The Spiritualist (20 page)

“It may not be so easy as that. She said her husband was talking to Elisha Capron.”

“Elisha?” She chuckled quietly. “Oh, he won’t side against me.”

“Dorothy, I don’t want to bring trouble upon you—”

“You’re no trouble, Evelyn.”

“But I might become so.”

She squeezed my hand again. “We’ll fight them all. As long as I have Michel to give me strength, I can do it.”

Her words made me uncomfortable. It was the opening I’d looked for, but now that it was here I hesitated. I remembered Michel’s unspoken warning, and I knew to be careful. “Dorothy, about Michel…”

She frowned at me. “What about him?”

“What exactly do you know of him?”

My words seemed to have a remarkable effect on her. She dropped my hand and fell back against the pillows as if she were suddenly exhausted. In a voice so soft I had to lean close to hear, she said, “You know, it’s hard to be old, Evelyn. People forget that old women were young once, but d’you think we old women forget? In my heart, I’m still thirty. But these bones of mine… I can’t move so fast, you know, and you start getting… left behind. It’s as if I’ve become invisible. But Michel saw me. He looked right at me. He listens to me. I’m just a sick old woman to everyone else.”

“No. Not just that,” I said quietly.

Her eyes were rheumy-looking, shiny with unshed tears. “My life wasn’t worth living until I met him, child.”

And it was those words that quieted me. I understood what she meant about someone truly seeing her, listening to her. I’d had that once, with my father. I also knew that, regardless of Michel’s manipulations, I couldn’t take this away from her. Not unless I had irrefutable proof. Until then, she wouldn’t believe me anyway. She had chosen not to.

“I understand,” I said. “I hope you’re right.”

“Oh, I am,” she whispered. “If you only knew, child. If you knew…” She smiled, her gaze distant, as if she were recalling some particularly pleasurable memory, and I had to look away.

I
was not looking forward to Thursday night’s circle. I knew Michel would know the truth of my participation, and that meant he would guard himself even more carefully, but there was no help for that. My biggest concern was in being careful not to offend him. Now that I’d seen the power he bore here, it was crucial I not get myself banished before I determined the truth.

Benjamin arrived early, before the others, and I was relieved to see him.

“You got my note,” I said as I greeted him in the foyer. “I wasn’t certain you knew there was to be a circle tonight.”

“As it happens, I did,” he said, unwrapping his fine gray wool scarf from about his neck and handing it and his top hat to a waiting Lambert. “I’d already received word from Dorothy. We’re to attempt to reach Peter’s spirit, I understand?”

“Yes. To see if we can discover the truth of his murder.”

“Now that you’re here, my dear, perhaps the affinities will be enough to lure Peter’s spirit.” With a glance at the hovering Lambert, Ben took my arm, directing me gently down the hall toward the parlor. In a low voice, he asked, “Where’s Jourdain?” “In the upstairs parlor,” I answered him, equally quietly.

He motioned for me to follow him across the room to the corner, out of earshot of the open parlor doorway. “Tell me quickly, before the others arrive—you’ve been here three days; have you noticed anything? How is Jourdain toward you?”

“I think he knows why I’m here.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He warned me—in so many words—that I’m here only because he allows me to be—and that he would be quick to move against me if I displeased him.”

Ben frowned. “Do you think he could convince Dorothy to abandon you?”

“Oh, I think certainly he could. His control of her is uncanny. It’s almost as if…” I trailed off, reluctant even to voice the thought. “As if there’s an unseemly affection between them.”

Ben raised his brows. “You mean he’s seduced her?”

I felt myself grow hot at the image his words raised. “I don’t know. I suspect it.”

“My God.” The flash of anger in his eyes was quick and hard. “To debase an invalid woman—”

“’Allo, Rampling.” Michel’s voice startled us both.

I turned to see him coming into the parlor, his movements languid, his smile welcoming, as if he hadn’t noticed how huddled Ben and I were in the corner, how private we meant our conversation to be.

I forced a bright smile of my own. “There you are. Benjamin’s arrived a bit early. I thought to offer him a brandy.”

