by M C Beaton
She did not know in which part of the great house this secret room was hidden. It was at the top, that she knew from looking out of the window.
Alice’s first feelings of unease started as dusk fell and the shadows began to lengthen. What if her ghost, her Duke, vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived? She realized she was still wearing the nightgown and hurriedly, but with reluctance, changed back into her rags.
The room grew very black and she could not find the tinderbox he had used the night before to light the fire. She climbed back into bed, wrapping the coverlet about her, and stared into the darkness, waiting and waiting.
“Now, what are we to do with you?” said a voice in her ear and she nearly leaped through the bed canopy in fright.
“Is that you, Your Grace?” she whispered.
“The late one,” rejoined that now familiar mocking voice. He lit a branch of candles on the table.
At first Alice almost did not recognize him. He had found a suit of clothes in the current mode, blue swallowtail coat, leather breeches and glossy Hessian boots. His snowy cravat was intricately tied and his close-cropped hair which had looked silver in the moonlight, turned out to be gold.
“What do you think?” he asked, turning slowly around in front of her.
“Very fine,” said Alice nervously. He looked so real, she began to wonder if it were not after all some relative of the Duke’s playing tricks.
“Thank you,” he said sedately. “I’Faith, it is a dreary fashion, I think. I prefer silks and satin and lace. This jacket is so tight, I had a monstrous hard job getting into it. I stole it from the present Duke’s wardrobe. Of course, he is so determined to excuse and explain away my existence that he will in all probability not mention it.”
“He will accuse one of the servants,” said Alice.
“No he will not. For he knows I exist. I talked to him tonight. I told him exactly what I thought of him and he listened to me very carefully and then he said, “There are no such things as ghosts, therefore I do not believe in you, I do not see you or hear you and so it will continue until you cease to plague me.’ Odd’s Life! What a cold fish. He has not even the imagination necessary to be frightened!”
“What is to become of me?” said Alice in a dreary voice.
“I don’t know,” said the ghost crossly. “Stop crouching and whimpering in that bed.”
“I’m cold.”
“Then I shall light a fire.”
“I’m hungry.”
“So am I,” he replied with surprise, “although I cannot understand why. I shall attend to the fire first, then the food and then your future. I can leave the Hall, by the way. I paid a very pleasant visit to my graveside. The tombstone is a trifle florid, I admit…”
“You are a ghost,” said Alice, shaken suddenly with superstitious dread.
“Of course I am, you silly chit. Hadn’t we already established that? I am not going to breathe brimstone on you or drag you off to the devil if that is what troubles you.”
Alice climbed slowly from the bed as he lit the fire. “It don’t seem natural,” she ventured.
“No,” he agreed pleasantly. “But you are better off here with me than slaving in that kitchen. You are hungry, which is why you are whining in that vulgar way of yours more than usual. Faugh! Those clothes of yours are going on the fire as soon as I have a blaze going.”
Alice clutched her clothes to her. “Don’t touch me!” she cried. “T’ain’t decent…”
“Oh, I do not have evil designs on you, my kitchen wench. Only on those horrible garments. I shall fetch you something else. Which color of gown, I wonder? Blue, I think.” And then he was gone.
Alice blinked. She was sure he had not opened the door. She crouched in a chair by the fire and waited.
He returned as suddenly as he had disappeared, bearing a heavy tray in one hand and a pile of clothing in the other. “Put these on,” he commanded, throwing the clothes on the bed.
Alice picked them up and cautiously retreated behind the far side of the bed and drew the curtains. The underthings were of fragile India muslin and the gown was of blue silk.
“I hope you do not catch your death of cold,” came the ghost’s voice from the other side of the bed. “What a marvelous age this is! Never have women worn so little. I do not approve, however. I like more left to the imagination. They do not wear what I would call gowns these days, but things more like shifts.”
Alice emerged cautiously in her new clothes. He turned and surveyed her for a long moment. She was very thin but her hair was magnificent and her eyes seemed very wide and dark in her thin face. The blue gown was a trifle large for her and inclined to slip at the shoulders. Alice had never worn such fine, thin material before and felt almost naked.
She nonetheless felt very grand and ladylike, for this was surely one of the Duchess’s gowns, and was disappointed when the ghost merely stared at her curiously for a few moments and then busied himself uncorking a bottle of wine.
“Do I look like a lady?” she asked timidly.
His very bright blue eyes raked over her. “No,” he said after due consideration. “You look like a kitchen maid in one of her mistress’s gowns. Now, don’t look so miserable. You are quite pretty in a half-starved way. Pull up a chair and sit down. The food is cold—a veal pie and a brace of grouse—but we also have wine and bread and a good fire. Then you have my fascinating company. Come, smile. Girls of your class are not usually favored with such exalted company.”
