“You know, don’t you, that the excitement would have worn off. I know men like Danny Longstreet, everybody does. It’s the novelty that he likes. He would have been good to you until he got used to you, then he would have gone back to his other women.”
Jace was quiet, listening, hoping he’d hear something, but the house was silent. Feeling like a fool, he turned onto his side and closed his eyes. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d had enough wine to make him sleepy. Nigh was just a room away and he liked that. Smiling, he drifted into that state of half-asleep, half-awake.
“Loved me,” he heard. “Danny loved me.”
“I don’t blame him,” Jace whispered.
Just as he fell asleep, he heard a voice say, “Told me so.”
10
Jace and Nigh were sitting at the kitchen table eating the huge breakfast that Mrs. Browne had begrudgingly prepared for them. Jace had gone downstairs first and done his best to prepare his housekeeper for the shocking fact that a woman had spent the night in the house with him. Only not “with” him, but…Jace had rolled his eyes in exasperation at himself for his intimidation by the woman.
But Mrs. Browne was not to be placated. When Nigh walked into the kitchen, Mrs. Browne humphed until he thought the plaster might crack. She fried a second plate of bacon and eggs, then she’d left the kitchen, as though she couldn’t bear to be in the same room with a woman like Nigh.
“Would she be that way with any woman who spent the night here?” Jace asked. “Or is it just you?”
“Mostly me. She doesn’t approve of my job. Thinks it’s ‘uppity’ and not a job for a proper woman.”
“Ah. Your job. And just what is it you do?”
Nigh started to tell him, then stopped. “Spelunking.”
Jace chuckled. “You’d better eat all of that. We might not get much for lunch.”
Nigh ate a piece of fried bread dipped in runny, yellow egg yolk, then asked, “We?”
“Unless you have something else you have to do. If you’re going to be my research assistant…” He shifted in his seat. “By the way, what salary do you want?”
“None. Finding out things about this house is reward enough for me.” The moment the words were out of her mouth, Nigh knew she’d said the wrong thing. What did he think, that she was doing this because she’d fallen in love with him? But she said nothing; she wanted to see what he’d say.
Jace started to say something but stopped. He was frowning as he looked down at his plate. “Nigh,” he began slowly. “About…” He hesitated. “About ‘us.’ I can’t…I mean, I don’t want you to think—”
She cut him off. “You don’t want me to think that you are the prize? Really, Mr. Montgomery, you should get your ego in check. I know I was drunk last night and I’m sure I made a pass at you, but then I make passes at lampposts when I’m drunk—which explains why I’m usually very frugal about drinking. I apologize for whatever I did.”
“You didn’t do anything,” he said quietly. “Actually, it was me who did—or didn’t do—anything. I just wanted to say that there are things in my life that…” He broke off and said nothing else.
“I’m glad we have that settled,” Nigh said, but couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. “I understand that you are off limits. I’ll stay away from the booze from now on. Now, how about we look into our mutual interest, which is the history of this house?”
“Sure, okay,” Jace said. He felt bad about what she was thinking, bad about not telling her the truth. If he had any sense at all, he’d…what? Go home to the United States and forget all of this?
He looked at the top of her head. “I’m not sure, but I think Ann may have spoken to me last night.”
“What did she say? ‘Get in an alcohol treatment program’?”
“No, but she did suggest that I send you,” he said solemnly.
Nigh tore off a piece of bread and tossed it at his head. He ducked and it missed him.
“Now I know how Lewis felt.”
“Lewis?” Nigh said, aghast. “Please tell me that I didn’t talk about Lewis last night.”
“You beat him up when you were six.”
Nigh groaned. “Never again allow me to drink. Please.” She took a breath. “What did Ann really say?”
“I was mostly asleep, but I think she said she loved Danny Longstreet.”
“Better than all her other suitors? Poor Ann was shut up in this house all her life. When she was a child, the villagers used to wonder about her and thought maybe she was deformed.”
“Actually, she’s quite pretty. When I saw her—”
“When you were hiding in the wardrobe?”
“Right. When I was hiding in the wardrobe, she was lamenting that she wasn’t as pretty as her cousin Catherine. But standards of beauty change. Today Catherine would be ordering diet pills off infomercials and Ann would be a model.”
“Hardly a model. She wasn’t tall enough. She—” Nigh broke off because a brown pottery bowl fell off a shelf on the dresser and loudly crashed to the floor.
Nigh looked at Jace and he looked back at her. “On second thought,” Nigh said carefully, “I think Ann was every bit as beautiful as any model we have today.”
Jace gave Nigh a look to let her know she should be careful of what she said. Together, they began to clean up the broken crockery.
“So Ann loved Danny Longstreet,” Nigh said as she swept broken shards into the pan Jace held steady. “Actually loved him.”
When Jace didn’t answer, she looked at him and saw the glazed expression on his face. “What is it?”
“I have it wrong. Ann didn’t say that she loved Danny, she said that Danny loved her. And he told her so.”
Nigh looked around the room nervously. “Excuse me for saying this, but I don’t think so.”
