The Spiritualist (22 page)

Then he was gone, into a night heavy with clouds and snow beginning to swirl in a bitter wind. I stood there, watching after him, feeling suddenly bereft. It wasn’t until his carriage clattered away that I closed the door and turned back to the stairs.

And saw Michel waiting at the landing.

H
ow long had he been there? My mind leaped through my conversation with Benjamin, trying to think of what he could have heard. Michel came down the stairs, as graceful and deliberate as a cat.

“Everyone gone?” he asked when he reached me.

“I—I thought you were abed.”

“Non.”

“But your cough—”

“I’m quite recovered,” he said. He took my arm. He was not rough, nor cruel. His strength was easy; evidenced, but not displayed. “I thought you and me should have a talk, eh,
chère
?”

When he took me down the hall, I didn’t protest. Best to play along, I thought, not to seem nervous, though I could not help throwing a glance at the door, or sending Benjamin a silent plea that I knew had no hope of answer. Michel released me when we reached the parlor. He turned to close the doors, plunging us into darkness. I heard fumbling, the strike of a match, the hiss, and he was lighting the gas, his face weirdly illuminated for a moment, frightening in the depth of its shadows. The jet caught; he turned the key, and the lamp blazed to life, and he was himself again, but no less frightening.

He came toward me, and I found myself backing away like some wretched coward. It was that thought that rallied me. He would hardly do me physical harm here—not here in this house. I forced myself to face him as he came to me, too close, and I made myself remain still as his fingers traced my cheekbone.

“You’re a pretty woman,
chère
,” he breathed. “But, I begin to think, a stupid one. This little game of yours… What are you about, I wonder?”

I wanted nothing more than to look away, to jerk away. My skin felt charged where he touched me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

His fingers moved nonchalantly to the corner of my mouth. His thumb swept my lower lip, and his gaze followed the movement of his hand. For a terrifying moment, I thought he would kiss me. “
C’est bon comme la vie
, eh? Ah, but
non
, I think not.”

I wrenched away. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“You’re no medium,” he said.

I was here by his sufferance
. I could not risk antagonizing him until I knew for certain the strength of my position with Dorothy. “I’m not the one who said I was.” I took a step back.

He followed. “D’you know how long I’ve been here,
chère
?”

The change in subject confused me. “You—you said eight months.”

“
Oui
. Eight months.” He moved away from me as he spoke, and though I felt nothing but relief at his distance, somehow it seemed even more dangerous. He was so deliberate; he went slowly about the room, his fingers skimming the surface of a heavy rosewood sideboard, the carved back of the settee. At the fireplace he paused. He picked up a Sevres vase from the mantel, turning it in his hands as if considering its best use. “Eight months. D’you know what she was like when I met her?”

“Dorothy?”

“She was hardly alive. Her doctors had her sleepwalking. I’ve given her back a reason to live, and now you want to come between us. I have to ask myself: why is that, hmmm? What does she want? Money? Ah, perhaps. She’s lost everything. Power? Perhaps. But then I think,
non
. She’s accused of killing her husband. What’s money or power if she hangs?”

He set the vase back upon the mantel. “But she wants something, eh? What could it be?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He sauntered away from the fireplace, making his circuitous way back to me. “Don’t you? Because I think you do.” He was there again, beside me. “You and me, we’ve much in common, hmmm? I understand you,
chère
. I know what you’re about. Don’t think you can fool me.”

“We—we’ve nothing in common.”

He raised a brow, and I immediately flushed, feeling the full weight of my fear, and hating myself for being so weak as to reveal it, and he leaned close.

“The circle doesn’t need two mediums,” he said quietly, and I did not mistake the menace in his words. His voice was a hot breath against my skin. I lurched back, and then wished I’d held my ground when he smiled. How easily he’d got beneath my skin. How easily I’d let him. I’d been too confident, after all, and he was so good… .

Michel stepped away, as if he hadn’t been threatening me only moments before, and made me an elegant bow and said with benign politeness, “Now our talk is over,
chère.
I must admit, I’m ready for bed. So I’ll leave you—unless you’d care to join me?”