“It’s good to see you, Rampling,” Michel said. “But I’ve a special liqueur waiting for us—perhaps you’d rather have that?”

“As you wish.” Benjamin bowed his head, his anger banked now, as if it had never been. “Evelyn tells me we’re to contact Peter’s spirit this evening.”

“We plan to try,” Michel said smoothly. “Though the spirits are sometimes capricious.”

“Yes, of course.” Ben turned back to me with a knowing smile, and I felt warm at his complicity. “We must hope for the best.”

The others arrived then, red-faced from the cold, breathing clouds of steam. In the too-warm foyer, the icy ghost of frigid air dissipated from their cloaks and scarves like magic.

“Evelyn!” Robert Dudley held out his arms to me, holding me close for a moment before he released me again. “Grace and I have been praying for a good result tonight. Surely Peter must be in the spheres by now.”

Sarah Grimm said, “I’ve had the strongest feeling all day. I feel so certain we’ll find him.”

“Atherton’s been squirrelly, but I feel as Sarah does,” Wilson Maull agreed.

Jacob Colville leaned down to kiss my cheek in greeting. “We’ll find him, Evie, never worry.”

Sarah Grimm’s dark eyes grew somber as she looked at Benjamin. She took his arm and leaned tearfully into him. “I’m so used to seeing you with Peter that it seems quite strange to see you without him.”

“He’s not really without him,” Maull reassured. “Peter’s spirit is watching over all of us. Why, he’s no doubt bending over Rampling’s shoulder this very moment. It only requires our own ecstasy to connect us.”

“We should go upstairs,” Michel said. “Dorothy’ll be waiting.”

We made the trek upward, and as we drew closer to the parlor with its pedestaled table, the talk began to fade, almost as if there were a sort of holiness attributed to the room that required the same reverence as a chapel. Dorothy was indeed waiting, settled upon the fish-monstrosity of a sofa, surrounded by her nurses. Michel made his way directly to her, and she moved to accommodate him as he sat beside her, and leaned into him as if he held her strength. He whispered something to one of her nurses, who went to the sideboard, where a row of decanters stood, and poured into a group of small glasses some kind of liqueur that glowed a pretty green. He took the first to Dorothy, who swallowed it with gusto, and then brought the tray of glasses to offer to the rest of us, explaining, “In anticipation of success, Mr. Jourdain said.”

“Success in what?” I asked.

“In finding Peter’s spirit, of course,” Dudley said. He took a glass and held it out in a toast. “To Peter!” We all followed suit, and he downed his in a single gulp, smacking his lips after. “Delicious. Such things can be quite efficacious when it comes to the spirits, Evelyn. Try it.”

I watched Benjamin drink the liqueur without care before I sipped suspiciously at my own. My reservations dissolved at my first taste. It was lovely: sweet and perfumey and herbal, though I couldn’t place the flavor. I’d never had anything like it, but the others obviously had. After they drank, the conversation became more animated and philosophical.

“—and then Lewis said the laws of nature were constant, that they could not be set aside simply because tables rose. But my lovely Sarah”—Wilson gave her an affectionate glance—“asked him how a spirit lifting a table was different from a man doing so in the material world.”

“I had to be simplistic,” Sarah demurred. “Lewis is so literal. I didn’t think he would understand the idea that spirits don’t lift the table so much as they inhabit it.”

Robert Dudley nodded. “The material world is simply an expression of the mind; that’s what so many fail to see. We’re so dependent on what is before us that we discount our intuition. Yet if one dismisses instinct, how can one understand or believe in a world that exists beyond one’s sight?”

His words made me uncomfortable. I thought of my mother, how instinct guided her every move—a dead bird could send her into a superstitious terror of bad luck for days, and dreams became maps to read the future by. I remembered a morning long before she’d died, when I’d come to breakfast and she’d glanced at me and said, “You didn’t sleep last night,” and thrown a frightened look at Papa. “Charles, she didn’t sleep.”

Papa glanced up from his coffee.

“It was nothing. Another nightmare, that’s all,” I told her.

