Lady Button and the Scandal in the Library
It was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, Fanny decided. A very pleasant way indeed, to sit here and watch her favourite television show play across the screen. Not, she amended, that there weren't many other pleasant ways to spend an afternoon, but there was just something so very freeing about watching something on the television.
Perhaps it was because unlike say an activity like reading, she only needed Alison for a very brief moment. To turn on the television, and correct the channel. She may have loved the act of reading and a good book in life, but in death getting someone to turn every page for you was a bit of a chore.
With the television she was free from that. And as far as watching went, there was truly no better thing to watch than the show that played upon the screen now.
Murder she Wrote
A most excellent show.
Far superior by far than any other show Alison had tried to tempt her with. Especially that Downton Abbey. The way those people's servants spoke to them, it was the height of absurdity. And she had said so repeatedly, until Alison had changed the channel. Which was a very good thing in the long run, for it had led Fanny into the arms of her true television love.
Jessica Fletcher
A sleuth more cunning and perception than even the law itself, a woman who everyone listened to. And she didn't have to be dead to get their attention. That had not been the way of it for Fanny, oh people might listen to her now - or at least the other ghosts and Alison - but in life…another tale entirely. It was ironic that the night George had actually noticed she there at all, was also the night he had killed her.
Some things were best not thought about in the light of day. Let the night have her screams, and her memories - the sunny hours were not built for such dark thoughts as that. And yet she had let them distract her from the opening of her show anyway.
Silly girl, said a voice in her thoughts that sounded distinctly like her mother's voice. She shook her head and focused on the show instead. It wasn't a lost she soon realised, for she had seen this episode before. In fact, she had seen it many times before. So many times that if she were to sit back and close her eyes she could replay it in its entirety inside her head.
As well as the next episode.
And the episode after that.
And the one after that.
And so on, and so on… until she reached the end, and there were no more episodes to see at all. Than it just started again. Gradually Fanny realised to her sudden horror, that she hadn't seen a new episode - new to her at least - of Murder She Wrote in over a month. She had watched the last of them in November, while Alison had been reading her new book. Oh the girl had thought herself so clever, keeping them all distracted like that with her televisions, but Fanny had known. Fanny knew everything that went on in this house.
Well, she did now anyway.
Don't think about George, do not think about George. She had…she had not forgiven him for murdering her, she would never forgive him for that. He had murdered her. But…she had come to a peace of a sort with…with the pain he must have been in. Not on that night, the pain was hers on that night, but all the years before that. All the years they had been married. A choice she now saw, that neither of them had really wanted. Oh yes she had been forced from the path she would have chosen for her life, by her father's debts. But George never would have chosen her either, perhaps would never have chosen to marry at all if it hadn't been for his position.
Both their choices taken away. And what had they received in return? Children who hated them. And a house, the house was pretty and hers at least - but it seemed like they could have had so much more if they hadn't been thrown together.
See these were the kinds of thoughts that entered her head when she did not have a television show to distract her. And Murder she Wrote was no longer capable of being that distraction. Well, then she would just have to instruct Alison to change the channel - or more accurately find Fanny another dvd to watch.
She headed straight to the Library to demand that Alison do something about this predicament. She stepped through the locked door - why the girl bothered with that Fanny didn't know, it wasn't as if the ghosts even had to use doors anymore. Walls, doors, they were all the same to them now. Fanny had only used the door now in consideration to the living woman's feelings. One did not flout the level of their intrusive abilities when they were about to ask for a favour.
She found Alison sitting in a chair at the corner of the library, and she was not alone. Before her chair, sat on the floor like children being read a fairy tale, were Robin and most astonishing of all, the Captain.
Except the story being read here was not a childish tale of fairies or pixies, not childish in the least. It was a sex scene, one between a woman and two men. Scandalous. She stayed there to hear it anyway. Shameful. She still didn't leave. She stayed there and listened to the whole sex scene and then, she stayed a bit longer.
The woman on the page was in a relationship, nay married to both these men. Bigamy! Shame!
And yet she still wasn't leaving, still had not said a single word to halt this scandal taking place in her library. She was just standing there, letting the words wash over her. And then she looked down and finally took in the forms of the Captain and Robin fully.
