Lady Anne and the Haunted Schoolgirl

  As her wedding to Lord Darkefell approaches, Lady Anne is summoned by a local girls’ school to help them with a young student troubled by ghostly apparitions. She’s quick to respond, and quick to discover the trickery behind the so-called ghosts. But despite her efforts to demonstrate to the student that she’s been the victim of a cruel hoax, the young woman apparently jumps to her death the very next night. Stunned and saddened by the turn of events, Lady Anne soon realizes that what she thought was a prank was a dark precursor to foul play.

  Certain that someone closely connected to the school murdered the young woman, Lady Anne promptly begins questioning students and staff alike to root out the culprit. Confronting calculating young classmates, pompous instructors, and even the shockingly callous relatives of the victim, she still feels no closer to exposing the killer. Then a pattern emerges suggesting exactly who was behind the foul deed, and Anne will put her life on the line to find justice for a young woman who lost her own life too soon …

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Lady Anne and the Haunted Schoolgirl

  Victoria Hamilton

  Copyright © 2024 by Donna Lea Simpson

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  Published by Beyond the Page at Smashwords

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-960511-70-6

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  One

  December, 1786

  Bath, England

  “I don’t think I can do this, Alethea,” Lady Anne Addison said, fingering the diaphanous robe en chemise her seamstress had made for her in advance of her wedding to Tony, Marquess of Darkefell. It was December. The wedding would be in three weeks.

  Unless she jilted him. The way she felt that moment it was a distinct possibility.

  Her friend, arching one eyebrow high, said, “Misgivings about marrying that man? He’s not my type, my dear, but even I can see the attraction. The man is a mountain of smolder, like a hot, glowing ember waiting to burst into a bonfire whenever he looks at you. He can barely restrain himself from grabbing you in a most inappropriate way.”

  Anne grinned. Her fiancé didn’t always restrain himself, but she was not about to share those most private moments even with a close friend. “I wasn’t saying I don’t think I can marry Tony; all I think about is marrying Tony. Or more precisely, what we can do after I marry Tony.” Irusan, her enormous cat, eyed the robe en chemise material with interest and hooked one claw in it, tearing the delicate fabric. Anne shooed him away. He huffily retreated to his velvet cushion to sulk, turning his back on them. “My father and Jamey arrive in Bath tomorrow. I don’t know if I can be in the same room as my father and my mother. They’ve been estranged so long. My mother is so … and my father is …” She sighed, plopped gracelessly down on a chair and covered her face with both hands.

  Her father and brother would be staying with her fiancé rather than in her grandmother’s home, where she and her mother were living. Her brother Jamey, with struggles of the mind so profound he required careful assistance, was a handful. Disorder agitated him, though he did his best to behave. And in this move to Bath and the weeks before Anne’s wedding, there was guaranteed to be tumult.

  Fortunately, a married couple traveled with him. Dorcas, the woman, and he had a special relationship. Early on she had set boundaries for him, and he behaved for her better than for anyone. Still, the trip would upset him, as would unusual surroundings and living in strange quarters. Seeing his mother for the first time in years would be trying. In short, the chance for trouble in Bath was weighted heavily in favor of catastrophe.

  Anne’s mother was not equipped to deal with him, nor was the break with Anne’s father healed, by any means, though letters had passed between the two. Would she see Jamey? Would she see Anne’s father? She had promised neither, becoming agitated and taking to her bed at the thought. Her nerves, she cried in anguish. Her poor frayed, fretted, ragged, unraveling nerves!

  Anne sighed heavily.

  “What are you thinking of, my friend?” Alethea asked. She stretched out her long legs, gowned in lovely blue brocade, and examined her own wedding ring, symbol of her marriage to Bertie, her friend and, she would say, her saving grace. “Or do I know?” She eyed her and nodded. “I do know what you’re going through. I recall even your brief time at school was chaotic for you, managing your worries about your mother and father and Jamey. I don’t envy you the next weeks of distress. But it’s not all up to you, Anne. Your father and mother must manage their own relationship as best they can. It is your duty to think of your husband-to-be and your wedding.”

  “Ah, yes, the wedding!” Shuddering, Anne rolled her eyes and collapsed back in her chair. “There is a topic guaranteed to make everything worse. It’s the event my mother has looked forward to her whole life, according to her. And with me marrying beyond anything she could have hoped or planned—she never imagined I’d catch a marquess—she is determined to parade the event before the bon ton. If she could, she would trundle me to London to be married at St. George’s Hanover Square. Tony, fortunately, refused, saying London was for others, but not for him. He will do his duty in the House, but not in the church.”

  Alethea snickered.

  “St. Swithin’s, thankfully, remains the site of our exchange of vows,” she said of the lovely church just up the street from her grandmother’s Paragon townhouse.

  “Wherein you will promise to obey his lordship,” Alethea said, with a wicked gleam in her eye.

  “I’ll do as I always have,” Anne retorted tartly.

  “By law he can do what he will.”

  Anne sobered. “I am wagering my whole future happiness on his promise to give me freedom, Alethea. Am I foolish to think him different than other men?”

  “I don’t think you foolish at all, my dear friend.” She put her hand over Anne’s then swiftly removed it. “I don’t know him well, but what I have seen of your man, I like.” Energetic as always, she jumped to her feet and put her hand out. “You need a distraction. You’re hungering for a problem to solve. Accompany me on a walk? I have someone with whom I’d like you to speak.”

  “Who?” Anne said, eyeing her friend with concern. Alethea did not go out much right now; her and her husband’s marriage had been subjected to scandalous rumor, and both were fragile still. She grabbed her friend’s hand and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.

  “Do you know Miss Sophia Lee?”

  “I know of her but have never met her. I’m acquainted with her sister, Harriet. We are contemporaries in age and have met with pleasure at lectures and readings, as our taste in literature agrees. We’ve thus corresponded on occasion about what she and her sister are writing.”

  “You know that they have a school quite near you.”

  “Of course, in the Belvedere Villas on Lansdown Road, a lovely building. I left my card there upon arriving in Bath, but I know how busy Harriet is. The Errors of Innocence has come out this year, and she’s now working toward having a play, The New Peerage, produced at the Drury next year,” Anne said. “She’s promised me a first-night box, as she said I inspired her in my letters. She did write me a brief note thanking me for the notice of my arrival in town, but she is engaged most days with the school and other concerns.”

  “Both sisters are very taken up with work and school affairs.”

  “I don’t take her inability to see me amiss. We are acquaintances, not close friends. She wishes me well and wrote that perhaps we can see each other over the Christmas season, when lessons will be suspended.” Anne frowned, searching amid the clutter of clothing draped about the room for her spencer. “She’s in quite the dither about the school from what I understand through mutual acquaintances.”

  Alethea nodded, her brows arched
with a knowing look. “Your feelings are hurt,” she said.

  “Not at all,” Anne insisted. One of her friend’s more annoying traits was that she thought she knew what people were feeling every day of the year. “In case you have forgotten, I have been busy myself with fake werewolves, ghosts and gypsy curses, and even in Bath with murder investigations and such nonsense,” Anne said.

  “Of course, Anne. I don’t suppose you know, though, that Sophia is a dear friend of mine, one of the few I trust. She has been quite as busy as her sister and writes as much.” She fished under a pile of stays and shifts, pulling out Anne’s spencer and handing it to her. “Perhaps while we walk I can explain their preoccupation with the school. Sophia is presently having trouble with one of her students, Miss Faithful Collier. The child is quite a silly chit, the kind who believes in ghosts and haunting and mediums. You know how that goes,” she said with a smile.

  “Yes, like the victims of our fraudulent mystic,” Anne said. The one she had exposed as a swindler.

  “Sophia is worried, and with cause. The child tried to do away with herself.”

  Anne, startled, stared at her friend as she pulled on the spencer. “Maybe you should begin at the beginning.”

  “Walk with me while I talk. Please speak with Sophia. It will do you both good.”

  “I will, if only to get away from my mother. There is no safe topic of conversation with her. If it is not my wedding, it is the marriage settlement negotiations with the family barrister. And if it is not that, it is my trousseau, thus the impossibly fragile robe en chemise. Tony will tear that frivolity apart in two minutes on our wedding night, unless Irusan destroys it first, behaving like a little lion.”

  The cat’s ears twitched and he looked over his shoulder at them as Alethea smothered a grin.

  “Lately the only thing that distracts Mama from talking about my wedding is worrying about getting robbed.”

  “Oh, those awful breakins lately!” Alethea exclaimed, shaking out her gown, smoothing it with her gloved hands. “We are altering the new house because of it. Bertie is having a German-made safe box installed to protect valuables. Thank goodness we are moving from our poky little hole-in-the-wall. Where we are is far too easy to break into, being so private.”

  “And what good are the magistrates? None at all.”

  “There are only two of them, Anne, after all. One is quite harsh and has had many thieves up on charges, though it always seems to be the cutpurses and market pickpockets rather than the jewel thieves. Magistrate Brereton, his name is. I know his wife. A lovely woman. We’ve been friends, though her husband doesn’t approve of our friendship, especially not lately with the trouble Bertie and I have had.”

  After the inevitable bustle of getting ready—the December air was chill and required the help of Anne’s maid, Mary, with muffs and boots as well as the requisite hat—they walked up the Paragon, then turned left onto Guinea Lane. From there they would walk up the steep incline until they reached Lansdown and turned to their right, strolling Lansdown briefly until they came to Belvedere House on the right. Before they got there Anne wanted answers. “You tempted me out for this walk with the promise of conversation and an explanation of your mysterious hints about Miss Sophia Lee and her troubled student. Speak.”

