Waters of the Deep: Unquiet Spirits, #2

By Alex Beecroft

Charles and Jasper are brought in to investigate a fatal stabbing in (the cotton-mill town of) Paradise. But this time the only troublesome ghost in the case is their own adopted child Lily. So what’s leaving the glistening trail in the woods? Why did the vicar’s daughter suddenly kill herself? And what is happening to the extra cow?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Beecroft
• Release date: Nov 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386383697

Alex Beecroft

Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the Peak District. Alex studied English and Philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full time author, Alex lives with her husband and two daughters in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist. Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has lead a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800 year old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn't learned to operate a mobile phone.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

In Which Dr. Floyd lances the boil of our discontent.

No ghosts roared out to greet Charles as he turned a now venerable Sultan towards Jasper’s drive rather than George’s. It would have been easier if they had. When Margaret, the White Lady of Clitheroe Hall had tried to smother him, he had been his father’s son. The hall had been his home, in the innocent sense that he had grown up there, and everything he beheld was familiar to the point that the stones were part of him, and he of them.

He hesitated at the end of the drive that had once lead up to the Admiral’s house, and now lead to the house that he shared with Jasper Marin, the Admiral’s bastard heir. A great revulsion for himself had carried him out of London at an hour too early for dawn, the broad summer sky like pitch above him. Now, he checked his watch, at half five in the morning a long bank of cloud lay golden in the east, heralding the drowned sun’s leap into a new day.

He could go to his childish home even yet. Sultan still tugged that way, towards the familiar stables. Charles could climb to his own old bedroom, which George had ordered redecorated in Chinese silk that winter to make it acceptable to guests. He could sleep where a ghostly hand had risen from his pillow and tried to throttle him. It would be better than facing Jasper while the sticky scales of Theo Tidy’s seed were still peeling from his belly.

With a groan, Charles dropped his reins and lowered his reeling head into his hands. Why had he done it? Honestly, he didn’t even like Theo any more - that had been a boy’s infatuation, once. And even then he had half suspected Theo of using it entirely to squeeze money out of him. He’d opened himself to blackmail and ruin, and why? Why?

Deprived of guidance, Sultan began ambling towards the Latham house, cropping along the sides of the dry path as he went. The very tip of an urn in the family graveyard gave an umber gleam in the broadening twilight, and Charles almost turned tail entirely, almost rode back to London, onto the docks, to a ship, to anywhere.

His head had begun to tighten around the brow, but the squeeze of a hangover couldn’t take away the sickness of his heart. It sent trails of ague through him, trembling and nauseous and heavy as sin, until it was all he could do not to slip off the saddle and sink into the bowels of the earth.

Instead, he gathered up the reins again and hauled Sultan’s head around. George’s house was not his house any longer. If he sneaked down to breakfast later in the morning, George would clap him on the back and laugh, and tell him he knew the blood would tell eventually. He knew this mad idea that he and Jasper could be somehow as committed and respectable as any married couple was a load of bunkum, and that perhaps now he should live hard while he still had his youth.

The thought of George’s praise was vile enough to drive Charles past and force him at last into the Admiral’s stables, where one of Jasper’s new pity-hires roused himself from a frowsty bale of blankets in the hay-loft and gave Charles what his guilty heart thought of as a condemning look. Of course, everyone could see it on him. And of course the boy - recruited straight out of the pillory when no one sane would have given him a job - would report everything to the master he idolized. Half of Jasper’s household worshiped Jasper and regarded Charles as the cursed interloper without whom they would have their own chance.

So why in God’s name shouldn’t Charles have his own admirers? Why in Hell’s name should he feel like he was walking to the scaffold instead of his own door?

Inside accosted his eyes with brightness, lamps lit in the hall and the receiving room. A footman took his coat and shoes, brought slippers and banyan. This was one of the Admiral’s ex sailors, and hadn’t troubled himself to put on his own coat to welcome his master’s delinquent toy home. Though Charles knew the servant well enough by now to know in his rational mind that this was how the man always was, he still felt cut by the small slight.

