The Shadow and the Night: Glenncailty Castle, Book 3 Page 20

  “You’re done for the night?”

  “There’s a ghost,” Tristan said, raising his voice to be heard over the screams.

  Melissa shrugged. “Aren’t there always, around here? I’ll be done in a few minutes.”

  “Come with me, now.”

  “I’m almost finished with this femur.”

  Tristan watched, his heart in his throat, as the maid’s face aged, her eyeless sockets retreating further into her head, lips pulled back to reveal not just teeth but the jaw bones themselves. The chains were wrapped around her arms, neck, chest and legs. Her naked breasts were a mess of grated flesh and black with blood.

  “Mon dieu.” Tristan moved toward Melissa, each step slow and careful. “The bones, mon ange. Who were they?”

  “This is the grave Seamus was trying to dig up. The casket was too rotted and wet to take out, so we dried it out in place and added bracing. We were finally able to exhume it earlier today. It was a woman—a girl, really. She was approximately seventeen or eighteen when she died. Her remains show extensive signs of abuse. Based on healed versus newer marks, I would say that whatever happened to her happened over the course of several years.”

  “What did they do to her?”

  “So far I’ve got multiple small fractures of the wrist and ankle bones, probably a result of sustained bondage. There are also nicks along the ribs and scapula indicative of severe soft tissue wounds, perhaps from a knife. There are also some marks around the eye sockets—they’re more healed on the left than on the right. If I had to guess, I’d say that she was blinded—her eyes forcibly removed with a sharp instrument, and it was done one eye at a time.”

  The maid wailed louder, the scream increasing in volume until Tristan covered his ears with his hands, his eyes watering.

  “Tristan, are you okay?” Melissa’s voice was barely audible.

  “We found your body. Give me your name and we’ll bury you.” Tristan’s words were a desperate bid to get the screaming to stop. He’d never tried to reason with a ghost before. Never attempted to guess what they needed or wanted. Melissa’s belief that each person’s life deserved the recognition of burial and ceremony had changed that for him.

  The noise didn’t stop.

  “Who are you?” he yelled.

  The screaming stopped, the silence deafening. Tristan looked at the maid. She was once more a pretty girl with a sad face, wearing a simple dress and a few lengths of chain.

  “I know her.” The woman’s voice came from the entrance to the church. “She’s my sister.”

  Tristan turned slowly. Even if he hadn’t recognized the voice, he would have known who would be there. There was no one else it could be.

  Elizabeth wore a pale blue sweater and gray slacks. Her hair was loose and she looked younger than normal.

  “Tristan, what’s going on?” Melissa asked.

  “Elizabeth is here.”

  “Oh. Her. Well, tell her I said ‘hi’. I’m almost finished.”

  Melissa’s casual attitude was almost comical. Tristan’s muscles were tense, and a quick glance around told him that Jacques was gone. Elizabeth’s boots thumped over the stone. She turned to look at the back wall, ignoring the skeletons laid out all around the small space.

  “You see them, don’t you?” she asked, gesturing at the image of wings burned into the stone on either side of the door.

  “Yes.” Tristan was taken by surprise. “No one else can.” He’d started to think that the wings weren’t real.

  “A pity, and they’re lovely.” Elizabeth faced him. “She’s protected, but you know that, don’t you?”

  “What are you?” Tristan tried to keep his tone casual, but the words came out harsher than he’d planned.

  “Your brother explained it to you, I assume?”

  “You know about Jacques?”

  “I can feel him. We are not the same, but when you took the job I felt something new arrive. There’re many ghosts here, but still I knew.”

  “How do you look and feel so real?” Tristan asked.

  “Because she’s not a ghost.” Now it was Seamus who was standing in the door. The master of the castle wore a long, gray coat and his face was half in shadow. With a small gesture of his hand, the hounds sat on the threshold, guards at the door.

