‘Tea? That is very kind of you, Miss Walton.’
‘It’s Walton-Cisneros, Mr Moncrieff.’
‘Of course, I beg your pardon,’ Sam said, although he could not help noticing that she had not corrected Charles or Lady Matthews.
‘I just need to do a couple of things while you have your tea, if you would be so kind as to humour me. Afterwards, I’ll do the reading. Is that agreeable?’
‘That would be perfect, and thank you very much for your hospitality.’
‘Also, to be fair, I owe you an apology,’ she said, lowering her voice and letting her eyes travel to the place where she, in her guise as a theatre seamstress, had delivered her expert blow.
‘It is of no consequence; do not trouble yourself. Although I must confess I do not very much like being hit on the head,’ he said good-humouredly.
‘It was the back of your neck, to be precise.’
‘If I may say so, that is a colossal map of the city,’ he said, feeling that a change of topic would be welcome. He was rewarded with another of those smirk-smiles.
‘It is, is it not? It came with the house, and I have grown extremely fond of it. It helps me imagine my dear spirit friends in their free wanderings through our mighty capital.’
Tea arrived, and she asked him whether he would mind terribly pouring it himself. Sam did as he was told. The young woman busied herself with a tattered copy of the Library Map of London and its Suburbs, penned a note, rang the bell, and gave it to the maid.
‘Would you be so kind as to pour me some tea as well, Mr Moncrieff? I’ll join you momentarily.’
‘It would be my pleasure.’
Again, he complied.
‘Thank you for your patience, and for pouring the tea. It’s so charming to see a man doing it for a change,’ she said, sitting down at last. ‘I could, of course, read your tea dregs, Romany style.’
‘It is also the customary way of reading the future where I come from, in Norfolk.’
She looked up directly at his eyes for the first time, and he said nothing more, enjoying her puzzlement. It appeared that possessing this kind of knowledge did not tally in her head with the idea she had formed of him. A second later she was regaining control of the conversation.
‘Perhaps you would prefer the cards.’
‘I had no idea there were so many alternatives.’
‘It rather depends on what you are interested in finding out. Is it fortune or health, or might it even be love?’
A sudden pang, but he could control it. For a moment Sam was at a loss what to say. He hadn’t had the sense to prepare the scene in advance.
‘Perhaps a little of everything,’ he offered.
‘I see. The Tarot cards are better for these kinds of vague, imprecise questions.’
‘That is a peculiar cabinet,’ he said. ‘It rather reminds me of another one I’ve seen recently.’
‘Indeed? May I ask where?’
‘At Madame Florence’s.’
‘Of course. Madame Florence happens to own the twin.’
‘Really? What a coincidence.’
‘Not at all. This is a very particular mediumistic cabinet, connected with Madame’s family history, as it happens. It was recovered from the wreckage of a passenger ship lost at sea near the coast of Essex. It all happened many decades ago, before I was born.’
‘How did it come into your possession?’
‘By the simplest method of all: money. I acquired it a few years ago at a public auction. It belonged to Sophia Wayfarer, the celebrated American Spiritualist, who died on that ship when she was coming for her first tour of England. It is the very cabinet from which she performed some of her more celebrated séances, the ones reproduced in exquisite detail in The Medium and Daybreak and Two Worlds.’
‘Medium and Daybreak?’ Sam was momentarily lost.
‘An old Spiritualist publication. It doesn’t run anymore.’
‘I see.’
‘From inside it she succeeded in producing one of the first spirit materialisations in history—after the Fox sisters, of course,’ she added. ‘If you believe in that kind of thing, that is.’ She looked intently at Sam.
‘And why does Madame Florence own the twin? Did she buy it too?’
Miss Walton laughed.
‘Madame Florence’s name is Florence Wayfarer; she was Sophia Wayfarer’s twin sister. They fell out and went their separate ways. They say Sophia was the more talented one, and that Florence only came into her own after her sister’s death.’
Of course, Sam thought. He now remembered Madame Florence’s full name from the bill announcing her séance. Something did not add up, something that brought darkness into the room all of a sudden: exactly how old was the youthful and charming Madame Florence?
‘Shall we proceed? I shall read the Tarot. Or, I could of course simply give you what you want, and then we both will save some time.’
‘I am afraid I do not follow.’
‘Mr Moncrieff, it is obvious that you are here because, somehow, you have decided to mistrust my abilities. I will not claim to be an expert at either card reading or palmistry; however, things tend to be less simple than we give them credit for.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I will assure you, sir, that my reading of the cards will be—real. However, I will not deny there is more to it than a supernatural gift.’
‘May I ask what do you mean, exactly?’
‘There are theories, methods. One can study the basics. There’s no need for deception, if one were to simply apply oneself, and follow what one learns. But, of course, at the end it is mostly psychology that matters.’
‘Psychology?’ He seemed to consider this. ‘I am afraid I’m not very sure what you can mean.’
‘I mean that I can read the cards because I’ve studied them, but, ultimately, one doesn’t need them to know.’
‘To know what?’
