by Nina Dreyer
Marion turned. She’d forgotten the woman was there.
She sat perched at the edge of her chair, back straight as a board, slicing her venison into small, precise strips. ‘Everything of value, the Fenian murder gangs will blow it all to kingdom come, so they will. They’ve no culture in them, no education.’
Colonel Brock grunted his agreement.
‘You were at the Hurlihy hanging,’ continued Mrs. McKittrick, turning to Marion. She had a stare like a police inspector.
‘Really, let’s not talk about such things at the dinner table,’ chirped Hettie.
‘You saw him die then,’ continued Mrs. McKittrick. ‘But did you see him after he’d died? See, because that’s my problem, I don’t mind whether mediums wear their corsets or not,’ she narrowed her eyes in the direction Brock, ‘I mind whether they’re telling the truth.’
‘Marion is the finest medium in Dublin,’ said John.
Hettie yawned into her napkin, leaving a faint imprint of lipstick and wine on it.
‘Maybe she is and maybe she’s not, but all the ones I’ve ever met were frauds,’ said Mrs. McKittrick. ‘They fob you off with all their platitudes and pleasantries and nothing of any substance. Like bad poets. Like politicians.’
Marion took a bite of her cooling venison to stop herself saying something she would regret. Mrs. McKittrick was still staring at her. Finally Marion put her fork down and stared back. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there are fraudulent mediums. But it is worse than that, because even more are dabblers. People who treat mediumship as a,’ she searched for the word, ‘as a pastime, as a hobby of no consequence. Trance writers with pencils. No,’ she waved her hand, ‘most don’t mean to deceive, but are themselves deceived. But you will be so kind as to allow that Mr. Kilcoyne and I are neither frauds nor naive until you have proved us guilty.’
The room fell silent.
Marion took up her fork again. She expected Mrs. McKittrick to take offense at this outburst, but instead, the woman’s eyes widened with pleasure.
‘Well,’ Brock snorted, tugging his soiled napkin from his collar, ‘I dare say business must be booming for you, John, after that performance of yours at the hanging of that snotty malcontent the other morning?’
John leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. ‘Some clients have withdrawn their patronage because of it. But we’ve got new clients flocking to us for sittings. The right kind of people. There’s a waiting list now. Especially to see Marion.’ He exhaled smoke at the chandelier.
‘Oh my,’ said Hettie, ‘it seems we’re very fortunate to have such a celebrity at our table. Perhaps we should put her to the test then, eh? Why, let’s have a little impromptu seance right now!’
‘An impromptu seance,’ said John slowly, ‘what a splendid idea.’ He was smiling at Marion, as if the two of them shared some dark secret together.
‘We’ll go to the adjoining room.’ Hettie rose and summoned a footman. ‘We will take dessert afterwards, but have the girl bring sherry and port to the yellow room. Oh my,’ she clapped her hands, ‘how very exciting. Aren’t you marvellously excited, darling?’ She smiled sourly at her husband.
‘Well John,’ Brock dropped his crumpled napkin on the table and pushed his chair back, ‘if the ladies are going off to titillate themselves with ghosts and spirits, I say you and I had better retreat for cigars in the billiard room.’
‘I actually think you’d want to see this,’ said John. ‘Take my word for it. Besides, you wanted a demonstration, remember?’
Brock frowned, but offered no further protest.
Marion emptied her wine glass and rose, feeling for an instant like a gladiator heading for the sand pit under the gaze of fanned and pampered lords and ladies. She steadied herself and took a deep breath. So long as that colonel in his hideous uniform would be out of sight, having an impromptu sitting with a tipsy housewife should not really present such a challenge.
The footman opened a tall white door to an adjoining room, and the party filed out.
Marion trailed behind John, who was talking easily to Hettie.
‘Will you do a reading for me?’ Mrs. McKittrick caught up with Marion and touched her arm. Her face was aglow and her tone was somewhere in between pleading and ordering. ‘Will you please?’
Marion opened her mouth to agree when Hettie looked over her shoulder and shot in, ‘oh no, she’ll do a reading for me. Oh really now Joanna, don’t make that face at me, you’ve already seen two hundred and seventeen mediums, this will be my first time! Come now, be a good sport.’
