Sowing Poison

by Janet Kellough

  “I didn’t claim that any of it made sense,” Susannah said testily. “I’m only telling you what people are saying. My goodness me, you never told me you wanted it to be sensible.”

  “Fair enough. Does Mrs. Sprung ever say anything about what goes on upstairs?”

  “Are you going to pick an argument with me over that as well?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “All right, but you have to understand that this is just what I was told. Apparently, Mrs. Elliott has managed to contact Mrs. Sprung’s dead daughter and they carry on a conversation every day. Mrs. Sprung seems to think that her little Amelia’s very happy where she is … as we all hope one day to be,” she added hastily, in deference to Lewis’s calling.

  “How does she know it’s her daughter?”

  “Apparently she can see her.”

  “What?”

  “I know, I know. She says she can see her, not clearly, there’s a haze somewhere between here and the hereafter, but well enough to be convinced that it’s really her. Mrs. Sprung said she really only intended to come the once, to make sure that the daughter was all right, but she enjoys the conversations so much that she wants to come every day. She’s says it’s just like having her little girl back home again.”

  “But what do they talk about?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Sprung fills her in on all the news, what her aunts and uncles and cousins are doing, what the weather’s like, what piece of needlework she has in hand, things like that.”

  “And what does the daughter say to her?”

  Susannah’s brow furrowed at that. “Come to think of it,” she said, “I’m not sure she’s ever said anything but ‘well and happy.’”

  “Interesting,” Lewis said, rising. He could hear the clink of dishes coming from the dining room and he supposed he’d better go and help Francis with the supper service. “If she tells you anything else, let me know, will you?”

  “You’ll have to come and visit me once in a while if I’m to do that,” Susannah said, with an impish grin on her face.

  Sophie shot Thaddeus a quick glance over her shoulder when he entered the kitchen, then turned and busied herself with ladling the soup into bowls. She seemed a little flustered. He wasn’t sure why, but guessed it had something to do with whatever Betsy wanted to talk to him about later.

  As he ferried the dishes back and forth to the dining room, he mulled over what Daniel had told him. Poor Mrs. Sprung, desperate for a connection to what she had lost. How was Clementine convincing her that she was speaking to the little girl? As he cleared the last of the plates, he made up his mind. He would see this miraculous communication firsthand.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Each day since she had arrived in Wellington, Clementine had become a little more desperate. She was still uncertain what exactly had happened to her husband, except that he was nowhere to be found. She sorely missed both his company and his advice. She knew she was being watched. She knew that someone had been in her room on the evening of the Orange Lodge meeting, although she had said nothing to the innkeeper about it.

  She was sorry now that she had gone to the Elliott farm that day. Perhaps she should have stayed at the hotel. But her options had been to sit in the small, stuffy parlour exchanging banal conversation with the other guests or, God forbid, the innkeeper himself, or to huddle in her room upstairs listening to the nonsense that was being spewed at the meeting across the hall. So she had opted to drive out to the farm and have another argument with Reuben. At least when she went to the farm she had the benefit of some fresh air both coming and going.

  She had locked her doors firmly as she left. She was certain that she had. She had checked the locks three times and carefully tucked the keys into her bag. The locks were flimsy and easily forced, but there had been no sign of violent assault on them. They had been picked — easy enough to do if you knew how. She suspected that Mr. Gilmour was the only person at Temperance House who had the necessary talent.

  She knew that the preacher was uneasy with her activities. She thought this was probably on the basis of the usual religious grounds, but it was always possible that he suspected something more. She was a little taken aback that her charms had failed to dazzle him in any way, although it did happen occasionally. Every once in a while she met a man who seemed immune to her. It was due to his wife, no doubt, even though she was such a peaked-looking thing and limped a little as she walked, but every time the preacher looked at her the rather harsh lines in his face softened and he appeared to have eyes for no one else. Some marriages were like that, she knew — so solid that not even an earthquake could shift them.

  In spite of his seeming disinterest in her, or maybe because of it, Clementine found him the most interesting person in the village. He was obviously intelligent, and seemed to read a great deal. She longed to cast aside the role she had chosen for herself and have a genuine conversation with him — philosophical, perhaps political — it wouldn’t matter as long as it was based on well-informed opinion. She had sought him out as he sat reading the papers in the parlour, mostly because she wanted to get some sense of what he knew, but also because she longed for somebody to talk to.

  Reuben Elliott’s company was driving her mad. Whenever they weren’t arguing, he had nothing to say other than observations regarding the state of the farm or comments on his father’s health. She had milked more information than she wanted from Meribeth Scully — she found the small-town gossip tedious in the extreme, now that she had used all that she needed from it. The other guests at the hotel were an unexciting group, and she had to be so careful when she interacted with clients outside of her sessions with them. That task was best left to the boy, who could move like a ghost among them. They would all be going home soon anyway — none of them were well-heeled enough to spend an unlimited amount of time and money contacting their dead. There was no golden goose in Wellington, and she could see that the initial deluge of customers was ebbing away into a trickle now that the novelty of it all had worn off. She would have to move on soon. She had no idea where she should go.

