Whoa, she thought again, and stiffened. If James thought he was still alive, then he thought he was engaged to Isabel. His engagement was the reason he’d resisted Sally’s advances. But if Isabel was marriage material, listed in the “respectable” category of womanhood and therefore strictly unavailable, then all-too-available Amanda was most definitely not respectable.
Like she hadn’t already known that? But now it was in her face. And now she knew she didn’t want to play the whore for James any more than she did for any man. Even with him, there had to be more to it than academic curiosity and biomechanics.
“Hey, slow down, things are going too fast here.” She pushed him away and stood wheezing, as hot and humid as the breeze that rattled the venetian blinds.
James was kind of pink in the face himself. He drew himself up, standing to attention, and fixed Amanda with a gaze that was remarkably tolerant, considering. “I beg your pardon, I am too impetuous. But your beauty… .”
“I get the message,” she said.
He frowned. “What can I say to you, Sweeting, to reassure you?”
Sweeting? That was a good one. Smiling wryly, she took another step away from him before her own senses sucked her back into his arms. Once you start necking, she thought, you stop talking, as though a relationship could have only one dimension at a time. Dealing with James’s weird dimension was difficult enough without throwing out all the other ones.
“I think,” she said, “I may know where your sword is.”
“Indeed?”
“Earl Balcarres sent it back to Dundreggan.”
“He sent it—why should he do that?”
“You were injured,” Amanda said carefully. “He sent your sword to Lady Isabel Seaton, as a memento.”
“Fearing I would die.” The pink drained from his face. “Isabel. Yes, I remember Isabel. A lightsome lass, with a smile much as yours, Amanda; a smile that opened the gillyflowers like the rays of Phoebus himself. It has been long indeed since I last saw Isabel.” James’s image wavered on the air like the smoke from Cynthia’s extinguished candle.
Amanda winced. Once again she’d forced him to look out of himself, away from the moment. She’d hurt him. She wasn’t sure whether she’d done it to learn about him or to make sexual points against him.
“Isabel, and the garden at Dundreggan—it seems naught but a pleasant dream. I remember much better the evil dream of Charlestown and sickness and death. And death.” James’s form solidified again, but he was still pale. His brow was furrowed and his lips tight. “Amanda, I am fair embrangled, all is strange around me, I know not where I am—Melrose—Virginia—and yet… .” He reached toward her.
Damn it all anyway, Amanda thought. It was just human instinct to reassure yourself by hanging onto someone else. And it wasn’t like he was aroused any more—she’d taken care of that as surely as if she’d thrown cold water on him.
She hugged him and laid her cheek against his shoulder. It was like holding the wind. She ached for him, for the poor lost soul, neither living nor dead. No matter what he might have thought of her when he was alive, now he was dead. Now he was vulnerable and he needed her. Their relationship—whatever it was—was unique.
With a whiskey-soft sigh, James wrapped Amanda close to his chest. “Death,” he said, so quietly she could hardly hear him. “The thought of death confounds me. I think of death and I think of Archibald, my cousin, all the deadly sins wrapped in the figure of a man.”
“The seven deadly sins? Like sloth and lust?”
“Lust, greed, envy—so is Archibald, a serpent in my bosom. I saw him and Isabel laughing together in the garden—in the garden where we had plighted our troth. When they saw me they stopped laughing and turned away, shamefaced. I donned the scarlet coat that night, and the next day I departed my homeland. But Archibald came later, after Charlestown, bearing letters from Isabel, letters that were proper enough, and yet—and yet were cold.”
A shiver slipped like an ice cube down Amanda’s back.
James was becoming thinner and thinner. She wasn’t holding him any more. She groped through the air.
His voice was distant but still crisp and clear. “Archibald is holding a pistol, a cocked pistol, and the muzzle of the pistol points at me. He smiles a smile that has in it no humor, no affection, nothing but malice. A flash of light—I am blinded and struck all aback—oh God, what is this, what does this mean? No!”