The adjoining was cooler than the dining parlour. Stark stripes decorated the yellow wallpaper.
Marion lingered in the doorway, looking around as the group wandered in. In a healthy house, she thought, this would have been an intimate room reserved for family and old friends, with photographs and musical instruments and a beloved shawl carelessly tossed aside on the armrest of a chair. As it was, it had all the personal warmth of a museum exhibit. All that was missing was the red chords shielding the paintings on the wall.
On a small round table in the centre of the room stood a vase overspilling with drooping white lilies. Their pungent, funereal scent filled the room and clung to everything. A thin orange dust from their stamen had gathered on the gleaming surface of the table.
John pushed a high-backed chair into the middle of the room, beckoning at Marion.
Mrs. McKittrick sat down on a low stool by the fire, hands clasped tightly over her knees. Brock paced around, trying to light a cigar, and his wife stood next to the lilies, smiling at John. ‘Where do you want me,’ she asked, balancing her wine glass in one hand and stroking the rubbery petals of the lilies with the other.
‘Sit here, next to Marion.’
Hettie sauntered over and seated herself, her silk gown rustling.
Marion shook her hands, pulled them tightly over her hair and seated herself. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply and held the breath, trying to still her heart, trying to forget the presence of the scowling English colonel. That uniform should be rotting in Flanders mud, not plastered to the sweating skin of a man in her presence.
‘I’m going to ask that the lights are turned down,’ said John, standing behind her. He rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘As far down as we can have them without anyone tripping and breaking their neck.’
‘Oh, how excitingly morbid,’ said Hettie, ‘it’s just like that stage play I saw in London, where the lights are turned down for a seance and then ah! The butler did it, with a candlestick!’
‘I will need a blindfold,’ said Marion, opening her eyes. It was no good, even with the lights dimmed as far down as they would go, the room had a restless, unsettled air.
‘Oh yes, Hettie, can you arrange something,’ asked John.
Hettie rose and rang a bell chord on the far wall. Moments later, a tall girl in a maid’s uniform appeared from a side door. She had unusually bright eyes, thought Marion.
‘Yes, you there, go to my room and take a scarf from the top left-hand drawer, one of the darker ones, but mind, not the one with the gold thread,’ said Hettie. The maid backed away and vanished.
‘Anyone for a stiff drink,’ said the colonel, uncorking a bottle with his teeth.
‘Oh Cecil, don’t do that when there’s a man standing here with a bottle opener,’ said Hettie, accepting a glass from him. The bottle glugged sluggishly. John took a glass and gave it to Marion. She knocked back its contents. The sweet, syrupy port spread a burst of heat through her chest. She felt slightly better. If only Mrs. McKittrick would stop staring at her so fixedly.
The maid reappeared and presented a dark blue scarf to Hettie, who sent the girl away with a flick of her hand and turned to John. ‘There, Indian silk, that should do. I bought this from a really charming little man in Lahore, after that boat trip, do you remember, Cecil? Oh, never mind, he won’t remember, he never remembers things like that.’
Marion set her glass on a little table and
straightened herself, clearing her throat several times. The heavy, penetrating smell of lilies, rot-sweet and earthen, seeped down her throat and into the very pores of her skin.
‘Marion,’ said John, squeezing her shoulder. ‘Are you ready?’
She nodded and leaned back, closing her eyes.
John placed the scarf over her eyes and tightened it in a hard knot at the back of her head.
Darkness descended.
She breathed shallowly for a few moments, recoiling from the scent of Hettie’s skin and the smell of her heavy perfume embedded in the fabric. It was too close, too intimate, like burying your face in Hettie’s neck, just below her hairline.
‘I’m going to ask for complete silence now,’ John said.
Marion sat very still. She steadied her breathing until her pulse mellowed. There it was, the outer edges of the darkness. There were still bursts and swirls of light behind her eyelids, the afterimages of the people in the room, the fireplace, the lilies. She breathed in, counting to ten, held, counting to twelve and breathed out, counting to twenty.
Then she reached out her hand. ‘Give me your wrist,’ she said quietly, ‘your left wrist.’
‘What,’ she heard Hettie laugh, a high, tinny sound. Nerves. Just like Christabel. ‘My wrist, why not my hand? I thought she was meant to hold my hand? Or read it, or something?’ A rustling of silk, an anxious movement.
