by Megan Chance
Ben frowned. “Do you think he could convince Dorothy to abandon you?”
“Oh, I think certainly he could. His control of her is uncanny. It’s almost as if…” I trailed off, reluctant even to voice the thought. “As if there’s an unseemly affection between them.”
Ben raised his brows. “You mean he’s seduced her?”
I felt myself grow hot at the image his words raised. “I don’t know. I suspect it.”
“My God.” The flash of anger in his eyes was quick and hard. “To debase an invalid woman—”
“’Allo, Rampling.” Michel’s voice startled us both.
I turned to see him coming into the parlor, his movements languid, his smile welcoming, as if he hadn’t noticed how huddled Ben and I were in the corner, how private we meant our conversation to be.
I forced a bright smile of my own. “There you are. Benjamin’s arrived a bit early. I thought to offer him a brandy.”
“It’s good to see you, Rampling,” Michel said. “But I’ve a special liqueur waiting for us—perhaps you’d rather have that?”
“As you wish.” Benjamin bowed his head, his anger banked now, as if it had never been. “Evelyn tells me we’re to contact Peter’s spirit this evening.”
“We plan to try,” Michel said smoothly. “Though the spirits are sometimes capricious.”
“Yes, of course.” Ben turned back to me with a knowing smile, and I felt warm at his complicity. “We must hope for the best.”
The others arrived then, red-faced from the cold, breathing clouds of steam. In the too-warm foyer, the icy ghost of frigid air dissipated from their cloaks and scarves like magic.
“Evelyn!” Robert Dudley held out his arms to me, holding me close for a moment before he released me again. “Grace and I have been praying for a good result tonight. Surely Peter must be in the spheres by now.”
Sarah Grimm said, “I’ve had the strongest feeling all day. I feel so certain we’ll find him.”
“Atherton’s been squirrelly, but I feel as Sarah does,” Wilson Maull agreed.
Jacob Colville leaned down to kiss my cheek in greeting. “We’ll find him, Evie, never worry.”
Sarah Grimm’s dark eyes grew somber as she looked at Benjamin. She took his arm and leaned tearfully into him. “I’m so used to seeing you with Peter that it seems quite strange to see you without him.”
“He’s not really without him,” Maull reassured. “Peter’s spirit is watching over all of us. Why, he’s no doubt bending over Rampling’s shoulder this very moment. It only requires our own ecstasy to connect us.”
“We should go upstairs,” Michel said. “Dorothy’ll be waiting.”
We made the trek upward, and as we drew closer to the parlor with its pedestaled table, the talk began to fade, almost as if there were a sort of holiness attributed to the room that required the same reverence as a chapel. Dorothy was indeed waiting, settled upon the fish-monstrosity of a sofa, surrounded by her nurses. Michel made his way directly to her, and she moved to accommodate him as he sat beside her, and leaned into him as if he held her strength. He whispered something to one of her nurses, who went to the sideboard, where a row of decanters stood, and poured into a group of small glasses some kind of liqueur that glowed a pretty green. He took the first to Dorothy, who swallowed it with gusto, and then brought the tray of glasses to offer to the rest of us, explaining, “In anticipation of success, Mr. Jourdain said.”
“Success in what?” I asked.
“In finding Peter’s spirit, of course,” Dudley said. He took a glass and held it out in a toast. “To Peter!” We all followed suit, and he downed his in a single gulp, smacking his lips after. “Delicious. Such things can be quite efficacious when it comes to the spirits, Evelyn. Try it.”
I watched Benjamin drink the liqueur without care before I sipped suspiciously at my own. My reservations dissolved at my first taste. It was lovely: sweet and perfumey and herbal, though I couldn’t place the flavor. I’d never had anything like it, but the others obviously had. After they drank, the conversation became more animated and philosophical.
“—and then Lewis said the laws of nature were constant, that they could not be set aside simply because tables rose. But my lovely Sarah”—Wilson gave her an affectionate glance—“asked him how a spirit lifting a table was different from a man doing so in the material world.”
