Phantom Bride

by Cach, Lisa

  “Hush, sweeting,” Serena heard him murmuring to her. “Madame Zousa has had a fit. Leave her to your brother and the Coxes. They will know what to do.”

  “But she did contact Serena, didn’t she?” Sophie asked. “The voice. Whose voice was that, praying? I didn’t see Madame Zousa’s lips moving.”

  “Hush, dearest, and don’t think of it. We’ll see if Cook can make you a toddy.”

  Madame Zousa began to come around, blinking, closing her mouth and reaching up to wipe at the saliva that had dribbled down her chin. Woding pulled out a handkerchief and helped her. The room brightened as Rhys got several candles lit.

  “Where is she?” Madame Zousa asked weakly.

  “Where is who?” Beth asked, wrapping her own shawl around the woman’s shoulders as Woding eased her into a sitting position.

  Madame Zousa looked around, her eyes passing over Serena without seeing her. “The tall, pale woman, with the long hair.” Her voice had lost its Romany accent, and begun to take on a distinctly Cornish hue.

  “I saw no one,” Beth said, “but I heard a woman’s voice speaking Latin. Did you hear it, too, Rhys?” she asked, turning to her husband.

  “I heard someone,” he said, “but I’m not saying I know who it was.” His tone of voice suggested he was holding much of his opinion back, and none of it was kind toward Madame Zousa.

  They all looked toward Woding.

  “I think we had best get you tucked up in bed,” he said to Madame Zousa. “I’ll ring for Marcy to keep an eye on you. We can discuss this all in the morning.”

  Marcy was duly called for, and Madame Zousa taken away. Serena caught Woding’s eye and she pointed to the black silk, candle, and chicken remains. He took her hint and blew out the candle, then gathered the silk, bones, and feathers together and tossed the lot into the fire.

  Serena stood and watched the materials go up in flame, wanting to be certain that every last scrap was burned to cinders. It was only when she heard the others leaving the room that she pulled herself away, unwilling to stay in the drawing room alone.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Beth was saying as the threesome crossed the entry hall and went into the library. It was a far cozier room, the fire already burning merrily in the hearth, the spines of the books giving the room a sense of comforting familiarity.

  Rhys and Woding pulled three chairs up around the fire; then Woding served them all brandy, Beth included. Serena wished she could have some herself, for her body was still trembling with the aftereffects of fright.

  Woding pulled an ottoman to the side of his chair, seemingly without purpose or intent. She was standing to the side, watching them all settle in with their drinks and beginning to feel very much the lonely, frightened outsider, when she realized that Woding meant the ottoman for her.

  She sniffled once, feeling a pathetic hint of grateful tears in her eyes, and sat down.

  The rehashing of the seance was about what she expected, with Beth excited, Rhys trying desperately to pass much of it off as a performance, and Woding largely keeping his own counsel. Blandamour appeared shortly before the group broke up, telling Woding that Sophie had been reluctantly put to bed under the care of her nurse. Serena rather felt for the poor wench, foolish though she might be, if she were going to have to spend the rest of her life mollycoddled in such a manner.

  As they parted for the evening, Serena stayed close to Woding’s side, visions of the black shadow haunting her thoughts. She followed him to his room.

  Alex closed the door and went to his bed, setting his candle on the small table beside it. He waited a few more moments to be sure that the others were out of earshot down the hall, and then turned to Serena, standing alone and pale across the dark room. She glowed with the self-contained luminescence of foxfire, visible herself yet illuminating nothing around her.

  “What the hell happened down there?” he asked, feeling a confused ire that had no proper target. Somehow, he was certain her presence had brought about the fiasco tonight, only she seemed as shaken by the events as was Madame Zousa.

  “I do not know,” she said.

  Predictable.

  “Enough with ‘I don’t know.’ You said you would not interfere tonight. I want to know why you broke your word, and why you spoke. For God’s sake, everyone heard you!”

  The full implications of her speaking and being heard by others suddenly dawned on him as he said it: he was not crazy. She did exist. He had proof now, of a sort, for they had heard her, too. He sat on the end of his bed, struck silent by the realization.

  He watched her come toward him, stopping a few feet away.

  “Forsooth, you did not see him?” she asked.

  “See whom?”

  Her hands were clasped tight in front of her. “I think it was the spirit of Hugh le Gayne.”

  “In the drawing room? Why? Have you seen him here before?”

  “No, but it felt like him, and what he did to that woman… It could only have been le Gayne. It had to have been!”

  “Serena,” he said in a low, calm voice, sensing the depth of her distress, “tell me from the beginning. What did you see?”

  She described a darkness upon dark, a shadow of some evil presence that had taken Madame Zousa and made of her a toy for his pleasure, raping her as they all sat and watched. He felt his skin go cold, tightening in belated goose pimples.

  “And you think this shadow was Hugh le Gayne?”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and gave a shiver. “It must have been.”

  “But he’s gone now, right? You got rid of him with that prayer you said.”

  “I think I did.”

  “Think? Or know?”

