by Alma Katsu
As he read it, his smile dissolved into a frown. He thrust it at her. “It makes no sense. A hoax, surely.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“It’s the ship’s stationery, so it could’ve come from anyone.” He watched as she pocketed the paper. “An enemy among the staff?”
She shook her head. She felt guilty; she didn’t think Mr. Latimer would approve of her discussing such things with the passengers, but it seemed natural to confide in Stead. “I was wondering, sir—you know so much about these things—if you think it might be a spirit trying to reach me?”
“A spirit?”
She took a step back, wringing her hands. “They said the dead boy heard a woman calling to him from the water and it reminded me of a story my grandmother Aisling told me when I was a child. Of a spirit of the sea—”
“My dear,” he said in a kind voice, “as a resident expert on spirits, I can tell you that they are incorporeal beings—”
“Incorporeal?”
“They have no flesh, no mass. They are specters. They cannot hold a pen or push a note under a door. Hence, no spirit could’ve written this note to you, Miss Hebbley. Unless of course they found someone to inhabit.”
She felt hot again, this time so hot she thought she might have a fever. “Like I said, my grandmother told me a story—and, and I know that spirits exist out on the ocean because I met one once. A tremendous great one, the witch queen of the sea she was—”
Stead shook his head. “A queen of the sea, is it?”
“It happened when I nearly drowned one day, at the shore outside my grandmother’s cottage—”
“Drowned? Well, that’s it, you see: a hallucination brought on by trauma.” Stead’s tone was kind but distant—that of a practiced journalist. “But didn’t you tell me you were an expert swimmer? That you swam every day for miles when you were a child? Which is it, Miss Hebbley? It can’t have been both.”
She drew back. She felt faint with fever. The room spun around her. She was sounding crazy, wasn’t she? Even to a known occultist, her fears were unfounded, silly. She wanted to argue with him: she knew what she knew, but the Englishman was twisting it all around, making her doubt herself, even as he spoke kindly and softly, like she was some spooked animal. . . .
She touched her forehead; it was clammy with sweat. The witch queen of the sea—Where did that come from? Had someone said it to her or had she read it in a story? A ghostly figure danced in her memory, faceless and indistinct, but how could she be sure it was real and not a hallucination? The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a dream.
Nothing made sense. Perhaps she was sick. The story had come from someplace inside her, a mischievous little story bubbling out of her like air bubbling to the surface from an underground lagoon. Her hand found the crumpled piece of stationery in her pocket. You know who I am.
She wiped her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand and curtsied unsteadily. “Forgive me, Mr. Stead, I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what’s come over me. I must be ill. . . .”
He took her elbow and tried to usher her to a chair. “You look unwell, dear. I didn’t want to say anything but . . . perhaps you should see the ship’s surgeon. . . .”
“No, I—” She pulled away from him. “I just need air.”
She rushed into the passageway, leaning against the wall to keep from falling to her knees. She couldn’t afford to see the ship’s surgeon just yet: the watch pinned to her apron said it was time to bring warm milk to the Fletchers.
She stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen, ducking about to avoid the busy head cook while she fetched and warmed the milk in a small pan, careful to make sure the milk didn’t become too hot and curdle, testing it with her pinkie finger before taking the pan off the heat. For a moment, she hovered there, waiting for the milk to cool a tiny bit. She pulled Caroline’s brooch from its now permanent spot in her pocket. Ran her fingers along its smooth shape. Then she put it away, before the milk would have time to get too cold.
Annie rushed to the Fletchers’ cabin, barely able to keep from dropping the tray. She knocked on the door harder than she meant and stood, nervously waiting to be let in. Listening to the noises on the other side of the door, murmuring and hushed tread on carpet. No longer the sound of moaning and sighing, though the memory of that still tugged at her chest, made her feel hot and dizzy again.
She rushed in as soon as the door swung open, not waiting to be invited. She knew what to do and set the tray down in the same place as before, pulled the cozy off the pot, turned to fetch the glass bottle.
