“Free of her?” My skin stung as if I’d been slapped. My own guilt rushed over me. I was free of her—free of having to please her, free of having to do the séances. Free of caring for her in those last months. “I didn’t want to be free of her.”
Something flashed across Gloria’s eyes. “For God’s sake, Ellie. You still think that what I did was all about your mother, don’t you? That she was the target.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I did it because it needed to end,” she said bluntly. “The lies, the foolishness. You living half an existence, sitting behind a curtain, helping her. You with a power you’ve been made to feel ashamed of, living nothing of a life.” She pushed herself off the fence and took a drag off her cigarette. “Have you ever thought, Ellie, that we’ve been given the greatest insight into life and death in the history of mankind? The answers weren’t given to a philosopher, or a religious leader, or a great scholar, or even a man. It was given to two girls, flappers who everyone sees as silly nuisances, cartoons, figures of fun. Girls who can’t even vote.” She tapped one finger against her temple through the cloth of her hat with a ruby-polished nail. “All of the secrets of the universe, of life and death, are sitting right here. A hundred people have walked past us on the street, and not a single one of them knows it.”
I shook my head. “You’re the one who enjoys the power, Gloria. It was never me.”
“I don’t enjoy it,” she corrected me. She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stepped on it. “I simply refuse to feel ashamed of it, to feel ashamed of anything. I’m supposed to feel ashamed of how I look, how I dress, the language I use, the makeup I wear. For staying out late, for dancing, for making money, for thinking things and being angry and asking questions. For letting a man go to bed with me, when he can just button up his pants and never feel a lick of shame for the rest of his life. And I say all of it can go to hell.”
My blood was pounding in my head, my cheeks flushing. I was powerfully angry, I realized, and it wasn’t at her. “Stop it.”
“Most of all, I’m supposed to be ashamed of my power,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “For being born with something the world has never seen. And I was ashamed of it—I never told you that, but I was. Until my brothers died, and George disowned me. That broke me, Ellie, in a way that you cannot imagine, but it also freed me. Because I suddenly realized: What is the point? Why waste your life being ashamed when you’re going to be dead anyway? So I make money and I drink too much gin and I fall in with worthless men and my family hates me. I have headaches and nightmares that would ice the skin off you. But I’m living my life, Ellie, and I make no apologies for it. Can you say the same?”
Overhead, two birds called to each other, back and forth, a quick trill of notes. A couple strolled by, oblivious of us, her hand on his arm, his shoulder leaning into hers as he spoke something in her ear. I sighed, willing my heartbeat back to normal. “Give me a cigarette,” I said.
She did, and lit it for me. “Well?”
I took a drag, my anger still simmering alongside my guilt. “My mother left me the house and a little bit of money,” I said, “but not enough that I don’t have to earn. I don’t know how to type, and I’m too freakish for any man to marry me. And even though I can’t stomach the thought of doing séances again, I really only have one talent.” I looked at her and shrugged. “So here I am. The Fantastique finds lost things, but she doesn’t talk to the dead anymore—I managed that much. I’ll live in the house, take clients, and live a quiet life. I won’t pretend I’m normal, but I also won’t hide behind the curtain.”
“And that’s what you want?” she said.
“Yes, it is.” It was what I wanted, in that moment. Just peace and quiet, a daily routine, a life where I knew what was expected of me. I’d had to build it myself, but now I had built it and I would live it. I had never had her courage, after all.
She crossed her arms and looked at me. Gloria Sutter, long legged and radiant even in a tweed suit on a cloudy November day, her eyes knowing and her lips dark. “Very well,” she said at last. “I’ll say this much. We had some good times, and now we’re quits, as they say. But you know where I am, and you know how to find me.”
She’d turned and walked away without another word, back toward Piccadilly. “I’ll think about it,” I’d called to her retreating back, but she gave no indication that she’d heard me. I could think things over, I thought. Perhaps something would change, something I couldn’t foresee. Perhaps someday I’d want to talk to the only other person in the world who was made the same way I was. There would be time. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that there was an endless supply of time.
But there hadn’t been.
I rounded a turn in the lane on my bicycle. I was truly sweating now and my legs were hurting, but according to the map in my mind I had just under two miles to go. I was a different woman than I had been that day in Green Park. I was alive. I was ready. I was no longer ashamed. How right Gloria had been, about everything. I was who I was, and I would no longer make any apologies.
Pickwick barked, once, sharply. His ears flattened, and he disappeared beneath a hedgerow.
“Pickwick?” I said.
And then a sharp crack sounded through the trees, and something hit my bicycle. The handlebars shook under my hands, the wheels veered of their own accord, and in the next second I hit the ground, the blackness coming up to meet me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT