“That proves that you didn’t meet the nasty little boy who lived here in 1912,” came the woman’s voice, so soft the wind in the trees almost drowned it.
Jace gave the first semblance of a laugh that had passed his lips in years. He put his hands in his pockets and tried to lift his neck, which was nearly as numb as his feet, and went in search of the gardener.
2
When Jace awoke the next morning the inside of his mouth felt like it had been used as a lint filter for a dryer. Worse, for a long moment, he couldn’t remember where he was. Enough light was seeping in between the heavy curtains that he knew it was morning, but he couldn’t remember how he got wherever he was.
He lay still on the bed, blinking into the gloom. He remembered Mrs. Browne’s lunch, then being pushed outside and meeting Mr. Hatch, the gardener. He was a little gnome of a man, so short he made Jace, at six two, feel like a giant. But for all Mr. Hatch’s small stature, he was certainly strong. When Jace first saw him, he was using a big handsaw to cut up a huge limb that had broken off a tree and fallen across a path.
“You wanta grab that end?” the man said in an accent that made Mrs. Browne’s sound as though it was from an English drawing room. “My helper is out sick today. If you ask me, what’s made him sick is that girlfriend of his. Too pushy, that one. Makin’ the boy think he’s somethin’ he’s not. Mark my words, she’ll be the downfall of him. All uppity, but she cleans the toilets over at the school. What’s the matter with you, boy? Can’t you pick up that thing? What they teachin’ you at that school?”
Jace stood up and looked at his hands. He could see them but he couldn’t feel them, so he couldn’t pick up his end of the heavy log. “I don’t know what school you’re talking about and I have no strength because Mrs. Browne fed me a bottle of the beer you made.”
The little man stood up straight and under his weathered skin Jace thought he saw a glow of pink. “You’re the new owner.”
“‘The Yank,’ as Mrs. Browne calls me. Jace Montgomery.” He held out his hand to shake, but the little man didn’t take it.
“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, I thought you was the lad the vicar said he was sendin’ to help me. What with you bein’ a big, strappin’ fellow, I thought you…” He trailed off, not seeming to know how to get himself out of the jam.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jace said, trying to put the man at ease. “Shall we try again with this log?”
“No, sir, the lad’ll be along soon now. He’s one of the vicar’s charity cases and the vicar is savin’ the boy whether he wants to be saved or not.”
“Maybe he’ll run off with your other lad’s girlfriend and you’ll get rid of both of them at once.”
Mr. Hatch gave a smile and Jace again tried to lift his end of the log. This time, with great concentration, he was able to help move it to the far side of the path.
“Where does this lead?” Jace asked, looking down the graveled path.
“Yonder,” Mr. Hatch said. “All the paths lead nowhere, then they connect up and lead back to the house. They were made for a lady of the house that didn’t ride. Ain’t no stables anywhere on the property, so if you’re wantin’ a horse you’ll have to build somethin’ to put it in. But then, you won’t be stayin’ long enough to build anythin’ so no need to worry about that.”
“And why won’t I be staying?”
“On account of the ghost.” He looked at Jace with his wrinkled, weathered face twisted into something that Jace assumed was meant to be frightening. “A real fright, she is.”
“How so?” Jace asked.
Mr. Hatch looked around to see if the young man the vicar was sending over was coming, but they were alone. “Come with me and we’ll share a glass of my wine and I’ll tell you everything. I’ve been here thirty years and I know all there is to know.”
Jace couldn’t resist the temptation to say, “Do you know more than Mrs. Browne?”
“Hmph! That one? She spends her days droolin’ over some boy on the telly. That cook. Now, mind you, I’m as open-minded as anybody, but is cookin’ a fit job for a man? And callin’ himself ‘the naked chef.’ Is that a proper thing for a man to do?”
Jace thought about asking Mr. Hatch if planting daffodils was a manly occupation but thought better of it.