Jace dumped the shards in the trash bin, then sat back down at the table. “You’re basing your opinion on the Longstreet you know today. Maybe Danny was different.”
“I’m basing my opinion on the fact that the parish register says that a village girl gave birth to Danny Longstreet’s child a few months after Ann’s death. He impregnated her while he was engaged to Ann. Is that true love?”
Jace looked at her with interest. “You have done some research, haven’t you? So tell me what happened to Danny.”
“He died from a fall from a horse four years after Ann’s death. Never married.”
“Any more kids?”
“Just the one that I know about. The girl wasn’t married to Danny, but she gave the baby the name of Longstreet. Gerald in the village is descended from that child.”
“If she gave the baby the name of Longstreet, Danny would have had to agree, wouldn’t he? He didn’t marry her, but he must have admitted that the child was his,” Jace said.
“And maybe supported it as long as he was alive. Danny’s father was quite rich.”
Jace thought for a moment. “So what happened to Ann’s letters? Victorians threw nothing away. Maybe they’re in the library and we could—”
“Burned,” Nigh said. “After her death, her father burned everything that had belonged to Ann.”
“All the letters? Maybe he missed something. Maybe in the attic we could find something.”
“Arthur Stuart not only burned all of his daughter’s letters, he burned all of her possessions. He was in a rage after his daughter killed herself on her wedding day. He had all her furniture, her clothes, everything hauled downstairs, taken out back, and burned. He wouldn’t even give it away to charity. The local vicar kept a journal and I’ve read it. The whole village went to see the bonfire. Arthur Stuart said his daughter was roasting in hell and that’s where all her belongings should be too.”
“Nice man,” Jace said. “No wonder Ann was willing to marry someone with half her IQ just to get away from him.”
“And no wonder she loved him. Maybe he would be unfaithful, but he had a generous enough spirit to allow his illegitimate child to have
his name. In the 1870s that was an uncommon thing to do.”
“Wonder why he didn’t marry the mother of his child?” Jace asked.
“Didn’t you say he was in love with Ann?”
“I know you’re being sarcastic,” Jace said, “but it is possible to be in love with one person and go to bed with someone else.”
“Speaking from experience?” Nigh asked, teasing.
Jace looked at her hard. “No,” he said in a way that made her stop smiling and look away.
There was an awkward silence between them. The food that was left on their plates was cold and unappetizing.
She stood up. “I think I’ll go up and…” Nigh began, thinking she’d brush her teeth and put on some clothes that fit better than Jace’s huge workout suit, but then she remembered that she had nothing with her. “I guess I should go home. Maybe we can meet later and—”
Mrs. Browne came bustling into the kitchen and from the happy look on her face, she had terrible news. “The whole village is looking for you,” she said to Nigh, her voice full of joy.
“Me? Why do they want me?”
“To apply for jobs, of course. There are two young people come up from London. They’re psychics. Read your mind. Tell you what you’re thinkin’ and what’s gonna happen to you. They said more people from London are comin’ today but they had to get their machines ready.”
Nigh sat back down. “Machines?”
“Oh, yes. Ghost machines. They have it on the telly. They have little machines and cameras, all sorts of things. They want to take pictures of the lady on her horse. They want to record the hoofbeats on the stairs.”
“And they all want to see me?” Nigh said, her mind full of horrible images.
“It’s all over town that you’re the one to see.”
Slowly, Nigh turned to look at Jace, who was standing by the door with a smug look on his face. “You did this.”
“No,” he said, breaking into a grin. “You did it to yourself. You made up the Ghost Center. I merely told them to talk to you instead of me.”
“There’s about twenty cars parked in front of that little house of yours,” Mrs. Browne said. “Can’t nobody from the village drive past. Clive is givin’ out tickets. He said that if this keeps up we’ll have enough money to repair the library roof. Mrs. Wheeler has been up all night makin’ up a brochure about the ghosts at Priory House, and Mrs. Parsons is printin’ it out. They’re gonna sell ’em for five pounds each.”
“Five pounds?” Nigh said, astonished.
“It’s the twenty-first century and there’s inflation, you know. Well, now, you two gotta get outta here. I got bakin’ to do for the tea shop. With all the visitors in the village, they’re eatin’ everything.”
Feeling as though she’d been hit with a bat, Nigh started toward the kitchen door, then turned back. “Mrs. Browne?”
“Yes, what is it?” she asked impatiently.
“If the people are here about ghosts in Priory House, why aren’t they here at this house? Why aren’t they pounding at the gates?”
“We told ’em the truth, that an American lives here.”
Nigh didn’t understand what she meant. She looked at Jace, but he shrugged. She looked back at Mrs. Browne.
“Guns,” Mrs. Browne said, as though both Jace and Nigh were idiots. “American law says that everybody in that country has to have a gun.”
“It’s true,” Jace said seriously. “It’s in our constitution that we have the right to bear arms. The law was specifically written so we could shoot English people.”
Mrs. Browne put her hands on her hips. “Well, I never!” she said.
Jace and Nigh ran from the room and were upstairs in the master bedroom before they allowed themselves to burst into laughter.
