Adrian pirouetted on the stupid slipper sole and bowed to the circle of over-accessorized peacocks. No wonder they needed assistance. Their choking, chin-high neckwear kept their parakeet noses in the air and prevented them turning their heads. As he pushed the chairs under their lard butts, he saw the first fellow twist off his cane top, then reach to chains on his waistcoat dangling doll-house sized implements—a miniature golden rake and, Lord be, a spoon!
Adrian longed for the searing but uncomplicated kiss of Lady Cocaine as the fop pushed a small ridge of powder from the cane-top onto the back of his hand.
Powder. Dingy impure stuff. Still. Adrian’s veins sang with an automatic rush of desire. He watched the fellow lift a hand to his beakish nose and . . . inhale. Now they were all doing it, producing diamond-studded gold and enamel pillboxes and doing lines of coke in front of God, the Devil, and everyone.
Nothing mattered. That Adrian was supposedly dead, that Heaven and Hell were feuding over his immortal soul, that Miss Marianne Merriweather was the most unlikely but succulent conquest of his career. He had to get one of those ample containers of retro-coke. He eyed the grandfather clock on the far wall. Almost midnight. Tomorrow would be “Boxing Day” indeed, with charity for all and coke for one.
The gentlemen drew up hare’s foots and handkerchiefs to pat their upper lips free of any untoward dust. Adrian swallowed. When would this charade of a party end?
Soon, it turned out. Adrian proved an adept footman as he helped each gentleman guest into heavy multi-collared coats and top hats. He reluctantly handed the gold-topped cane to its owner, but that was stage business. During the garbing, he’d also helped himself to three small boxes.
Already a thief, Adrian was giddy to be assigned a sleeping pallet in the butler’s pantry to guard the family silver, given only a cudgel, and left alone with the true love of his life. He settled down in the dark with a feeble lantern on the counter and a chamber pot in the corner. He hated the primitive facilities, and those ninny fops didn’t seem promising company for an eternity of Hell, but their private stock was certainly an inducement to stay in their world and choose their presumed afterlife.
A scratching sound on the door forced instant stillness. Had one of Marianne’s critters gotten inside?
“Let me in,” a soft voice whispered.
He went to turn the latch, then paused. Who was out and about the house at this hour? Could it be the haunting child? Or, Miss Marianne, back for more kissing berries? That idea soothed his impatience. Turning the latch, a rustle of silks and a wave of scent rushed into his arms.
Her lips were already approaching his when Adrian grabbed her slim, gloved wrists and held her off. “Selina.”
“How convenient that they took you out of the musty old servants’ quarters and left you here all alone. And what a pity that you’re a nobody. You are the most eligible man to enter our circle since my ninny of a sister cast Lord Heathford out of it. Heathford was already flirting madly with me.”
“I choose my own poisons. Now, get back to bed before I cry ‘thief!’ and get you ruined.” He pushed her out and locked the door.
His hands shook as he fought the jeweled catch of the first box. Half the contents spilled over his knuckles, but, savoring the sharp, aching hunger, he greedily sniffed the entire line, waiting for the instant, hellish hit of paradise.
He expelled the powder with a violent sneeze. Tobacco! This stuff was tobacco dust. No wonder it was dusky brown. He tore open the other precious boxes and sniffed their contents. Same disgusting bedbug dirt!
Tossing the diamond-crusted enamel and gold trinkets away, Adrian fell onto his hard pallet, panting for heightened emotion lost. He found another drug invading his system. That G-rated kissing game with Marianne had been oddly exciting. Replaying it calmed him. He felt warm in a way far beyond the physical. He wanted to play it again. He was sure she would cooperate. But . . . if he’d rather stay here than ruin her in reality, as his disappointing forebear had been unable to achieve despite all his scandal-mongering . . . he couldn’t have her. Even disgraced as she was for rebuffing Lord Heathford, a nameless, penniless footman would hardly be accepted by her family.
They could run away. Without money? He’d run away once without money and look at him now. Well, look at where he had been in the real, modern world. Rich, famous. Infamous. An idol. A sex symbol.
