Fitz shuddered theatrically. “I wish you luck. I’d rather not encounter that fellow again, myself. He’s far too canny for me. It’s like he can see what you’re thinking.” He looked at me, sitting on his dressing room chair, and laughed his easy laugh. “Perhaps you should watch your back, Ellie. Now shove off. I’ve a dinner to attend.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Gild Theatre, which was to house Ramona’s clairvoyant extravaganza, was nearly deserted at eight thirty. I stepped off the omnibus and looked up and down the street, noting a dim chop suey restaurant, a few tiny, smelly pubs, and the faint sounds of traffic from a nearby, busier thoroughfare. A thin rain had begun to fall, almost mist in the wet air, and the pavements were slick. This was not exactly the center of London’s high-class entertainment.
The Gild was shabby, pushed right up against the street, only a dim electrical light glaring sickly from one of the street-level windows and shedding flimsy illumination over the peeling posters. So far, an evening of psychic stage demonstrations had not drawn an audience, and the weather wasn’t helping.
“Ellie.”
I turned. James detached himself from a pool of shadow and came toward me. He wore a dark overcoat against the damp, chill air, his hat pulled over his forehead. He raised an umbrella and opened it.
“You didn’t come prepared,” he said.
“I know.” I pulled up my collar. I was most likely the only Londoner abroad tonight who had forgotten her umbrella, but I’d had a lot on my mind when I’d left the house. I glanced at James again, trying to see his face in the darkness. After what happened when we’d last seen each other, I couldn’t guess what his attitude would be, and his voice gave nothing away.
He did not touch me, but moved me under the umbrella, his arm behind me. I could smell the damp wool of his coat. To any observer, we were huddled together as if we were a couple. Tension radiated from him like vibrations from a tuning fork.
“When was the last time you came to one of these?” he asked.
“It’s been years,” I admitted. “Gloria and I used to attend them sometimes.”
He grunted. “Slumming.”
“No,” I said. “The ones we attended were always at better theaters than this.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
I supposed not. He meant that Gloria and I were two real psychics coming to watch a fake’s stage show. “And when was the last time you attended a show like this?” I asked.
“Three weeks ago,” he said.
“For one of your reports?”
“It’s what I do,” he replied. He turned his head, and for a brief second the lights reflected on the planes of his face. “You haven’t missed much. The tricks haven’t improved, from what I can see. I’ve bought our tickets.”
“All right.” I looked at the dreary facade of the Gild Theatre, slick now with rain. “Let’s go see whether Ramona makes an appearance.”
The theater was small, the proscenium low, the chairs hard and crowded close together. There was no heat, and already my toes were cold and damp inside my high-heeled shoes. A small crowd trickled in alongside us: older women, draped in heavy fabrics and cheap, elaborate hats; young people, visibly drunk and rowdy; single men, most of them older than forty, wearing graying shirts under jackets worn at the elbows. One man slept softly in his chair, snoring; I was fairly certain he’d bought a ticket just to get out of the rain.
We took seats near the back, and I unbuttoned my coat despite the chill. James slid down in his seat and our knees touched. I leaned away from him and scanned the audience again, trying to catalog everyone in more detail under the watery electric light.
“Ellie.”
I turned to find James looking at me. He’d removed his hat, and under the light I could see that his jaw was tight, his eyes on me in an intense expression I couldn’t read.
“About yesterday,” he said.
I looked away again. “Stop,” I said, forcing the words out. “I cannot apologize enough for yesterday. It was inexcusable.” I blinked hard. “All I can say for myself is that I did not intend to be cruel.”
“You are not cruel,” he said softly after a long moment. “Look at me.”
I turned back again. There was pain on his face now, bleak and vicious. I did not have to touch him to know that he was thinking of that black forest, the trees, the cold, the screaming. Just as I was.
“I am going to tell you this once and once only. Do you understand?”
I nodded, mute.
“What you saw yesterday, I have never told to anyone. And I never will. What happened in those woods, what happened to Fenton—you’ve seen some of it now, so there’s no going back, but never ask me about it because I say now that I will never, ever tell you. Not ever. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” I said through numb lips. I watched him turn away from me, run a hand quickly through his dark blond hair, watched a drop of rain make its way down the lapel of his coat. “Do you remember the first time we met?” I asked, the words a surprise even to me as they came from my mouth.
He paused, then nodded. “The Stavros Club on Gerrard Street,” he said, but his expression calmed at the change of subject.
So he did remember. We had been drinking that night, Gloria and I. We’d been standing on the edge of the dance floor, mussed and a little sweaty, taking a breather while the orchestra members refreshed themselves at the bar. Gloria had bent to fix the buckle on her high heel, and when she went down I saw a man approaching us behind her, his hands in his coat pockets, striding fast through the crowd. His expression was angry and determined, but when he saw me—I was obviously a surprise—it changed. His gaze moved swiftly down me, taking everything in, sliding over my hips and my waist in a look so fiery I felt my skin flush hot under my clothes. When Gloria stood again he still stared at me, at my face and my mussed hair, my eyes. Finally he pulled his gaze from me and looked back to Gloria, getting angry again.
