Death of a Ghost Read online

  “Do you wish me to put a fellow Christian in pain?” Adam sounded shocked. “The sight of the instruments was enough for her. We should thank heaven for it.”

  “But you will have nothing to tell the Sheriff about Lord Hungerford,” Ossian blustered. “Won’t he be angry?”

  Adam laughed. “You don’t suppose they needed Jane Wood’s testimony to catch Lord Hungerford? What you saw was for form. Hungerford is a loose-tongued fool and will trip himself in time. Watch and see.”

  They returned to Adam’s house in Lychfont. Ossian said little that evening. He was busy at his wax table, trimming it with flower-headed creatures whose manes were long, thin petals, whose backs and legs twisted in and out like the fruit trees on the wall of the Abbey garden. He finished the work skilfully, but was not content. Mother Bungay boiled a capon for supper, but he prodded its leg with the flat of his knife.

  “You have no appetite,” she commented dourly. “You saw more today than you had a stomach to. I told you, Adam, he was too young. I said it would be too much for him.”

  Adam finished chewing, slowly, before he answered. “Too much and too little,” he said. “Little enough from me, in truth. It’s what he saw in his own mind that surfeits him.”

  SULIS PROPPED HERSELF up on a cushion. She felt wonderfully weary.

  “A melancholy song,” she told Alaris. “A song to sweeten misery. Sing of the river.”

  “Of course, mistress,” Alaris replied.

  They had retreated to her morning chamber. Sulis, indolent with grief, stretched out upon the bed. Alaris took her lyre, sat on a marble step and began to pluck out a tune. Her voice was sweet, but Sulis did not trouble with the words. They were bound to be melancholy, for that was what she had commanded. A river, she had said, and now, while her maid’s fingers rippled across the lyre, Sulis found her mind drifting, flowing with the river on its journey. Fifty miles inland she rose, a slip of light amidst the chalk and flint. Gargled by rock, she bobbed under the blown grass, hummed fat bees across her banks, ricocheted the dragonflies downstream and followed thirstily to the plain. At length, she became a divider of fields, made way through rich harvests of oats and wheat. Sheep’s teeth nipped her shallows and cattle curved their tongues to reap crystal sheaves, while in her silted depths the slick trout threaded pennants of luminous weed. Then, tiring, she slowed and muddled through ill-assorted islets, reserving solid clumps of land for the use of coots and ducks, for the remote ghosts of swans. Sulis shifted comfortably on her pillow. This was Lychfont, her own country. The rushes towered there. No fisher waited, but sieving birds prospected the mud or snatched at elvers. There the flats were loose and salty, lifted and relaid four times a day by the restless Solent tides. And there—

  But what was this? Less than a mile distant, misty as giants, stood gantries, cranes and pipes for oil, thicker than a man is tall. This was not her Lychfont. This was urban water, chopped and grey, and it was thronged with greasy traffic. The coast was gashed.

  Sulis sat up abruptly and shivered. She scowled at Alaris, who was still playing on the far side of the room. She suspected that she had just had a vision of the place where Ossian – wretched, vile boy! – had taken flight. A tawdry place indeed, with its filth and noise and ugly buildings. She kicked her sandal clean across the room.

  Alaris had done ill, there was no doubt. The scryer she had recommended was proving a disaster. He had quite taken over the Lychfont kitchen. Even now, he was occupied with a ludicrous divination involving glass tubes and knuckle-bones, smoke and daubs of bright green paint. In an hour, or perhaps two, he would call on Sulis to help him cast the Oracular Head. Yes – he would call on her! As if she were no better than his clerk! Only her deep love for Ossian, he had declared, would draw him back to his centre, to Lychfont – to her arms.

  Charlatan.

  None of that would matter if Ossian could indeed be returned safely, but she had small hope of success. She wondered whether to strike the scryer dead straight away. It might be the kindest thing. Hope had proved a gadfly torment, much worse than dull despair.

  Meanwhile, the immortals’ busts stared coldly from the far side of the room. The great marble fireplace gaped and the grate was a set of rusty iron teeth. He is lost, they seemed to say. He is lost as the flame that flickered yesterday. You shall never have him.