“Oh, yes they are,” flashed Alice, suddenly angry. “A certain type o’ women.”
“Lightskirts? Ah, yes. Perhaps you will become a famous courtesan.”
“A what?”
“Never mind. Drink your wine, close your mouth—it is hanging open in a stupid, peasant way—and eat. We will discuss your future later.”
Effectively silenced and humiliated, Alice started to eat, handling the knife and fork very awkwardly since she was used to eating with her fingers.
Alice drank a glass of wine very quickly and then another. Like most French wines which had passed through the hands of a London importer, it was heavily fortified with brandy. At first she felt dizzy but, after making a good meal, she began to feel strangely elated. The Duke ate and drank silently, seemingly immersed in his thoughts. The November gales hurled across the Downs, throwing icy rain against the window. The fire hissed and crackled and the wavering light from the candles on the table enclosed them in a small pool of light.
Alice found herself wondering idly how it was that the Duke could take his return to life so calmly.
The Duke had not taken it calmly in the least. After his first exaltation at finding himself alive, he had settled down to some serious thought. Why had he been brought back? To atone for his sins? What if his wife, Agnes, should materialize? He shuddered. He could still hear her steady complaints, see her steady disintegration as she removed herself from the world on an opium cloud, surrounding herself with quacks who told her it was necessary medicine for her imagined ills. What was he supposed to do with this half-life? As daylight filtered from the east, he simply ceased to exist. There was no dramatic return to the grave. Just nothing. It was all very strange.
And who was this little kitchen maid who had the power to summon him back? He studied her covertly as she bent her glossy black head over her food. She could, perhaps, be a great beauty given a bit more flesh and a great deal of rest. But apart from that, she was very much a kitchen maid with her slow country speech and her red, calloused hands.
He said in a kinder voice than he had used to her before, “What is thy name, child?”
“Alice. Alice Lovesey.”
“Thy parents?”
“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I was brung here when I was twelve, I do reckon. Person who brung me says as how I was found wandering. There was this here riddle note pinned to my dress with my name.”
“Lovesey,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder. I do not kno
w of any family of that name about here.”
Flushed with wine and comforted with food, Alice clasped her little hands together and stared at him earnestly. “Oh, p’raps I be the daughter of a high-born lady who’s a-looking for me still.”
“No. You are not high born,” said the ghost flatly. “It is possible however your parents were a respectable country couple. You could change, of course. If, say, I trained you to be a lady and found you an establishment in London, then there is no reason why you should not marry well. Dear Agnes’s jewels, correctly sold, should set you up with an excellent dot.
“It will be difficult to make a lady of you—but not entirely impossible. I shall find you a wardrobe tomorrow. For that, I must go further afield. I think I should cease my haunting of this establishment until you are settled.”
“I don’t want you to steal things for me,” said Alice in a low voice.
“Then I shall leave money for them, my prude. I shall take the present Duke’s money and that will not be stealing for, after all, I am only taking what is my own. We shall contrive. I don’t suppose you can read or write.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” said Alice proudly. “I can do both.”
“Really!” His thin eyebrows flew up in surprise. “Forgive me if I do not believe you. Wait!”
To Alice’s alarm he went straight through the wall and disappeared.
“A new accomplishment,” he murmured, returning as abruptly as he had left with a pile of books, paper, pen and ink.
“Now,” he said, flicking over the pages of a book. “I shall give you something to read to me and then I want you to write it. Let me see…”
He handed her a calf-bound volume of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and pointed to a paragraph with one long, polished nail.
Alice looked at the print, half afraid that this one talent should have deserted her. But the sense of the words leaped immediately to her brain, and she read clearly.
“Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these mortal acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily.”
“Clever man,” murmured the Duke. “Very good, my child. Now write what thou hast read.”
Alice had never tried to write, that she could remember, but somewhere in the back of her brain, she knew that she could. She dipped the newly sharpened quill in the inkwell, bent over the paper, closed her eyes for a moment in intense concentration and began to write while the Duke watched her carefully. When she had finished, she handed him the parchment and he studied the neat Roman script in surprise.
“A scholarly hand, i’faith,” he said. “Thou hast learning somewhere in thy misty past, Alice.”
Alice beamed at him proudly. “Then my parents had learning?”
He nodded. “Someone undoubtedly did. I think we have done enough work for tonight. Before you retire, I shall leave you some copies of La Belle Assemblée and tomorrow when I am gone, you may pass the day in studying the fashions of London. I shall leave you enough food for breakfast. Ah, you cannot wear that flimsy gown. I shall find you a morning dress.”