An invisible movement. A rush in the air. A drinking glass sitting on the kitchen counter leaped against the wall and shattered.
“James!” Amanda called. But he was gone, leaving nothing behind but the tang of whiskey in her nose and mouth and the moist glow deep in her abdomen.
“James?” She sank to the floor next to the shards of glass as though kneeling over a sprawled body. But that body had been thrust abruptly from life into death two hundred years ago.
Warily she collected the broken bits of glass. They chimed like a tolling bell. So now she knew. As Hewitt said, James had died by homicide. And what a tidy little murder it had been, done in the midst of battle. James had been betrayed by his own cousin and, by extension, his fiancée. No wonder his shade couldn’t rest.
If he wanted comfort, Amanda thought, she was his, semantics be damned. If he wanted revenge, even after all this time, then she’d help him get it. Maybe she was playing with fire herself… . No. Fire was dangerous, true, but it also meant warmth and light. “James?”
He was gone.
Chapter Eleven
Amanda opened the front door, admitting a burst of sunshine. Lafayette whisked by her skirts and paced off along the top of a brick wall, his tail straight up in the air like an exclamation point. He’d never come back to the apartment last night. Neither had James. Amanda felt bad about the cat, but not as bad as she felt about the man.
Way to go, she told herself. According to one theory, as soon as a ghost realized it was no longer alive, it would disappear. She could only hope that James’s desire either for her or for revenge was stronger than a minor detail such as death.
Now she understood why he was trapped between this life and the next, alone and lost. It must be precious little comfort to him that Archibald hadn’t shot him in the back. James’s personal honor and that of the Grant family had been violated.
Amanda turned back into the entrance hall. She found a cloth in the sideboard, started polishing the fingerprints from the Lucite boxes in James’s display, and considered the evidence against Cousin Archibald.
Means. Even if Archibald hadn’t been carrying a pistol since he left Scotland, he’d have found any number of firearms in the British camp. Had poor James tried to fend him off with his sword? Even the primitive pistol of the day would have the advantage of a sword—especially a pistol in the hand of a trusted relative.
Motive. What if Archibald, as Balcarres’s aide-de-camp, had intercepted the letter telling James about his brother’s death? He’d realize he was the heir. Although wanting Isabel might have been motive enough to get rid of James. That was one way to make her fall into his arms, to comfort her on her loss. Or he and Isabel may have already had some agreement—her letters were cold… . Amanda shook her head. She was veering into speculation.
What wasn’t speculation was Archibald’s opportunity. In the midst of battle, with men shouting, horses galloping, cannons firing, all Archibald had to do was point and shoot. The murder would’ve taken a minute. Less.
And then that rat Archibald returned James’s sword to Balcarres—here sir, just as I plucked it from his lifeless hand—and finagled himself a discharge. He’d probably cried crocodile tears over the devastated folks at home. Who really must have been devastated, Amanda thought. James’s parents lost two sons in less than a year. And Isabel, whether she’d been unfaithful to James or not, must’ve felt something when James’s sword returned from the wars in Archibald’s hand. No telling what sort of line Archibald had used on her to turn her away from James.
/> All right! Amanda congratulated herself and sent silent thanks to Carrie and old Malcolm Grant. It all worked, it all fit together, except for the one thing that had baffled everyone, from herself to Hewitt, all along. Why was James buried at Melrose?
There. The boxes were clean. Amanda blew a kiss toward the one that held James’s portrait, made a face at herself, and put away the polishing cloth. She stepped out the door onto the porch.
The river was a sheet of glare in the morning sun, a boat on its surface almost invisible. The lawn shone emerald green. Amanda could actually smell the heat, a combination of warm grass and stone and a distant whiff of fish. July in Virginia was bright, no doubt about it.
Bright daylight. James had seen the flash of Archibald’s pistol. Even if the battle had been fought on a cloudy day, the flashes of the guns would’ve been invisible. James had been killed at night.