  Even her son had let her down; whenever she didn’t actively need him to help with the customers, he no longer spent much time sitting quietly in the public rooms of the hotel. Instead, he went racing off to find the preacher’s little granddaughter. She couldn’t blame him, she supposed; he was getting far too old to spend all his time with his mama, and they had moved so often that he hadn’t ever had many friends. Martha was a charming little girl, very pretty, with her grandfather’s intelligence apparent in her look and speech, but she represented yet another danger — how much had the little boy told her about his life before coming to Wellington? And how much had she repeated to the preacher?

  Lewis was unsure of the procedure for joining one of Clementine’s little groups, so the next morning he hurried to clear away the breakfast dishes, then waited at the bottom of the stairs until he heard footsteps in the upstairs hall. He climbed the steps and arrived at the Elliotts’ sitting room just as her customers were shuffling one by one through the doorway. Horatio was waiting just inside, taking the money for his mother. His eyes widened when he saw who the last visitor was, but he made no remark as he held his hand out. Lewis was embarrassed. He had somehow forgotten that this was essentially a financial transaction, and he had only two pennies in his pocket.

  “That’s all right, dear, this one is on the house.” Clementine seemed not the least surprised that he had decided to join the group.

  It took a few moments for Lewis’s eyes to adjust to the dimness of the room. Heavy curtains had been hung across the window wall and the little light that filtered through the damask cast an eerie greenish glow that made everything shadowy and indistinct. Similar drapery covered the door that Lewis knew led into the Elliotts’ bedroom. The other two walls were bare, the plaster also appearing greenish in the poor light.

  “Please, sit down,” Clementine said, gesturing to a chair that was set at the small r
ound table in the centre of the room. “My goodness, Mr. Lewis, you’re the seventh at the table. Seven is a lucky number, you know.” The others looked at him enviously.

  The table was covered in a heavy brocade cloth with tassels along the edge, and some of these had been caught under the foot of his chair. When he pulled it out to sit down, the tassels travelled with the chair and disarranged the cloth. Clementine grabbed it to prevent it going any farther and when Lewis knelt to free the tangle, he peered underneath as long as he dared. But the room was too dark for him to discern whether he was seeing anything other than the legs and feet of the people already sitting. When he stood again, he carefully pulled the brocade back into position. Clementine shot him a venomous look, or so he thought, but it might just have been the heavy shadowing around her eyes.

  “Are all here?” Her voice was sepulchral, deepened substantially from the high, irritating conversational voice she normally used.

  There was a sticky heaviness in the air and a whiff of smoke. He detected another smell underneath the perfumed air, something that he knew was familiar but that he couldn’t quite place. It was very hot in the room and it seemed very crowded.

  “We are set to begin,” Clementine said. “Please join hands. Now, I must warn you that, no matter what happens here today, no matter what you see or hear, you must not let go. It would be dangerous for the spirits to sever the connection in so abrupt a manner.”

  Lewis clasped the hands of the plump woman to his right and a red-faced man to his left. He wondered at the presence of the man; he looked like a farmer or a labourer, not someone he thought would subscribe to nonsense easily. The woman, on the other hand, had probably lost someone, a son, perhaps, or a husband. She looked excitable. She would be much more susceptible to the idea that one could contact the dead, he figured.

  “We seek enlightenment,” Clementine intoned. “We seek the spirits of those who have left us.” She swayed slightly as she spoke, and in order to maintain a uniform distance between them, everyone else at the table swayed as well. “Concentrate. Everyone must concentrate. It is helpful, sometimes, to close one’s eyes.”

  The man and the woman on either side of him dutifully closed their eyes, but Lewis had no intention of following that particular instruction. He needed to keep his eyes wide open.

  “Come to us,” Clementine said. “Come to us and give us news of our beloved ones.” A rhythmic knocking began, the sound of wood striking wood. It sounded as though someone was rapping on the tabletop, but when Lewis looked around, everyone’s hands were still firmly joined.

  “Come to us, come to us, come to us,” Clementine repeated, and then she stopped swaying and appeared to be in a deep reverie or trance. When she spoke again, it was in a voice that was entirely different from her previous tone and different as well from her everyday speech. Something in the way she pronounced the vowels conjured up thoughts of Eastern Europe — or Egypt or Turkey or somewhere that was definitely not Wellington. “This is Karina. I am the gatekeeper. I will guide you to what you seek.”

  Lewis watched Clementine closely. Her face was in shadow, but to his astonishment a thin white vapour began to emanate from around her head —steam or smoke. Slowly, the stream spun out and upward, wafting slightly while Lewis looked on in fascination.

  “Mama?” The voice was that of a small child and seemed to be coming from the curtains. Everyone at the table jumped, and everyone but Mrs. Sprung gasped.

  “Your Mama is here,” said the voice coming from Clementine’s mouth. “She wants to talk to you.” Even in the dim light, he could see the tears rolling down Mrs. Sprung’s face. “She never stops thinking of you, Amelia, you can be sure of that.”

