Phantom Bride Read online

Alex sat atop one of the crenelated parapets of the tower of the rebuilt castle, oblivious to the sheer, hundred-foot drop at his back. He could see for miles, over downs and small pockets of woodland, sheep-dotted fields and hedgerows, the river and the gray village of Bradford-on-Avon, which nestled along its bank. And he could see the sky, all of it, a glorious blue dome stretching from horizon to horizon and into the endless realms of space beyond.

  A breeze through his hair drew him back to earth, and he smiled at his cousin. “You still think it was Serena who pushed me from that wall.”

  “It makes no sense to me how even an ignorant child of the city like you could have come to such grief without help.”

  “Ah, but the wonder of the stars…” Alex said, sweeping his hand above him at the sunlit heavens.

  Rhys snorted rudely. “There’s not a romantic, fanciful bone in your body.”

  “Why, darling, what an unfair statement to make,” Beth Cox said, her bonneted head appearing above the trapdoor of the tower. Rhys went to assist his wife up the final steep steps, grasping her hand and pulling her up. “Whoop!” Beth gasped as she found herself suddenly standing, her fluffy skirts billowing in the breeze. “Oh, good gracious,” she said, taking in the view.

  Alex watched as Rhys put his arm around his wife, steadying her. It reminded him that he’d tried his hand at that once, that closeness with a woman, ripe with the hopes of family and a long life of sharing and affection. He’d been young, his emotions running wild, and had been swept away by Frances’s charm, and by her adoration of him. When she’d looked up at him with her big brown eyes, he’d felt invincible. Pretty, petite, warm-hearted and vivacious Frances: he’d thought himself the luckiest man in the world when she’d accepted his impulsive proposal. As soon as he’d parted from her, however, the doubts had set in. A sinking dread had come over him that night, a certainty that he’d made a mistake that he could not correct without dishonoring his family and humiliating Frances.

  Sleep and a good breakfast had restored his humor, and he’d shoved aside his doubts. He’d accepted the congratulations of his friends, and let himself be swayed by their conviction that it would be a happy marriage, that Frances was a treasure, that he had found true love. His sisters had been over the moon. Rhys had reassured him that any doubts were the nerves of a bridegroom, nothing more.

  In the six years to follow, he’d wished he’d listened to his own heart.

  The marriage had been a failure from his point of view, but he’d done all he could to play the role of doting husband in both public and private. No one, not even Frances, had known he found her too tiresome for words. He’d felt guilty admitting to himself how little he liked her, with her vapid babbling, her megrims, her needy dependence. Never was he so lonely as when he was in her presence, knowing that she did not even suspect his unhappiness. He felt as if his true self were invisible. As long as he went through the motions of loving her, she thought their connection complete. On those occasions when he’d tried to share a deeper part of himself, she’d taken on the blank gaze of a Roman statue until he finished, and then resumed her chattering on the neighbor’s truant laundry maid or the shocking price of ribbons.

  Everyone else had adored Frances. The failure of their marriage must therefore be his own fault, a consequence of some ill-made part of his heart that didn’t know how to properly love.

  Worst of all, when a fever had abruptly swept Frances away and left him a widower, his relief at her passing––oh, the blessed silence of living alone! of not having his name called a thousand times a day, of not being interrupted in his studies, of not struggling to look entertained by the river of empty words that tumbled endlessly from her lovely pink lips––had been almost as strong as his grief.

  He wasn’t made to be a husband. He was heartless, cold, more interested in the stars than in companionship. It could not have been Frances’s fault, for in the years since her death he’d met many young ladies who were everything that was desirable in a wife, and yet he’d felt no more than lust for the pretty ones, and a platonic friendship toward the intellectuals. His heart had remained untouched, no matter how he prodded it and told it that a normal man wanted a wife.

  He wasn’t normal. His heart was too frozen to meet the warm needs of a woman. He had no affection to give. That was the simple truth, and he had made his peace with it… even if seeing the way that Rhys and Beth looked at each other sent a stab of longing through his gut.