‘Everything one needs to know, desires to know. Besides, Mr Moncrieff, I will not give you a true portrait of yourself, I will only tell you two or three things of no consequence you will not mind hearing from a total stranger.’
‘I see. Nonetheless, I have come all the way here.’
‘Would you really like me to show you?’
‘Please; but, in that case, may I ask for the honest version?’
‘Honest version? My dear Mr Moncrieff, it is I who doesn’t follow you now.’
‘Very simply put, if you are going to demonstrate your psychological knowledge, could you at least please spare me the little trifles, and attempt a true character portrait? That would be far more impressive,’ he said, punctuating his talk with a long sip of his tea.
‘I see. Very well. But please, do not be alarmed.’
‘Alarmed?’ he chuckled.
‘And please remember that it was you who asked me.’
He half-smiled, pretending to be amused at her reaction, but inwardly he was wondering what he had volunteered for.
‘Very well. I’ll start.’ Miss Walton looked at him intently; and, eventually, she spoke. ‘You have never truly felt that you belong anywhere, and have problems relating to one place. Your life has been a succession of forward movements, always so as to not have to ask deep questions about what you left behind. You have always felt like an outsider, and indeed feel that you are looking at life as if through a window, as if you are considering someone else’s existence. From that we can ascertain that you suffer serious problems in engaging with reality. Am I wrong?’
Sam didn’t say anything. He found it hard to swallow the tea. She continued shuffling the cards in her hands, but she wasn’t drawing any, she didn’t need to do so to speak. ‘You don’t remember, or know, much from your childhood. In fact, you avoid thinking about your childhood altogether; this means you confuse things sometimes. I was struck by your reference to Charles as your “uncle”, when you two are not related, are you? Charles is your guardian, and you are his godson, his charge.
Let me see, what else—’
It was on hearing this that the young man obviously wanted her to stop talking; although it seemed that a part of him wanted to listen as well. She was observing him intently while she gathered speed; it was almost possible to see one idea leading into another as she threaded her argument. Miss Walton drew three more cards, completing a circle on the table.
‘Which leads me to believe that something—something happened to you, at some point. Probably very early on. Something that has made you mistrustful, something that weighs a great deal—’
‘Please, stop.’ He was standing now, and had moved close to the window.
She could not refrain from a little smile as she collected the cards together.
‘Please, accept my apologies, Mr Moncrieff. I should know better.’
He turned round to look at her, and their eyes met for a few seconds before he spoke:
‘You are quite right,’ he conceded. ‘Charles and I are not related.’
‘It is of no consequence,’ she said. ‘It only struck me as peculiar. What does it say about you, as it were?’
‘Does it need to mean something, Miss Walton?’ Sam tried to sound lighter than he felt.
‘You tell me, Mr Moncrieff.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Helena’s previous experiences of the supernatural had been so disappointing as to be considered fraudulent. Even now, so many years later, remembering it all made her feel so sad, so angry.
The mediums had come all the way from Leeds on a southern tour, and agreed to stop by in Cambridge for a few days as her grandfather’s guests. She knew very well what Grandfather wanted, for didn’t she want the same thing? He wasn’t a believer; it wasn’t like that. He was a practical man, and he was simply checking a possibility. He invited those two famous Northern mediums as a kind of scientific experiment.
‘What we will be testing, my dear, are the rationalist, humanist and Cartesian ideas that underlie the Spiritualist faith; its claims to being an empirical religion, continuously tested and retested by its zealous members.’
All that was very well, but they both wanted it to work: to see her again, to hear her laughter, to smell her perfume.
Alas, that proved to be all that they could grant them, to fill the parlour with Grandmother’s Andalusian smell of warm oranges and cinnamon and the acid twang of lemons in the nostrils—until it all smelled of rotten lemons, and Grandfather left the room to walk into the garden angry and talking loudly, and the two mediums retired into their room with the promise of a more successful séance the next day. And Helena—
Something was wrong in that carefully curated scene. Cinnamon?
She treasured a very precise memory of that patio in Seville. Overbearing heat, looking for shade amongst the plants, the delicate murmur of the little fountain. It had two cherubim, looking intently into the little lemon trees in their massive terracotta pots. She liked to see the women splashing the fresh water on the loza floor to clean it, and, with scientific curiosity, she would kneel down and see it evaporate almost at once in the intense heat before her very eyes. Helena was amazed by everything she was seeing, although it probably didn’t happen like she remembered it. The colours, the yellow light of the sun, the smell of dung from the horse-drawn carts, the courtesy of the people. Coming from London, where they had been briefly living before the trip, a despicable human haunt, a veritable jungle of bad manners and humans crashing on top of one another, this courtesy shocked her deeply. Until then, she had thought that the adult world was about pushing aside the person before you in the queue, about eating or being eaten.
But she remembered the smells well. Oranges and lemons. A strange flower called dama de noche, lady of the night, that only opened at dusk, pouring its pungent aroma into the world. The kitchen she secretly haunted. The fresh smell of the animals in the heat. The sweet fumes of the nearby river. It was called the Guadalquivir.
