She took my arm. “Men I can manipulate,” she said. “Let’s go. He’s waiting.”
I stared at James now, sitting next to me in the Gild Theatre three years later, and thought about what had happened next. James had put us into a taxi, as promised. He’d taken us back to Gloria’s flat. He’d dumped Gloria into bed, where she immediately started snoring. And then he helped me, wobbling, onto Gloria’s sofa, where he placed an old chintz pillow for my head, and got me a blanket, and swung my legs up as if fixing a mannequin. I don’t know what I expected—I had absolutely no experience of men—but I lay there beneath Gloria’s mermaid painting, my eyes half closed as the ceiling spun above me, thinking I should say something clever and witty, something that would bring that look back, make him sit up and notice me. His hands had been strong and competent, holding my ankle as he unbuckled one shoe and slid it off, then the other. When I risked a glance at him, I saw he was looking down, his brow smooth, his expression blank. It’s not what you think, I’d thought wildly as his palms touched my calves with impersonal care, moving my legs in place on the sofa. I’m not what you think. I’m not. But instead I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted the tang of blood, and after a moment he stood in silence and left the flat, closing the door quietly behind him.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” I said to him now, thinking, Moody and a little obsessive, like a tangle of thorns. “When we met that night.”
“Didn’t like you?”
“It’s part of the pattern, it seems,” I admitted. “My making the worst possible impression on you.”
He stilled, staring ahead at the empty stage, and he did not look at me. After a long pause, he spoke. “You can’t tell a girl who’s had too much to drink that she has nice legs,” he said, choosing his words with care. “It makes you a cad.”
I trained my own gaze on the stage, heat rising in my cheeks, and remembered his blank expression as he’d removed my shoes. I’d wanted to ask him if he knew who I was that night—knew what I was, whose daughter I was. But now I realized that the answer didn’t matter.
“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”
His shoulders relaxed visibly at that, his body settling almost imperceptibly back into the chair. He looked around the theater, which had stopped filling at a quarter full. “Which one is the plant, do you suppose?”
“The fellow on the aisle,” I said almost immediately, my cheeks cooling. I nodded toward a man, thirtyish, sitting alone in an aisle seat, running his fingers along the brim of the hat in his lap. A plant was someone hired by the onstage psychic to play into the fake reading, in order to convince everyone else in the audience. “Aisle seats are the best places for plants, and he looks respectable.”
“Interesting, but no.” James warmed to the topic, his expression losing its stiffness. “It’s the old woman in the fourth row.”
I stared at the woman’s plump back, though I saw nothing unusual. “She’s with her husband,” I said. “That can’t be right.”
“That isn’t her husband,” James said calmly. “That’s how I know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are at least three inches of space between his shoulder and hers,” James said. “He just reached down to pick up something he’d dropped, and he leaned away from her as if she had leprosy. Those two are acting, and not well.”
I stared harder, more than aware that there was no space between James’s shoulder and mine. “That would make two people in on the plant. It’s risky.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. “But I’ve seen it before. No one suspects a nice old couple.” He motioned toward a group of men moving single file down the aisle, wearing cloth caps and simple wool jackets—workmen, perhaps, from one of the factories nearby after the end of a shift. “Those fellows have been drinking.”
He was right; they wove unevenly and laughed at one another’s jokes. I shook my head and tutted. “Drunks at a séance,” I said. “There’s nothing worse. I can almost feel sorry for her.”
I glanced at James to find him smiling a little. I knew how he felt. I had the same sort of giddiness talking to someone who knew the business as well as I did. I took off my hat and tried to sop some of the remaining dampness from my hair. “I pick the fellow with the mustache,” I said, eyeing a young man with hard eyes sitting alone. “He may as well have a sign.”
“Single men don’t make the best plants,” James countered. “The audience tends to trust women more than men.”
“I’m right,” I said. “He doesn’t belong.”
The half smile didn’t leave his lips. “We’ll see,” he said.
The lights flickered low and the stage lights came on. After a pedestrian warm-up act in which a man sweating through his pancake makeup released doves from his sleeves to the jeers of the sparse audience, a woman with a bust like a ship’s prow took a seat at the piano in the orchestra and began to play a dramatic set of chords. Two technicians dragged wooden chairs onto the stage, angling them slightly together as if two people were to have a conversation. Then the lights dimmed again and came up, revealing a woman of forty-five standing on the stage, heavily made up and wearing a matching paisley dress and head scarf.
The woman raised her arms dramatically. “I am The Great Evelina!” she shouted. “I am here to speak to the dead!”
Someone hooted. The man sleeping in his seat snorted and changed position.
The Great Evelina swept her theatrical robes to one of the chairs and sat down. “This chair,” she said, motioning toward the empty seat before her, “will contain the invisible spirit with which I speak. I tell you, a spirit shall sit here and converse with me!” She closed her eyes. “Who among the dead wishes to join me? Who among the dead has a message?”