“Gloria,” he said, his voice rough. “Get out of here and go home.”
Gloria, laughing, had introduced him as James Hawley from the New Society, who was doing a top secret series of tests on her. Still not looking my way, James had reminded her that the stated tests were scheduled for eight o’clock the next morning, some seven hours away, and he’d appreciate it if his subject would sober up and get some rest. Gloria had told him to stop being a stick, and how had he found her, anyway?
I’d watched the entire exchange, speechless, my throat dry. I hadn’t imagined that look. My body still felt it. When Gloria finally introduced us, I’d only nodded blankly at James, tongue-tied. He nodded at me formally, his gaze under control now, but still I saw the flare in his eyes.
I was more than a little bit drunk and the room was spinning and the air was close, but James Hawley, with his blond hair and dark-lashed eyes and boxer’s shoulders, had hit me like a blow. He was the opposite of all of Gloria’s other male acquaintances, who were foppish and theatrical in comparison. When he’d told Gloria he was going to order us a taxi and we’d damned well better get in it, he gave me another glance, then disappeared into the crowd again. Gloria turned to me.
“He isn’t always like that,” she said. “He’s just being beastly at the moment. He can be rather nice.”
“Oh,” I said.
And suddenly Gloria was looking at me through the haze of all the gin she’d imbibed, her eyes narrowing. “Ellie, darling, you like him.”
“I didn’t even talk to him,” I said in a tone I thought was reasonable, my face going hot again.
“He’s good-looking enough. I’ll give you that,” Gloria said as if I hadn’t spoken. “He looks rather stunning when he takes his jacket off. But he’s a difficult one. Moody and a little obsessive, like a tangle of thorns. He’d probably be good for you, come to think of it. He disapproves of drinking entirely.”
“Oh,” I’d said stupidly again, thinking that he must have noticed I was drunk.
Gloria glanced at my face, then away again with an affected shrug. “To each her own, but he isn’t my type.”
“What is your type?” I asked.
She took my arm. “Men I can manipulate,” she said. “Let’s go. He’s waiting.”
I stared at James now, sitting next to me in the Gild Theatre three years later, and thought about what had happened next. James had put us into a taxi, as promised. He’d taken us back to Gloria’s flat. He’d dumped Gloria into bed, where she immediately started snoring. And then he helped me, wobbling, onto Gloria’s sofa, where he placed an old chintz pillow for my head, and got me a blanket, and swung my legs up as if fixing a mannequin. I don’t know what I expected—I had absolutely no experience of men—but I lay there beneath Gloria’s mermaid painting, my eyes half closed as the ceiling spun above me, thinking I should say something clever and witty, something that would bring that look back, make him sit up and notice me. His hands had been strong and competent, holding my ankle as he unbuckled one shoe and slid it off, then the other. When I risked a glance at him, I saw he was looking down, his brow smooth, his expression blank. It’s not what you think, I’d thought wildly as his palms touched my calves with impersonal care, moving my legs in place on the sofa. I’m not what you think. I’m not. But instead I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted the tang of blood, and after a moment he stood in silence and left the flat, closing the door quietly behind him.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” I said to him now, thinking, Moody and a little obsessive, like a tangle of thorns. “When we met that night.”
“Didn’t like you?”
“It’s part of the pattern, it seems,” I admitted. “My making the worst possible impression on you.”
He stilled, staring ahead at the empty stage, and he did not look at me. After a long pause, he spoke. “You can’t tell a girl who’s had too much to drink that she has nice legs,” he said, choosing his words with care. “It makes you a cad.”
I trained my own gaze on the stage, heat rising in my cheeks, and remembered his blank expression as he’d removed my shoes. I’d wanted to ask him if he knew who I was that night—knew what I was, whose daughter I was. But now I realized that the answer didn’t matter.
“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”
His shoulders relaxed visibly at that, his body settling almost imperceptibly back into the chair. He looked around the theater, which had stopped filling at a quarter full. “Which one is the plant, do you suppose?”
“The fellow on the aisle,” I said almost immediately, my cheeks cooling. I nodded toward a man, thirtyish, sitting alone in an aisle seat, running his fingers along the brim of the hat in his lap. A plant was someone hired by the onstage psychic to play into the fake reading, in order to convince everyone else in the audience. “Aisle seats are the best places for plants, and he looks respectable.”
“Interesting, but no.” James warmed to the topic, his expression losing its stiffness. “It’s the old woman in the fourth row.”
I stared at the woman’s plump back, though I saw nothing unusual. “She’s with her husband,” I said. “That can’t be right.”
“That isn’t her husband,” James said calmly. “That’s how I know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are at least three inches of space between his shoulder and hers,” James said. “He just reached down to pick up something he’d dropped, and he leaned away from her as if she had leprosy. Those two are acting, and not well.”
I stared harder, more than aware that there was no space between James’s shoulder and mine. “That would make two people in on the plant. It’s risky.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. “But I’ve seen it before. No one suspects a nice old couple.” He motioned toward a group of men moving single file down the aisle, wearing cloth caps and simple wool jackets—workmen, perhaps, from one of the factories nearby after the end of a shift. “Those fellows have been drinking.”