But cinnamon? She didn’t recall any cinnamon. Of course, she could have simply been wrong; the visit had happened many years back, when she was five or six years old. And Helena knew all too well that her mind had started forming its own version of her grandmother’s Seville. But still.
Helena had never accepted that she possessed a particularly acute intuition, but she had always been a good observer. Of people, of places. She seemed to possess some manner of grasping a situation; it is almost as if she had strategically assessed in her brain the many possible outcomes in a few seconds; and so, she could perhaps anticipate a fight in an inn, a passing moment of danger. These little trifles did not mean she ‘foresaw’, of course; they could not do so, she explained to herself, for foresight, as such, did not exist. But observation, careful and meditated, common sense, rationality, having the patience and the inclination to gather the different fractured pieces of a puzzle and put them together… these traits she did possess. And they sometimes conjured up a frighteningly accurate reading of a particular situation.
And her reading of their guests was as follows: it felt as if the two mediums had put together a version of what they imagined a Seville townhouse to smell like; that is, without ever having been to the actual place, but rather gathering their ideas from books and third-hand testimonials; therefore they had got a thing or two wrong. Nothing terrible, of course. Mere trifles. Deep inside, their business was not about actual communication with the shadows, but about giving solace to those left behind. Grandfather and herself.
Of course, she had not been allowed to attend, but she had found a way of seeing it all, smelling it all. She was good at that kind of thing, as she imagined most children were.
The next session was more successful, but all the mediums had been able to materialise was a pair of ghostly hands, too pale to belong to Grandmother. And so on and so on.
They had not seen her, alas! She had not come. And the two mediums departed for London, to start on the last leg of their journey.
A sad, disappointing moment from her life, one that was better left forgotten.
* * *
Helena had been following James Woodhouse for a whole week. She knew he was keeping an eye on Samuel Moncrieff, but didn’t know the reason for his interest. Mr Woodhouse was a college friend of Sam’s—and Helena suspected that there was more to Sam’s recent past than even someone as sharp-eyed as herself could have seen. She needed to talk to this young man. What she didn’t realise was that she had been caught, that her pursuit was not as invisible as she had fancied. She turned a corner, and was disappointed to find the young man waiting to confront her. She seemed to be losing her touch.
‘May I ask why you are following me, miss?’
Helena sighed, put out by having been caught so easily. Eventually she spoke.
‘My name is Helena Walton. We both are investigating the same person. And I wasn’t following you, exactly; we both have, in fact, been following the same person for days.’
It was obviously the last thing that the young man in front of her had expected. He looked confused.
‘Mr Woodhouse, I have been investigating Samuel Moncrieff, and I know you are doing the same,’ she explained. ‘It is clear that we need to talk.’
He looked at her with a curious, odd expression, more sad than angry, she could see. He gave her the impression of being exhausted, as if he had just completed some superhuman task. She could now see the deep black shadows underneath his eyes.
‘Talk?’ he seemed amused at the notion. ‘What about? I cannot help you. I cannot help anyone. You should go back to your nice new house.’
She had not expected this. So he knew who Helena was, and where she lived. He turned away from her and started walking, and only when he was about to disappear again round the corner and into the crowd did she say:
‘Mr Woodhouse! Please, at least listen to what I’ve got to say.’
He stopped, but didn’t turn to face her.
‘How do you know I am investigating Sam?’ he asked.
‘I’v
e got my methods.’
‘Who else knows?’
‘No one. Just me.’
He pondered on this.
‘I suggest a truce, Mr Woodhouse. Let me buy you lunch at my club, and we can talk. Afterwards, if still you do not believe that we can help each other, I will leave you in peace.’
Reluctant, but also curious, he accepted. Helena hailed a hansom, and told the driver to take them the short ride to Maddox Street. They got out at the entrance of a severe-looking building. Once inside Helena talked to someone at reception, and they were immediately shown into a small and cosy private room on the first floor. It had a panelled double window overlooking a small garden with fruit trees, desolate in their winter guise. The walls displayed books and paintings, and the room itself was furnished with chaise longues covered with cushions and drapes, side tables with vases, and little lamps that gave out a warm and pleasant light. In the grate fluttered a welcoming fire, and, next to it, a small round table was laid for a private lunch. The young man confessed he’s never been in a woman’s club before, and he looked favourably impressed.
‘Mr Woodhouse.’
‘Jim, please.’
‘Jim. I ought to thank you—knowing that someone else is keeping an eye on our common friend, Mr Moncrieff, lets me rest more soundly at night.’
‘Our friend…’ He could not contain a chuckle. ‘Not at all. It is my pleasure to be of some use,’ he said, mockingly.
None of them said anything for a brief moment, during which time two servers entered the room with lunch. The young man was obviously thankful for the opportunity the meal offered not to interrogate his unexpected nervousness. They took their seats at the little table, and he looked for something to drink. He was served some excellent wine.
They both busied themselves with the warm rolls and the celery soup.
‘I’m curious, how did you become a detective?’
She smiled. ‘So, you do know what I do?’
‘I also have my methods.’
‘Is that how you describe my work?’
‘How else could it be described?’
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