Alice clasped her hands tightly together when he had left. She felt she should be frightened. But he was the first sympathetic person she had ever met that she could remember and so, at last, she decided to simply accept his ghostly existence without fretting her brains over the reason for this strange and unearthly manifestation.
He was soon back, another gown over his arm. “Put it on,” he ordered rather sharply. “I am not yet accustomed to the nakedness of some of these modern gowns and would prefer you more covered.”
Alice retreated again behind the screen of the bed. This ensemble was indeed less revealing and more to Alice’s taste. It was a plain cambric morning dress, high at the neck and with a short train and let in round the bottom with two rows of worked trimming. A pelisse of green sarsenet, very fitting, went over it. The pelisse was trimmed with fancy trimming and fastened with a gold brooch, confined round Alice’s small waist with a girdle of sarsenet with a gold clasp. There was a pair of walking shoes of brocaded silk to go with it, rather large for Alice’s small feet. She felt strange wearing shoes, the first time in her life that she could remember having put any on.
She emerged from the back of the bed, hoping the Duke would see a kitchen maid transformed into a lady, but he only looked at her indifferently and remarked that she “would do.”
“I shall leave you to your rest,” he said, draining off the last of the wine.
“Don’t go,” pleaded Alice. She all at once did not want to be left alone, and did not somehow want to think of what he might get up to in the hours of darkness.
“You look very tired,” he remarked, hesitating by the door.
“Oh, please, if you stay with me, we could talk and then I could sleep all day and not feel so alone,” said Alice.
He hesitated and then suddenly smiled at her in a bewitching way which quite took away her breath. “Very well,” he said, sitting down by the fire. “What do you think of my room?”
Alice looked around. It was small and paneled and sparsely furnished. But it was grander than anything she had ever known before. Apart from the bed in the corner, there was the table at which they had eaten with two high-carved chairs beside it The low fireplace was flanked on either side by two easy chairs and there was a tall wardrobe in one corner and a washstand in the other. A portrait of a lady with masses of fine light hair and a vague expression hung over the fireplace. She was wearing the dress of the last century and had two French greyhounds at her skirts. In the background stretched a romantic Italianate landscape with drooping trees, an obelisk, and an approaching thunderstorm.
“Agnes,” he said, following her gaze.
“Your wife,” said Alice, quickly averting her eyes from the picture in case she should conjure this ghost back from the dead. “Do you miss her very much?” she added in a low voice.
“You are obtuse,” he said severely. “I thought I had made it plain that I do not.”
“Then why did you marry her?” asked Alice, made bold by the wine she had drunk.
He glared at her haughtily and then relaxed and seemed to smile at himself. “I was about to stand on my ghostly dignity,” he said. “I married her, my curious child, because I was well to go at the time. When I came to my senses, I found her insipid, she who had seemed an ethereal angel the night before. Alas! She was of gentle birth and informed me some three months after our delectable night that she was with child. Since I did not love anyone I entered into a marriage of convenience for the sake of the child.
“There was, of course, no child nor could there be, I gather. It was not that Agnes deliberately tricked me. She was simply a liar. It was hard for her to tell truth from lie since she lived in an opium fog most of the time. I tried to stop her habit but she was extremely cunning and finally I became disaffected. She loved scenes. I abhorred them. She was never happier than when berating me in front of my friends. Ah, me! I enjoyed myself in a very wild way with friends of similar inclinations. I slept most of the day then and roistered at night so there is not much changed now I am come back. What a short night I shall have in the summer! If I am still on this earth.”
Alice suddenly thought of London, of becoming a society lady and found that the idea terrified her.
“When I go to London,” she said timidly, “will you be with me?”
“Of course not,” he said stretching out a booted foot to the dying fire. “I should be very much in the way. Your main motive is to become married, remember?”
“But we are so comfortable here,” yawned Alice sleepily.
“It is comfortable compared to what you have known. But it would not always be so. You need the company of young people like yourself. How old are you?”
“Nineteen, I reckon.”
“I was thirty-two years of age when I died.”
“That’s not old,” said Alice.
&n
bsp; He looked at her oddly and then said gently, “We would not be suited; we would never have been suited, you know.”
“Because I’m a servant?”
“No. Not that,” he said lightly. “I never… er… had amorous designs on virgins.”
“Oh!” Alice felt hurt and fell into a sulky silence, staring at the red embers.
The red glow faded and receded. She was dreamily conscious of being picked up and carried to bed and felt she should protest. And the next thing she knew, the midday sun was streaming in through the diamond panes of the window. There was bread and cheese on a silver tray on the table and a jug of milk.
There were also several back numbers of La Belle Assemblée. Then Alice realized she could not remember being put to bed.
