by Candace Camp
“Do you think she killed Lady Pamela?” Great-uncle Bellard asked.
“I have no idea. I am not even sure that Lady Pamela was killed. According to the doctor, she was not shot, nor stabbed nor beaten nor strangled. He is inclined to believe she died of natural causes, probably a heart attack. I did not tell him, of course, that she was in the act of stealing the Martyrs’ treasure. But given that she was, perhaps the fear of being discovered or the excitement of it caused her heart to fail, though no one has ever seen any indication in her of a weak heart.”
“And one has to wonder if Madame Valenskaya would have been able to kill her,” Great-uncle Bellard added. “After all, she was much older than Lady Pamela, who was young and fit.”
“And Madame Valenskaya had been drinking,” Olivia pointed out. “I noticed two nights in a row that there was alcohol on her breath.”
“And why, if they fought over the casket, were there no signs of a struggle, either in the room or on Pamela?” Stephen mused. “Why, having bested her, would the woman not have seized the casket and taken it with her?”
There was a rumble of voices and the sound of footsteps outside, and the three of them turned toward the hall. A moment later, a strange trio appeared in the doorway: Tom Quick and Rafe McIntyre, each with a firm grasp on one arm of Madame Valenskaya, who stood dispiritedly between them.
She was dusty and bedraggled, her hair straggling down from its knot.
“We found her hiding in the unused part of the house,” Rafe said, steering the woman into the study.
“I was not hiding,” the medium protested, pulling herself a little straighter and trying to regain the threads of her dignity. She jerked her arms from the men’s loose holds. “I was lost.”
“Is that right?” Tom asked, grinning. “Then why’d we find you inside that wardrobe?”
“I was frightened when I heard you approach.” Her eyes darted about the room. “Where is my dear friend, Lady St. Leger?”
“You needn’t look to her for help, Madame. She has finally seen how you have deceived her these past few months,” Stephen said.
“What? You lie! I haff never—”
“Be quiet!” Stephen snapped, and, startled, Madame Valenskaya subsided, looking at him warily.
“You have worse problems now than Lady St. Leger discovering the game you and your group have been playing on her. Lady Pamela is dead.”
Madame Valenskaya gaped at him, her face turning white. “Dead! Oh, no! Oh, no! They have killed her!” The medium’s Russian accent had completely deserted her now. She looked frantically about the room as if she was once again going to hide. She grabbed Stephen’s arm. “You must help me. You must protect me.”
Stephen took her arms and none too gently deposited her in a chair. “What do you mean, ‘they have killed her’? What are you talking about? Who killed her?”
“They will kill me, too. You must help me,” Madame Valenskaya repeated, rolling her eyes about in a dramatic way.
“Really, Madame, I have a little trouble believing these histrionics,” Stephen told her sternly.
“No! I am telling you the truth! You must believe me!” Madame Valenskaya looked panic-stricken, and despite her melodramatic way of acting, Olivia had no trouble believing the woman was indeed terrified.
“Then, tell me, of whom are you so frightened?”
“Irene!” Madame Valenskaya said at last, looking around nervously, as if her daughter might suddenly appear in the room with them.
“You are saying that your daughter killed Lady Pamela?” Stephen asked skeptically.
“Yes! Yes! It had to be her. She—she’s—you don’t know her. She looks timid and retiring, but that is all an act. It is what she wants people to think, so they won’t see what’s really inside her. But she is powerful! It was all her idea—it always is. I am only an actress, you see. That is what I did all my life, and I made a living at it. But then Irene came up with this idea, you see—a way for us to make money. I used an accent. In America, I was French, and in France, I was Russian. And here, as well, I was Russian, as it worked so well. Irene pulled Mr. Babington into it, as well. She—she convinced him to join us, to let us use his house.”
“So you’re saying that it was Irina—Irene—who set up the tricks?” Olivia asked. “Painting the glove with phosphorescent paint? Hiding a music box about your person and turning it on?”
Madame Valenskaya gaped at her. “How did you know? Yes, she learned how to do all that and showed me. She and Howard rigged up some things in his ceiling, too, so that harps and such would hang from it, looking like they dropped from the sky. She was smart. But she always wanted something more. She would cast stones and lay out those cards.” She gave an outsize shudder. “It scared the devil out of me, I tell you, what I would hear coming from her room sometimes.”
“What do you mean? What did you hear?” Rafe asked.
“Voices…chanting…and once, in one of the upper rooms at Babington’s house, I saw this, this star sort of thing done in chalk on the floor. It fair gave me the shivers, I’ll tell you.”
“She was dabbling in the black arts?” Stephen asked.
Madame Valenskaya nodded her head emphatically. “And after that is when she came up with this idea. This thing about Blackhope.”
“Here?” Stephen looked surprised. “This house specifically?”
“Yes. She went on and on about it. She looked into everything about the estate and who lived here. She was happy as could be when Pamela came to town. She arranged it so she could meet her, but Lady Pamela wasn’t any too interested in the séances. She said she didn’t believe in that nonsense, you see. Irene was furious, only then Lady St. Leger arrived, and Irene learned how it was with her, how she mourned her son, the one that died—more than that Lady Pamela ever did, I’ll warrant you! So she cooked up this scheme to get Lady St. Leger. She got Lady Pamela involved in it, promised to give her some of the money, you know. So Lady Pamela told us all about things at the house and about her dead husband, so I could make Lady St. Leger think I was talking to him.”