He was right; they wove unevenly and laughed at one another’s jokes. I shook my head and tutted. “Drunks at a séance,” I said. “There’s nothing worse. I can almost feel sorry for her.”
I glanced at James to find him smiling a little. I knew how he felt. I had the same sort of giddiness talking to someone who knew the business as well as I did. I took off my hat and tried to sop some of the remaining dampness from my hair. “I pick the fellow with the mustache,” I said, eyeing a young man with hard eyes sitting alone. “He may as well have a sign.”
“Single men don’t make the best plants,” James countered. “The audience tends to trust women more than men.”
“I’m right,” I said. “He doesn’t belong.”
The half smile didn’t leave his lips. “We’ll see,” he said.
The lights flickered low and the stage lights came on. After a pedestrian warm-up act in which a man sweating through his pancake makeup released doves from his sleeves to the jeers of the sparse audience, a woman with a bust like a ship’s prow took a seat at the piano in the orchestra and began to play a dramatic set of chords. Two technicians dragged wooden chairs onto the stage, angling them slightly together as if two people were to have a conversation. Then the lights dimmed again and came up, revealing a woman of forty-five standing on the stage, heavily made up and wearing a matching paisley dress and head scarf.
The woman raised her arms dramatically. “I am The Great Evelina!” she shouted. “I am here to speak to the dead!”
Someone hooted. The man sleeping in his seat snorted and changed position.
The Great Evelina swept her theatrical robes to one of the chairs and sat down. “This chair,” she said, motioning toward the empty seat before her, “will contain the invisible spirit with which I speak. I tell you, a spirit shall sit here and converse with me!” She closed her eyes. “Who among the dead wishes to join me? Who among the dead has a message?”
Next to me, James sighed.
“Silence!” The Great Evelina shouted, as if she’d heard him. “The spirits are speaking! I am hearing something . . . a name. There is . . . a J. The name has a J.”
“That’s Jane!” The old woman who was with her faux husband sprang from her seat. “That’s my daughter!”
The audience went quiet. “I should have bet you a pound,” James murmured to me.
“Don’t be cocky,” I replied. “Two psychics, two plants.”
“Jane!” The Great Evelina proclaimed from the stage, her eyes still closed. “Yes, Jane speaks to me. She uses me as her instrument to communicate with her beloved parents. I obey.”
“Jane!” the old woman warbled, distressed. If she was acting, she was rather good.
“She speaks,” said Evelina. “The voice is very strong. She says she died of influenza. It was quick and she did not suffer. She had brown hair. An innocent angel.”
“It’s true!” The old woman gasped. “My child! Oh, Jane, I miss you so much!”
The group of drunk men hooted again, bored of the sentimentality, while an elderly woman in the front row dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
I felt James’s shoulders lift and sag as he sighed again. “Do you have any premonitions?” he whispered in my ear.
“Yes,” I said, ignoring the fact that I could feel his warm breath on my neck. “I predict that it’s going to be a long evening.”
“That sleeping fellow has the right idea,” he replied, putting on his hat and pulling the brim over his eyes. “Wake me when Ramona comes on, if she ever does.”
I glanced at him, at the relaxed line of his mouth under the hat brim, his muscular arms crossed over his chest, but I couldn’t relax. I was jumpy with tension, with a sick feeling. Something about the entire display both
ered me, and it wasn’t just the terrible quality of The Great Evelina’s act. It was the crassness of it, of the performer and the audience both—all of them using death for a night’s cheap entertainment. I thought of the old woman I’d seen when I was seven, the horrible stench of her. I looked at the woman weeping quietly in the front row.
“This is wrong,” I said softly.
Next to me, James shifted in his seat.
I watched Evelina continue her dreary, faked conversation with the imaginary Jane, using the empty chair as a prop, the girl’s imaginary parents chiming in. “I can’t stand it.”
“I thought you said you’d seen shows like this before?” James’s low voice came from beside me.
“I have. But it was with Gloria.” I struggled with the memory, struggled with the words. “Everything was different with Gloria. This—this is just horrible.”
“This,” James said casually, “is why I hate people.”
He reached up and tilted his hat back a little, fixing his gaze on the stage. Despite his careful pose, I saw he was not relaxed at all. There was something deadly serious and steely in his eyes, something I understood. “This is why you do what you do, isn’t it?” I asked him. “You debunk people like this. People who cheapen all of the death you saw.” He did not reply, and a chill of horror went down my back. “Did you ever equate me with this? Did you think this was me?”
For a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. “I didn’t know,” he finally admitted. “You have no idea how many liars I’ve met in my lifetime.”
It threatened to close in on me again, the disappointment of failing him, but this time I fought it. “This is not me,” I said, my voice fierce even to my own ears beneath the whisper of it. “This was never me.”
Finally he looked at me. The steeliness left his expression, and the lines of his face were almost amused, almost relieved. “I know.”
The lights dimmed again, and Evelina, finished with her show, tottered off. James sat up in his chair and took off his hat again, his attention evaporating like water. I was still giddy from the look he’d given me, but I felt my own pulse of excitement as I followed his gaze.
The Other Side of Midnight Page 9