence, you’d have drawn them like proverbial moths to a flame.”

  He didn’t like that. A muscle twitched at the corner of his set mouth. “Or Lady Fairford could have told her. Is that what you do too? ‘Display’ your gifts with little sideshows, guaranteed to garner you some attention? A lot of attention.”

  “No,” I said tiredly. There was no point in saying more.

  “Your sideshow at the school cost you your job,” he observed.

  “Well, I was careless,” I said perversely. “A moment of distraction let the spirit in.”

  “And sealed your fate?” he suggested, as though trying for mockery he couldn’t quite achieve.

  “As you say.”

  He looked away from me, gazing a few yards ahead, where the meadow track entered the woods. “You care for Emily, don’t you?” he said abruptly.

 
“How could I not?”

  “It’s for that, not avarice, you put up with the insults heaped upon you in this house.”

  I laughed. “Hardly heaped, sir. Or if they have been, I’ve been too thick-skinned to notice them.”

  He strode faster, jerking one arm with an air of suppressed violence. “I don’t believe that either,” he said grimly. “It seems I believe instead in your generosity. Does it extend even to me?”

  “Why should I be generous to you?” I asked with genuine curiosity.

  A sardonic smile flickered across his lips. “Why indeed?” His gaze, intense and difficult, burned into my face. I thought he would say more and waited, intrigued, but instead a frown suddenly dragged down his brow. “Why do you wear so much black? For your husband?”

  Taken aback, I could only nod.

  “You miss him so much?”

  I nodded again.

  “When did he die?”

  “A little over two years ago,” I managed.

  “Of what?”

  “Cholera.”

  He halted, forcing me to stop too from politeness. “Mr. Gideon,” he said.

  I smiled. “Some of his parishioners called him that.”

  “I met him. I met him once when we were trying to publicize public health and the water supplies. I think he was already ill.”

  Again, I looked away. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I began to walk on.

  “I liked him,” came Patrick’s voice beside me. “Which is rare. I don’t normally care for men of God. I’m sorry if my stupidity made it harder to bear.”

  “No,” I said, covering my surprise in his apology. “I am used to bearing it now. As are you, I think. But yours still eats at you.”

  “Ah, well, I have more than grief to bear. You, at least, must have the comfort of knowing you’d done all you could do for your husband.”

  He spoke sardonically, as if hiding from habit, but I was almost afraid to breathe because he’d brought the subject up. It seemed he really did want to clear the air, for whatever reason

  I turned to him. “What happened?”

  “To Rose?” He sighed. “I don’t know. We’d…quarrelled. I was self-righteously ignoring her, so although I refused to admit she could have killed herself, I’ve no real idea what was going on in her mind at the time. I know she was unhappy. She could have fallen in a distraction caused by that unhappiness. Or maybe she really couldn’t bear it. Either way, I was the cause of it.”

  “And you live with it every day.”

  A crooked smile tugged at his lips. “Are you trying for absolution? I said you were generous.”

  “I can’t give absolution, only common sense. Living with that kind of guilt may be a small price to pay for murder. But it’s a high one for being young and hurt.”

  His startled gaze flew to mine. It was something he would have to think about on his own. But it had given me another thought.

  “What happened to Rose colours everyone’s thoughts, especially yours, about Martin’s death. What if that were deliberate?”

  Patrick’s frown deepened. “You mean the manner of Martin’s death was meant to distract everyone from what really happened to Arthur?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve,” he protested.

  I smiled. “You only think you don’t. The signs are there for anyone who cares for you. Or who cares to look,” I added hastily.

  “Like you?” he said, lashing out at me for the idea that his feelings were not completely private. “Sensing my emotions?”

  “I saw you,” I confessed. “The night you arrived here, in the storm. I saw you kneeling in the rain.”

  His gaze slid away from mine. I was sure he would deny it. But: “A moment of weakness,” he said.

  One I was shamelessly prepared to take advantage of. The stakes were too high not to. I said, “You didn’t come from the station, did you? You were already in the area.”

  Of course, I wanted him to blurt out the truth, even if he never spoke to me again afterwards, but I was prepared to be abused for underhand tactics and learn nothing. What I didn’t expect was the catch in his breath that amounted to laughter, or the sardonic humour gleaming in his eyes as he halted again and turned to me so quickly that I stepped back only to be brought up short against a tree.

  “Yes, I was,” he agreed. “I stayed the night before as the guest of our neighbour, Sir Neil Jordan, with whose wife, Caroline, I’ve been conducting a quite torrid illicit affair.” He came closer, hemming me in. “Are you shocked?”

