Revenge of the Barbary Ghost (16 page)

“That, indeed, is the question, my lord.”

***

Mary, appearing to feel much better, awoke Anne the next morning to tell her that Mrs. Quintrell had come back with no prompting, and so breakfast was ready. As Anne descended the creaky stairs, the scents of laundry and soup and beeswax polish indicated that cleaning and food preparation were indeed going on. Pamela was already in the dining room, but not eating. She stood at a window and gazed out.

“How are you this morning?” Anne asked, going to her friend.

Pam merely shrugged. Anne gently brushed away a trace of cobweb clinging to her friend’s hair. Lynn Quintrell’s housemaid duties were certainly not performed with any degree of enthusiasm or ability! The home was getting dirtier by the day. Even though she had filled in for the absent Lynn Quintrell the day before, Pamela’s lady’s maid, Alice, a local girl, didn’t seem to do her job properly either, for Anne rarely saw her.

Mary claimed the young maid didn’t seem to know the proper way to do anything, apart from the rudiments of hairstyling. Sewing, millinery, spot removal: all were mysteries to Alice. But then, Pamela likely could not afford better on her limited income. Incompetent help was better than no help at all. “Are you recovered from your poor health yesterday?” Anne asked, watching Pamela.

“I’m fine, really, Anne,” she said, with a slight smile on her perfect bow lips.

Anne took some of the eggs that sat on a sideboard, but looked askance at the other items, some of them unidentifiable blackish lumps. Mrs. Quintrell might be back, but she was in no good mood, if the state of her cooking was any evidence. “Where is St. James?”

“I haven’t seen him this morning; I suppose he’s gone back to his regiment,” Pam said, with a frown.

Anne felt a momentary qualm. Perhaps he had gone back to his regiment early, but why? The easiest way to find out would be to see if his horse was still in the small stable just beyond the house and outbuildings. She could hardly eat breakfast, she was so anxious. Since Pamela employed no groom and kept no carriage, the stable was usually empty. St. James looked after his own horse when he was there, feeding and grooming Pilot, as the gelding was named.

She slipped from the house out the front door, followed the crushed stone path around it to the stable, a rickety, leaning building—the stable was in worse shape than the other outbuildings—and tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed it open, the creak of the hinges shuddering through her ears, and found what she did not want to find. Pilot huffed and stamped, and anxiously looked over the low stall wall at her in the gloom, rolling his eyes.

Anne swallowed hard, her stomach churning. This did not necessarily mean a thing, she thought. Not a thing! St. James was not the most responsible of fellows, and he may have gone for a walk without feeding his horse or tending him. She returned to the house and sent Robbie down to the stable to do what was necessary for the poor animal, feeding, watering, grooming and turning him out into the tiny enclosure next to the stable. The boy was excited about being given such an important chore. “Just be careful of his hooves, Robbie,” Anne warned. “He’s a well-trained fellow, but a fidgety boy might unnerve him.”

She retreated to her room to ready herself for the day, and since she had no secrets from Mary, told her everything that had occurred the night before.

“Fancy the captain being the ghost all along!” the maid marveled, coiling Anne’s long hair into an acceptable style for day. “Never would I have thought of it!”

“But where is he now?” She twisted her head, looking at her reflection in the wavery glass of the mirror, and nodded. When one was not a beauty, it simplified things; tidiness and economy of time were the two guiding principles of her daily regimen. “That’ll do,” she said, about the style. “At least you’ve tamed it. In this dampness, it wants to frizz and puff out into a cloud of hair.” She rose and sighed. “Marcus didn’t sleep in his room, Mary, I checked on my way back up. Lynn Quintrell is still helping her mother in the kitchen, doing dishes and pans, I suppose, from Lolly’s meal last night, so she’s not been upstairs to make up the beds, and his has not been disturbed.” Anne paced and then stopped to gaze out the window toward the cliff. “He was going back to make sure the others were safe, I think. But
what
others? Who, in particular, was he concerned about?”

“I dinna know, milady. But the captain can take care o’ himself, I’m sure.”