They were sitting, both frog legged, looking up at Alison, or rather the book she was holding with joy sparkling in their twin pairs of not wholly human eyes. There was a faint embarrassed flush across the long equine nose of the Captain, as if he was slightly embarrassed by the scandalous words being read to him, not enough to get up and leave of course. Robin on the other hand, wore a delighted grin - not in any way lecherous per say, but as if the words being spoken caused him such joy that he could not contain it within himself anymore.
And then it finally dawned on Fanny, Alison was reading these words, these words of intimacy to two men. It no longer mattered that these men were her loyal second in command the Captain, or her semi-familiar Robin. All that mattered was that this was the kind of thing, this lowering of moral standards, that lead to unfaithfulness in spouses, and inevitably being pushed out of the window by said faithless man. She had to put a stop to this. She had to put a stop to this now.
"What on earth is going on here?"
Fanny's words startled the readers, causing Alison to sigh and lean backwards in her chair, the Captain to rise in indignation, and Robin to laugh.
It was perhaps that laugh that really set everything off. You see if there was one thing that Fanny Button nee Holmes hated, even more than perceived infidelity, it was being laughed at. It would be an understatement to say that she saw red then, in fact red was all she saw. Her world was red. Red before her eyes, red before her back, even red upon her cheeks. So flushed with rage and humiliation was she that had she been able to see herself in some reflective surface then, she would have thought herself almost as red as a harlot. But of course there were no reflective surfaces in the Button Library. It had been some odd whim of George's that she hadn't had the energy to fight him on in life. Maybe all for the better, who wanted to sit and look at one's self in the mirror anyway, while there was a room full of books to be read.
Now though, Fanny wasn't thinking of the books anymore. All she saw were the two men in front of her, and she wasn't even sure which men they were. The Captain? Standing there, telling her she was being rude and disagreeable, and that she clearly just hadn't understood the book. Surely it couldn't be, not her loyal second. He would never speak to her like that, he would always obey her word. If she told him to stop and come away from the book than that is what he would do. Though of course, he would never be caught listening to such…to such…well…there were no words.
Nor could the second man be her Robin, no, this great laughing ape must be something else. Someone else, a thief, snuck into her beloved Button House in the middle of the night. One that had not the decency to make himself scarce by morning.
And then it was almost as if she wasn't seeing them, those two familiar trusted men, no she was somewhere else. She was back in that room again, on that night watching her husband and their servants…rutting upon each other.
She screamed, she yelled, and she bellowed her outrage at the thought, all just as she wished she had done on the actual night.
However outside of her own head she wasn't actually screaming bloody murder at her cheating husband. She wasn't berating him for his betrayal at all, she was berating the Captain and Robin. Who, of course, had done no such betrayal and where in fact quite indignant at having been accused of such a thing. They screamed back, or at least Robin did, calling the great lady stupid, mad, and brainless. A long with most of the other insults he had learned over the thousands of years he had been stuck here. Which was a lot of them. The Captain did not scream, he did not so much as open his mouth once the vile accusation had left hers. But his face had gone white from rage and he turned from the screaming pair and marched out of that room. As if to stay a moment longer would have been to surrender himself to the madness.
Eventually Robin and Fanny's screaming grew so loud, and so explosive that it dragged the others away from their shows, and their films, and their reruns. They crowded into the library, clearly completely clueless as to the reason for the argument but more than eager to join in with the noise.
During the following ruckus, Alison took her book and left.
The gatehouse had once been a pretty thing, a lovely little escape from the busy city, and the stresses of modern life. Or at least that was how they had advertised it. After the lightning strike and the subsequent fire this was very much not the case. It was a desolate, burnt out wreck of a thing - that somehow even after all these months, still smelled of smoke.
Mike grimaced at it, he did so every time he saw it, couldn't help it, it was almost an involuntary reaction at this point. He couldn't help thinking about not only the loss of income, but the day he had almost died. All for a stupid argument. God…he could have died, pulling a stuffed bear into a thunder storm. That would have been an embarrassing way to go.
That was why he tried not to think about it, which usually meant avoiding the wreckage entirely. But not today, today he couldn't find Alison anywhere in the house, or the garden which unfortunately meant she could only really be in one place.
The Gatehouse.
Unless she had gone out, but no, he was sure she would have told him if that were the case. She wouldn't leave him alone with ghosts without knowing where she was, not again. They promised each other. Always keep in contact. That was the plan. So she had to be in the gatehouse, if she wasn't well, her chamomile tea would just have to get cold.
