by Tamara Berry
I have a dozen other things to say to her—all of them sharp, most of them antagonistic—but Ashley speaks up before I have a chance to utter any.
“She’s right,” he says. Like Sid, he’s taken this last bit of information to heart. His face has grown pale and his expression taut, the silent film star at his most forlorn. “It’s always children who suffer the most.”
Naturally, Birdie finds this an ideal opportunity to be ghastly. “Children will continue to suffer,” she says. “Until Gloriana is appeased, the descendants of the Stewart line will fall victim to her wrath. No child is too young, no babe too innocent.”
As far as I’m concerned, this is the final straw. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of, but cursing children isn’t one of them.
“Birdie, if you don’t snap out of your trance this instant, I’m going to call on the power of the Great Goddess to remove you from this room.” I kick the leg of her chair again and lower my voice to a whisper only she can hear. “And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to call on the power of Otis Stewart to lend me his aid instead. I’ll tell him exactly what you just said and how you said it. You decide which approach you think is more likely to succeed.”
My words strike home. Birdie’s posture becomes less rigid, her eyes once again fixed on the world around her.
I turn to face Sid and Ashley. “Now. I know you’ve been through a lot, but I’d really appreciate it if you continued your story. The sooner I can get to work locating this treasure of yours, the sooner we can lay all this to rest.” I take a deep breath but a short one, fearful that to pause for even a second will give Birdie an opportunity to get going again. “I take it that your family’s piratical history included the theft of Gloriana’s, uh, Burden? At which the point the curse transferred itself to you?”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes, that was it exactly.” It takes Sid a moment to return to the topic at hand, but she makes an admirable show of corralling her thoughts. “It was soon discovered that the only way to prevent the curse from killing everything and everyone was to hide it—to protect it. The gold can’t be spent or invested, can’t be placed in a museum or even in a bank for safekeeping. We’re only allowed to be its caretakers. Nothing more.”
It sounds like a terrible waste of gold to me, but I’m willing to play along. For now.
“Otis said that no one has seen it in decades. Is that true?”
Sid shoots her brother a scared, anxious look. When she speaks, her voice is hollow. “Yes. Ashley and I saw it years ago, but only once.”
“Once was enough,” Ashley says bitterly.
Although I don’t have any of Birdie’s insider information, I’m able to put the pieces of this conversation into a neatly fitted puzzle. I may not have been fed Otis’s tragic backstory or told about the pregnant wife he seems to have lost in a boating accident. I might not know where Glenn Stewart kept his best wine reserves or the entirety of every curse and haunting that has ever plagued the United Kingdom. What I do know, however, is what it’s like to lose everything that matters in one awful, catastrophic swoop.
“How did she die?” I ask, my voice slightly cracking. “Your mother?”
There’s no surprise in either Sid’s or Ashley’s expression. Whether because Birdie has inured them to the mysteries of the sixth sense, or they simply don’t have enough in them to care anymore, all they bear is heavy resignation.
“Pancreatic cancer,” Sid says. She hugs the post of the bed as if to brace herself. “It hit violently and suddenly. She passed within a month of her diagnosis.”
I nod my understanding and refrain from offering the token sympathies that rise to my lips. My own mother passed away when I was eighteen, taken in the car accident that also robbed me of my sister, Winnie. Words did little to help me then, and they’re equally useless now.
Unless, of course, they’re coming from Winnie herself.
“How old were you at the time?” I ask instead.
Ashley answers for them both. “Sid was thirteen. I was twelve. We were both old enough to have outgrown looking for buried treasure, but we were home on school holiday and bored to tears.”
“We thought it would be fun,” Sid adds. “An adventure.”
“Some adventure,” Ashley sniffs.
Sid looks to me as if for absolution. “We were so young,” she explains. “And we figured it would be a game—just make-believe, you know? We’d grown up hearing about the curse, but we didn’t actually believe it.”
