The Spiritualist (36 page)

But I was troubled too. Committing Dorothy to an asylum was a grossly final step. It would have caused a scandal. Though it was true that no adoption of Michel would stand after, and that Michel would lose everything he’d worked for, it seemed out of character for Peter to do something that so lacked finesse and discretion. He had cared a great deal for society’s opinion, and the Bennetts had been friends of the Athertons for generations. To commit Dorothy would have destroyed her. I could not think why Peter would do it.

“It doesn’t seem like him,” I said doubtfully.

“Ah, the supportive wife,” Michel taunted. “You knew him so well, then?”

Dorothy said, “I thought the same thing. I was shocked, child, but later, I realized, well, Peter had not seemed himself those last months.”

“Perhaps it was only a harmless threat—”

“He said he’d drawn up the papers,” Dorothy said.

“Did you see them?” I asked.

She shook her head.

Michel took a bite of his roast. “He could’ve been lying, eh?”

“Peter didn’t lie,” I said.

“
Non?
What a fairy tale you must live in,
Madame
, to believe such a thing.”

Dorothy said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. He’s gone; we’ll never know what he intended. But in a way, it turned out well. His death brought you to us, Evelyn. And how much good you’ve done! To bring me my sons in the way you have! And look at Michel. He’s much better too. He isn’t coughing as much.”

Or at all, I thought. I looked at him in surprise. Consumptives didn’t just stop coughing, did they?

He caught my gaze, as if he knew what I was thinking. With his fork, he pointed to the window. “It isn’t her. It’s the weather. It’s turned.”

“Yes, how warm and dry it’s become,” I said sarcastically.

“You should have seen him when I found him,” Dorothy said. She leaned toward him, stroking from his shoulder to his back, fixing upon him a gaze so tender I was amazed he didn’t melt away beneath it. “So thin. So very ill. We were a pair, my dear boy, were we not?”

He took a gulp of wine. I thought he was careful not to meet my gaze.
“Oui.”

“Look at him now, that bloom upon his cheeks. Between the two of you, my life has changed in ways I never expected.” She set aside her knife eagerly, pushing her plate away. “I know there’s no circle, so perhaps it won’t do, but it used to with Michel—do you remember, dear boy? How we used to see the boys together, just the two of us?”

“
Oui
. I remember. But
Madame
is too newly chosen,
ma chère
. Who knows if she can bring them without the circle?”

I frowned. “You mean now?”

“If you feel you can. I wish to hear them again,” Dorothy said.

“Remember what happened last night,” Michel said softly.

“I’m willing to try,” I said, not because I wanted to, or because I thought I could—in fact, I was afraid—but because I felt the sway he had over her, and I knew how irresistible it was, and I wanted to weaken it.

“Wonderful!” Dorothy clapped her hands, jubilant as a child. She twisted in her chair, motioning impatiently to the maid who stood in the doorway. “Bella, come and clear, please.”

“Leave the wine,” Michel directed.

The table was quickly cleared but for the glasses and the decanter. Michel did not look the least bit happy, and I was glad for that, to be thwarting him at least in this one thing.

Dorothy turned to him. “We should be alternating.”

He shoved his chair back and rose, helping Dorothy from her seat with grace and charm, though I felt the impatience in his movements. When they’d switched seats so that he was at the head of the table between us, he dragged his wineglass closer.

“You should direct us, dear boy,” she said.

He took Dorothy’s hand and reached for mine. Involuntarily, I drew back, and he said, “What’s wrong,
Madame
? Are you afraid?”

I shook my head, and let him take my hand.

“You’re tense,
Madame
,” he said. “One can’t call the spirits that way.”

I closed my eyes, trying to ignore his touch. “Will you say a prayer?”

Dorothy obliged, and I tried to clear my mind, but it was obstinate, it wanted only to remember last night, to polish each image like a gem. I heard Dorothy’s words like the sound of a droning bee; I felt the caress of Michel’s thumb, and my body seemed to leap toward him, as if he tuned me to his pleasure, and I was dropping deep, deep into the memory of those last predawn hours.

