Secrets of the Highwayman (10 page)

This was the first time he’d been able to remember those desperate days in Spain so clearly. If he’d remembered before then, he would have been able to warn his family…

“By the way, Mother, Major Pengorren, your husband, is a murderer who wants to steal Ravenswood from me and sire children on my sister.”

Would they have believed him? No one wanted to believe ill of the person they loved, and everyone had loved Pengorren—the major’s wish was granted in that.

He had to discover how to stop Pengorren.

How to put things right.

There’s going to be a storm and the old oak
tree in the park is going to fall over.

The words were already in her head when she woke. A premonition, just like the ones she used to have when she was young, before she learned to shut off that part of herself. Before the headaches started coming. There was an throbbing pain in her head now, but the ibuprofen had helped. Why was this happening to her again? Why had it come back now after all these years?

And then she heard the noise. There was something scratching on her bedroom door. Melanie’s eyes opened. Her bedroom was very dark. She could hear the soft patter of rain on the casement window, but it didn’t sound soothing. It sounded sinister, like an ominous sound track to a spooky movie.

The scratching came again, louder this time.

Mice, probably,
she told herself.
Or rats.

She shivered as she sat up, reaching for her robe. The flashlight was on the table by the bed, and she fumbled
to turn it on. The light was too bright, momentarily blinding her. As her eyes grew accustomed, she swung the beam around the bedroom. A chair there, the fireplace here, her suitcase against the wall by the door. Nothing to be afraid of.

Ravenswood was empty.

Even its namesake had deserted her. When she went to bed Nathaniel still hadn’t returned, and she was beginning to wonder if he ever would. Not that she missed him, of course. That was ridiculous. How could you miss a man you’d only just met and who wasn’t a “man” anyway, not in the normal meaning of the word.

“It’ll be a relief when he’s gone,” she said aloud, and then wished she hadn’t when her voice sank without trace into the silence.

Robe wrapped around her, flashlight in hand, she made her way to the door. She was pleased to note that when she reached for the doorknob her fingers were perfectly steady. She pushed the door open and stepped out into the corridor, quickly sweeping the torch in an arc, hoping to catch whatever was doing the scratching.

Again, nothing.

Melanie held her breath and listened to the stillness. It was almost as if the house were listening, too. To her? Or whatever was lurking in the shadows?

Lurking! What kind of a word is that? Get a grip, Melanie.

Melanie drew her robe closer around her, as if the soft fleecy cloth in lemon yellow was designed to keep her safe. She didn’t like this. She had never felt so far out of her comfort zone. Give her a nice neat office and clients
asking questions she was qualified to answer and she was perfectly all right. Instead, she had a dead man and a stone that led to another world and a black hound from hell and a red-haired woman with talons for feet who terrified her.

“Where
is
he?” she whispered.

Maybe Nathaniel really wasn’t coming back this time.

Melanie admitted she’d be very disappointed if that was the case. Unnervingly, an image of his handsome face popped into her mind, with that charming, teasing smile playing on his mouth. Just thinking about him made her feel as if she had lowered her emotional barriers. Made herself vulnerable.

She felt guilty, too.

As if she were indulging in something that went against her personal code of conduct. Like eating two slices of chocolate cake instead of one, or drinking the whole bottle of wine, or reading erotica and then feeling all hot and bothered, and so lonely…

Nathaniel Raven could definitely be classified as erotica. He was hot. Suzie always said life was too short not to enjoy it, she’d think Melanie was crazy not to have asked him up to her room already; it wasn’t as if they hadn’t connected. The sexual tension had been sizzling between them from the moment she saw him. But Melanie wasn’t Suzie. Even though it was nearly two years since her last lover, she was happy with her life the way it was—she didn’t need complications—and she certainly didn’t thrive on them in the way Suzie did.

And why was she even thinking about Nathaniel Raven right now?