  “You!” Melissa jumped to her feet. “Don’t touch the graveyard.” She rushed toward the door.

  “Stay here.” Tristan grabbed her hand as she passed him, pulling her to a stop.

  “Why?” Melissa demanded.

  Tristan looked from Elizabeth to Seamus. “This ends tonight.”

  “Ends?” Seamus asked. “I wish that were so. But there is no end.” As he moved into the light, Tristan could see the weary lines that marked Seamus’ face.

  “There is,” Tristan countered. He couldn’t say why he was so certain, but the air was thick and time seemed to have slowed. It felt like a moment when things would change.

  Melissa stilled, her gaze searching his face. She couldn’t hear Elizabeth, so she didn’t know the extent of what had been said. He expected her to protest, but instead she nodded. “Tell me what to do,” she whispered, lacing her fingers into his.

  Tristan squeezed her hand.

  “You say she’s not a ghost,” Tristan said. “What is she?”

  “I’m interested to know why Dr. Heavey isn’t able to see her,” Seamus said.

  “I told you, Seamus.” Elizabeth folded her arms. “She’s protected.”

  “What by?”

  Elizabeth looked at the wall of the church and the outline of wings that was burned into the stone. “I won’t tell you that.” She looked at Tristan.

  “Is it really…are they real?” Tristan didn’t dare be any more specific with his question.

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Good exists, same as evil. I suspect the manifestation has more to do with your beliefs, or hers, than the true nature of it. Your mind needed a way to process what you were in the presence of.”

  “What are you talking about?” Seamus asked. He made his way into the church and followed their gaze to the wall. His limp, which he normally hid with a measured walking style, was more apparent than Tristan had ever seen it.

  “What are you talking about?” Melissa repeated. Despite her earlier words, he could tell her patience was wearing thin.

  “Elizabeth knows about what happened to us in here,” he explained.

  “She knows? How? Was that her? Did she answer your question about what she is?”

  “She didn’t.” He responded to Melissa but focused on Elizabeth.

  “As I said, she’s not a ghost.” Seamus peered into a casket set out on the table. The edges were reinforced with straps, and a clean sheet of paper waited on the next table over, ready to have the bones laid out.

  “Don’t touch that,” Melissa snapped at him.

  “Then what is she?” Tristan asked.

  Elizabeth didn’t respond. Just when Tristan was about to repeat his questions, Seamus spoke.

  “Do you know what that is out there?” Seamus motioned toward the cemetery.

  “A graveyard full of victims,” Melissa answered. “Every one of these skeletons bears the marks of severe trauma. Some aren’t conclusively the result of violence—they could have been the result of accidents—but all together it’s very clear that people laid to rest out there were purposefully injured prior to death. Many of the injuries were severe enough to be the cause of death.”

  “The victims of my family’s madness are buried there, in a Church of England cemetery, because torturing and killing wasn’t enough. They had to make sure that the souls suffered even after death.” Seamus’ matter-of-fact words were haunting, chilling.

  Melissa frowned. “How do you know all this?”

  “Let’s say it’s family knowledge.” Seamus looked at Elizabeth.

  “Then who destroyed the grave markers?” Melissa asked.

  “The markers were put in place by the families of
the dead. It was done in secret, in the dead of night or when the Lord of Glenncailty returned to England, giving these people some measure of peace. Until the day it was decided these dead shouldn’t be acknowledged, and the Lord of Glenncailty ordered the gravestones destroyed.”

  “But they are not your family,” Tristan said. “You inherited the land when Ireland became independent.” He remembered that much from the various castle histories they had posted around.

  “I’m afraid that isn’t true. O’Muircheartaigh is simply the Irish version of my true last name.”

  “Moriarty,” Melissa said. “‘Hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.’”

  “Who?” Tristan was not sure what the significance of that name was or what Melissa was talking about.

  “Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis,” she explained. “That’s how Holmes describes Moriarty.”

  “Of course.” Tristan nodded.

