Christmas Yet to Come (4 page)

Justin's frown grew deeper. “What happened if you didn't convince them?”

“That never happened. I'm very convincing.”

“No doubt. What did you do, take off the shroud?”

“That would have frightened them into even earlier graves.” His cool sardonic tone sent irritation prickling beneath her skin, but she forced herself not to show it. “You wouldn't have wanted to see me as a wraith.” A real pity she couldn't show him one and put him in his place.

He didn't seem to have heard that last remark. “What do you mean, even earlier graves?”

She took another step back, deliberately that time. “I showed them the consequences of their deaths—people remembering them with contempt, if they were remembered at all. At worst, they were stolen from before their bodies even grew cold. One man's house was literally torn down, brick by brick, by a crowd, because of a rumor he'd hidden thousands of pounds somewhere on his property. Not a pleasant legacy.”

The furrow between his brows might have been cut with a knife, and his lips tightened as he listened. “That sounds blatantly manipulative. I don't believe scaring people with visions accomplishes anything in the long run.”

Since scaring people with visions had been her entire reason for returning to the world, she felt even more infuriated. “My record says otherwise.”

“Well, you must have lost some faith in the method, if you refused to carry out your duties.”

“I didn't lose faith in the method.” So this was why she'd never been permitted to speak to people; it was impossible to argue with someone who refused to talk. Being a faceless wraith had helped in that regard too. “I just got tired of what I had to do.”

A little of the hardness eased out of his face, and now he looked more curious than condemning. “Why? I mean, you seem to believe you were saving people's lives.”

And losing what was left of my own.
So much of her past had disappeared as the years passed by. What if, finally, she didn't even know how she'd ended up there, didn't remember once being alive? There would truly be nothing beneath the shroud.

If people thought she was terrifying before, she didn't want to imagine what it would be like once the last trace of her humanity, her self, was gone for good. But whatever the effects on her, she could have borne them. After all, what did it matter if a ghost who only appeared to one person on one night felt less and less human as the years passed?

No, her rebellion had been touched off because of the last man to whom she'd appeared. He'd vowed on his knees before her to honor and celebrate Christmas, but not with a sense of joy and generosity. Instead, he'd behaved as if he had been provisionally released from a dungeon, and any mistake would result in his being thrown back in.

That wasn't at all the result she was supposed to achieve, but since she couldn't talk to him, she tried to remain with him to make it right somehow, rather than returning to the darkness once her hour was over. Naturally, the void swallowed her up. But while her remembrance of her life was gone, the memories she'd gained in death were only too vivid. And even if those had been wiped away too, she didn't think she would ever again be content with her duty.

None of which she could say to Justin, since he was doing just fine criticizing her work without any help from her. She'd revealed enough as it was, and there was a more important matter to deal with.

“I have to tell you something else,” she said. “I've seen your future.”

“You have?” His brows arched, and she thought she had succeeded in diverting the course of the conversation, but the surprise turned to a grin, which wasn't any better. “Oh, wait, I'm one of these unfortunate victims who has to be terrified into becoming a better man. I'm sorry, but that didn't occur to me until now.”

Laura folded her arms and gave him what she hoped was an are-you-quite-finished stare as he sat back down, sprawling comfortably in the chair as if preparing to be entertained. “Go ahead, please. Did I starve because I was too stingy to buy bread, or was I trampled by a crowd of widows and orphans I'd evicted?”

“You were either stabbed or shot.” She didn't feel like softening that blow at all now. “There was a lot of blood, it happened here and it will happen soon.”

The line of his shoulders went tense, his face suddenly intent as the amusement vanished. “You're serious.”

“I wouldn't joke about anyone's death.”
Especially not yours.

“But how do you know this vision will come true?”

She thought this was the reason she'd always been the third act. People who had already seen the pasts and presents unfolding before their eyes didn't need to be convinced that a third specter was showing them their own future. For the first time, she had to consider why someone should believe her.

“Visions of the future are shadows of the present,” she said, thinking aloud, “and as shadows can be altered by substance or light, so can the future. But something has to happen for the shadows to be changed. And there's only one way to change what I saw.”

“What's that?”

She lifted her head, feeling the cowl slip down to her shoulders. “I'll leave. I'll take up the responsibilities I abdicated, and I won't turn my back on them again. If there must be a Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, I've had a great deal more practice at it than you have.”

