by Colleen Ladd
“Oh for pity’s sake,” Portia said aloud. The portrait wasn’t alive. Nor, for that matter, was it doomed to stay in one place, as had been most emphatically proven of late. If she kept on like this, she’d fulfill Mrs. McFerran’s fondest dreams and run herself out of the Hall with superstitious nonsense.
Lady Amelia died horribly, choking on her own blood. Portia had already known that. The entire neighborhood believed Lord Ashburne guilty. She’d known that too. The only one who didn’t believe Lord Ashburne a blood-soaked fiend was Foxkin. And Portia herself. Though she hardly counted, as her belief was more a matter of expediency than knowledge.
Portia did not believe in premonitions or visions. She did not believe that spirits, guilty or otherwise, reached out from their graves. And she did not believe that something was watching her, however much her nerves pricked. There were no spirits haunting the Hall.
And there was no earthly reason for her to feel lonely in her room now that Giles Ashburne’s portrait no longer hung over the hearth.
Portia picked up her candle and left her room. If she wasn’t going to be able to sleep and she couldn’t be trusted with a needle, she might as well read. Something reasoned, rational, logical. Plato or Aristotle, perhaps.
From his frame, Giles Ashburne watched her approach the landing and Portia deliberately turned her body to shield her candle rather than let the dancing flame imbue the portrait with any more life than the painter had already given it. It was not until she was halfway down the stairs, his painted gaze heavy on her back, that she saw light in the depths of the great hall. Instinctively, she cupped her hand around her candle and shrank down against the stairs. She froze, her breath caught so hard in her breast that her ribs ached with it, trapped between the painting behind her and the man before.
He stood by the library door, limned in a pale wavering light that picked out his harsh profile and dark hair and left the rest of him to fade into the night. He was all in black but for the patch of white where his linen showed at the neck. If he was wearing a cravat, it was white as well, though she rather thought he wasn’t, this man who showed himself most often in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, as if such undress was standard for spirits.
Portia forced herself down one step, then the next. She lost sight of him when she reached the foot of the stairs, and hurried round to find he’d vanished. The moldering green baize door that led to the kitchen was too far. The doors to the parlor and morning room had been under her eye the whole time. There was nowhere he could have gone but the library.
Portia smiled. “I’ve got you, my lord ghost.”
The library door was locked. Portia fumbled out the key, cursing under her breath when it stuck in the lock. The hinges creaked horribly when she teased the door open and, hissing in frustration, she threw it wide, only to find the library cold and dark and silent.
Portia advanced cautiously, her candle casting a dancing light that ebbed and flowed, now stretching as far she could reach, now pooling around her feet, cold in worn slippers. Afraid that the door might slam behind her, Portia deliberately closed it herself, even going so far as to lock it, though her heart constricted at the soft click. She took her legs on a stiff, unwilling circuit of the room, poking her candle into the recesses and dark corners, the high-backed chairs, and everywhere a man might hide.
Nothing.
She reached for the curtains with a hand that shook, holding her breath against the bump of her fingers against something solid. Nothing lurked behind the curtains but the windows, through which the half-grown moon peered furtively, its light silvering the furnishings. Portia made a second circuit, this time looking under the desk, the couch, even the chairs, finding only the cat, whose eyes flared at the candle’s approach, frightening Portia near to death. Portia bit her tongue hard and continued the search, wondering why she’d wanted the blasted animal in the first place. She found herself once more by the high, black windows, her candle reflecting off the window-glass in a golden pool of light.
Portia sighed, defeated. He’d come into the library—she was certain of it—but there was no sign of him now.
A light flashed outside. Not a reflection. It was definitely outside, moving and flickering on the grounds. She put both hands to the window, spilling hot tallow down the glass, before she remembered it didn’t open.