Amanda brought her fist down on the railing. That was it! Archibald had ambushed James in the garden the night before the battle and bundled his body into a makeshift grave. As Balcarres’s aide Archibald would have known the battle was coming—the British had provoked it. All he had to do was act innocent until the regiment was mopping up afterwards, say that James had been killed in action, and trot out the sword.
The scabbard must have been bent when James fell on it. He’d died with his sword in his hand, otherwise it would have been bent, too… . Well, it might be bent, Amanda didn’t know. It was enough that Archibald had taken the sword and left the scabbard. James never said he’d run up the stairs, slashing at the banisters, the morning of Greensprings Farm. It was much more likely the soldiers had moved out the night before. Who would notice the odd pistol shot in the dark when a camp was breaking for battle?
With the British troops falling back on Yorktown Balcarres wouldn’t have had time to ask questions or view the body, even if he’d doubted Archibald’s word. And why should he? It showed what respect the Colonel had had for James’s family, if not for the man himself, that he’d taken the time to write—or at least dictate—the letter.
Maybe, in one final excruciating irony, he’d dictated the letter to Archibald.
Amanda pirouetted up and down the steps feeling like a Jeopardy grand champion. Not only did her theory fit all the facts, it could pretty much be extrapolated from the physical and written evidence. She could tell Carrie about it without giving away anything she’d learned from James personally.
She stopped, winded. And what James wanted, personally, was revenge. Although Archibald Grant was beyond the reach of any earthly jury. Surely, in the afterlife, he’d been turned away from the Pearly Gates and appropriately judged—vengeance being His, sayeth the Lord. But that wasn’t enough for James. Even at this late date he could achieve something symbolic by revealing the truth. And that was where Amanda came in.
A bus rumbled into the parking lot, accompanied by the slamming of car doors. Quickly she settled her cap, opened her fan, and stood ready.
Wayne came hobbling along the path, leaning on an elegant walking stick, nursed along by Carrie. “Good morning!” he shouted to Amanda. “I’m back!”
“How are you feeling?” Amanda called.
“Fine, just fine, no prob …” He slipped on the gravel and grabbed Carrie’s arm.
Between them the two women managed to get him up the steps. “You go and sit in the library,” Carrie told him. “We’ll send people in to you.”
“Are you sure you can manage?” he asked.
“We’ll try.”
Amanda had Carrie all to herself for two minutes. “What we need to do,” she told her, “is get hold of Lady Norah and The Honorable Malcolm and ask for more information. I tried looking them up on the Internet, but you can imagine how many Grants there are in Scotland.”
“You searched for the word ‘Dundreggan’, of course.”
“Yeah, and I came up with a company called Preservation Imaging, Ltd. The address is Dundreggan by Glenmoriston, which is the right place. But, you know, Cynthia’s never said the Grants are still living there. If Lord Dundreggan died and Lady Norah had to sell off some heirlooms, why not the ancestral lands as well? It happens all the time, what with taxes and death duties and everything. There’re clan chiefs living in apartments in Poughkeepsie.”
“So let’s just ask Cynthia for the number,” Carrie said, and added with a laugh, “If it wasn’t for you and your crazy crush, I wouldn’t have done half this much research by now. In fact, I really should put you down as a co-author on that article. Okay?”
Visions of publication danced in Amanda’s head. “Thanks!”
“Cynthia’s coming out here this afternoon, by the way.”
“Not another seance. Please.”
“All she said was something about adding to the display.”
Amanda glanced over her shoulder. The Lucite boxes gleamed in the light from the open door. Was that bit of silver moving? No, it was Carrie’s reflection as she stepped out the door to greet the first group of sightseers.
“When we get a chance,” Amanda whispered, “I’ll tell you a theory about why James was buried here.”
“Great!” Carrie turned to the tourists. “Welcome to Melrose Hall.”
Amanda assumed Sally’s personality and went to work. By noon she’d had several interesting conversations with well-informed visitors, not counting the teenaged boy who eyed her bosom and asked, “Doesn’t it hurt to be all squished up like that?”
