Chapter Five #3
“Britannia Lovell.” The woman steps forward, her arms folded across her chest as if in defiance.
Her tone is distinctly careless, as is the tiny, almost invisible, superior sneer on her face.
I get it. She’s in parachute silk and I’m in jeans, her hair is set in perfect ripples and mine is scraped back in a messy bun.
She’s a bird of paradise and right now I’m a sparrow, but I’m breathing and she’s not, so I still wouldn’t trade places.
Bohemia. Britannia. Is there anything about these people that isn’t theatrical?
She tips her head to one side and smiles up at Leo. “Do you see me too, Leo Dark?”
I glance up at him too and I recognize the expression on his face as he nods and swallows hard, because he used to look at me that way. Don’t be so completely and utterly bloody stupid, Leo Dark. She’s been dead for almost a hundred years.
“We should go,” Dino says, glaring hard at Britannia. “We have practice to do.” He doesn’t even look our way before he vanishes.
Britannia smiles impishly at Leo. “No rest for the wicked, and I’m very wicked indeed, Mr. Dark.”
“Britannia…” her husband says, holding her elbow.
There’s an edge to his tone, weariness, and I wonder about the dynamic of their marriage.
I cannot imagine that this bird of paradise would have been easily caged; he’d obviously grown accustomed to trying to clip her wings around other men.
Even as a ghost, waves of sexual energy emanate from her; she must have been quite a force to be reckoned with when she was alive.
Lock up your husbands, or in my case, I might need to lock up my ex-boyfriend for his own good.
Britannia lifts her fingers to her lips and kisses them lightly, then looks from Leo to her husband and back again, as if she’s deciding which of them deserves her kiss.
In the end she blows it toward Bohemia, then wiggles her fingers in farewell toward Leo with a delighted little laugh as she disappears.
That woman is going to be hard bloody work.
The ringmaster shakes his head, his knowing, steely eyes on Leo. “Don’t even think those thoughts. She’s dead, and she’s mine.”
Leo blinks a few times, as if he’s just come up for air after holding his breath underwater. “I wasn’t thinking any thoughts.”
“You have no idea how many sacrifices I made to be with her, or how many blind eyes she asked me to turn over the years,” Bohemia says.
It’s much more revealing than I’d expected, a glimpse straight into the fractured heart of their marriage.
I feel an unexpected pang of sympathy for him; being one side of an eternal love triangle must be incredibly tiring.
Behind him, the lion stirs and I cannot help but flinch.
“He killed five men before he came to me,” Bohemia tells us flatly, his eyes on the beast. His words do nothing to ease my fears, nor does the expression on his face when he looks our way. “Don’t come back here again.” His words are stark and ominous.
Then he moves to stand behind his animal, lays his hand on its back, and they both vanish into thin air.
Leo and I don’t speak for a moment, then we drop onto the stairs and sit side by side.
“That was intense,” he says, pushing his hands through his hair, his elbows on his knees. I don’t know if he means the lion or Britannia Lovell. He had a strong reaction to both of them.
I’m a well-brought-up girl and I know when to use my manners, even if it is with someone who has caused me pain in the past.
“Thank you, for…you know.” I splay my hands and look at my fingers. “The hand-holding thing.”
He laughs under his breath and brushes his fingers against mine, catching hold of them for a second.
It’s a flicker of the past, comforting because we are both coming down from our encounter with Goliath.
It means nothing, or very little at least, but I don’t pull away, and at that exact moment Fletch appears at the bottom of the stairs and looks up at us.
His eyes take us in, the way we are sitting close together and holding hands. I pull away, confused, and he shakes his head and makes a sound in his throat, a “whatever” huff, an “it means nothing to me who you mess around with” sound.
“You’ll be glad to hear I’m off,” he says. I don’t know whether he’s speaking to Leo or to me; probably both of us.
I watch him slam out of the broad entrance doors and sigh. “Tell me you’re not involved with him,” Leo says quietly, even though he has absolutely no right to ask me.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.” I get to my feet and push my hair out of my eyes.
“He’s trouble,” Leo mutters.
“So were you,” I snap.
Leo stands too and looks down at me, then shakes his head and takes off down the stairs.
I don’t follow straightaway, and I definitely don’t let any stray thoughts into my head about love triangles, new ones or centuries old.