Melanie turned to face her bedroom and peered back through the doorway, training the flashlight on the four-poster bed. Empty, of course. The Raven wasn’t lying there wearing nothing but a smoldering look. She tried to smile, but the room felt so cold and lonely, and she wasn’t tired anymore. Maybe she could read some more of Miss Pengorren’s diary? It didn’t seem as if Nathaniel was going to do it, and she
had
promised to help him although they didn’t seem to be doing much “working together.”

But it was as good an excuse as any not to go back to bed.

Melanie had finally accepted that the electricity wasn’t going to work tonight, no matter how often she swore as she flicked the switches. A search of the kitchen cupboards produced a lamp and some candles, and she set them up around the library, hoping the soft light would rid her of the sense of dread that seemed to have lodged deep inside her.

Instead, the mullioned windows reflected back an eerie glow, reminding Melanie uncomfortably of her recent trip into the past, and the shadows in the corners made her think of ghosts and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night.

“Or, in this case, scratch in the night.”

Her voice sounded small, but Melanie was determined not to let her imagination take over.

“This is an old house,” she reminded herself, like an
adult talking to a child, “and it would be very easy to begin thinking…thinking too much about what has happened here.”

She might be retracing Nathaniel’s steps in time, but there was no way she was going to start seeing ghosts or any other scary shit like that. She’d been there once, and she wasn’t going back. The thought of meeting Felicity Raven on the stairs with a broken neck, or Major Pengorren leering at her from the landing, made her feel queasy.

Melanie looked around the room. Her throat was tight, and she kept needing to swallow, but she knew it was all in her head. “Overactive imagination,” the family doctor had said when they took her to see him when she was a child. After that, they called anything she saw or heard or felt that no one else did her “imagination.”

Melanie knew there was no place for imagination here, now. The candles were burning steadily, the room was empty, and everything was quiet. Time to get on with what she came to do.

With a determined breath Melanie turned to the contents of Miss Pengorren’s desk.

Despite coming here with the sole purpose of reading through the diaries, at first she resisted them. She sorted through a wooden box full of photographs she’d found in a bottom drawer, inspecting the sepia faces and trying to decipher the shaky writing on the backs. The names were not ones she recognized, but they must have meant something to the old woman who lived most of her life in this house.

One small photograph, probably taken on an old box
Brownie camera, showed a young and smiling Miss Pengorren arm in arm with a handsome young man in uniform. According to the date on the back, it was 1943, during World War II. Melanie examined the faces. They looked so fresh and vibrant, so full of life and determined to enjoy every moment. War did that to people, she supposed, made them value the time they had. Perhaps Miss Pengorren had a lover who died during the war? Perhaps that was why she had ended up alone here at Ravenswood, a crotchety old spinster.

Melanie shook herself. Usually she didn’t let those sorts of thoughts into her head—she was not prone to melancholy or flights of romantic fancy. Miss Pengorren was a formidable old lady with a sharp tongue, not someone to be pitied.

She tipped the photographs back into the box and pushed it to the back of the drawer she’d found it in. And then she reached for the final diary in the set and, going to the very first page, dated halfway through last year, began to read.

Miss Pengorren was complaining about the weather. It wasn’t until Melanie was a third of the way through the diary—and by then she was getting quite expert at deciphering Miss Pengorren’s writing—that something out of the ordinary caught her attention.

I saw him. He stood by my bed and stared down at me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again he was gone.

Melanie felt a chill that was nothing to do with the lack of a fire. Was this an intruder? Or was Miss Pengorren dreaming, or worse, beginning to show symptoms of
mental deterioration? Or—the thought came out of nowhere—was the “he” Nathaniel Raven? Miss Pengorren believed that the house belonged to Nathaniel and replaced his portrait. Did he frighten her into doing that? The first time Melanie saw Nathaniel, he was a ghost, and Eddie told her that others saw him “walking.” Miss Pengorren had more reason to see him than most—she was living in his house, she was related to him through his sister.

The hairs on the back of her neck bristled.

Melanie’s head came up, and she stared around the room. Shadows danced beyond the glow of the candles and the steady light of the lamp. It was very quiet. The earlier rain was gone, and even the constant wash of the sea against the cliffs was barely audible. Everything was hushed, waiting.

