A Haunted Romance by Sindra van Yssel Page A

into the house and left them in the living room, which looked entirely too empty without something in it. While boxes were not a great look, it was better than nothing.
    She’d been nervous the whole ride over, but she calmed down as soon as she took her boots off. The house was quiet, and just as she’d left it—a perfectly normal old rural house. The idea that the place was haunted seemed fanciful again. She’d missed it.
    She’d missed Trent too. She’d had a fantasy of him sitting on the stoop, waiting for her, but she knew it was silly. Still, he had been around an awful lot, and she liked that. The place seems less warm when he isn’t around. And it gets pretty hot when he is . She hadn’t felt that way about a man for a long time.
    She knew she really ought to write, so she set up her laptop and stared at it for a while. She read the last few pages of her manuscript in an attempt to get jump-started, but it was no use. Since talking to the archivist that morning and buying a scanner, she’d been eager to get to the contents of the chest. She closed her laptop and brought it to the bedroom.
    She washed and thoroughly dried her hands before touching anything; the oils that built up on skin could be fatal to old documents. The books and magazines she lifted out first, even though she was more interested in the papers. Each issue of the Pearl went in its own acid-free bag. The books she put on the bookcase in her office, after recording the titles, authors, and dates of each. There were a couple more in French, but the other three were English. Altar of Venus , 1890. The Way of a Man with a Maid , 1896. A Night in a Moorish Harem , 1905. Only the last had an author’s name on it, a Lord George Herbert. If nothing else, the owner of the chest had been consistent in their reading material, or possibly they had left their more respectable books on the shelves in the house while the salacious ones were locked away in a chest.
    It took her half an hour to get the scanner working to her satisfaction. She sat on the floor of her bedroom, a stack of acid-free plastic sleeves beside her, her laptop and scanner all hooked up. Gingerly, she lifted the first page and slid it into a sleeve and then placed in the scanner. It whirred satisfyingly as she pushed the button, and she looked at the image on her laptop. It took her several tries before she had the correct settings to make legible images of the page.
    She turned the page over to scan the other side. She resisted the temptation to read each page as she lifted it out; she’d read the digital copies later. From the glimpses she caught while the scanner did its thing, the first few were like the first, although not all from the same person. Each was written by an Englishman who had never met Minerva, or Minnie as she was called by one man. Minerva might have been virginal, but in letters, she had no shortage of lovers.
    After twenty or so pages, Chelsea was ready to quit for the night. She had to be so careful with each page, and the scanner took too long. The few salacious passages she’d come across had left her a little horny, which didn’t make it easy to go slow. But each image needed to be examined to make sure that the words were readable before the next was placed in the scanner.
    She scanned one more page and glanced at the next, intending to leave it in the chest for tomorrow. But the page caught her eye because it didn’t look like it was a letter. The writing was different too; despite the flowery nature of the script of the letters, there was a sameness to them, even those from different authors. This writing had just as many flourishes, but they were different, more feminine. Chapter One , the author had spelled out, and then written below, In which Amelia is first introduced to the pleasures of the flesh but retains her maidenhead.
    Her lethargy gone, Chelsea read on. Amelia was an American schoolgirl who found herself in London, and it was clear that