Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Oh aye,” Malcolm agreed.

  Footsteps rang on the staircase, not growing louder and louder but starting suddenly out of nothing. A tearing, ripping sound followed by a crash reverberated through the corridor.

  Sharing a dubious look, Amanda and Malcolm crept down the steps to the landing outside the great hall. Where they found Archibald’s portrait lying across the angle of floor and wall, its gilt frame twisted. A vicious slash had turned his prim expression into a scream and eviscerated his ample chest. The edges of the canvas waved faintly in a cold draft that seemed to blow less from the ground floor than from the grave.

  “Bugger it,” said Malcolm.

  Amanda scowled up at James’s portrait, at his self-satisfied smile, at his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “Are you happy now?” she asked.

  “I’d no make book on it.” Malcolm propped up the painting, trying to straighten its twisted frame. “Another job for the restorer in Edinburgh, right enough. The man’s a bull in a china shop.”

  He meant James, not the restorer. “Maybe he’s finished his search and destroy mission for the day.”

  “One way or the other, we’ll be layin’ doon some plans the morn.” Defiantly Malcolm put his arm around Amanda’s shoulders and walked her to her room. “Would you like me to sleep on the floor, to keep you company?”

  “He’d love that.”

  “Like wavin’ a red flag afore his nose? All right, then, but give a shout if he comes courtin’. He needs a lesson in manners.” They indulged in one kiss, a wary look up and down the corridor, and then another. “Good night.”

  “Watch your back,” Amanda told him, and went into her room. There was another evening gone of the precious few remaining, damn it all anyway.

  Her cosmetics lay scattered across the dressing table, eye shadow crumbled over the starched linen mat, lipstick a gory gash across the mirror. In the bathroom the flowers were not only beheaded but crushed into the tile floor. Oh shit.

  A cold gust of wind chilled her to the bone. She spun around.

  “Amanda, Sweeting,” James said. “Were your words of love but lies?”

  She’d never seen him like this, dream distorted into nightmare. His eyes were hard and cold as marble. His mouth was set in so determined a line she suspected he was trying to keep it from quivering, either with rage or hurt or some explosive combination of the two.

  His hand rested on the hilt of the sword. The genuine sword, its brass hilt catching and shading the light as his hand, as his entire body, did not. Of course the real sword fit the undamaged memory of the scabbard, and yet… . She squinted. Yes, the twisted and time-abraded scabbard hung partly over and partly under its smooth twin, making a weird double image.

  “My sweet, would you betray me?”

  “No,” Amanda returned. “You weren’t exactly honest with me, were you?”

  “Fie, madam! How dare you judge my account of such weighty matters as my very death!” He stepped toward her. The light bled from the not quite solid scarlet of his coat.

  She stood her ground. If only his eyes weren’t so hurt. He made her feel she’d done him wrong. He made her feel sorry for him.

  “I had thought you different from the others of your sex. I had thought you not fickle but faithful. But no. You are but a strumpet, a trollop, spreading your legs for any man with the words to woo and the coin to pay.”

  “Oh, for the love of … Come off it, James. I never lied to you. Yes, I told you I loved you. I got carried away. I’m sorry. But you took my feelings for you and stomped on them. If that’s not betrayal, what is?”

  His pain seared into anger. His lip curled. “You speak of love, do you? So did Clytemnestra love Agamemnon. So did Medea love her sons by Jason. Love, in a woman’s voice, is nothing but an infernal lie.”

  “It is? Is that why I did what you asked me to? I brought you home. I gave you back your sword. I warned you back in Virginia you couldn’t get revenge against Archibald, but I promised to tell your story. And I did, damn it, I did.”

  “Archibald and his wicked lies!”

  “Archibald was telling the truth,” Amanda said, “and you know it.”

  One stride and James was in her face. His breath reeked. He reeked, like he hadn’t had a bath in two hundred years. She edged away and found her back pressed against the doorframe. “You would betray me, Madame? No, I think not.” He caressed her cheek.

