Michael peered under the overhang. “Aye?”
“Beautiful embroidery.” And, as he moved, “Take off your shoes.”
He sent her a look of amusement and exasperation mingled. His Reeboks thudded on the floor and his head thumped the pillow. He balanced his glass on the cross on his chest; X marks the spot. “Victorian. Elspeth’s?”
“Seaming her sanity with embroidery floss? I bet this is where she met Rudolph. No wonder this room isn’t haunted. She was happy here.”
“Depends on how you mean happy.” Michael raised his head to drink. “Wasn’t Elspeth engaged to a man in Dundee before John carried her away? It’s like you said— he always wanted things that belonged to someone else. At least he couldn’t keep her.”
“Ah, she had him knackered right and proper. Takin’ trophies in the battle of the sexes, she was.”
“And it can be a battle,” Rebecca said. She reached for her Scotch, sipped, put it back. The room had a warm golden aura, as if she were looking at it through her glass. “Why did you ever take up with Sheila to begin with?”
He tensed. “It was almost two years ago. I was workin’ on the Jacobite exhibit at the British Museum. The same Jacobites the English used tae shoot like rabbits— noo they’re fair romantic. Sheila was publicity director. I was lonely and randy and she was lookin’ for entertainment. It was like a nettle rash. It’s nae good tae scratch it but you do anyway.”
“Quite lethal,” Rebecca agreed.
“And why did you take up wi’ Ray?”
“I was the classic ugly duckling. Braces on my teeth, glasses, nose in a book, no idea how to make friends, scared to death of boys. When I finally grew up, lonely and randy, there was Ray. He wanted me.”
Michael turned his head to look at her. “All it took was him wantin’ you? I was right— your standards are awful low.”
“I got what I wanted at the time. A family, more or less. At least he was never cruel to me, like Sheila was to you.”
That deflected Michael’s scrutiny. “I widna play her game of kiss my hand and thank you for civilizin’ me.”
Yes, he defended his territory. Even if he was a closet romantic. Rebecca’s mind frothed with satiny whiskey-scented bubbles. Aren’t we a couple of goofs, lying here with our bodies separated by a foot and a half, when the Atlantic isn’t wide enough to separate our minds.
Michael leaned across her to set his glass on the bedside table. He rapped the top approvingly. “Sheraton.”
“Oh?” she said, more for his posture than his comment.
He stayed propped on his elbows, his body angled across the bed, half beside her, half over her. His forefinger appeared in her peripheral vision and traced a line down her temple to her jaw. “Do you ken,” he murmured, his breath warm with peat smoke, his eyes sparkling with clean-washed Caledonian sunlight, “that I’m a Scottish pervert?”
“You are?”
“Aye. I like women better than whiskey.”
“I see.” She raised her hand and twined her fingers in the long, soft hair at the nape of his neck. “I thought, though, you didn’t like me.”
He grinned. “I’ve been likin’ you as much as you’ve been likin’ me.”
“That bad?” She grinned back.
“Just aboot.” The fingertip moved to her mouth and stroked her lower lip. “But then, I do like a woman wi’ a tart tongue in her head.”
“Show me,” said Rebecca. Her hand pulled his head down to hers. He parted his lips and showed her. Just as the whiskey had detonated in her mouth and nose the kiss detonated in her entire body. Some shred of rationality said, what do you think you’re doing? The rest of her sighed, and said, It’s about time.
“Ah, lass.” Michael laughed against her lips. “That’s right magic.”
She would’ve laughed, too, at the delightful absurdity of it, except laughing spoiled the shape of her mouth for kissing.
It must have been the lifetime of burred r’s and rounded vowels that gave his lips and tongue such flexibility. He covered her face, her ears, her throat with little licks and nibbles, a bit haphazardly, but not, thank God, sloppily. He tasted different from American men, but that was probably the benign influence of the whiskey. If he smelled of anything beyond his own subtle scent, it was soap. Her hand found the gap between the hem of his sweatshirt and the top of his jeans, hungry for that cool yet warm skin.
His hands were delicate, strong, inquisitive. Sleight of hands, touching her as he touched the chanter of the pipes until she, too, sang in a high, clear melody played over the drone of his breath.
