“You may not believe the answer,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. One of the better parts about being the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come had been not needing to speak to anyone. “But I promise you, it’s the truth.” She took the plunge. “I’m not human.”
If he really was her replacement, he might not have needed a void within the cowl, because no expression at all showed on his face. It was completely deadpan—oh, bad choice of words—but she remembered his profession. He’d probably listened to a lot of people bargaining or begging or even threatening him, and had learned to look completely unmoved as a result.
“Go on.” He went over to a padded chair and sat down. Laura would have liked to do the same, but she was used to looking down at people, and that simply wouldn’t happen as long as he was on his feet.
Not that she felt any more powerful at the moment, but she went on doggedly. “Until last night, I was a ghost. Though spirit would be more correct a term, because I had more autonomy than a ghost usually does.”
That was true, since she could appear anywhere. As long as she only did so on one particular night of the year. And unlike ghosts, who remembered only too well who they had been in life, she would never be tormented by the knowledge of who and what she’d lost.
“But I eventually refused to carry out my duties, so I was turned into…this.” She glanced down a little self-consciously. “I suppose I should be grateful I was permitted to keep the shroud.”
Justin looked at her as if she had recited a very mundane shopping list. “That’s quite a story.”
“Isn’t it?” She didn’t feel at all like smiling, but she made herself do so anyway, to show him he couldn’t provoke her. He rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and propped his chin on his fist.
“Can you prove a word of it?” he asked.
Laura turned to the wall, her heart beating faster. Of course this would work, because she’d just done it a few moments ago. There was no reason she couldn’t repeat it. Squaring her shoulders, she strode forward as fast as she could.
The rapid pace took her halfway into her room before she caught herself—she’d been too quick, and probably still too much on edge from being discovered. Now she felt more confident. He wasn’t likely to argue with the evidence of his own eyes.
She walked back through the wall and glanced triumphantly to see his reaction, only to find an empty chair. From right beside her, he cleared his throat, and she started. Damn it, she was getting tired of his managing to take her aback.
Though at least he’d lost the patient, blank expression. He was clearly trying to maintain his mask, but the look in his eyes was sharp and searching.
“May I touch that?” he said.
She supposed he meant the shroud, so she nodded. A lot of people had touched it, some grasping and tearing at it as if that could accomplish anything. Justin took a fold of it between finger and thumb, as carefully as if it had been a snowflake.
Then he slipped two fingers through a rent in the shroud and touched her upper arm. It was only a light press of fingertips, as if to make sure she was solid beneath the sleeve, but it sent an odd tingling jolt through her. She stepped back reflexively, and he dropped his hand at once.
The unsettled feeling was back, and this time she didn’t think it was only because she had never been touched before. He stood far too near to her, so close she had to tilt her head up to meet his eyes, and she thought she could hear his breathing. Or was it her own? She couldn’t be sure.
“What were your duties?” he said.
It took an effort not to sigh in relief, though she almost wished he would return to his seat. She pulled the shroud closed at her throat, wondering why the ragged cloth had no scent at all when she could smell him so distinctly—clean linen and shaving soap and the bay rum aftershave, all mingling together into something musky and masculine.
“I was called the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.” Remembering her responsibilities helped steady her, and some of her cold, detached mien crept back into her chest. “Especially at this time of year, it’s easy for most people to be generous and joyous, but some aren’t. If they failed to show compassion for their fellow human beings, I visited them in the small hours of Christmas Eve and convinced them to turn aside from their ways.”
Justin’s frown grew deeper. “What happened if you didn’t convince them?”
“That never happened. I’m very convincing.”
“No doubt. What did you do, take off the shroud?”
“That would have frightened them into even earlier graves.” His cool sardonic tone sent irritation prickling beneath her skin, but she forced herself not to show it. “You wouldn’t have wanted to see me as a wraith.” A real pity she couldn’t show him one and put him in his place.
He didn’t seem to have heard that last remark. “What do you mean, even earlier graves?”
She took another step back, deliberately that time. “I showed them the consequences of their deaths—people remembering them with contempt, if they were remembered at all. At worst, they were stolen from before their bodies even grew cold. One man’s house was literally torn down, brick by brick, by a crowd, because of a rumor he’d hidden thousands of pounds somewhere on his property. Not a pleasant legacy.”
The furrow between his brows might have been cut with a knife, and his lips tightened as he listened. “That sounds blatantly manipulative. I don’t believe scaring people with visions accomplishes anything in the long run.”
Since scaring people with visions had been her entire reason for returning to the world, she felt even more infuriated. “My record says otherwise.”
“Well, you must have lost some faith in the method, if you refused to carry out your duties.”
“I didn’t lose faith in the method.” So this was why she’d never been permitted to speak to people; it was impossible to argue with someone who refused to talk. Being a faceless wraith had helped in that regard too. “I just got tired of what I had to do.”
A little of the hardness eased out of his face, and now he looked more curious than condemning. “Why? I mean, you seem to believe you were saving people’s lives.”
