Phantom Bride

by Cach, Lisa

She somehow knew Woding’s manhood would not look the same.

  The warrior in her said this was the perfect time to investigate that issue, when he would sense her presence and be made uncomfortable. He would not want to remain in a home where he had no privacy, where every time he took his drawers down he felt someone was staring. As much as her brothers had enjoyed flaunting themselves, she knew that they had enjoyed it only while they had control over the baring of their nether parts. Certainly Briggs had not reacted well when she—cringing in disgust the whole while—had reached out and given that little mouse a quick yank.

  Something in her balked at the idea of spying on Woding at his bath, though. She didn’t know if it was fear of him that stopped her, or unease with her own desire to look upon his naked body.

  She was suddenly certain that if she saw him naked and wet, she would be unable to resist licking him, running her tongue over his chest, lapping the drops from the smooth planes of muscle… Her face burned both in embarrassment at the picture her imagination conjured, and with the heat of what could only be lust.

  Licking a naked Woding would be a marvelous haunting technique, to be sure, but… she didn’t think she could bear it when her lustful touch made him scream in horror. A woman had her pride.

  Better to retreat, at least for the moment. She would leave Woding, his squeezable buttocks, and his stars to themselves until she decided what course to follow with him. There was always more than one flank on which to attack an enemy.

  It was time she went to battle, and took back Maiden Castle.

  “Dickie, bring up a cask of beer from the cellar, will you? There’s a good lad,” Horace Leboff, the cook, told his young assistant.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Leboff,” Dickie said, glad enough to set down his paring knife and give his cramping knuckles a break from potato peeling.

  He took a candle and went round the corner of the kitchen to the doorway that led down to the cellars. This household was small enough in numbers, and Mr. Leboff was large and strong enough that no one dared to filch spirits, and so the beer cellar door was left unlocked. Dickie liked that. Although he and a few of the other younger servants had talked about how easy it would be to steal a cask, there was some element of pride in knowing they were trusted not to be thieves.

  The stone stairway to the cellar was dark and cold. He lit the candles in their brackets as he went down, the flickering flames turning his own shadow into that of a grotesque, misshapen man upon the opposite wall. He wished there were gas lighting down here, as there was in the king’s hall chandeliers.

  He thought of Marcy, who lived two houses down from his parents, and how her big hazel eyes would go wide with awe when he told her how he and a few of the others all but ran the castle. She had thoughts herself of going into service, but he doubted she could find a posting as plum as this one.

  He did not much miss home, except for Marcy. Mayhap it was seeing no one but men all day that put her so much in his mind. Mr. Woding was a strange one, having no women in his house, but Dickie wouldn’t complain. A man could let down his guard this way, and be himself. He didn’t have to apologize for a belch, and no one shrieked and said he was disgusting when he passed a bit of gas.

  He raised the candle high when he reached the bottom of the steps, looking over the humped shapes of the casks. Marcy would ask him if he’d seen the ghost of Serena. They had both grown up hearing the legend of the murderous lady of Maiden Castle. He almost wished he would see her, to have something other than secondhand, half-imagined rumors to tell.

  He felt a hand lay itself against his cheek, the flesh as damp and cold as a corpse in the night.

  He jumped, a strangled shriek gurgling out of his throat. The sensation vanished, leaving his heart pounding painfully in his chest. He stood motionless, breathing like a winded horse, bulging eyes darting about, seeking movement in the flickering shadows.

  Nothing happened. He shivered, his skin chilled, the cold going to the bone. All was quiet beyond the noise of his own thundering body. Had he imagined it?

  He set the candle in the last bracket, nearly dropping it before managing, with a shaking hand, to wedge it in tight. He went to heft the nearest cask onto his shoulder.

  There was a slow creaking sound from the top of the stairs, and he stopped to listen, prickles running up the back of his neck. The sound quickened, the creak going higher-pitched, louder, recognizable now as hinges, and then the door slammed shut, all the candles along the stairs blowing out in a rush of frozen air.

