The Spiritualist (50 page)

Then, almost in the same moment, I realized that I was still in the parlor, that there was shouting, that Michel was beside me.

His hand was on my arm, holding me steady as my legs went weak. And then I realized that Benjamin was collapsed on the floor, and there was a pool of something dark spreading from beneath his head. Lying beside him was Peter’s gun.

The others were rushing over. There was shouting, chaos. Someone turned up the lights. It was too sudden, too bright. I collapsed into Michel’s arms, turning my head into his chest.

“Someone must call the police,” Jacob said.

“There’s a watchman outside. I saw him when we came up.”

“Go call him.” I felt the rumble of Michel’s voice against my cheek.

Someone went running. I looked down to see Wilson Maull kneeling beside Ben. He looked up with an expression of disgusted dismay. “He’s quite dead.”

Grace sobbed and flung herself at her husband.

“Is Evelyn all right? She wasn’t hurt? Evelyn, are you all right?” Sarah’s face was pale with concern.

I nodded. “I think I’m… fine.”

“Dear Lord, did you see the way he went after you? I thought certain he’d killed you.”

“It was the spirit he was after. His wife’s spirit.”

I heard the sound of running on the stairs. One of Dorothy’s nurses came racing into the room, the watchman close on his heels.

“There’s been a terrible accident,” Michel said quietly as the policeman came inside, and the others backed away to give him access to Benjamin’s body.

The watchman recoiled. “Jesus Christ. What the hell happened here?”

“He shot himself,” Michel said. I looked at him in surprise, and his arm tightened about me in warning. “Didn’t he,
Madame
?”

I said, “Yes. It was quite horrible.”

“I hardly saw it myself, I was too concerned with
Madame
Atherton.”

“He tried to kill her,” Sarah said. “He tried to strangle her!”

“Here now—” the policeman said. “He shot himself, you say?”

“Yes, I saw it. I thought he meant to shoot Evelyn, but instead he turned the gun on himself,” said Wilson Maull.

“Why would he do that?”

“I suppose he couldn’t live with himself after what he’d done,” Michel said calmly. “Killing two people that way—we all heard him confess, didn’t we?”

“I heard it,” Robert Dudley said.

“Me too,” said his wife.

“He said he killed Peter Atherton,” Dorothy said. She was leaning heavily on Charley’s arm, and she was pale as death. “He admitted to it.”

“And his own wife, a year ago,” Michel said.

I listened to him in awe. He made them all believe it. Every word. I said, “How terribly guilty he must have felt all this time.”

“Not guilty enough to take the blame, though,” Dorothy said sharply. “He left that for you, didn’t he?”

Sarah nodded. “We saw it all. We heard him say it.”

The police watchman knelt at Benjamin’s side. “Nearly blew ‘is ‘ead off.”

Grace made a sound of horror.

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Dudley said.

“Oh, o’ course. Pardon me,” said the policeman. He sighed and got to his feet. “Is there someone we can send for my captain?”

“Lambert will go.” Dorothy nodded to the nurse who’d brought the police officer and who now stood by the door. “Go send him to the station, Matthew, will you?”

The nurse left quickly. The police officer reached into his pocket and took out his notebook. “You say he’s the one killed Peter Atherton?”

“Whose wife stands just there—accused herself,” Jacob said in indignation. “Who has borne all manner of insults these past weeks while the real killer posed as her lawyer!”

“This is Benjamin Rampling?” the policeman asked. He looked at me.

I nodded. “My husband’s partner.”

“He admitted he killed your husband?”

“Yes.”

“Did he happen to say why?”

“I don’t know. It was all so sudden, but there was something about a falling-out—”

“They’d argued wretchedly,” Sarah said.

“I believe Atherton tried to end the partnership,” Dudley offered.

“No doubt an accident,” Michel said. “He had quite a temper. He admitted to killing his wife in a rage.”

“He was still furious with her,” Grace said. “We could all see it.”

I glanced down at Benjamin, at the blood soaking into Dorothy’s velvet tapestry carpet, turning the pale cabbage roses red, and I said weakly, “Could someone cover him, please?”

“
Madame
should sit down,” Michel said. “Might I take her to the settee?”

“Of course.” The officer waved us away. Wilson Maull took a knitted throw from a nearby chair and spread it over Benjamin’s body, tucking it in, as if he meant to prepare him for a good night’s sleep instead of one for eternity.

He paused. “What’s this?” He reached for something—the necklace where it had fallen to the floor, just next to Ben’s hand. “The spirit’s locket,” Wilson said almost reverently as he picked it up. Without a word, Michel took it from him and gave it to me. Then he led me to the settee, away from the others. I heard them arguing among themselves, providing the policeman with details, tripping over one another to embellish further what was nothing more than the delusion Michel had hand-fed them. They had seen nothing. It was too dark. Only I had seen it. Only I had seen Michel rush to my defense. Only I had seen him pull Peter’s gun from his frock coat pocket—the gun I had not known he carried—and set it against Benjamin’s temple. He had not hesitated; he had made no warning, he had never given Benjamin the chance to release me.