“Something was different last night from what I witnessed before. Seeing the Barbary Ghost impeded the excise officers little. They came better prepared for a fight. I need to find out what has gone on in past months. I hope to heaven St. James is just out walking after a sleepless night.”

But waiting patiently for something to happen, or for Marcus to show up, or for the tide to retreat so she could go down to the water, was not in her character. Instead, she thought of easing her curiosity on some other points. For weeks, she had heard strange noises at night, some from the attic, some from the lower levels of the house. The attic, she had discovered early, was just a storage spot, and the noises must have been from rats or other small animals sheltering from the wind or rain. Perhaps the noises from the cellar were animals too, but she did wonder how large an animal would make a noise in the cellar loud enough to drift all the way up to her second-floor room.

She was going to find out if there was any way into the house through the cellar that did not involve the main level of the house, she decided. And perhaps Marcus was down there, working on one of his mechanical toys, projects she had known to consume hours of his time in years gone by, without him being aware that people were waiting for him.

She hoped that was the solution, as she slipped through the kitchen while Mrs. Quintrell was in the crude cold pantry, and found the basement steps on the other side of a plank door. She quietly pulled the cellar door closed behind her, and crept down the stairs, appreciating the weak light from the candle she had thought to bring.

The basement was a warren of room after room after room, and it took her a few minutes to figure out where she was. The foundation was old stone and crumbling in some spots, dirt tumbling in through cracks. She walked through the whole string of rooms immediately one after the other and saw nothing but crates, barrels, and shelves of jarred preserves. Cobwebs stuck to her hair and clung to her dress as she poked her nose into corners.

But eventually she found a door she had not yet opened. Perhaps it led to the outside.

She held up her candle and examined the latch. It was shiny, without the patina of age or any rust from the damp sea air, but it had no padlock. She lifted the latch and pushed open the door; no creak or whine gave away its movement. Holding the candle up, she stepped into the room, some kind of work space.

It was, unlike the rest of the dusty stone-foundation cellar, immaculately tidy. A bench lined one wall, and under it were kegs. Anne frowned. This space had the definite mark of St. James; he was much neater in his habits and more organized than his sister. He had for years amused himself with clockwork automatons, card tricks and magician’s illusions (a fact that should have made her twig to the identity of the Barbary Ghost) as well as the more serious branches of scientific study, and wherever they lived, he had a workshop. Above the bench were shelves with tools neatly stowed and a row of small pottery globes with neat cork stoppers, as well as small wooden casks labeled “potassium nitrate” and various other elements in Marcus’s neat script.

She set the candle on a nearby barrel and looked around, wondering why the workshop was in a secret part of the house. In the past he had demanded large windows and bright light for his work space. Then she glanced down at the keg; printed on it in stenciled letters was the word “gunpowder.” Hastily, she snatched her candle up and backed away. So
that
was why he had this hidden; this room was the center of his Barbary Ghost fireworks illusions.

She exited the room and latched the door, then ascended the stairs, for there was nothing else to see in the cellar. Marcus was still not back, and in fact never did return.

Pamela didn’t even try to conceal her agitation. Anne decided to share what she knew with her friend, and was relieved to find that at least Pamela was aware her brother was the Barbary Ghost. “How long have you known?” she asked her friend, as they sat on the terrace. They had decided to walk down to the beach as soon as they judged the tide would have rolled out, to see if there would be any reminders of the melee the night before, or any clue as to where St. James had gone.

“I’ve known all along. St. Ives is only three miles from here, and he was able to slip out at night from his regimental billet easily. You know what St. James is like,” Pamela said, with a faint attempt at a smile. “He loves excitement, and he’s always dabbled in hocus pocus. The Barbary Ghost was his idea, and I think he would have done it even if Captain Micklethwaite had not approached him.”

“Micklethwaite?”

“He … he’s apparently a ship captain who uses his vessels for the free trade, as those fellows call it.”

They were silent for a while, but finally Pamela stood and paced to the edge of the terrace, looking out to sea. She turned back to Anne, wringing her hands together. “I can’t wait any longer; I want to look down on the beach, just see what went on, if there is any sign of what he has gotten up to. Perhaps Marcus got caught in his cave by the tide. He cannot swim at all, you know, and has a dreadful fear of the water.”

