Ghost Knight Read online

  I peered through the bushes and saw Ella pull a trowel from her pocket—the same one she’d had at Stonehenge. She really thought of everything.

  “What does the urn look like?” she asked.

  “It’s made of lead, with some magical symbols on the lid. But don’t forget—it’s mine!”

  “Of course,” Ella said. She began to dig.

  Aleister stood right behind her. It was very hard to stay hidden while he ogled her with his ghost eyes, but I’d had to promise to show myself only once it was definite that the little creep had led her to the right place.

  Don’t you touch her, Aleister Jindrich! I thought. Don’t you dare.

  He can’t touch her, you idiot! I answered myself. But that didn’t really help.

  “I can’t see anything. Are you sure it was here?” Ella asked after a while.

  “Yes, definitely. It must be there.”

  Ella pushed her trowel deeper into the damp earth. It felt like she was digging for hours, but finally I heard a faint clink. Metal on metal. Ella dropped the trowel and reached into the deep hole.

  “I can feel it!” she called. “An urn, just as you said.”

  “You see?” Aleister was so proud; it made him glow in the dark like a white mushroom. As though it was a huge achievement to steal a dead man’s heart. “So?” he purred. “Where’s my kiss?”

  Ella gave him an icy look.

  “First I have to see the heart. What if whatever’s down there is just an old cookie tin or something?”

  Aleister’s pale face became blotchy with rage. “It is the heart, and you will give me my kiss. Now!”

  Ella got to her feet. She was still taller than he was, by far. “Really? And how’s that going to happen? You’re a ghost. And even if you were made of flesh and blood, I’d rather kiss all my grandmother’s toads than you.”

  He tried to grab her, but his arms went right through her body. Ella attempted to push him away, which of course didn’t have much effect either.

  “Leave her alone, you dead little thief!” I screamed. I jumped out of the bushes so quickly that I stepped right into the freshly dug hole, twisting my ankle as I struggled to pull my foot out. But I still managed to stand protectively in front of Ella. The relieved look she gave me made the twisted ankle totally worth it.

  “You get the heart,” I said to her, keeping my eyes on Aleister. “I’ll deal with the little creep.”

  Sounded great, but I didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to do that. Of course, I could have called Longspee. But how could I call myself his squire if I couldn’t even handle a ghost who was five inches shorter than I?

  Aleister had turned the color of a moldy orange. He was shaking with rage.

  “What are you doing here?” he hissed at me. His eyes were turning into a pair of glowing embers. “Did that blasted knight send you?”

  “And what if?” I replied. “It’s still his heart, isn’t it?”

  “I will kill you!” Aleister screamed. His head was now glowing like a pumpkin on Halloween.

  “Well, you can’t!” I taunted him. “And believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve had my fair share of dealings with your kind over the past few days!”

  Behind me, Ella screamed with delight. “I’ve got it, Jon!” she cried.

  She was holding an urn made of gray metal—lead, as Aleister had told her—and covered with symbols.

  The sight made me forget all about Aleister. Ella shouted a warning, but it was too late. He had jumped me, and his body melted with mine, flooding my heart and my brain with all his rage and with so many images and sounds that I suddenly didn’t even know my own name.

  “Leave him!” I heard Ella scream.

  I felt her arms wrap around me, making Aleister’s iciness shrink away from her warmth.

  “Jon!” she called, giving me my name back. “Jon!”

  Aleister was gone as quickly as he’d invaded me. I knelt on the wet ground, shivering and feeling terribly stupid—and definitely not worthy of being a knight’s squire.

  “I should’ve known!” I muttered angrily. “I should’ve jumped to the side, or crossed my arms, or—”

  “Forget about it!” Ella said, helping me back to my feet. “He sprang on me just like that as well. He’s a filthy little creep, and I hope we never see him again.”

  The urn was still lying where she’d dropped it when she came to my aid. It looked like an old-fashioned flowerpot. Ella picked it up and wiped it with her sleeve. “Black magic!” she said as I looked at the symbols on its lid. “No worries, Zelda always tells me they can only hurt you when you believe in them. Let’s go back to the gate. Uncle Matt’s probably really anxious already.”