  He trembled, unable to move, the cask wobbling on his shoulder. Don’t let it touch me, he thought. If it didn’t touch him again, he would be all right. He could hold together. As long as it didn’t touch him.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven—” he began to pray, his skin pebbled with goose pimples as if it, too, dreaded what might come.

  Cold hands wrapped around his throat.

  The cask fell, splitting open on the stone floor with a crashing splash. Dickie howled, scrambling for the stairs in the dark, running headlong into a wall, stumbling into barrels, knocking several off their stands before at last he found the foot of the stairs again, and scampered up them on all fours.

  The ring handle of the door would not turn. He put all his strength into it, sweat coursing down his face. There were footsteps, slow and deliberate, coming up the stairs behind him.

  He pounded on the door, screaming, “Mr. Leboff! Help me, God help me! Mr. Leboff!” He heard the rustle of cloth, a breath not his own stirring the air behind him, a chill like winter on his skin.

  The door suddenly opened, and he fell forward onto Leboff’s massive, solid frame.

  “Dickie, what is it? What’s happened to you, lad?”

  “Sss—” he tried. “Ssss—”

  “Yes? Sss—?”

  “Ssserena,” he yelped, regaining his feet and stumbling away from the open doorway.

  Leboff peered down the dark stairwell, then turned to look him up and down, a frown on his face. “You’ve wet yourself. Best you clean yourself up before anyone sees you. And don’t you be speaking a word of this!” Leboff warned, his expression dark. “There’s no need to be stirring up false rumors. I think someone has been playing a prank on you.”

  Dickie looked down, away from Leboff’s eyes, aware now of the warm wetness of his trousers and the sharp smell that mixed with the beer on his shoes. “I dropped a cask,” he admitted. He knew it hadn’t been one of the other servants teasing him. It had been Serena who had come after him; he was sure of it.

  “You can clean up the beer after you change,” the big cook said. “When we find who spooked you, I’ll have Mr. Underhill take the cost out of his wages.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dickie said, and went to fetch clean trousers, wondering how he’d ever be able to make himself return to that cellar.

  Daniel Padgett rubbed beeswax onto the mahogany rail of the great staircase. He was tall, strong, and blond, and he knew he looked as if he should be out plowing fields or hauling blocks of granite on his shoulder. Doing men’s work.

  He took another dab of wax onto his cloth, rubbing the satiny rail, quietly pleased with the faint honey scent and the way the wood shone under his care. His title was footman, but he knew he was doing the work of a housemaid. Pride had urged him to protest when his duties were outlined for him, but prudence had kept his mouth shut. The wages here were better than anything to be had in a mill or on a farm, and he lacked the skills of a craftsman. If Mr. Woding wanted to pay him to sweep, dust, polish, and scrub, then sweep, dust, polish, and scrub Daniel would.

  And besides, he rather liked being a maid and making things neat and orderly. Not that his mother would ever believe that, given the trails of mess he left behind at home. Somehow, though, here at the castle, it was different. Mr. Underhill showed him what to do, then left him to do it. There was no nagging, no correcting every minor flaw, no hurrying him along. As long as it was done by the end of the day, and done well, he was
his own master.

  Tomorrow Mr. Underhill was going to show him how to wash clothes, and give him as his helpers for the day John Flury, the gardener’s grandson who did odd jobs, and Dickie Chiles, the cook’s assistant. He had not decided yet how he felt about spending the day in the laundry, but it was worth trying. He hadn’t thought he’d find scrubbing the bathtub bearable, and look how that had turned out. He had never really liked “men’s work,” anyway. Perhaps this was his calling.

  He dropped his rag over the edge of his supply bucket, and with both hands checked the texture of the wood, admiring the way it reflected multicolored light from the rose window at the head of the stairs. It needed just a spot more wax.

  He reached for his rag, fumbling along the edge of the pail for it. He turned to look. The rag was gone.

  He peered in the pail. Nothing but clean, folded cloths. He lifted the pail. No, nothing. He turned in circles, thinking it must be beneath him, stuck to his shoe, tucked into the back of his pants—it had to be somewhere. He bent over the rail, looking down at the gray stone floor below. No.

