EIGHTEEN

P atricia wandered the house a bit. She spent some time in the music room playing Georgiana Darcy’s pianoforte (like her father, Patricia was also a talented musician), and then contemplated the family portraits in the Great Hall. She stopped in the vast library and browsed the contents of the massive bookshelves for a while. She spent several hours tracing her lineage in Burke’s Peerage , just to satisfy her curiosity and confirm what she had been told. She also perused Delhi Darcy’s Excessively Diverted , after which she returned to her bedchamber. She took dinner in her room again that night, the third and final night the ghost of Bess was due to appear.

When Miss Neston delivered the tray of food, Patricia thanked her for the stack of books and magazines she had delivered a few days ago.

“Sorry, ma’am?”

“The books and magazines you put on my night table. It was very thoughtful, thank you.”

“Oh, but that wasn’t me, ma’am.”

“Well, someone brought them into my room when I wasn’t here. I just assumed it was you.”

“Sorry, ma’am, but it wasn’t.”

“Who else has access to my room, then?”

The maid thought about it for a moment, then replied, “Nobody. At least, nobody should, ma’am.”

Patricia was quiet, until Miss Neston asked, “Will you be wanting anything else, ma’am?”

“No, that’s all, you can go.”

She wolfed down her dinner. She wanted to finish the Blake detective story—although there was too much truth in it to be just a story, she knew—to discover if it contained any more revelations she could use to her benefit. Apparently Blake had, all those years ago, discovered the Duchess’ murderous ways, although Patricia had not yet reached that part of the tale.

To her chagrin, she discovered the magazine was gone. She searched everywhere in her room, but it was nowhere to be found. She was disturbed. Someone had to have come into her room to take the magazine, unless Miss Neston had palmed it while she delivered the dinner.

She wished she had known the magazine was gone; she would have looked for it while she was in the library. But she wasn’t going to venture out of her room tonight, so she resolved to check the library tomorrow.

Robbed of her preferred reading material, she picked up Sade’s Justine . She had never read it before. The abuses heaped on the title character, a young French girl, were too reminiscent of the night of her arrival at Pemberley and she tossed the book aside in disgust.

Patricia was restless. She wandered the room and on a lark began tapping the walls, since she’d heard from Parker, and also had read in many guidebooks, that many secret passageways were used by dwellers during religious persecutions, royalist roundhead civil war days, and since then. If someone delivered and removed the reading material, perhaps they were using a secret door to enter and exit. A secret entrance was also the only explanation for Carla’s midnight appearances in her room, assuming Bess was not real.

Patricia looked under the bed, inspected the floor for any ill-fitting boards, and even checked behind the huge mirror mounted opposite her bed. But she found nothing suspicious, no sliding panels, no peep holes, and no trapdoors.

She rang for tea before bed.

Miss Neston brought the tea, stoked the fire in the grate, lowered the lights, and turned down the bed. Patricia locked the door behind her, sipped her tea, and tried to read again, the Swinburne poetry this time, but the restlessness had deserted her and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. The printed words went in and out of focus. She staggered over to the bed and collapsed on her back, fully clothed. She fell asleep at once, dead to the world.

It was midnight. A storm whipped up the wind and rattled the windows.

Patricia was sprawled on the bed, arms akimbo and legs splayed, one booted foot pointing at the gilt-edged mirror facing the bed, the other hanging off the bedside.

Lightning crashed. Patricia awoke with a start, eyes wide.

Bess stood at the foot of the bed, naked.

Patricia was paralyzed. She could only stare at Bess’ alabaster skin, and full, firm breasts. Once again Patricia was stricken; was this Bess or was it Carla? She looked like Carla and yet she didn’t, somehow.

Bess—Patricia couldn’t think of this apparition as Carla, no matter how hard she tried—came to Patricia, climbing over the foot of the bed. Her eyes blazed. She inched toward Patricia, crawling up between her spread legs. Patricia tried to close them, and Bess stopped her with one hand on each thigh, forcing them apart.

Then Bess lay atop Patricia, nose to nose, and Patricia could feel Bess’ warm flesh. Dazed, she wondered why a ghost’s flesh would be warm. Strong arms gripped Patricia’s shoulders, holding her down. Bess’ knee insistently rubbed up and down against Patricia’s pelvis, and Bess buried her face in Patricia’s hair, kissing and nipping at the nape of her neck and earlobes.

Patricia felt like she was outside her body, watching the two lovers, Bess and herself, from a distant vantage point. But she was also inside her body at the same time, grinding and writhing with ecstasy against Bess’ knee and upper thigh until she came in jerks and shudders.

Bess got up on her knees, still between Patricia’s spread legs. She undid Patricia’s skirt and pulled it off. Patricia had gone commando that day so next Bess removed Patricia’s blouse. She leaned back down and sucked on Patricia’ nipples. She moved up and lowered her own breast into Patricia’s mouth. Patricia reciprocated, licking her hard nipples and dark areolae.

Bess moaned.

Patricia, standing outside of herself and watching, considered whether ghosts moaned. Of course they did, she realized. Moaning was a ghost’s stock-in-trade. But typically it was moaning and groaning to scare people off, not in response to pleasures one would have thought were restricted to the living and breathing. Also, there were no stereotypical rattling chains dragging across the wooden floor with Bess, and no white sheets. Or rather, this ghost was mussing up the bed’s white sheets rather than wearing one.

Patricia, the Patricia who was in bed with Bess, grabbed Bess’ derriere and pulled her closer. Bess turned around, lowered herself back to Patricia’s waiting lips, and buried her head between Patricia’s legs. The two lovers engaged in a vigorous soixante neuf, their sighs and soft cries filling the cold room.

Patricia wrapped her legs around Bess’ arching torso and squeezed, her boots pressing down on the small of Bess’ back. She came again and again in convulsions of orgasms, waves of hot and cold, and then Bess came as Patricia continued to tongue and lick her.

The two women lay together for a while in a tight embrace, heads still between each other’s legs, and Patricia began to drift off in postcoital bliss.

Then Bess was not on top of her, but stood at the foot of the bed again, in front of the large mirror, reaching out to Patricia, almost imploringly.

Patricia blinked.

Bess was gone.

Patricia jumped up. She was dizzy, disoriented, and she wanted to follow—follow where, though?—but the ghost was gone.

In a rush, she pulled her skirt and blouse back on and exited her room into the hallway. She looked left and right, but the dimly lit hall was empty. Just the usual paintings, vases displayed on sideboards, and other objets d’art that characterized the house.

Patricia was frightened. The ghost had been real. Real flesh and blood. Real skin, hair, eyes, and lips. Real, living people did not just disappear in the blink of an eye.

She had looked for secret entrances and hadn’t found any. And even if there was a secret entrance and exit from Patricia’s room, there wasn’t time for any normal human being to utilize it in an eye-blink.

If Bess was not a normal human being, what was she? Her skin was warm, her heart beat. Patricia had felt it. Spirits were supposed to be ethereal, noncorporeal. One could put a hand right through a ghost and it would come out the other side. Or at least it was that way in films and stories. What was she thinking? What did anyone really know about the spirit world, anyway? If there even was such a thing.

Patricia felt like she was moving in slow motion now, racing toward the stairway to the right of her room at a snail’s pace. She was fifteen feet, fifteen yards, fifteen miles from the top of the stairs.

She blinked, and suddenly was at the edge of the stairway. Something caught against her ankles, a cord maybe, then it was gone and she was falling down, and she was being carried, and the butler and Mrs. Abingdon appeared, and everything went black.