  “I do not know! One moment he was there; the next he was gone.” They were both silent a long moment, and then she added, “I am afraid he might come back.”

  The thought gave him no small unease. “The bones were burned, and I doubt Madame Zousa—or whatever her name really is—will be calling upon the dead anytime soon.”

  “Perhaps he will not need her next time. Perhaps she has shown him the way to escape the bounds of hell and come after me!”

  “Serena, stop it,” Alex ordered. “You’re frightening yourself. It—or he—is gone.”

  “He has been burning in hell all these years, waiting for a second chance at me. How do you know he will not return? He did it once! Maybe he’s still here in the castle, waiting for me to be alone, or waiting until I go to that place between wakings, where I shall be helpless.”

  “What place?”

  She fluttered a hand impatiently at him. “When I am not here. It is like your dreamworld, only with no dreams. It is nothingness. There would be nothing to stop him if he came after me there, no way for me to defend myself!”

  She was talking herself into a terror. Who ever heard of a ghost afraid of a ghost? And this behavior from her was unexpected for another reason: even though frightened, he would have thought she would take an offensive position against the shadow. Hugh le Gayne must have been a monstrous man to have so devastating an effect on her so many years after his death.

  “Do something, Woding,” she said suddenly. He could feel her gaze intently on him. “You have the power. You can guard us all against him.”

  “I have no power against such things. You are proof enough of that.”

  “The stars! You understand the stars, you are an astrologer, you must know how to keep le Gayne away.”

  “An astrologer?” He laughed. “I am no astrologer, Serena. I do not seek the future in the stars.”

  “But why else would you spend your nights in study of the heavens?”

  “I seek knowledge, but not of the kind you mean. I am trying to decipher the riddle of falling stars. I am an amateur scientist, is all. An astronomer.”

  “Do not the stars tell you what will happen, and explain what has?”

  “Not in any mode I can understand.”

  “The men of greatest
learning in my day were the astrologers,” Serena said. “ ’Tis well known that the fate of man is writ in the stars and planets. Why do you not know this as well?”

  He chewed the inside of his lip a moment, thinking on how best to explain himself. She wouldn’t hear him at all if he started by totally refuting her beliefs. “There are those who still believe that truth can be read in the heavens,” he began. “That is not, however, the type of truth I am seeking. What I want to know is what causes those streaks of light that we call falling stars. I want to know what they really are, not just what they appear to be. I am curious.”

  “You are going to a lot of trouble to satisfy your curiosity, Woding.” She narrowed her dark eyes at him. “There must be more to it than that. If it is not to seek power, it is something else.”

  “I do not know why there should be anything else.”

  “Is this because of what happened when you were here as a boy, the night the stars fell?” she asked.

  “What do you remember of that night?” he asked carefully.

  “What do you?” she countered.

  He tread carefully. “Rhys has always said you tried to kill me. He would have me believe that you pushed me from that wall.”

  “I did not!”

  “But you were here.”

  “Of course I was here. By Saint Stephen, where else would I have been? I have not left the place for nigh on five centuries.”

  “Did you see me fall?”

  “I—” she started, then stopped.

  “Did you see me fall?” he repeated.

  “For God’s love, I did not mean to hurt you,” she said quickly, softly. “I do not even know what happened, not entirely. I saw you there, gazing up at the night sky, and I reached out…” She paused, her eyes focused somewhere in the past.

  “And?”

  She came back, looking at him again. “And somehow you must have seen me. I did not mean to frighten you.”

  “Why did you reach for me?”

  “I do not know!”

  “Serena, I grow tired of that answer.”

  “Why should I know the answers to all your questions?”

  “I am asking why you reached for me.”

  “And I am telling you, I do not know! There was something about your face, the expression in your eyes, as if your soul had suddenly expanded in a flash of wonder. I do not know. Perhaps I thought… thought I could somehow touch what you felt. I wanted to be a part of your wonder, if only for a moment.”

  This was not what he had expected to hear. Where was the rage, the hatred, the murderous passion? All he heard was a heart-wrenching longing. He could hardly believe that he had been the boy to rouse such feelings in her.

  “And then I think you saw me, and were horrified, and you lost your footing and fell,” she said. “I woke your cousin, and held my gown against your cut until he gained his wits and came to help you. I do not believe I meant you any harm.”

  “You have doubts?”

  “Envy does terrible things to a person, Woding. You were more alive on that wall than I could remember ever being. I wanted that, but if I couldn’t have it, how do I know that part of me did not want to be certain that no one else had it, either?”

  A faint understanding of her nature and her experiences began to flicker beneath his consciousness, softening him toward her even as her complexities took him aback. “Do you still envy me?”

  “I will not harm you.”

  “That is not what I asked.”

  “What do the envies of a mere spirit, insubstantial as air, matter? Why do you ask anything about me at all? I cannot matter to you. Perhaps you seek only to pacify me by playing to my vanity.”

  The remark was close enough to his original intent to make him uncomfortable, but his interest in her had since taken on a life of its own, an interest that seemed more valid than obsessional now that he had trustworthy witnesses to her existence. “Perhaps it is the other way around, and you are blackmailing me into talking with you,” he said, avoiding her accusation. “If I ignored you, by morning I might have no male staff left at all.”