  He scratched at his shirtfront, frowning, turned back to the pail, and there it was, draped over the edge of the pail, exactly as he had left it.

  Daniel picked the cloth up carefully, smelled it, looked around. Was he as daft as his mum had always said? He dabbed the rag into the wax and went to work again on the rail.

  The next time he turned around, the pail had disappeared.

  Jim Sommer, coachman, stableboy, and groom all rolled into one fifty-year-old, small, lumpish package of a man, did not like the winding tunnel that led from the castle down to the stables and the lower gate. It was dark, lit in day only by a few deep, narrow windows, and it spooked the horses. He didn’t blame them. Every step echoed in the confounded passage, as he should know— every time he wanted something to eat, he had to walk its length up to the castle kitchens.

  He was not given to foolish fancies, but he trusted his horses. If their instincts rebelled against a person or a place, he was inclined to think there was something wrong with that person or place.

  He walked the passage now, grumbling to himself as his stomach grumbled to him. He’d like to give a piece of his mind to the idiot who’d designed the place. The sound of his own breathing bounced off the walls, sounding louder than it should.

  He felt the hair slowly rising on the back of his neck as he approached the spot where the horses shied five times out of ten. There was an alcove in the wall, visible only as a darker shadow now that there were no torches lit. He did not take his eyes from that spot as he made a wide berth of it.

  A sigh of pent-up breath escaped him as he rounded another turn and the alcove was out of sight, but before the last of the air left his lungs he tripped over something, sending it clanging on the stones as he stumbled, heart jumping into his throat. His knees hit the paving, his palms scraping stone as he broke his fall.

  Sommer panted a moment, his mind checking through his body for injury. He was all right. His glance fell on the object he had tripped over, barely visible in the dim light: a pail, cleaning rags spilling from its mouth.

  Sommer got angrily to his feet, grabbed the pail handle, and marched up the last winding curve of the tunnel, across the courtyard, and straight to the kitchens. When he got there, he stomped to the worktable that dominated the vaulted room, slammed the pail down on the wood, and turned a glaring eye to the others who were gathered there: Leboff, Daniel the housemaid, and Dickie the scullery wench.

  “What fool,” he began, feeling his face flaming with anger, “what utter imbecile—no, what brainless spawn of a dung-eating maggot was stupid enough to leave his cleaning pail in the middle of the tunnel, where one of my horses could have stumbled into it and broken a leg?”

  Daniel made a squeaking sound and fainted.

  “Hey, ho!” Sommer said in surprise, as Dickie scrambled to catch his falling comrade, managing just barely to ease the tall man to the floor. “What’s wrong with him?” the coachman asked, his anger forgotten. “His bucket, was it? I wouldn’t have been that hard on him,” he said, pulling in his chin, frowning down disapprovingly at the man’s limp form. “Thought he had more backbone to him than that, for all that he makes beds for his wages.”

  “Shut up,” Leboff ordered curtly. He dipped a cloth in water and lowered himself heavily to one knee, where he could dab at Daniel’s face.

  Sommer shrugged and took an apple from the worktable, crunching into it as he watched the little drama on the floor.

  “Sommer, make yourself useful,” Leboff ordered as Daniel came around. “Go find Mr. Underhill.”

  “Eh? And tell him what?” he asked around a mouthful of apple.

  “Tell him we have a prankster among us. And when we catch him, I’m going to break his miserable neck.”

  Chapter Seven

  Three weeks later

  Golden rays of late afternoon sunlight slanted through the diamond panes of the dining room windows, sparkling on the wineglasses and the silver epergne that held an arrangement of fruit and flowers. The rays were doing a fair job of brightening the otherwise ridiculously gloomy chamber, Alex thought.

  “I do so love this room,” Beth said, lifting her wineglass as young Dickie began to clear away the remaining dishes, preparatory to removing the top tablecloth and bringing in dessert.

  “Good lord, you cannot be serious,” Rhys said to his wife. “With that… that…” he stammered, looking up at the wall behind Alex. “What is that thing, anyway?”

