Page 2 of The Prestley Ghost

But he wouldn’t. He would never cause John more pain, and he had agreed to help deal with the Prestley ghost, and he did like helping people, albeit not as much as John, who would heroically give away their last coins to roadside beggars and orphans, a fact rather than an exaggeration.

Charles managed their finances, and had even before leaving university.

Their inheritance had only gone so far, and someone had to think about incomes versus expenditures, and that someone was not ever going to be John, and should not have to be.

Charles could do that. Charles would do that. Anything.

Anything, not to make up for what he’d done—he could not do that—but to make the world easier.

He followed the path along the river and up a gradual rise, until he encountered an old stone wall, and leaned against it, looking at the water, the village, the fields, the steeple, without really seeing any of it.

John wanted him to talk. There was nothing to say.

What was left? I’m sorry that I told our parents that everything they’d spent their lives researching, the ghosts and the folklore, was true?

I’m sorry that I brought us to that bridge, all those years ago, and when the water rose and the stones broke and the drowned man screamed, I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to save anyone?

But that was obvious; that was blatant; that did not need speaking aloud.

He could say: I tried, John, I did try, I was young and small and terrified, and I did what I could, I pulled you out, I know I was too late but I tried; but that was only an insufficiency of words. It had been, and remained, his fault.

John had never said so, not once. But no one had had to say it. The black-draped funeral and the physicians’ sidelong looks and John’s persistent limp, thirteen years on, all shouted Charles’s name.

His hands bit into the stones of the wall. The river rushed and thrashed, furious with impending ice. The sun was lowering in the west, across the green fields and untroubled serene places of England. Charles’s fingers hurt, bruised from trying to dig into rock.

He moved his hands. He did not want scratches, injuries, more for John to fret over.

He stared into the vicious eddies of the water again. It scraped past rocks, churned, bubbled, frothed. Water. Of course. No escaping it, evidently.

“Well,” said a light wry voice, “don’t do that, if that’s what you’re thinking; I wouldn’t advise it, and I should know,” and the hair shivered at the back of Charles’s neck, and along his arms, because the cold hadn’t just been cold.

He snapped his gaze to the left. A thoroughly luscious man, perhaps a few years younger than Charles’s own twenty-six, was leaning insouciantly against the stone wall beside him; leaning was not the correct term, given that the man’s elbows were transparent and slipping in and out of rock, and his old-fashioned full-skirted coat swung in ripples as if it were gauze and not rich green velvet.

He had blond hair, the color of sunlight and as weightless, and tawny-brown eyes that were also almost gold, at least as far as could be seen in ephemeral form; and his face would have made sculptors fall to both knees, if not for the faint delicate outlines of trees and fields through the shape of him.

The young man even smiled, and it was a beautiful smile, Charles registered through all the amazement, and indeed flirtatious, though perhaps less so than wistful. “I could try to pull you out, only I’m not good at much beyond small objects. But I would try.”

“You’re the ghost.”

“Ah, you’ve heard of me.”

“You were in the churchyard—”

“Yes,” the ghost said helpfully. “But now I’m here.”

* * * *

The ghost was indeed here. Charles clung to the wall and to equilibrium. He knew how to talk to ghosts. He’d done it before. He normally had more warning. “Why aren’t you confined to one place?”

“Are we meant to be?”

“Yes!”

“Oh.” The young man considered this. “Well, I suppose I’ve never gone much further than the bridge at the mill, or the edge of the forest, so perhaps you’re not wrong.”

“I’m not—why are you here?”

“At first I was curious—” The young man shrugged—Charles had never seen a ghost shrug—and ran a hazy hand through his shoulder-length hair, a tumbled romantic fall of gilt-edge light. “And then I got worried. It’s a bad spot.”

“Why is everyone worried about me,” Charles grumbled, accidentally aloud.

The ghost’s eyebrows went up. “Should we be? Would you like to talk? I’m a fairly good listener.”

“No!” He scrambled for self-control. Being a good medium. Helping people. Using his gift. Doing good with it, the way John had decided they should, the way Charles himself wanted to. Helping ghosts, not…being helped by them. Or whatever might be happening. “I’m fine. You’re not. You’re a ghost.”

“Er…yes? I thought that was obvious? Should I wave my arms a bit and make distressing noises?”

