Page 6 of The Prestley Ghost

“Ah,” said an instantly recognizable voice at his side, and Alex shimmered into view, dressed in the same old-fashioned green and gold and tapestry flowers, hair like old coins, eyes like treasure.

He looked young, Charles thought; so young, only twenty-one when he’d died, though of course Alexander Leonfeld had been twenty-one for fifty-two years. “You found me.”

“I hadn’t, technically, yet.” He had, though: just the instant before.

The stone was tastefully ornate, not terrifically overdone, but decorated with scrollwork and an overlay that draped like fine lace across a curve of marble, gifted work by talented hands.

The inscription was simple: Alex’s name, and the dates. “You’re here at Prestley, not at home.”

Alex paused with one unquiet hand lifted. “You did find me.” His tone was different, this time.

“They buried you here.” And Charles did not know whether that was a question, and if so, which one. Would it help to relocate Alex’s resting place? Or did he simply want to know why here, and how Alex had felt, and if he had been loved?

“Oliver…” Alex shook his head, but he was smiling, with fondness. Not as if recalling a great grief, though, or Charles thought not. “Oliver. I—” He broke off, and faded from view, as Mayor Mirrison and his wife appeared: sweeping into the churchyard upon a tide of self-importance.

“Where,” inquired the mayor, “is your brother?”

Charles looked at the church. He truly did not mean that to be a sarcastic look; but the glare he received in response indicated that it had been taken so.

The mayor huffed at him on top of the glare. “So he is not performing his duty.”

“He is the rector,” Charles said, “and he happens to be in the church, so…”

“Don’t be impertinent. I meant your duty, as well. Ridding Prestley of our ghost.” One large finger wagged at him. “We saw you speaking to the ghost, didn’t we, Martha?”

“We did. And you seemed happy to do so.”

“Perhaps it is a scheme.” The mayor inflated further. “You and your brother. Arranging for a haunting, ensuring our goodwill. Relying upon your family name and our goodwill.”

“Why on earth,” Charles demanded, “would we do that? Especially if we plan to live here.”

“Who knows what you might do,” Martha Mirrison observed, with a sniff, “you are out of doors without a hat or gloves, and those trousers are decidedly inappropriate.”

Charles looked at his trousers, inadvertently. He couldn’t see anything terribly wrong.

“You are,” suggested the mayor, “a Hayward. Perhaps you wish to use our distress to increase your family’s reputation. Perhaps you wish to write a book. But that would invite scandal. Discussion. Disreputable visitors. Are you planning to invite disreputable visitors, young man?”

“Yes,” Charles said before he could stop himself, “I’ve hired six of the best courtesans from Madame Lilith’s and I’m planning to take them all on a picnic up on Blackberry Hill, they’ll be here later today, would you like to join us?”

Martha made a horrified small sound. “Are you certain you’re the rector’s brother? Such impropriety!”

“Perhaps it is the fault of his profession,” Mayor Mirrison contributed. “Useful, but unreliable. Speaking to the dead. Not natural. A bit cracked.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alex said, materializing directly at the mayor’s broad elbow, “I’m speaking to you, right now; are you unnatural, darling?” He even batted those long golden eyelashes.

The mayor made a sound best described as a squawk, jumped to one side, and clung to his wife. They both glared at Alex.

Who raised one hand and offered an exaggeratedly fluttery wave of fingers. “I know you can hear me.”

“You’re a ghost!”

“And you’re not, and I’m happy we’ve all described each other.”

“Avaunt,” the mayor tried, desperately. “Vanish. Something. Go away.” He scowled Charles’s direction. “Do something.”

“Who, me?” Charles said. “I might do anything. I’m thoroughly disreputable and out of doors without a hat.” He was, in fact, enjoying the moment immensely. Even more so when Alex winked at him.

“But you can see,” Martha implored, “that this really cannot happen. This—this disruption. Startling people. It’s not nice.”

“I might be insulted,” Alex said. “I do actually try to be very nice. I complimented Miss Barnes’s dress last week.”

The mayor jabbed a finger at him, thundered, “Unnatural!” and then pointed the finger at Charles for good measure. “Do your job!” Upon which, evidently feeling the need to retreat, he and his wife backed out of the haunted churchyard, and fled.

Charles gave in and laughed, just for a moment; not even because it was all that funny, but because Alex had been perfect, and Alex was smiling as well, not laughing but with amusement in that smile, in those golden eyes, and Charles could have kissed him, if—

If. So many ifs, and they crowded into his chest and onto his tongue, until he could say none of them, and he had stopped laughing.

