Chapter Twelve
Chapter
Twelve
He leads me from the dining room, his fingers laced casually in mine.
I can hear the low airplane engine–style rumble of Lestat’s snoring coming from the direction of the kitchen, so I feel safe to assume he’s eaten the monstrously huge bone Cook had left out for him as well as his usual fare and is now away with the fairies in his bed beside the gargantuan Aga.
Castle living clearly agrees with him more than it does me.
“Okay?” Fletch catches me around the waist because I’m swaying a little thanks to the several-glasses-of-wine-in-heels-on-stairs situation.
“I’m climbing the sweeping staircase of a stately castle with warm-bedsheets man,” I whisper. “Must not fuck up. Must not fuck up.”
“Are you talking to yourself?”
I nod, hoping he didn’t catch my last words. “To myself and no one else, Fletcher Gunn.”
He laughs under his breath, and I’m aware of his fingers spanning my waist. “You don’t even need the ghosts to make you weird, you do a great job all on your own.”
He’s aiming for lighthearted, yet I find his comment makes my heart anything but light.
“I know, I know,” I sigh as we approach our doors. “You think I’m weird and that the way I can talk to ghosts makes me look kooky and crazy and, oh, isn’t she just bizarre! Don’t you think I’ve lived my whole life with those kind of labels, Fletch?”
He looks disconcerted as I reach for the door handle of the Princess Suite.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. “You’re thinking here she goes again, turning the ruddy blower whatsit onto cold.
Well, you’re right, because I can’t go to bed with someone who thinks I’m foxy as fuck to look at but batshit crazy on the inside.
From now on let’s keep it stuck on hell freezes over ice cold all the sodding time.
Let’s make it so ruddy freezing that the castle becomes an ice palace and your knob shrinks as tiny as a walnut pickled in a jar. ”
At this point I try to show him just how small a walnut is between my thumb and forefinger, then I wave my hand in the vague direction of his walnut crotch. God I’m drunk. How strong was that wine? I’m no seasoned drinker, but I can usually hold my own better than this over a few glasses.
“Go to bed, princess.” Fletch doesn’t react to my tirade, just holds me close and presses his lips against my forehead. “You need some sleep.”
“Ice princess,” I say, correcting him, and leaning against his chest. “I’m practically fucking Elsa.”
He slides his hand down to the small of my back and laughs softly in my ear. “Who’s Elsa and can I watch?”
I frown. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Fletcher Gunn?”
“My mother’s dead.”
“God, I’m sorry.” I look up at him, stricken by his flat tone and bald words. We stare at each other in silence for a few long moments. “I really don’t know the first thing about you, do I?”
He reaches behind me and pushes my door open. “Go to bed, Melody. I’ll be right across the hall if you need me.”
And with that, he turns away and leaves me standing alone in the hallway.
“I don’t think this shadowing thing is going to work out, Fletch.”
He shakes the morning paper out on the breakfast table and scans the headlines, like a bored businessman before he leaves for work in the city.
“I don’t give up on assignments,” he says offhand. He turns the page as Hells Bells hurries in with a mammoth English breakfast and places it down in front of him.
“The dog has had some sausages,” she says breathlessly, winding one of her vivid ginger plaits around her fingers as she looks at me. “And some bacon. And black pudding. And a Scotch egg.”
“Thank you,” I murmur, wondering if they’ve confused Lestat with a small, fat, really ugly horse and feel glad that I don’t have to share a bed with him tonight.
Once Hells Bells is out of earshot, I try again.
“You wouldn’t be giving up on the assignment. It’s me that’s changed my mind, not you.”
He closes the paper and regards me steadily across the dining table. “I’m sorry if my crack about the lap-dancing monk hit a raw nerve,” he says, spooning sugar into his tea.
“It did,” I say honestly. “And I’m equally sorry if my crack about your mother was insensitive under the circumstances.”
“It wasn’t,” he says shortly. “You didn’t know.
No tea and sympathy required, it was a long time ago and I’m a big boy now.
” I’ve never stopped to think of Fletch as someone’s son or someone’s brother or someone’s friend, even.
