Ciji Ware by A Light on the Veranda

Whitaker—later she married a Clayton, which is my maiden name—fell in love with a real cad .”
    “Sounds kinda familiar,” Daphne joked ruefully.
    Maddy smiled in sympathy and continued with her story. “He was a French aristocrat, or something, tagging along with the duc d’Orléans who’d been exiled, for a time, to America in the aftermath of the French Revolution.” She paused for breath and then waved at Daphne. “Well, you know all this history stuff, but, anyway—”
    “Wait a minute,” Daphne interrupted. The hair on her arms was standing on end. “You were born a Clayton. How could this Daphne also be a Whitaker like Cousin Marcus and Grandmother Kingsbury?” And how strange, she mused, that she had just been telling Corlis yesterday about the young duc d’Orléans’s celebrated visit to Natchez.
    “The ghost on my direct side of the family is also considered a Whitaker because, like I said, my husband Marcus and I were cousins several generations back—like half the folks in Natchez,” Maddy said with amused exasperation.
    “Oh,” Daphne said in a small voice.
    Warming to her tale, Maddy continued, “Your namesake, the other Daphne, met this Frenchman when she was an impressionable girl and was totally smitten by the scoundrel. He promised to return from New Orleans to marry her, and she reportedly pined away for the bounder till her dyin’ day, playin’ the harp and waitin’ for her faithless lover to return. Such a waste.”
    “And did he ever come back to Natchez?” Daphne asked, unwilling to admit, even to herself, that her heart was pounding erratically and her pulse was racing.
    “Well, I don’t rightly know,” Maddy said thoughtfully. “Clearly, she finally married someone else… but apparently she’s still playin’ her harp in the parlor in the middle of the night!” she pronounced triumphantly.
    “Do you know who she married?”
    “Oh, of course I do, ’cause it caused a lot of talk at the time. Daphne Drake Whitaker eventually married Aaron Clayton—a Yankee, my great-grandmother said he was—and musta had children by him, ’cause that’s where my daddy got his name, Drake Clayton the Fourth.”
    “Now, tell me the truth,” Daphne demanded. “You live in Bluff House. Have you ever heard your harp playing by itself in the middle of the night?”
    “I thought I heard it once,” Madeline said with a pensive, faraway look. “Right after Marcus and Clayton passed on… but, of course, I was not myself much durin’ that time…”
    “Oh… sweetie.” Daphne was suddenly contrite that their bantering conversation had led to this subject. Maddy’s grief over the double tragedy of losing a husband and a son in the same year had thrown her into a serious bout of depression requiring medication and a brief period of hospitalization. “What person wouldn’t have thought she heard—”
    “But a tour guide over at Rosalie swears she’s heard Daphne Whitaker playin’ her ghostly harp in the parlor there,” Maddy rushed on, obviously not upset by their discussion of ghostly matters. “And believe me, she’s a prominent member of the D.A.R. The tour guide, I mean… not the ghost!” Maddy laughed at her own joke, which completely assured Daphne that her adored cousin’s spirits were fully restored.
    “Have other people seen this supposed ghost?” Daphne asked skeptically.
    “Oh, lots. The cleaning woman at Monmouth says she heard a harp playin’ by itself a while back, and one of the gardeners at another plantation house upriver, that has a harp in the upstairs music room, vows on a stack of Bibles he hears it through the open windows every spring—”
    Daphne stood abruptly, carried her coffee cup to the sink, and rinsed it out. “Well, this flesh-and-blood harpist better skedaddle out of here,” she announced firmly. She’d been overtired and overwrought from the accumulation of stress in her life these days. Proof? The brief but bizarre moment at