“Very clever,” Stephen said sarcastically.
Madame Valenskaya paused and looked at him, seeing the contempt and anger on his face. She lifted her chin and said with some defiance, “We weren’t doing anything all that wrong! It made her ladyship happy to think she was talking with her Roddy, and that’s a fact.”
“And the fact that you were lying to her, playing on her grief to extract money from her, makes no difference, is that it?”
“We didn’t hurt her!” Madame Valenskaya contended. “She wanted to hear those things, and she had plenty of money. It wasn’t as if we took much. She’d give me a ring or a bracelet or some such thing.”
“Nice little items you could sell or pawn.”
“She never missed ’em, she had so much.”
“But what about Blackhope?” Olivia asked, dragging the two combatants back to the subject. “Did your daughter set it up for you to come here?”
“Yes. She worked it around, her and Lady Pamela, so that Lady St. Leger invited us to come here, thinking she’d come up with the idea herself.”
“But why?”
“It was because of what Irene was doing,” Madame Valenskaya said obscurely. “She wanted to find that treasure, her and Lady Pamela both. Irene thought up tricks to make the lot of you think there were ghosts here—the monk in the garden and like that. Lady Pamela told her about the place in the nursery where you could take off a tile and talk and sound like you were right in the room below. Her husband had told her about you and him playing with it, you see.”
“Yes, of course. I should have realized she was lying about that.”
“But why did your daughter want the treasure so much?” Olivia asked. “I mean, there are more valuable things in this house, as I understand it. Why that particular box?”
“Because of—of what she was doing. What I told you—” She glanced around again nervously.
“Madame Valenskaya, don’t worry,” Stephen said. “We will not let your daughter do anything to you.”
“Maybe you won’t be able to stop her!” Madame Valenskaya said. “You were right there when that happened to Mr. Babington, and you couldn’t stop that, now could you?”
“You’re saying that…Irene did that to Mr. Babington? Put him into a coma?” Stephen asked.
“Course she did. Or, rather, what she conjured up. She—see, something’s latched on to her. She never was a sweet girl. I mean, she always looked out for herself first and the devil with anybody else. But she wasn’t…obsessed, the way she is now. The last few months, all she can talk about is Blackhope and getting in and getting that treasure and all. And she got all secretive-like, locking herself up for hours in that room, you know, the one where I saw that funny star thing.”
“She is practicing witchcraft.”
“More than that. She summoned something up. Something awful and wicked.”
“What do you mean ‘something’?”
“I don’t know.” Madame Valenskaya lowered her voice. “Spirits, I think. Evil ones. Maybe even the devil. That’s what’s been coming into the séances lately. Nothing like that ever happened before. I swear it. Something took hold of Babington that night, something powerful evil. Didn’t you feel it?”
“Yes, I did,” Olivia agreed. “What do you think it was?”
“I don’t know! I don’t want to know. I told her I didn’t want to do it anymore. And she told me I had to keep on. She threatened me if I didn’t. But I couldn’t! It was too scary. I was afraid of what was going to happen next. That’s why I ran away. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t know what I was going to do.” She looked at Olivia a little ruefully. “The fact is, my lady, I’d had a mite too much to drink last night. I didn’t think about what I was going to do once I’d got there. I just wanted to get away from her. To hide. So last night, in the middle of the night I got up and—”
She stopped, her face growing visibly paler.
“Yes?” Stephen urged, leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the woman’s face. “What happened?”
Madame Valenskaya swallowed and said, “I saw Lady Pamela going down the hall, all quietlike. She was in front of me, going the same way I was. I didn’t know what to do, but she looked so odd, the way she was sneaking along, so I followed her. She went into this bedroom around the corner, and I went after her and opened the door a crack and peeked in. There was a door in the wall, and it was open into another room, and there was a candle in the room. I could see that. I guess Lady Pamela was in there, because I didn’t see her anywhere else. But—but then all of a sudden that little room was filled with this awful oily black smoke. And—and it scared me so bad, I nearly dropped my own candle. I closed the door and I ran. That’s—that’s when I did get lost in that other part of the house. I hid when I heard them coming because—I don’t know what I thought. I was scared.”
She paused, then added mournfully, “I wish I’d never come to this house.”
No one added what they all thought—that everyone else in the house no doubt wished the same thing.
Stephen sighed, then said, “You had best take her back to her room, Tom.”
“No!” Madame Valenskaya screeched. “You can’t send me back there. Irene will be furious with me. There’s no telling what she’ll do to me!”
“I’ll stand guard outside her door,” Tom offered.
Madame Valenskaya sent him a contemptuous glance. “As if you could thwart her!”
“I will be talking to ‘Irina’ in the meantime, Madame Valenskaya,” Stephen said sternly. “I will get to the bottom of this and be rid of you both. Now, I suggest you go to your room, or I shall have to fetch the constable to investigate the fraud which you and your daughter have perpetrated upon my mother.”