Stoned out of his gourd and bored by everything anybody in his right mind could ever want.
His thoughts drifted back to Marianne. She wasn’t stupid. She knew those, as the soaps say, stolen moments with him were doubly ruinous, but she’d wanted them. That chick had . . . guts. Why?
Adrian realized for the first time in his rock idol life that he had fallen so low he was questioning why a woman would want to sleep with him. He punched the pallet in an effort to soften the filling and fell back into a welcome darkness.
***
At the crack of dawn somewhere, the butler, Lennox, counted the silverware, inspected the plate, and then sprung Adrian from pantry duty. He washed at the ewer and basin in the servants’ quarters, almost longing for the stable’s crude, cold shower. Water in Hell, he knew, would be much warmer. If there was any but tears.
Lennox then directed him to the grounds to assist Miss Marianne in tending her charges. “You must do some actual work,” Lennox said, aping his condescending betters of the Snuff Box Brigade. Adrian tried not to grin.
He hied outside, inhaling damp country air perfumed by earthy scents he couldn’t name. Somehow, his misadventure with the tobacco dust last night had dulled the edge of his addiction. In fact, he was anticipating a new obsession. He spotted Marianne’s graceful figure bending to the insane assortment of animals that had gathered around her with competing baas and whines and mews.
In the screened latticework that made a cage of the classically designed folly building, chirps and peeps added to a dissonant modern symphony. The music of nature, like Marianne, was surprisingly charming. He’d never heard it before, having gone from city slum to a parade of city arenas.
She led him to a bench, where a small wicker cage held a cat.
“A new Christmas folly?” he asked.
“Papa also lets me keep whatever wanders onto the grounds. I found this terrified three-legged cat lurking outside the folly this morning.” She put her hand inside, but jumped back when the creature hissed and spat. “He’ll take some taming.”
“Don’t we all.”
She shrugged. “The bird seed bags are heavy, if you don’t mind—”
“I’m at your command, don’t you remember?”
She just smiled.
So he sprinkled bags of seed in the folly, and in feeders near the brick walls defining the groomed grounds for the wild birds, while the goat and lamb and rabbit groomed the sward with their morning munching.
He also slipped up behind Marianne’s tempting nape, bare despite the outdoor jacket, and nibbled on her soft, warm skin. She turned and smiled.
“You can’t seriously consider consorting with a footman,” he told her.
“I suppose we could run away to be married in Gretna Green.”
“Married?” What an alien concept. She wasn’t modern enough to simply sleep with him though. “We can elope? In this day and age?”
“Of course the scandal would be tripled, but I’m used to that,” she said.
“You would marry me, a penniless stranger with no other occupation than plucking mistletoe berries from archways, and one so bereft of a memory that I don’t know half of what the commonest things are called.” Bereft? He was starting to talk like them.
“You remember what occurred under the archway last night quite vividly. Now,” she ordered, “step away, before some house servant spies us doing more than feeding the birds.”
He obeyed, fighting a twenty-first century urge to have her, and have her now, but it wasn’t mere lust. It was some amazing, bemusing warm feeling he’d never felt for a woman befor
e.
The white rabbit had hopped along with them, and as they neared the wall shrubberies, he was startled to see the creature now had an Alice, a young girl wearing a patched white pinafore, with her long ash-blond hair tied back. She smiled at him, fading in and out as if in a strobe light, a stranger who sometimes looked just like his sister, Lucy.
An annoyed cry nearer the house broke the spell. Marianne and Adrian turned at once, and when he looked back, the apparition was gone.
“Dirty old thing!” Selina stood by the wicker cage with its door sprung wide. “It almost bit me. You will bring the most miserable, deformed, ungrateful, ugly creatures home, Marianne.” She was looking at Adrian.
“Selina, you know better than to open one of my holding cages!” Marianne rushed over. “He’s gone! You’ve driven him away and he’ll never come back.”
