A Good Heart is Hard to Find

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That didn’t come out quite how I meant it to,’ he said sardonically.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. In that case, I’d certainly like to stay until morning, though I’m pretty sure that if there are any ghosts they won’t appear tonight.’

  They’d probably be too scared to.

  He shrugged. ‘They won’t appear any night, since I’m neither gullible nor susceptible to suggestion. But no one can say I didn’t give them the opportunity to show themselves before I open the house up again.’

  ‘You’re going to live here?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘In the lonely west wing, mostly. My sister’s going to run part of the main house as a sort of guesthouse, doing weekend ghost-hunting breaks. I said I’d suss it out. See what sort of special effects we could use.’

  ‘Special effects?’

  ‘Well, you can’t book ghosts to appear, can you? Although,’ he added, looking at me in a measuring way that I didn’t quite like, ‘I could book you as Something From the Crypt. That should scare the punters.’

  ‘No thank you, I only do the Crypt-ograms when I’m strapped for cash.’ I shivered suddenly. ‘I think I’ll put my cloak back on. It’s cold even with that fire.’

  ‘Sorry – I told Craig to leave the electricity and gas on, but they’ve all been cut off. They’re supposed to be reconnecting everything tomorrow, although maybe the phone will be a bit longer. The police are coming back then too, for the definitive list of what’s missing.’

  He looked down at the sheets of paper. ‘I was about to do the ground floor and cellars until you disturbed me.’

  ‘I think you were pretty disturbed already,’ I told him icily. I mean, who was the one with the bumped head and the crushed wrist?

  ‘Then perhaps you’d better help me finish it, as compensation for breaking and entering?’ he suggested.

  ‘I only entered,’ I said with dignity. ‘You left the door open. But I’ll help if it gets me a look at the rest of the place before it goes all hotely.’

  ‘I’m keeping the ambience, it’s just the lights I’d like back – and the heating. We could have candle-type sconces on the walls, for that spooky look,’ he said distastefully.

  ‘If you’re so revolted by anything to do with the supernatural, I can’t imagine why you’re letting your sister run ghost-hunting weekends!’ I said tartly.

  He shrugged and looked at me like it was none of my business. (Which it wasn’t – just call me nosy.)

  ‘She needs something to occupy her, and it won’t do any harm – I’ll see to that,’ he said firmly. Subject closed.

  So I spent the night with Dante Chase, although I expected to see nothing more scary than him, because any self-respecting wraith would have given up and gone away by now.

  (And from Dante’s fancy dress I suspected that they would soon have some competition, since I thought he intended to appear on guesthouse weekends as First Ghost: the Most Haunted Manor in Britain, featuring Britain’s Most Haunted Man.)

  I was dying to ask about his relationship with Emma, and what she died of, because he was practically guilt-edged. I didn’t even need to look into his mind to feel it, and it was so like the Keturah/Sylvanus situation that it would be really useful stuff to know … but better not.

  Checking the inventory took ages, Miss Kedge having been devoted to expensive knick-knacks, but I do not think she was devoted to brandy, so the bottle (or was that perhaps bottles?) Dante produced must have been lying forgotten in the cellars.

  He carried it round with us, though a cuddly St Bernard he was not, and I got so cold after a while that I had another little nip … though I was positive it was Dante who finished it.

  Almost positive.

  And I might hate the taste, but it certainly warmed us up on our Quest for the Questionable.

  ‘I doubt you’ll ever track most of this down,’ I said finally. ‘Fifty small items of Tunbridge Ware? A collection of porcelain cockatoos?’

  ‘It’s all under the insurance so I don’t care if they don’t find any of it, except the family miniatures. I’d really like those back,’ he said, removing the list from my grasp and ticking off yet another missing memento.

  When we’d finished the survey (and a lot of brandy) and given up on the ghosts, it was nearly morning, so we retired back to Dante’s bedroom, the only warm place in the house, to wait for old rosy-fingered Dawn.

  I woke up stiff, tired and headachy, curled up in a four-poster bed next to a stranger.

