Barbara Metzger (20 page)

“
All
ladies can play, of course, and I am sure the company is bored with my poor offerings.”

They’d be more than bored if Juneclaire sat at the pianoforte, she thought with just a tinge of hysteria, not wanting to shame Merry. She was saved this time by the dowager, who, rousing from her nap, declared that not all who could play well were ladies. “I wish more young gels knew their limits, instead of foisting their meager accomplishments on poor dolts with nothing better to do. Besides, Miss Beaumont has other talents, like teaching a blind woman how to play cards. I’ll take you all on at whist, with her help. And my own deck.”

Sydelle excused herself with a headache, rather than waste her time talking to Elsbeth or Lady Fanny. The men were all commandeered for the dowager’s game, except the curate, who was aiding Fanny at her devotions. He didn’t count anyway.

Juneclaire sat behind the dowager, whispering the discards. St. Cloud was partnering his grandmother, straight across from them, and Juneclaire could see his brows lift when he felt the rough edges of the pinpricks. Niles smiled; marked cards were nothing new to him.

Lord Wilmott, however, was furious. He threw his hand down and jumped to his feet. “This is an outrage! These cards have been tampered with.” He glared at Juneclaire. “We don’t consider cardsharping a drawing-room accomplishment in our circles, miss.”

Juneclaire felt the roast pheasant she’d enjoyed at dinner try to take wing. She couldn’t look at Merry. It was the dowager who spoke first, though. “Of course the cards are marked, you popinjay. What did you think, I was reading my hands through Miss Beaumont’s eye? And where was the advantage, Harmon? If I remember correctly, you had the deal.”

Lord Wilmott sat down, red-faced and muttering. Juneclaire released her breath. Then St. Cloud spoke, every inch the earl. “I believe you owe the ladies an apology, sir. Lady St. Cloud has ever been the best whist player of my acquaintance; she has no need to cheat to beat you. And Miss Beaumont is many things, including a guest in this house, may I remind you, but she is not a Captain Sharp. I did not like your comments.”

Lord Wilmott mumbled his apologies and took up his hand, ungracefully. His antipathy toward St. Cloud was barely concealed and was magnified when the earl suggested Lord Wilmott apply to Lady Fanny for a physic, if his stomach was in such an uproar it disordered his senses. The dowager cackled and Niles smirked. Lord Wilmott glared most at the outside witness to his humiliation, Juneclaire. Worse, in his eyes, he and Niles were sadly trounced. He excused himself before the tea tray was brought in.

Soon after, Juneclaire noticed that the dowager was looking peaked, exhausted by her triumph. “We should be going, my lord,” she told the earl.

He walked with her toward the other side of the room, where the gold drapes were drawn against the night. “I, ah, took the liberty of having the dowager’s and your things moved over to the Priory during dinner.” He wisely stepped back.

“You what? Why, you arrogant, overbearing—”

“Now don’t cut up stiff, Junco. You know it’s best for the dowager.”

“I know it suits your plans, my lord, and I know you like having your own way.”

“Why, there have to be
some
advantages to having a title,” he teased.

She was not amused. “I resent being forced to go along with your whims, willy-nilly.”

“This, my little bird, is not a whim. I am trying to show you that. Since you are already up in the boughs, I may as well admit to the other decision I took on myself. I had my man Foley tell your people that you were safe here, with me.”

Juneclaire had written three letters to her family, then ripped them up, not knowing what to say. She should be thankful, she supposed, that Merry had undertaken an unpleasant task, but Aunt Marta was not likely to consider her safe, not if she knew the earl’s reputation, and not if he kept stroking the inside of Juneclaire’s elbow, where her gloves ended. And certainly not if she knew how Juneclaire wanted to succumb to the gleam in Merry’s green, green eyes. “Oh, dear.”

H
e was arrogant and overbearing and quite, quite wonderful! He led her himself to the family wing to a white-and-rose room with Chinese wallpaper. Pansy was waiting there, wearing a baby’s bonnet, but clean and shiny and noisily ecstatic to see Juneclaire. Shamrock was curled in a basket by the fireplace, and a freckle-faced young maid sat sewing, ready to help her to bed. The dowager was installed in the suite next door, he explained, with Nutley and Sally Munch each assigned a bedchamber off the dressing room. Nutley was pleased so many more servants would be listening for the dowager’s calls, and Sally was thrilled to have all the Priory footmen to practice her wiles upon. The Penningtons, St. Cloud continued, wanted to stay on as caretakers at the Dower House, where they were comfortable, rather than be interlopers in the Priory staff hierarchy. He was sending young Ned and his mother, who was feeling much better with the proper medicine, to help look after the house and the old couple. That should keep everybody out of trouble, the earl said. Then he kissed her hand good night, in view of the new maid, and thanked her for coming, as if she’d had a choice!