It was a creepy place the gatehouse, didn't seem to really belong in the real world anymore. It belonged in someone's nightmare, like one of those old hobbit holes you saw at the edge of the more ragged country roads. The kind whose doors were all broken, and whose roofs had all been caved in. When Mike had been a kid he remembered looking out of the window of their car, and staring at those tiny things. Trying for some reason to memorise every cracked door step, and broken flower pot. Hadn't been easy, his Dad had always told his Mum to speed up when such things came into sight of the car. And so they'd always rushed by them, but Mike had seen them anyway. He remembered them. Remembered the old feeling of fear, the paranoia of something, something you couldn't see watching you. And he wondered now if there really had been ghosts there. Wondered, if he were to take her to see those little broken hobbit holes, would Alison see those ghosts?
Maybe not, maybe some places were too creepy even for dead people.
After all, their ghosts avoided the gatehouse.
The ghosts must have really ticked Alison off for her to be hiding in here.
He spotted Alison, sitting beside one of the burnt out walls. A book, with a ballet shoe on the front cover clutched tightly in her hands. As he neared her, mug of steaming tea in his own hand, she closed the book with a thud and leaned back against the blanketed wall with a satisfied sigh.
"Well," said his wife. "That was good."
And then she looked up into Mike's eyes and a smile sprung to her face, though whether that was at him or the mug he was offering her was anyone's guess.
"Oh Christ, thank you. I needed that."
She took the mug and held it in her gloved hands, breathing the heat fumes of the drink with abject bliss across her face. Mike sank down to the ground, shuffling to sit beside her, his back pressed to the ruined wall she leant on, his own mug - hot chocolate instead of that slightly bitter stuff his wife gulped down on a daily basis - clutched protectively to his chest.
"The TVs not work this time?"
"Not…in a manner of speaking. Fanny found us in the library."
"Oh." Said Mike in complete understanding. He didn't have had to meet her to know that Lady Fanny Button was perhaps not the intended audience for this particular book series. Then again he probably would have said the same about the Captain, and Alison had already told him how the WWII Ghost had gone bananas for the second book.
"We alone?"
They probably were, but it was always safer to ask.
"We are now, it was only the Captain here and he left when you sat down. I think he wanted to give us some privacy. At least I hope that's why."
She looked troubled for a moment, but then seemed to shake it off. Not as if it didn't matter, but more like it was something to be gone over at a later moment.
"Not Robin?" asked Mike taking a tentative sip of his hot chocolate. Still a tad too close to scolding, best to let it cool a bit more.
"No, I think he's still back in the library. Having an argument or a contest to see who can scream the loudest. They all are."
"You okay?" For a moment there she had looked so annoyed, like she just wanted to take her book and smack every ghost in the face. Or maybe just scream at them. But then she turned to him and smiled, which eased the tension in her eyes, even if the smile itself looked a bit strained and forced.
"Yeah, it's just frustrating. They are so frustrating."
"Yeah," said Mike slowly. "I bet." A beat, then. "Was your book good at least?"
"Yes, Ailish Sinclair's books always are. But I think for the next one, maybe I should just go read it in a cafe. Less…drama."
And Mike, Mike couldn't stop himself laughing at that. Which made Alison laugh too. It was a good sound to hear, a very good sound . She wrapped her arms around him, he wrapped his around her and they both sat there and laughed. Maybe the gatehouse wasn't so bad after all, it was kind of nice to be alone together for once.
End
Author's Note:
Ailish Sinclair's final instalment of her brand new Dancer Series – Fouetté is out now. I would thoroughly recommend that anyone reading this story head on over to Amazon and give the book a read and a buy, not necessarily in that order.
Fouetté - Dancing with the Past
Amalphia Treadwell is living her happily ever after.
She's happy in her life, and her home, and her relationships, and is very excited about the plan she's just made with her best friend Justin. Turbulence and turmoil are distant memories, and blue skies and sunshine lie ahead.
Then a child who shouldn't exist walks up the steps towards her and, as she looks into his eyes, she knows that nothing will ever be the same again.
Beginning six years after the end of the previous book in the series, the third and final part of Amalphia's journey is a steamy tale of love, dance, obsession and forgiveness.
Fouetté contains graphic sex scenes, adult language and a small amount of violence.