“But what if it was the ghost?” someone asked. “The candle went out and lit itself again, didn’t it?”
“A draft, no doubt—I’m afraid nothing happened that can’t be explained rationally—but it was fun, wasn’t it? Something to tell your neighbors about.” Cynthia picked up the miniature and gave it to Amanda. “Put this back, please. It’s almost two o’clock, we have to get the room cleaned up and opened again… .” The party was over. The ladies of the garden club went murmuring, heads close together, across the hall and out the front door.
Amanda paused in the dining room doorway to see Cynthia sweep the table with a long, speculative look. A slight smile played across her pink lips. She tucked her purse beneath her arm with the air of a soldier shouldering his rifle. Turning, she met Amanda’s eyes. Not the least trace of embarrassment crossed her expression. She closed one mauve eyelid, set her forefinger against her nose, and sailed out the door.
Yeah, right. Amanda put the miniature back into its box and returned to the dining room. The candlestick was still on the table. She replaced it on the sideboard, next to the three others in the set. The candle’s stark white didn’t match the creamy shade of the others. Aha! Cynthia had smuggled in a candle that wouldn’t stay extinguished—Amanda had once put a set of smaller ones on her father’s birthday cake. Yes, there was the original candle, tucked into a drawer of the sideboard. She pried the trick candle from its holder and put the real one back.
Here came the caterers, invading the room with plastic bins and brooms. Amanda scooted into the entrance hall. How soon, she wondered, before the garden ladies told everyone in Tidewater Virginia about the mysterious happenings at Melrose and another rush of tourists descended upon the place? Clever of Cynthia, to pretend nothing strange had happened. Too obvious a ghost wouldn’t be nearly as believable.
But then, had Cynthia played the trick, or had it been played on her? She’d gone to the trouble to create a ghost when there really was one. Amanda was almost sorry James hadn’t gone ahead and set the tablecloth on fire, except she wouldn’t have wanted any of the other women to have heart attacks. She doubted if the devil himself could penetrate Cynthia’s brass shell.
Amanda dumped the prank candle in the trash just as Carrie looked in the kitchen door. “A seance?” she stage-whispered. “Who does she think she’s kidding?”
“No one,” Amanda replied. “She’s merely casting rumor upon the public waters, hoping it’ll return in the form of more admissions.”
“Why do I want so badly to throw a cream pie in her face?” Carrie disappeared toward the front door.
Grinning, Amanda followed and greeted the next group of tourists. But her humor wore thin as the afternoon dragged on. Should she tell Carrie how Cynthia faked the seance? Carrie would get a kick out of the truth. But if Amanda started talking about James as a ghost, rather than as a historical figure, she might give herself away. Tomorrow, she decided, after everything had settled a bit. It wasn’t as though Cynthia’s cunning was hurting anything—it was all in the cause of historical preservation—and it wasn’t entirely dishonest, although Lady C. meant it to be… . Since when, Amanda asked herself, did the end justify the means? Cynthia got her jollies from manipulating people. She deserved Carrie’s cream pie in the face.
Between the day’s heat and its moral questions, by quitting time Amanda felt as wrung out as one of the caterer’s dish rags. She handed the last of the food to the departing students, waved good-bye to Carrie and Roy, and checked over the kitchen. Everything was ship-shape, as usual for anything under Cynthia’s control.
Amanda washed and changed and roamed around outside. The summerhouse excavation was looking very tidy, the foundations completely exposed and marked with little tags. She hoped his students had brought Dr. Hewitt some of the luncheon goodies.
Japanese beetles were eating the roses in the top terrace. Amanda noted the fact on her clipboard. And the kitchen garden needed weeding. She pulled out a tuft or two of green herself, before it occurred to her that she might be murdering some kind of antique onion or spinach.
She went back inside and inspected the house. Not one object was out of place. The desk blotter was pristine. In the entrance hall the portrait, the bones, the silver buckle and fittings, were anonymous shapes in the shadows. James must have tired himself out waving the candle around. Amanda couldn’t even imagine how much energy it took to levitate an object, let alone materialize.