  “Miss Faithful Collier, daughter of a barrister; good enough social standing. He prospered in his second marriage in particular, the youngest daughter of a viscount, Faithful’s mother, you know.” She paused, then added, “The girl’s older brother, son of the first wife, took training as a solicitor.”

  “I sense a slight in your tone, as if the young man has degraded his family.”

  “I intended it to be an insult. No man—or woman—should bring their family down in consequence. It is the obligation we bear, to lift our family, not submerge them. A barrister may be a gentleman, but a solicitor never will. It gets worse; instead of making the law his occupation, the son is now a clerk in a shipping concern. He failed even as a solicitor.” She frowned and shook her head. “There has been trouble there with the son, gambling debts, or misbegotten seduction or such. The family’s trajectory is firmly set on a downward path.”

  “How discriminatory you are.”

  “Are you a Leveller?” she said, referencing a very old movement. “I hadn’t thought it, and you the daughter of an earl.”

  “Maybe it is because I am the daughter of an earl that I have learned to view men and women in the light of their own qualities, not their family’s inheritances.”

  “Perhaps. I assure you, I am not discriminatory, merely a realist. You are fortunate, but mere misses like myself needed to be careful lest we bring our family down a step.”

  Anne wasn’t sure whether Alethea was joking or not.

  Her friend glanced at her as they strolled. “I’m quite serious, you know. I say nothing at all about the quality of the person if I condemn their station. Their value as a man or woman is entirely separate from their position in society.”

  “About the girl …”

  “Yes, about the girl. Her mother—”

  “—the viscount’s youngest daughter—”

  “—is dead. Her father is a tyrant, her brother looks down on her—”

  “He looks down on her? She has the higher status over her brother, yes?”

  “Of course, but has illogic ever stopped the ignorant from looking down on the intelligent, or boors from looking down on the cultured? He is a man, ergo, he is the superior. The son is a rotter, a wastrel, from all evidence, though I cannot say where Sophia got the information from. Gossip, likely. She is widely connected through the school, but also through her writing and meets with all sorts of people. Because the family is descending, poor Faithful will likely do no better than to marry a dreary law clerk without higher aspirations.”

  “How awful that all she can expect from life is marriage to the first decent fellow who deigns to ask.” If her father even ensured the fellow was decent, and not merely willing to take responsibility for her forever after in exchange for a marital moiety—in other words, a dowry. Anne paused on their ascending walk to catch her breath. The frigid weather caused her lung condition to trouble her on occasion. Gazing at Alethea, she said, “You seem very engaged in the whole affair. Do you have a connection with this child?”

  Alethea moodily stared up Guinea Lane. On their right was a low wall interrupted by an entrance onto a walking path into a park. “I am become tender in my old age and current troubled situation. I have nothing to do and am bored.”

  “That is not the extent of it, my friend.”

  “I have met the girl. She’s sensitive, nervous. Unhappy. Motherless. I feel a kinship, I suppose, both of us rudderless boats on storm toss’t seas.”

  This was the closest Alethea had come in the last few days to referring to her self-imposed status as a social outcast. The skies had become as gloomy as Alethea’s mood, with a cold wind sweeping down the street. They continued their walk, past a maid scrubbing a front step, who cast a wary eye at the sky and hastened her scrub brush to her task with alacrity. They turned onto Lansdown and Anne’s companion stayed her with one gloved hand on Anne’s arm.

  “What is it?” Anne asked, examining her friend’s uncertain expression.

  “Faithful is an imaginative girl. Please don’t belittle her for it.”

  “Do you think me a monster?”

  “I know your opinion of flights of fancy.”

  “On the contrary,” Anne said lightly. “I delight in folly. I will indulge tales of brownies and elves, fairies and gnomes living in the hedgerow. As long as humankind does not try to blame their own misdeeds on the faery folk, I shall indulge it.”

  “Let us see if you put that philosophy into practice. She claims she is being haunted by the ghost of a dead schoolgirl who led her to the roof and told her to jump. Or the ghost of her mother.” Alethea frowned and shook her head. “The tale has become confused.”

  Anne thought, or maybe the girl is confused, but she did not say it aloud. “How old is she?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen! From your description I pictured a child.”

  “Wait until you meet her, and you will understand why I described her so.”

  Together they passed a shrouded lane that led, Anne knew, to the park they had passed when they strolled Guinea Lane. Belvedere House was a pretty villa set back from the other residences on Lansdown. With eight sets of windows along the front three stories and an attic, it was symmetrical and pleasing to the eye, a pretty break from the townhomes beyond them, stolidly towering over the street in conjoined dourness. Anne looked up to the top of the building, a distance of forty or so feet, and wondered, would the girl have died if she fell—or leaped—from there? “Was it from the front or back she was about to leap?”