Lady Anne 02 - Revenge of the Barbary Ghost Read online

  Books in the Lady Anne Mystery Series

  by Donna Lea Simpson

  Lady Anne and the Howl in the Dark

  Revenge of the Barbary Ghost

  Curse of the Gypsy

  Revenge of the Barbary Ghost

  A LADY ANNE MYSTERY

  Donna Lea Simpson

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Donna Lea Simpson

  Material excerpted from A Deadly Grind copyright © 2012 by Donna Lea Simpson

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-937349-25-7

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Author Afterword

  Also Available from Donna Lea Simpson

  About the Author

  To all the dedicated readers and fans

  of Lady Anne Addison

  and her dashing Marquess of Darkefell,

  here is the continuation of her story.

  Thank you all for your wonderful letters

  asking what is to become of her!

  One

  How should a lady go about forgetting an utterly unforgettable man?

  Lady Anne Addison huddled in the dark on the grassy lip of a cliff overlooking a Cornish cove, watching the moonlight dance on the waves that broke on the gleaming beach, many fathoms below. The tide was rising, and the sound was a hushed susurration, a whisper that blended with the rustle of the long grass around her. It reminded her of a husky voice whispering in her ear, a wicked, devastatingly masculine voice, familiar to her and ever-present in her dreams.

  Lord Darkefell.

  Two weeks before, she had fled from Yorkshire to this lovely spot in Cornwall to enjoy time with Pamela and Marcus St. James, effervescent brother and sister, friends since Anne’s disastrous Season many years before. But if she was to be honest, her flight had been prompted by a need to get away from the infuriating, impenetrable, exasperating and completely dazzling Marquess of Darkefell, the man who had inexplicably proposed to her moments after saving her life. She had teetered on the brink of oblivion, shoved to the edge of a cliff above a waterfall by a murderous madman; the marquess risked his life to save her, then bellowed that she had to marry him.

  As spring blossomed in gaudy profusion in the Cornish sunshine, she had begun to wonder why she had run away. Not that she believed she should have accepted Darkefell’s proposal. They barely knew each other. Shared kisses, as breathtaking as they were, were not a sturdy base upon which to build a union that would last many years and see as much sorrow as joy. She had only begun to take the marquess’s measure when he shouted at her that she must marry him.

  Must. Marry. Him. The words taken separately did not threaten, but together … oh, the overwhelming panic! She fancied herself courageous, but it was fear that had sent her scuttling south away from a fearsome urge to throw herself into the marquess’s arms and shout yes.

  Her cowardice was not a welcome revelation. She put her chin on her knees and stared at the moon, but a noise below on the shore made her peek over the edge of the cliff again. She couldn’t see a thing, and so returned her gaze to the waning full moon above.

  If not for that idiotic proposal and her odd reaction to it, she reflected, she would not have departed from Yorkshire so hastily. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see herself married to Darkefell—Tony, as he was known to his intimates—it was that she feared she would too easily become entranced, then infatuated, and finally sucked into a swirling vortex of adoration. He was intelligent, forceful, handsome, a skilled seducer, and maddeningly, infuriatingly fascinating. His kisses suffocated her with strange desires she knew not how to defeat. And his wretched proposal, as infuriating as it was, had threatened to undermine her determination to delay marriage until she knew her own mind on the subject.

  He was a dangerous man.

  She sighed and stared up at the blanket of gleaming stars, idly picking out constellations her father had shown her through the lens of a telescope many years before, as she pondered her marital prospects. It seemed the longer she remained a spinster, the more difficult it was to imagine being married. She had been her own woman for so long and now, at the age of twenty-four, did not want to become a mere appendage, a burden, a moral obligation to any man. Some would argue she already was her father’s burden, and too long a weight on his purse, since she had not deigned to yoke herself with a man in holy wedlock. But her father, the Earl of Harecross, abstracted, scholarly and buried in his ancient Greeks and Macedonians, his language studies and cultural research, never made her feel that she was a encumbrance, legal or otherwise.

  She stretched out on the ground, cradling her head in her bent arm, and lazily played with the long grass, weaving it in and out of her fingers as she contemplated her mixed feelings toward the marquess. While Darkefell kissed her she could think of nothing but how she wished it would go on forever. But when he released her, he was still the same commanding, wretchedly stubborn man! Preposterous to think that marriage to him, apart from the obvious physical delights he could offer and the wicked pleasures he would no doubt teach her, would be anything less than a parade of exasperating arguments and endless aggravation.

  But lying out on a moonlit cliff in Cornwall in the middle of the night while her cat, Irusan, played with the toads and rodents, would solve nothing. She should go in and sleep. The next day promised another round of visits with new acquaintances in the seaside village of St. Wyllow, on the north coast of Cornwall: flirtation with Marcus St. James, shopping with Pamela and perhaps a fete or party with the officers of St. James’s regiment, billeted in nearby St. Ives.