And losing what was left of my own. So much of her past had disappeared as the years passed by. What if, finally, she didn’t even know how she’d ended up there, didn’t remember once being alive? There would truly be nothing beneath the shroud.
If people thought she was terrifying before, she didn’t want to imagine what it would be like once the last trace of her humanity, her self, was gone for good. But whatever the effects on her, she could have borne them. After all, what did it matter if a ghost who only appeared to one person on one night felt less and less human as the years passed?
No, her rebellion had been touched off because of the last man to whom she’d appeared. He’d vowed on his knees before her to honor and celebrate Christmas, but not with a sense of joy and generosity. Instead, he’d behaved as if he had been provisionally released from a dungeon, and any mistake would result in his being thrown back in.
That wasn’t at all the result she was supposed to achieve, but since she couldn’t talk to him, she tried to remain with him to make it right somehow, rather than returning to the darkness once her hour was over. Naturally, the void swallowed her up. But while her remembrance of her life was gone, the memories she’d gained in death were only too vivid. And even if those had been wiped away too, she didn’t think she would ever again be content with her duty.
None of which she could say to Justin, since he was doing just fine criticizing her work without any help from her. She’d revealed enough as it was, and there was a more important matter to deal with.
“I have to tell you something else,” she said. “I’ve seen your future.”
“You have?” His brows arched, and she thought she had succeeded in diverting the course of the
conversation, but the surprise turned to a grin, which wasn’t any better. “Oh, wait, I’m one of these unfortunate victims who has to be terrified into becoming a better man. I’m sorry, but that didn’t occur to me until now.”
Laura folded her arms and gave him what she hoped was an are-you-quite-finished stare as he sat back down, sprawling comfortably in the chair as if preparing to be entertained. “Go ahead, please. Did I starve because I was too stingy to buy bread, or was I trampled by a crowd of widows and orphans I’d evicted?”
“You were either stabbed or shot.” She didn’t feel like softening that blow at all now. “There was a lot of blood, it happened here and it will happen soon.”
The line of his shoulders went tense, his face suddenly intent as the amusement vanished. “You’re serious.”
“I wouldn’t joke about anyone’s death.” Especially not yours.
“But how do you know this vision will come true?”
She thought this was the reason she’d always been the third act. People who had already seen the pasts and presents unfolding before their eyes didn’t need to be convinced that a third specter was showing them their own future. For the first time, she had to consider why someone should believe her.
“Visions of the future are shadows of the present,” she said, thinking aloud, “and as shadows can be altered by substance or light, so can the future. But something has to happen for the shadows to be changed. And there’s only one way to change what I saw.”
“What’s that?”
She lifted her head, feeling the cowl slip down to her shoulders. “I’ll leave. I’ll take up the responsibilities I abdicated, and I won’t turn my back on them again. If there must be a Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, I’ve had a great deal more practice at it than you have.”
She didn’t know what kind of reaction she had expected from him. Regret at the prospect of losing her would have made her feel good, but she knew better than to even imagine that. Relief that he wasn’t going to die seemed more likely. But instead he looked thoughtful and preoccupied, as though he was turning over everything she had said, studying the story from different angles to find a flaw in it.
“Why were you doing all this?” he said eventually. “I mean, was it your idea to become a spirit and start showing people visions?”
“Of course it wasn’t my idea. But what choice did I have? I lost my life when I was twelve, so I took the chance to do something with my afterlife instead.” She thought of the vast stillness of the void, and said softly, “For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything. Neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.”
“Ecclesiastes, chapter nine.” Justin’s reply came like an echo of her voice. “You died so young?”
Laura nodded, hoping he wouldn’t feel he had to smother her in sympathy. She almost leaned back against the wall, to feel something comfortably solid, but remembered at the last moment she wore the shroud and might simply fall through, so she straightened up again.
“My parents told me not to go ice skating alone.” She’d never confided that to anyone, but since she’d died, she’d never talked to another person, and she needed to shift the burden of what she’d done off her shoulders. “But I didn’t want to wait for anyone to join me. I think my skates were new. A present I was impatient to try out.”
There was a pause. “Do you want to send a message to your family?” he asked.
“No.” It was a relief that he’d resorted to the simplest, most practical thing to say, and his gaze on her was both direct and accepting. “I don’t remember who they are—I wasn’t lying about that, at any rate. All I recall is how it happened, and why dig up a grave that’s twenty years old?” Enough time for her to take her place among the stars, one more mote of dust drifting through the night.
“But—” Justin leaned forward. “Will you have to die again?”
“I’m not sure,” she had to admit. “Hopefully not. But I wasn’t prepared to become a human, so I’m certainly not versed on how to reverse the process.”
His gaze went over her. “Well, wearing the shroud doesn’t seem to have made a difference.”
“Other than allowing me to walk through walls, no.” She plucked a fold of it away from her dress. “Maybe it’s the human clothes between this and my skin. Maybe it has to be the shroud alone.”