“I had to be simplistic,” Sarah demurred. “Lewis is so literal. I didn’t think he would understand the idea that spirits don’t lift the table so much as they inhabit it.”
Robert Dudley nodded. “The material world is simply an expression of the mind; that’s what so many fail to see. We’re so dependent on what is before us that we discount our intuition. Yet if one dismisses instinct, how can one understand or believe in a world that exists beyond one’s sight?”
His words made me uncomfortable. I thought of my mother, how instinct guided her every move—a dead bird could send her into a superstitious terror of bad luck for days, and dreams became maps to read the future by. I remembered a morning long before she’d died, when I’d come to breakfast and she’d glanced at me and said, “You didn’t sleep last night,” and thrown a frightened look at Papa. “Charles, she didn’t sleep.”
Papa glanced up from his coffee.
“It was nothing. Another nightmare, that’s all,” I told her.
“You must try to fight them, my dear,” Mama said, her voice hushed. “You must not let them speak to you.”
Her words frightened me, as they always did. “My dreams are not like yours,” I snapped.
She reached for the brown bottle on the table, her fingers trembling so much that the glass dropper clinked against the rim. I watched as she put the drops in her tea, and I knew Papa did too, each of us silently counting. Fifteen drops—more than last week. She replaced the dropper and brought the cup to her lips, taking quick, deep sips, even though it steamed and must have burned.
“They’re only dreams,” I insisted, as I had a hundred times before.
Her cup clattered into the saucer. She and my father exchanged a glance, and I saw again her fear, and heard it in her voice when she said, “Of course they are, Evie. Of course.”
I hated it when she spoke that way. I watched as she went into the kitchen, her step a bit staggered from the effects of the laudanum, and then I turned angrily to my father. “Why don’t you reason with her? Why don’t you ever tell her that there are no spirits?”
He set down his cup and said softly, “I don’t know that there aren’t.”
“Papa!”
“We can’t know everything, Evie, though I would wish we could. Logic only tells us what’s there; it can’t really address what isn’t. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.”
“How can they be real? What if it’s—” I couldn’t say the word. “What if I’m like her?”
“Then you would be special indeed.”
His words did not reassure me. “She doesn’t feel special, Papa. You must see how it frightens her. She’s taking more medicine than ever.”
“Her trial is that no one else believes it, Evie. So she has no choice but to doubt it herself. If anything would drive one mad, I think that would be it.”
“I don’t want to be mad,” I whispered.
“Then you must do what everyone must do. We can only trust in what little we know. Put your faith in that. Trying to justify a world we don’t hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it’s better just to accept that things are as we see them.” He sighed and looked toward the kitchen. “I think it would help if she could believe that. So I try to believe it for her.”
I tried to blink the memory away, but the liqueur I’d drunk crept up on me; I felt a strange lassitude, an easing of reticence that made me ask sharply, “Isn’t that what sends people into asylums? Belief in a world one can’t see, that might not ev
en exist?”
“I think perhaps the mad are misunderstood,” Grace said gently. “How can we condemn them when most of us refuse to see any world beyond the material one? How much happier we would be if we all accepted Divine Love without question and admitted that it’s our destiny to join with it!”
“Hear hear,” Wilson Maull said, taking another glass of the liqueur and lifting it in a toast. “To the invisible world—the only real one!”
He drained his glass and the others looked on approvingly. I heard the rustle of movement—Dorothy’s nurses were helping her rise. She called out, “Let’s begin!” and I was relieved at the ending of a conversation that troubled me. As I turned to go to the table, I saw that Michel was watching me with a thoughtful expression. When I caught his gaze he glanced quickly away, and I felt a puzzling disquiet that had nothing to do with the conversation.
“This should be interesting,” Ben murmured as he came up beside me.
I had thought that, as Benjamin was here, I might sit beside him and change the composition of the seating, but that was not to be. Sarah motioned him to the chair beside hers, and Grace took the seat on his other side, and I stood there hesitantly until only the chair beside Michel was empty.