It took me a moment to respond, and when I found my voice it was weaker than I would have wished. “I can’t imagine why I would.”

“Can’t you?” Again, that wretched, knowing smile. “Ah, well then.
Bon soir.
”

After he was gone, I stayed for a while in the parlor. I was afraid to go up the stairs to my room, where his was across the hall. He’d let me be for now; what if he changed his mind? So I stayed. I listened to his footsteps up the stairs, one landing, then the second, and then the fading resonance of the third. I imagined him going down the hall, pausing at my door, considering, before he moved on. Then the twist of the key in his lock, the stepping inside. I thought I heard the faint, hollow thud of the closing door.

And then I realized I was standing in a darkness that pulsed with the flame of the single gaslight, that the shadows beyond still held the feel of him, as if his spirit lingered, and I picked up my skirts and fled the parlor, not stopping to turn down the gas, nearly running up the stairs, my skirts swinging like a bell. When I reached the safety of my room, I closed the door tightly behind me, leaning back against it, too shaken to do anything more, and angry with myself for being so rattled. Finally, I rang for Kitty, who was there in minutes, and who set to undressing me with a comforting familiarity.

“You look pale, ma’am,” she said with concern as she undid the crinoline. “Are you ill?”

I shook my head. “Just overset.”

“Perhaps a sip to calm you then? There’s a bottle over there on the desk. I saw it just yesterday.”

I glanced to the desk. I could not think how I’d missed it before, but there it was, a crystal decanter that was dark with some liquid, with two glasses turned upside down beside it. Sherry, I thought. I was tense with nerves; it would relax me, and so I nodded, and Kitty went to get it. I heard the gentle clink of the stopper as she lifted it, and then she brought a glass to me, and I took it and drank, surprised to find that it wasn’t sherry at all, but the same green liqueur I’d had earlier that evening. I liked it better than sherry, in any case, and I finished it quickly. Its effect was nearly immediate. I closed my eyes, sighing at the warmth that stole over me. When Kitty finished undressing me, and left, I poured another.

I was feeling better now, not so unnerved, but still Michel’s threat resisted the palliative, and I didn’t feel completely safe until I had locked my bedroom door from the inside and put the key beneath my pillow.

No one would think to search for it there, I thought with satisfaction, but with that thought came another—the very briefest, most ethereal of notions, the echo of his words:
Can’t you?
—and I took the key from its hiding place and put it in the drawer of the desk. And refused to think of it again.

The drink had relaxed me enough that I fell immediately into sleep, but my dreams were scattered and strange, and when they finally did coalesce, it was into the now familiar darkness lit slowly and inexorably by the glow in the very center of it, a glow that illuminated the table and the people around it. Dorothy, and Wilson Maull, the Dudleys, Sarah Grimm, Jacob Colville, and finally, myself and Michel. He was holding my hand tightly, speaking in a voice I didn’t recognize, that song he’d chanted to me before in another place, another dream time, and it bound me as easily and as well, and I knew I must somehow break the hold.

Before I could, I felt his hand against my skirts. Impossible, how could it be his hand—his hand was clasping mine—but it was there nonetheless, pressing, trailing down my leg, though he sat straight at the table; I didn’t see him move at all. But I felt his hands—both of them now—beneath my skirts, stroking up my legs to my garters. His fingers easing beneath the ribbons, moving ever upward. I felt his warm breath on my skin, and my own breath suspended, waiting, and I heard myself asking,
“What was that song?”

I heard his answer like a whisper in my head.
“A nun’s lament. An old Creole tune.”

“What does it mean?”

“She’s longing for love, and can’t find it.”

“A nun? Longing for love?”

His lips pressed against my inner thigh; I felt them move on my skin, I felt his kiss, though I heard his voice as if he were sitting beside me, and when I looked over, he was.

“For God’s love
, chère,
”
he said.