  What do you know about it? thought Sulis sourly. She glared at all the marble pantheon.

  “Alaris!” she cried abruptly. “Why are you playing such a doleful tune? Is this how you think to cheer me?”

  “Pardon, mistress!”

  “One might think this was Ossian’s funeral, not his wedding day.”

  “I am a fool. Shall I sing a merry song, mistress?”

  “Gracious no! Have you no sense of what a grieving heart can stand?” Sulis shook her head. “No, no, of course you have not. Your sensibilities are coarse and common. That is your nature. You are not to blame.”

  “Thank you, mistress.”

  “But leave me now. I need to rest in silence.”

  Alaris shimmered from the room. Sulis let her gaze follow, but Alaris was a blur and Sulis’s eyes were rainbow crystal. “Foolish girl,” she said fondly, letting slip a tear. “I hope I never have to kill you.”

  “THAT’S EXCELLENT, OSSIAN. Just hold it there.”

  “My back’s killing me!” cried Ossian. He was modelling for his father’s picture, half-naked and holding a makeshift shepherd’s crook.

  “Don’t whinge, we’ve only been working for forty minutes. Catherine, what do you think?”

  Catherine peered critically over the top of the easel. Ossian was stooped in the rockery twenty-five metres away, a pained expression on his face. “Not quite Poussin, is it? And the foliage does seem a very bright green.”

  “I can tone that down later. But look at Ossian – is that what you’d call a graceful posture?”

  “The fact he’s managing it at all is impressive,” said Catherine tactfully. “You look marvellous, Ossian!”

  “Yeah… right.”

  “Listen to him!” said Jack. “Careless ease is what we’re after. Imagine. You’re a simple shepherd, piping on a rustic flute and so on. Your sheep are behaving themselves in a tidy flock nearby. You’ve bent down to buckle your sandal, when you look back over your shoulder and spot—” Jack turned to Catherine in sudden confusion. “Just what does he see back there?”

  “A girl, I’d say. Definitely.”

  “A girl, right. And she’s beautiful. Nicest looking girl you ever saw. Get it? Now, bend down and look relaxed but alert.”

  “How’s this?”

  “Natural, please! You can do better, Ossian.”

  “Oh, let him go, Jack. He’s too self-conscious.”

  Jack muttered. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give him a break while I moderate the greenery. You hear that, Ossian?”

  Ossian stood up a little stiffly. “I’m out of here.”

  “But remember – you owe me three more hours, at a time of my choosing!”

  “Yessir, Mr Jack.”

  Jack turned to Catherine. “I should probably have him shot.”

  “Nonsense!” she giggled. “Have him die of love instead. Much more pastoral.”

  Ossian heard their laughter as he slipped his shirt back on and made for cover. His back was stiff and he stretched as he walked, each limb in turn. Soon he found himself by the topiary hedge at the side of the house. He had noticed it sidelong from his bedroom window, and the ornamental lake beyond it.

  The hedge was Mr Frazer’s hobby. Each bush was cut into the shape of a bird or animal and together they were dancing a wild conga. Ossian observed them wryly; it was not what he would have expected from Catherine’s sombre husband. He squeezed between a dragon and a waddling pig and found himself on a closely-cropped lawn. A shrubbery and an answering cliff of box hedge rose thirty metres away, while to his left the long, oval lake, guarded by a flock of paddling statues, discouraged esc
ape to the house. The fourth way, up towards the wood, the valley’s neck was choked with trees. The patch of garden was closed in, silent and stuffy with windless scents. One or two ghosts fled like startled birds at his approach.

  He crossed the lawn. Some croquet hoops were set up there, but had been abandoned. His impression was that they had been that way for some time. But a mallet lay waiting, as if it had been intended for him. He thought of the scene in that Inspector Gordius novel where the Rural Dean had been discovered, face down in the orchids with a pruning knife at his side. And how the poor gardener who was first on the scene had picked it up quite naturally and been, for a while, suspected. It had carried his dabs.

  Ossian lifted the mallet and felt the weight of its head on his palm.

  “Colonel Mustard,” he said aloud in an actor’s voice, “on the lawn, with the lead piping!”