Ashley gives up his position near the fireplace and begins pacing the room. His steps are long and firm—at direct odds with the lithe, boyish lines of him. “We knew right away what we had done,” he says. “Father never blamed us for her illness or her death, but he vowed that no one would ever find the treasure again—not that either of us looked for it after that. We learned our lesson the first time.”
Sid sags against the bedpost. “And that was it, really. We knew the coins were hidden somewhere on Airgead Island, because Father told us it was too dangerous to keep them anywhere else. As long as they stay isolated here, the world is safe from the curse. It’s our duty—our burden—to continue to watch over them. It’s the only way to keep it from hurting people.”
I do some rapid mental calculations. Queen Elizabeth I died in the early sixteen hundreds, which means they’ve been sitting on this curse for well over four hundred years. I’ve worked with some old ghosts in my day, but never anything like this. Four centuries is an awfully long time for fear to hold fast, for one family to bear the weight of keeping superstition alive. It’s also a long time for no one to cash in on a treasure that sounds to be worth a small fortune. Surely even cursed gold could be melted down and repurposed for general resale?
“It would have been fine like that,” Ashley says. He takes another long-strided turn about the room. “It could have stayed hidden forever. It should have stayed hidden forever.”
I don’t want to interrupt the flow of the story by asking questions, so it’s just as well that Sid takes any remaining guesswork out of it. She catches my eye. “As he got older, Father started to develop fears about what would happen to the gold once he died,” she explains. “Ashley and I, we don’t . . . It’s so far to come and so inconvenient to travel. It’s no wonder he started to get strange notions in his head.”
Ashley chuffs a bitter laugh. “You mean it’s no wonder that someone started putting strange notions in his head.”
Sid frowns. “We don’t know that for sure, Ashley. It’s only a guess.” To me, she adds, “A few weeks before he died, Father announced that he’d come up with an ideal hiding place. We tried to talk him out of moving it, and I thought we’d succeeded, only—”
“—only he drowned,” Ashley finishes for her. His lips form a flat line. “A man born and reared on the sea, who lived his entire life with one foot on land and another in a boat, drowned in all of six inches of water in the bathtub.”
“Ashley . . .”
“What? It’s the truth. If the gold was still here, then none of this would have happened. But it did happen. It is happening.” He turns to me, his eyes glittering in the candlelight. “Someone took it. It’s the only explanation I can think of. Whoever convinced Father to move the gold must have been watching to see where he put it. They’re out there somewhere—selling it, spending it—and we’re the ones paying the price.”
Sid, apparently, is done arguing. She sighs and takes her lower lip between her teeth.
“And until we have it back, we’re all at risk.” Ashley glances around the room, his gaze pausing meaningfully on each face. “We have to find it and bring it back to the island, or one of us will be next.”
As much as I love a melodrama playing out before my eyes, I take umbrage at that last part. “No one is going to die,” I say with a stern warning look at Birdie lest she take it into her head to start doomsaying again. “For one thing, I’m here, and I have yet to lose a single client. For another .
. .”
For another, it’s starting to feel as though what we’re dealing with is less like a centuries-old curse and more like a modern-day murderer. I wasn’t here when Glenn Stewart died, obviously, and I haven’t had a chance to scrounge up his autopsy report, but I’d be mightily interested to know the details of that final bath of his.
Like Otis pointed out, I’m a woman of sense. That sense is telling me that however fun it is to weave tales of ancient curses and threats of death hanging overhead, the much more likely possibility is that someone decided they wanted that gold for themselves—and that they’d stop at nothing to get their hands on it. It wouldn’t be enough to convince Glenn to move the treasure and pillage the new hiding space; if they wanted to get away with the crime, then Glenn couldn’t be around to put two and two together afterward.
However, I can hardly say any of this out loud. Not only am I working on pure conjecture at this point, but I doubt there’s any way I’ll be able to convince this family that their underlying problem is plain, ordinary greed. They’ve given this curse so much power over their lives, allowed it to dictate so many of their actions, that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of us could sprain an ankle on a slippery rock, and these two would most likely assume it was caused by ancient supernatural powers instead of the fallibility of human joints.