“Well, he got out somehow,” Portia muttered. She sped back through the library, her candle fluttering weakly in her shaking hand as she fought open the locked door, raced down the hall and through the kitchen door into the chill night. Portia took a stifled breath, wispy clouds and a pale moon pushing the cold down upon her like a wet blanket. She shivered, wishing she had her cloak. No time now. She hurried around the corner of the house, one hand shielding her candle, careful not to look at it for fear she’d set a legion of ghostly lights dancing behind her eyes and miss the real one in the throng.
There wasn’t even a shred of wind. The night held its breath, even the little night creatures falling still as Portia stood with Ashburne Hall looming at her back and strained to see into the thick blackness of the home wood.
Nothing. He was here; she knew he was. The wood drew her with its pretense of emptiness. He was here, and this time she wasn’t going to be put off. She walked slowly, finding her way with blind determination. Lightning burst without warning off to her right and something hissed by her head. Portia stumbled, her heart leaping into her throat.
Though there was no rain, no grumble of thunder, another burst of flame exploded nearby with a close, flat crack. Something hit Portia hard, throwing her to the ground, driving the wind out of her. The candle fell from her hand and went out. Something went hissing and rattling through the brittle tangle of dead rosebushes. Portia could barely breathe. She got her hands up and pushed against the weight that covered her.
“Hold still,” he muttered in her ear, his breath stirring her hair. She shoved him hard, and he shifted, only to lie heavier against her. “Lie still, you fool!” His voice was vicious, near soundless. “He’s shooting at you.”
Portia gaped up at him, making no sense of the words. The moon tipped his hair with silver and burned in his eyes as he glared at her from far too close. Her chest rose against his with every breath. She was stifling. She flattened her hands on his chest and pushed. His coat was open, his linen warm with the heat of his body. “Get off.” Her voice was appallingly weak.
He cursed, something she couldn’t make out for the softness of his voice but knew by its ugly sound, and swooped down, blocking out the night sky, kissing her as Roger never had. There’d been sweet innocent kisses before their wedding, short perfunctory ones after. Nothing like this. His mouth was demanding, as hot and hard as the body that trapped her. Portia made a noise in her throat even she wasn’t certain was a protest and pushed at him, but he might as well have been made of stone.
Warm stone. With lips that burned like fire. Her very bones were melting. She was going to dissolve into a puddle and soak into the cold earth beneath her. Or, more likely, the hard body that covered her. Her hands slid up to his shoulders, but she couldn’t have said whether she was pushing or pulling. He broke off suddenly, leaving her breathless, and stared down at her with eyes that no longer burned with the moon, but with a fire hotter and darker.
Portia licked her lips, tasting him there. He laid his fingers on her mouth. “Quiet,” he whispered, and she could feel his breath on her face. “Listen.”
At first, she could hear nothing at all over the pounding of her heart. She was aware only of the touch of his calloused fingers, rough as Roger’s had never been, the hard heat of his body bearing her down with a determination Roger had never shown, even in their marriage bed. For the first time, she saw Roger as not only a faithless libertine, but a weak and ineffectual man. As the thought slid into her mind, taking her away from the moment and the feel of him over her, she heard movement in the home wood, sounds so soft and faint they might have been the shuffle of small creatures
, the sighing of the wind.
He moved not a muscle, his fingers stilled on her lips, head cocked slightly away from her as he listened. She strained her ears all the harder, finally realizing that what she heard were careful footsteps, catching the crack of a branch and, just at the edge of her hearing, a muttered curse.
The noises grew steadily fainter and died away completely, but he remained frozen through several dozen beats of her heart before letting out a slow breath that relaxed him against her. By the time he brought his eyes back to her face and removed his fingers, Portia had recovered both her voice and her sense.
“Giles Ashburne, if you would be so good as to get off me?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Keep your voice down, madam.” His low voice rumbled through his chest and set up an unsettling reverberation in her own.
“Whoever it was is gone,” Portia hissed.
“Mayhap he’s not gone far.” This time, when she pushed, he yielded, though not by much.