  “Too right, Ossian! No room for squeamishness in this game,” said Sue, emerging unexpectedly from behind a large, leaf-fleeced sheep. Ossian jumped. Since that early-morning invasion with Colin the day before he had hardly seen Sue, and never alone. She was wearing jeans and a blue silk shirt that rippled in the faint breeze, as though her body were ruffled water. She too was holding a mallet. “Croquet is just chess with hammers.”

  “You scared me!” said Ossian, who strongly suspected she had meant to. “And I’m crap at chess.”

  Sue gave a brief laugh. “So we’ll play croquet! Get ready, Ossian. Prepare to scrabble in shrubs and prickly bushes.”

  “I guess,” Ossian agreed cautiously, but Sue hadn’t waited for agreement. She was already positioning herself by the first hoop. As soon as she gripped the mallet she changed. Crouching, she lined up her shot with the concentration of a sniper; she was obviously an expert. She swung, hit and took the first hoop majestically, like a triumphal arch. Ossian leaned in what he hoped was an elegant way on the handle of his mallet. He knew nothing about croquet, he told her – “Something to do with flamingos, isn’t it?” – but that only provoked a shout of savage laughter.

  “Off with your head! Just watch and learn.”

  He had to wait a while for his turn. When it came, he hit the ball equivocally into the metal of the hoop. It made an unlovely clunk and wobbled.

  “Bad luck!” commiserated Sue. After that, she sent him scrabbling into shrubs and bushes according to her promise, but always with the reluctant air of someone who has accidentally run over a small animal and is now obliged, through sheer humanity, to wring its neck.

  Despite this rough treatment, Ossian began to enjoy himself. He liked to watch her work, so slim and intent, stooping slightly before cannoning her own ball through the next hoop, or his – with a definitive whack – back into the shrubbery. Ossian came to know that shrubbery rather well. For the fifth time he got down on his knees and burrowed into it, a flail of wild briar combing his scalp. He was aware too of Sue’s eyes on his backside. Perhaps that’s why she hits me this way so often, he thought. She likes to watch me grovel.

  “I’d ask Colin to join us,” Sue was saying, “but it’s really a game for two, don’t you think?”

  Ossian found that it was pleasant to agree and see Sue reward him with that astonishing smile and feel her step just a little closer than was necessary to the placing of her shot.

  After that, he did not mind about losing – not even when a zealous attempt of his own to hit the peg clipped his ball towards the lake. There it collided with a stone cornucopia and sank.

  “Never mind,” said Sue. “We have some spares. No,” she said, seeing Ossian lie down at the water’s edge, “don’t be silly, it’s deeper than it looks. I’ll get the gardener to fish it out. No need to slime your arm with algae. Oh, yuck!”

  He threatened her with the dripping, frog-green limb. She shrieked, laughing.

  “Monster!”

  “No squeamishness, remember!”

  She raised her mallet as if to defend herself, and for a moment they were struggling over it. In the end, Ossian wrested it from her, pulling her closer in the process. Momentarily off-balance, he felt the softness of her breast on his palm. The thrill it gave him made him gasp.

  “No squeamishness,” she smiled, then converted it to a childish pout as she flopped on to the grass beside him. “Oh, Ossian, what were you and Jack thinking of, staying away from Lychfont all this time?”

  “Earning a living mostly. Dad goes where the commissions are.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Just part of the Purdey luggage,” said Ossian.

  “Poor thing!” Sue mocked. “Dragged out to America for a year. What did that do for your education?”

  “America was educational,” said Ossian firmly. “Very.”

  He smiled to himself. Lizzy had taught him a lot, for a start. He’d been a good student too. “We’ve never stayed long anywhere. Always going places, Dad and me.”

  Sue looked at him oddly, the sun catching her green-blue eyes. “And do you ever meet yourself coming back?”

  There was something strange in her tone, as if she were giving him some kind of hint. “What do you mean by that?” said Ossian aggressively.

  “Nothing!” laughed Sue. “Only that you’re very busy. Like you said.”

  “What? Oh, yeah, Dad’s feet are itchy all right.”

  But Sue was not fooled. “What did you think I meant, Ossian?”