Caroline had set the baby on the bed, lying in the center of a white blanket. There was something different about Ondine. Annie could tell right away. The baby was abnormally quiet. Listless. And there were ghastly-looking half-moons under the child’s eyes. The baby was sick. Obviously, something was wrong. Mark had been right, last night, to be worried.
Annie studied Caroline reclining on the bed with her daughter. She wasn’t sure that was the way a mother should look at her newborn, at something so defenseless. There was something calculating about that look. Studious. It made Annie frightened, yet again, for Ondine.
“Did you hear me, Annie? Miss Hebbley?” Caroline was speaking to her. “You can go. I’ll take it from here.” There was a coldness in Caroline’s voice. She had become a different person—not the vivacious, chatty one who’d boarded the ship two days ago.
“Yes, ma’am, of course.” Annie walked slowly down the alleyway, clutching the metal tray to her chest. Caroline’s sudden change chilled her, while Stead’s words still rung in her head. Spirits were incorporeal.
Unless they were not.
Changeling. Every mother in Ireland knew about changelings. How fairies sneaked into nurseries at night and plucked babies out of their cribs, would take your innocent child and replace it with a fairy baby. Sick babies were thought to be changelings. The deformed, babies that were inhuman in a way. Her father called it ignorance, to say such things. It was nothing more than an excuse to deny responsibility for bringing the poor wee one into the world.
The ship lurched underfoot, bucking like a wild horse and throwing Annie against the wall. She clutched the railing to stay upright, the world spinning around her.
Nothing made sense to her anymore.
What if it wasn’t the baby who was a changeling, but the mother? Could the fairies—or an unkind spirit—have whisked Caroline away and left one of their own in her place? Because Caroline was acting differently; in the short time Annie had known her, she’d gone from smart and warm and caring to cold and evasive. She looked different: paler, warier, her hands trembling when she thought no one was watching. Her own husband had said as much to Annie, or implied it anyway.
The spirit had been trying to find a way into the corporeal world. . . . First, the dead boy. Now Caroline.
Annie shook her head, as though she could shake off the poisonous thought of it. That was too wild. Fantastical. She knew what her father would say of such thoughts. He would say she was crazy, as crazy as his mother-in-law with her belief in magical powers.
Maybe she was crazy.
Annie smeared a hand over her sweaty face. No, not crazy—ill. She had been on her way to the ship’s surgeon, hadn’t she?
But it seemed to her that there were only two possibilities: either Caroline was possessed by an evil spirit, a wicked thing from the fairy world, or she, Annie, was losing her mind. And she did not believe she was losing her mind. She had an important job. Dozens of passengers depended on her and she remembered everything with perfect clarity. She cleaned her rooms, served her passengers, remembered who wanted a pot of tea delivered to their room at night, who preferred candles to electric light. There had been no complaints, no mishaps.
She was fine. Perfectly fine.
That left only one
alternative.
Chapter Twenty-One
Maddie Astor no longer knew herself.
In a matter of months, she’d become someone the former schoolgirl wouldn’t recognize. Not just in status but in shape. Her body was no longer her own.
She groaned and rolled over in bed. She couldn’t take another morning of lying in, especially not with the way Jack’s hands had roamed all night, even in his sleep, wanting her—no matter that her girlish form had stretched and gone taut and round at the middle, that her feet were swelling enough that her favorite shoes had begun to pinch.
Last night’s piano concert played an insistent march through her brain and she found she had hardly slept at all, visions of Stead’s spirits rustling through her thoughts, unsettling.
She kept thinking of Caroline’s frightening story of the possessed man. Kept replaying the séance they’d had, two nights ago now, racking her mind for clues. The spirit had been about to manifest itself, but the séance had been cut short—by that stewardess Miss Hebbley asking for the doctor. For Teddy. That implied that the evil spirit Ava Willing Astor had sent after her wasn’t in Stead’s room but with Teddy. She wished she knew how these things worked. Could a spirit be in two places at once?