11
I feel like a clown,” Nigh said, and even to herself she sounded petulant, like a pouting child. She pulled up the long sweatpants so she wouldn’t walk on them. The bottoms of the pant legs had cuffs on them, and the waist tied with a drawstring, but in between there were about ten yards of fabric that hung about her. The top was just as bad. When she bent over the neckline fell away so you could see all the way to the floor. It was not sexy. As for shoes, all she had were her new, but ruined, high heels. She had on a pair of Jace’s gym socks.
Jace glanced at her, nodded, then looked back at the screen of his laptop. “What do we have so far?”
Nigh was sitting on the window seat in the chintz bedroom. It had started to rain outside so Jace built a fire. The room was cozy and warm and altogether wonderful. If circumstances were different, she would be enjoying herself. Maybe it was a bit odd that she and Jace were in a bedroom, but it was the room that had been made to look like Ann’s room, so Nigh told herself it was part of the research. But there was something wrong. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was a feeling. Several times her life had depended on her going with her gut feelings and this was one of those times.
“What is it that you want to prove?” Nigh asked, her tone a bit more aggressive than she meant it to be.
“I think we should start with proving that Ann didn’t kill herself,” Jace said.
“How can we find out what happened a hundred and twenty-eight years ago? If Ann left a note, it was destroyed by her father. If she wrote letters or kept a diary, they were destroyed too.”
“What about who she wrote letters to? Maybe they kept them,” Jace said.
“If we read all Ann’s letters, what would we find out? That she wanted to marry Danny Longstreet? Maybe we’d find out that Danny wanted to marry her. But we already know these things. How can we find out what happened in those last few minutes before she died?”
“Being in love doesn’t stop someone from committing suicide,” Jace said softly, then looked at her. “What would we have if we did prove that Ann was murdered? The right to move her bones into the churchyard? I’m not sure, but I’ll bet that if you talk to the vicar he’ll move them now.”
“Probably,” Nigh said, looking out the window.
Jace put his laptop on the bed and went to stand by her. “You want me to take you home?” he asked.
“And have people pounding on my door asking me for a job performing séances?”
“Are you really angry about that? It was either you or me and you started it,” Jace said. “I think—”
She looked up at him. “No, I can handle those people. It’s something else. It’s something about this room. I don’t think Ann wants me in here. Maybe she’s as much in love with you as you are with her.”
“I’m not—” Jace began, then reached out to touch her hair, but he drew back. “So where is this tower that used to hold the lady highwayman’s clothes?”
“Great idea!” she said, then got off the window—and promptly tripped on the sweatpants. Jace caught her before she hit the floor, but he quickly let her go.
It took them a minute before they could get the old door open. It was easier to open from inside the tunnel. Once they were out of Ann’s bedroom, Nigh felt better. She gave a sigh of relief and for a moment leaned against the stone wall. “You can see her but I think I can feel her. She’s frustrated about something and I can feel it. I don’t think we’re doing what she wants us to do.” She looked at Jace in the candlelight. “Or maybe Ann is angry that I’m taking up your time.”
“If there’s one thing in the world a person knows, it’s when another person loves you,” Jace said. “Not mouths the words, but really means it. I’m sure I’d know if Ann or any other woman was in love with me. She’s not.”
“So what’s this all about?” Nigh asked, looking at him. “Why has she been showing herself to you? In all my research, I’ve never heard of anyone else seeing Ann.”
“But everyone who has lived here has seen ghosts,” he said. “They assumed it was the criminal woman and got the heck out. I don’t think they were seeing the robber; I think it was Ann. But from all I’ve heard, the only people who were
really able to communicate with her have been children.”
Nigh started up the stairs. The stones were cold through the thick socks, but it felt good to have Jace with her. She’d been up the steps a hundred times but always by herself and when she was a child. Had Ann Stuart looked after her when she was small?
“If you’re the first adult she’s been able to reach and you’re not doing what she wants, maybe that’s her frustration.” She looked back at him. “If you see her again, be sure and ask her what it is she wants you to do.”
“My guess is that she wants us to find Danny Longstreet’s ghost and get it to her so they can fly off to heaven together,” Jace said, smiling.
Nigh didn’t say anything for the rest of the way up the stairs and neither did Jace.
At the top was the round turret room, about ten feet in diameter. There was an old chair in the room and the windowsills were covered with small ornaments from outdoors: a bird’s nest, three seashells, a striped rock, lots of dried leaves.
Jace knew that these things had been put there by Nigh when she was a child. “The playhouse of a little girl,” he said, picking up the items and looking at them. “It’s amazing that no one found out you were here.”
“I think Hatch knew, but no one else. My parents didn’t know. And, of course, the house has been vacant most of my life.”
“When was the last time you were here?”
“The day my mother died. Everyone wanted to give me sympathy, but I just wanted to be alone. This was the only place that I could escape to where no one could find me. I stayed for most of a day, and when I went down, I could face them.”
When Jace said nothing, she turned to him. “Has anyone close to you died?”
“Yes,” he said, succinctly and curtly, obviously wanting to say no more.
“Does that death have anything to do with this house and why you want to find out about Ann?”