  His hand felt like the clod of mud she’d thrown on his coffin. She shuddered, rejecting him, rejecting any sympathy she could still find for him. “It’s over, James. It’s finished. It’s time for you to go.”

  His eyes glinted. His caressing hand tightened into a fist pressing into the softness of her cheek.

  She jerked away. “Stop it! Leave me alone!”

  “Oh my sweet,” he whispered. “Such hideous words to fall from your delicious lips, like ripe fruit become ashes. It is the greatest shame that if you will not have me, if I cannot have you, then no one will.”

  With a sleek rasp of metal he drew his sword. The blade passed so close beneath her chin she felt its cold steel kiss. “Hey!”

  She twisted, ducking beneath his arm and stumbling to the side. Scarlet and tartan swirled. James seized her hair, jerking her forward so she landed hard on her knees. He knotted his fingers in her hair like he’d done while they were having sex. Making love. At least, she’d been making love. But James probably didn’t see the contrast between then and now.

  “James, stop it!” She wrenched away, by the sharp pain leaving several strands of hair in his hand. “Ow!”

  Amanda leaped to her feet, but a weight, not as much as a man’s body, perhaps, but a substantial force, hit her from behind. Falling against the window seat, she scrambled onto it and turned at bay. She kicked at him, but her feet struck uselessly against no more resistance than draped fabric.

  James stood over her, sword upraised. The hand wielding the sword might be incorporeal, but the blade itself was thirty-two inches of fine Stirling steel. Amanda shrank back. This was beyond nightmare. This was real. She was gasping like a fish, unable to breathe, unable to cry out.

  He smiled. Her terror was probably turning him on, damn him. A flick of his wrist and the sword tip snicked the catch on the window. A thrust, the ping of metal against glass, and the window flew open. The cold wet air that gushed inside raised goose bumps on her skin.

  The sword gleamed, drawing arcs in the shadows, more vivid than James’s hand or face or body. Tenderly its cold, hard length slipped past Amanda’s cheek, first one side, then the other. She edged backward. Her hands scrabbled at the window frame. Behind her yawned empty air. Her shoulders cramped as she tried desperately to keep her balance.

  In an outburst of fear and denial mixed, Amanda screamed. “Malcolm!” The name seemed to swell and echo until the wind itself repeated the cry, whisking it away into nothingness.

  James’s lips parted. His voice was gentle as velvet. “Ah, my sweet, the poet Marvell said that no one embraces in the privacy of the grave. Shall we determine the truth of his words?”

  She tried to inhale enough air to scream again. But his eyes fixed hers, drowning her in lust and rage and fear, and she choked. The lace at his wrist shivered. The tip of the sword touched the placket of her blouse between her breasts. With the briefest hesitation the blade cut the cloth. When it pricked her skin it stung like cold fire. The heavens gaped at her back, and for a moment she wondered if they’d bury her, too, in the old churchyard.

  From miles away came Wayne’s voice. “Holy shit. That’s James Grant.”

  Malcolm’s voice was louder, like a clang of sword against sword. “You filthy sod. Where’s your honor then, murderin’ a defenseless woman?”

  The bright streak of the blade vanished. Amanda blinked. Oh. She forced one burning inhalation into her lungs, then another.

  In front of her she saw James’s back, the red coat tails and the pleats of his kilt. Beyond him stood Malcolm, just
inside the door of the room. No wonder he hadn’t heard their voices. His hair was wet and he was wearing only a pair of jeans. He’d been in the shower, probably seeing the murder scene from Psycho with himself as the victim.

  But no, Amanda managed to think. James was after her. He had to take her out first. He had something to prove to her.

  Two pale ovals in the doorway, ripped with the black holes of eyes and mouths, were Wayne and Norah. Somewhere Cerberus was barking hysterically. He’d been barking for several minutes now.

  Like a hunting cat’s tail the sword flicked back and forth. He knows how to use it, Amanda thought, easing herself off the window seat and along the wall. She suspected Malcolm knew that. “Give over, James,” he said. “You’re finished here.”

  “So then, it’s you, the insolent dog,” James said. Their voices were uncannily similar. “How dare you walk about my father’s house as though you were its master? How dare you lay your hands upon my woman? By my troth, I’ll sup upon your giblets before this night is done.”