It casts him in a different light, one I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with.
He has a clearly defined role on the periphery of my life; he’s Fletch the annoying hack, Fletch my verbal sparring partner, Fletch, the man who occasionally snogs me in dark alleyways and boffs my brains out in midnight trysts.
“Think of it this way. If you pull me off the job, the supplement will run anyway. I’m obliged to file the report up to this point and then state that you asked me to leave because you weren’t comfortable with being watched.
” He cuts a sausage in half and makes “aw shucks” eyes at me.
“Hate to say it, but it smacks of flaky, Ghostbuster.”
Fine. If he’s determined to stick this out, then I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me interact with the ghosts again; that little performance of his at dinner last night hit home.
I’ll make sure he knows enough of what’s going on to write his precious report, but no way am I going to look like a crackpot or have him portray me as such for the sake of column inches.
I flounce out of the open French doors into the garden and leave him there to chow down on his meat mountain.
Stomping around the paths, I pause once I’m out of sight behind the shrubbery and call Fletch a few choice names to make myself feel better. It doesn’t, especially, but seeing as I’m out here on my own I use the time to have a poke around to see if I can work out what draws Britannia here so often.
There isn’t anything obvious to seize on. Flower beds in fine summer bloom, lush rhododendron bushes, an herb garden with little wooden name sticks to guide the gardener.
I’m thinking of heading back inside when I spot what looks like the top edge of a wooden bench behind the bushes, and as I stand and study the foliage, I can just about make out a long-overgrown path leading between the big, frilly rhododendron heads.
Glancing around to check that Fletch hasn’t snuck up on me, I push my way through the flowers and find myself in a small clearing, and there is indeed an old, intricate bench.
It strikes me as an odd site for it really; the castle grounds are so gorgeous, why would someone choose to hide themselves away behind here?
The old wood groans a little as I take a seat, pushing my hands underneath my thighs as I survey the hidey-hole.
The plant life isn’t so abundant back here; it doesn’t get much sunlight, so the ground is dry, patchy grass and not much else, and I’m facing the bottom of the garden wall a few feet away.
There has to be something here, I know it.
Dropping to my knees to inspect the ground, I scrub my hands methodically over the grass and crawl toward the tall tangle of weeds against the wall.
The exposed pale gray bricks are smooth to the touch, and as I clear away the plants, my fingers slowly work until they come into contact with something among the leaves.
More carefully now, I keep going until I reveal a wooden cross bracketed flush against the wall.
It’s about a foot tall and quite chunky, and it’s been engraved with initials in an old-fashioned, curly script that makes me sit very still so my brain can connect the dots.
B. B.
It takes me less than a minute to deduce that they must stand for Britannia and Bohemia.
Acting on a sudden hunch, my heart races a little faster as I start to move the rocks lined up at the bottom of the wall aside.
I daren’t dig too deeply for fear of what I might unearth, but if I can just go down an inch or so I might be lucky.
My fingers scrabble in the loose soil and I have a bit of a turn when I encounter a fat, wriggling earthworm, but after a few strenuous, unpleasant minutes searching, my fingers finally close around the thing I’m looking for. My hunch was right. The key.
I pull my phone out and photograph the engraving for the file and then reach out and trace my fingers over the letters. What is this place? Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m sitting by Britannia and Bohemia Lovell’s gravesite.
I’ve never been more glad to see Marina than I am when she and Artie turn up together just after nine.
Having them here bolsters me because they’re in my corner without question and I’m extra glad because she’s carrying a clear-lidded box of prettily iced cupcakes.
My fine-tuned sugar barometer suggests salted caramel; tea break just got a lot more interesting.
“Saw these and thought of you,” she says with a grin, pushing them into my hands. “How was your night?”
I resolutely don’t look at Fletch, who’s followed me through into the reception hall. “Uneventful.”
“Nothing went bump in the night,” he drawls. I don’t know if he’s referring to us or the ghosts.
I hand Artie the box of cupcakes. “Artie, would you mind taking these down to the kitchen, please, and check in on Lestat while you’re there?”