  The unfamiliar room was fuzzy with grey early-morning light, and it took me a few heart-thumping minutes to remember where I was, and even then I couldn’t for the life of me recall how – or why – I was back in Dante’s bedroom.

  It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Under the old eiderdown that covered us his naked arm lay warmly and heavily across me, but his face was half-turned away and masked by long, dishevelled dark hair.

  As I stared at him, some confused memories began to bubble disturbingly to the surface.

  At least, I think they were memories.

  Hadn’t I been woken at some point from the pounding terror of my cupboard nightmare, and taken into a warm, comforting embrace? And surely I knew – remembered – how the muscles of his broad back moved under my hands … and how his lips felt on mine.

  Or maybe it was the feel of mine on his? For I began to have an awful feeling it was me doing most of the kissing, and desperately wanting him, even urging him, to—

  Oh God: it was all coming back to me!

  Shivering (but not from cold, for the world’s most efficient hottie was right in there with me), I took a quick horrified peek under the eiderdown … and then a second, more admiring one.

  I must have been possessed – and I didn’t think brandy agreed with me, so clearly I did not take after Pa in that respect either, which is something, I suppose.

  Dante was still breathing deeply, so with infinite caution I slid out from under his arm and off the bed, nearly falling when my foot landed on an empty bottle.

  He moved restlessly and murmured something, then turned over and settled back to that regular breathing. Reassured, I tiptoed round the bed, collecting clothes as I went, and took a good look at him.

  He seemed a lot younger than I’d thought with the grim lines smoothed out by sleep, and a lot of dark stubble softening his square chin. Nothing would make that hawk nose anything other than aggressive, though, and I wasn’t convinced a mouth so hard and straight could ever break into a grin, although it could feel soft and …

  No. Let’s not go down that road. He looked relaxed, anyway.

  It’s wonderful what physical exercise can do for a man.

  Some deeply primal instinct was urging me to go downstairs and make him a huge cooked breakfast, but I was ruthless with it. It wasn’t my fault he looked like he needed feeding up.

  One hank of springy raven hair still lay across his cheek, and on a sudden impulse I leaned over and gently pushed it away, before drawing back quickly, afraid he would wake up.

  My mind slid safely away into the alternative reality of Keturah:

  … Keturah took the pillow, meaning to extinguish his life and so never have to face the full enormity of what she had done.

  Then she put it down again, slowly: he might move and act like a man, but he was not mortal. He could not love … or die.

  He could only possess.

  Keturah, you’re in big trouble. What the hell got into you? Or maybe that should be: what from hell got into you?

  It certainly wasn’t Sylvanus.

  With a new plot twist uncoiling in my mind, I left the kitchen key on the bedside table, picked up Guido, and went out into weak early sunshine, where I didn’t burn, crumble into dust, or turn into a pillar of stone, all distinct possibilities and no more than I deserved.

  Crumpled, creaking, unwashed, unloved, unfaithful and unchaste, I hurried towards the haven of h
ome as the first birds and little Birdie croaked into action.

  It felt like a decade since I’d set out.

  Cassandra Leigh, I know what you did last night.

  What I don’t know is why.

  A writer can take research too far.

  8

  Raising the Spirits

  The latest offering from strangely popular horror writer Cass Leigh, Nocturnally Yours, has no claims to literary merit whatsoever …

  Observer

  It felt strange to be arriving home in the grey light of dawn rather than the dark hours of the morning as I usually did after my little expeditions; but then, I don’t usually carry my research to such extremes.

  My head still ached, along with all the other portions of my anatomy that had come into contact with the staircase, and I seemed to be developing a Dante-sized bracelet of bruises on one wrist.

  That man didn’t know his own strength.

  Although I felt absolutely shattered, once I’d had a shower and changed I settled down to write up the events of the night while they were still fresh in my mind.

  Those I remember clearly, anyway – and the rest had better be forgotten, although perhaps I really hadn’t behaved too badly with Dante Chase after all, considering I’d had a nasty bump on the head and quantities of brandy forced down my throat?