She was back in her apartment before she realized she hadn’t seen Lafayette. She tried running the can opener. Nothing. Surely he hadn’t eaten so much in the main kitchen he wouldn’t at least see what she had to offer.
In the gathering darkness she walked through the house again, opening closet doors and dresser drawers. Lafayette looked up from his nest on a stack of towels in a kitchen cupboard and meowed.
“What are you doing in there?” she asked him. “Had to check out an open door? Sleeping off the salmon, I’ll bet. You might have been in there all night. Come on.”
Lafayette stretched and yawned, making it clear that he was only cooperating out of generosity and good breeding. He followed her back to her apartment and accepted a few morsels of food.
Amanda stood holding the cat kibble and wondering whether James’s invisible alter ego had either lured Lafayette into the cupboard or shut the doors once he was already inside. The conscious James wasn’t exactly a cat-lover, but then, in his time period few people were… .
Assuming James had shut Lafayette in the cabinet was like assuming Wayne had thrown himself down the staircase, Amanda told herself firmly, and put her momentary misgiving away with the box of cat food.
Chapter Ten
Amanda shifted tubs and bags haphazardly around the interior of the refrigerator, telling herself she should eat a serving of crow for letting Cynthia to make an accomplice out of her. But she was fresh out of crow. She was reaching for a package of cheese when the phone rang.
“Melrose Hall. Amanda Witham.”
“It’s me, Carrie. Guess what?”
“The fax came in?”
“Sure did, about eleven o’clock this morning. Martin left a message on my machine, so I ran up here to the library and picked it up. I’ll meet you at the McDonald’s in fifteen minutes—that way I can pick up some burgers for the guys.”
“You’re on,” Amanda said. She grabbed her purse and car keys and let herself out of the house. Cynthia’s dainty little garden party edibles, while delicious at the time, hadn’t stayed with her. Nothing like a scholarly quest to work up an appetite. Or intriguing sexual prospects, for that matter.
The bright colors and slick lines of the McDonald’s contrasted nicely with Melrose’s antique graces. Amanda bought herself a Big Mac and a Coke and found Carrie at a booth in the corner, sucking reflectively on a milkshake. A brown envelope lay on the table in front of her.
“Gimme, gimme,” Amanda said, sliding onto the opposite bench. She reached for the envelope but Carrie slapped her hands away.
“All in due order, Miss Witham. First of all …” Putting on her glasses, Carrie took out a page of paper overflowing with eighteenth-century script. Two lines were highlighted with a yellow marker. “… the statistics: Captain James Grant of Dundreggan, Inverness-shire. Born Dundreggan, March 1754. Died Virginia, July 1781.”
Amanda thought, he is—was—twenty-seven.
Carrie pulled two more papers from the envelope. “This page is a letter from Colonel Alexander Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres, to James’s parents. Dated July 7, 1781, the day after the battle at Greensprings Farm. The other page is a transcription.”
Even from her upside-down viewpoint Amanda could see that the second page was typewritten. “That must have been done a long time ago, judging by the typeface, but anything’s better than plowing through eighteenth-century handwriting. What does it say?”
“I’ll spare you the formal syntax, but what it boils down to is that James died a noble death leading h
is troops. No more details given, but a bullet through the heart doesn’t leave much room for details.”
“Tell me about it,” Amanda said, and remembered how James had answered when she used that expression on him.
“Balcarres goes on to tender his respects to James’s uncle, who we’ve met before—Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, who raised the 71st. James might have been a grandson of old Lord Lovat of Tower Hill fame.”
“A little nepotism at work here?”
“Standard procedure. And he had a fiancée, Lady Isabel Seaton.”
“Fiancée?” repeated Amanda. “He left not one but two girls behind him?”
“All that about Sally might be just a story,” Carrie pointed out. “As you said yourself, in real life they might never even have met.”
“Yeah.” Amanda made a face—she’d almost let the cat out of the bag. Casually she dredged the pickles from her burger.
“Balcarres says he’s sending James’s sword home to Isabel via his aide-de-camp, one Archibald Grant. Remember him?”