  She heaved a sigh, weary at the thought of it, and began to rise, brushing dried grass from her full skirts and petticoat. “Come along, Irusan,” she called out, softly. As she stood, a movement on the water caught her eye. And on the beach! She hunkered back down and stared over the cliff through the curtain of dancing grass. Irusan retur
ned to her side and rubbed against her legs.

  “What is that, puss, on the beach?” Anne whispered, squinting. He answered with an inquisitive “mrow?”

  Moonglow caught the movement and lit it from above like a chandelier above a theater stage. She watched men on the beach, creeping out from the shadow of the cliff, and spotted a boat approaching, oars swishing through the choppy water. Anne frowned and stared as she put one staying hand on Irusan’s thick mane of fur. The moonlight path delineated a boat lumbering low in the water and manned by many oarsmen. A cresting wave carried the boat forward and it surged onto the sand. The men on the beach dashed forward to pull it up further, and the activity became frenetic. An oilskin cover was thrown back, then barrels and boxes were plucked from the laden boat and passed along a line of dark-clad men. Some slung rope-tied tubs over their shoulders and beetled up the shore to a dray with a draft horse hitched. One figure stood out, alone, waving a cutlass and directing the activity with bold motions.

  Smugglers! There was no other explanation, and Anne shivered; she was familiar with sordid tales of the brutal tribe, so-called free traders, near her Kentish home. Wondering what she should do—stay down in the grass to avoid detection, or depart to the safe confines of the house—she watched, breath held.

  Cliff House, Pamela’s rented home, was a good ways back from the cliff from which it took its name. A rocky cut divided the bluff where she huddled from another prominence beyond, which jutted above the sandy beach at an equal height. As she glanced toward that other cliff, she noted movement in the moonlight, something more than the tall grass rustling in the quickening breeze. Several men stood, suddenly, and with a shout surged toward the rocky path along the cut, down to the beach.

  But another figure appeared that same moment, floating impossibly in midair beyond the cliff’s edge where Anne crouched. She fell back on her rump in the long grass and scuttled, crablike, backward. It was a black-bearded, turban-clad man, dressed in a banyan made of rich, glowing fabrics, and ballooning white pantaloons; he slashed a scimitar through the air with one hand while holding a lantern in the other. His mouth opened as if he shouted, but no sound came out, and the men who had been moving down toward the smugglers halted in the rocky cut, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the moonlight, faces bleached with fear. The Mussulman—for that is what the specter appeared to Anne to be, though she had only oriental portraits to go by—gestured wildly, then, with one grand motion, produced smoke. The men fell back and Anne, trembling, put one hand to her mouth to keep from crying out.

  An explosion accompanied by a brilliant shower of sparks shattered the quietude and echoed in the sheltered bay. Another crack of sound down on the beach echoed against the cliff wall, and sand arced up, bright lights lit the night sky; the zinging sound of fireworks followed the explosion. Anne stumbled to her feet and cried out, staggering further backward from the cliff edge as some of the other group of men retreated in a panicked scramble of movement, back up to the far prominence. Irusan had already streaked away, back toward the house.

  Anne’s only thought was to escape and she ran quite a way, but turned back toward the cliff as the smoke cleared, and saw that the Mussulman, or Mohammedan, as she had also heard them named, was gone. But to where? Curiosity, her fatal flaw, would not allow her to just return to the house without knowing all. She crept back and looked over the cliff edge; the beach below was deserted! The remaining revenue men on the other side of the cut—preventative men was what Anne surmised they must be, and fortunately they had not seen her—stood as still as she and stared, agape. Then they again clambered down to the beach, with shouts and angry howls of disbelief.

  Anne, grateful for the moonlight, hastened through the long grass away from the cliff, down the slope, back toward the protected garden of Pamela and Marcus St. James’s house. What had she just witnessed? Smugglers, to be sure, but who or what was the Mussulman—a ghost? an apparition?—and where had the smugglers gone after his fantastical performance?

  She had been bored with the frivolous parade of life in Cornwall, and was wishing for something more interesting to help her forget Lord Tony Darkefell. As so seldom happens in life, it seemed that her wish had been granted. She entered the gate at the bottom of Cliff House’s garden, and, with Irusan dashing beside her, bustled to the terrace, then in the door and up the servants’ stairs to her third-floor suite.

  “Where were you, milady?” Mary, Anne’s maid, ghostly in her plain shift and nightcap, cried, rushing to her as she entered the bedchamber. “I was that turned aboot with fright! I haird weird noises, popping and clattering, thought to ask you what it was, and found you gone.”