There you are
. The words came from inside my head. I felt the push of her through my longing, almost as if my yearning for him were her own. She seemed to swell within me until the voice and I were one. There was no separating us, and I—Evelyn Atherton—seemed to disappear, to fade. I became someone else, though it was as if I watched from a far distance. I saw myself stir. My eyes opened, but I saw only vapor, and wavering forms within it.
Do you know me?

“We’re calling the spirits of John and Everett Bennett. Are they here to speak with us?”

Not today. Today I’m the one who’s come. You would do well to heed me.

The voice rang in my head. I saw Michel’s slow and constant caress upon my hand, and I felt the spirit within me watching as well. An avid stare. A hungry one. She was uncomfortable in my body. She longed to break free.

“Johnny? Johnny, my darling, is that you?”

He is not here. I am here now. Tell him I am here.

My voice seemed not to be mine. It came from a far distance, and yet it was loud, and I was watching myself speak. “He’s not here. I am here now.”

I saw Michel’s polish slip in surprise. I felt her satisfaction as she waited for him to regain himself.

“Who is here? Who speaks to us through
Madame
Atherton?”

Dorothy said, “Who are you? Tell us, spirit. Who are you?”

My body smiled.

“Who are you, spirit?” Michel demanded again.

I saw my own mouth open. I felt the struggle of the spirit within me, the urge to answer, and I said—not in my own voice, not me at all—
“One who knows you.”

“What’s your errand? Who are you?”

I felt I was being sucked like wind through a tunnel. I felt my body shudder. I felt myself pulled back—or, it was more as if the door opened again and called me to enter. I began to feel myself again—the blood in my veins, the flex of my fingers held tight in other hands, the drawing of my breath. But I could not gain the strength to open my eyes. The vision was fading.

“Child?” Dorothy’s voice, soft and urgent, calling me back. “Evelyn?”

I opened my eyes, blinking in the glare of gaslight. Dorothy was staring at me, concerned, and I knew vaguely that it had something to do with what had just happened, like a dream whose color you remember upon waking, though the details escape, impossible to put together again.

Michel released my hand. He seemed disconcerted as he shoved my wineglass toward me. Roughly, he said, “Drink. It’ll clear your head.”

I made no move to take it, and he pushed the glass into my hand. I took a sip. The drink was warm on my tongue, and he was right; it did seem to clear my head. The blurry edges of my mind began to sharpen, and I began to remember. No boys at all, but a voice, a woman’s voice. I remembered what she said.
One who knows you
. Then I looked at Dorothy. Her face had gone slack with disappointment.

“They didn’t come.”

“
Non.
She needs more experience. She doesn’t know how to call.” Michel looked at me. “You’ve done enough tonight.”

A
fter he took Dorothy from the room, I put down the wine-glass and went upstairs, calling for Kitty along the way.

I let her chatter as she undressed me, but I heard little of what she said, and when she finally left me, I sat in the chair near the fire, clad in my nightgown and robe, and stared into the flames, glad for the silence, for the opportunity to think.

Yet logic or reason escaped me, and the night wavered uncomfortably before me, a mix of sensations rather than images. The way the spirit had felt within me, her restlessness, the way she had watched Michel, the words she’d said.
One who knows you
. How real it had seemed—but dreams felt real too. And I had no doubt that those in the throes of madness believed their own delusions. I thought of my mother, of her laudanum-induced stupor, her effort to silence the voices in her head, and I felt her terror in a way I never had.

Yet Michel had said to let them in, to learn to control them. It meant admitting the spirits were real. Could it be, as he’d said, that it was like telegraph lines or electricity—simply something science had not yet discovered? Did he really believe that, or were his assurances meant only to lure me into trusting him? Into madness?

