Page 7 of The Prestley Ghost

“No, well…” Alex sighed again, a ghost-exhale on the wind.

“We were all so…so young, I suppose. Young and wealthy and utterly idiotic, with titles or money or both, and we all liked…flouting convention in various ways, and none of our families approved, of course, but we all proclaimed loudly that we didn’t care.

Thoroughly, to borrow a description, careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality and desperately mortal…

not that I think we were good enough to deserve the Shakespeare reference.

We liked parties and late nights and opera singers and those male dancers at Marlowe’s, and also each other, in all sorts of combinations…

wine and brandy and champagne the night before, composing poetry or a violin concerto or a painting of sunlight in the morning, not that we were all that talented, but we tried…

the whole group of us, Ellis and Oliver and Jane Talbot and Bennett Sefton and Kit de Courcey, and sometimes someone would sleep with someone else—or more than one—and it’d be a delight, and sometimes someone wouldn’t’ve been told first, and they’d get jealous… ”

“Was that what happened?”

“What happened was that we were mostly still wildly drunk and Oliver and Bennett got into a shouting match about Kit, and someone said something actually unforgiveable, and then someone had pistols, and I tried to calm everyone down, but they were determined. They picked the spot over by the river, in the Rookwood park. I agreed to be Oliver’s second because I thought maybe I could still talk them out of it.

Oliver fired wide on purpose, and so did Ben, but Ben couldn’t hit a barn even sober, and dying hurts more than one might expect, but at least it was quick. ”

“Christ,” Charles said. He wanted to take Alex’s hand. He wanted to answer that blithely dismissed long-ago pain with comfort: I’m here, you didn’t deserve that, you shouldn’t’ve had to be hurt, I’m sorry. “You…no wonder you’re here, it must have been…awful. For you, for them.”

“Worse for them.” Alex wasn’t looking at him; but those cold fingers were suddenly real enough to brush Charles’s, forlorn; and Charles swung that way and caught Alex’s hand between both of his, wishing he could warm it.

“That was more or less the end…Ben actually joined a monastery, astonishingly enough. Ellis Rookwood…I was never sure whether that was an accident, or guilt. Kit went off to write for the opera and be happy, I think. And Oliver…left, after he buried me. He couldn’t stand to be here.

I’d thought if any of them heard me—like this, I mean, calling out—it’d be him, but I didn’t have much control over how and when I could be visible yet, and also I think he didn’t want to know. ”

“Did you love him?”

“Yes. Well, no, and yes. I think…” Alex was looking, now; their eyes met.

Alex’s body remained insubstantial, hazy, a dream of a young man who’d once tried to help, and who’d died for that.

His hand was cold in Charles’s, because it would not warm.

“The way that you love someone, when you’re both twenty years old and foolish and careless and falling into each other…

when you aren’t thinking about the future, only about now, and fun, and liking each other…

I think he felt more than I did. I thought so then, and I knew it wasn’t fair to him, and I’d almost said something, except we’d all said from the start that we wouldn’t take anything seriously.

It was easy to keep having fun. I think now I should have told him how I felt, or didn’t.

I’ve had a while to think about it. It wasn’t kind. I wasn’t kind, really, back then.”

“You were,” Charles said, “you are, you told me you tried to stop it, what happened—you tried to calm everyone down, you didn’t shoot anyone—and you’ve never hurt anyone, not even now—you worry about me in the cold, and you show up to defend me from the mayor and his wife—”

Alex laughed, but sadly. “You didn’t need the help.”

“You aren’t ever cruel.”

“Sometimes only bored,” Alex said, “and willing to pop up out of nowhere and flirt with churchyard visitors.” He was clearly trying to be self-deprecating, but he was also holding Charles’s hand.

“That’s my point, I think. Some ghosts can—can hurt people.

I’ve seen—I know they can. And what I’ve done—never mind.

But you…you never have. You might tease or startle people, but you wouldn’t ever harm them.

” He wanted to touch more; he lifted a hand, reached out, realized the futility at the last second: his solid fingers, not quite brushing Alex’s hair, wanting to cup that cheek, to make Alex see how true this was.

He could do none of that. He saw his hand, and the outline of the trees and grass and stones through the watercolor hues of Alex’s shape. He stopped.