“I suppose that was a bit cruel, popping up that way.” Alex perched on his own gravestone, somewhere between sitting and leaning; Charles imagined that if anyone was allowed to do so, he was. “It did scare them. I just couldn’t resist, and I didn’t like the way they were talking to you.”

“You left, at first.”

“Being tactful. But they’d already seen me.”

“You said they tried to have you banished before.”

“It’s been tried a few times.” Alex kicked a clump of grass, or rather swung his foot through a clump of grass, idly. “It’s never worked. No one with any real power.”

“Do you want to stay?”

“Oh, that…that’s a complicated question.

” Alex kicked the grass again. His foot, outlined in old-fashioned black with a decorative buckle, was oddly attractive too.

That ankle. The shape. And Charles had to get some sort of hold on his own emotions, because he’d never thought much about a man’s ankles before, but somehow everything about Alex was just purely interesting.

“Maybe I do. Are you asking because you want to know how to get rid of me?”

“No,” Charles said, even though the answer should’ve been yes, standing there in overgrown green grass, on a chilly autumn morning, himself alive and a gifted medium, Alex a ghost at his side, sitting on a gravestone.

“I just wanted to…to know, I suppose. Sometimes people do want to go on, but they don’t know how.

I can try to assist with that. And I thought…

you were saying, before the accusations of impropriety… your…Oliver…”

“Oh, right.” Alex looked away, ran a ghostly hand through equally spectral blond hair, sighed. “I don’t know if I want to…it’s personal.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“I know you are.”

Silence hovered like the marble lace veil: draped, hushed, heavy. A gust of wind rustled, shivering the trees, off to spread gossip: the rector’s younger brother chatting with the Prestley ghost, here among the markers of the dead.

“You like it here,” Charles said, cautiously, after a moment. The silence was his fault; he wanted Alex to smile again. “Don’t you?”

“You want to know how to convince me to move on?”

“No. I just want to know…I don’t know. What you’re thinking.”

“Too much, at the moment. Though my father—and any number of other people—would’ve laughed about that; thinking too much was rarely my problem. Or any of ours.”

“Anything you want to tell me.”

“Well.” Alex got up from the stone, moved a step or a drift, went to look out into the village.

“For one, everything these days is lighter. Brighter. Lamps at home, streetlights…when I was born the world felt darker. I don’t mean that as an insult to my own time; it was soft and familiar, all black velvet and candlelight.

It’s just different, now.” In the cool austere autumn morning, he stood out: a stray bit of brightness himself, a previous century’s whisper of opulence and embroidered frock coats, of late theatre nights and high-heeled shoes, of tipsy laughter and wealth and a harmless reckless reel between taverns and grand houses and bedrooms.

Charles moved closer. Drawn in by that tattered beautiful loneliness. “Do you miss it?”

“Oh, sometimes. I miss knowing the world—knowing little things, like the best place to find a strong pot of coffee after stumbling out of Marlowe’s wonderful brothel at three in the morning, or the tailor who always had the best hand with a good imported silk.

I doubt any of my old favorite shops still survive, in London or home at Foxleigh.

” Alex watched a cart pass, a delivery; Charles couldn’t tell of what, from the distance.

“I miss my friends. But it’s not…I do also like seeing the world, now.

New novels, new fashions, new inventions.

The railways. Steam—I’d love to ride a train.

” And his voice was the voice of the young man he was, for an instant.

Charles watched him. Couldn’t not. Such delight, such joy.

When he himself had almost forgotten that: wrapped up in guilt, in obligation.

But Alexander Leonfeld—despite a shocking painful death, at too young an age—had loved candlelight and soft dark and good silk and strong coffee, and even now looked at the world and wanted to explore.

He said, voice rough, “Would you want to do that, if you could? To travel?”

“Ah, you’re looking for unfinished business.” Alex’s voice was deliberately light, just then. “Of course I would, but it isn’t that. Or I don’t think so. I don’t actually know what it is.”

“Not all ghosts do.”

“No, I imagine not.” Alex had also shifted closer, so near they might’ve touched.

The coldness of him was palpable, seeping through clothing; but Charles could not move away.

“I think at first it was just surprise. I hadn’t expected to die.

I didn’t believe it.” He stopped. “You know the story. If you found me.”

“Only some of it. There was a duel. You weren’t supposed to get shot.”