Anne felt sure that the small crevice she had found, though above the tidewater, would not be a viable place to spend a night. It wasn’t deep enough, nor secret enough. But she could not take away her friend’s suggestions. As for herself, she feared that St. James had been arrested the night before. If so, they would hear about him soon; she didn’t want to imagine what would happen to him after that. For an officer in the army to take part in such illegal activity could be possibly treasonous, for all she knew of the law. She did know that treason was a hanging offense.

Though Robbie insisted on accompanying Anne and Pamela down to the beach, Anne sent Mary to St. Wyllow for Sanderson. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she wanted her sturdy driver at Cliff House, if only to take them to St. Ives to see if St. James had, for some odd reason, decided to walk back to his regiment.

Or in case he had been arrested and they had him in a military jail.

They clambered awkwardly down the cut toward the beach, dresses and shawls making the climb difficult. Pamela, not as energetic as Anne, needed to pause after the climb and sat on a rocky outcropping for a long moment. The tide had receded, leaving behind, on the wet sand, a line of seaweed and detritus. Anne could see that the smugglers had not had the opportunity to retrieve their missing booty, as ankers and half ankers and wooden crates littered the beach, jumbled by the tide.

Pamela recovered, and she and Anne walked toward the slice of shore below Cliff House to try to see up to the crevice in the rock, but once there it was evident that whatever had happened the night before, St. James was not there now. “We may as well go back to the house,” Pamela said, her tone listless.

Anne shook her head. “You can go ahead, but I want to look around a little more.”

“I’ll wait for you, then,” she said, with a listless sigh.

Anne eyed her with a worried frown; Pamela did not seem to be herself lately, or had she been this way for longer than Anne had bothered to notice? Her high spirits were more occasional now than they had been, but was that just a natural mellowing with time? Anne turned back and scanned the rock wall, and then gazed down the beach. A jot of color beyond a rock caught her eye; perhaps a bolt of smuggled cloth, or a flag, or some such thing, flapping in the wind?

Robbie, his pockets full of shells, bounced after her, but as Anne began to clamber over the rocky outcropping near the base of the cliff she put up one hand; some foreknowledge quivered within her at what she would see, and she was not going to have that little boy scarred by the sight, if it should prove to be unfortunate. “Robbie,” she said, her voice trembling, as she turned and looked back at him. “Go back to Miss Pamela, if you would.”

“But—”

“Robbie, now!” She took in a long shaky breath and turned her gaze back to the flapping piece of cloth.

He retreated and she put out one hand to steady herself, then climbed over the rock. She gasped in horror, a sick sound gurgling in her throat. St. James’s dead eyes, crusted with sand and seaweed, stared at her, his flesh white and pasty, wrinkled from saturation from the tide. But he did not drown; oh, no … his throat had been cruelly cut, and his flesh hung open, the tidewater having scrubbed him clean, leaving behind a pale, waterlogged appearance, with more seaweed tangled in his hair and across the ferocious wound.

“Oh!” she cried, then clamped a hand over her mouth. She glanced back, her vision blurred by tears. Pamela and Robbie were down at the water’s edge, the woman watching while the boy used a piece of plank to dig in the sand. Anne swiftly clambered back over the rock intent on one thing: She would
make
Pamela go back up to Cliff House, where she would tell her what had happened to her beloved older brother.

But things rarely work out as expected. When Anne spotted Darkefell striding purposefully down the beach toward her she ran to him and threw herself into his arms.

“Anne, Anne, what is it?” he asked, holding her close.

For one long moment she surrendered to the delicious warmth of his arms, putting her head against his chest. His steadily thudding heart, racing from the climb down, his warmth, the growing familiarity of his scent: it all comforted her, and the tears came.

“Tony, oh, Tony!” she groaned, looking up at him. “It’s St. James; he’s dead, his throat slashed! He’s been
murdered
!” She pushed away from him, staggered sideways, and lost her breakfast on the wet sand.