His throat moved slightly as he swallowed, and suddenly she knew what was going through his mind. But all he said was, “You’ll—want to try that in your room.”
For a moment she thought of trying it right there. She’d never felt that way with anyone before. He could keep her off-balance while still treating her like a real person, rather than as an entity with no feelings of her own, only a purpose to be carried out. Maybe he accepted her because he was at peace with himself.
If her time with him was running out fast, she didn’t want to just leave. She didn’t want to go back to being a faceless, formless wraith which had never known the warmth of a human touch, his touch. And yet she couldn’t say or do anything.
It wasn’t the fact that she’d known him for less than a day, because that was about twenty times longer than she’d known another person. It was the fact that she wasn’t confident when it came to showing how she felt. She had told him she’d been a ghost, had walked through a wall and had warned him about his impending death, but all that had been necessary, and his response had been the best she could have expected under the circumstances. It would be stretching her luck to go further, let alone to hope he’d feel the same way.
She wanted him to touch her again as he’d done before, except more intimately this time. She wanted to trace the line of his jaw and sink her fingers into his hair, to breathe in the smell of him and feel how warm, how very much alive he would be.
But it wasn’t the place or the time. It was likely never to be, because she felt sure that once she slipped the shroud over her bare skin, her flesh would melt like mist. She would return to the darkness, to wait until she was summoned forth again.
“All right,” she said, struggling to speak normally. The last thing she wanted was for him to know she would miss him—his generosity and companionship, even the novelty of being with someone who was so much unafraid of her that he dared to be sarcastic. She turned, thankful for a reason for him not to see her face. “If you don’t see me again, you’ll know—”
“Wait.”
Something in his voice made her glance back over her shoulder. He was on his feet. “There’s something I wondered.” She waited, and he ran a hand through his thick dark hair, pushing it back from his forehead. “Is that all you’ve ever done—appear to people before Christmas and show them visions of their deaths?”
“Well, no.” It sounded unbearably bleak when he put it that way. “Sometimes I showed them other people’s lives—people who were affected by their deaths. Usually because those people stood to inherit money or thought a long-overdue justice had finally been carried out.”
Justin shook his head and muttered something that sounded like “invasion of privacy” before he continued. “What I meant was, you wanted them to enjoy Christmas, didn’t you? To hang up holly and give gifts and all that tri—er, all that. But you don’t remember doing any of that as a child, and you didn’t even do it after you…became yourself.”
“How could I have? I was a spirit.”
“Well, you’re not one now. You said your duties were always carried out in the small hours of Christmas Eve.” He pulled a pocket watch from his jacket and flipped it open. “It’s only three in the afternoon. If you stay for supper, we could celebrate Christmas before you go back to…wherever you came from, in enough time to haunt some other poor sod.”
Laura blinked. “How will we celebrate?” She glanced at the window to see if the snow had somehow cleared away, but it sifted down, albeit not as fiercely
as it had done before. “Do you even have decorations?”
Justin rubbed a palm over his jaw with a soft rasping sound. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“But—”
He held up a hand. “Please, Miss Snow. I’d be remiss if I didn’t treat a guest in the spirit of Christmas. I’ll send for you when it’s time for supper.”
Laura almost started to protest again, because she wasn’t used to a human telling her what to do. It also occurred to her that if he didn’t believe her story, but wanted to make certain she wouldn’t run through the nearest wall, stay-in-your-room might be a good way to delay her while he sent for the local constables. But when he’d talked to her before, he had disagreed and he had been sarcastic. If he’d wanted to lull her into a false sense of security, it would have made more sense for him not to rile her.
Besides, she didn’t think he was that deceptive. Reserved, yes, but not a liar.
“All right.” She paused. “And I’d rather you called me Laura.”
She could see any number of thoughts going through the cool banker’s brain—curiosity as to where she’d found the name, a habit of accuracy insisting it wasn’t even her real name—but he only nodded, and she stepped through the wall.
Chapter Four
Candle in hand, Justin entered the attic a little cautiously. When his father had been alive, that room had been packed almost end-to-end with chests and boxes. Toys, china, even furniture. And, of course, there would have been Christmas decorations, taken out each year, inspected and dusted to hang from the branches of a tree and the edge of the mantelpiece.
Those were long gone, discreetly sold. When he allowed himself to think about them, he remembered the way those ornaments had shone in the firelight. But at the time, he’d told himself no one ever starved for a lack of polished tin spirals that gleamed like icicles.
Now, he looked at the few boxes that remained, all neatly labeled under a coating of dust. He knew what was in those—clothes that wouldn’t fetch more than pennies, yet which had plenty of wear in them. Probably because they were all out of fashion. And there were a few mementoes of his mother: her journals, monogrammed handkerchiefs, a tortoiseshell comb. Nothing he could take downstairs to use, despite his inviting Miss Snow—Laura—to stay for Christmas.
Christmas Yet To Come (The Ghosts of Christmas) Page 4