“Christ,” Charles said, inadvertently. “You’re not just a ghost, you’re a ridiculous one.”

“How lucky for you that I’m not easily insulted. Honestly, I was trying to help.” The young man eyed the river. “It’s also going to be very cold. Unpleasant.”

“I’m not trying to drown myself!”

“Oh. Good, then.”

“I was just thinking.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m supposed to be banishing you.”

“Ah.” The ghost leaned against the old grey stones of the Prestley wall again, even closer to Charles.

He was even more angelic up close, except perhaps for the eyebrows, too dark and heavy for that pretty face; but somehow that made him more human.

The brocade of his antique waistcoat held a tapestry of flowers and leaves, in contrast to Charles’s plain blue and brown lines. “Did you want to try that, then?”

“You sound as if you don’t believe I can.”

“A few people have tried, a few decades ago.” The ghost leaned in a bit closer, and Charles would’ve sworn that was deliberate, a temptation, and he might indeed be susceptible to gorgeous men with eyes like summer heat, but ideally the man in question would be alive and breathing and not transparent. Not to mention that he had a job to do.

He got out, “Tried?” The beauty was distracting. Even more so, this ghost appeared to have some sort of conscience, or kindness, or benevolence, assuming the attempt at assistance had been genuine. That was unusual. And intriguing.

No. Not intriguing. Charles managed not to swear aloud.

“Tried,” the ghost agreed, unreasonably calm about it. “None of them actually bothered to talk to me. They shouted a lot in Latin and waved incense around and rang bells. I decided to be nice about it and vanish for a while. You know, let them think they’d done something.”

“Chivalrous of you,” Charles said, before he could stop himself. This was a ghost. He was not here to be witty and exchange teasing conversation.

The ghost looked mildly hurt. “They went to a certain amount of effort. It seemed the polite thing to do. It didn’t hurt me, and I don’t mind being invisible for a bit.”

“A ghost and a martyr to social politeness. Impressive.”

“One does what one can to help others.” Those tawny eyes narrowed. “As you’re doing, trying to banish me. So you should understand.”

“I’m being lectured on empathy and compassion by a non-corporeal manifestation.”

“I’m only saying, you don’t know everything about other people.

” The young man ran a spectral hand through his hair again, turned away from Charles toward the river.

“Sometimes people are hurting. Or they need to feel that they’ve done something to protect people they love.

I don’t have to be alive to remember that. ”

Charles had opened his mouth to answer. The thread of heartache in the last words tugged his answer sideways.

“Did someone hurt you? Or are you trying to protect someone? Is that why you’re here?

” He would’ve asked in any case—it mattered, for banishment and because the folklorist background in his heart wanted to know—but he found that he wished to know the answer with an unexpected amount of interest.

“One of those.” The man did an exaggerated wave of fingers, brushing away the idea: graceful, elegant, simultaneously antique and just slightly theatrical. “Would you like to try now? It won’t work, but I’ll play along if it’ll help.”

“Now you’re humoring me.”

“I’m having fun. Most people don’t take the time for a chat.”

“I’m not most people.”

“Oh, my. Should I be astonished? Should I have read your name in the papers? Some sort of adventure-novel hero? Should I swoon?” But that was teasing; the ghost’s eyes were dancing, alight with golden interest and amusement.

“You’re the new rector’s brother, I know that, but I hadn’t realized you were someone of such significance.

Though, to be fair, you’ve not in fact introduced yourself.

I would like to know the name of the gentleman into whose arms I’m swooning. ”

“Christ,” Charles said again. It seemed to be called for.

He also tried not to think about his arms around those slim shoulders.

Himself scooping up a ridiculous elegant tumble of laughter and flowered waistcoat and sunshine hair.

Himself being useful, firm and strong, if his pretty ghost really did somehow need rescuing and carrying.

He was possibly losing his mind. Perhaps ghosts could cause madness. Charles had not read anything to that effect in the Hayward notebooks and published philosophical treatises, but that didn’t mean it was impossible.

He said, “To be clear, I am an actual medium—I’ve done this before—my name is Charles, my brother John is the rector, and our parents were Eliza and James Hayward—”

“Ah, the folklorists. The mayor has two of those volumes. He was excessively pleased that your brother inherited the living here. I suspect he’s considered asking you both to autograph his copies.”