  “Mary,” Anne said, grasping her harried maid by the upper arms. “I have seen the most monstrous thing!” Pacing in the narrow confines of her room, a small white-papered chamber with slanted ceilings, she described the scene, her suspicion of smugglers, and the appearance of the Mussulman specter. She stopped and stared, sketching the scene in the air with her hands. “He rose from beyond the cliff like … like nothing I have ever seen. And he floated! I’m going to Pamela to see if she has ever seen the specter.”

  Her maid shuddered. “Oh, milady,” she said, keeping her voice down, for her son, Wee Robbie, was asleep in the attached dressing room, where Mary and her boy had a cot. “I dinna wish to know more. If it’s smugglers, they’re a desperate lot of cutthroats, and the less said, the better.”

  “You’ve been with me long enough to have heard the tales at Harecross Hall,” Anne said of her home near the Kentish shore, and rumors of smugglers along the coast of the channel. “Smugglers I will avoid speaking of, but I do wish to know more about the specter. What can it be? I’d go back out now to look, but it disappeared, and won’t be back this night, I’ve no doubt. I wish to explore the cliff edge tomorrow, though.”

  “But ye won’t go out again tonight, will you? Promise me?”

  “No, Mary. I’m just going down the hall to speak with Pamela, and then I’ll return to my bed like the proper spinster I’m supposed to be.”

  The maid gazed at her for a long moment and then said, “Perhaps Miss St. James knows all about the smugglers’ use of the beach below.”

  “Pamela would never countenance those brutes using her beach! No, as a tenant in this house she has a right to know what I’ve seen. I’m going to tell her.”

  “Aye, but perhaps you’re just carryin’ water to the well.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  After two weeks at Cliff House, she knew her way along the dark and narrow halls. The house had all the appearance of airiness and roominess from the outside, but inside it was a warren of ill-conceived dimness and antiquated notions of lighting. It was a very old house, and many times in the last weeks Anne had heard strange sounds emanating from downstairs, only to find, when she went to investigate, that the noises had stopped. She’d heard creaking from above, too, in the attic, but the house was not particularly well kept and Anne thought it was likely what her maid called wee beasties. Mary feared that the house was haunted, but Anne thought it was just poorly ventilated and draughty, and probably overrun with mice.

  Pamela’s room was not far, though further than Anne would have thought practical. Why had Pam not put her in the suite next to hers? It certainly would have been easier for the maid, Lynn, who came in daily to make up fires, haul ashes, clean slops and change linens. Anne tapped on her friend’s door. “Pamela, are you awake?” She entered, to find her dark-haired, blue-eyed friend sitting up with a candle and reading a novel.

  “What is it?” Pam said.

  Anne climbed up on the end of the bed, sweeping the poofed skirts of her robe à la polonaise aside, and tucked her feet underneath her. She said, “Pam, the most amazing thing. Did you not hear fireworks a short time ago?”

  “Fireworks? What are you talking about?” Pam asked, her pretty face wrinkled in a puzzled frown, laying her book facedown on the covers
.

  Anne repeated her story, with the appropriate interjections from her friend.

  When she was done, Pam leaned forward, her dark eyes sparkling, and said, “You’ve just seen the Barbary Ghost!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My dear, you’ve been here almost two weeks. Have you not noticed the small inn down the road a ways? We pass it every time we walk to St. Wyllow.”

  “I’ve seen the inn, but why do you speak of it?”

  “Anne, it’s called the Barbary Ghost.”

  Not wishing to admit that her normal perspicacity was lacking these days, so wrapped up were her thoughts and efforts in supposedly forgetting a certain dark-eyed marquess from Yorkshire, she merely said, “Tell me about the Barbary Ghost!”

  Pam settled back against her pillow. “Cornwall, being a peninsular arm thrust out into the sea, was thought by some to be particularly vulnerable, and many years ago a Barbary ship entered these waters. The Barbary pirates are notorious slavers, my dear, and have a wicked taste for northern ladies to take off to their pasha’s harems, where the pale-skinned girls become highly prized concubines.”

  “I have heard of Barbary pirates, my dear, and their ransom demands.”

  “Yes, well, the captives who do not bring ransom money are kept in harems and subjected to the most shocking treatment! Anyway, this particular pirate ship anchored near St. Wyllow, and it is said that a landing party ended up right on the beach below this house!”

  “Really?” Anne said, clasping her hands together. “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know the exact date,” Pam said, waving one hand in the air in a dismissive gesture. “Trust you, my practical friend, to wish for a time schedule. It was years ago … perhaps as much as an hundred. Anyway, one particular Barbary pirate came ashore in search of a certain girl, one whom he had seen from afar, and with whom he had fallen in love.”