I need this job, but this case, this castle, is already messing with my head.
I reach into my back pocket and slick on some cherry lip gloss for an emergency sugar fix, roll my shoulders, then head back downstairs.
I intend to join the others, but then a thought strikes me and I detour into the library in the hope of finding the elderly couple I’d seen playing cards in there yesterday.
I’m in luck; they’re there again, chatting and laughing quietly over their game, in a world of their own at the small table by the window.
They don’t pay me any attention; no doubt they’re used to people milling around them without having a clue they’re there.
I pretend to be interested in a book for a moment while I watch them out of the corner of my eye.
I’d place them in their eighties or thereabouts.
She exudes a quiet pearls-and-twinset glamour that speaks of a life luxuriously spent, and he holds himself in the upright manner of a man who dedicated years to the armed forces.
Lord Alistair Shilling, I think, and his wife Eleanor, for whom he had the frescoes in the ballroom painted as a romantic wedding gift.
Closing the book in my hands, I tuck the hair that’s worked free of my bun behind my ears and walk slowly toward them. When they don’t react, I move to stand right beside their table. Still nothing. All right then. Walking behind the guy’s chair, I survey his cards and then do the same to his wife.
“Don’t play the ace, he’s waiting for it,” I murmur in her ear, and she jumps out of her skin.
Or else she would have, if she had any. “Goodness, dear!” She slaps her cards face down on the table and looks up at me as I come around to stand beside her again.
“You gave me the fright of my life there!”
Her husband gives me the once-over. “Apologies for our rudeness,” he says. “You looked like a breather.”
“A breather?” I murmur.
“It’s our little name for the living, dear,” she says, recovering her composure.
“Oh, right. That’s probably because I am one. A breather, I mean.” He lays his cards face down, just as his wife had. I’m impressed; even when startled, these two don’t show each other their hand.
“But you can see us? And talk to us?” He frowns. “Did you hear that, Eleanor? This girl can see us and breathe at the same time.”
Eleanor. Bingo, I was right.
“And hear us,” Eleanor murmurs, wide-eyed.
I get this sometimes. The dead are startled because I’m not dead too. It’s the same way the living are creeped out by the fact I can see dead people; they usually lump me in with the undead, like zombies and vampires. You can imagine how popular I was at Christmas parties as a kid.
I wait a beat to let them take me in. Eleanor reaches out a hand slowly and pokes my forearm with one bony finger.
We all watch her finger sink effortlessly through my flesh and she retracts it with a delicately disdainful look, as if she’s just stuck her hand inside a raw chicken.
I hold my smile in place, even though that’s the second time this morning I’ve been ghost-prodded.
“I’m just a normal human who can see and talk to ghosts.”
“Why?” he asks, suspicious.
I shrug and steal a line from Lady Gaga. “I was born this way.”
They don’t know what to say to that and I pull out a chair. “Mind if I sit?”
They shake their heads and watch me carefully as I lower myself into the chair, as warily as I watched Goliath earlier.
“Well, this is nice, dear. We don’t get many visitors,” Eleanor says, polite and strained.
I’m unsure what to say to that; she’s been stuck here in this library playing cards for God knows how many years watching the breathers come and go around her without even knowing she’s there. Thank goodness they have each other.
“Any visitors,” her husband says, still assessing me. “Can’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m afraid, young lady, on account of the fact that we’re dead and the ruddy servants can’t hear a word we say.”
I glance down and smile discreetly. An army officer in life and death too, given the way he barks his words and the brace of medals pinned to his blazer.
“Are you from the church?” Eleanor asks suddenly, her pale eyes clouding as they rake my neck, presumably searching for a cross.
I pause. Why would she ask me that? I’m about as godly as my hairbrush.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
She smiles, her hand fluttering at her throat. “Thank goodness for that. I thought for a moment that you’d come to exorcize us or whatever it is that those people do.”
Jeez, I hope she doesn’t look out of the window and spot Babs.
Not that I’m about to flick holy water around and start muttering incantations.
My job here is to free trapped, disruptive spirits, and these two seem to be neither of those things.
I’m perfectly happy to leave them alone.
If they promise to play nice, no one will even know they’re here.
“So…may I call you Eleanor?” I ask, and her face relaxes into a smile.
“Oh you must, my dear, you must. And this is my husband—”