“Yes, I do.” Cousin Archibald the dolt. Amanda visualized some pimply youth with buckteeth and a hee-haw of a laugh, and so little finesse at romance he made Wayne look like James Bond.
“Balcarres finishes with the usual ‘I have the very great honor to remain, etc., etc.’ What’s interesting is that there’s a note at the bottom of the transcription, in the same typeface: Quote, ‘James Grant was the younger of two sons.’”
Amanda peered at the uneven lines of type. “He couldn’t inherit, so he went into the army. More standard procedure.”
“Yeah, but listen to this. ‘James’s elder brother pre-deceased him, but the letter informing James of this did not reach him before his own death.’” Carrie shook her head. “He was the laird of the castle and didn’t know it—there’s irony for you.”
One that he might not appreciate, Amanda thought. She bit, chewed, and swallowed. “So who did the property go to? Does it say?”
“‘Dundreggan House devolved upon Archibald Grant, James’s cousin, who also served in the 71st. (See letter) He returned from the American wars in 1781 and married Lady Isabel Seaton in 1782.’”
“Cousin Archibald sure didn’t waste any time, did he?” Amanda said with a snort. “So he not only inherited Dundreggan but Isabel. Most women back then being more or less property themselves, if you’ll excuse the editorial comment.”
“I doubt if Isabel was either rich or crazy enough to do her own thing. She was lucky if anyone bothered to ask her opinion of either engagement. Anyway, the note ends by saying, ‘James Grant’s sword is on display at Dundreggan House.’”
Go figure, Amanda told herself. Where else would it be? Like most puzzles, the answer was obvious once you knew it. “It was there when that note was written,” she cautioned. “Is it dated?”
“No. It might be as old as the eighteen-nineties or whenever it was they invented typewriters, but it’s signed in a good twentieth-century scrawl. Malcolm, I guess. Malcolm Grant.”
“Cynthia said something about Norah’s son The Honorable Malcolm giving a blood sample for the DNA tests. Might be him. The whole family must be ancient.” Amanda imagined withered, white-haired codgers sitting around a Gothic fireplace, knitting needles and antique typewriter clacking away. “I bet they were doing genealogical research. My grandmother’s into that, she has us traced all the way back to Suffolk in England.”
Amanda pulled the pages toward her. But they were only copies, modern ink on modern paper. It was the words that mattered, voices gossiping over time’s back fence. She slipped the papers into the envelope and gave them back to Carrie.
With a last mighty slurp Carrie finished her milk shake. “I don’t know how long this letter and the transcription have been in the museum in Edinburgh. Years, possibly. Decades.” She glanced at her watch and took off her glasses. “I need to go. The family deserves some kind of food, even if it isn’t home made. See you tomorrow.”
“Sure. Thanks a lot for calling me tonight.”
Amanda ate the rest of her burger without really tasting it. So there it was. The sword. As objects of desire went, it was higher on James’s list than Amanda herself was. And it was back home, just where it should have been, just where he wanted to go. To go home with honor. Maybe Isabel, in the classical tradition of the time, had told him either to return with his shield or upon it—either after honorable battle or dead. But he hadn’t returned at all.
Amanda threw away her trash, went out into the night, and turned her car back toward Melrose. The garish lights of the twenty-first century faded behind her. She imagined herself driving back into the past. A group of redcoated soldiers would appear from the trees at the side of the road, startled by her headlights the way James always seemed startled by consciousness.
And why hadn’t Balcarres sent the scabbard back with the sword? Maybe the two had been separated in battle. The Brits had found the sword on the field, but James’s body, with the scabbard still at his side, had been picked up and buried by passing farmers or slaves. She could see someone burying a body where it had fallen if it hadn’t been found right away. After a couple of days in July anyone, no matter how handsome, would be ghastlier than Stephen King’s worst nightmare.
James had to have died with his colleagues. Otherwise, how did Balcarres know he was dead the day after the battle? But if he had died at Greensprings Farm, why was he buried at Melrose?
