chapter 15
We begin with a prayer,” Mother murmured. I couldn’t look at Elizabeth, who was trying to meet my gaze, or Colin by the door, or Xavier, sitting all concerned across from me. Tabitha was no doubt in the throes of glee at my imminent downfall. I took a deep breath. I had to focus myself.
The sitters bent their heads for a moment. There was no one else, not a single spirit or ghost. Not even Rowena. We were truly on our own tonight.
“If everyone will take hands? It helps to conduct the flow of energy.”
Everyone joined hands. Mother’s grip was tight, grinding my finger bones together. The whispering hadn’t entirely died down. I had to fight the urge to turn and stare at Lord Thornwood, standing behind us. The back of my neck was all tingles and prickles. What was he doing here? Was he truly who I thought he was? And what did that mean for me, exactly?
“Do you feel that?” someone murmured.
There was a cold breath of air, one I knew had nothing to do with spirits. This one was too rhythmic, too predictable. I wasn’t sure where the bellows were or who was manning them, but I recognized the stale air. The table shivered.
“Henry!” A woman gasped, huddling closer to her husband. Henry didn’t look any more inclined to bravery.
The shiver turned to a shudder.
“Are the spirits here?”
Three distinct taps.
“Yes,” Mother translated. “Three for yes, two for maybe, one for no.”
“Grandfather?” a man asked tentatively. “I can smell your cologne.”
Three more taps. The young man flushed happily. His eyes were very bright.
“We are indeed blessed here tonight,” Mother declared.
The séance was following the same standards they all did; there were just no ghosts to take part. The metal plate discreetly attached to the bottom of Mother’s left shoe was the reason for the resounding taps. Whispers again, but this time about ancestors and cold hands on the shoulder. Not about the startling resemblance between Lord Thornwood and me.
Mother’s grip tightened painfully on mine. I felt under the table leg with the toe of my boot, slowly inching across the wood until I found the vial I’d secured there. I tilted it so that the liquid pooled onto the carpet, easily absorbed before the end of the night. A waft of heavy perfume, lilac, enveloped us. A woman sniffed delicately.
“Lilac perfume! My mother’s favorite!”
No one recalled that twenty years ago there had been quite a craze for lilac perfume. There were few drawing room sitters of a certain age who didn’t have an olfactory memory similar to this one. The woman wept openly. I felt horrid.
“Maman always promised she would send me a sign.”
My shoulders slumped. I had never wanted to run from a séance as much as I did now. If I could have chewed through my own wrists to tear my hands free, I would have leaped over the table toward the door. Mother often said she provided a service, a comfort to the grieving, no different from any priest, who, after all, couldn’t prove the existence of God any more than anyone could prove the existence of ghosts. I couldn’t help but feel it was a cruel hoax, but I was caught like a fly in a web. Mother rose gracefully to her feet.
“I will retire to contact them more deeply. Let us sing to welcome them!”
She eased behind the curtain, ostensibly to sit on the stool provided and open herself up to the spirits. I thought of the man at the pond. Perhaps it was for the best that Mother had no real talent for this work.
After a long moment in the singing dark, a pale face emerged in the small parting of the curtains. The eyes were glassy, the expression eerie. Someone squeaked. A glass rattled on a side table when someone else took a surprised step backward.
“Do you see? Do you see? She’s entranced!”
“That isn’t her face!”
“The eyes, you know. So different.”
Everyone was more than eager to offer up their own brand of certainty. Mother’s face did indeed look otherworldly. She kept it frighteningly still before withdrawing. And then the tricky part: for full-spirit materialization, Mother had to emerge completely from the cabinet, with none the wiser.
Tricky and yet simpler than you might imagine, if done properly.
The audience was far too busy looking at the window, their attention redirected by Colin, who had subtly pulled the drapes. Marjorie was in the room directly overhead with a basket of distractions.
“It’s snowing!”
There was a general outcry of appreciation. Marjorie shook out the bits of shredded feathers Colin had gathered, just enough for a brief and bizarre fall of snow on a fine summer night. By morning, the wind would have carried the feathers away. Any that remained would be removed by Colin, who would spend the dark hours when everyone, including the servants, were abed, cleaning up any remaining evidence.
Earlier, Colin had attached thread to the set of curtains at the other set of windows. Now, he gave it a tug. No one noticed. They were too busy pointing to the magically drifting drapes. Marjorie, knowing the routine, had run to the next set of overhanging windows and was now lowering a specially made wax hand to the edge of the casement. All we saw were pale fingertips scratching at the glass. A flutter of red rose petals dripped like blood.
And then it was Mother’s turn.
There was a bloodcurdling shriek and everyone jumped in their seats. Hands fluttered to pale throats, gasps ricocheted through the room.
Alice Owen had arrived.
Alice was always popular as she circled through the room in a white shift, careful not to touch anyone. The shift had been soaked in lavender water and worn damp under Mother’s corset. Released, the scent filled the room like another guest. Murmurs and whispers followed in its wake.
“I am Alice,” she said, her voice quite altered. She sounded younger, her tone decidedly nasal. She stopped behind an old man’s chair. A dignified woman across the table squeaked. “She pinched me!”
She was clearly out of arm’s reach from Mother. The pinch came from the small metal darning needle attached to a flexible rod in my boot. It was nothing to slip it out under the table and give the sitters a small poke. It always made them giggle, and I always chose the most disapproving matron or condescending young lord.
“And me!” a young girl exclaimed with a loud chuckle.
I hadn’t even touched her.
That happened rather frequently as well.
Mother continued to drift throughout the room. The sitters seemed well and truly distracted, thoroughly entertained by the promise of scandalous gossip and the shiver of speaking to the dead. I was just as distracted, wondering what Lord Thornwood was thinking and if I would be able to speak to him. Even if I didn’t quite know what I was meant to say.
It was my fault.
I wasn’t paying attention.
Actually, it was Rowena’s fault.
The room tilted, the comfortable chair faded, and I became dead to the whispers of the guests around me. It was suddenly the middle of the night. I wore a thick wrapper against the chill and there was darkness all around me, even in the corridor just outside the half-opened door. I was in a library, kneeling on the hard stones in front of a fireplace. Only a single ember smoldered, flaring red when I dug through the ash. I pulled at the corner of a folded parchment letter, burned at the edges.
I couldn’t make out the writing but I recognized it. Rowena recognized it. And it sent such a cold lance of fear through her stomach that she had to grab the side of the marble fireplace for support.
Her secret was out.
And she was doomed.
I slammed back into my body when one of the gas lamps suddenly flamed high.
I’d been trapped in Rowena’s memory and hadn’t seen Caroline move. Colin was across the room and too far away to stop her. She shot me a triumphant glance. The light was soft like honey, touching everything. It dripped over jet beads and diamond hairpins, over starched cravats, over the quivering ferns, and seemed to pool on mother’s discarded dress, peeking out from behind the curtain.
Mother herself froze between the sitters and the row of guests standing behind them. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, her throat bare of its necklace. She wore only her linen shift. The light shone through it, revealing her limbs and illuminating every curve.