  “Perhaps the question should be, am I gullible?” I retorted.

  “If you only read the wrong kind of newspapers,” Patrick mocked, “you’d be more inclined to believe. On the other hand, Caroline would take it as a kindness if you didn’t repeat it.”

  Although not quite touching me, he really was far too close. Even in the cool of the morning, I could feel the heat from his body, inhale his distinctively male, clean odour, rakishly tinged by last night’s excesses. In truth, I found it difficult to breathe.

  “Then why tell me?” I managed.

  “To see if it would turn you back against me. Am I under suspicion again? Or does my crime of adultery absolve me?”

  “I told you, I don’t do absolution. If you want forgiveness, you should apply to Sir Neil. If it’s true.”

  He considered me. “You think I couldn’t seduce a Society beauty?”

  I thought he could seduce anyone he wished to. Even I, who should have been appalled by his confession, was fighting instead a more powerful tug of arousal, all mixed up with quite inappropriate jealousy.

  “Your conquests don’t interest me,” I snapped.

  “There, we have something else in common,” he said obscurely. “May I kiss you now, or should I wait for the romance of the ball?”

  I stared at him. “Neither.”

  “Because of Caroline? Or me?”

  “Neither,” I said. “Because of me.”

  “Oh, splendid answer,” he approved, drawing closer, angling his head so that my lips wanted to part in preparation. “Except you’re breathing too fast, and I’m fairly sure your heart is galloping.”

  Desire, his and mine, rolled over me in waves, spreading heat and wicked excitement.

  “So is yours,” I said huskily.

  “Oh, I know that. Do I have to accept ‘neither’ as your final answer?”

  “You shouldn’t play games with a powerless woman in the employ of your family.”

  “I know that too. How fortunate you’re not remotely powerless.”

  Wasn’t I?

  “But you’re avoiding an answer,” he observed. “Which is one, of a sort…” His breath hitched. “I’m not sure I can wait for this evening.” His lips almost touched mine, and the butterflies in my stomach lurched and dived. “Only if I kiss you, I won’t want to stop. How would you feel about that, Barbara? We have a tree to support us…”

  I wanted quite hard to be indignant, but everything in me leapt with excitement at his words. Part of me yearned to be that bold, uninhibited woman. But if she did lurk somewhere inside me, she needed to be fed with more than he was offering.

  I said, “You’re still mistaking me for a trollop.”

  He blinked, expelling his breath in laughter on my lips. “You shouldn’t even know such words. Why do I like you so much?”

  Faint praise, you might think, from a man who wanted to make love to you. Or at least kiss you. But for some reason, his words melted me in warmth. He liked me.

  Or said he did.

  “I still won’t let you kiss me,” I whispered.

  His lips, so close to mine, stretched into a smile. “Tonight it is, then.”

  He stepped back, offering me his arm like a gentleman, as if he
hadn’t just made most improper advances. His gleaming eyes told me the irony was not lost on him. This time it was I who tried to hide a laugh. I took his arm and turned our steps firmly back towards the hall.

  He said, “Have you or Emily heard any more ghostly noises?”

  I tried to adjust my brain to reality and thought, rather than sheer feeling. “You mean the unghostly whispering?” I replied at last. “No. Obviously, whoever it was knew we were on to them when we chased them physically through the house. I suspect if we only found out who that was, it would shed light on Martin’s death too. And the falling statue.”

  “Maybe.” He kicked a stone aside from the path in a distracted kind of a way. “Years ago, before George’s wedding, when the ballroom was being repaired and refurbished, my uncle spoke to the architect about old plans of the house which showed every addition made to it since pre-Tudor times. He said something about hollow walls.”

  I felt my eyes widen at the possibilities of that as I gazed up at him. “Hollow walls? Is there access?”

  He shrugged. “My uncle thought so, but I didn’t live here by then. I never looked.”

  “But it could explain much more easily how Emily heard those noises in lots of different places. More than the chimneys would have to have been used. Do these plans really exist?”

  “They did,” Patrick said ruefully. “In a bound book. But when I looked for it in the office, I couldn’t find it. I’ve been looking in the library too.”

  “Drat this ball,” I said impatiently. “Until it’s over, there will be no opportunity to make a proper search. We’ll have to wait until Sunday afternoon, when most of the guests should be gone.”

  We emerged through the trees to see a coach and horses trotting up the curving driveway towards the house. It was a very smart equipage. A crest on the side glinted in the sun, and the horses were all gleaming black.

  Patrick halted suddenly, as if taken by surprise. Some powerful jumble of emotion exploded out of him, blasting me hard enough to make me gasp. Instinctively, he grasped my hand on his arm.