When they reached a brick shed, Mr. Hatch stepped into the dark interior and returned with a blue glass bottle and two stained ceramic mugs. “Over here, under her tree,” he said. “We’ll have a bit of rest and I’ll tell you all that you want to hear.”
I’m going to regret this, Jace thought as he took the cup of wine. It was made from raspberries and was delicious, but it was even more lethal than the beer. Mr. Hatch downed two cups full for every half a cup that Jace drank, but even so, after forty-five minutes, Jace wanted to curl up under the tree and go to sleep.
But for all Jace’s questions, Mr. Hatch didn’t tell him anything about the ghost. He talked at length about putting in a bed of dahlias, but he didn’t mention the ghost—and he evaded Jace when he tried to ask. Jace got the impression that Mr. Hatch was so sure that Jace, an American, would stay at Priory House for so short a time that he wanted to do as much to the garden as possible before the house was put up for sale again. And he didn’t want to hasten the end by talking about the ghost that had scared so many other people away.
Maybe it was a feeling that two could play at this game, but Jace didn’t mention that the ghost had spoken to him, and that she didn’t sound like anyone’s idea of a lady highwayman.
“Ah, here he is now,” Mr. Hatch said, emptying his glass for the fourth time. “I’ll get him to help you up to your room.”
“I’m fine,” Jace said as he put his hand on the tree and tried to stand up. Legs that were once numb but functioning had now turned to rubber. “I’ll be fine. I want to hear about the ghost and about—”
That’s the last thing Jace remembered before he awoke in a strange room with his tongue feeling like it had turned into a caterpillar. Surprisingly, his head didn’t hurt, but his mind was fuzzy. Eventually, he remembered the two soft comments by an unknown voice.
“Are you here?” he whispered, but there was no sound. He lay still, listening and thinking about what he’d heard. Yesterday, in between two drunken sessions, he thought he’d heard a woman’s voice. She’d even made a joke to him. Could that have happened, or was it just the byproduct of some outrageously potent booze that he’d been given?
“Please answer me,” he said. “If you’re here, please talk to me. I want to contact someone.” Until he said the words out loud, he hadn’t realized he’d thought them. He’d told his uncle Frank that a ghost in the house didn’t bother him, but now he was seeing that he liked the idea of a ghost. Maybe she could contact Stacy for him. He wanted to ask her what had been so terrible in her life that she couldn’t bear to go on living.
When there was no answer to his questions, Jace began to feel silly. He had no idea where he was in the house. He remembered that the master bedroom had an enormous four-poster bed in it. The man who had remodeled the house back in the 1850s had bought the bed from an auction of the furnishings of a bankrupt duke. The bed was made of heavily carved, age-blackened oak, and the mattress was eight feet square. To make sure the bed stayed in the house, the remodeler had had the room built around it. The only way to get the bed out was to cut it into pieces. Over the years, the bed had come to be included in the sale, like the windows and the sinks.
But now Jace was in another room. It was half the size of the master bedroom and much prettier. There were windows on two sides, one set forming a pretty alcove where a deep window seat had been built. He could imagine Stacy curled up there with a book while the rain lashed against the windows. She’d always loved the rain.
For the first time since Stacy’s death, Jace felt at peace. He closed his eyes, wanting to go back to sleep, but he knew he couldn’t. How long had he been asleep? Since he passed out under what Mr. Hatch
called “her” tree? The man said he was going to tell Jace about the ghost, but he hadn’t. He’d spent their short time together enumerating all that needed to be done to the outside. There were ditches that needed to be cleaned, plants that needed replacing, things like manure that needed to be bought. “You need some animals around here,” Mr. Hatch said, draining his cup of the potent wine. “We need the manure. That a place this size should have to buy cow dung goes against what’s right.” Thirty minutes later, Jace found out that there were a lot of things that Mr. Hatch thought went “against what’s right.”
Now, lying in the bed, he thought, Someone is doing this. Someone is making me feel calm. Part of him thought that was absurd, but another part knew that he hadn’t felt this calm since Stacy died. “If you’re here, please talk to me,” he said.