Again Melanie told herself to ignore her unease. After what she’d been through recently, surely nothing could ever frighten her again? The trouble was it didn’t seem to work that way. If anything, the realization that there were worse things in heaven and hell than she ever imagined only made her more anxious.

It was as if a little voice in her head was whispering,
I told you so.

And there was the sense of something inside her, stirring, opening up, and she didn’t like it. She tried to tell herself she didn’t know what that “something” was, but she did. On some other level, she did know what lay inside her, had always known that her so-called imagination was genuine, and the knowledge terrified her.

There’s going to be a storm and—

“No!” she cut off the thought before it could properly form and forced her attention back to the diary.

There were pages and pages of Miss Pengorren rambling on about her neighbors and the wanderings of their sheep, and a series of disputes about a fence that kept falling down. She meticulously noted the quotes she’d received from the various fencing contractors and then, abruptly, in the middle of it all, another strange entry.

He came again last night. He stood over my bed, and he seemed to glow, like the moon at its brightest. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t myself, a giddy excitement gripped me, as if I was a young girl. My heart was pounding. When he left I felt so weary. Too much excitement. Even so, I cannot help myself. I know it is wrong, but I long for him to come to me again.

Miss Pengorren was an old lady. What was happening to her? Who was “he” and what did he want? Melanie’s eyes slid over the following page and found another, more terse entry, which told her that Miss Pengorren didn’t understand her predicament any more than Melanie.

He came again. God help me. He must be a devil. I begged him to go, to leave me in peace, but he laughed. He torments me. What does he want?

Something creaked in the room. Melanie looked up, but there was nothing to see, only the shadows in the corners, and although she held her breath and listened hard, there was nothing further to hear beyond the silence.

She flicked once more through the pages.

I long for him, although I fear him. I know who he is and the awful thing is…I don’t care…I want him back…

“That’s enough.”

Her own voice was loud and startling. She didn’t even know who she was speaking to. Herself? Whatever was inside her, stirring? Or Miss Pengorren’s midnight visitor?

Abruptly she stood up and shoved the diary into its spot on the shelf. She felt as taut as a violin string and didn’t want to continue with this tonight. She couldn’t. She was tired, and her hands were shaking. She turned around quickly, to blow out the candles, and that was when she saw him.

It.

Not Nathaniel. This wasn’t tall, handsome Nathaniel. This was something smaller, shrunken, and even though it was in the corner, she knew it wasn’t a shadow. The shape of it looked more or less human, but hunched over on itself, almost as if it lacked the strength to stand upright. She couldn’t see the face; it, too, was bent over between gaunt, bony shoulders, and the skin of its skull gleamed through the sparse clumps of white hair.

Old. Ancient. But it wasn’t just the age of the creature that made her heart hammer like thunder in her ears. It was the awful sense of malevolence that drifted from it. A dark, dreadful evil. Melanie had never experienced true evil before, she didn’t realize it had a smell, a taste, a heavy and oppressive ambience. She felt dizzy and
sick. With one hand covering her mouth, she clutched at the back of the chair with the other, holding herself up on jelly legs.

The chair creaked, and the thing turned slightly toward her. It was wearing a robe, the cloth dark and coarse, with sleeves that dangled down over its hands, and boots of cloth tied to its feet. A monk, maybe, or…or…But her shocked brain wouldn’t give her answers. There was nothing in her world that looked like this.

Melanie began to ease away from the desk toward the door, her eyes fixed on the crouched figure. It didn’t move again, but she knew it was aware of her. She knew that in a moment it would begin to approach her and that skull would begin to lift, and she would see…

Melanie lost it completely.

With a choking cry, she turned and ran.

A sound behind her, and she knew it was dragging itself across the floor in her wake. She flung herself at the door, fumbling with the doorknob. Time seemed to slow so that it took ages to open, and when it did, she burst out onto the landing.

A wedge of candlelight spilled from the room behind her, but the stairs were dark. Melanie didn’t see the fold in the carpet runner. Not until her toe caught it and she tumbled forward, just like Felicity Raven.

Into space.