“You must try to fight them, my dear,” Mama said, her voice hushed. “You must not let them speak to you.”

Her words frightened me, as they always did. “My dreams are not like yours,” I snapped.

She reached for the brown bottle on the table, her fingers trembling so much that the glass dropper clinked against the rim. I watched as she put the drops in her tea, and I knew Papa did too, each of us silently counting. Fifteen drops—more than last week. She replaced the dropper and brought the cup to her lips, taking quick, deep sips, even though it steamed and must have burned.

“They’re only dreams,” I insisted, as I had a hundred times before.

Her cup clattered into the saucer. She and my father exchanged a glance, and I saw again her fear, and heard it in her voice when she said, “Of course they are, Evie. Of course.”

I hated it when she spoke that way. I watched as she went into the kitchen, her step a bit staggered from the effects of the laudanum, and then I turned angrily to my father. “Why don’t you reason with her? Why don’t you ever tell her that there are no spirits?”

He set down his cup and said softly, “I don’t know that there aren’t.”

“Papa!”

“We can’t know everything, Evie, though I would wish we could. Logic only tells us what’s there; it can’t really address what isn’t. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.”

“How can they be real? What if it’s—” I couldn’t say the word. “What if I’m like her?”

“Then you would be special indeed.”

His words did not reassure me. “
She
doesn’t feel special, Papa. You must see how it frightens her. She’s taking more medicine than ever.”

“Her trial is that no one else believes it, Evie. So she has no choice but to doubt it herself. If anything would drive one mad, I think that would be it.”

“I don’t want to be mad,” I whispered.

“Then you must do what everyone must do. We can only trust in what little we know. Put your faith in that. Trying to justify a world we don’t hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it’s better just to accept that things are as we see them.” He sighed and looked toward the kitchen. “I think it would help if she could believe that. So I try to believe it for her.”

I tried to blink the memory away, but the liqueur I’d drunk crept up on me; I felt a strange lassitude, an easing of reticence that made me ask sharply, “Isn’t that what sends people into asylums? Belief in a world one can’t see, that might not even exist?”

“I think perhaps the mad are misunderstood,” Grace said gently. “How can we condemn them when most of us refuse to see any world beyond the material one? How much happier we would be if we all accepted Divine Love without question and admitted that it’s our destiny to join with it!”

“Hear hear,” Wilson Maull said, taking another glass of the liqueur and lifting it in a toast. “To the invisible world—the only real one!”

He drained his glass and the others looked on approvingly. I heard the rustle of movement—Dorothy’s nurses were helping her rise. She called out, “Let’s begin!” and I was relieved at the ending of a conversation that troubled me. As I turned to go to the table, I saw that Michel was watching me with a thoughtful expression. When I caught his gaze he glanced quickly away, and I felt a puzzling disquiet that had nothing to do with the conversation.

“This should be interesting,” Ben murmured as he came up beside me.

I had thought that, as Benjamin was here, I might sit beside him and change the composition of the seating, but that was not to be. Sarah motioned him to the chair beside hers, and Grace took the seat on his other side, and I stood there hesitantly until only the chair beside Michel was empty.

He sat down and looked at me questioningly until I took my place. Then he said in a low voice, “Are you ready,
Madame
?”

“I hardly know. Can one ever be ready to hear the voices of the dead?”

He took my hand, and Robert Dudley took the other, and the lights were lowered, the room cast in a dim gloom. Silence descended. Michel’s hand opened slightly on mine, his fingers pressed flat, almost caressing, and his touch brought back the dream I’d had and I began to feel strange, too sensitive and yet distant at the same time, as if I were falling into sleep. I started when Jacob began the prayer—I had expected instead Michel’s voice, the lulling French chant.

Quickly I looked across the table at Benjamin. I could see only the shadows of his eyes in the stripe of pale skin above the darkness of his beard. I could not see his expression.

Dudley said, “Almighty God, let us talk with the spirits tonight. Let us speak to Peter Atherton.”

There was quiet.

“If there are spirits present, let them be heard. Let them direct us to the spirit of our friend and husband Peter Atherton.”