I was so weary. What had I accomplished in my time here? The only evidence I’d discovered was a watch chain that Peter had supposedly given to Michel, and a possible adoption, and the bewildering fact of Peter’s attempt to commit Dorothy to an asylum—the latter two of which I needed papers to prove. Worse yet, I had allowed myself into a tryst with a man I believed was a killer. I was a failure in every way. I wanted myself back, the Evelyn who did not hear voices and did not have wicked, perverse longings. I heard the footsteps down the hall, and my body recognized them before my mind did. I stiffened. I heard the pause at my door, and I waited for the knock, the turn of the knob.

The footsteps moved on.

The disappointment that came over me was so sharp I nearly cried aloud with it. What had he done to me, that I should feel this way? I felt I was vibrating, a string plucked by invisible hands, his hands, and I was so repulsed and furious that it should be so that I could scarcely contain myself. I did not want him. I wanted nothing to do with him. I wanted him in jail. Hanged. Buried in some dark place far away from me. When he was gone, I would be sure the whole world knew of his villainy.
“He was a mountebank, a charlatan who killed my husband for the basest of reasons, for money. He was the worst kind of criminal,”
I would say.

“Did you never wonder what Peter was doing down by the river that night?

I frowned, staring into the fire, at the flames leaping and dancing before my eyes.

“No doubt it’s become a habit with you. Ignoring things.”

He was so confident that I would not find the evidence against him. He thought he was so wily.

I rose, restless, my mind turning, Peter’s face wavering before me.
“Don’t believe him. Don’t trust him.”
No, I did not. But I remembered how I’d reached for him after my nightmare, drawn to the comfort he offered.
“You are that rare thing
, chère
. A real medium.”

I felt I was drowning. I went to the window, pulling aside the drapes, staring out at the brightly colored globes of the carriage lamps gimbeling like stars in the darkness, people moving in and out of the streetlights’ glow—present one moment, the next gone, as if they’d never existed, as if only the light gave them materiality. I let the curtains fall. I paced back to the fire. I wanted answers. Not taunting hints, not manipulation, but real answers. Not just about Peter, but about my ability to hear spirits.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I was out of my bedroom, down the hall. It wasn’t until I was before his door that I paused, and only then because the craving moved over me like a rising tide. The spirits’ words mocked me.
Do not give in to temptation.
Like the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Thou shalt not murder the husband and let the wife take the blame.

No
, I thought.
Don’t do it.
There would be a better time. It was stupid to confront him now, tonight, when my yearnings were still so strong, when I doubted I could resist him.

His door opened.

“Why,
allô, chère.
” His hair was loose. He wore only a dressing gown, which opened indecently to reveal his naked chest. He leaned against the doorjamb. “Looking for me?”

My hunger rooted me. I wished I could disappear.

He said, “Why not admit what you want?”

He held out his hand.

And I, like the fool I was, took it.

He pulled me into his room, and closed the door, and then he pushed me up against it. I felt his hands at my dressing gown, jerking it from my shoulders, down my arms, until it fell in a pool around my feet, and then he was pulling the ribbon at the neck of my nightgown so it gaped open, and plunging his hands into it, pushing and twisting until the fabric gathered at my waist and I was naked above it. His mouth was everywhere—on mine, then at my throat, my breasts. My own hands crept beneath his robe, clutching at his narrow hips, pulling him close. I wanted him so badly I did not seem myself.

Then he was drawing up the skirt of my nightgown, lifting me as he plunged into me, and I curled my legs around him and moved with him. He caught my cries with his mouth, and the world dissolved—my questions and my doubts—in the force of my climax. And then, when he was spent himself, and the pleasure left us so we sagged exhausted and sweating against the door, our breathing ragged and heavy, he murmured against my shoulder, “We can’t keep doing this,
chère
.”

I felt sick at the words, especially when I believed them myself. “Of course,” I said stiffly. “If you would just let—”

“Next time, we should use the bed.”

I made a sound—I hardly knew what it was, a gulp, a cry of dismay, a laugh. I buried my face in him. “I can’t be here. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t even like you.”