  “He’s not Archibald,” Amanda croaked from the other side of the dressing table.

  James snickered. “Of course he’s not Archibald, do you take me for a fool, woman?”

  She took him for a lot of things, but a fool was not one of them.

  “It’s no your father’s house,” said Malcolm. “No any more. And she’s no your woman. She can choose who she wants, and she’s no wantin’ you.”

  Amanda groped frantically for her lines. “Go away, James. I don’t want you any more. You’re here because of me, but now I want you gone.”

  He half-turned toward her, brows drawn down. “Sweeting, your words lay such a heavy burden upon my heart that in just a moment I shall be obliged to stop them, but first, if I may beg your indulgence, I have this dog to spit.”

  In one smooth motion James spun and lunged at Malcolm. The sword flashed. A woman cried out. It could’ve been Norah. It could’ve been Amanda herself. She didn’t know.

  Malcolm grabbed the chair from beside the door and jerked it upward. With a solid thunk of metal against wood it knocked the sword away. He yanked the chair to the side. The sword, imbedded in the chair’s leg, almost came out of James’s hand.

  Almost. But James’s battle-honed instincts went with the sword’s momentum, so his hand never left the hilt. A wrench, and he retrieved it. He raised it again. “A fine attempt, dog, but it will not save your life.”

  “Go to hell,” Malcolm told him, “where you belong.” He dodged, swinging the chair in a circle in front of him. With a clang it met the scabbard at James’s side and then continued on through James’s insubstantial body. Streaks of scarlet spun away through the shadows.

  With an unintelligible cry James seized the scabbard. His form wavered and thinned around the twisted length of metal and its straighter but immaterial phantom.

  His body winked out. The sword and the scabbard hung in mid-air for a long moment and then faded, swallowed by darkness, and were gone. A rush of wind toward the door, invisible movement, sent Malcolm diving to one side and Wayne and Norah retreating down the hall. Cerberus stopped barking and started whining. Somewhere in the distance a cat yowled.

  Amanda slid bonelessly down the wall and sat hard on the floor. Geological ages passed as she breathed, in and out, in and out. One by one her thoughts came creeping back into her mind. Melrose. Dundreggan.

  Malcolm. He was kneeling beside her. “Are you all right, lassie? You’re bleedin’.” He unbuttoned her blouse, reached into the bathroom, and pressed a towel against her chest.

  Malcolm was touching her breasts. It wasn’t happening at all the way it should be, but she couldn’t remember just what she’d had in mind.

  “Holy shit,” said Wayne’s voice. “That was James Grant.”

  Something large and furry appeared in Amanda’s peripheral vision. It was either Cerberus or Norah in a plush robe. “Amanda, are you all right?”

  It was talking. It must be Norah.

  “He tried to kill me,” Amanda croaked.

  “That he did.”

  “How could he do that?”

  “There’s much too fine a line between love and hate,” said Norah. “Malcolm, you hair needs drying, you’ll catch your death of cold.”

  “I almost caught my death o’ cold steel, Mum, and you’re worryin’ yoursel’ aboot my hair?”

  “I’m a mother,” she returned, voice quavering. “Mothers default to the mundane in moments of terror.”

  “Terror,” Malcolm repeated with a slightly crazed laugh. “Oh aye.”

  Amanda focussed on his face. His brows were clenched, his lips were parted, damp strands of his hair hung across his pale forehead. His chest was rising and falling as though he’d run a marathon. “You saved my life,” she told him. “My hero and—and everything.”

  “James Grant,” said Wayne. “It was really him. Geez.”

  A fierce wave of nausea swept over her. She swept Malcolm aside, scrambled to her feet, and staggered into the bathroom.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  So much for positive thinking,” Amanda said. “James has taken on a life of his own. He doesn’t need me any more.” She eased herself down onto the sitting room couch next to Malcolm and accepted a sloppy glass of whiskey from Wayne’s shaking hand.