  “I don’t see what was unfair about it,” Rhys was saying to his wife. “The man would rather spend his nights with a telescope than a woman.”

  Beth rolled her eyes, shaking her head at his obtuseness. “You have only to take a look around you, my darling, to see the truth.”

  Alex and Rhys both raised their eyebrows, their twin expressions forcing Beth to elaborate. “It’s a castle,” she said, as if speaking to simpletons. “A medieval castle atop a mountain, pennants waving, portcullis raised as if awaiting the return of its lord from the Crusades.” She sighed, moving a little closer to the edge and looking out over the body of the fortress. “If Serena does still haunt this hill, I am certain she is glad to see her home occupied again, especially after the Briggs family abandoned her so abruptly. There were rumors that Mr. Briggs did not like sharing his home with a ghost. You wouldn’t mind though, would you, Alex? Not a man with your kind sensibilities.”

  Alex raised a single eyebrow at his cousin, who responded to his wife’s words with a shrug and a helpless expression. Beth could find romance in a pigsty; a castle held a host of wonderful imaginings, even one with a murderous ghost for a caretaker.

  “I took the place only for the view,” Alex said. “It’s the perfect spot from which to study the night sky. And you already know it was Mr. Briggs who rebuilt Maiden Castle, so I can’t take credit for that bit of your fancy. I would have been content with the tower and a one-room cottage.”

  Beth wrinkled her nose at him. “Pish.”

  He smothered a smile. Ah, well. Let her think him a dashing, romantic figure in his castle on the hill if it pleased her. No doubt she would slowly drive Rhys up a wall with her fanciful thoughts.

  “Uncle Alex?” a small voice asked, and he turned to see his niece Louisa, age nine, poking her blond head above the hatchway. “Uncle Alex, Mummy is looking for you. She said to come right this minute.”

  “Did she?” He raised his eyebrows at her.

  “She did. She said to tell you she is waiting in the library.” Louisa frowned at him. “I shouldn’t keep her waiting, if I were you,” she said, and then ducked back down the hatchway, her message delivered.

  Alex turned a wry smile on Rhys and Beth. “Duty calls.”

  Serena stood amid the spring flowers in the garden, staring up at the new stone walls of the castle as if their solidity were a personal challenge. She would rip them down with her bare hands if she could. God knew she had done her best to keep them from going up.

  She’d worked hard to chase out the new occupants, too. For all the good it did her. The Briggses and their staff had moved out, but now someone else was moving in, and she’d have to start all over.

  Didn’t anyone understand that this place belonged to her now, and that she wanted to be left alone? She had been at the fortress for nearly five hundred years. She had earned it with her own blood and determination. It was hers, and she was not inclined to share.

  Living people. How she loathed them.

  She jerked her chin up and flicked back a long tress of pale blond hair with the back of her hand. As her father had once said, the first step to defeating an enemy was to know him. It was time to reconnoiter.

  She walked through the flowers to the stone path, and followed it the length of the garden to the new iron gate at the end. The only thing she could thank Briggs for was having the garden replanted and cleaned up. She had grown used to it being wild, and had not known how lovely cultivated flowers could be. There were many growing here now that she had nev
er seen before, their hues brilliant, their blossoms huge and exotic to her eyes.

  She walked through the iron gate, wincing as it shivered through her. The folktales about iron holding in a spirit were not true, but the metal was unpleasant to encounter nonetheless.

  The courtyard she stepped into was filled with wagons and people moving about, unloading furniture and supplies and shouting orders at one another. The noise they made had her cringing back, the voices a vibrating, ringing assault on her head.

  She had forgotten how loud they were, living people. The six-month respite since Briggs had left had allowed her to forget, and she had luxuriated in the quiet of a vacant building.

  She clenched her teeth and wove her way through the milling servants, careful to avoid being stepped through. No one turned to look, no one commented that she was dressed oddly, and no one made way for her, for no one could see her. She was invisible, without substance, and of even less consequence to them than she had been to her father and brothers. It was that that infuriated her above all else: how they behaved as if she did not exist.