He thought of everything, Juneclaire had to admit. Her own three gowns hung in the wardrobe, with the brown habit and two simple gowns she and Sally and Nutley had managed to make over from the dowager’s castoffs, and two other new dresses. These, her new maid Parker happily informed her, had been run up by the Priory’s own resident seamstress that afternoon, with more to come since miss’s trunks had so unfortunately gone astray in the carriage mishap.

There were powders and oils and hot towels, hot-house flowers and a stack of books on the bed stand, a dish of biscuits if she or Pansy got hungry during the night. What more could a poor orphan runaway want? Plenty.

Merry was kind. He cared for her. He wanted her and needed her, he said, and she believed him. He never mentioned love. Juneclaire could barely think in his presence, her blood pounded so loudly in her head. She thought he was the most splendid man in the world, if a trifle imperious and temper-prone. She thought she could make him happy, since the mere thought of him made her smile. She also thought she was halfway in love with him from the night at the barn, and the other half was a heartbeat away. But she was, indeed, a poor orphan runaway, and she would never burden him with such a wife, only to have him regret his good intentions later. Unless he loved her . . .

Merry asked for time to change her mind. Perhaps in time she could change his from just wanting to marry her to not wanting to live without her. It was possible. She thought she’d ask Mrs. Pennington to save her a wishbone when she visited them tomorrow. She went to sleep, smiling.

 

Tap, tap. Tap, tap. There it was again, Juneclaire thought in a muzzy fog. All those workmen and they never found the woodpeckers. Merry would be angry. She snuggled deeper in the covers.

Tap, crunch. Tap, crunch. Woodpeckers riding on rats? Merry would be very angry. Juneclaire turned over.

Tap, crunch, sigh. On remorseful rats? That was too much. She fumbled for the flint. Someone handed it to her, and she automatically said “Thank you” before lighting her candle.

Either there was a ghost in her room, or Juneclaire’d had too much wine. She opted for the wine. No self-respecting ghost ever looked like this. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a full gray beard and mustache, a brocaded coat from the last century—camphor-scented to prove it—that couldn’t button across a wide paunch, and a peg leg.

Oh, good, Juneclaire thought, still half asleep, that explains the tapping. The empty plate of biscuits by her bed explained the crunching. Well, they were gone, so the ghost could leave and she could go back to sleep. She bent to blow out the candle, and the ghost sighed again, a mournful, graveyard sigh indeed. It occurred to Juneclaire that she should scream. She opened her mouth, but the ghost stopped her by saying, “So you’re Merry’s bride.”

Merry? Only one person ever called him Merry, he’d said. “Uncle George?”

“Aye.” He pulled a chair closer to her bed and fed the last biscuit to the pig when Pansy came to investigate. Then he sighed again, scratching behind Pansy’s big ears poking through the baby bonnet, as though it were the most natural thing for a pig—or a ghost—to be in a lady’s bedchamber at three in the morning. Juneclaire swore she would never take a sip of wine again.

Then she got a whiff of her guest, past the camphor. He’d been partaking of the grape, too, it seemed. “Um, Uncle George, how did you get in here?” Her door was locked; she didn’t trust that Niles. The specter waved vaguely at the wardrobe against the far side of the room. Juneclaire nodded. That made sense. Ghosts didn’t need to use doors. “Can you tell me why you’ve come? What it is that you want?” She was thinking in terms of revenge, or a better burial, typical ghostly reasons for haunting their ancestral homes.

“Someone to talk to, I guess.” He sighed again. Life, or half life, was hard. “Fanny gets down on her hands and knees and starts praying every time I try to talk to her, when she doesn’t swoon. I don’t know how many more visits from me Mother’s heart can take, what with her sure I’m Death come to carry her off. And Merry nearly ran me through with his sword tonight, thinking I was some nightmare from his French prison days. I tried old Pennington, but he drank down his wife’s last bottle of rum and passed out next to her. Now he’s taken to wearing garlic around his neck.”

“Is that what it is? I noticed something. . . .”

“Don’t want to go near the old fellow, and I can’t ever rouse Nutley. I swear the woman sleeps like one of the dead.”

He should know, but “She’s deaf,” Juneclaire told him.

“Oh. None of the other servants have been around long enough, so you see, there’s no one to talk to. They all think I’m dead.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I don’t think so. Are ghosts hungry?”

“How should I know? You’re the first one I’ve met.” Shamrock was now twining himself around the apparition’s leg, and Pansy was wearing her idiotic grin of a hog in heaven. Juneclaire shrugged and slipped out of bed. She gingerly reached out her hand and touched his arm with the tips of her fingers. Solid. She poked her own arm to make sure. Solid, and awake. Unless she was dreaming about pinching herself to see if she was dreaming. She sat back down on the bed. “Uncle George? That is, may I call you Uncle George?” He nodded, with another sigh. “Why don’t you just come back tomorrow, in the daylight, and have Talbot announce you?”

“I wish it were that easy, lass. I wish it were. I can tell you’ve a wise head on your shoulders, and I’d explain all about it, if only I weren’t so devilishly sharp set. I’d go down to the kitchens, but Merry’s got a guard posted there with a pistol. One along the corridor here, too.”

“Someone’s been stealing food and things and frightening the servants, to say nothing of poor Lady Fanny. You should be ashamed, sir.”

“I am, child. Very ashamed. And very hungry.”

 

So Juneclaire went to find the kitchens, with Uncle George’s directions tumbling about in her head. She was in the east wing; the kitchens were two stories down, halfway along the central transverse in what was the old Priory’s refectory. She went in her bare feet so as not to wake anybody, especially the guard who was asleep at the end of the corridor. A hunting rifle was propped alongside his chair, barrel pointing up. Juneclaire shielded her candle and tiptoed past. So did Pansy.

The kitchen guard was awake, playing patience and sipping an ale. He thought nothing odd about a barefoot houseguest in her white flannel nightgown helping herself to another dinner. Hell, he thought, everyone knew the gentry was peculiar. Once you got over the pig in the baby bonnet, the rest didn’t make a halfpenny’s difference.

Juneclaire found a hamper to fill, as if she and Pansy were going on a picnic, then covered the whole with a napkin so the guard couldn’t tell how much food she was taking, she hoped. She could barely carry the basket as it was, with the candle in her other hand.

“I’d help you, miss, but it’d mean my job, were I to leave my post.” The guard was back at his game.

“But you will tell them in the morning that I took the leftovers, won’t you? I don’t want anyone to think there were burglars or . . . ghosts.”

“I’ll be sure to mention it, lest they think I was eating more myself than Napoleon’s army during the whole Russian campaign.”

Juneclaire blushed but held her head high and retraced her steps. She thought she did, anyway. Somehow she found herself in the servants’ quarters, built out of the old monks’ cells. She turned around quickly and let Pansy lead the way, trusting the pig’s unerring nose to get them . . . back to the kitchen. The guard sent her on her way in the other direction, shaking his head.

Her feet were cold, the basket was heavy, and Juneclaire was sure she must have dreamed the whole thing. She tiptoed carefully past the sleeping hall watchman but was not quite as careful about Pansy, who stopped to investigate. Her pink leathery nose whiffled into the watchman’s dangling hand to check for crumbs. The guard jumped up and shouted and his chair fell back, crashing. The pig ran away, screaming, and the leaning gun went off, blowing a porcelain bust of Galileo into cosmic dust indeed.

The first door to fly open was Lady Fanny’s. Right in front of her was a figure swathed in white cloth, surrounded by swirls of otherworldly clouds. Juneclaire moaned. The countess collapsed onto the floor at her feet, out cold.

The dowager was shouting to know what was going on and demanding to be taken home to the Dower House, where a body wasn’t likely to be shot in her bed. Sally Munch poked her head out of the door, fireplace poker in hand.

Then St. Cloud was there, carrying his mother back to her room, calling for her woman, shouting the dowager back to bed, dismissing the guard and the twenty or thirty other servants in various stages of undress who appeared from nowhere. And looking at Juneclaire in sorrow.