  I’d completely forgotten about The Beard. As we ran past the Bishop’s Palace (and no, in the dark it really doesn’t look anything like a school), I thought I could see an angry flicker behind one of the windows. In my head I still heard the echoes of breaking glass and the feeling of Aleister Jindrich falling through the cold winter air to his death.

  To this day, I sometimes have one of the foul memories Aleister left like greasy fingerprints in my head.

  Believe me, it’s not a nice feeling.

  EVENSONG

  When we reached the gate, we saw The Beard prowling up and down behind it like a caged tiger.

  “That took forever!” he cursed us. “What do you think your mothers are going to do to me if they find out that I waited here obediently while you two went to meet a ghost in the middle of the night? And don’t give me your ‘he was just a little one’!”

  “Mum won’t hear about this from me,” I answered, swinging my legs over the iron gate. “And it’s only ten o’clock.”

  “Exactly,” said Ella. She passed me the urn through the bars. “Relax, Uncle Matt. We had the whole thing totally under control.”

  Which was a big fat lie. But The Beard hadn’t heard anything Ella had said anyway. He just had eyes for the urn.

  “You… you got it?” he stammered.

  I nodded and squeezed the urn tightly to my chest. It was all good, even though my head still felt gunked up by Aleister.

  “We have to tell Longspee,” I said to The Beard. “But you’d better not wait for us here. Aleister might still come after us.”

  Ella and I steered toward the cathedral. The Beard came after us. Of course.

  I stopped.

  “What are you doing? You can’t come with us!” I really tried to sound nice. After all, he’d tried to save Ella’s life in Kilmington, even if he hadn’t really done much good.

  “Yes? And why not?”

  Because Longspee is mine, I wanted to answer. But of course I knew how childish that would sound.

  His next argument didn’t sound much better than mine. “I just want to see him!”

  “Why? If you want to see a ghost, go back and look at Aleister.”

  “He’s not a knight!” The Beard snapped. His face went so red I could see it even in the darkness. “I barely got a quick look at him in Kilmington.”

  “But if you come, he won’t even show himself.”

  “Stop it!” Ella interrupted us impatiently. “It doesn’t matter whether Uncle Matt comes or not. Longspee won’t show himself anyway.”

  She pointed at the windows of the cathedral. Bright light flooded through them, and I remembered Angus telling me something about a concert for which the choristers had been rehearsing. I looked disappointedly at the urn, but Ella took my arm.

  “Come on, we’ll tell him everything anyway,” she said. “He’ll hear us somehow.”

  We snuck down the south aisle so that the practicing choristers wouldn’t notice us. Ella and I were as silent as the stones around us, but The Beard couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  “Just look at those columns!” he whispered. “Did you know they are bent because the tower is too heavy for them?”

  “Yes, we know that,” I whispered back. But that didn’t shut him up.<
br />
  “Do you know the story of how they found the place for the cathedral?” he whispered again.

  “Yeah, sure,” I whispered, squeezing the urn closer to my chest. Longspee’s sarcophagus appeared behind the columns.

  Ella gave me an encouraging nudge.

  “Go on!” she whispered. “He’ll definitely hear you.”

  The choristers sang as if a choir of angels had descended from heaven. It was always so hard to believe that Angus’s mouth could produce such sounds. Longspee’s stone figure lay there peacefully, as if the boys had sung him to sleep. I went between the columns and leaned over the tomb.

  “I hope you can hear me, William!” I whispered. “I think we found your heart. And tomorrow we will take it to Lacock, to your wife’s grave. The urn is sealed, and that’s why we couldn’t open it, but—”

  A loud voice interrupted me.

  “Hey, Jon! What the heck are you doing here?”

  I hadn’t noticed that the choristers had stopped singing. They were spilling from the choir room like an excited flock of birds. And Angus was the tallest and loudest. When he called my name, all eyes fell on me, and I was standing there, the urn pressed to my chest, and I wished they’d all disappear to God-knows-where.

