Page 10 of The Prestley Ghost
“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 youcertainyou’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; areyouunnatural, 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. Goaway.” He scowled Charles’s direction. “Dosomething.”
“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.Startlingpeople. It’s notnice.”
“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.”