  Who was I kidding?

  But I was sure he drank much, much more, so hopefully he wouldn’t remember a thing about it. And if he did, he probably wouldn’t think anything of it … unlike me. I just couldn’t believe I’d done that! And compared to my only other lover, Max, he—

  No. Behave yourself, Cass, I told myself. You weren’t responsible for what happened, so just put it right out of your mind. With any luck your path and Dante’s will hardly ever cross, which will make it easier: he didn’t like you, so he’s hardly going to come looking for you, is he?

  Right, lecture to myself over and uncomfortable memories consigned to box labelled ‘Pretend It Never Happened’, leaving the other strange aspects of the night for consideration.

  For instance, it was interesting to discover that no matter how I rationalized the supernatural, or how often I had cheerfully walked in haunted or spooky places, the first sight of Dante Chase frightened me into illogical flight.

  Mind you, if it hadn’t been for the bird in the cupboard, the second and third sight of him might have had much the same effect. A scary and arrogant man with a temper on a hair-trigger, that about summed up the impression he made, though perhaps I should have made allowances for the eagle nose. And the guilt.

  He was thin for his height and frame and too fine-drawn, though he still had muscles in all the right places. His knee-breeches and ruffles had suited him very well, but he would have looked even more at home emerging out of the Celtic twilight, wearing a homespun cape and wielding a drawn sword, with snake-headed torques of gold clasped around his muscular bare forearms …

  Stop it, Cass.

  That unnerving way his eyes had seemed to flash green-blue in their deep sockets was clearly just a trick of the lantern-light, and I bet they are that shallow light blue really, like Jane’s. It’s interesting, though, because you somehow expect dark eyes to go with black hair, and it doesn’t always follow. I can use that:

  ‘Keturah!’ whispered Sylvanus, but where the soft hazel eyes of her lover should have been, burning-cold orbs of aquamarine shone instead.

  What a coincidence that Emma should have made him promise to try and bring her back, just like Sylvanus and Keturah! Though in Dante’s case, clearly, he was just meant to contact her beyond the grave, not actually try and raise her from it.

  It was also fascinating on a personal level to meet someone even more consumed with guilt than me, though I didn’t understand why he was so guilty about his wife’s death, when he wasn’t there. What did she die of? An accident, illness, or one of those rare but horrific pregnancy complications that I’d read about in that book Orla gave me? And even being the hostage that survived seemed to be making him feel guilty too!

  He had already taught me one valuable lesson (more than one really, but the rest were locked in the Pretend It Never Happened box), for until that night I hadn’t realized it was possible to take an instant dislike to a man but still find him scarily attractive.

  I decided to infuse all that frightening sexiness into the Vampire of the Manor character, an updated Dracula in a biting saga about blood relatives.

  Come to that, my vampire could bite Keturah too, because for some mysterious reason she’d gone wimpy on me and I was getting quite tired of her.

  At least then she’d actually have some power to battle with whatever evil thing came back in the shape of Sylvanus … unless my vampire could choose to take over the form of what was once Sylvanus? Or maybe one of his female vampires was the one who fancied Sylvanus so much that she called him back when Keturah had failed him?

  A vampire love-triangle – or pentagram. Mmm. I needed to think about it a bit more.

  And I was going to call my Dracula Vladimir.

  By ten it was quite impossible to stop my head slumping forward over the keyboard so, not wanting the alphabet permanently embossed on my cheek, I went to bed.

  Despite the neighbouring Surround Sound I fell instantly into a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep, and might have slept on and on for ever had a delivery driver not practically beaten my door in, determined not to have to turn his van round in my thread of a lane twice in one day.

  While normally paler than pale in complexion, after the night I’d had I must have looked like the living dead, because he silently and nervously thrust the pad for me to sign, shoved a parcel into my arms, and left at high speed on smoking tyres.