Madame Valenskaya subsided at that threat, apparently fearing gaol even more than her daughter. She went docilely with Tom out the door. Rafe volunteered to bring Irene down to the study and strode out of the room after them.
Stephen and Olivia looked at each other. “We are talking about possession now?” he asked disbelievingly.
Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know that it is any more bizarre than any of the other things we have seen.”
Great-uncle Bellard spoke up. “If we believe that those who have died can remain in a house in some form, as your Lady Alys and Sir John seem to have, then I would think it’s not that hard to believe such a lingering spirit could somehow enter a living human being. You have accepted that Olivia sensed a sort of lurking evil. What if it tried to enter Mr. Babington? You said that he looked and sounded unlike himself.”
Olivia nodded. “That is true. It was…eerie. It was Babington, and yet it wasn’t. Still…”
“I know,” Stephen said. “I cannot accept it, either.”
“Yet we can scarcely deny what our own senses have told us,” Olivia argued. “It is hard not to think that we have been drawn into this centuries-old struggle between a couple in love and her husband.”
“It makes no sense. And even if it were true, how are we to stop it?”
“I have one idea,” Olivia began tentatively. “The other time when I touched the casket, I—for want of a better word—saw Lady Alys and her husband. What if I were to hold the casket again? Maybe we could see more. Maybe we could find out what really happened and what we could do to stop this haunting.”
“No,” Stephen said quickly. “I won’t allow it. You remember what happened to you last time you held the casket. It made you ill. You fainted.”
“It was the shock,” Olivia argued. “I was not prepared for it, but this time I will be. I am sure it won’t affect me so badly. Please, we must try it.”
They argued the point back and forth for several minutes, with Great-uncle Bellard coming down on Olivia’s side. Stephen was unconvinced, however.
“You didn’t see what it did to her,” he pointed out to the older man. “I did. I don’t want to have her hurt again.”
“But it is my choice, isn’t it?” Olivia asked. “And you will be there to help me, should anything happen. I had a headache afterward, but that was all. I think that would be a small price to pay to find out what is going on.”
At that point, Rafe appeared in the doorway, looking a little uneasy. “Now the daughter is gone.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “I can’t find her. I looked in her room and then in Babington’s. A maid said she had been in there earlier, that Irina had told the maid to leave and she would stay with the patient, but she’s gone now.”
“Damn. Well, I suppose we had better set up a full-scale hunt for her.”
“Stephen…” Olivia went over to him. “I think it’s even more important that we try our experiment. What if Madame Valenskaya is telling the truth? No matter how much we don’t want to believe in the idea of her daughter conjuring up some evil and setting it loose in the house, I think it is scarcely something we can ignore. Please, let me try.”
Reluctantly Stephen gave in.
Rafe and Great-uncle Bellard left to search for the missing Irene, and Stephen and Olivia made their way up the stairs to the bedroom leading to the secret room, where a footman still stood guard.
They stepped inside, and Olivia cast an uneasy look toward the wall where the secret door was now closed, indistinguishable from the rest of the wall. She did not want to step back into that room where Pamela had died.
Stephen, seeing the direction of her gaze, said, “Don’t worry. We won’t do it in there. I’ll bring the casket out here.”
“I am surprised you left it here,” Olivia replied, relieved that she would not have to go into the secret room. Even before Pamela had died in there, she had found it almost unbearable to enter it.
“I wasn’t sure what else to do with it. I expect that Pamela did not tell ‘Irina’ how to get into the room. She would have wanted to keep the treasure all to herself. Besid
es, with the guard outside, no one could enter here. I can’t keep the footman on guard forever, of course. I presume I shall have to move the treasure down to the safe, which I obviously should have done much sooner than this.”
Olivia sat down beside the bed, and Stephen went over to the wall and opened the door into the inner room. He emerged a moment later, leaving the door into the room open. He walked over to where Olivia sat and set the golden box down on the bed.
The two of then looked at it for a moment; then Olivia stood up and put her hands on the box. Nothing happened. She stood that way for a moment, feeling slightly foolish.
“Perhaps if you touched one of the pieces inside…?” Stephen suggested.
“All right.” Olivia undid the clasp and opened the lid. She hesitated for a moment, then reached in and picked up the rosary.
As her fingers curled around it, a jolt ran through her, shocking her. Stephen saw her flinch, and he reached out instinctively, his hands curling over hers. He, too, felt the shock of sensation, the warmth that suddenly flowed into him.
They stood, hands locked together, suddenly engulfed in a world long dead.
16
Stephen and Olivia smelled smoke and the scent of fresh blood; screams pierced their ears. It was as if a scene were playing out in front of them, and yet, strangely, they not only saw but also felt what the people before them felt.
Sir John and Lady Alys stood on a set of winding stairs. He was protectively below her, wielding his sword with ferocity against a small band of soldiers who were trying to push past him up the stairs. Behind him, Alys drew her dagger from its scabbard on her belt. Jewels winked in the hilt, but the blade was not decorative. She gripped it firmly, facing out, ready to jab at any man who tried to come at them from the side, where the steps were close to the ground.