The Mayor of Bellacourt

Chapter 3

When you're a ghost your days (to the extent that it can be said that you experience time in any sort of conventional, linear sense) inevitably follow a fairly predictable routine. In the case of Lady Mallory Cliffe, the spirit who been haunting the halls of Bellacourt Manor for years--for longer than it had been Bellacourt Manor, in fact--this meant:

1. a few minutes moaning and wailing along the upper halls in the very early morning hours;

2. rearranging or hiding a few of the family's personal items in the afternoons (She particularly enjoying moving Lady Hortense's stuff, as doing so inevitably led to accusatory screaming fits between Hortense and her more attractive sisters, which in turn offered Lady Mallory a deep sense of accomplishment.);

3. evenings spent basically just hanging out in the bathroom, watching Master Frederick receive his daily and incredibly thorough scrub-down;

4. and then maybe a spectral molestation of Master Frederick in the very late evenings, if she had the ectoplasmic energy.

It wasn't much of a schedule, admittedly, but it satisfied. When she'd found herself bound to this existence after strangling her husband (and accidentally knocking over an oil lamp in the attempt, burning both him and herself alive in their bedroom.), she'd thought: OK, that didn't go according to plan, but let's make the best of it. And so she had.

Lady Mallory wasn't quite sure if she'd been left to roam the halls of Bellacourt Manor as a sort of penance for her so-called "crimes", or whether this was essentially a cosmic gift, an extended vacation without her revolting husband around. Sometimes she wondered if secretly it was just her own dread of running into her husband in the afterlife that kept her here. In any case, she had a nice little thing going. She'd been bored and gloomy at first, haunting the empty house alone for however long, but since the Bellacourts had moved in things had improved considerably. She'd fallen into an easy rhythm haunting the lives of those who dwelled within Bellacourt Manor, and it suited her immensely.

Maybe her routine lacked the excitement of some of Newport's more horrifying hauntings and possessions (The Astors, down the street, were said to have the most terrifyingly delightful poltergeists), but who had the energy for all that? And frankly she kind of liked the Bellacourts. Well, not Hor, certainly, but a good many of the other ones.

The point was: ghosts need a regimen, if their afterlives are to mean anything at all. If you don't stick to a reasonably regular haunting schedule, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror one morning and it's like Wait, what the fuck have I been doing the last 50 years? Time being so fluid and meaningless for the dead and all.

So one can imagine Lady Mallory's surprise and annoyance when she arrived at the servants' halls one morning at Bellacourt Manor, ready to moan and wail and really get a nice, chilling start on the day, to find that the halls were already filled with the sounds of moaning and wailing.

Someone was apparently super worked up about something. Lady Mallory found it difficult to focus her thoughts, such was the tenor of the desperate sobbing that seemed to occupy every bit of aural space on this floor.

Lady Mallory began poking her head through the walls of various rooms until she found the source of the noise at last: Blanche. Of course. She was sobbing and blubbering in her room, clinging desperately to a small framed picture. UGH. Blanche was the worst. Like: excuse you? This job is taken? Don't you have a spittoon to scrub? (Or whatever her job was.) Lady Mallory's whole schedule was going to be screwed up now.