“For another,” I say, thinking quickly, “an entire month passed between your father’s death and Harvey’s. However powerful this curse is, it’s not a fast-moving one. We have plenty of time before we need to start worrying.”
As if on cue, the lightning outside cracks once again, this time followed closely by a boom of angry thunder. Since we’re already without power, there’s not much the elements can do to harm us, but that doesn’t stop Sid and Ashley from falling prey to their worst fears.
I catch Birdie’s eye over the top of Sid’s swooning head. Do something, I mentally will her. Say something. All the calm wisdom I can muster isn’t going to help if Birdie sits there pretending like I’m the only person in the room who understands the true state of affairs around here. She’s intelligent—and perceptive—enough to have reached the same conclusion as me.
In fact, there’s something about the tilt to her head, the way she allows our eyes to meet and hold, that makes me think she shares my suspicions about Glenn’s real fate.
“You two are absolutely right,” Birdie says as she rises to her feet. She places herself in front of the now-sputtering candelabra, which has the effect of silhouetting the drapes of her figure in a perfectly ghoulish way. “The sooner we find that gold, the better it will be for all of us.”
That’s not quite what I had in mind, but Birdie’s speech has the effect of drawing Sid’s attention, so I consider it a plus.
But then she speaks again. “It’s not a good idea to let Gloriana flitter about this castle for much longer. If we don’t get a handle on her soon, there’s no telling what horrors she’ll unleash.”
It’s all I can do not to heave a despairing sigh. I really wish Birdie would stop inventing additional ghosts for us to conjure up. We’re only on the first day, but between Glenn, Gloriana, and Harvey, she’s promised a total of three spirits. I have no idea how many special effects she can come up with on the fly, but until I get my hands on my own belongings, there’s no way I can keep that kind of pace.
Sid turns to her with the first look of hope she’s shown since we entered this room. “So you can do it?” she asks. “You can talk to Father and ask him what happened to the treasure?”
Birdie lifts her chin. “It won’t be easy, especially now that I know what it is we’re up against, but I’ll be able to contact him. You have my word on that. When Birdie White comes to your aid, you can rest assured that the outcome will be a happy one.”
Now that the guarantee has been offered and accepted—which, by the way, is a terrible practice in a business like this one—Ashley loses some of his fear. It’s replaced by a look of interest.
“How did you know to come to our aid?” he asks. “Sid wrote to Nicholas, asking him to send Madame Eleanor, but no one else knows of our troubles. If she didn’t bring you . . . ?”
Not even a pointed question like this has the ability to discompose Birdie.
“Your father visited me in a dream,” she says in her musically intoned, dramatic way. “I was called to support you—and dear Ella, of course—in your hour of need. How else would I have known to be on that particular train at that particular time?”
Dear Ella has some questions of her own on that subject, but she knows better than to ask them. If Birdie didn’t out-and-out lie in response, she’d most likely spin it into some tale designed to make me look like a fool.
“How, indeed?” I echo. Birdie might be beating me at my own game, but I’m not ready to admit defeat just yet. I turn my attention to Sid. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to start with a tour of the castle and the island grounds to get my bearings. Birdie, you’re more than welcome to come along, but I imagine you’re already familiar with the layout.”
In fact, I wouldn’t put it past her to have memorized the blueprints weeks ago.
To her credit, Birdie doesn’t take any umbrage at my words. She merely bestows a magnanimous smile on me before turning an even more magnanimous one on Sid and Ashley. “By all means, take dear Ella on her tour,” she says. “I’m sure this is all a bit new and unusual for her. I’m going to reach out to my spirit guide and see if he has any insight.”
It’s all I can do to keep myself from groaning out loud. That makes four spirits now. Four.
“Your spirit guide?” Sid echoes.