  They were in her castle, and yet they treated it as if it were their own, as if she were not there!

  She wouldn’t let them ignore her. She paused to drag her fingers across the nape of a man’s neck, and was rewarded by his startled jump. He turned around, but, seeing no one, could only rub at his neck and wonder.

  Let him wonder, Serena thought. She was only getting started.

  She could have floated above the servants had she wished, like thistledown on the wind. She could have gone from the garden straight through the castle walls, and avoided them altogether. Thomas would have said it was stubbornness that had her walking among them, stubbornness and her own peculiar form of defiance against the obvious truth that she was no longer completely human.

  In part he would have been right.

  The rectangular courtyard formed the center for the long, U-shaped castle that surrounded it, the open end leading to a drive that, through a modern, ingenious bit of engineering, wound down like a tunneling spiral staircase before opening out below at the gatehouse on the side of the steep hill. That dark passage had made an excellent place in which to spook horses and terrorize Briggs and his coach and footmen.

  Serena climbed the stairs to a pair of the castle’s doors, held open by wooden wedges. She paused to the side, waiting for workers to pass through with their crated burden. She felt something brush against her leg.

  “Beezely!”

  The orange cat meowed, staring up at her unconcerned as a workman put a boot through him.

  “Beezely, silly kitty, you’re in the way.” Serena squatted down and picked up the phantom cat. She pressed her nose to the space between Beezely’s ragged ears, hugging the animal close, protective even though she knew the cat was past all harm. The feline, her first and only pet, had been her one true companion through the centuries. Twenty years into her ghosthood, the cat had dragged himself into her garden, wounded from battle with some unknown animal. He had died a few hours later, but his spirit had stayed with her. “I don’t know how you can be so unconcerned, with this disturbance all around us,” she said to him.

  Beezely purred and kneaded her sleeve, his sharp claws pricking her skin. Being a ghost like her, the cat always seemed solid to her touch—more so than “real” things, which she could pass through at will. It usually took an intentional, exhausting effort on her part to touch or move solid objects, or to make herself visible or heard.

  The doorway now empty, Serena went through and into the ancestral hall. It was an empty room with a big fireplace, but on the walls were painted the twining, twisted branches of a family tree, with spaces for portraits and names among the leaves. Men were on the north wall, women on the south. Briggs hadn’t had time to finish, so it was just his own red face peering out from the leaves on the men’s wall. Mrs. Briggs, opposite, looked wan and disappointed. As she should, saddled with Briggs for a husband.

  The next room was the king’s hall, with a marble diamond-patterned floor and a gilded, royal blue groined ceiling that made the display of ancient, blackened weapons on one wall look as out of place as a dead rat on a banquet table. Briggs and his wife had taste that even she could recognize as theatrical.

  Serena could hear voices coming from the library at the other end of the king’s hall: the enemy. She went toward the sound.

  Beezely tensed in her arms. An enormous hound had appeared in the doorway to the library, head raised, eyes staring straight at them. Beezely hissed and clawed his way loose from Serena’s arms, dropping to the floor with his back arched, hair on end.

  The hound’s ears lowered uncertainly as he looked at Serena, the beginning of a whine starting in his throat, but then Beezely trotted away from her. The hound gave a tremendous bark, and the animals were off, Beezely an orange streak heading for the door. The hound’s claws scrabbled for purchase as he gave chase on the polished floor, nails clicking and clattering as he galloped after the cat.

  Serena had seen it before: dogs had a natural fear of ghosts, but their instinct to chase and kill animals smaller than themselves often overrode it. Especially where Beezely was concerned. Either that, or the cat somehow taunted the beasts into going after him. Serena had thought that was the case more than once over the years.

  “Otto! What in God’s name—” The speaker came into the hall in time to see the rear end of his dog disappear through the door to the ancestral hall. The man halted, his dark blue eyes staring straight through Serena for a long moment, and in that moment her shadowed heart stopped in her ghostly chest.