  My heart sank when I saw it was the proofs of my next novel, Shock to the Spirits, because whenever I was getting really into the new novel, the last epic kept turning up in some ghastly resurrection shuffle; first for a bit of rewriting, then copy-editing, then for proof-checking like now.

  It just wouldn’t give up and go away.

  Still, this should be the last of it, and then hopefully it would march its denizens of the undead into bookshops all across the country with no further help from me.

  After another long, hot shower I felt almost human myself, and settled down to do the proofreading so as to get rid of the damned thing fast and return to Lover, Come Back to Me. I just couldn’t wait to get to grips with my new character, Vladimir: all bite and no bark.

  I read through the proofs of Shock to the Spirits twice, then repacked it and sent it on its way just before the post office shut.

  Westery post office was also Emlyn’s garage, hardware, and twenty-four-hour shop, having expanded to cater for all things as the village businesses vanished one by one, to be replaced by entirely useless antique shops such as Jason’s.

  Emlyn had a prime position right by the village green and Haunted Well, which was in the garden of Orla’s big Victorian house. That day, instead of tourists, clusters of daffodils were standing brazenly about on the green, but it was early in the season yet.

  Westery was one of those villages on the Welsh border that was not so much a destination as a stopping-off place en route to somewhere more interesting. There was a nice old church, the pub, five antique shops, one second-hand bookshop, and Orla’s Haunted Well B&B, and that was about it.

  Emlyn’s Dutch wife, Clara, was serving behind the till of the supermarket section, and we had a nice chat while I bought a pizza (chorizo with black olives), which I heated and ate as soon as I got home.

  Then I settled down to some hard work on Lover, Come Back to Me, which went very well once I realized that Vlad’s crucial mistake was biting Keturah just as the sun began to rise, because the whole vampire-transformation thing wasn’t nearly completed when he had to make a bolt for home in his flashy black sports car.

  Keturah was now not quite human and not quite vampire, and a whole lot more interesting.

  Go, girl.<
br />
  Orla rang, very late and not quite sober, to say that she’d just had a drink with a gorgeous man, and all he wanted to talk about was me.

  ‘I don’t know any gorgeous men,’ I said vaguely, what mental faculties I possessed still focused on the alternative universe inhabited by Vlad, Keturah and Sylvanus. ‘Apart from Max, and he’s in America.’

  ‘Not Max, idiot! His patina may be authentic, but his veneer’s crackled.’

  ‘You’ve been hanging around Jason too much, Orla. Or drinking. Or both.’

  ‘Both. But I’m sober enough to recognize a good thing when it walks into the pub and strikes up a conversation with me. This man is years younger than Max – younger than either of us, come to that – and he said he bumped into you last night, and he understood you were some kind of writer. Tall, slim, longish floppy dark hair, and sort of greeny-blue eyes.’

  ‘Oh him,’ I said shortly, with a sudden weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, compounded of panic, guilt and embarrassment. ‘He’s not gorgeous, he’s got a huge beak of a nose!’

  ‘Aquiline, and just the right size. And I love those hollow cheekbones, and the way his lips are so straight they make a sort of arrow shape when he smiles.’

  ‘He can smile?’

  ‘Are we talking about the same man?’ Orla demanded. ‘He says he’s the new owner of Kedge Hall, but his name’s not Kedge, it’s Gabriel something.’

  ‘Dante Chase?’ I suggested dubiously.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘But that’s nothing like Gabriel!’

  ‘Yes it is – I knew it was something to do with Rossetti.’

  ‘He’s nothing to do with Rossetti.’

  ‘You know, the Dante Gabriel bit – don’t be obtuse. He looked familiar, too, and after he’d gone I remembered where from: he was in the news about eighteen months ago, because he was a hostage somewhere or other. South America, I think, but I’m going to look him up on the internet.’

  ‘So, did you give him the Orla Third Degree interrogation?’

  ‘No, because he wasn’t there long, and he made most of the conversational running, bringing the subject back to you all the time. He wanted to know if you were married or anything, so I told him you were in a committed long-term relationship.’