“Charles,” Alex said, “I—” He turned; motion was happening. John, at the church side door. Looking their way.

Charles swore under his breath. “He’ll try to walk out here next, and that grass is wet—I should—”

“You love him. So very much. You and your brother, saving people, rescuing ghosts. Bringing us peace.” Alex’s chilly hand slid out of Charles’ grip. “I should go. For now.”

“Alex—”

“I just need to think,” Alex whispered, and was gone. Cleanly, coolly; and the immediacy cut like a knife, sliced like a bullet. A pistol shot. Staggering.

Charles stood in place, in the churchyard. Fought to catch his breath.

John outright took a step, and another: down the steps, into the wet grass. Charles clung to the horror of that—he’d made his brother venture onto dangerous terrain—as a fixed point in his whole shaken universe, and ran that way.

* * * *

The rest of the day was interminable. Charles spent part of it in the bookshop, part of it helping John organize the parish records and do the accounts, and part of it hovering in the churchyard in case Alex reappeared.

That did not happen, and a storm blew in, blustery and crackling and lashing him with rain. He gave up and went home, dripping.

He’d wanted to be there. He’d wanted to—

To help. To say, simply: I didn’t know you then, but I know you now, and from everything you’ve said, I still believe it: you haven’t hurt anyone. You couldn’t.

He liked being with Alex. He liked the way Alex thought about light and dark, and language, and kindness. He did not think it was love, based on two encounters and historical research, but—

But he’d thought the word love. Which meant that maybe he was thinking it, and maybe he was horribly afraid he was falling, or starting to fall, for a ghost he’d promised to banish from the village of Prestley.

John had asked whether he was well. Whether that had been another encounter, another attempted banishment. No, Charles had said. I wouldn’t try, without you.

He’d promised that, too. So many promises. And he was only himself, not good enough, only good at causing hurt. The opposite of Alex.

John’s leg had been hurting a bit, and he was in bed early, though he’d said he stay up reading for a while.

He’d asked whether Charles had anything more useful, a means of settling this ghost into a peaceful rest, a task to finish or an object to salt and burn and ritually cleanse.

Charles did not have any of those. His ghost seemed to just want to be here and alive, or not alive; there was not a specific task.

There was a body, but that would mean digging up Alex’s grave, and—

And, selfishly, he wanted Alex here. All gold and warm, even if cold to the touch, and bright and inviting.

Short and petite and utterly mesmerizing, talking, telling stories.

No wonder he and his friends had been so merry and beautiful and glorious together; Charles could see it, with Alex at the center, laughing, blond hair tied back in a queue or falling into his face, dressed in ridiculous foppish colors, alive in the world and in each moment, passionate about a play or a dancer or a poem.

Reminded, inspired, he went back to the rectory’s small library. The rain drummed upon the roof, and over the windowpane.

The shelves had his and John’s books and family records now, of course, but some of the collection had come with the house. And he had a guess. They’d all been artists, Alex had said: violin and painting and poetry. And Alex spoke like someone who loved words, who told stories.

His guess turned out to be right: there was one small slim volume on a shelf, bound in green, published as simply Poems by A.L. He took it down, and curled up in a chair, while the rain pounded.

His first honest impression was that Alex had also been honest: they weren’t brilliant. They were in the sort of meter that’d been fashionable in the later eighteenth century, and somewhat stylistically overdone, and very ornate, in the manner of a young man trying to be clever.

But here and there small flashes of truly memorable phrasing flickered through.

Moonbeams like dry bones and heartache. A road taken, one’s back turned to the past. A taste of wine like fire and sugar and need that wouldn’t be fulfilled, because the desire was for something more, unnamable even to the speaker, but the sweetness was here and now, and so he’d drink from it and forget.

Alex was at his best when he forgot to be decorative and clever, and instead simply wrote about feeling, with the kind of loneliness that Charles knew, because he knew how it felt to be alone in a crowd, how to pretend to smile when wanting the world to be different.

He shut the book but left his finger in it, to mark the spot.

Of course Alex had been a poet. Stories and stories, and Charles wanted more. And he wanted Alex to be at peace, at last.

He could not have everything. He never could. He knew.