He sat down and looked at me questioningly until I took my place. Then he said in a low voice, “Are you ready, Madame?”
“I hardly know. Can one ever be ready to hear the voices of the dead?”
He took my hand, and Robert Dudley took the other, and the lights were lowered, the room cast in a dim gloom. Silence descended. Michel’s hand opened slightly on mine, his fingers pressed flat, almost caressing, and his touch brought back the dream I’d had and I began to feel strange, too sensitive and yet distant at the same time, as if I were falling into sleep. I started when Jacob began the prayer—I had expected instead Michel’s voice, the lulling French chant.
Quickly I looked across the table at Benjamin. I could see only the shadows of his eyes in the stripe of pale skin above the darkness of his beard. I could not see his expression.
Dudley said, “Almighty God, let us talk with the spirits tonight. Let us speak to Peter Atherton.”
There was quiet.
“If there are spirits present, let them be heard. Let them direct us to the spirit of our friend and husband Peter Atherton.”
I felt the tension as we all waited. I heard hushed breathing, the faint rustle of silk. Michel’s hand tightened on mine; I felt his sudden rigidity in the moment before Sarah burst out, “Is there a spirit here?”
“I am here,” Michel said, and I was surprised that it wasn’t Peter’s voice he’d chosen, but one soft and light, not that of a grown man, but of a child.
“Atherton?” Dudley asked. “Is this the spirit of Peter Atherton who speaks through Jourdain?”
“I miss you, Mama.”
Dorothy gasped. “Johnny!” she called out; it was almost a sob. “Johnny, my dear, dear boy, how glad I am you’re here. What do you say tonight, my son?”
“You must take better care of yourself, Mama. As much as I want to have you with me, there are still things on earth you must do.”
“Yes, yes,” she said eagerly. “I’m doing them, just as you said.”
“I know. May I touch you again, Mama? Upon your shoulder? I miss you so.”
“Of course, of course.” Dorothy was like an excited girl; her need and pleasure were embarrassingly transparent. She waited, and then after a moment she seemed to sag beneath a touch only she could feel. “Oh, Johnny… Is Everett there? Is he with you?”
Whatever lassitude the liqueur had inspired in me disappeared. The obviousness of Michel’s manipulation annoyed me, for the way he fooled her was almost pathetic in its simplicity. Michel said, “I must go, Mama. There’re other spirits here, waiting to talk.”
“Atherton?” Jacob Colville spoke. “Is Peter Atherton’s spirit among you?”
There was a pause, but the rigidity in Michel’s body did not ease. His thigh, beneath the table, pressed closer, into my skirts, moving with me even as I instinctively moved away. “Peter’s spirit is not yet strong,” he said, still in the youthful voice of Johnny Bennett. “He will come to Michel in dreams—”
“For God’s sake, he comes to me in dreams,” I burst out, impatient at his lack of deftness. “That’s hardly enough.”
The moment I said it, I knew I’d erred. I felt their sudden attention, their confusion and surprise. And betrayal too, from somewhere, I felt betrayal. The cacophony was so startling and strange that I was bewildered. When Benjamin asked quietly, “What did you say?” I felt Michel’s sudden absence. He sagged, as if the spirit of Johnny Bennett had been physically holding him upright; his fingers went lax upon mine.
“Turn up the lights!” Grace called in a high, nervous voice. “Look at Michel—the spirits are gone.”
He had collapsed; his head lolled on the table like one asleep. Robert Dudley loosed my hand to rush to him. Dudley grabbed Michel’s shoulders, pulling him back against the chair. Sarah ran to turn up the lights—one by one they went bright, but Michel did not rouse, and the tension in the room did not abate. Slowly, I realized they were all staring at me.
“What is it?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
Jacob Colville roused, as if he’d just been awakened from a deep sleep. “Did you say Peter came to you in dreams, Evelyn?”
“I’m simply pointing out—”
“How does Peter’s spirit manifest itself?”
“It isn’t like that.” I looked at Benjamin, who was frowning. “It’s more like… nightmares.”
“What happens in these nightmares?” Grace asked.