  He stared at her mulishly, but it seemed he had no choice. “I thought you were talking about that unreal feeling, you know?” he blurted. “Everyone gets it sometimes, I expect. Like you’re part of another person’s dream, maybe, or an echo – still echoing on long after the music’s stopped. Not real. You ever felt like that?”

  “Can’t say I have,” said Sue, looking at him curiously. “You poor thing, Ossian. I think you need some cheering up. Come on.”

  She rose and took his hand, turning back to the house.

  “Hey, what about our game?” said Ossian.

  “I don’t know. I’m not in the mood for that any more.”

  “What’s the rush, Sue?”

  “Hunger. You make me hungry and I just saw the time. Come inside and I’ll introduce you to my Welsh rarebit.”

  “It’s barely gone twelve.”

  She gave him her most inviting smile. “Farmhouse cheddar… Worcester sauce… Hot English mustard. And, of course, the secret Frazer ingredient. Can you resist?”

  Ossian began to follow automatically, then checked himself. Somewhere in his mind a signal was set at danger. He thought of all those lovesick boys – and then of hammers, blood and bone.

  “You go,” he said, turning back to the croquet. “I need to practise.”

  Sue bridled. Ossian saw it as he lined up his next shot with her discarded ball. She was not used to being refused. That gave him a dry satisfaction, though the refusing also pained him – a medicinal pain, like that of a wound being swabbed. Serve her right for making him find her attractive.

  “Suit yourself,” she said coldly, and wandered to the edge of the wood.

  Ossian watched the swing of her mallet as it beheaded dandelions in the rough grass and the way she did not look back. He knew himself to be a small, decapitated flower. The pleasure he had felt in pushing Sue away fell apart like ash. Why had he done it, he wondered? And what, when she mentioned hunger, had made him remember the ghosts in the kitchen yard?

  He became aware of a presence at the edge of his vision. There, amidst the box-hedge revellers, a new ghost was standing, powerful and intent. This was no limp and dreary spirit like that which had drifted after him on his first day at Lychfont. This ghost was flexed like muscle; it almost believed itself alive. And something like branches, like antlers, grew from its head, brown against the green of the hedge. Ossian reeled away slightly, was afraid of it, though he was not the object of its gaze. That was focused laser-tight on Sue and held steady until, sensing it there, she turned and gazed back. Then, with a shiver, the ghost relaxed and patched its
elf into the sculpted leaves invisibly.

  Sue returned to Ossian almost humble, head cast down. And when her eyes met his, the neediness in her gaze made him feel as if he had been presented with a miraculous second chance. Again he felt that bond, that strange half-kinship with her, which made her bad opinion unbearable. It seemed… fitting that they should be friends.

  “You saw?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded. “It was an old one. And angry. Something bad happened to it, a long time ago.”

  “The way it stared!” She shivered. “It frightened me, Ossian. Please come inside. I don’t want to be out here any more.” She moved back, away from the hedge. He put his arm around her shoulder. As they came to the edge of the ornamental lake she added in a small, confessional voice: “We’ve got to talk.”

  “We’ve been talking!” said Ossian.

  “Not social talk! I mean about the Lychfont ghosts.” She was edging her way around the end of the lake, where they could only walk in single file. “And what got sacrificed on the Corn Stone, when you and Colin were kids—”

  “The Corn Stone?” said Ossian, stumbling after. “Has Colin been talking to you about that? What’s he said?”

  “You know Colin! He’s such a one for dangling secrets. I know he’s got some idea in his head about you. But I want to work it out – I’ve got to. Like good old Sergeant Rosie O’Shea, you know?”

  She was waiting for him on the terrace now. The neediness was still in her voice, but already Sue looked a good deal less vulnerable. Ossian noticed that he was following her into the house after all. Sue seemed to be the kind of person who always got what she wanted in the end.

  “As soon as Mum said you were coming to visit,” she explained, “Colin began to hint at something gory in your past. When I ask him for details he clams up, but it’s important, I know it is. So tell me the whole truth now, Ossian. Just what did you two do there all those years ago?”

  “Nothing,” said Ossian, recklessly meeting her gaze at the French windows. That gaze did not falter. He forced the word out again. “Nothing, Sue. There’s really nothing to tell.”