She recalled what Stead had said, that a spirit might possess a body. Could Teddy have been possessed by the spirit?
She replayed it all again: the chanted questions, the candles. And then, the sweep of air as Miss Hebbley had burst in on them, causing enough of a breeze to snuff out all the candles at once.
She sat up—carefully, so as not to stir Jack.
Had Miss Hebbley’s entrance caused the candles to blow out? She remembered the sudden eerie dampening of flame, as though all had been snuffed out simultaneously by the same unseen hand. She pictured Annie Hebbley’s pale face in the darkness—like a ghost.
Could Miss Hebbley be the possessed one?
The idea seemed outlandish, of course.
But there was no disputing there was something odd about the stewardess. She had a strange effect whenever she came into a room. No one stayed long in her company. Just the thought of her needy, searching gaze gave Maddie a chill.
She thought again of Caroline’s words. Surely Maddie was not alone in suspecting that something terrible was afoot here. She wasn’t wrong to believe in the prophecy. She was not hysterical, as Dr. Leader would call it. This was real.
Wasn’t it?
She got out of bed. She needed to be among people.
She couldn’t stand being pregnant, she mused as she dressed herself, in such a hurry that she didn’t bother to call her maid for help. She hated the idea that the child would have to somehow wrestle its way out of her at the end. Like a demon being exorcised from its victim’s body—Wasn’t that human birth?
She snatched a black shawl from the pile in her trunk—she was in mourning, after all. Not just for Teddy but for her former self, the one who’d played and studied and socialized and flirted. The girl who’d been alive with possibility, all of it ahead of her. Strange—terrible—how you could turn a corner from young and vibrant and on the brink of everything, to being tired all the time, stretched tight like a balloon filled to bursting.
She made her way to the bedroom door, just as her husband was rolling over with a yawn, beginning to stretch. “Don’t wait for me to head up to luncheon,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m going to find the girls and take a turn on the decks. The walking is good for my poor swollen ankles—Dr. Prendergast told me so.”
In the lounge on the A deck, she found the Fortune sisters—Alice, Ethel, and Mabel—heads bowed together over some piece of gossip, no doubt. The Fortunes were in their early to mid-twenties, far closer in age to Maddie than some of the other women in their set. In fact, she sort of enjoyed playing the worldly-wise married lady around Ethel, who was engaged to be wed when they returned to Winnipeg. They had all sorts of questions about what they termed the Bedroom Arts.
It was certainly an effective distraction from the prophecy.
“Oh, Maddie, do join us.” The sisters were flattered by her attention, she knew. Mabel patted the chair next to her while Alice poured tea.
She lowered herself into the chair, grateful for the thick seat cushion. “What are you up to?”
Ethel leaned in. “We’re going to see if we can’t find Mr. William Sloper— You’ve met Mr. Sloper, haven’t you? He’s developed quite a crush on Alice.”
Alice lowered her lashes and blushed, as was required of a properly bred young lady, but Maddie could tell she was as proud as a lioness making her first kill.
“We met in Paris,” Alice said softly. “Just two Americans making the grand tour.”
“He rescheduled his passage on an earlier ship so they could be together a little longer,” Mabel said. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“Is he handsome?” Maddie asked. Might as well get to the heart of the matter. This was the face you would be looking at across the breakfast table for the next twenty or thirty years.
“Very,” Ethel said. Alice lowered her lashes again and blushed twice as hard.
“Then by all means, let’s find him. I’d like to take a look at him myself.” The thought of a handsome man made Maddie’s pulse quicken. It wasn’t that Jack was ugly but—God help her—he just wasn’t her type. He wasn’t very distinguished looking. He had a youthful, almost silly-looking face, in her opinion. She deserved at least to look at handsome young men whenever she could. It was her secret pleasure.