‘I take your left wrist,’ Marion felt in the dark, clasping her fingers around Hettie’s fragile wrist, ‘and press my thumb to your pulse, see? This vein here, this one, it leads directly into your heart. Now, you are still, and I will listen.’
‘Asinine way to spend an evening,’ Brock’s voice grumbled. A clink of glasses and a gurgle.
Marion pressed her eyes firmly shut and rolled them up, up, as far up as they would go until a dull ache spread in her eye sockets.
Bursts of light swirled and hissed and then finally drew back, revealing a blank slate of perfect darkness. If anybody loves this woman, Marion said with her mind’s voice, if there is anybody here who wishes to speak to her, then come now. I am reaching out to you.
Marion let her mind dilute in the darkness. She pressed her thumb into Hettie’s wrist, feeling the weak pulse flutter into her skin. As quick and soft as a rabbit’s heartbeat.
A warm pressure began to build on the root of her throat, a hot, choking feeling. Marion tried to keep her focus. ‘There is someone here,’ she said hoarsely.
A presence, slight, nearing.
‘Who is it?’ Hettie jerked very slightly. Her voice sounded muffled, as though coming through thick layers of wet wool.
Marion leaned her head back and sank deeper into the outer darkness.
She saw him, then. Scarcely more than an outline, a smeared sketch in black ink. A faceless presence. Where his face should have been there was a tight knot of want, of a longing as sharp and taut as a piano string about to snap.
‘It is a young man. Twenty, twenty-two years of age. Dark… dark hair.’ Marion struggled to speak as the images flooded into her. The presence slid closer, reaching tendril-thin fingers towards Hettie.
‘He loved you in life,’ Marion breathed, ‘no, not love, infatuation, obsession…’
Hettie’s wrist tensed, then began to tremble in Marion’s grasp.
‘He perished from a… I see blood on his mouth. His mouth is blood. And his lungs. His lungs are blood, draining from him.’
‘Yes,’ Hettie’s voice was like broken glass, ‘oh God. Oh God. Paulie.’
‘Don’t give the medium any names, it ruins the evidence,’ John’s voice came in a distant whisper.
‘What does he say? Can he hear me?’ Hettie’s voice broke. ‘Paulie? Can you hear me?’
‘He cannot hear you,’ Marion struggled to form the words through clenched jaws. Her tongue was thick and stiff and sluggish and her throat burned. ‘But he sees you often. He gazes on you often.’ The presence glided nearer.
His chest was a bloody pit.
‘Oh dear God,’ Hettie’s sobs came quietly, ‘this is so beautiful…’
‘He gazes upon you… as you… as you sleep.’ Marion furrowed her brows. A shiver of cold sweat spread over her face and throat. The demon lover, she thought, and she saw him then, bending over the bed and willing the sleeping woman to die, die, sliding his blurred fingers down her throat for her to be strangled in her sleep so he could drag her down with him, down into the darkness.
Marion fixed the presence in her mind, reached out her mind’s hand and touched his chest gently, gently. Pieces of it came away like brittle, transparent flakes of skin from a cracked winter lip.
An acrid stench began to rise in the darkness, rot-sweet and sour and burning, mustard and chlorine and singed flesh. She saw it, then. Rags of a uniform clung to his blistered skin.
A scalding heat burned down her throat and between her shoulder blades. Mustard gas.
A dead soldier.
A dead English soldier.
A spectre of the Western Front.
They were not supposed to follow you home.
Marion’s throat began to close. Gasping for air, she raised her mind’s hands and shoved the presence with the force of her mind, straining and grinding her teeth, repulsing him with curse and threat, if you come near this woman again while she lives, I will bind your shade to a talisman and fling it into the abyss of the ocean and you will be alone there till the end of time and I will…
Marion gulped for air, releasing her grip on Hettie’s wrist and clawing at the knot of the scarf. The dead presence bled away in the darkness, trailing a smell of mustard and rot. She snapped her eyes open. Her hands were shaking, the roof of her mouth burning.
They were not supposed to follow you home.
