This is a snippet from Moonlight Becomes You, my story for the next Bluestocking Belles collection. Is he a ghost? He doesn’t know himself! (I do, though.)

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As far as Barnabus Radcliffe could ascertain, he was a ghost. He remembered being on his way to meet his parents and sister at a house party. Feltonworthy was going to be there, too, and he hadn’t seen Feltonworthy since the poor fellow became earl.

Was Barney thrown from his horse? He seemed to remember flying through the air, but the memory is faint and fractured. Certainly he didn’t remember dying.

But it must be true, for the next thing he remembered was seeing Feltonworthy playing pall mall with a lady he didn’t know. He called out, but no sound came out of his mouth. Feltonworthy continued taking his stroke, and the ball sailed straight toward Barney. And then through him, as if he wasn’t there.

Furthermore, when Feltonworthy followed the ball, and Barney tried to stand in his way, Feltonworthy walked right through him.

He did it again a while later, when he was leaving the pall mall course.

Yes. Barney must be a ghost.

He followed Feltonworthy into the house. He recognized where he was, now. The house belonged to the Farrington-Smythes, and it was to their house party he had been heading when whatever-it-was happened to him.

So his parents must be here, too. Surely they would be able to see him. And his sister! His sister was, as she was fond of telling people, sensitive. Even if his parents were blind to his existence, Amelia would be able to tell he was here. Wouldn’t she?

Being a ghost had the advantage that he could walk through doors and even walls, checking each room. It had the disadvantage that nobody knew he was there. Not his good friend Feltonworthy. Not his father. Not his sister. Not even his mother, whom he found playing piquet with Mrs. Farrington-Smythe.

He couldn’t make himself seen or heard. He couldn’t move any objects. He couldn’t chill the air, or do anything else that apparently alerted people to the presence of a ghost. What a complete have those ghost stories turned out to be!

Perhaps this was the afterlife. Looking in on the family who did not know he was dead, and seeing them carry on without him. But that couldn’t be the fate of everyone, for surely the place would be full of ghosts, if everyone just drifted around all the time? And he had not seen any other ghosts since he suddenly found himself in Farrington-Smythe’s shrubbery.

Was he being punished for his sins? He hadn’t been a bad man. Or, at least, he didn’t think he had been that bad. He had cut up a few larks, of course, but he hadn’t broken any of the Ten Commandments.

Unless you counted the one about adultery, although Mrs. Moffat had assured him she was a widow, so surely God would give him a pass on that one? Since his close encounter with Mr. Moffat when he was nineteen, he had been far more careful.

Wasn’t there also one about keeping Sunday’s holy? He couldn’t remember how it went, but he supposed he should have attended services more often, or at all, in fact. He sent up a hasty prayer promising to mend his ways if this turned out to be some kind of a weird dream. He really didn’t want to be dead. And he especially didn’t want to be dead if it turned out he would be spending eternity all by himself. While he was a man who liked his own company, one could have too much of a good thing.