“Oh, yes. Montague is always communicative in situations like this. He adores family entanglements. In fact, he helped me connect Lady Gainsborough with her grandmother just last month. You may have read about it in the papers.”
This commentary appears to impress the company. I don’t know if it’s the noble name-dropping that does it, or if it’s the confidence with which she utters it, but Birdie White knows her audience.
“Oh, my,” Sid murmurs. “And what, exactly, will this Montague do?”
In this, as in all things, Birdie has an answer ready. “All spirit guides are different. Some are the ghosts of those who have gone before us; others are heavenly beings. My Montague is one of the former. He’s good at seeking out information and connecting me with people and services in the great hereafter.”
“Like a helpful hotel concierge,” I agree in bland innocence.
Birdie doesn’t miss my sarcasm. She turns to me with her brows soaring high. “Exactly so. What did you say the name of your spirit guide is, dear? Or don’t you have one?”
It doesn’t behoove me to rise to the bait. I’m better than that—better, I’m almost certain, than Bridget Wimpole-White. It makes me odiously self-consequential to say that, I know, but it’s true. If I can’t out-medium this woman, with her tired tricks and overdrawn sentiments, then I’m not worthy of the title bestowed on me by the powers that be.
“I do have one, actually,” I say. “And like your Montague, she falls into the first category.”
Any triumph I might feel at getting the best of Bridie is flattened by the voice that immediately fills my ears. Ellie, don’t, Winnie says. This isn’t a good idea.
I know it isn’t, and I wish I had the strength of character not to give in, but what can I say? I’m only human, after all.
“Her name is Winnie.”
Birdie’s eyebrows disappear into her hairline. “Winnie?” she echoes. “How quaint.”
Even though I know I should stop there, refuse to fall any deeper into this hole of my own making, I don’t. There’s something about the way she’s playing Sid and Ashley—the way she’s using them—that makes me acutely uncomfortable. I know it’s not the most honorable work in the world, feigning a connection with the great beyond for personal gain, but I’ve always believed that my services have real value.
&
nbsp; I can help this family, I’m sure of it. If not to find the gold, then at least to break the idea that it wields some kind of supernatural power over them, to prove to them that the tragedies that have recently befallen them are of human—not ghostly—origin.
And Winnie is going to help me.
“It’s short for Winifred,” I say tightly. “Winifred Wilde. She’s my sister. Or, rather, she was my sister. She died last year.”
I can tell that this news takes Birdie by surprise. Unless I’m very much mistaken, it also impresses her. Her brows come back down. “A family connection,” she muses. “How unusual.”
She wants to say more on the subject, but Sid—either with profound insight or with a desire to get on with her day—forestalls her. “I’d love to take you around myself, Madame Eleanor, but I’ve got to see Elspeth about the menus for the rest of the week. Ashley, could you . . . ?”
“I’m going to head out and help Otis with the generator.” He shakes his head and sighs in a way that alerts the entire room that another quote is imminent. “‘Let us be men, not monkeys minding machines.’ ”
No one seems to have anything to say in the face of such damping commentary, so I step into the breach. “Don’t worry about it. Winnie is all the company I need. I’m sure she’ll point out anything worth note. Maybe she can even recruit Montague to lend a helping hand.”
I half expect my sister to reply with something sharp and scathing, but she has no more to add to the conversation. Either that, or she’s not happy with the way I’m handling things. To be honest, I’m not altogether pleased about it myself. So far, this case isn’t at all what I expected. Nicholas isn’t here, I have two complete fools for clients, Birdie is plaguing the life out of me, and there’s a very real possibility of murder hanging overhead.
Some women might be daunted by such a prospect, but I refuse to be one of them.
“Make you sure you take some extra candles, Madame Eleanor,” Sid says with a wavering smile. “We wouldn’t want you to get lost along the way.”
“I won’t,” I promise. And even if I do, I don’t mind this opportunity to poke around on my own. I hardly expect to stumble on the treasure or a murder clue during my first look around, but some things in this world are more valuable than gold.