Rebecca didn’t wonder what elemental fires burned beneath his surface. She saw them, touched them, tasted them, in the intricate pattern of flame and ash that was his face close to her face, that was his body beside hers. He was hiding nothing; whatever he was was there in her arms, beneath her hands, sheening her lips with the flavor of grain and peat and something indefinable that was Michael.
Hail spattered into the humming in her head.
Michael’s body went stiff. His head lifted and turned toward the door. Footsteps. James’s heavy steps, bloody great tackety boots, thudded down the staircase and up the hall toward the door. Rebecca’s mind stuttered. This time they were going to see him.
The steps stopped in the doorway as if repelled by something inside. But nothing was there. Not the least hint of a shape moved in the bright light of the hall. A gust of cold air, like an exhalation of hurt and disillusionment, chilled Rebecca’s forehead. Then the presence was gone.
The rain spit and drizzled. The lights glared as crudely as those in an operating room. This room is haunted after all, Rebecca thought. This bed is haunted, we’ve been overcome by an echo of lust. And yet touching Michael wasn’t lustful clawing at an itch. It was the slow friction of music in the mind, soothing and exciting at once.
Michael caught his breath in a wheeze and looked down at Rebecca. His affectionate expression melted and ran, exposing his mask of crisp appraisal. Then that, too, evaporated, revealing doubt and pain. His eyes frosted, barriers rising. Whatever insight she’d had into the light and shadow inside him was cut off with the finality of a door slamming shut.
He slid down her body, lifted her sweater, and laid his face on her bare skin in the hollow where her ribs curved and parted. The moment stretched, a note of music held to an excruciating length. Her mind played two melodies in counterpoint, please stop, don’t stop, please stop, don’t stop.
Then in one shuddering movement Michael pulled himself away, stood up, and walked out of the room.
Rebecca looked at the canopy without seeing it, her thoughts tumbling like pebbles in a mountain stream, their edges smoothed by bewilderment. She had seen pain on his face. She had seen conscience.
Her stomach was cold. She yanked her sweater down and rolled off the bed. The floor seemed to hiccup beneath her feet. “Michael?” His shoes lay beside the bed, pigeon-toed with perplexity.
He was leaning against the frame of his door, presenting her with the crumpled back of his sweatshirt. “Michael, it’s all right, talk to me.”
“Sod off,” he said.
She’d expected any remark but that. “What?”
“You’re needin’ a translation? Sod off— go away, let me be.” For once his back was eloquent, quivering with rage and bitterness.
Each word hit her like a brickbat. Her stomach cramped. “Michael!” She took a step toward him, whether to embrace him or hit him she didn’t know.
He slammed his door in her face. The crash reverberated through the house and was echoed by a sharp blow inside the room.
“Michael!” Fool, Rebecca told herself, to stand here childishly calling his name. I got carried away by one side of a two-faced inconsiderate slug. I am setting my standards pretty damn low. His name backed up in her throat and swelled painfully in her chest.
She blundered back into the large bedroom. The bottle of Scotch still sat on the bureau. She grasped it and raised
it toward the stone windowsill— this is what happens when alcohol takes control of your senses… . Swearing viciously, she lowered the bottle and set it down. Wasteful, to break half a bottle of Laphroaig. It would make a terrible mess. Eric gave it to me. Remember Eric? I know where I stand with him.
Rebecca turned off the lights and the space heater and smoothed the bedcovers like she’d pat dirt around a land mine. She stalked down to her room to discover Darnley sleeping on her bed. He looked up with a smugly masculine expression. She considered throwing him, too, but it wasn’t his fault she was a certified idiot.
The house was no longer cozy but suffocating. The breath of air in the staircase was laughing derisively. The taste of Scotch was rancid in her mouth and her stomach gulped bubbles of nausea. She scowled at Elspeth’s portrait. “It’s all your fault, leaving your cheap lusts lying around like bear traps.”
But she and Michael had sensed no memory but that of shared experience. Those few moments hadn’t been cheap. Not cheap at all.
