The countryside was in full early-autumn glow, the grass still a gentle green but the trees beginning to turn red, yellow, and orange, like a painter playing with his palette. The sky was chalky white, the air warm, and I passed brick red houses with pretty terraces and cottages with thatched roofs. Hedgerows lined the road in places, and I cycled up and down a few gentle slopes. Kent may have been outside of London—and so a foreign country to a great many Londoners—but it was hardly wild; instead, it was a pretty patchwork of farms and cottages, churches and bridges, like a great garden. It didn’t seem the place where anyone could be murdered. But my shoulders stayed tense and the back of my neck felt raw, as if someone had flayed the skin off. I was almost certain I was being watched.
After a while I stopped at the top of a hill, pretending that I was not gasping for breath, that sweat was not soaking my back between my shoulder blades. I put my feet on the ground and looked around me, letting the teasing breeze cool my skin. Pickwick circled back to me from the bushes at the side of the road and waited for me, a polite question in his eyes. I twisted in my position and looked behind me, wondering where my guardians might be. Around that farmhouse over there? Behind that stone wall, those hedgerows? Beneath that bridge, or in that clump of trees, or behind the long wooden fence to the left? Which roads were they watching, and how were they staying hidden? The peaceful Kent countryside seemed to have an infinite number of spots where a man could crouch unseen. No one could jump out and garrote me in daylight on a bicycle, at least, but I worried for James. Where was he? Had my lure worked? Was the man from Ramona’s apartment watching me even now?
There was nothing for it. I got back on the bicycle and pushed the pedals, deliberately forcing my mind away. Instead, I thought of the last time I’d seen Gloria.
It was November 1923, over a year after my mother’s death. I’d been standing in Fortnum and Mason, staring at a display of teas, when I heard a familiar voice over my shoulder.
“Hello, darling.”
Gloria was wearing a tweed jacket and matching hat that made her look like a rich man’s spoiled young wife on a shopping trip. She wore lipstick so dark it was almost mulberry purple, the shade startling against her pale skin, and I immediately felt the impulse to yank out my handkerchief and blot it off.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Doing a bit of shopping?”
I didn’t need any tea, but I’d been desperate to leave the silence of the house. “Yes,” I replied, trying to sound sophisticated, casual. “And you?”
She gave me a knowing twist of that dark mouth, and I wondered why I had even tried to fool her. Gloria always knew when I was lying. “Darling, tea doesn’t interest me. If it doesn’t have gin in it, I don’t drink it.”
No, Gloria never shopped for tea, and she never shopped in Fortnum and Mason. She was standing there because she’d seen me; that was the only reason. And suddenly, past my grief and my anger, I was so pathetically glad to see her that I had to look away. “How have you been, Gloria?”
“Here’s what I think,” she said, ignoring my question. “You’ll either take a walk with me, or you won’t. Part of you wants to, and part of you wants me to walk away. The question is, which part of you will win?”
They were bold words, confident and challenging, but I knew better. I knew by the underlying quaver in her voice—undetectable by anyone who didn’t know her as I did—that it was a question, an invitation. That she didn’t know whether I would say yes. And that, in some part of her, it mattered.
It crumbled all of my defenses, that small quaver in her voice. Ever since my mother had died, since I’d torn up the beautiful mermaid card and thrown it out, I had been suffocatingly lonely in a way that had almost shocked me. I had been a cipher even to myself, an invisible woman. With Gloria’s small overture, a year of anger, which I had fought so desperately to hang on to, slipped away. It hurt, but I felt something like relief, too.
I managed a shrug. “Yes,” I said.
The day was chilled, the sun fighting to escape from behind a bank of clouds. We headed down Piccadilly, away from Piccadilly Circus, moving through the crowds, not speaking. Gloria walked half a step ahead of me, the shoulder of her tweed jacket aligned with my collarbone. I could see the white column of her neck under the bobbed edge of her hair and her cloche hat, the winking movement of an earring. I could smell her perfume. I had followed her into any number of restaurants and clubs this way, just at her shoulder, watching the gaze of every man in the room land on her before traveling idly to me. It was the natural order of things, bruisingly familiar.
I followed her into the calm of Green Park and we took one of the paths, the disintegrating leaves blowing like dust under our footsteps, the tall trees indifferent overhead. Even in November, Green Park was busy, Londoners taking the chance to stroll this stretch of relative quiet as the chill wind blew.
We stopped at Constitution Hill, and Gloria leaned on the wrought-iron fence, fishing in her pocket for a cigarette case. I crossed my arms over my chest and watched her.
“Thank you for the card,” I managed at last.
She crooked a penciled eyebrow at me and searched her pocket again.
I sighed. “Do you want me to stay angry at you or not?”
Gloria found the cigarette case and straightened. “She wanted to quit, Ellie. I only provided the excuse.”
“Ah, so that’s why you arranged it, then? From the goodness of your heart?”
“No, of course not. I told you from the first that I don’t like competition.”
“You’ve taken care of it very nicely, then.”
“Not exactly.” She placed an unlit cigarette between her lips and watched me, her eyes hooded. She dropped the case back into her pocket and pulled out her matches. I had the urge, as I often did with Gloria, to put my hand on her. To feel the energy that came from her like heat. “The Fantastique is still in business, after all. But she doesn’t do séances anymore.”
“No.”
“Finding lost things, is it? Interesting, I suppose.” She shrugged. She knew what I was doing—of course she knew. She always made it her business. “I wondered what you would do once you were free of her.”