She didn't know what kind of reaction she had expected from him. Regret at the prospect of losing her would have made her feel good, but she knew better than to even imagine that. Relief that he wasn't going to die seemed more likely. But instead he looked thoughtful and preoccupied, as though he was turning over everything she had said, studying the story from different angles to find a flaw in it.

“Why were you doing all this?” he said eventually. “I mean, was it your idea to become a spirit and start showing people visions?”

“Of course it wasn't my idea. But what choice did I have? I lost my life when I was twelve, so I took the chance to do something with my afterlife instead.” She thought of the vast stillness of the void, and said softly, “For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything. Neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.”

“Ecclesiastes, chapter nine.” Justin's reply came like an echo of her voice. “You died so young?”

Laura nodded, hoping he wouldn't feel he had to smother her in sympathy. She almost leaned back against the wall, to feel something comfortably solid, but remembered at the last moment she wore the shroud and might simply fall through, so she straightened up again.

“My parents told me not to go ice skating alone.” She'd never confided that to anyone, but since she'd died, she'd never talked to another person, and she needed to shift the burden of what she'd done off her shoulders. “But I didn't want to wait for anyone to join me. I think my skates were new. A present I was impatient to try out.”

There was a pause. “Do you want to send a message to your family?” he asked.

“No.” It was a relief that he'd resorted to the simplest, most practical thing to say, and his gaze on her was both direct and accepting. “I don't remember who they are—I wasn't lying about that, at any rate. All I recall is how it happened, and why dig up a grave that's twenty years old?” Enough time for her to take her place among the stars, one more mote of dust drifting through the night.

“But—” Justin leaned forward. “Will you have to die again?”

“I'm not sure,” she had to admit. “Hopefully not. But I wasn't prepared to become a human, so I'm certainly not versed on how to reverse the process.”

His gaze went over her. “Well, wearing the shroud doesn't seem to have made a difference.”

“Other than allowing me to walk through walls, no.” She plucked a fold of it away from her dress. “Maybe it's the human clothes between this and my skin. Maybe it has to be the shroud alone.”

His throat moved slightly as he swallowed, and suddenly she knew what was going through his mind. But all he said was, “You'll—want to try that in your room.”

For a moment she thought of trying it right there. She'd never felt that way with anyone before. He could keep her off-balance while still treating her like a real person, rather than as an entity with no feelings of her own, only a purpose to be carried out. Maybe he accepted her because he was at peace with himself.

If her time with him was running out fast, she didn't want to just leave. She didn't want to go back to being a faceless, formless wraith which had never known the warmth of a human touch, his touch. And yet she couldn't say or do anything.

It wasn't the fact that she'd known him for less than a day, because that was about twenty times longer than she'd known another person. It was the fact that she wasn't confident when it came to showing how she felt. She had told him she'd been a ghost, had walked through a wall and had warned him about his impending death, but all that had been necessary, and his response had been the best she could have expected under the circumstances. It would be stretching her luck to go further, let alone to hope he'd feel the same way.

She wanted him to touch her again as he'd done before, except more intimately this time. She wanted to trace the line of his jaw and sink her fingers into his hair, to breathe in the smell of him and feel how warm, how very much alive he would be.

But it wasn't the place or the time. It was likely never to be, because she felt sure that once she slipped the shroud over her bare skin, her flesh would melt like mist. She would return to the darkness, to wait until she was summoned forth again.

“All right,” she said, struggling to speak normally. The last thing she wanted was for him to know she would miss him—his generosity and companionship, even the novelty of being with someone who was so much unafraid of her that he dared to be sarcastic. She turned, thankful for a reason for him not to see her face. “If you don't see me again, you'll know—”

“Wait.”

Something in his voice made her glance back over her shoulder. He was on his feet. “There's something I wondered.” She waited, and he ran a hand through his thick dark hair, pushing it back from his forehead. “Is that all you've ever done—appear to people before Christmas and show them visions of their deaths?”

“Well, no.” It sounded unbearably bleak when he put it that way. “Sometimes I showed them other people's lives—people who were affected by their deaths. Usually because those people stood to inherit money or thought a long-overdue justice had finally been carried out.”

Justin shook his head and muttered something that sounded like “invasion of privacy” before he continued. “What I meant was, you wanted them to enjoy Christmas, didn't you? To hang up holly and give gifts and all that tri—er, all that. But you don't remember doing any of that as a child, and you didn't even do it after you…became yourself.”

