“In my corridor. You don’t sound surprised.”
“Saw it too.”
Zeb turned to face him. Dash gave a mildly embarrassed shrug. “Late last night, going to bed. Ghostly grey hooded form, you know. Assumed it was my imagination or a servant or some such. Rotten low light here: I must say, I thought acetylene would be better. Hawley, you think?”
“Everyone else was accounted for when I saw my ghost.”
“Hmph. Let’s you and I keep an eye on Mr. Hawley Wyckham, shall we?”
“Let’s do that,” Zeb said.
***
Zeb headed down to the library with his satchel that afternoon, in the hope of getting some use out of the day, and found Jessamine. He would have retreated, but she looked up and smiled. “Good afternoon, Cousin Zeb.”
“Well, good-ish. The weather’s closing in a bit.” It was decidedly grey outside now; he was glad he’d gone out that morning. “What are you up to?”
“I am going over the housekeeping accounts,” Jessamine said composedly. “Learning how to manage Lackaday House, since I will be its mistress one day.”
It was something to do, he supposed. He couldn’t help noticing she seemed very confident about the success of the marriage plan. “I imagine there’s a great deal to the running of a place this size, and such a remote one,” he offered. “It must be difficult tokeep it supplied?”
“The grocer sends a cart from town once a week. I hope you don’t find the food monotonous? I don’t think Bram is very happy. He’s a gourmet, isn’t he? He must be finding our plain fare very tiresome.”
“It’ll do him good,” Zeb said without sympathy.
“I hope so, but he often seems in a bad temper at meals. He was quite angry about the book, wasn’t he? I am enjoying it a great deal.”
“The Monastery? Are you really? Where have you got to?”
“The second volume.”
“You, uh, didn’t find the end of the first volume a bit much?”
“Oh, it was terrible.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“In the sense of the poets. Awful and magnificent and sublime. Like the fall of Satan inParadise Lost. That’s what it makes me feel: pity and terror.”
“Oh,” Zeb said. “Gosh.”
“And the cruelty of the monks, the evil of it. No wonder the ghost walks. No wonder it comes to punish wrongdoers and leaves its writing on the wall.”
Zeb had forgotten that. “The ghost does that, doesn’t it? In the book, I mean. It writes on the walls in blood.”
“Yes, the ghost does that,” Jessamine said. “Did you see what Hawley saw?”
“There wasn’t anything there.”
“Of course not. I knew there would not be.”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t you remember? The words can only be seen by the guilty one. A message just for him, or me, or you.”
“That’s in the book. In this case, there just wasn’t anything there.”
She frowned a little. “You think the ghost is a story, don’t you?”