They were in luck: they didn’t even need to make a complete lap of the boat deck afterward to find Mr. Sloper. He was in the gymnasium with a crowd of other first-class passengers watching the boxers spar again. Oh, the boxers—people couldn’t get enough of them, it seemed. To the men, they were nothing more than a prize racehorse or a fast car: an object to be admired. They watched for form and athletic prowess. The women on the other hand . . .
Maddie knew why there were as many women here as men. How often did you get to see a man in such good physical condition stripped down to their drawers? They were wearing special boxing outfits, scanty linen drawers and a shirt without sleeves or collar to keep them cool. Women rarely saw this much of a man’s body—artists didn’t paint them as often as they did half-dressed women—and now that she had the opportunity, Maddie couldn’t stop looking.
Perhaps she was not pregnant with a girl after all, she thought, but a boy. The rush of desire she sometimes felt these past few months was positively masculine.
Both men were definitely good-looking. The blond was more to Maddie’s taste. The other—while somewhat baby faced—was too big and hulking. Easy to imagine being crushed underneath all that muscle. The blond was smaller and slender. He looked like he’d be a good dancer. He was more sophisticated looking; with the right clothes, he could be positively debonair. There was cunning to his face, too.
If she went up to talk to him, she was sure he’d snap to attention because of who she was. Mrs. John Jacob Astor. It would be amusing to have this handsome specimen of a man on her arm for the rest of the voyage, fetching drinks and plumping pillows and rubbing her feet—he’d rub her feet, if she asked. But it would likely be far too maddening, this handsome bloke fawning on her out of show and not true interest.
Out of the corner of her eye, Maddie saw the stewardess Annie Hebbley. The sudden appearance when she’d been thinking of her only an hour earlier sent a chill through Maddie’s veins. The fantasy of showboating around with the blond boxer evaporated into thin air: Maddie’s attention was riveted on the pale wraith in the gray uniform making her way through the crowd. That searching, empty face with hungry eyes was like something in a mausoleum frieze. No one else seemed to pay any attention to her. It was almost as though no one could see her but Maddie. Like she wasn’t really there.
There was something else, too. The stewardess was passing i
n front of a row of windows that looked out over the promenade, and yet she cast no reflection on the glass. Maddie blinked and strained to focus as hard as she could, and yet she saw no trace of Annie Hebbley. Not a streak, not a ripple. Not a wisp of the strange Irish girl.
She went cold all over.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The truth was, Dai felt miserable.
Society women surrounded Dai and Leslie at the dinner table, in their colorful silks and satins, arms enclosed in long evening gloves. A blond on the right and a redhead on the left, and three brunettes like charms on a bracelet across the table from him. From their expressions, Dai couldn’t tell what they were thinking; society men often came to the boxing halls and engaged him in chitchat, but he had little experience with their women. They may have been smiling, but their eyes were sharp, like pointed daggers searching for a chink in Leslie’s facade. As though they knew he was not what he was trying so hard to appear to be.
Word had gotten out already that Leslie had telepathic abilities—he worked quickly. Dai had to imagine Violet had been essential in planting the gossip so well—and now these women flocked happily around him, clamoring for him to divine something about them. Me, me, me, rang the voices, high and pretty and sweet. Les wouldn’t, of course; he’d only had time to slip into a few cabins and so his marks were preselected. But let them think he was only demure.
That was part of the game.
At the moment, his target was Miss Ethel Fortune, eldest daughter in a family of wealthy Canadians. Les had been able to find out all kinds of things about her from one quick trip to their suite. The family—three daughters, a son, a pair of stolid parents—had just completed a grand tour of Europe and Miss Ethel had used the trip to amass her trousseau. But he had found a few interesting things among her dresses and silk nightgowns.
“Oh, come on,” Dai said, right on cue. “Leslie, they’ll never believe it unless you show it off. I swear, ladies, his ability is uncanny, much as he may deny it.”