“How could I have? I was a spirit.”

“Well, you're not one now. You said your duties were always carried out in the small hours of Christmas Eve.” He pulled a pocket watch from his jacket and flipped it open. “It's only three in the afternoon. If you stay for supper, we could celebrate Christmas before you go back to…wherever you came from, in enough time to haunt some other poor sod.”

Laura blinked. “How will we celebrate?” She glanced at the window to see if the snow had somehow cleared away, but it sifted down, albeit not as fiercely as it had done before. “Do you even have decorations?”

Justin rubbed a palm over his jaw with a soft rasping sound. “I'll see what I can do.”

“But—”

He held up a hand. “Please, Miss Snow. I'd be remiss if I didn't treat a guest in the spirit of Christmas. I'll send for you when it's time for supper.”

Laura almost started to protest again, because she wasn't used to a human telling her what to do. It also occurred to her that if he didn't believe her story, but wanted to make certain she wouldn't run through the nearest wall, stay-in-your-room might be a good way to delay her while he sent for the local constables. But when he'd talked to her before, he had disagreed and he had been sarcastic. If he'd wanted to lull her into a false sense of security, it would have made more sense for him not to rile her.

Besides, she didn't think he was that deceptive. Reserved, yes, but not a liar.

“All right.” She paused. “And I'd rather you called me Laura.”

She could see any number of thoughts going through the cool banker's brain—curiosity as to where she'd found the name, a habit of accuracy insisting it wasn't even her real name—but he only nodded, and she stepped through the wall.

Chapter Four

Candle in hand, Justin entered the attic a little cautiously. When his father had been alive, that room had been packed almost end-to-end with chests and boxes. Toys, china, even furniture. And, of course, there would have been Christmas decorations, taken out each year, inspected and dusted to hang from the branches of a tree and the edge of the mantelpiece.

Those were long gone, discreetly sold. When he allowed himself to think about them, he remembered the way those ornaments had shone in the firelight. But at the time, he'd told himself no one ever starved for a lack of polished tin spirals that gleamed like icicles.

Now, he looked at the few boxes that remained, all neatly labeled under a coating of dust. He knew what was in those—clothes that wouldn't fetch more than pennies, yet which had plenty of wear in them. Probably because they were all out of fashion. And there were a few mementoes of his mother: her journals, monogrammed handkerchiefs, a tortoiseshell comb. Nothing he could take downstairs to use, despite his inviting Miss Snow—Laura—to stay for Christmas.

Really, what had he been expecting to find? Boxes of red ribbons and glass bells and frosted baubles miraculously still there? He sat down on a box, which creaked.
Now what?

Well, he could have a meal laid out. Mrs. Rowe, his cook, had left enough food. But he'd promised Laura a celebration. He wanted to give her something to remember him by before she left, but more than that, he wanted to see her smile, a pretty flush riding high on her cheekbones and her face lit up so her eyes glowed. For all of her afterlife, there had never been spring or summer or autumn, only the bleakest face of winter. He could change that, at least for one night.

All right, think
. He had to be like her, innovative enough to turn a candlestick into a cutlery receptacle. What a pity about the snowfall; if not for that, he might have gone out to cut sprigs of holly and yew branches to fill vases. He could even have collected handfuls of wispy old-man's-beard to decorate the edges of the shelves.

Wait, there were pine cones. Mrs. Rowe used those as cheap firestarters, and he was sure she had plenty. He could scatter flour or salt to make the cones look tipped with snow or frost. That was a start. And he had plenty of leftover paper. He could do something with that, maybe make a lantern chain.

Which might look childish and economical, to put it politely, something he wouldn't normally have dreamed of doing. But there had been no self-pity at all in Laura's voice when she'd spoken of what had happened to her, so he tried not to be embarrassed about his own situation either.

Of course, she'd had years to come to terms with her life, or lack thereof. Though she didn't look like a girl left sleeping forever beneath ice. Oh, she was young, but there was none of that girl's innocence in the calm steady eyes that had seen too much. She hadn't even blinked when she'd told him he would die unless she left.

He still wasn't sure what to make of that. If he'd been told someone had predicted his death, it would have sounded like cross-my-palm-with-silver nonsense that would only disturb the credulous. Not that it bothered him hearing it so directly, but he disliked it nonetheless. If the implication was that misfortunes up to and including murder were part of some great plan, Justin would have preferred not to believe he'd displeased any divine power to that extent.

