Bones of a Feather - Carolyn Haines [82]
“Make yourself useful and find Millicent,” I told him.
He put his nose in the air and sniffed, then snuffled along the ground. Sweetie followed suit, and the two dogs took off in the underbrush. I had no choice but to run after them as fast as I could.
Four hundred acres is a lot of territory to cover on foot, especially if it’s wooded. My cell phone had a compass, which might have been somewhat useful to keep me going in a general direction—had I not finally discovered that the battery was not just dead but damaged. No wonder it wouldn’t hold a charge. As I trudged through the woods I thought about the Girl Scout meetings Mrs. Freeman hosted in her two-story home. She’d attempted to interest us Sunflower County girls in the arts of compass and map reading, proper table settings, honorable conduct, and home décor. Glancing at the sun and trying to aim for a westerly direction, I wished I’d been more tractable.
A soft voice, Victorian in phrasing and clear with melancholy, made me stop and turn around.
“Spirit of Earth! thy hand is chill: / I’ve felt its icy clasp; / And, shuddering, I remember still … / That stony-hearted grasp. / Thine eye bids love and joy depart: / Oh, turn its gaze from me! / It presses down my shrinking heart; / I will not walk with thee!” The young woman coming toward me wore a floor-length gown of gray flannel that must have been stifling in the summer heat.
Moving between the bright sun and the shadows, she was more vision than real. Perhaps I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. My only fear was that Sweetie and Roscoe would get so far ahead I couldn’t find them.
“Who are you?” I asked, when she stopped and lingered in the shade of two leafy sycamores. It struck me that she could easily be a ghost.
“You know my sister’s work far better than my own.”
If not a ghost than a riddler. I had no patience. “Step forward.”
She did so, and I saw she carried a book. Her hair was styled in ringlets from a center part and gathered at each ear—most unattractive. “Who is your sister? Or better yet, who the hell are you?”
“I am Anne Brontë, Emily’s sister. You’re drawn to the men who populate her world, especially those who forego good manners for passion. You, Sarah Booth Delaney, are addicted to passion.”
“I am no such thing. Come out of the shadows.” I wasn’t certain who—or what—I was dealing with and it unnerved me a little, but I doubted the spirit of a Brontë sister was walking the woods. The dark halls of Briarcliff, or the dense woods, might be home to any number of lunatics with delusions of literary grandeur, but not a genteel Brontë.
“Whatever pleases you, madam.” She stepped forward, and the sunlight caught her beautiful mocha skin.
“Jitty!” She’d tricked me. I should have caught on to her more quickly, and it irked me that she’d had me going. “Aren’t you about to sweat to death in that getup? Even ghosts surely feel the oppressive August weather.”
“Ladies glow, they don’t sweat.” She clung to the stiff and proper phrasing and pronunciation. “I don’t believe sweat was ever a condition applied to me or my sisters.”
“Okay, you don’t sweat. Pardon me. But you also don’t look well.” She wasn’t sweating, and though her skin was lovely, there was a hint of dark bruising beneath her eyes and she gave a tiny cough into a white tatted handkerchief. When she lowered it, I saw it was spotted with blood. Why she’d chosen the persona of a seriously ill young woman, I couldn’t guess. “What’s wrong with you?”
“The moors are not a healthy climate for me. I’m the youngest and most delicate of the living sisters. Death has haunted my family, but it’s such a fine topic for poetry.”
I wracked my brain trying to remember my literature classes. I’d been more of a Poe fan, but the gothic creations of Emily Brontë had remained with me. The work of Anne, the youngest of the Brontë brood, was not as familiar. She’d died young, I remembered that. “Tuberculosis.” At last I put my finger on it.
“Very good.” She smiled wanly.
“Why