Rebecca’s body went as limp as if she’d been gutted and flayed. With a moan of pain she took out her contacts. She crawled onto the bed and stared toward the ceiling. But she heard no sound from the room upstairs.
Chapter Twenty
Rebecca woke up knowing something wasn’t right. She was fully dressed, with a vile taste in her mouth that made her look suspiciously at Darnley as he slept at the foot of the bed, his tail curled over his nose.
Then her thoughts congealed. Remembering was like picking at a scab. With a groan she rose, dressed, and combed out the tangles in her hair. Outside her window thin clouds were shredded by a cold wind, revealing pennons of blue sky. Waves of sunshine raced across the lawn and hurdled the trees.
Michael’s eyes were blue. Michael’s eyes were closed, locked, and guarded by armed sentries.
Rebecca braced herself before going into the kitchen. Sure enough, there he was, brooding over a mug of tea, a rack of toast untouched on the table before him. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good mornin’,” Michael replied, equally flat. He didn’t look up.
Rebecca nestled a filter into the coffeepot, measured the coffee, added water. Steam rose and she inhaled the delectable odor. Caffeine was much more dependable than a man.
Michael was wearing a red sweatshirt emblazoned with the sentiment, “Renegade Time Lord”. His mouth was such a thin, tight line she couldn’t believe it had been so flexible the night before. His right hand, cupped around his mug, was red and swollen. That’s what that crash had been after he slammed his door in her face. He’d driven his fist into the stone wall. Rebecca’s face crumpled into a grimace somewhere between a smile and wail. “Would you like me to fix some ice for your hand?”
“No,” he replied. And, a moment later, “Thank you.”
She poured coffee and drank. It wasn’t as good as she’d anticipated.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said to the toast. “I had no call tongue lashin’ you like that.”
She wanted to retort, What makes you think I care? But last night she had cared only too obviously. “No, you didn’t,” she said.
The silence stretched like a rubber band. Then Michael slammed back his chair and strode out of the room muttering something about work to do. He hadn’t once looked at her.
Rebecca watched her coffee slop back and forth in its cup. Typical. You might as well skin a man alive as expect him to verbalize his feelings. The circumstances were pathetically banal, after all; they’d been forced together in trying times, they were only human, they’d gone overboard. No harm done. Thanks more to a ghost than to her own good sense.
But God, how good it had been to hold him! Not just felt good, was good, body, mind, and soul, right down to those purring kittens of her wits.
She slammed her mug into the sink so hard it cracked. She stared, appalled. Damaging estate property. Things were going downhill fast.
Rebecca picked up the fifth-floor inventory from the Hall. Michael could finish the fourth floor by himself, she wasn’t going anywhere near that demon-possessed bed. James’s steps had stopped in the doorway. Maybe as a child he’d seen his mother and Rudolph in that bed. The sight might have been enough to shock him into celibacy for the rest of his life. There was a good case to be made for celibacy.
Rebecca started in one of the smaller rooms on the fifth floor. She cataloged the collection of Victorian paper theaters, the cut-out dolls dressed as shepherds, kings, and clowns carefully bundled into envelopes. She checked off the scrapbooks filled with old stamps— have to get them appraised. She opened the jeweler’s boxes containing 17th century objets de vertu, a cup carved from carnelian, a turquoise pomander, a tiny jeweled casket that smelled faintly of roses.
But more objects were listed on the inventory than were here. Either they were in another room or had been de-accessioned. She tapped her pencil on the notebook, sympathetic to James’s reluctance to part with his possessions but wishing he’d realized what a headache it would mean to the innocent historian. In the gaps in the inventories was space for plenty of mischief.
Maybe Michael was pleased she hadn’t made it with Eric because he wanted her himself. And yet, men didn’t seem to have much of an impulse toward exclusivity. Masculine games of power being what they were, he might have taken what he could get just to score off Eric. But he hadn’t. He’d buried his face in her stomach and clung to her as if he were being dragged away by some outside force.
It was all just fun and games. She played with Eric, Michael played with her. He’d said he wouldn’t play Sheila’s games. Hypocrite. She laid down her pencil and rubbed her throbbing temples. Just shrug it all off, that’s what the rules say, that’s what he’s done.