  “Where have you been, Whitcroft?” Angus called, ignoring the disapproving look of the choirmaster. Like an excited puppy, he plowed through the rows of chairs toward me. “Stu and I were already—”

  He stopped abruptly, seeing Ella standing behind me.

  “Hey, that…” he stuttered, turning bright red. “Hi, Ella!”

  She answered, “Hi!” and gave him such an icy look that I nearly felt pity for him. But Angus didn’t even notice. He’d spotted the urn.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing!” I answered, hiding the urn behind my back. And then… yes, I can’t deny it, The Beard saved me.

  “Hi, there!” he said, coming around one of the columns, holding out his hand to Angus. “Jon was with me these past couple days. I’m his soon-to-be stepfather. I presume you’re one of his roommates?”

  “Oh, hello,” Angus stammered, shooting me a nervous look. “Hi, Mr. Beard, I mean, Mr….”

  “Littlejohn,” the Beard said. Angus was probably racking his brain as to why I’d call someone The Beard who didn’t have even a trace of hair on his chin. “I’m Ella’s uncle, and I was just showing Ella and Jon my favorite tomb in the cathedral. This sarcophagus is one of the most impressive examples of medieval masonry.”

  “Yeah, Bona—I mean, Mr. Rifkin already explained that to us,” Angus muttered. He was looking at Ella again.

  The Beard continued to talk about medieval art and the tombs in the cathedral. He really tried his best, but I knew Angus was thinking of only one thing: that he would go back, shake Stu awake, and tell him he’d seen me with Ella Littlejohn again.

  And, Jon Whitcroft, I thought while The Beard droned on, what do you care what Angus tells Stu? You found Longspee’s heart! And yet I was still glad I’d be sleeping at Zelda’s that night.

  LACOCK ABBEY

  Zelda wouldn’t let us go to bed before we’d told her everything about the chorister and Longspee’s heart. And she still sent us to school the next morning, but not without a solemn promise to look after the urn and to defend it with her crutches if need be.

  School. Math, history, grammar. It all seemed so absurd compared to what we’d gone through in the past few days and nights. I wanted to climb on my desk and scream, “Can’t you see? I’m as good as grown up. In the body of a knight I fought a murderer on the top of a tower. I’ve become Longspee’s squire, and I found his stolen heart! What do you think you can teach me?”

  But of course I stayed in my chair. During English, a rather hideous doodle landed on my desk, showing me and Ella kissing. All day I waited for Aleister to appear and demand the heart back. And he did appear in the end—in the boys’ bathroom. But instead of the heart, he just talked about how confused he’d been since our encounter and how his head was buzzing with nothing but math homework and the strategic aspects of the Lionheart’s Crusades. I was surprised our melting had had this effect on him, because school had been the last thing on my mind recently. But I was happy enough that he felt miserable, and I left him with the advice to just finally dissolve himself and disappear.

  I did my homework in the backseat of Zelda’s car. It was a long drive from Salisbury to Lacock, and this time the passenger seat belonged to the urn with William Longspee’s heart. The seal had been broken.

  “I thought I’d better check that it really contains what we were hoping for,” Zelda had said when she noticed my look. “And I’d say the answer is yes. The content looks to me like what I imagine a thousand-year-old heart to look like. But, believe me, even if we were taking an old shoe to Lacock Abbey, the only thing that counts is that William Longspee now can believe in himself again. And that’s thanks to you. And to his own courage.”

  The look Ella gave me made it quite clear she was glad we were not taking an old shoe to Lacock.

  “Do you think Longspee will see his wife again?” she whispered while Zelda was cursing a truck driver who, in her opinion, was driving far too slowly. “Do you believe in heaven and hell and stuff, Jon?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “But I really hope Stourton either dissolved into thin air or has gone to a place that will keep him away from me for eternity. Angus believes in heaven. But I’m not sure. Problem is, if heaven exists, then who gets in?”

  “Exactly!” Ella whispered. “For example, would Zelda get in?”

