Page 32 of Infamous

‘Ghosts?’ said Simon.

Eddie noticed that all of her younger siblings were suddenly paying far more attention than they usually did to anything at all.

‘Stuffed full of them. You can hardly move without walking through strangely frigid patches, or glimpsing an apparition in the next room. I’m convinced there was somebody else sitting in my chair at dinner once – it felt frightfully rude to eat my chicken in some poor dead fellow’s lap.’

‘Have you spoken to one?’ said Amelia, gazing at him with enormous eyes from under her unruly fringe.

‘On occasion,’ said Nash.

Simon’s mouth had fallen open. Beatrice tapped Nash on the shoulder again, and when he held out his hand, she dropped so many pieces of metal into it that some of them bounced off and scattered onto the floor.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Miller. ‘Sorry about that. Family heirloom, was it?’

‘You know, I have always found linear time to be very restrictive,’ said Nash cheerfully, as Beatrice handed back what had once been a watch with an expression of impish glee on her face.

Dinner was much of the same. Eddie would have been horrified by her family’s behaviour, but Nash seemed genuinely thrilled by it all; he managed to hold a long conversation with Simon about different types of tree nut without looking the least bit bored, provided Amelia with a long list of every horse he had ever encountered and their merits, gave Beatrice all of his pudding when he caught her eyeing it up, and even managed to engage Lucy-Anne in a lively discussion about music.

‘I play the harp, myself,’ she said, fluttering her eyelashes at him in what she probably imagined was a coquettish fashion and instead looking as if she had grit in both eyes.

‘I should dearly love to hear you play,’ said Nash.

He was treating her like an adult, like he would any other lady around the table, a clear distinction between how he spoke to her and how he spoke to thechildren, and Eddie could tell that she was completely intoxicated by it.

After dinner his wish was granted; they all sat in the drawing room while she played piece after piece, only looking up from the harp to ensure that Nash was watching. Eddie sat on the floor with Simon, attempting to put Nash’s watch back together, Simon getting increasingly frustrated with her lack of technical know-how, while Nash smoked a pipe with Mr Miller – the two of them were united in their disdain for a particular newspaper, and were very content to sit and complain about it at length.

‘Stop flirting with my sister,’ Eddie hissed when she got the chance, handing him another glass of wine while her father tried to placate an overtired Beatrice.

‘WhoshouldI flirt with, then?’ Nash muttered back. ‘I did try your father, but he’s very hard to read .?.?.’

Eddie snorted and then tried to turn it into a cough when she saw her father watching them.

By the time Nash bade them all farewell, Eddie was halfway convinced that he could have told them that he was whisking her away to perform satanic rituals in this apparently very haunted house of his, and her mother and father simply would have shaken his hand and wished him well on his commune with Satan. To Eddie’s horror, Lucy-Annegiggledwhen he kissed her hand in farewell, and then stood at the window watching him walk away down the street.

‘You do know he’s married,’ she said, when the rest of the family had either naturally dispersed or, in Beatrice’s case, been carried, struggling, up to bed.

Lucy-Anne, who had clearly been in another world entirely, turned to face Eddie with a scowl on her face and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

‘Iknow that,’ she bit out. ‘But I am not entirely convinced thatIamthe one who needs reminding.’

Eddie could only gape incredulously at her sister as she raised her eyebrows, clearly feeling very pleased with herself, and then turned and flounced away towards the stairs.

Chapter Thirteen

When Nash had described the house as being ‘upon a lake’, Eddie had conjured visions of a large and comfortable estate tucked into the curve of a glorified pond, perhaps with a pretty wooden sailing boat moored at the end of a jetty for afternoon jaunts around the water. It hadn’t seemed important to dig for more details, the fact of her invitation being all that truly mattered, and she only realised halfway through their first day of travelling that she had absolutely no idea what she was getting herself into.

The party had been divided between two coaches. At first Eddie had been glad that she had been allocated a place with Dayo Akerele, the Nicholsons and Juno the dog, far from eager to spend two days sitting opposite Rose and her fiancé with her heart a gaping wound, but it had quickly become apparent that Nash and Liza weren’t really speaking, which added a palpable frisson of awkwardness to their journey.

‘Have you been to the house before?’ she murmured to Mr Akerele, once Nash was either asleep or doing a good job of pretending. Liza was staring expressionlessly out of the window.

‘No,’ said Dayo. ‘Decamping to the countryside to stay in a haunted house with friends of Nash is usually the sort of thing I stay away from at all costs.’

‘Why did you decide to come this time, then?’

Mr Akerele pulled a face. ‘I have a deadline,’ he said. ‘I need to write, and Nash said .?.?. Well, he said a lot of things, but primarily that it would be a good place to get my head down and work uninterrupted.’

Nash had said the same to Eddie, but she had heard the rattling of many bottles of liquor when their trunks were deposited into the back of the coach, and was starting to have doubts.

‘At the merest hint of a ghost, or nonsense of that sort,’ Dayo said, pulling his hat down over his face and crossing his arms so that he might nap, ‘I will be on the first boat out.’