  Lewis had leaned his forearms against the edge of the table and now he felt it shift slightly underneath them, then rise an inch or so from the ground. No one else seemed to notice. They had all opened their eyes and were staring at a spot somewhere behind his back. He craned around and nearly let go of the hands he clasped. There, on the wall, was the figure of a young girl with long yellow hair. The apparition was indistinct, blurry at the edges, and inverted, its head pointing at the floor. The ghostly girl seemed not to notice her peculiar position, and every strand of her hair stayed in place, as did the collar of her dress, nothing trailing toward the floor as one would expect of someone who was hanging upside-down.

  “Amelia, honey, it’s your Mama. How are you dear?” Mrs. Sprung called out.

  “Mama? I miss you, Mama. You should come and see me soon.”

  “Oh, I will, darling, I will. I miss you, too.”

  “I have lots of friends here.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Mrs. Sprung said. “Who are you playing with today?”

  “Mary.”

  Lewis felt his heart thumping. Mary had been the name of his first daughter.

  “Mary who?” Mrs. Sprung asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s too little to say.”

  Karina’s voice asked, “Is there anyone from Mary’s family asking for her today?”

  “She’s nodding her head yes,” Amelia said. “But she doesn’t talk very much.”

  Lewis’s Mary had been in possession of only a few words when she had died from the terrible burning scald that had covered her body. There had been no words that day either, only the child’s screams. It had been his fault that Mary had died, his carelessness, and a burden would be lifted from him if only he could tell her how sorry he was and how much he missed her. One guilty part of him wanted desperately to believe in this charade.

  Yet he knew that he could not be seeing what his senses recorded, for he was sure that the dead did not come back; they did not communicate with the living. If they did, all his dead daughters would have been carrying on conversations with him long since, he had wished it so often. Mary was such a common name. There must be any number of Marys who had met with accident at a young age. Why was he correlating what he heard with his own experience? And yet he had jumped when he heard it, as if the child were, at last, speaking to him from beyond.

  And then he realized how clever Clementine was. Somewhere, someone must have told her that he had lost a daughter named Mary. He suspected Daniel, who continued to behave like a blushing schoolboy in Mrs. Elliott’s presence. She had taken this one piece of information and inserted it into the fantasy world she had constructed for Mrs. Sprung. Blindsided by the presentation of this one slightly relevant fact, he had for a moment reacted the same way that all of her victims must react — he had believed what he wanted to believe. This was not witchcraft or treating with the devil as the church would have everyone believe. This was nothing more than a confidence game. He resolved to turn the rules to his advantage.

  “Is there anyone else there?” Karina asked.

  “There are lots of people here, but I don’t know all of their names,” said the Amelia voice.

  Lewis took a deep breath and spoke, watching Clementine’s face as he asked “Is there anyone there called Nathan?”

  Clementine’s trance-like composure slipped a little, he could see, her eyes widened and her face seemed to sag, but she recovered herself quickly.

  “Mama, I want to go play with Mary,” the Amelia voice said. “Come back and talk to me tomorrow.”

  “Oh, but wait,” Mrs. Sprung said, but the upside-down apparition faded before she could say anything more.”

  “I am the gatekeeper. Who is it you seek?” The mysterious Karina spoke again, but Lewis was sure he could detect Clementine’s normal timbre underneath the voice.

  “We’re looking for Nathan,” Lewis said. “Is he there? Can he talk to us?”

  “There is no Nathan,” Karina said.

  “What do you mean?” Lewis said. “You must have millions of spirits there, and not one single one of them is named Nathan?”

  “There is no Nathan who wishes to communicate. I am the gatekeeper. I open the gate only to those who wish to peer through it.”

  Clementine appeared to
be coming out of the trance she had been in. Her eyes were no longer rolled back and the tension around her mouth faded. The ethereal white stream that had come from her ears had dissipated while they had been watching the figure on the wall. She bent her head slightly and panted as she let go of the hands she had clasped. After a moment she looked up at them. “I’m sorry. The spirits stay for only as long as they wish to. We’ll have to try again tomorrow.”

  “I won’t be here tomorrow.” It was the ruddy-faced man. “I came all this way and I didn’t get a chance to ask anything.” He looked accusingly at Lewis. “This one chased them all away.”

  “I truly don’t believe Amelia or anyone else will return today,” Clementine said. “If you push too hard they get very shy for some reason.” She appeared to be deep in thought. “There are other ways to discover the secrets of the afterlife. With your permission, we can try another method.”

  The man nodded his agreement. Clementine got up from the table and went to a small chest that had been placed against the wall. From it she produced two large sheets of paper that looked to Lewis like blank newsprint. She returned to the trunk for two inkwells and pens that she placed in front of her. She sat and unfolded the newsprint. She picked up the pens, grasping one in each hand. “I must ask you once again to concentrate. You needn’t hold hands this time, but please do not speak, do not interrupt. It would be very dangerous for me if I were disturbed in the middle of this.”

  They dutifully stared at the tablecloth. The heavy scent grew even heavier and suddenly the room seemed full of grey mist. Clementine had resumed her trance-like state, but said nothing. Her head swung from side to side, first slowly, then quicker and quicker, then with a jerk her hands sprang into action.