Adrian eyed the folly’s lattice, thinking the hungry cat would first bound in that direction. No. It wanted hiding and escape; hunger came later, just as it had for him. He turned to where he’d seen the girlish ghost and saw even the rabbit had bounded out of sight. Scanning the bushes, he spotted the gray stripped cat clinging high in a hawthorn tree, only feet from jumping atop the wall and down into unfenced countryside.
Adrian could climb the tree, but he needed to cut off the cat’s escape route before he could force it back down to the grounds.
“Bring the cage,” he called to Marianne.
Selina was indignant. “A footman ordering a lady?”
Marianne obeyed immediately. Adrian flung himself up a neighboring tree, working through brittle, sharp branches as he pressed against the wall, ever climbing, until the cat started to back down the precarious limb toward the trunk.
Once up there, Adrian glimpsed the brown and green misty land rolling toward the gray horizon. He could jump over the wall and disappear into whatever fate he could find elsewhere.
He looked back to Marianne’s anxious face below, watching him and the cat with equal distress. His abrupt lunge toward the cat had its three legs scrabbling back down the trunk. Marianne caught it, still three feet above the ground, and plunked it into the cage, her coat protecting her from the churning claws.
Adrian stayed where he was. Pitt had promised that, if he bested his forebear by despoiling a virgin, Hell would be his, and he would like it. If he eloped with Marianne, he’d have to do a hell of a lot of good deeds to earn Heaven. If either of them existed. All this could be delusion.
Grabbing one thorny branch after another, he bounded to the ground.
“Your hands look cat-clawed,” Marianne said, dismayed. “I’ll treat you inside.”
Selina was staring daggers at them, and had likely released the cat out of spite.
“How wonderful,” Marianne told him, “you could get poor Tricorn down.”
“Simple,” he said, with an expression he realized was rare to him: a smile. “A cat is a contrary creature. The more you chase it, the farther it will run, and the less you try to lure it, the closer it will come.” This time he was staring at Selina.
***
Adrian’s next duty was stand by with Heggs to serve the family at a mouth-watering Boxing Day breakfast of rashers of bacon and sausage and potatoes. Wait. He was hungering for food. He could actually feel things; thorns hurt, tenderness healed.
Marianne praised his cat-retrieving exploit at the table and Papa cast him an approving glance.
Boxing Day was not the Christmas Day celebrated in the modern media. Only a few neighboring guests joined the family for mid-day dinner. As a footman, Adrian was able to “salt” the stolen snuffboxes around the drawing room for the cleaning staff to find before the owners even missed them.
Adrian joined Heggs at attention on either end of the buffet, observing the merriment. Punch flowed, as it had the previous evening. Adrian’s high was watching Marianne in a tissue-thin red gown that swayed and clung to her figure in dizzying turn.
“You sly puss,” Sir Pinchot Farthingay, well in his cups, addressed her in the drawing room later. “Scandal indeed. Our legs were pulled and our eyes wool-blinded. What a fine jest you’ve made this Christmas.”
“I’m sorry?” Marianne said.
Sir Pinchot wagged a crooked finger. “No denying it, Miss. I’ve seen through the disguise. This will be the talk of Pall Mall. I should have known no sane girl would jilt a peer of the realm.”
“Please, Sir Pinchot,” Mama wailed from the sofa, sending the spaniels into flight. “Do not speak of the unspeakable. My daughter’s disgrace—”
“Is a hoax. Did you think I wouldn’t see through it? I am the most perceptive person in my circle.”
A silence fell. Apparently Sir Pinchot’s self-evaluation was not universally recognized.
“This fellow here,” he pointed at Adrian. “He is no footman.”
No one spoke. How could they deny it?
“In fact,” the man went on, “he is a horribly bad footman. I’ve never seen such a bungling fellow in a house of presumed first water.”
More silence. This insulted the family and staff, which mattered far more than Adrian. In fact, he felt more embarrassed for them than himself.
Selena finally spoke. “That is because of Marianne with her selfish, selfish ways; too good for a well-connected lord, but not too good for a footman!”
“Selina!” Mama cried out in shock. “Marianne, is this true?”
