O Night Divine A Holiday Collection of Spirited Christmas Tales - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,27

he agreed with a smile.

He was very handsome, Elizabeth thought, though terribly young and not at all the sort for her being that he was stark raving mad. Still, pretty. A moment later, with the sherry in hand, she found the dowager duchess and delivered the drink.

“Who were you speaking to over there?” the dowager duchess demanded.

“Some gentleman… just making observation about the soiree,” Elizabeth remarked.

“I saw no gentleman! I saw you talking to yourself like some sort of madwoman,” the dowager duchess replied with a stern look. “It’s one thing for these heartless, wretched gossips to try and rake you over the coals for your past. It’s quite another for you to provide them additional grist for the gossip mill. Mind yourself, Miss Burkhart.”

She hadn’t seen him. Elizabeth blinked. She hadn’t seen him at all. Was she mad? Was she going mad from the pressure of trying not to destroy her daughter’s lunch into society as the Viscountess Seaburn? “I find I am not feeling quite myself, your grace. Please pardon me for a moment, won’t you?”

Without waiting for an answer, Elizabeth made a hasty exit from the ballroom. Down the stairs, she reached the second floor and darted past a footman toward the darkened doorway of the library. Inside the room, she closed the door behind her with a resounding thud and with only the light of the fire burning low in the hearth to guide her, made her way toward the desk. There was a gas lamp there and, with shaking hands, she finally managed to strike a match to tinder and get the blasted thing lit.

As the dim glow filled the room, Elizabeth looked around and found herself alone. She breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m not mad. I’m not mad at all. I simply had a momentary lapse of reality brought on by the stress of nosy, old biddies.”

“Is that what it was?”

A shriek escaped her and she nearly set the entire house ablaze by sending the lamp she’d just lit crashing to the floor. At the last moment, she managed to right it and only the wildly flickering flame revealed just how closely disaster had been averted.

“You were not in here a moment ago! How did you simply… you can’t simply materialize! That isn’t how things work!” Elizabeth said, stamping her foot on the carpet for emphasis.

“I can. I do. I’m dead. It’s sort of how we do things.”

“Dead?” Her eyes widened, her brows shooting almost to her hairline in complete shock. “Dead? I’m being haunted? I don’t deserve this! Why would you haunt me? Haunt one of those dreadful, gossipy wretches in the ballroom! That’s who deserves to be haunted!”

She was arguing with what arguably could only be a figment of her imagination. Realizing that, Elizabeth clamped her lips shut and turned away from the “spirit”.

“It’s not a punishment, you know?” he said, strolling idly around the perimeter of the desk until he was, once more, in her line of sight. “Don’t get me wrong. It can be. Sometimes it ought to be… but the dead have work just like the living.”

Against her better judgment, Elizabeth gave him a once over, noting his impeccably tied cravat and starched collar. Other than the fact that his waistcoat tended toward the garish side of things, he was turned out meticulously. “And do the dead have valets?”

He grinned, once more showing just how handsome he was. At least, she thought, if she had to lose her mind then her hallucinations weren’t horrendous to look upon.

“We don’t. But we don’t really have a physical form either so this is what I was buried in.” The last was uttered in a somewhat theatrical whisper. “But I’m not here to talk about death and burials, Elizabeth Selene Burkhart. I’m here to talk about life… the life you should have. The life you can have if you’ll allow me to guide you.”

“Guide me to what?” she demanded. Did hallucinations always use one’s middle name?

“The love and the life that would have been yours… if William Satterly had not intervened. There’s a perfect person for all of us, you know? Your daughter found hers. Now it’s your turn.”

“Who are you really?” Elizabeth asked.

“You can call me Burney,” he said. “All of my friends do.”

Burney. The name teased her memory. But where she’d heard it from, she could not say. “Very well, Burney… tell me who this perfect gentleman is for me. I will arrange an introduction and you need haunt me