Page 106 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
If he expected me to flit round the garden in this outfit afterwards I’d catch my death even with all that wine inside me.
I wondered if Dr Amulet Bone always wore white.
…chained to the bed he saw her coming slowly towards him, a glimmer of white in the darkness. Then he heard the soft susurrationof her long skirts against the cold stone floor and began uncontrollably to shiver…
As the clock sonorously struck midnight somewhere down in the dark depths of the house, I ran barefoot down the carpeted hall, my gauzy draperies streaming behind me.
My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight coming from the tall windows down one side, but as I reached the dark, blank panelling at the endwhere the gallery turned, a dank waft of air touched my face and then something – or someone – snatched me into cold, muffling blackness.
My scream must have been cut off by the closing of the secret panel behind me, and was probably most effective, but as I drew breath for another mighty shriek, a large hand covered my mouth.
‘Shh! It’s only me – you’re safe!’ hissed Dante. He musthave feltme shaking uncontrollably, because he gave an exclamation and, wrapping his arms around me said apologetically: ‘Sorry, Cass – I was so made up with finding this stair and the panelling that I forgot about the cupboard effect. And it isn’t a cupboard, because there’s a way out.’
I rested my head against his broad chest: déjà vu again.
‘If you ever do anything like that to me again, I’ll killyou, Dante Chase,’ I promised, waiting for my heart to stop pounding away.
‘It must have looked pretty authentic to our Spectrologists, though – they were up on the balcony when you ran from under it, bang on the stroke of midnight. Come on,’ he added, switching on a small torch and pointing it down some shallow, twisting steps. My Chinese shoes sat sedately side by side on the top one. ‘It’sthe rose garden now.’
I noticed that he was wearing his ruffled shirt and breeches again.
‘You’re going to do some haunting too?’
‘We’regoing to do some haunting, as the doomed lovers who walk the rose garden.’
‘We are? I don’t remember hearing about those.’
‘Probably not, since I took a leaf out of your book and made it up. However, it’s a sad and tragic tale. Come on.’
We emerged on thekitchen floor through what looked like a china cupboard, and leaving the house by a side door, sneaked around to the rose garden.
Dante took my hand in a lover-like fashion, but when I shivered he put his arm around me instead, which was much warmer and equally authentic. As we strolled through the formal pathways I wondered how many of the visitors had read Dante’s thoughtfully printed hand-outand were even now observing us through the windows.
It can’t have been very exciting.
When I said so, Dante suddenly suggested he add some reality to an unconvincing performance and kissed me.
It would not have been in character to struggle, but when I could speak again my mouth said: ‘Call that a convincing performance?’ without asking my brain’s permission first. I knew drinking in Dante’scompany was a bad idea.
He was already breathing a trifle heavily for a ghost, but this put him on his mettle, and things might then have got a trifle out of hand had not the scrunch of gravel alerted us to the fact that one or more of the visitors were creeping up on us.
Hand in hand we fled down the rose garden, crept along the far side of the overgrown yew hedge and into the side door ofthe west wing, which Dante locked behind us before we collapsed in a breathless heap.
