These Haunted Hearts: A Regency Ghost Story (6 page)

With difficulty, he kept his voice even. “Why? Had
you betrayed me?”

She didn’t meet his eyes. “Of course not. I loved
you.”

“And I love you.” Foreboding filled him. Her unease
was visible. Nor did he miss the significance of the past tense in
her statement. “Whatever you did, my beloved, I wouldn’t hurt
you.”

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” She raised her hands to
her ears and turned away in a fury. “I told you what happened. Now
go away and never come near me again.”

Her distress lashed at his heart, convincing him
further that he could never injure her. “Isabella, tell me what you
remember, not what you’ve heard a string of confounded gossiping
fools say in this house.”

Her shoulders trembled. Damn it, he’d made her cry.
His voice softened and he fought the urge to take her in his arms
and reassure her. She was no longer the terrified cypher who had
discovered him in the east tower, but he knew she’d scarper if he
pushed her too far. “Sweetest love, tell me.”

She turned. “I—”

She raised a shaking hand to her lips as though
afraid to say the words. But when she spoke, her voice was
surprisingly steady, for all that her cheeks glistened with tears.
“I was on the landing at the top of the grand staircase above the
great hall. All the wedding guests were shouting and crowding
around something on the floor. I bent over the banister to see and
realized that it was my body. Lying on the tiles. I…I tried to say
something, to tell them that I wasn’t dead at all, I was here
alive. But even though I cried and screamed and pleaded, nobody
paid a moment’s attention. Then my father gathered the men and they
rushed upstairs and grabbed you. The family story is that you were
hauled out of the Chinese bed, but that’s not true. You were
standing next to me looking down into the hall. I tried to call out
to you, but you didn’t hear me either.”

Josiah frowned. “Do you remember me pushing you?”

Reluctantly she shook her head. “No. But everyone
says you did and that was the law’s verdict. My father had you
carried off to London in shackles. You were tried in the House of
Lords. Then they hanged you. You never said a word in your
defense.”

Her matter-of-fact tone confirmed her unshakable
faith in what she said. He felt like all the blood drained from his
body. Which was lunatic. He had neither blood nor body.

Dear God, what an awful fate. For anyone. Perhaps it
was a mercy he remembered nothing. His silence at his trial was a
damning detail.

She was still speaking. “After that, they closed up
Marston Hall and dismantled the bed, saying it brought bad luck.
I’ve been here alone for seventy years, barring the few servants
who acted as caretakers.” In spite of the misery in her face, her
lips twisted in a wry smile. “You’d think, given I was the innocent
party, I’d waft up to heaven and you’d linger to expiate your sins
down here. Where have you been?”

There was so much he wanted to say, so much he wanted
to disagree with in her dramatic story. But his resistance to what
she’d told him was purely emotional. He had no facts to go on.
Nothing she said had stirred a shred of memory in him. His history
remained a blank from the moment when as the happiest man in the
world, he’d swept Isabella into his arms.

He forced himself to answer, although where he’d been
was one of the least important issues between them. “I don’t know.
I woke up in the Chinese bed last night. I remember marrying you,
then kissing you behind the vase, then carrying you up the stairs.
That was almost seventy years ago with nothing in between.”

“There’s a wedding in this house in the morning.
Perhaps that conjured you from hell.”

He wished she sounded like she was joking. “I don’t
think I’ve been in hell. Or if I have, I don’t recall it. It’s like
no time has passed since we wed. When I woke up, I thought I was
still alive. That you were still my wife.”

Her lips twisted in another bleak smile. “I suppose I
still am. Although we vowed to stay together till death us do part,
and death did indeed part us. It’s quite a conundrum. One for the
ecclesiastical courts, I’m sure.”

It was his turn to find her mockery grating. How
could she accept so unquestioningly that he’d murdered her? When
she’d known how steadfastly he’d loved her.

But then she’d had nearly seven decades to come to
terms with what had happened. He’d only been extant for one
bewildering day.

“Don’t,” he couldn’t help saying.

She shot him a hostile glance. “Perhaps your spirit
is attached in some way to the bed. The thing’s been in pieces in
the cellar since they shut the house. They only finished
reassembling it yesterday.”

The theory made as much sense as anything else in
this topsy-turvy world. So many mysteries. So many puzzles. But
just one was important. Had he killed this vivid woman he
adored?

He forced himself to ask the question. “If you don’t
remember, how can you be sure?”

Her eyes remained guarded. It hurt him to think how
openly she’d once trusted him. “I’ve had plenty of time to listen
to the people at the hall talk about what happened. We quarreled in
the Chinese bedroom. The servants heard us.”

Their wooing had been a tempestuous affair, marked by
passionate clashes and even more passionate reconciliations. “We
were always quarreling. That was nothing new.”

She shrugged, although he didn’t find her nonchalance
convincing. “This time, your rage attained such a pitch that you
shoved me down the stairs.”

It could make sense, he supposed, with another man
and another woman. But still the story seemed wrong. Yet what did
he have to place in opposition to what had been accepted for nearly
seventy years? Isabella believed he’d killed her. Family history
confirmed he’d killed her. What did the revulsion in his soul
matter compared to all these hard facts?

“I cannot believe it. I
will
not believe it,”
he said in a flat voice, even as cruel reality beat at him,
insisted he accept the completely unacceptable.

She regarded him sadly and for once he saw past her
anger to her desolation. “No, you don’t
want
to believe it.
Neither did I.” She paused. “But you will, over time. Anything is
possible over time.”

When she slipped out of the room and left him alone,
he didn’t have the heart to stop her.