Maybe the Colonel hadn’t returned the scabbard because it had that kink in it, and the sword wouldn’t fit it any more, so they went ahead and buried it with James’s body. At Melrose. She kept returning to Melrose.
Literally. In past the gatehouse she went, and parked her car in the shed. The floodlights defined the walls and windows of Melrose Hall almost without shadow, she noticed, just as James’s body was defined by the lights of time and space and desire.
Once inside her apartment Amanda checked the alarm systems, petted Lafayette, and eyed her computer. Yeah, she was getting a lot done. Nothing like a man to thoroughly distract a woman from her work. Even though this man could help her with her work. She had to ask the right questions—she needed to take notes. Although she was hardly going to take notes in the middle of a clinch.
The room went cold, like a freezer door swinging open. Lafayette growled, deep in his throat, and fluffed up his fur. Amanda turned slowly around. James Grant stood in the bedroom door, scowling at the cat.
Lafayette arched and hissed and made tracks for the door. The flap slapped back and forth. Paws scrambled down the corridor into silence. The chill ebbed from Amanda’s skin, leaving her glowing with warmth.
James raised his eyes to her. His frown softened into a rueful laugh. “I hold horses and dogs in the highest esteem. I find the hunt, the dogs baying after the fox, the horses streaming over the hedgerows and across the fields in the greatest similitude of a cavalry charge, to be vastly amusing. But cats—cats are sly creatures, and I fear I have little love for them.”
“He’s just scared of you,” Amanda said, and added to herself, I bet you’re more than a little scared of him, too. James wasn’t so far removed from the days when cats were thought to be witch’s familiars. And it was only in the last few decades that fox hunting had become politically incorrect.
He was looking at her, and cats and horses weren’t what was on his mind.
She scrambled for words. “Thank you for not frightening anyone at the garden club lunch today.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The women in the dining room today, who were calling your name. Thank you for putting the candlestick back down again. It’s not a good idea to play with fire—though of course you know that.”
He stared at her as though she wasn’t speaking English.
“You didn’t hear anyone calling your name today?”
“No, I did not. I’m very sorry, Miss Witham, Amanda, if I could have been of assistance to you and yet failed to be so.”
&
nbsp; “Where do you go when you’re not with m …” She stopped abruptly.
Too late. His puzzled expression crumpled into outright confusion. “Why, nowhere, but to sleep and to dream—in faith, this night has lasted a prodigious length of time, until the light of day seems but a dream itself.” He grimaced fiercely, shrugging not just his shoulders but his entire body, rejecting her question, his answer, and the implications of both.
That hadn’t been a fair question, she told herself. And yet she’d confirmed her hunch that he was truly aware only when he was focussed in physical form. Flattering, to think he was only conscious when he was with her, and that the moving objects were nothing but left over scraps of energy. Of potency, she thought. Of virility.
James stepped toward her, hands outstretched, palms up. “Are you frightened of me?”
“Oh no, not at all.” She raised her hands and placed them in his grasp.
“Aren’t you the saucy one? Perhaps you should be frightened of me, Amanda.” He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
She was ready for him. She fingered his coat and his belt, pressing herself against his body as insistently he pressed against her, hanging on his mouth and tongue—oh yeah. She could sense him in every fiber, every nerve ending. Maybe it was all a delicate equation of matter and energy, of relativity in defiance of time and death. She didn’t care. For someone with no physicality he was sure physical.
Would he be able to take off his clothes or were they permanently part of his image—if rumor was correct he wasn’t wearing anything under his kilt anyway… . Whoa. She pulled away to catch her breath. She’d never raced from the starting gate to the finish line this fast, but then, she’d never been afraid a guy would disappear in the backstretch, either.
He followed so eagerly they did a quick dance step across the floor and kissed again. His hands were beneath her T-shirt, like butterflies on her ribs, climbing upward. Oh yeah. She wondered whether he could deal with hooks and eyes and zippers. But he was awfully good at this. He’d probably known all about the lacings of petticoats and stays. As a bachelor, an officer, and a gentleman he’d had every chance to get it on with… .
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