Portia took in a fuller breath than she’d managed since he knocked her down, the cool air doing less to clear her mind than she’d hoped. She realized suddenly that she had one hand pushed up under his coat, the other tangled in the thick dark hair at the nape of his neck, and felt a hot flush paint her face. Impossible for him to see her blush by the thin moonlight, but he must have felt her face heat, for he showed his teeth in a sudden smile that flashed white in the darkness. Portia looked quickly away and removed her hands as casually as possible. The hand that had been under his coat felt strangely warm, even after she no longer touched him and, when she held it up, she saw that her fingers were painted black in the moonlight.
“I think,” Portia said in a remarkably calm voice, “we’d best get you inside, my lord, and bind up your wound before you bleed to death.”
“I’m already dead,” he said in a voice equally calm. “Or hadn’t you heard?”
“I had not heard ghosts could bleed.”
“Ghosts can do a lot of things.” Ashburne showed no inclination to move and Portia’s heart lurched as she imagined him sinking down and dying where he lay, trapping her under the weight of his body. She scolded herself for being a complete goosecap. He would not be so calm if he were badly injured. A moment later, he lifted himself to his knees in one quick movement that left her breathless with surprise and the sudden chill.
When she would have risen, however, he held her down with one broad hand while he looked around. Finally, he stood and reached to hand her up. He did not show a gentleman’s courtesy in brushing the grass and leaves from her skirts, nor give her a moment to do it herself, but started for the Hall with her hand still clasped in his. She had to trot to keep up with him. He didn’t falter when a cloud covered the moon, but kept on through the blackness with surefooted familiarity, not pausing until they were in the kitchen with the door locked behind them.
Only then did he let Portia go. She didn’t waste time shaking feeling back into her fingers, but went straight to the stove to poke up the fire and add another log. There ought to have been a candle somewhere near the stove, but she couldn’t find it. She turned to Ashburne, who stood watching her from the door, the light of the growing fire licking tentatively at his features.
“Find some candles and light them. You’ll know better than I where they are. Then take off your coat and sit down. And if you vanish on me, I’ll rouse the whole house looking for you.”
Five minutes later, Mrs. McFerran walked in on her as she searched the stillroom. The housekeeper looked much less formidable blinking over her candle with her nightcap drooping over one eye.
“Spirits,” Portia said, before the woman could ask what she was about. “There’s a wine cellar, of course, but where do you keep the hard liquors?”
Mrs. McFerran’s lips compressed. Portia ignored her, making a soft sound of triumph when she found the healing ointment she remembered seeing in her earlier search of the room. She hoped Ashburne wouldn’t be in need of the laudanum, which was still in the McFerrans’ room. She gathered up the ointment, needle and thread, and strips of linen bandaging she’d already discovered. “Well?” she said when she saw the other woman still in the doorway. “What are you waiting for? Spirits, Mrs. McFerran, get me some. Not sherry. Scotch, brandy, port if you must. Hurry.”
She left the woman gaping after her and returned to the kitchen, not acknowledging the fear that he’d be gone when she got there until she pushed open the door with her hip and found him adding more wood to the fire. Ashburne whirled at her entrance, taking an extra step to catch his balance. Portia dumped the supplies she’d gathered on the table and went to take his arm.
“I am quite well, madam.” He tried to pull his arm out of Portia’s grasp and she tightened her grip on his sleeve.
“You didn’t remove your coat.”
“I saw no need.”
Portia turned back his collar with her free hand, revealing a shirt seeping with blood. When he laid her before Ransley in the great hall, his shirtfront was covered in blood. Portia banished Courtland from her mind and said, “Come, sir—” just as Mrs. McFerran returned, a dusty bottle in her hands.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, very nearly dropping the bottle. She plunked it down on the table and went to take Ashburne by the arm. His injured one, as it happened, and Portia wasn’t the only one to notice how he paled. “Oh,” Mrs. McFerran exclaimed again, releasing him. “My lord, what—”
“Nothing to worry yourself over.” Portia was astounded to see his stony expression soften. “I’ll be fine, Mrs. McFerran. Go on back to your husband.”