“That, young sir, is a concern appropriate only to myself and my maidservant,” she responded tartly, and shut the door behind him.
She took a sandwich and some iced tea to Wayne. The dark paneling of the library seemed to absorb some of the sunlight flooding in the window, and the room was relatively cool. “Every time I step outside,” she said, “I feel like I’m going to run into Dante and Virgil.”
Wayne looked at her.
“The Inferno. You know, the tourist’s guide to hell.”
“Oh,” he said. “That.”
Amanda put the tray down on the desk, telling herself that James would have gotten the reference.
“You didn’t take Mother’s game with the seance seriously, did you?” Wayne asked.
“Was it a game?”
“Sure. She told me all about it. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to see it. Damned ankle.”
There was her opening. “Wayne,” she asked, “when you fell down the stairs, did you see anything—a shadow or something—that startled you?”
“No, I didn’t see a thing. Why?”
“Just trying to figure out why you fell.” He wasn’t lying. He was only a good actor when he played Page.
Wayne was still looking at her. Odd, how different his gaze felt from James’s, even though the subtexts were so similar. “You don’t have to lie to me, Amanda. I can take the truth.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going with somebody on the sly, aren’t you? He comes out here after work, which is why you won’t let me stay.”
Amanda pretended to inspect a musty copy of Clarissa Harlow. Wayne was hitting too close to the mark with that one.
“You can tell me,” he persisted. “I can take it.”
Maybe she should just make up someone, she thought wearily. Or name the guy she’d broken up with last winter. It’d be easier on Wayne’s ego. But she’d said all along she didn’t want him, and that was the honest truth. As distinct from the slightly dishonest truth about James. “No, Wayne, there’s no one else. We’re just not right for each other. You think we could move on past this, please?”
“Sure. Okay.” He picked up the sandwich and took a huge bite from it, chewing with sharp, peevish movements of his jaw.
Amanda retreated from the room and grabbed a sandwich for herself in the kitchen. Wayne was tenacious, she had to give him credit for that. Where had he gotten it into his head someone was visiting her after hours?
It was almost closing time when Cynthia appeared like a delicate
cloud on Melrose’s horizon. She was wearing a flowered chiffon skirt and a peasant vest that made her look cool in both senses of the word—her idea of weekend clothing, no doubt. The woman probably wouldn’t be caught dead in a T-shirt and shorts.
“Hello, Amanda dear. And Carrie, how nice to see you again. How’s Wayne holding up?”
“He’s fine,” answered Carrie. “We’ve been sending people in to him in the library.”
“He does a really good job as Page,” Amanda added.
“How sweet of you to say so.” Cynthia patted her arm.
Amanda’s smile stiffened. James’s “Sweeting” was endearing, not irritating. Amazing the difference made by a little sex appeal. “To what do we owe the honor of your visit, Madame?”
“How charming!” Cynthia cooed. “Actually I’m first on the scene, as usual. My work is just too fascinating.”
“Who else is coming?” Carrie asked.
“The Benedettos, Helen Medina, Bill Hewitt’s crew—he’s over at Jamestown today—we had to hurry the lab along, but you’ll be very impressed.” She wafted across the entrance hall and inspected the display. “Don’t these prints add to the exhibit, though?”
Amanda elbowed Carrie and waggled her eyebrows in Cynthia’s direction.
“Mrs. Chancellor,” Carrie said, “as you know, I’ve been researching James Grant for the journal article. Yesterday I got some very interesting information from Edinburgh. His sword was sent back to Dundreggan.”
“Oh it was?” Cynthia turned back around. “How thrilling!”
“It wasn’t for sale with the portrait?” asked Amanda.
“No, it wasn’t. I’m sure the broker would have told me. It could have been sold years ago, I suppose. Or it might still be a treasured family heirloom. A memento of a brave and tragic ancestor, who went off to—well, he was defending his country, wasn’t he?”
“We’re planning to contact Lady Norah and ask her some questions,” Carrie persevered. “If you could …”
Shadows in Scarlet Page 13