I woke abruptly and sat up in bed, my sweat chilling in the cold night air. I’d kicked the blankets down about my feet, and my nightgown was twisted around my thighs. I tugged my gown into place and pulled the blankets up again about my shoulders and sat there staring into the room, too alert, every little sound—the
ssshhh
of the sheet against my skin, my own breathing, the creak of the house settling—seemed to set my nerves jangling. I was wide awake, my emotions a jumbled confusion I could not set straight.

I looked at the door. I had locked it, but suddenly I was unsure. Before I knew it, I was out of bed, unreasonably panicked, though I knew logically that I was being foolish. I put my hand on the knob and turned, thinking it would not unlatch—how could it? But when I pulled, the door creaked and opened, and I stared at it without comprehension. All I could think was that it couldn’t be so. I had locked it.

I closed the door and went to the desk, pulling out the drawer, fumbling about for the key I’d put there earlier.

I couldn’t find it. I went through the drawer, pulling out everything inside in my haste to find it. Notepaper and a note-book, a penknife, scattered pen nibs, the printed card of a ferry schedule. I pressed my fingers flat and felt along every inch of the inside, clear into the cracks, thinking it had fallen into a crevice… . Nothing.

I opened the other drawers, doing the same to them, until there was a pile of papers and such on the top of the desk, and dusty pen nibs and pencils scattered across the floor. The key was gone. I lit the candle beside my bed and brought it to the desk, bending to send its light into the very corners of the drawers, but they were empty.

Weakly, I went back to my bed and sagged upon it, and though I knew the key was not there, though I remembered moving it, I felt beneath the pillow. My fingers touched something—paper, and I stopped short, my breath too fast and too loud in my ears. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was an envelope—fine stock, very thick and expensive. I’d never seen it before. But I knew unmistakably what was in it. I felt the weight and the outlines, the flat round head, the cylinder of the rod, the flat, short bars.

My fingers were trembling. The urge to throw it from me was great, but I didn’t. Almost despite myself, I opened the envelope. I drew out the key, and with it, a note. A few words only, in a hand I didn’t know, but one I recognized just the same. Elegant. Flourished.

You lost this. M

There was no thought of going back to sleep now.

I
N THE MORNING,
even Kitty noticed my exhaustion.

“You look ready to fall over, ma’am,” she said, peering at me with worry as I sat in a chair by the fire. “The missus was askin’ for you, but I could tell her you’re still asleep.”

It was a moment before I realized she was waiting for my answer. I roused myself, shaking my head. “No. I’m fine. Just help me dress.”

Kitty clucked her tongue, but she did as I asked, and she was mostly silent about it. I refused breakfast, taking only a cup of strong tea with milk and sugar as she dressed me. The vestiges of my nightmare clung, and as the hours of the night had drifted into morning, I’d wondered if I were quite sane. Perhaps I hadn’t locked the door. Perhaps I’d lost the key after all, and Michel’s replacement of it was not the threat I saw it as.

But then I remembered my dream, and I knew he’d been in my room, and that he meant me to know it. What was real about the dream, what was not, that was what I didn’t know. Uncomfortably, I remembered the feel of his hands, his lips, against my skin. I remembered my disarray when I’d awakened. While I slept, had he…? I was too distressed to finish the thought.
“I know what you’re about… . The circle doesn’t need two mediums… .”

Ben’s warning that Michel would try to seduce me had not frightened me; I realized now it should have. I’d placed too much faith in my own sharp-wittedness.

How quickly I’d lost the upper hand. I’d thought I’d put him on the defensive, but he knew this game, and now my only hope was to strategize as well as he did. I must play Michel’s weaknesses as he had played mine. I was here to save myself; I could not let my fear get in the way.

“The missus is waitin’, ma’am,” Kitty reminded me.

Dorothy was leaning back upon her pillows when I arrived in her room, and the curtains were closed, though the morning was bright, the sun sparkling on a thin layer of newly fallen snow. The gaslight was burning high; the close room stuffy with its smell, along with the usual scents of medicine and potpourri. It was hot too, with the furnace blasting up my skirts and the fire stoked. Dorothy herself was huddled in the blankets as if she were freezing.