“I’ll do no such thing, my lord. You’ll be needing care, I’m thinking.” Mrs. McFerran gave Portia a withering look as much as to say that certainly she couldn’t manage it, and went to fill a pot with water from a bucket near the door.
“I’m thinking,” Ashburne said, “you had both better get on to bed.” He extracted his sleeve from Portia’s grasp and went to take the pot from Mrs. McFerran, setting it on the stove with a bang that slopped water over the rim, raising a furious hiss from the fire.
“But my lord—”
“Of all the cloth-headed—”
“Out.” Ashburne’s voice was no louder than theirs, but it was as effective as a roar. Mrs. McFerran turned without another word and headed for the door. Portia stood her ground, but not without a quaver.
“Leave the bottle,” she said when the housekeeper picked it up on her way out. The woman hesitated, distributing her glare equally between Portia and Ashburne, then put it down and swept out, not quite banging the door behind her. “Why does it not surprise me that she didn’t faint dead away at the sight of her ‘ghost’?”
“I’ve no idea. Why haven’t you?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“No?” he said with an unpleasant smile. “Why haven’t you come looking for me then?”
“And have no better luck than I did searching for my dresses? No thank you, my lord.”
Ashburne dipped his fingers in the water, which could hardly be more than lukewarm yet, and shook them off. “I believe I told you to get out.”
“I have no intention of doing so.”
He growled. “I don’t need any female flutterings, nor anyone to fuss over me. Why do you think I got rid of Mrs. McFerran?”
“Come, sir, be reasonable. You can hardly stitch up your own wound. Sit here and let me tend you.” Portia tried to guide him to the table, where half a dozen candles flickered in various holders, but he was as immovable as a rock.
“I need no tending, madam.”
“Yes, I know; you’re dead.” Portia clenched her teeth and breathed out hard through her mouth rather than voice some of the words that rose to her tongue. Then, as sweetly as she could, she said, “Forgive me if I’m mistaken, Lord Ashburne, but it seems to me that you’ve been shot. Though I’m aware that, on the whole, dead men don’t bleed, you might want to do something about that before you ruin more than yo
ur shirt, coat, and waistcoat.”
“I was shot,” Ashburne said, deftly removing his arm from her grasp, “because of you, you damned interfering woman.”
“Me?”
“You. God save me from goose-brained females who haven’t got the sense not to go running out into the dark.”
“I was running after you,” Portia said between her teeth. “If you hadn’t been playing this stupid game—”
“It’s not a game, and as I wasn’t outside, you can hardly have been following me, madam.”
“Stop calling me that.” She didn’t know how he could invest the word with more venom even than Ransley, but it was grating. “If you weren’t outside, then who was?”
“Whoever it was, I’d wager a monkey he doesn’t like you.”
“Me! He was shooting at you. Given how fondly you’re regarded in the area, it’s preposterous to assume anything else.”
“Yes,” Ashburne purred, stepping entirely too close, “but I am wearing black, while you...” He fingered the sleeve of her pale green gown. “...were quite visible, even in the dark. Whoever was lurking in the home wood could have had no doubt he was shooting at a woman. So unless you’re going to suggest that Mrs. McFerran has recently made a mortal enemy—”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she had,” Portia muttered.
“—it was you he was firing at.”
“Then he was a demmed poor shot.”
“Not as poor as all that. He’d have hit you if I hadn’t pushed you down.”
Which meant, of course, that he had been shot because of her. Furthermore, that his covering body, hiding her pale dress with his black coat, had saved her life. Portia tried not to think about it, which was as impossible as not noticing that the blood on Ashburne’s shirt was creeping slowly towards his buttons. “Then I owe you, sir. And if you are a gentleman, you will allow me to repay my debt. Sit down.”