  “I heard that, Ella Littlejohn!” Zelda said. She was overtaking the truck at such a hair-raising speed, I was afraid her poor old car would lose all four wheels in the effort. “And, no, they probably wouldn’t let me in. But, anyway, I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell.”

  Before I could ask her where she thought we go when we die, and whether her toads would go there too, Zelda was already steering her car into the parking lot of Lacock Abbey.

  I don’t think I’d mind if someone buried my heart in Lacock Abbey. You get the feeling the journey to the next world is a little bit shorter from there, whatever that next world might be.

  “I have a friend who works in the museum shop,” Zelda said as she hobbled ahead across the parking lot. (She still steadfastly refused to use her crutches for anything but fighting ghosts.) “Margaret and I went to school together. She married an idiot, and she’s not very bright herself, but she’ll definitely help us.”

  Margaret was standing behind the cash register. She was quite tall and so big that you could’ve fit four Zeldas into her clothes. Her watery blue eyes bulged a little, giving her a look of being constantly surprised. Zelda asked after Margaret’s grandchildren and counted the money for the entry tickets into her hand. But then Zelda quickly got to the point.

  “Listen, Margaret!” she whispered across the counter. “I need your help. We have to bury something in Ela of Salisbury’s grave.”

  Margaret’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.

  “What kind of silliness is this, Zelda?” she whispered back, shooting a worried glance at her colleague who was restocking the postcard display. “I’ve gotten used to the toads jumping around my feet every time I go to have tea with you, but that’s really all you can ask.”

  “Heavens, Margaret, I haven’t asked you for anything since I let you copy my homework at school,” Zelda retorted under her breath. “So don’t be like that. You do know the story that Ela of Salisbury buried her husband’s heart here at Lacock, right?”

  Margaret frowned. “Didn’t she also bring her son’s heart here as well? You know, the poor boy who was hacked to pieces near Jerusalem?”

  Zelda shook her head impatiently. “No idea. The whole heart-burying fad was far too popular at some point. But, no, I’m only talking about her husband’s heart.” Zelda leaned over the counter. “Ela buried the wrong heart, Margaret. William Longspee’s m
urderer stole his heart and palmed his servant’s heart off to the wife.”

  Margaret squeezed a hand to her chest, as though she was afraid someone could do the same to her heart. “No! But that’s terrible!”

  “Relax!” Zelda whispered. “We have the right heart. So show us where Ela is buried, and we’ll set the whole affair to rest.”

  Margaret stared at the plastic bag in Ella’s hand. “Is it in there?” she breathed.

  Ella frowned and nodded.

  Margaret gasped for air, and for a moment I really expected her eyes to drop out of her head.

  “But, you see, there is no grave!” She exhaled. “There’s only the memorial stone in the cloisters, and I’m not even sure Ela’s actually buried beneath that.”

  Ella and I exchanged a worried look, but Zelda was not to be discouraged by such details.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “Then we’ll bury the heart as close to that stone as we can. Don’t you think Longspee might accept that, Jon?”

  “Longspee?” Margaret’s watery blue eyes zeroed in on me.

  “William Longspee, Ela’s husband,” Zelda explained. “Oh, try not to look so obtuse, Margaret. Who do you think told us about the stolen heart if not Longspee’s ghost?”

  That did it. The poor woman lost it, and Zelda had to use all her persuasive powers to get Margaret to agree to come out from behind her counter and take us across to the abbey.

  Lacock Abbey lies quite a bit away from the road, as if it’s trying to hide itself from a world in which visitors no longer arrive on horseback, as they’d done in Ela’s day. Margaret told us that the abbey hadn’t seen any nuns since Henry VIII closed all the monasteries. I still felt as if I could see Longspee’s wife behind every window, as though she’d spent all these centuries waiting for his heart.

  “I think you’re just trying to play tricks on me again, Zelda Littlejohn!” Margaret muttered in a low voice while we followed a tourist couple down the path that ends in the abbey’s cloisters. “Just like when we were children and you tried to convince me there were fairies living in your garden.”