There was a rustle of fabric near the window and he turned, fully expecting to see a transparent white shape, but there was nothing. However, there was no wind in the room to make the curtain move.
Sighing, Jace swung his bare feet off the bed. He was fully dressed, but his shoes and socks had been removed. Wonder who took them off? he thought.
He went in search of the nearest bathroom. One thing he’d learned about English houses was that no matter how much they cost, a bathroom that wasn’t “down the hall” was a rare thing. On the Internet, he’d seen twelve-million-dollar houses with a third floor that had seven bedrooms and only a powder room to share. To bathe, people had to go downstairs.
He found a bathroom en suite, as the English say, meaning that a door opened into the bedroom. As his head began to clear, he realized that the room he had slept in was one of the bedrooms that the previous owners had used for storage. When Jace had seen the room, it had been full of big packing boxes and racks full of garments in zippered bags. His visit had been cursory and his mind hadn’t been on the house itself, so he’d not realized the room was as beautiful as it was.
When he saw that his toiletries were on the sink, he realized he was in the master bathroom. He was glad to see that there was a shower as well as a huge tub. He stripped off his clothes, took a long shower, brushed his teeth eleven times, then put a towel around his waist and went in search of his clothes. While he slept, someone had taken his suitcases out of his car and unpacked them.
Suddenly, his calmness was gone, replaced by panic. Where was his suitcase? With a growing sense of foreboding, he searched for his large case. It took him a while, but he found it in the back of a built-in cupboard in one of the closet-bedrooms. He pulled the suitcase out and opened it, then searched the lining. When he felt the leather case of the photo, he breathed a sigh of relief. He had brought only one photo of Stacy and he’d hidden it under the lining of his suitcase. He’d decided that it would be better if he kept what he was doing and why a secret. He would tell people he was interested in their lady swashbuckler ghost rather than in a woman who’d committed suicide just a few years ago. Jace feared that if he showed the photo and asked questions, someone would warn the person Stacy had met to get out of town. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, but he knew that his questions had to be subtle and he had to work around what he actually wanted to know.
“So you found me!” Mrs. Browne said when Jace at last found her kitchen.
“No problem,” he said, lying. Once again, he’d taken a wrong turn. Frustrated, he’d gone outside and tried to find another way in. For such a big house, it had extraordinarily few exterior doors. In the end, he had to circle the entire house before he found the door that Mrs. Browne had pushed him out of the day before. Seeing that the long walk had made his heart beat faster, he knew he’d made the right choice when he put on a sweatsuit. A run around his seventy-two acres would be good for him.
“It’s late, but I think I can still make you a breakfast,” Mrs. Browne said.
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was 8:05 in the morning. “That would be kind of you.” He took a seat at the big table in the center of the room. “Where do you live?” He knew there were two apartments in that wing of the house. He was told that the housekeeper lived in one but the other one was vacant. He wanted to be sure he didn’t accidentally wander into Mrs. Browne’s private territory.
She had her back to him at the Aga and when he saw her stiffen, he knew she’d taken his question the wrong way. “Do you mean to evict me?”
“Throw out Jamie’s girl? How could I do that?”
She rewarded his jest with a bit of a smile and a platter of food: three sausages, three fried eggs, broiled mushrooms and tomatoes, and two thick slices of fried bread. It was accompanied by a pot of tea strong enough to float fishing weights.
Jace looked up at her in astonishment. “This is from Jamie?”
“No, that’s a good English breakfast. But if it’s too much for the likes of you…” She reached out to take the plate away.
Jace stopped her. Living alone, he tended to eat a boring bowl of cereal for breakfast, but since he’d slept through dinner last night, he was ravenous. “I’ll manage,” he said, picking up his fork.
“See that you do. You’re a mite thin to be livin’ in England.”
Jace looked at her back and thought that no matter what he accomplished in his life, to Mrs. Browne he’d always fall short because of where he was born. The food was delicious. It was high calorie, cholesterol laden, and bad for him, but wonderful tasting. “So where do you live?”
