“Oh!” Anthea clapped her hands. “How marvelous! Are you truly magical?”
“Truly, though limited—I’d no teacher, you see, so it was rather hard to make use of the Talent. Took me sixty years to learn that little trick, though rattling chains and slamming doors came somewhat more easily.”
Anthea leaned toward him, but felt only a chill and shivered.
“The fire’s glow does make the room more pleasant.” Then she shook her head in irritation. “But there’s nothing to do!”
“Oh, there are games to pass the time.” Sir Roderick stood and paced over to a table nearby. “There’s backgammon here, you see, and chess.”
Anthea made a face. “Chess is boring. Besides, I don’t know how to play it.”
“Really? I assure you, you’ll find it exciting enough once you’ve learned.”
“I’ve no desire to.”
“Oh, come now! Just to indulge a new friend, eh? It’s been years since I’ve had a game—decades, in fact.”
With surprise, Anthea realized that she really had made a friend, though a very unlikely one. Hard on that came fright that she might lose him and be completely alone again—except for Mama and Papa, who scarcely noticed her, and that poisonous Nanny and the chilly staff. She rose with a theatrical sigh and came over to the table. “Oh, well, just to please you, then.”
“Truly? I’m ever so grateful!” Sir Roderick pointed at the table, and a drawer slid open. A chess piece floated out of it to settle on the checkerboard inlaid in the wood.
Anthea stared, amazed, and feeling just the slightest frisson of fear.
“Dreadfully sorry,” Sir Roderick apologized, “but I can’t really grasp them, you know. Can’t handle anything much over a pound, either. Well, then, this piece is called a pawn, and there are eight of them to a side ... .”
“How lovely!” Anthea picked up the miniature carving, delighted at the warm darkness of the rosewood. “Is it a medieval soldier, then?”
“Yes, and quite authentic, too, which is why it’s just the teeniest bit battered. It can only move forward one pace at a time, unless it’s fighting another pawn, in which case it moves diagonally ahead.” Sir Roderick pointed again, and another warrior floated out of the drawer, armored like the ghost himself, though with a visored helm. It sat astride a rearing horse. “This one is a knight, and he’s the hardest of all, because his horse can jump over anything in front of him—but it always lands to the side, you see.”
The miniature knight leaped off the board, sailed two spaces forward, then swerved to the side and settled again. “Like a capital L,” Sir Roderick explained. “And this is a bishop ...”
Anthea listened, enthralled. It made so much more sense when he explained it! Though it helped that the pieces looked like what they really were, not just little knobs and rods. She settled down to make a pleasant evening of it, after all.
They played every day after that, with the ghost carefully coaching Anthea in tactics and gambits. Finally she realized that he was deliberately letting her win two games out of three, and demanded he start playing to win. He claimed that he did, but she was still suspicious of how often she came up victorious.
For Sir Roderick became her great friend, of course. In winter, he strolled out with her in the very earliest morning, as visible by day as by night (though only to her), and showed her the beauties of newly fallen snow and the lacework it made of the branches in the woodlot. She would have thought it a dreary waste otherwise, but with him she was able to see beauties that she never would have discovered otherwise. And she had need of it, for Mama, in despair at having missed a London Christmas, pined away and succumbed to pneumonia, dying between New Year’s and Twelfth Night. When Anthea saw her eyes close for the last time, and Nanny managed to pry her away from the lifeless clay, she dashed out of the room and ran pell-mell down the stairs and into the library, where she threw herself down among the cushions on the window seat and wept and wept. She must have cried herself to sleep, for of a sudden, she woke with a start and found herself in darkness. For a moment, the fear was so sharp as almost to make her cry out; then she was able to make out the familiar shapes of tables and chairs, and the racks of dusty old volumes on the walls, by a faint glow that somehow permeated the room. Then that glow brightened and coalesced, drawing in on itself till it assumed the familiar form of her armored and headless friend. “I had to watch over you, you see,” Sir Roderick said, almost apologetically. “I couldn’t have you waking alone in the dark.”
“Oh, Sir Roderick! Oh, thank you!” Anthea leaped up and dashed to her friend, throwing her arms about him—and right through him, and the chill bit into her. She drew back, and the tears started afresh. “Or, Sir Roderick, it’s terrible! Mama has quite pined away—and has died!”
“Yes, Anthea,” the ghost said quietly, “I know.”
“You know? But how ...” Then Anthea’s eyes widened, and she clapped a hand over her mouth-but her thoughts fairly shouted, Of course! You knew the moment she came forth from her body—for she’s a ghost now, too, isn’t she?
“She is,” Sir Roderick confirmed.
Anthea was so agitated that she didn’t even notice that the ghost had read her thoughts.
“But she hasn’t lingered, I’m afraid,” Sir Roderick said.
“She was a good woman underneath it all, and departed almost immediately for Heaven. She hadn’t a fallen head to hold her here, you see.”
“No, she had ... Oh, I mustn’t say it!”
“No, you must,” Sir Roderick said gently. “ ‘A child who needed her,’ is that what you were going to say? Yes, she had, little lady, and she misses you quite sorely—I know, for she’s telling me that now, even as we speak.”
“Oh, is she truly?” Anthea cried.
“Yes, though she won’t be able to do it for long, and not very often—and only another ghost can hear her. When she realized she was about to die, she repented of her silliness in mourning her London life, for then she discovered how precious life had been, even though it wasn’t exactly to her taste.” The ghost sighed, and Anthea somehow knew he would have been shaking his head, if he’d had one. “Of course, it was too late then, for she’d let the sickness take far too firm a hold on her. She never knew how much you meant to her, Anthea, until suddenly she found you beyond her reach. Now she aches for you, child, and will surely do all she can to comfort and reassure you from where she is.”
“Oh, Sir Roderick!” Anthea threw herself into his arms, not minding the chill, snuggling down against the upholstery of the big old wing chair which was all she could feel, and she wept and wept again, in the insubstantial embrace of a ghost.
Papa almost turned into a specter himself, after that. He became wan and melancholy, and seemed to take very little notice of the life about him. Alarmed, Anthea took every chance she could to evade Nanny—not hard, for the woman ignored her as much as possible—and crept in to be with Papa, and pay what attentions she could, for fear that he, too, might leave her for the buffering of death—and she must have succeeded to some extent, for, though he didn’t seem to take much interest in life, he didn’t die, either.
It was a strain on her, and she probably couldn’t have borne it if it hadn’t been for the attentions of Sir Roderick. She had a great deal of lost and lonely time, for Nanny seemed to feel that if she wasn’t causing trouble, there was no need to bother with her—she’d far rather drink Father’s port with the cook—and Papa wouldn’t take much cosseting before he would send her away, so that he might be alone to wallow in self-pity. Hurt, Anthea would wander off to the library and try to nap. There she whiled away the time till evening with napping and reading, for there were a great many books in the library. It was fortunate she did, for Papa either wasn’t willing to spend money on a governess, or never thought of it—and in the evenings, Sir Roderick would guide her studies, suggesting books to her, and discussing them after she’d read them. He insisted on a half-hour of mathematics every night, and a deal of science and history and geography, too—but he made it all so interesting that it was almost fun. It never occurred to Anthea to wonder how he knew so much that hadn’t been discovered until after he had died, or even that he knew so much of books, when most medieval knights had never learned to read.