Maggie MacKeever Read Online Free Page B

note she’d left.
    “Talking don’t pay toll,” Mrs. Snugglebutt remarked regretfully. Loveday realized guiltily that the woman had been speaking to her. “Reckon I’d better go see to things.”
    Loveday promptly took her cue from the two cups that sat in plain view on the tray. “Oh, no,” she protested. “Stay and take tea with me.”
    “Reckon I just might do that.” Mrs. Snugglebutt lowered herself into a comfortable chair and watched critically as Loveday poured the tea. “I always start my day with a nice glass of rum and new milk, but that wouldn’t do for a young lass like yourself.”
    “Tell me about the castle.” Loveday reached for a slice of buttered bread. “Is it really haunted?”
    “There’s ghosts, and then there’s ghosts!” Seemingly surprised at her own profundity, Mrs. Snugglebutt shook her head. “Ballerfast’s got one real ghost, and some others as ain’t really real, you understand, but as causes more grief than the dead ones. If you take my meanin’.” She pinned the bewildered Loveday with a steely gray eye. “You could maybe help, miss, if you’d make a push to remember what you know about that night.”
    Loveday had no doubts as to what night the housekeeper meant. “I’ll try, but I don’t know what good it will do. I don’t seem to recall much.”
    Mrs. Snugglebutt nodded. “You ain’t scairt of spirits, are you? I can fix you up a nice little batch of nettle and yarrow if need be.”
    Loveday hastened to assure the woman that such measures wouldn’t be necessary, though she privately wondered if this were true. How did one know if one feared ghosts when one had never encountered one? In any case, she wasn’t convinced of the relative merits of yarrow and nettle. “Tell me about the ghost.”
    “Ah, the tower lady.” Mrs. Snugglebutt unfolded her tale with relish. “ ‘Twas a long time ago, by all reckonings, maybe the fifteenth century or so.”
    “Is the castle really that old?” Loveday asked, surprised. Her room certainly didn’t date back that far.
    “Parts of it are, miss. As I was sayin’, the tower lady lived back then, and ‘tis the tower that she haunts. You’ll not be rememberin’ the tower?” Loveday shook her head. “Ah, well. Our lady wed a man old enough to be her grandfather, by all accounts, and he built the castle for her. A right proper nincompoop he was. Set hisself up as a mighty lord, he did, but his lady soon tired of all her fripperies and falderals, and soon enough she took herself a lover. ‘Twas some question as to whether the child she bore was her lord’s or no, but he didn’t suspect. Bamboozled him good, she did! Anyways, the master comes back unexpected-like one day and catches them together, in the very act you might say, and I reckon the fur flew! He shut his lady up in the tower, with no one to see her for the rest of her born days except the deaf-mute who served her. ‘Tis said her lord never looked on her again ‘til the very end.” Mrs. Snugglebutt heaved a great sigh for the vagaries of man, and poured herself another cup of tea.
    “But what happened to her?” Loveday asked, fascinated not so much by the tale as by Mrs. Snugglebutt’s dramatic narration.
    “She died, poor soul, as will we all.” Mrs. Snugglebutt’s pious tone made Loveday shiver. “Cold, miss? No? Well, the lady took to walkin’ atop the tower—there was a staircase outside the tower itself then, but it’s long crumbled now. ‘Tis said she was lookin’ for her lover to come to her, not knowin’ that her lord had killed him in a particular nasty way.” She fixed Loveday with a ghoulish gaze. “Chopped off his manhood, he did, then let the dogs at him. Feel faint, miss? Shall I stop?”
    “No,” Loveday said weakly. “Do finish it.”
    Mrs. Snugglebutt shrugged. “ ‘Tisn’t much left to tell. His lordship was pretty smug, what with his lady locked in the tower, a-prayin’ away her days, and the boy growin’ up to