“Across the way,” she said, waving her hand in the general direction of “outside.”
Jace wanted to ask more, but just then Mrs. Browne saw a girl walking through the courtyard.
“There that dratted girl is again! Mark my word, she’s stealin’ raspberries. That old man Hatch says the birds get ’em, but I think they’re in it together. She’s sellin’ ’em is what I think. If I ever catch her, I’ll sack her.” With that, she bustled out of the kitchen, running for the outside door. Minutes later, Jace saw her running across the courtyard after the poor girl, who seemed to be guilty only of shaking the dust out of a rug.
Jace took the opportunity of Mrs. Browne’s absence to look about the kitchen. There were three doors in it; one was the entrance, so he looked at the other two. One door led to a room full of cabinets and a sink. A quick glance showed him the cabinets were full of dishes. None of it seemed to be the “good” china. No names like Herend or Spode or even Wedgwood were on the bottoms, but there was enough that he could give a dinner party for a dozen or more. If I knew anybody, he thought.
He stepped back into the kitchen, saw that Mrs. Browne was still bawling out the poor cleaning girl, then he went to the other door. It was a pantry with three skinny windows on one wall and slate shelves on the other. Cans, bags, and boxes filled the shelves, as well as jars of homemade jams and pickles. There was a big jar labeled “peaches in rum” that looked interesting.
“I’m turning into an alcoholic,” he said, then at a sound, he looked out the narrow windows. The view was almost obscured by strings of herbs and sausages, but he was looking at the entryway into the courtyard. Interesting, he thought. No one could enter or leave that Mrs. Browne, enthroned in her kitchen, wouldn’t know about. He saw her hurry through the opening, but she turned left into a narrow door. “Her apartment,” Jace said, smiling and feeling that he’d solved a mystery.
When she returned to the kitchen, Jace was back at the table, finishing his platter of breakfast. He looked at her for praise, but she just said “hmph” in a way that was becoming familiar to him.
After Jace finished his meal, he found the outside door and went into the garden. From what he’d seen so far, the grounds were beautiful and Mr. Hatch did a splendid job of keeping them up. The breakfast sat heavy in his stomach and he was still feeling the effects of the beer and wine from the day before, but all in all, he felt better than he had in, well, in three years. Again, he thought there was something being done or said to him that was making him feel good.
As he wandered about the a
cres near the house, he marveled at them. There were several flowerbeds, lush and full, with not a weed in sight. There was a pretty pond full of big goldfish and surrounded on three sides by tall evergreen hedges. His favorite thing was a row of topiaries in the shape of animals. There were four of them: a swan, a bear, a big fish, and something that could be a dragon if you looked at it at the right angle.
He walked under a long pergola with square brick pillars and wooden beams overhead. Lacy-leaved vines nearly covered the beams. There was a rose garden, and everywhere benches seemed to be tucked in some cool, beautiful spot.
At the end of the rose garden was a young man digging a hole, but there was something about the way he was digging that made Jace think the boy had almost been caught doing something else. His clue was that the young man was using a rake to dig with.
“Good morning,” Jace said.
“Morning, sir. You the new master?”
Jace smiled at the old-fashioned term, then followed the boy’s glance toward the trees. A small foot moved. “Are you the one with the girlfriend who’s going to be the downfall of him? Lead him into wicked ways?” Behind them, a girl giggled.
“Yes, sir, I am,” the boy said. “I’m Mick, the first garden assistant.”
The young man was tall, strong, and looked intelligent. “Planning to take over after Mr. Hatch leaves?”
Mick laughed as though that weren’t possible, but the girl came out of the trees, clutched Mick’s arm possessively, and said, “Yes, he is.”
Jace thought that if young Mick had any ambition it was because of her. There was something about them that made him like them. “So when’s the wedding?”
Mick looked at his feet, but the girl smiled. “In the autumn. I’m finishing a secretarial course, but my dad won’t pay for it if I’m married.”