Of course, it could be argued that Laura had been sent to him for that very reason, to save him from an unjust death, but he didn't like that either. It was hardly fair to her, to drop such an unasked-for responsibility in her lap. He could tell she enjoyed living again, and certainly eating again, but now she'd have to give that up, just as she'd lost everything else once. He wondered if she would keep any memories of him or if those would be gone too.

He'd believed everything she said, he realized a moment later. Under any other circumstances, he might have thought she was either delusional or trying some confidence trick on him, and his profession had made him good at watching people's faces and bodies for the involuntary signs they were lying or nervous.

None of which had showed with Laura. Her crystal-grey gaze had met his directly, and she'd been more flustered at breakfast when she'd made the mistake of eating out of the sugar bowl. The truth certainly explained all those little eccentricities of hers. Not to mention how she'd ended up within locked gates wearing a shroud.

After she'd left his bedroom, he had examined the wall carefully, running his hands over it for good measure, but it felt like solid stone. So what she'd done left him three choices. He could believe there was something wrong with his eyes and/or mind, which was why he'd just seen a woman walk through a wall, he could come up with his own explanation of how that trick had been performed, or he could accept her story.

He was perfectly sane, he didn't see things that weren't there, and he couldn't unravel the secret behind the trick. Which left only one option. Just his luck. If she was telling the truth, she'd be gone before the next morning.

Determinedly, he turned his thoughts away from that and went back down to the kitchen for the pine cones. Finding a barrel of apples in the cellar, he carried up an armful of those as well, and as he worked to decorate the parlor he forgot everything else but the novelty of the task. He even found himself humming “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. And somehow, making the best out of so little seemed like an accomplishment too.

Besides, when he was finally done, he looked around with a feeling that Laura would be charmed by the end result.

And that was all that mattered.

After hanging the shroud up in the wardrobe, Laura sat on her bed to wait. The hours until supper lasted for weeks. She had never anticipated a Christmas Eve before, and she wished there was something she could actually do.

Finally she went down to the kitchen, boiled water and took a jug up to her bedroom, to wash as best she could. After she had finished, she wrapped herself in the dressing gown and combed her hair, hoping her appearance was appropriate.

No, not quite, because there were line drawings of women in some of the books, and all of those women had their hair up, arranged and styled attractively. She didn't know how to begin to do that. Better to leave her hair the way it was than try to ape a fashion and look foolish as a result. Studying herself in the mirror, she made herself smile. That was the most she could—

A crack raced over the surface of the mirror. It sliced the reflection of her face in two.

Laura jerked back, but nothing further happened except for the edges of the crack fusing together. The split melded as she watched, and the mirror was whole again. It might never have happened, except for the pounding of her heart and the gooseprickles covering her arms.

Damn it
. Even if she called Justin, there was nothing she could show him, and that had been a warning for her. Except she didn't know what exactly she was being warned about.

Feeling vulnerable—which was new—she hastily struggled back into her borrowed clothes and sat down to wait. She had expected a knock at the door, but instead a bell rang downstairs. The sound disquieted her; it was high and piercing, oddly disconnected from human contact, as if the bell had rung on its own.

No, that was ridiculous. She was jumpy after seeing the crack in the mirror, and if Justin wanted to celebrate Christmas, she wouldn't cast a shadow over his efforts by imagining things.

Tossing her hair back, she straightened her shoulders and went downstairs.

The fragrance of cinnamon stole into her senses, warm and redolent of spices, but beneath it was the crispness of apples and a sweeter scent like oranges. She quickened her pace, but stopped in the doorway of the parlor.

She hadn't expected it to look very different from what she'd seen last night, and indeed, it didn't. Justin hadn't had much to work with, after all. But the furniture had been polished, and gleams of well-kept brass shone from the fire irons and the bell on the mantelpiece. A low table had been drawn up before the fire, and on it was a little stub of tree that she guessed had been cut from one of the shrubs flanking the front door. Apples filled a basket, one of them studded with cloves. The mantelpiece was hung with a chain of red paper flowers that looked vivid in the firelight, and beside the fireplace was another sheaf of flowers in a paper cone patterned with music notes, which might have been taken from the book of sheet music.