“I’m sure not.” Papa looked for denial from Marianne, who was blushing to match her gown and looked about to make a fiery speech.
“Of course it is true,” Sir Pinchot said, winking and lifting his punch cup, “and we should toast the happy couple.”
With a shriek, Mama swooned, but couldn’t resist opening one eye to peek. The spaniels circled the sofa, barking. Adrian stepped forward to do, say something.
Sir Pinchot pointed at him. “There, you see. The uncommon height.”
True, men in this time were all shorter than he.
“The profile.”
True, despite low birth, he had avoided the French and English excess of nose.
“And the way he looks at her. Only a donkey would miss the signs.”
Gasps were now audible. Marianne took a deep and most flattering breath. Adrian opened his mouth to deny anything and everything.
“Clearly,” Sir Pinchot said, narrowing his eyes, “if you shorn the hair and styled it à la Beau Brummel, then swathed the neck in more than that modest ascot, you would have Adrian Ashworth, Lord Heathford, standing before you in proper guise. Why the devil the young couple concocted this charade, I don’t know, but no engagement was broken.”
“It’s true.” Marianne was smiling as she came to Adrian’s side, all false docility. “Dear Adrian had a terrible accident while driving his perch phaeton last Christmas.”
So a perch phaeton was a buggy-whip era hot rod . . .
“He broke a limb and lost his memory. He’s been at his country estate gravely out of his senses, until recently, when his memory began to return. We decided he should rejoin polite company in disguise, to see if that stimulated his memory. He will have to relearn many things, but is well on the way to being fully himself again.”
Mama herself was fully conscious again. “So, Marianne, you will indeed wed a lord. Selina, stop pouting and sit up straight. You must be on your best behavior to obtain your own happy future. This has been the most amazing Boxing Day. Everything that is wrong is now right.”
Cheers and glasses were raised as Marianne led Adrian into the family circle and sat him beside her on a couch.
Near the fireplace, a blazing reflection seemed to be a small girl all in dazzling white, even to her beautiful long hair. The upright frills on her pinafore shoulders resembled small wings. Her transparent image still pulsed in and out of focus; half the time she was indeed Lucy. Adrian understood then that Lucy was indeed gone in his own time, had died as a child. Maybe limbo was a place where the innocent went when there was no one on
earth to love and miss them.
Meanwhile, Adrian felt so gobsmacked by this turn of fate he was just happy that the yapping spaniels, not he, had messed the carpet.
***
Since the servants were honored on Boxing Day, Adrian insisted on occupying the butler’s pantry again. A lordly bedchamber would be prepared for him tomorrow.
Besides, he wanted time alone to understand his past and future.
So he lay in the candlelight fighting hot, childish tears for Lucy and his other, hopefully surviving siblings, whom he’d never see again. He understood Lucy had wanted him to have “a second chance,” and wondered how the real Lord Heathford was doing in Adrian’s former place and time. At least, he’d start addicted to nothing but snuff.
He wondered if that Adrian would ruin a virgin and opt for Hell, and if he himself would ever get a hot shower in this world.
A soft knock came on the door.
He rose to open it, sure of the incoming silks and scent.
Marianne rushed into his arms. “We forgot to give the new footman his Boxing Day gift,” she said breathlessly.
“Your hands are empty,” he pointed out, because they were curled tight into his shirt.
She pushed off the long lacy white cloak to reveal a long, semi-transparent white gown that spoke well of nightwear in this era. A wide crimson sash was tied in an immense bow beneath her breasts.
“I’m your Boxing Day present. Unwrap me.”
“This can’t be proper.”
“I certainly hope it isn’t.”
“You know I’m not really . . . him.”
“Of course. You are somewhat like, but not definitively so. Thank God for Sir Pinchot and his near-sighted, wine-loving notions.”
“You must wonder who and what I am.”
“We can discuss that later. I’m more interested in wondering what you plan to do with me now, for how long, where and when over and over forever. And what I can call you during it. ”
“Actually, it is Adrian. Adrian Arthur. When did you develop this mad . . . addiction?”
Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River Page 20