  He was a tall man, perhaps even an inch taller than Serena herself, with broad shoulders and a sturdy frame. He was neither thin nor fat, having instead that solidness of muscled form that bespoke a man past the first gangly flush of youth. His silky black hair was streaked on one temple with white, and his shadowed jaw spoke of a heavy beard if left unshaven.

  Marry, but he was a handsome man!

  He was dressed in a jacket of dark forest green, the collar of his white shirt coming only halfway up his neck, his cravat tied without flamboyance. She had often spied on Briggs as he dressed with the help of his valet, and had grown familiar with this modern mode of dress. Briggs’s clothes had been much brighter, however, and his collar points had reached halfway up his cheeks. She’d marveled that he didn’t put an eye out on one of them.

  This man looked much more competent than had the castle’s last intruder. There was intelligence in his eyes, and a relaxed confidence. Something nervous fluttered inside her; something shy and uncertain.

  And then a faint sense of familiarity floated through her, coupled with a distant, long-suppressed yearning. The confusing, unexpected combination brought a sudden panic welling up inside her.

  He had to be gotten rid of, as quickly as possible.

  A female voice with all the melody of a crow’s suddenly rang out at him from behind, and Serena watched him close his eyes briefly, lips tightening as he summoned patience.

  “It’s foolish, Alex. Foolish and irresponsible,” the woman said, coming into the hall. She looked older than him by a handful of years, and there were deep lines from the sides of her sharp nose to the corners of her sour mouth. “How can you trust others to run the mills for you? We shall be robbed blind, while you sit up here and play at being an astronomer. Do you think you will discover a planet, like your hero, Mr. Herschel?” She had her hands on her hips, looking at the man as though he were a recalcitrant child. “This is just another of your childish fantasies, like the time you tried to run away and join the navy.”

  “I am no longer twelve years old, Philippa,” he said, turning to her. He spoke softly, calmly, yet there was a sure strength in his words. “And you know, as well as do Amelia, Constance, and Sophie, that I would never make a decision that would result in a reduction in your or their incomes. Your well-being has always been my primary concern.”

  Philippa looked as i
f she wanted to say more, her lips pursed tight with discontent, but apparently his words rang true. “Well. You have shown more business sense than Father ever did, I will grant you that. But it’s a good thing you only leased this monstrosity, instead of buying it outright. We should surely have all been in the poorhouse then, with the upkeep.”

  Alex gave a half smile. “Mr. Briggs wasn’t quite ready to give up the idea of being lord of the manor. I think he likes to tell his friends that he owns a castle. He claims to be descended from a line of German princes.”

  The comment coaxed a twitch of a smile from Philippa’s lips. “I find it highly unlikely that such a round little man could have noble blood, even if only German.”

  Serena studied the man, her eyes narrowed. There must be something wrong with him. He was placating this woman who cast doubt upon his good sense, when he should instead be telling her to hold her tongue. From what they’d said the woman must be his sister, but that should mean nothing. Thomas had never lacked the backbone to argue with her when he disagreed, even though she usually had been right.

  She had been mistaken to think it was strength she heard in this man’s voice. He was obviously some form of coward, weak and trembly as jelly.

  Square shoulders and a strong jaw did not make a warrior. She would have him out of here within a week. The fluttering panic in her chest quieted, and she buried that faint, painful sense of yearning.

  He surely would be no more difficult to evict than Briggs had been. Easier, as he had nothing but a lease to hold him, unlike Briggs, who had invested huge sums of money in building this “monstrosity,” as the Philippa woman so aptly called it. Briggs’s wife had at first pleaded to stay, but when her husband had started reporting to her each of his ghostly encounters, she’d become more eager than he to leave the place.

  Or at least that’s what Mrs. Briggs had let him believe. From what Serena had overheard, Mr. Briggs had a wandering eye, and his wife had thought to contain his philandering up on the remote mountaintop. There was always a servant wench willing to lift her skirts for the master’s favor, however, and Mrs. Briggs found it harder to endure her husband’s indiscretions when they occurred under her own roof rather than at the home of a mistress.