CALISTA OPENED HER eyes. She lay naked atop
the lavishly embroidered counterpane of the Chinese bed. The room
was still dark. If she’d slept after discovering such astonishing
pleasure in Miles’s arms, it hadn’t been for long.

Wincing, she shifted carefully. Her body ached with
unfamiliar twinges. But what did fleeting discomfort matter now
that Miles had opened a blissful new world to her?

Miles slept at her side, curled around her as if he
couldn’t bear to let her go, even in sleep. Inside this closed
room, she was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervasive scents of
sex and sated male.

As she stared up into the darkness, she wondered if
she could endure such happiness. If she could endure the
possibility of losing such happiness.

Better to die now…

Puzzled, she frowned. What had prompted that bleak
thought?

Reaching her peak in Miles’s embrace, she’d finally
accepted that she’d been wrong to give her fears such a hold over
her. She and Miles were meant to be together. When his body had
thundered into hers, she’d believed that she’d never doubt his love
again.

Except that those words that dragged her back toward
the quicksand of doubt weren’t just in her mind. Someone had spoken
to her. In a low, insinuating tone that made her skin prickle. She
wasn’t sure whether it was man or woman. The unidentified voice was
low and infinitely noxious.

No. No, this couldn’t be happening. It was
impossible. Calista Aston was a devotee of scientific process. She
didn’t believe in disembodied voices or curses or spirits.

Except that she’d heard that horrible voice most
distinctly.

When she stared up at the tester, she saw two tiny
pinpoints of bright red above her. Two tiny pinpoints of red that
focused on her in a way that both frightened and fascinated
her.

With a shiver, Calista realized that the lights
emanated from that same malevolent face she’d noticed this
afternoon. The wrinkled, gleeful face that had mocked her fragile
hopes of finding happiness in marriage.

The red eyes glared back at her, filled with fiendish
intelligence.

Perhaps she was dreaming. Dreams could seem so real,
couldn’t they? And even after such rapture, the pressures of the
last days might add a grim tenor to her fantasies.

Everything in the room remained black and silent. She
told herself this must be a dream. But she was too aware of Miles
beside her, the possessive weight of his arm across her breasts,
the soft sigh of his breathing, the heat of his body pressed to her
side.

Fear tightened her belly and tasted sour on her lips.
She was undoubtedly awake.

And unable to break the hold those two burning red
eyes exerted. Transfixed, she stared upward. The eyes pierced her
to the soul. Her weak, frightened, imperfect soul. The eyes saw all
her faults and inadequacies. All her unrequited longing for Miles
to love her forever.

Just as they had earlier, the eyes derided her futile
yearning. They knew her wishes would never come true.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she whispered into the
night. “This is all imagination.”

Beside her, Miles stirred without waking. The eyes
above her didn’t waver. The steady scarlet glow was uncomfortable,
unwelcome, but still Calista couldn’t look away. Suddenly, in spite
of the warmth of Miles’s body, she was deathly cold.

A whisper came to her ears. Hissing. Caustic.
Knowing.

Accept that you’ll never be enough for him.

The voice’s cruel assurance sliced through her.
Closing her eyes, she insisted again that she didn’t believe in
ghosts. She’d never been a fanciful woman. She’d always been
hostile to anything she couldn’t measure with her own senses.
Scornful of weaker minds that credited influences beyond the here
and now.

She felt neither hostile nor scornful now. She felt
scared and alone and defenseless. And helpless to combat the truth
of the voice’s poisonous insinuations.

Let Miles go, Calista. Let him go. He’ll tire of you
before long. Perhaps even now he plots how to leave you.

To escape the taunting voice, she turned her head
away, crushing her cheek into the tasseled silk pillow. She
desperately wanted to argue, but the voice said everything she’d
told herself again and again since she’d fallen in love with Miles.
The voice caught her doubts and turned them into excruciating
actuality.

“You’re not real,” she muttered. “You’re not
real.”

The voice didn’t even bother contradicting her
agitated denial. Instead Calista heard a laugh replete with such
evil that she wanted to run screaming from the room. Except that
those glinting red eyes, like living rubies, held her trapped.

You’ve had your measure of joy. More than you
deserve. Give up and leave Miles free to find someone who will make
him happy. You want him to be happy, don’t you? He’ll never be
happy with you.

The eyes flickered toward the door without releasing
their influence over her. She knew that the voice, the eyes, wanted
her to leave the bed now, to leave Miles’s side.

“No,” she said almost soundlessly, while forces she
couldn’t see and didn’t understand tugged at her, compelled
compliance. She squeezed her eyes shut, although some preternatural
sense knew that the red lights still burned down at her like twin
flames of hell.

You know this happiness won’t last. Don’t let your
joy turn to bitterness. Come with me. I’ll give you peace.

“I’ve found peace.”

Again, that low, contemptuous laugh. The voice
obviously considered her answer completely fatuous. Unfortunately,
right now, so did she.

Still she fought back. When Miles had held her in his
arms, she’d felt his love like a living entity. She couldn’t
believe he’d been lying when he said he loved her. He’d been so
tender, so passionate, so eager to show her pleasure.

Of course he loved her. He loved her.

Yes, he loves you now. But for how long?

“Forever,” she whispered, but both she and the voice
knew she lied.

For long silent minutes, she and whatever malign
spirit inhabited this room battled one another. And all the while,
doubts scuttled through her mind like cockroaches.

She resisted until the pull became too strong to
withstand.

Slowly she sat up. Miles’s arm fell away from her.
Immediately she felt the absence of his protective embrace.