He had simply pulled the trigger.

I
t was nearly three in the morning before the police finished their questioning and the coroner had come to take the body away.

“Looks cut-and-dried enough,” he said as he’d stared down at the body. “They all saw him do it, eh?”

Dorothy had collapsed at two o’clock, and Michel had gone with her nurses to take her to bed, and to give her the cordial that calmed her nerves and helped her sleep. But she had not gone without patting my hand and saying, “You’re free now, Evelyn, child. They’ll drop the charges against you.” Then her face had crumpled, and she’d gripped my fingers hard. “You won’t leave me, will you, my dear? You’ll stay?”

“I’ve no plans to go anywhere,” I told her.

“You’re like a daughter to me,” she said.

Michel had taken her away then, and I leaned back upon the settee, exhausted, watching as the policemen did their work, and the circle disbanded one by one as each was questioned and released. Lambert had called the maids and the driver and the gardener into service, and they moved the furniture and labored to roll the ruined carpet and take it away, but there was still a stain upon the wood beneath. When I finally rose to go to my own room, Bella was working upon it, scrubbing with tired resignation—though the household was so disconcerted by Benjamin’s “suicide” that I doubted anyone would sleep tonight.

Including myself. Wearily, I went upstairs, grateful that I was dressed so simply that all I must do was fall into my bed. But I was afraid of sleep. I didn’t know who might visit me in my dreams—Peter again? Or Adele? Or worse yet, Benjamin? There was some justice, I supposed, in them all being together, if in fact they were. They had tortured one another well enough in the material world; now that they had returned to one another, I hoped they might find peace. Certainly I deserved it, if they did not.

It wasn’t until I reached my bedroom and took off Adele’s dressing gown that I realized the fine lawn was spattered with Benjamin’s blood. I let it fall to the floor—tomorrow I would burn it—and then I stumbled wearily into my bed. The locket was still in my hand; I lifted it, letting it dangle for a moment to glimmer dimly in the subdued light of the street-lamps eking around the edges of the curtains. Benjamin had loved her once, I supposed, though no doubt that love was like Peter’s had been for me—an attempt to live within the world, a necessary evil, given that he was forbidden from revealing the truth of his heart. To love so secretly, and then to lose Peter to a man who would not love him back, to have no recourse. How Benjamin must have hated Michel.

I closed my eyes for a moment. I thought of how Ben and I had walked together. Now I realized it was not shyness that had been in his eyes when he said, “I regret it took me so long to find my heart’s desire,” but sorrow. Perhaps we were all the same when it came to that. Perhaps there were those who never found it.

I put the locket on the bedside table, letting the chain fall in a steady stream from my hand to pool around it, and then I lay there in the darkness, staring up at a ceiling I could not see—it could almost have been the way to heaven, so far it seemed above my head—and waited.

It was nearly dawn before he stepped inside the door.

He moved quietly, as if he thought I slept and didn’t want to wake me, and I didn’t disabuse him; I liked to watch him move within the shadows. That grace, that silky confidence, as if he never considered that I might refuse him. He undressed, laying his clothes upon the chair, and then moved to the side of the bed and pulled aside the covers carefully, crawling between them. I sighed, and moved into his arms, and he held me close, stroking my hair.

“I’ll keep the nightmares away,
chère
,” he said.

It was only then that I slept.

Y
ou’re a free woman,” Michel said as I put the newspaper aside. He sat across the table from me, eating heartily of a late breakfast I had no appetite for. “A relief, I imagine, eh?”

“I don’t quite know yet,” I told him.

“Time enough to come to terms with it,” Dorothy said. I had been surprised that she made her way downstairs this morning, but she seemed anxious to take breakfast with us, though she only picked at her food and barely drank her tea. “It’ll be months before you live down the notoriety. Until then, no one but those in the faster circles will have anything to do with you.”

Michel glanced up at me. “Give them time. The rest’ll come looking for you before long. Once they hear of your talent, they’ll want to see it for themselves.”

I met his gaze. “Well then, I shall give them a show worth waiting for.”

He smiled.

Dorothy said, “Mark my words, the two of you will have them all convinced by year’s end.”

Lambert came to the door. “Pardon me, Mrs. Atherton, but there’s a Mrs. Burden here to see you.”

I looked up in surprise. “Mrs. Burden? Pamela?”

“How quickly they descend,” Michel said wryly. “Even earlier than you predicted.”

I rose, setting aside the damask napkin. To Lambert, I said, “I’ll see her.”

“She’s waiting in the parlor, ma’am.”

Michel said, “Remember what’s owed you,
Madame.
We aren’t done yet.”

I met his gaze. “Oh, I know.”

“Don’t give in to them, Evelyn,” Dorothy called after me as I went to the door. “They’re vultures, the lot of them.”

I could not help but smile at the image as I went into the parlor, especially when I saw Pamela standing by the window, dressed in mourning, her hat so bedecked with black feathers that she looked very like some strange kind of bird.