Justin stood at the sideboard filling two glasses, but to her relief, he wore the same velvet jacket and shabby trousers, so she didn't feel plain in her blue dress. “I'm afraid the brandy's all finished.” He looked slightly embarrassed as he gave her one of the glasses. “All we have is sherry.”

“Oh, I don't mind,” Laura said. “The place is lovely. Where did you get all those red flowers from?”

The apologetic expression vanished in a smile. He didn't seem different when he smiled, except for the way it lit up his eyes as though they reflected the dozen or more candles that lighted the room. “I folded them out of scrap paper, and there are more uses for red ink than the debits column. Uh, this is for you.”

He took a flat package from a pocket and pressed it into her free hand. The wrapping was plain brown paper, but he had drawn a picture on it—a snowman in the garden, looking into a window of the house.

“I—thank you.” She took the gift out of sheer reflex, too startled to refuse. “What is it?”

“It's a Christmas present,” Justin said. She leveled a look at him. “Oh, sorry. It's a volume of Swinburne's poetry. Not new, unfortunately, but I thought you might like it.” He frowned. “Unless you can't take anything at all back with you?”

Laura wished she could. He'd even given her a gift. Until then, she'd more or less tolerated being human again. Some aspects of that had been pleasant, but others had been frustrating, as if to balance the experience.

Suddenly, though, it was wonderful.

Without thinking, she put her arms around him—carefully, because she didn't want to spill the sherry—and rested her cheek against the softness of his jacket for a moment, all she could allow herself. His free arm went around her waist, but before he could tighten the embrace, she slipped free.

Heat crept up her throat and she couldn't quite meet his eyes, but she darted a skittish glance up through her lashes. His throat moved as he swallowed, and he didn't look at ease either.

But he recovered first. “Merry Christmas.” He lifted his glass and clinked it against hers.

She sat down before the fire with her book in her lap. Pine cones were crackling in the flames, and the lit candles on the sills looked even brighter against the night beyond the windows.

“I've been wondering,” he said as she sipped her sherry. “If your whole purpose is to make people celebrate Christmas, what about those who were raised Hindus, or Jews?”

Laura knew little about life beyond the narrow scope of what had been her duties, but she supposed people of other religions had their own holy days. “I think it would be unfair at best to expect someone of a different faith to celebrate Christmas. And if I felt I was treating people unfairly, it wouldn't have taken me twenty years to want a change.”

The cool assessment in his expression softened, but she knew better than to expect him to be satisfied with the explanation, and sure enough he went on. “Still doesn't seem entirely right to me. I mean, even those who start out Christian can lapse.”

“Like you?”

“I read the
National Reformer
. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me you read the
National Reformer
, whatever that is.” Laura felt she'd done more hard thinking in the last few days than she had in the past two decades. “It doesn't have anything to do with being a devout churchgoer, you know. It's more a question of whether you have kindness and compassion.”

“And you don't think I do.”

She saw through that at once: if she admitted he was generous and considerate, her whole purpose as a ghost came into question. But no one could have called him mean-spirited after everything he had done for her.

“Are you kind to yourself?” she asked.

He didn't seem to have a rejoinder to that, and when he raised his glass, it looked more of a salute to her than a toast. To her relief, he went on to the topic of their dinner, and told her he was unfortunately of not much use in the kitchen. “So all I have is a cold chicken my cook prepared before she left. Oh, and ginger cake.”

“That sounds delicious,” Laura said, deciding the gracious response to a victory would be to call no attention to it, but once he got up to fetch their meal, she checked the clock on the mantelpiece. Almost nine already.

She wasn't sure if she had till midnight or until the last minute before three, because the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come always appeared at the stroke of the third hour after midnight. Either way, it was hardly enough time to read her book, not that she wanted to spend her few remaining hours reading.

For once her appetite deserted her, and she knew Justin could tell when he glanced at her plate, but he said nothing about it. Instead, he told a few stories of his work as a banker, including how he'd once spotted a counterfeit five-pound note and, following protocol, had detained the man who'd given it to him until a police constable arrived.

“So the constable came in,” he said. “The fake banknote was on a table where the suspected counterfeiter couldn't have reached it. The constable asked if he could compare it to a genuine fiver to be certain, but when he did, there was no difference. The two notes were identical. I thought I'd made a horrible mistake. The suspected counterfeiter threatened to sue me for slander, but the constable told him to calm down and leave quietly because I was just doing my job.”