  Alex knew without turning of what his cousin spoke. “I believe it is a caribou.”

  “Caribou? Where did Briggs get a caribou?”

  “Canada, I should imagine.”

  “I think it’s clever,” Beth said, admiring the head and enormous rack protruding from high on the wall. Its missing body had been painted onto the plaster work, one hoof raised as if it were about to take a step.

  “The damn thing is cross-eyed,” Rhys said.

  “And I like the carving over the fireplace, as well,” she said, nodding toward the four-foot-tall, carved and painted woodwork coat of arms.

  “Briggs probably stole it,” Rhys said.

  “You have no imagination.”

  “You have too much,” Rhys countered his wife.

  “Alex, I insist you champion me in this,” Beth said, turning her soft blue-gray eyes to him. “Don’t you find that living here makes you want to don hose and doublet, and carry a sword at your side?”

  He smiled crookedly. He did like Beth, despite her fancies. She was so sweetly sincere in her romanticism, it was hard to hold it against her. “I’m afraid that Briggs’s taste in furnishings is not mine, but I will not deny that the castle has something of an atmosphere to it. It seems to encourage one’s imagination to take flight.”

  Dickie, replacing the epergne and placing dessert spoons on the clean cloth, made a small sound in his throat.

  Rhys caught the sound, raising his eyebrows first to Dickie, then to Alex. “Have there been sightings of the dread Serena?”

  “Oh, do tell!” Beth exclaimed, clapping her hands in delight.

  Dickie carelessly plunked down dishes of ice cream in front of each of the diners, barely nodded to Alex, and dashed from the room.

  “Ice cream! Ghost stories and ice cream,” Beth sighed on a breath of pleasure.

  “I think it is a mischievous staff member we have, not a ghost,” Alex said. “With the exception of Underhill and Sommer, the staff are all locals who have no doubt grown up with the legends of Maiden Castle. One of them seems to have taken it into his head to play the restless spirit: things go missing, only to turn up in the unlikeliest of places; footsteps are heard in the hallways and on stairs, strange thumpings heard in the middle of the night; doors appear to open and close on their own; and many complain of sudden cold chills. All of it, however, can be explained away by a mischievous human hand, drafts, and imagination.”

  “Do you
have suspicions of who the culprit might be?” Rhys asked.

  “Underhill is looking into it, but has not yet come to a conclusion. Ben Flury, the gardener, can be ruled out. He’s seventy if he’s a day, and goes home at night. That leaves Leboff and the three young men, two of whom claim to have had ghostly encounters, and one of whom, John, the gardener’s grandson, seems genuinely frightened by the stories. He will no longer spend the night at the castle, and refuses to work alone. I find it impossible to believe that Leboff could be the prankster: the man is as solid as granite.”

  “Perhaps one of the others lied about his own ghostly encounter,” Rhys suggested. “Or maybe the two young men you haven’t eliminated are in it together.”

  Beth spoke up. “Or maybe there really is a ghost. Everyone suspects that’s why Briggs left so quickly, despite the story he gave about his wife wanting to live closer to their eldest son and grandchildren. I hear he could not get a single night’s rest while he lived here.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Rhys demanded. “I never heard that.”

  “From Mrs. Rogers, who heard it from Mrs. Fields, who got it from her daughter, who sold eggs to one of the kitchen staff.”

  “The usual reliable sources, I see.”

  “I’d have thought you’d be siding with Beth on this,” Alex said to his cousin. “You were always all for blaming Serena for my accident.”

  “Frankly, I can’t decide which is the more appealing of the two possibilities,” Rhys said. “Having a prankster to outwit, or knowing you’re being haunted by a medieval murderess.”

  “Many thanks for your concern.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  A tingling awareness began to creep up Alex’s neck, one that he had not felt since that day when he’d had the nightmare. He’d thought he’d succeeded in banishing his foolish imaginings; why had they come back? Over the past weeks he’d become more convinced than ever that his staff were frightening themselves, and that there were no ghosts. He continued conversing with Rhys and Beth, his mind only half on what he said as some internal sense tried to locate the source of his unease.