  “Fitting, in a way, that my family should bear the name of a villain,” Seamus said.

  “If your family was English, how did they keep this place? I thought lands were returned to Irish citizens.” Tristan was holding his anger in check, but it was getting more difficult. Was all this secrecy merely to protect Seamus’ claim to the land?

  “It was, but he has a legitimate claim as an Irish citizen,” Melissa said.

  Tristan frowned as he looked down at her. It seemed that she’d learned more about this place and its history than anyone, even him, had given her credit for. Seamus was examining her with an unfriendly expression.

  “My family has been loyal to this country since the Easter Rising,” he said finally. “Since a second son living here sided with rebels, renouncing his claim to the titles in England and changing his name.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re the direct descendant of the only surviving child from the nursery.”

  Seamus’ gaze slid away from Melissa.

  Tristan’s brows rose. “He is?”

  “Yes. There were four children, and we accounted for three of them.”

  “George was taken to England.” Elizabeth had been strangely quiet as Tristan and Melissa tried to puzzle out what was going on. “The lord’s English wife was barren, and rather than let the title pass to a relative, they lied and manipulated their way into having John’s Irish bastard made heir.

  “George was half-Irish, but he didn’t know—he was so young that he forgot where he’d come from, or he was forced to forget. By the time he was an adult and returned to Ireland as the master of the castle, no one recognized him. Or if they did, they didn’t acknowledge that the harsh, cruel man bore the same blood as one of the glen’s most respected families.”

  Tristan quickly related what Elizabeth was saying to Melissa.

  “Is she really speaking about it as if she were there?” Melissa asked.

  “I was,” Elizabeth answered. “I’ve been here for a long time.”

  “How?” Tristan asked.

  “She keeps track of our sins and makes sure we pay for them.” Seamus looked at Elizabeth, and there was loathing in his eyes.

  “She is your conscience?” Tristan asked.

  “She is the ghost of every person who recognized the sins but did not stop it.” Seamus smiled, and it was a terrible, cold thing.

  Tristan puzzled that over. “She’s not a single ghost. She’s many ghosts, all together.”

  Elizabeth nodded once.

  “And that is why she’s so real?” Melissa asked, brow furrowed as she tried to follow the conversation.

  “She’s nodding,” Tristan reported.

  There was a flash of movement in the corner at the same time that the lights flickered. Tristan shoved Melissa behind him. Protected or not, he couldn’t stand to see the maid in chains hovering near Melissa while she devolved into a thing of horror. He would keep her close. He would protect her.

  Elizabeth and Seamus both looked at the gray-tinged apparition who now stood between them.

  “You said you knew her,” Tristan said. “You said she was your sister.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “I began when she died.”

  “How?”

  The work light closest to the door clicked off, leaving half the interior in shadow. Tristan backed himself and Melissa up until they were firmly in the pool of light from the remaining lamp.

  “Once, a long time ago, I was Elizabeth. My father’s titles included that of Lord of Glenncailty. He died when I was young, and my brother inherited. I did not know my brother well—he’d been away at school while I was growing up. When he did come home, I was afraid of him. When he grew bored, he decided to go to Ireland to survey his holding here.”

  Elizabeth paused, looking between Tristan and Seamus. Realizing why she’d paused, Tristan quickly passed on what she was saying to Melissa.

  “Before he left, he decided to take my companion with him. She was a year older than me and we’d been friends since we were small, though she was a servant. My mother elevated her to the status of companion as we grew. But she was still a servant, and I had no power to stop my brother from taking her as part of his entourage, and she had no way of leaving our household to seek different employment—my brother’s influence would have prevented her from getting another position.”

  Elizabeth came to stand beside the skeleton Melissa had been examining. Her hand hovered over the skull, which had a spider web of cracks in the top.

  “I knew when she died,” Elizabeth said. “I could feel it. When my brother returned, I plied his valet with alcohol until he revealed what had happened to my friend.

