Read Online The Ghosts of Greenwood by Maggie MacKeever - Free Book Online

seen to cause the expression of horror that you described?”
    He shrugged. “I’ve already told you that I noticed no one and nothing.”
    “Mayhap he saw a wicked tinker with a silk scarf round his throat and a gold ring in his ear. Mayhap it was a sight so fearsome to him that his heart seized up.” Jael drew on her pipe.
    “Mayhap.” Giuseppe shoved aside an armful of dead leaves. “And if so, what then?”
    Jael exhaled, slowly. “A hard way to kill a man, surely? It would have been much simpler to slip a pillow over his face and smother him while he slept.”
    “So it would.” Giuseppe removed the scarf from round his neck and used it to wipe his brow. “If one had access to the Hall. I am but a poor traveller, miri pen. ”
    Jael prodded a piece of broken statue with her foot. “What is this damned tale of a ghost?”
    “Imagine it.” His smile flashed. “A gaunt and ghastly figure, clad in a tattered shroud, wailing in a gruesome manner about past sins for which payment is long past due. That’s how I would have played the ghost. Not as a country squire out for an evening stroll, which is how this ghost has been described.”
    “This is the truth? You’re not responsible?”
    “Would I rob you or pick your pockets? Nor will I lie when I cannot gain from it so much as sixpence. Another began this. I merely lend my efforts. Imagine the talk there will be when it’s discovered that the fountain in Lady Margaret’s Garden is flowing once again.” Giuseppe threw down his shovel and took the pipe from Jael’s hand. “Good Sir Wesley Halliday, who let the dirty tinkers camp on his land. Who was so generous as to let us occasionally hunt the beasts in his park.” He spat.
    Jael hitched up her skirt and unsheathed a sharp-bladed dagger. In a desultory manner, she hacked at the vines that wound around the bench. “You should come to London. I can do little for you here.”
    Giuseppe drew in the pipe’s sweet smoke. “You would see me as fettered as yourself.”
    “Fettered?” Jael threw back her head and laughed. “I am as influential as any baroness, if in another manner, and not among the swells. Unlike you, baro, I have no need to roam.”
    “Yet you came here.”
    Jael’s amusement fled as quickly as it had come. “God’s bones, what choice had I, once I learned of Sir Wesley’s death? You say Lady Halliday came to you to have her fortune read. What did you say?”
    Giuseppe handed her the pipe and retrieved his shovel. “ ‘A stranger, a journey; you’ll remember all your long life what the gypsy tells you this day.’ Do dogs eat dogs, or are all the gorgios dead in the land, that you doubt me now?”
    “I doubt the lengths to which you may go.” Jael resumed hacking at the vine. “You haven’t told me what brought you to Sir Wesley, your cap in your hand.”
    The flickering lantern cast shadows on Giuseppe’s lean face. “You think I came begging? Some food and blankets, master, so that the poor tinkers might not freeze or starve.”
    “I think you have a hundred gold coins buried beneath your campfire.” With a flash of scarlet skirts, Jael rose from the bench. “You strain my patience, Giuseppe.”
    He plucked more dead leaves from the fountain. “I knew Sir Wesley visited his hothouse most mornings. I saw him go into Lady Margaret’s Garden that morning, followed, and found him here.”
    “Looking as if he’d glimpsed a fiend from hell. And then you left before anyone could discover you alone with the body.” Jael plunged her dagger into the earth. “Swear to me this is how it happened, tacho rat. For the true blood.”
    The fountain clear now of debris, Giuseppe sought the water’s source. “My mother dead and Janthina gone also, from this garden, twenty years past. Should I not crave revenge?”
    Jael wiped her knife on her skirt, her glance as sharp as its blade. “It’s not for me to tell you what you should and should not crave. But tread carefully,