The Ghost Who Loved Me

Nora Walsh was twenty-seven years old and had been talking to Edmund Ashby for six weeks before she admitted she was in love with him.

The admission was inconvenient on several counts. Edmund had been dead since 1871. He was also—she had verified this in three separate Edinburgh archive visits—very real, at least in the sense that a man named Edmund Ashby had lived in the townhouse on Candlemaker Row from 1863 until his death, had written two novels and most of a third, and had died at thirty-three of a fever that the era’s medicine had no particular argument against.

She had bought the writing desk at an estate sale in Shropshire in March. The estate agent had described it as “a significant piece with interesting provenance.” Nora had looked at the mahogany and the brass handles and the wear on the leather surface and thought: someone loved this desk. That much was obvious.

She had not expected the desk to come with its original owner.

He had announced himself on the second night, when she was working late on a catalogue entry: a voice from the direction of the desk, low and Scottish-accented, with the vowel qualities of the mid-nineteenth century. You’re filing me under Furniture (General). I wrote three academic papers at this surface.

She’d looked up. He was standing behind the desk—not quite visible, the way presences aren’t quite visible, but entirely present, and reading to her as a man in his early thirties with dark hair and the frustration of someone who had just encountered a scholarly error.

She’d said: “If you give me the correct filing, I’ll update the entry.”

They’d been talking every evening since.

She learned: he had been tied to the desk since 1871 because the novel was unfinished and he was constitutionally unable to leave it that way. Four women had owned the desk in a hundred and fifty years. Three hadn’t been able to perceive him. The fourth had chosen not to.

“Why?” Nora asked, one late April evening.

“Because she was sensible.” He was at the window, looking out at the Close. He had been getting more solid—more defined at the edges, less translucent—as the weeks went on, and she had been cataloguing this the way she catalogued everything: with careful attention and a professional refusal to draw personal conclusions. “She understood that becoming involved with a ghost is a limited proposition.”

“Limited how?”

He turned from the window. The lamplight fell across his face and shoulders, picking out the line of his jaw, the dark of his hair. He looked, she thought—not for the first time—as though he had been very attractive when alive. This observation was becoming less professional.

“I am dead, Miss Walsh. I can offer conversation, companionship, and the correction of scholarly errors. I cannot offer the rest of it.”

“The rest of what?”

He was quiet for a moment. “The rest of what you deserve.”

She put her pencil down.

This was, she understood, the point at which a sensible woman said goodnight and went to bed and spent the following week finding a buyer for the desk. She had a life: a business, a lease, a thesis she was supposed to be finishing. She had no particular use for a Victorian ghost who stood at her window in the evenings and looked at her as though she were a text he was translating and couldn’t quite put down.

“Edmund.”

“Yes.”

“When you say more solid—is there a limit to how solid?”

He went still in the way he responded to questions whose answers he had thought about but not intended to voice. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been this real. Not even in 1869.”

She stood up from her desk.

The three steps between them felt different from other distances. She put her hand against his face, and he was cool—the specific coolness of an Edinburgh evening, which was also the specific coolness of him—and solid, actually solid, the scratch of stubble against her palm and the way his breath changed, audibly, at the contact.

“You’re breathing,” she said.

“I seem to be.” His voice had lost its careful quality.

She kissed him.

He kissed back, and the lamp held its flame, and the wanting behind it was six weeks of evening conversations and deliberate distance and all the professional cataloguing she had done of his jawline and his hands and the way he said her name. He kissed with the full force of a hundred and fifty years of waiting, and she kissed him back with the full force of someone who had stopped pretending she wasn’t going to.

He walked her backward toward the chaise and she went willingly, pulling him by the lapels, and the cool solidity of him was exactly as surprising and exactly as right as she had not allowed herself to imagine.

He laid her down and looked at her the way he looked at manuscripts he was afraid of damaging: with complete, focused attention. She pulled him down to her and said, “I’m not a manuscript.”

“No,” he said. “You’re considerably more interesting.”

He undressed her with the systematic care of someone who has wanted to do a thing for a long time and intends to do it well. His hands were cool and certain on her skin—her collarbone, her breasts, the curve of her waist—and everywhere they rested, heat pooled in their wake, the specific heat generated by cold against wanting. He worked slowly down her body, unhurried, learning her with his hands and then with his mouth.

When he settled between her thighs, he looked up at her. “Tell me what you want,” he said.

“You already know.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

She said it. Clearly, directly, with no academic hedging. The expression on his face at the words was worth the saying.

His mouth on her was cool at first and then not—the temperature of him rising with effort or desire or some mechanics she didn’t require herself to understand. He worked with patience and attention, learning what she responded to and returning to it, his tongue drawing long strokes and then small focused circles, and she gripped the cushion above her head and let the sound of it go, let it fill the quiet room, because she was twenty-seven years old in her own bookshop and there was no reason to be quiet.

He brought two fingers inside her and she gasped, and he worked her with both—mouth and hand together—unhurried and relentless, until her thighs were locked around his shoulders and her hips were moving without her permission and the orgasm broke through her in long shuddering waves, her voice loud and helpless, her whole body pulled taut and then released.

He held her through the aftershocks. When her breathing had returned to something like normal, she pulled at his shoulders.

“Come here,” she said. “Now.”

He came to her, and she reached for him with efficient hands, and he was fully present when she found him, real and entirely there, and his breath went sharp at her touch. She pulled him toward her and he pressed into her slowly—the sound he made as he did, low and helpless, a century and a half of waiting compressed into two syllables—went through her like a struck chord.

He moved carefully at first, as though he couldn’t quite believe it either, learning the fit of it. Then less carefully. The cold-to-warm of him, the particular solid weight and depth, the catch of his breath against her throat—she was already close again and he knew it, adjusting his angle until she was gripping his shoulders and saying his name on a different register than she’d ever said anyone’s name, urgent and present and entirely ungoverned.

She came hard, and felt his rhythm falter and then fail entirely, his forehead pressed to hers, her name in his mouth like something sacred and finally permitted. When he shuddered against her, the full presence of him—solid, warm now, entirely real—was overwhelming and exactly right, and she held him through it with both arms and felt the long shaking release move through him like weather.

Afterward, the lamp was very quiet.

She lay with her cheek against his chest—cooler than before, temperature slowly finding its level—and listened to the breathing he had evidently remembered how to do.

“Are you still here?” she asked.

“Less solid than I was.” He turned his head against her hair. “More than I expected.”

“Is that good?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been in this room for a hundred and fifty years, Miss Walsh. I’ve watched every rain Edinburgh had to offer, twice. I’ve read everything on your shelves. I’ve translated four archive entries from my own letters that scholars have been getting wrong for thirty years.” A pause. “Ask me again if this is good.”

She laughed—surprised, genuine, the laugh of someone who has just recognized something that reorganizes several other things.

“Stay,” she said.

“I’m still here,” he said. Which was not an answer and was also entirely one.

Outside, the Close settled into its midnight register. The mahogany desk sat in the corner with its brass handles and its worn leather surface, and the novel in the drawer was still unfinished, and seemed, at the moment, in absolutely no hurry to be otherwise.