Page 2 of The Prestley Ghost
“You didn’t have to bodily throw the entire delegation out. Poor Miss Primrose.”
“Don’t exaggerate. And don’t look at me that way.”
“They brought up our parents,” John said, voice, eyes, more gentle now, sympathetic, “and you—”
“There was no need to bring that up, and it’s none of their business.” Charles wanted this to be definitive. It was not, because he heard his own defensiveness, and loathed it. Nevertheless, he could not say everything he was thinking, not to his older brother and that utterly generous forgiving heart; so instead he went to find the brandy on the sideboard, and poured a hearty amount into the tea. It did not taste particularly appealing, but that was the point.
“It wasn’t your fault,” John said. “Itisn’t. You don’t have to—”
“Just tell me what you need me to do.”
“I need you to talk to me.”
Charles downed the rest of the dreadful brandy-tea concoction. “Iam.”
“You’re not listening.”
“First you want me to talk. And then listen. Which is it?”
“Charles—”
“I’ll do anything you need,” Charles said. “You know I will. Every time—at Oxford, at Dean, here—if you tell me you want to protect villagers from a drowning-spot or from stone-throwing angry spirits or just from an apparently unfashionable churchyard ghost, I’ll do it. You never have to ask. Anything. Is that clear enough?” He turned from John’s wide eyes, extended hand; from the silent accusation of the cane and the scrape of branches across the window and his heart. “I’ll go for a walk. And see whether I can deal with this ghost. It doesn’t sound like a difficult one.”
“Charles!”
He left, without looking back.
* * * *
The wind bit like the fangs of tiny needle-mouthed spirits. The afternoon crackled toward evening in sharply outlined colors and shapes: gunmetal grey, black lines of trees, the swinging painted signs of village shops, solid rooftops and gold in firegleam from windows. The air tasted of chimney-smoke and harvests.
Charles shivered, because he had not brought a coat, and his shirtsleeves and waistcoat were not warm enough; still, he deserved that too, so he did not turn back. He kicked a pebble in the dirt of the lane, and then wished he had not, because the pebble had done nothing to deserve that.
He should turn right and cross the lane and head to the churchyard, conveniently near the rectory. He should see aboutthe ghost, which might indeed be a simple task, in relative terms, of course. He should go back and apologize to John.
He should discover a means of moving through time, and ensure that the pain and grief and loss had never happened. He should tell his younger self to conceal, hide, pretend, so that none of this had ever come to pass, and Eliza and James Hayward would be alive to continue their brilliant folklorists’ work, and John would not require support to walk across a room.
He spun away from the village’s hearth-lights and shops, and went for a rapid walk, instead.
He did not have a destination in mind, as such, but the path meandered over autumn-brittle ground and a deceptively slim but deep treachery of river, crossed by stones. Charles hopped from stone to stone, slipped, caught his balance, pondered fleetingly whether he should throw himself in. Might be fitting. Easier. Plainly an accident. No one’s fault.
But he wouldn’t. He would never cause John more pain, and he had agreed to help deal with the Prestley ghost, and he didlikehelping people, albeit not as much as John, who would heroically give away their last coins to roadside beggars and orphans, a fact rather than an exaggeration. Charles managed their finances, and had even before leaving university. Their inheritance had only gone so far, and someone had to think about incomes versus expenditures, and that someone was not ever going to be John, and should not have to be. Charles could do that. Charles would do that. Anything.
Anything, not to make up for what he’d done—he could not do that—but to make the world easier.
He followed the path along the river and up a gradual rise, until he encountered an old stone wall, and leaned against it, looking at the water, the village, the fields, the steeple, without really seeing any of it.
John wanted him to talk. There was nothing to say. What was left? I’m sorry that I told our parents that everything they’d spent their lives researching, the ghosts and the folklore, was true? I’m sorry that I brought us to that bridge, all those years ago, and when the water rose and the stones broke and the drowned man screamed, I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to save anyone? But that was obvious; that was blatant; that did not need speaking aloud.
He could say: I tried, John, I did try, I was young and small and terrified, and I did what I could, I pulled you out, I know I was too late but I tried; but that was only an insufficiency of words. It had been, and remained, his fault.
John had never said so, not once. But no one had had to say it. The black-draped funeral and the physicians’ sidelong looks and John’s persistent limp, thirteen years on, all shouted Charles’s name.
His hands bit into the stones of the wall. The river rushed and thrashed, furious with impending ice. The sun was lowering in the west, across the green fields and untroubled serene places of England. Charles’s fingers hurt, bruised from trying to dig into rock.
He moved his hands. He did not want scratches, injuries, more for John to fret over.
He stared into the vicious eddies of the water again. It scraped past rocks, churned, bubbled, frothed. Water. Of course. No escaping it, evidently.