I glanced at her in confusion. “I dream I’m in the circle and then I hear Peter’s voice. Or sometimes, it seems I’m awake, and he’s there beside me. But I’m really asleep.”
“But those aren’t just nightmares, Evie, surely you see that? Why, Peter’s been communicating with you all this time and you never said a word!”
“Because they’re only—”
“What does he say?”
“Nothing. He says nothing. ‘Find the truth. Don’t believe him’ . . . Things like that.”
“Find the truth?” Grace repeated.
“It doesn’t really make sense, like all dreams. Nothing really means anything.”
“Few mediums believe in their gift at the start,” Dorothy said. “Even Michel didn’t. But once you’re called, there’s no turning back.”
“Once I’m—” I stared at her in surprise. “What are you talking about?”
Slowly, Robert Dudley straightened, lifting his hands from Michel’s shoulders. “How wonderful! We’ve another medium in our midst.”
Wilson Maull said, “Good God.”
I was incredulous. “What?”
“You’ve been called, Evelyn dear,” Grace said. “The spirit said Peter would come to Michel in dreams, but he’s already visited you—it seems clear he’s chosen the medium he wishes to communicate through.”
“Perhaps we should be cautious here,” Ben said.
“What’s there to be cautious about?” Dorothy asked sharply. There was a light in her eyes—the same kind of light I’d seen when she looked at Michel. Except this time, she was looking at me, and I felt a strange stir in my stomach. “The spirits have spoken. They’ve called Evelyn to attend to their mission. She’s no choice in the matter.”
Beside me, Michel stirred. He lifted his head, blinking, and said, “They’re gone.”
“Yes, yes, we know,” Dudley said excitedly. “But they’ve left us something very valuable. They’ve left us a fledgling medium.”
Michel frowned, as if he were confused.
Grace’s sallow face was almost pretty in its animation as she said, “Peter’s spirit’s been visiting Evie in dreams. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Michel turned slowly to me.
“We can develop her! What a gift we’ve been given!” Grace said.
>
I glanced again at Dorothy. She was smiling, and I realized suddenly that this was my opportunity. I had wanted to guarantee that Michel could not dislodge me, and the way had fallen into my hands.
Slowly I said, “Do you really think so?”
“Evelyn,” Ben said sharply. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Ben, how can you not see? Look around you—why, look at Dorothy. We’ve been invigorated—can you doubt the truth of it?”
I saw the protest jump to his lips, and I tried to warn him with my eyes. His gaze went to Dorothy, as I’d intended. I knew he was seeing the rapturous excitement in her, and I was almost giddy as he turned back to me and said reluctantly, “Are you certain? Isn’t it possible we’re misinterpreting this?”
“The signs are all here,” Sarah said. “Peter told us you had nightmares, Evelyn.”
Dudley said, “Why, the spirits have been urging your development for some time!”
“Or perhaps not.” Michel’s voice was soft. “Perhaps they’re only nightmares.”
“But what of her father’s visit?” Dorothy asked. “Why, he was here at our last circle.”
“Was he?” Ben asked. He looked at me. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I’d forgotten it in all the other… excitement,” I said.
Sarah said, “Michel, you’re the expert. How shall we develop Evelyn? What should we do?”
Michel put his fingers to his temple. “I don’t know. My strength…”
“He’s overtired, poor boy.” Dorothy turned to her nurses, calling, “Fetch him some sherry!”
“You must give us a plan when you’ve recovered yourself,” Robert said. “Who else but you can help us?”
“I’m no expert at developing others,” Michel snapped—an uncharacteristic loss of control. I had to hide my smile.
“Please, let him rest. We mustn’t ask more of him just now. Tomorrow will be soon enough,” Dorothy said.
One of the nurses brought Michel a glass of sherry, which he swallowed in a single gulp.
“Yes, tomorrow. Perhaps we should meet again then,” Jacob said.
“Perhaps.” Michel set the glass onto the table hard enough that I felt its vibration through the polished wood. “Or perhaps tomorrow will bring us some other wisdom, eh?”