Master Jasper be waiting up in the library, the man said, Charles’s green silk coat shrugged over his elbow. The coat wasn’t stained, was it? The coat would give nothing away to the servants. But then why would he—

Why the hell would he be waiting for me? Charles snapped. It’s no concern of his when I rise or retire.

As you say. The old sailor shrugged one shoulder, slovenly and unimpressed, aware of his own status as an old retainer whom Charles couldn’t fire. I just thought you’d like to know.

The whole of England must know they were living together in sin. There were mocking pamphlets about it available from Harding’s print shop. Theo had known, and used it to argue that since Charles’s virtue had been lost, what mattered a little extra diversion on top?

Oh, God, he was going to be sick.

He clapped a hand over his mouth and bowed forward to keep it in. No, he couldn’t carry this guilt any longer. He couldn’t go to bed with this and wake up with it again in the morning. Whatever else he was, he was no coward. He should face it. On second thought, perhaps I’ll go to him. We won’t need you any more tonight. Go to bed.

The library door swung noiselessly open on a tranquil scene. Fire still warm in heaps of embers in the grate, Jasper nodding on the green leather and mahogany chaise before it, with a light silk house-coat pooling in sun-bright gold over his long legs, and his wig off, the curls of his un-powdered hair catching glimmers of ruby from the fire. Warm. Warm as home.

Charles’s courage failed him. He drew back to leave the room, but the door slammed itself behind him with a skirl of cold air and there was Lily, a gray smudge of the memory of a child with ringlets and ribbons that belonged to another century. See Papa, I said he’d come back.

Jasper raised his eyes to meet Charles’s gaze, and it was as though he was a mouse beneath a naturalist’s glass dome, all the air being sucked away from him while he ran frantically up the invisible walls trying to breathe. He didn’t know what Jasper saw in his face. Everything, perhaps.

So now I see you aren’t lying dead beside the road somewhere between here and London, I’m going to bed. I’m too tired to talk.

A kindly room, gem toned. Charles had bought the still life of pomegranates that hung above the mantle, and the six foot span of assorted books bound in dark green leather that faced him over Jasper’s shoulder, but it felt like a dragon’s den. If he moved, if he spoke, he would be annihilated. All hope would be lost.

He tried anyway. Jasper I...

Jasper’s face had been sullen until then, weary with endurance. But as he stood and the gold silk flared with his movement as if in flames, Charles was abruptly afraid of him as he had never been before.

No, Jasper said. I told you. I’m too tired to deal with this calmly, so—

Please, Charles tried, pierced by the thought that this was worse than he had supposed, by the sensation that the lungs were pulling away from his ribs, the fibers that held him together stretching and tearing. I need to—

It’s always about what you need, isn’t it? The worst thing was that look had been turned on George once. The thought that Charles could ever have made Jasper feel as used as George once had, that Charles might live down to that example was...

I didn’t mean to sleep with—

Stop!

They had been scaling up to a full face shouting match, despite Jasper’s wishes, but at that all-but-confession, Jasper had frozen deadly still, and Lily had whisked between them like a small Arctic breeze, her chill pulling the moisture out of the air, making it snow on her insubstantial fingers. She grasped for Charles and the sensation of her hand passing through his leg behind the knee was like being filled with dirty water, clammy and unclean.

Don’t. Please don’t argue. She ran to Jasper and tugged the silk of his robe around herself, so he could settle a hand on top of it and thus be touching her. It looked like tears on her little round face, but she was dead, a long dead thing, and Charles couldn’t be completely sure her tears were anything real. Daddy don’t argue. He’ll put you in the wall. I don’t want to go back in the wall.

Jasper thawed enough to give Charles another long gaze. One that said whatever he had been expecting, this was worse. Then he looked down at the uncanny child and gathered her close. We’re not going in the wall, sweetie. We’re going to bed. And then we’re all going to discuss it in the morning.

Can I—

You can sleep wherever you like, Charles. But not with me.

Jasper pushed past him, shut the door behind himself with a click as final as a coffin lid. After which the prospect of opening the door and going anywhere was more than Charles could bear. He slumped down on the chaise where Jasper had been, huddling into the faint warmth he had left, and waited in dumb suffering until they could talk again.

Why had