  Norah took her own glass and drank deeply. “The only reason he still wants you, I expect, is on principal. His principal.”

  She’d shooed Wayne downstairs to get a bottle of whiskey and Malcolm to his room while she helped Amanda rinse out her mouth, bandage her cut, and wrap herself up in the warmest garments she owned, her flannel nightgown and robe. Now Amanda snuggled shamelessly into Malcolm’s sweater-covered side, right there in front of Wayne, Norah, and God. The tang of the whiskey blessed her cold limbs and scoured the nasty taste from her mouth.

  So she’d thrown up in front of him. This business of falling hard for a guy, falling into what might be a really positive relationship, allowed for awkward moments like that. Unlike infatuation, which winked out the moment the going got tough.

  Better to throw up than make mulch for the roses below her window. She shivered.

  Malcolm’s arm tightened around her waist. “I’m sorry. I told you to confront him, I was wrong.”

  “It was worth a try,” Amanda told him firmly. “It’s okay.”

  He’d looked great wearing only his jeans, she thought. Not that she’d exactly noticed at the time. Now he was pale, close to shivering himself. His hair was a shining auburn mane, his blue-gray eyes seething with thought and emotion intertwined. No way his eyes looked like James’s, with their self-absorbed rage.

  Beside the couch Cerberus sighed dolefully. The cats huddled in front of the electric fire, every now and then shooting a resentful glance toward the humans. Wayne frowned like he was working his way through a crossword puzzle. “What did he say? ‘I’ll sup upon your giblets?’”

  “He has a right flair for the language,” said Norah.

  “Most educated people did, two hundred years ago,” Amanda pointed out.

  “What did he call you?” Wayne went on. “Sweeting?”

  “Yeah. Better than ‘hey you broad’, I guess.”

  Norah’s brows listed to the side. If she realized the full significance of the endearment, she was too polite to blurt it out.

  Wayne was either too naive or too slow. “I’ve never seen anyone waving a sword around like that. Not in real life. You know what I think? I think it’s a kind of—whatchamacallit—a folic symbol.”

  “Phallic symbol,” Amanda corrected, adding silently, No kidding.

  Malcolm snorted, “I’ve no seen the theory o’ over-compensatin’ for inadequacy demonstrated quite so effectively.”

  Norah grinned. Wayne did too, after working it through.

  Good shot. While Amanda didn’t think James had plotted ever since that first moment on the staircase to use her to re-animate himself—the seduction was simply his own defau
lt mechanism—still she felt betrayed. Would you betray me, Madame? You bet, she thought, if that’s what it takes to make you go away.

  She wasn’t going to waste sympathy on him any more. He’d taken her—love, infatuation, lust, whatever—and turned it to bitterness. He’d raped her. Not with his body, which she’d welcomed, but with his sword and his spite. As Norah said, there was much too fine a line between love and hate. And Amanda had just crossed it.

  Malcolm’s unshaven cheek prickled against her temple. “You’d best be tellin’ Wayne the story.”

  Edited for general audiences. “I first saw James the same day Bill Hewitt dug up his bones,” Amanda began. “I knew who he was before Hewitt and Carrie identified him… .”

  As the story wound down to the present Wayne’s bewilderment gelled into stunned comprehension. “So he knows he’s dead, he can’t accept it, and he’s bummed out.”

  “Sorry?” Norah asked,

  “Angry,” translated Amanda.

  “And he’s got a crush on you—like everybody else, I guess.” To his credit, Wayne wasn’t getting either hurt or huffy with the spectacle Malcolm and Amanda were making of themselves. “At least I never went around… . Good God! That’s what happened! I thought I was nuts.”

  “What?”

  “You remember the afternoon I fell down the stairs, Amanda? Just as I stuck my foot out for the top step, I felt a real hard push right between my shoulder blades. But no one was there. So I decided I’d tripped or stumbled or something and was imagining the push.”

  “Do I remember?” Amanda retorted. “I thought maybe you’d caught a glimpse of James and been so startled you fell. But when I asked you if you’d seen anything you seemed totally baffled.”

  “That was just it—I didn’t see a thing.”