  “My brother tortured her. He took her from me to torment me. He hated me, or maybe it was just that he enjoyed his ownership of me. He wasn’t as powerful or wealthy as he wanted to be, and it made him mean. Made him long to control something, someone.

  “She was my only true friend. But he couldn’t see me suffering, so instead he made her suffer. She was forced to work as a scullery maid while wearing chains like a slave. She was regularly beaten, raped and tortured. Once, when she fought back, my brother cut out her eye. Then he cut out the other one, blinding her. She died not long after that.”

  The words were bitter and foul on his tongue as Tristan repeated what had been said. Melissa squeezed his hand.

  “What my brother never knew, and I never told him, was that she was our sister. My mother told me the truth, said that my father had an affair and the woman died when the child was small. Our cook took Joan in, raised her. My mother knew the truth and tried to look out for the little girl. When she saw that we loved one another as sisters did, my mother made sure we were there for each other.

  “My brother tortured, raped and murdered our sister.”

  Silence hung in the air, thick after Elizabeth’s story. Tristan whispered what he’d heard to Melissa.

  “What happened to her, to Elizabeth?” Melissa asked.

  “I died when I was forty. I never married. My brother did, and I tried to help raise his children, to make sure they would not do what their father had done. I died thinking I’d succeeded.”

  “The rot goes deep.” Seamus had been quiet while Elizabeth spoke. “The next man was no better.”

  “Who else is Elizabeth?” Melissa asked. “Didn’t you say she’s more than one ghost?”

  “In every generation there was a woman who knew what was happening in Glenncailty and did not stop it. Some tried, some didn’t, but their consciousness remained, joining with others, until I was here,” Elizabeth explained.

  “But it’s over. There is no one being tortured here. The past is gone,” Tristan said.

  “It cannot be over until it is washed clean,” Seamus said. “For one hundred years, Elizabeth has been there, demanding that we atone for the sins of our family. That’s why I opened the hotel. Hundreds of years of death and torment were waiting in these walls. I wanted to burn it to the ground, but all that would do is remove the physical place. The past would remain.”
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br />   “So you’re trying to cancel out the negativity with positivity,” Melissa said. “There’s a precedent for that in the belief systems of many cultures. I assume that’s why Elizabeth took on the role of general manager, to help in this quest. But if what you want is to cleanse Glenncailty, then why did you fight me? Why did you try and remove the bones?”

  “And if you knew these things, why didn’t you say them?” Tristan added, angry that he and everyone else who’d come to make Glenncailty a success were being used. They were foot soldiers in a war against the darkness of the past.

  “I wanted to bring happiness and life to this wretched place, but I did not intend to do it while revealing the darkness. Perhaps I was naive to think that I could change Glenncailty while maintaining my family’s secrets.”

  “I hate secrets,” Melissa said.

  “I gathered as much.” Seamus walked up to Melissa, and Tristan stepped in front of her.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, rubbing his shoulder.

  Tristan stepped to the side.

  “You will give them peace?” Seamus asked, gesturing to the bones. His tone was intense, his black eyes piercing in the harsh light.

  “I don’t know about that, but I will find them. I will, if I can, give them back their names, and they will be treated with respect.”

  “All of them?”

  “Everyone in the cemetery.”

  “And the others?”

  “There are more?”

  Seamus nodded.

  Melissa sighed and folded her arms. “I’ll go over every inch of the grounds.”

  “Then Tristan is right. This ends tonight.”

  Seamus reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife.

  Tristan grabbed Melissa, jerking her away, his first thought to protect her. The last thing he saw before the remaining light flickered and died was the glint of metal. He drew them to the floor, crouching in the darkness. He listened for Seamus footsteps but couldn’t hear anything.

  “Melissa,” he hissed, “are you all right?”

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She squeezed his hands.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving him alone in here with the bones. I think he might be slightly nuts.”