Rebecca looked up to meet the painted eyes of young Queen Victoria gazing steadily from a Winterhalter portrait. “I’m not particularly amused either,” she said.
Footsteps. Rebecca turned sharply, only to see Dorothy and her basket of cleaners and scrubbers stepping into the hallway. The housekeeper held a cigarette clenched in her lips, her face screwed around it like a prune around its pit. “Mrs Garst,” Rebecca called, “would you mind not smoking indoors, please? Some of Mr Forbes’s things might be damaged by smoke.”
Dorothy dumped her supplies and trudged back down like Winnie-the-Pooh’s Eeyore told he couldn’t play. The woman grew more bloated every day. Overeating, perhaps. Or too much medication. If stuck with a pin Dorothy would deflate into a puddle of flesh and double-knit.
But for the grace of education and opportunity, Rebecca thought, that could be me in thirty years. A menial scorned by smart-alec college girls as something less than human, embittered by the sour dregs of custom and ignorance. For a few months in her youth Dorothy had been young and free. Now she had nothing except her son and his family to look on with pride or hope.
Rebecca laid down the inventory. Dammit, she was making no progress at all with the vertical hold of her mind tuned to rapid scan.
She looked into the large bedroom; at least the ghosts there were not her own. There was the portrait of Mary Stuart. There was Elspeth’s furrow in the bedclothes. There was the portrait of John Forbes and his self-righteously male scowl. Five cut glass bottles stood on the dresser. Rebecca frowned. Five, not seven. Maybe they’d gone up this time, instead of down.
She went up. The ballroom was washed in air and light, blocks of quicksilver sunlight making a tartan pattern with the planks of the floor. No bottles. But Phil’s battery-operated screwdriver and a box of screws lay on a tabouret by a Queen Anne wing chair.
Rebecca picked up the tools, walked down all the flights to the entry, picked the key to the shed off the hook by the door and stepped out into the sunshine. It was cold, but a nice day for a walk. She should ask Michael— no, better go alone. It would be so much easier if she hated him.
The shed still reeked of gasoline. Rebecca put the tools on a bench next to a broken lamp and glanced at the grimy milk jugs. They were empty. S
he checked the gas can. It was full, the lid on securely. Oh well, give the place time to air out.
She returned to the house to find Dorothy leaving yet another foil-wrapped bundle in the kitchen. “Heavenly hash,” she announced.
“Thank you,” Rebecca said. She left the front door open for Phil and went back upstairs. Michael was sitting at the bureau in the fourth floor room, leaning on his elbow, just as he’d been when she’d gone down.
As she went up the next flight of stairs she heard footsteps ringing on the treads above her head. Hello James, she thought, and quickened her pace to the room where she’d been working. She stopped dead in the doorway.
The pile of old paperbacks that had been on top of a wardrobe now lay stacked neatly on the floor. If they’d fallen, they’d have spewed paper shrapnel all over the room. They’d been lifted down. Michael? He apparently hadn’t moved while she’d been gone. James, maybe. Why?
Rebecca sifted through the books. Among the yellowed pages was a sheet of rag paper covered with James’s handwriting, one end torn roughly off. The back of her neck shriveled. She’d seen that paper before.
She trotted down the stairs, pausing on the fourth floor to ask Michael perfunctorily if he’d been upstairs. “No,” he replied without looking around.
Rebecca brushed past Dorothy on the landing and hurried into the Hall. The boxes holding James’s diaries and scrapbooks were lined up beside the table. Not in this one, not in that one… . There! Rebecca opened the one with the photograph and the torn scrap of paper. The scrap fit the bottom of the letter as perfectly as one puzzle piece dovetailing into another.
Rebecca smiled with satisfaction, feeling like Miss Marple. She read, “June 3, 1952. My dear Mrs Brown. Yes, your parents were valued servants to my father, and it is for their sake and that of your childhood here at Dun Iain that I am troubling myself to answer your last letter. You must realize, Mrs Brown, that your demands are growing more unreasonable all the time. What makes you think that any newspaper today would be at all interested in a scandal that happened in 1901?”
Ashes to Ashes Page 26
