Free Top O' the Mournin' by Maddy Hunter

bathroom for a better look at myself in the mirror. The welts peppered my arms and throat, but they hadn’t reached my face yet.
    “Did you eat somethin’ you was allergic to?” Nana asked.
    “I’m not allergic to anything.”
    “Hives can sometimes be activated by stress,” said Tilly. “Are you feeling stressed by anything?”
    I thought about my life over the last twenty-four hours…and scratched some more. “Not that I know of!” I lied. And what was worse, the more I thought about Rita, the more creeped out I was getting that she’d seen something that had literally scared her to death. What if Ashley had told the truth about the castle? What if it really was haunted?
    “If she’s not stressed out, I think we should tell her,” I heard Tilly say.
    When I didn’t hear Nana reply, I poked my head out the bathroom door. “Tell me what?”
    Tilly looked at Nana. Nana looked at Tilly, then at me. “It’s about the castle, dear. I don’t mean to alarm you, but…it’s haunted.”
    My mouth fell open. “You know? Who told you? Bernice? How did she find out? Was she eavesdropping again? Oh, great. If Bernice knows, everyone will know, and they’ll all want to go home. I can’t go home. What am I supposed to do about Etienne? He took time off work to be with me. I think he might be planning to pop the question!”
    Nana clapped her hands together. “How nice for you, dear. You want I should e-mail your mother so’s she can reserve the Knights a Columbus hall for the reception? You can never book too early these days.”
    “No e-mails! Not yet. Now let’s back up. Who told you about the castle?”
    “Tilly told me last night,” said Nana, “but she’s kept it to herself ’cause she didn’t wanna spook anyone. What with the maid dyin’ like that, though, we thought you oughta know what you might be dealin’ with.”
    “How did you find out?” I asked Tilly.
    “It’s a long story.” She staked out one of the room’s velvet boudoir chairs and sat down. With a waggle of her walking stick, she directed Nana and me to do the same.
    “One of my pet courses during my years at Iowa State was a graduate seminar on Irish myth and legend, and one of the most poignant tales my students uncovered was that of a wealthy English lord who accepted an invitation from James I to settle on land the king was disbursing in Ireland. By James’s edict, Irish landowners were expelled from their farms, driven into bogs, and forced to act as slave labor to the new English landowners. This particular English lord had a daughter who some say was the most beautiful female ever to set foot on Irish soil. She was light-eyed, golden-haired, and fair-skinned, and when her father commissioned a castle to be built, the girl fell in love with a handsome Irish laborer who was as dark as the girl was fair. Naturally, their union was forbidden. They didn’t share the same social class or the same faith, but despite their differences, they ran off and were married in a secret ceremony by an Irish monk. No one knew what they had done until it became obvious that the girl was breeding. Her father forced a confession out of her, and they say he was so incensed, he locked her in the dungeon and forbid anyone in the family to speak to her. As far as he was concerned, his daughter was dead to him. When her lover discovered her punishment, he tried to scale the castle wall one night to save her, but his body was found floating in the moat the next morning. When the girl’s father told her of her lover’s fate, she went into premature labor and, after two days of agonizing pain, died in childbirth.
    “Legend holds that from that time on, the two lovers have roamed the castle in search of each other, their wailing cries echoing through the halls. And when experts have chased down the cries, they’ve found a man’s wet footprints, as if he were dripping from the moat, and a woman’s bloody footprints, as if she were fresh from