She darted a glance at Hettie, who sat, glassy-eyed, her hands limp in her lap. Her face shone feverishly, and she smiled in little jerks, as if her mind was telling her to laugh and scream at the same time. A hairpin had loosened itself under her glittering headband.
Marion swallowed hard, again and again, willing herself to breathe slowly and calmly. She looked around. John caught her eye. He sat across from her, legs loosely crossed, driving one finger around the lip of his brandy glass and looking at Marion with a look of deep, slow-burning satisfaction.
‘I say, John,’ Brock blurted out, coughing cigar smoke, ‘perhaps you were right then, perhaps your lady friend here does have the potential to be useful,’ he chortled, waving smoke from his eyes, ‘first a dead Sinn Féin gunman, and now my wife’s sad little dead boyfriend, how utterly, preposterously remarkable!’
Hettie jerked to her feet and stormed out of the room with a strangled sob.
Marion rose and glanced at the others. John seemed to not have noticed, Brock stabbed his cigar stump into a silver ashtray with shaking fingers, and Mrs. McKittrick sat like a grey statue, staring at a point in the distance.
Marion turned and hurried out after Hettie.
The night wind was as cold as a slap of sea water. Marion shut the French glass door behind her. Thick snowflakes whirled through the air. A small terrace lay before her, with iron-wrought garden furniture covered with a scattering of dead leaves.
Hettie stood with her back to the house, leaning against a low stone balustrade, her breath rising in puffs of steam. Her sparkling headband had come askew, and a few of her downy curls shivered in the wind.
Marion hovered on the wet stone step. She’d never really given any thought to women like Hettie. The wives, mothers and sweethearts left behind in England had never been anything to her. Not even a blank slate.
She walked tentatively towards Hettie. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Hettie spun around. ‘Upset me? Oh God, you didn’t. Don’t you see?’ She laughed, a sliver of pale gums, but her smile was like quicksilver and her mouth quivered. Tears were gathering in her eyes. ‘He’s actually still… he’s still there. Here. My poor Paulie.’ She pressed a hand to her chest and g
azed up at the clouded night sky.
Marion bit her lip. A snowflake caught in her eyelashes. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and tried to suppress the rising stench of rot and poisoned gas lingering in the back of her throat.
‘She’ll want your services next.’ Hettie jutted her chin in the direction of the house. ‘Joanna McKittrick. God. I don’t even know why we invite her down anymore, she’s intent on being permanently miserable. No, I swear I’m serious. You’ll find out soon, she’ll bloody well hang herself on your doorbell if you don’t let her in. You’ll never be rid of her.’
‘Why? Has she suffered a special loss?’
Hettie snorted. ‘No more special than anybody else’s loss. Not all of us decide to turn into public martyrs over it.’
Marion glanced at her. ‘Do you want to talk about it? About the sitting?’
Hettie drew in a long, ragged breath. ‘Oh God. You must have heard it all heaps of times before, mustn’t you? It’s probably nothing special for you at all, just more of the same.’ She smiled sadly. ‘But I swear, it wasn’t like the cliches. We weren’t star-crossed, he wasn’t a starving artist, he was the second son of a glove manufacturer. He proposed to me the day I turned twenty-three. Up in Havenswood, outside Manchester. We walked in the grounds, and it snowed so much that winter. I used to draw pictures of him, nothing much, just shadow profiles while he read by the fire. He read to me. Keats. Byron. All that sentimental nonsense, but I adored it. We really loved each other. Well, so I always thought, but the war did come along and sour it all for us, didn’t it?’ She sniffled.
‘The Somme,’ Marion asked quietly, ‘Ypres?’
Hettie nodded briefly. ‘Do you know what my mother said, after I got the telegram from the War Office? She said, well, at least you didn’t marry him before this happened, because then you’d be a widow now, and nobody likes a dreary widow.’
Dreary widows. Widows everywhere. Marion leaned her head back. The whirling snow was turning to sleet. She remembered the cold July morning when she had received her own telegram. She remembered the little piece of paper tumbling from her hand onto the shining marble floor, and the blur of the days and weeks following, when she’d laid curled up in sweat-soaked sheets, clutching her medallion in a screaming psychosis of laudanum grief-fever. Oberstleutnant Erich von Rheimsbach. Fallen for the Vaterland. Iron Cross. Passchendaele.