  “They may leave you anyway, after they hear what happened tonight. And most assuredly the women will leave you if Hugh le Gayne returns. He would not be so gentle with your servants as I.”

  “That is not a pleasant thought,” he said.

  He did not know for certain what had happened tonight, even after Serena’s explanation. Madame Zousa might have only had a fit, and not called any spirits at all. He did believe that Serena thought she had seen something, though. He knew now that she would not have spoken otherwise, and she most certainly would not have admitted her fears to him if something had not truly, deeply frightened her. That much, at least, he understood about her.

  “Then do something about it, Woding. Search your books. Find something to keep him away.”

  “Mr. Blandamour might be the better source of help.”

  She made a disparaging noise with which he could not help but agree. One did not easily imagine the gangly vicar in a spiritual duel with the likes of a shadowy le Gayne.

  He went on. “You seem to have done an admirable job of banishing the spirit yourself.”

  “You’re not going to help me,” she stated flatly.

  “Serena, I am not what you think. My charts and my telescope have nothing to do with magic.”

  “Astrology is not magic.”

  He sighed. “I’ll tell you what. When we have a moment to ourselves, I’ll take you to my study and explain what I do there. Maybe then you will understand what I’m trying to say. If there is any magic to be had, you can find it and use it yourself.”

  She nodded, quick and firm. “I will do so.”

  “All right then. Let’s call it a night, shall we?” He stood up, leading the way to the door.

  She didn’t move.

  “Serena? Good night.”

  She stayed standing there.

  “I want to take a bath and go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She only looked at him.

  He held on to his patience. “What is it?”

  “I want to stay here tonight.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t want to be alone. I won’t bother you. I’ve spent the night here before, and never troubled you.”

  He’d been plenty troubled. He did not relish the idea of repeating those erotic nightmares. A partial lie, that; but it would be harder to enjoy them when he’d started getting to know her as a person, for God’s sake. “I would rather you did not.”

  “He may still be here.”

  “If he returns, you may come wake me.”

  “I pray thee, please?” she asked softly. “May I stay?” The plea sounded as if it cost half her soul.

  It occurred to him that she must have rarely asked favors of anyone. Her vulnerability defeated him in a way her aggression never had.

  “All right,” he sighed.

  “Thank you.”

  Was that a smile he saw on her face? “Make yourself comfortable. I’m going to take my bath.”

  She looked worried, and opened her mouth to speak. “Alone,” he said, before she could even ask.

  “I won’t look.”

  “No.”

  “I promise.”

  “No.”

  “Prithee, please?”

  “Those words are not a magic incantation to get whatever you wish,” he said sourly.

  She kept looking at him.

  He had created a monster. It had been easier to have her do as she wished than to have to consent to it, making himself a willing partner. “Fine,” he said at last. “Do as you will. But keep in mind that I can tell when you’re watching me.”

  Good God. He sounded like a virgin protecting her modesty. Why should it matter even if she did look? he wondered as she followed him into his dressing room. She made a show of staring closely at a landscape painting while he ran the water and undressed.

&n
bsp; The problem was, a part of him almost wanted her to turn around and stare, as he knew she had done before.

  He slipped into the hot water, aware of her presence and her every movement as she went from painting to dresser, displaying unnatural interest in the contents of the room. There was, he admitted to himself, something strangely arousing about bathing in the presence of a woman. It was even more perverse that he should be getting a thrill from that, considering that she was a ghost.

  The nightmare in which he had made love to her on the ruined wall flitted back to him in disjointed, half-remembered images. Would she truly be cold to the touch? A tingling memory of unwanted pleasure shimmered through him, stirring his manhood.

  He was a sick devil, no question about it.

  As he dried off, he watched her from the corner of his eye, trying—or hoping?—to catch her breaking her promise. She was as good as her word, though, completely turning her back as he toweled off. He put his arms in his dressing gown and tied it shut, disdaining a nightshirt. If she was going to behave herself, there was no point in putting himself through the torture of twisted, clinging fabric.

  Serena noted the lack of nightshirt with a bare quirking of the corners of her lips. Good, she thought. At least while he slept she would have the delight of looking at his neck and, possibly, a bit of shoulder. Get him warm enough and even some chest might become visible. It was a great pity he was not as free with his person as her brothers had been with theirs.

  She followed him back into his bedroom. He raised an eyebrow to her when he reached the side of his bed, and she obligingly turned her back once again, listening with a tingling awareness in her loins as his dressing gown was removed and the sheets drawn back.

  This was most unlike her, lusting after a man—and tonight of all nights, after that encounter with le Gayne! Perhaps she could blame it all on that first view of his bare buttocks. Or maybe it was his hiring of that girl to be a stable-lass, such an unexpected, admirable thing to do. Or maybe it was that he showed an interest in her, and noted her presence when no one else did.

  He was an even-tempered, gentle man, and therefore a new creature to her acquaintance. Surely her fascination could be attributed to that alone.