Moreover, Mrs. Latham would make sure that the calumny reached the ears of Mr. Benfelton, and he would come to talk to Harriet in maddeningly vague terms about marriage and respectability and his ambitions—and doubtless contrive to stay long enough that he had to be invited to tea. This evening’s one mercy, Harriet reflected as she dressed for dinner, was that he would not be here. Mr. Benfelton was a high-minded man, and he did not approve of mediums.
That dinner turned out to be one of the least uncomfortable meals Harriet had sat through at Chisholm End; ugly and gaudy he might be, but Dr. Venefidezzi talked brilliantly. He told stories of Italia and Graecia and Macedonia, stories about werewolves and vampires and ghouls, and had the entire Latham household hanging breathlessly on his words. He even, at Claudia’s pleading, took off his coat and rolled back his sleeve to show them the scars on his arm, where a werewolf had bitten him. Harriet kept to herself the idea that any large dog could have done the same.
By the time the company rose from the table to make their way to the Blue Room, Virginia and Claudia were wide-eyed and peering nervously into the shadows. The younger Mrs. Latham was pretending indifference, but the way her head snapped around at the creak of a floorboard betrayed her. Old Mrs. Latham wouldn’t have been fazed by finding a vampire in her bed, and Mr. Latham had no imagination and scorned his wife’s habit of séances in any event. He took himself off to his study; Harriet, bringing up the rear of Dr. Venefidezzi’s little procession, wished she could have done the same.
Her place, however, was dancing attendance on old Mrs. Latham. She carried the candelabrum into the Blue Room and closed the door behind her at Dr. Venefidezzi’s request. The medium took some time arranging the Latham ladies around the table; Harriet examined the room, noting approvingly that Dr. Venefidezzi was what she thought of as a “sensible” medium. There were no cabinets for him to be locked into, no array of ropes, none of the paraphernalia that would indicate the tiresome manifestations of ghostly hands and ectoplasmic cheesecloth. His props consisted simply of candles placed on the sideboard, and a bowl with a plain robin’s-egg-blue glaze, filled with water, which was sitting in the middle of the table where the epergne had been.
Old Mrs. Latham was asking about the bowl, in a tone indicating she was ready to be offended at the banishment of her cousin Emmeline’s valuable gift.
“It is necessary,” Dr. Venefidezzi said, handing Claudia to a chair. “My control, you see, was drowned as a child.”
Virginia and Claudia shrieked and twittered with pleasurable alarm, but old Mrs. Latham was satisfied. Without old Mrs. Latham’s satisfaction, nothing happened at Chisholm End; Harriet could not quite tell, from the medium’s face, whether he had deduced that for himself or not.
He seated Harriet last, in the chair next to his own. She observed that he had contrived to place old Mrs. Latham as far from himself as possible, with her daughter-in-law beside her, so that the circle, starting from Dr. Venefidezzi and proceeding widdershins, went: the medium, Harriet, young Mrs. Latham, old Mrs. Latham, Virginia, Claudia.
Dr. Venefidezzi asked them to take hands, as mediums always did. Harriet’s right hand was pinched and prodded by young Mrs. Latham’s rings; her left hand found the medium’s hand, broad and stubby-fingered, warm and dry, unlike the hot, moist hands of Mr. Benfelton.
Dr. Venefidezzi said, “I will ask you not to break the circle, no matter what I may say or what strange sounds you may hear. Nothing in this room can harm you unless you let it.”
That was rather less comforting than the normal line of patter. Harriet felt a faint stirring of unease, a sense that perhaps Dr. Venefidezzi was not what she thought him. But she glanced sideways at his astonishing waistcoat, his ugly, good-natured face, and told herself not to be a goose.
“My control’s name is Francis. He is a child, and I will ask you not to frighten him. Ask him your questions, ladies.”
Dr. Venefidezzi lowered his head. They sat in stiff, uncomfortable silence for several minutes before the medium threw his head back and cried out, a shout with no words in it. Harriet and Claudia both flinched involuntarily and probably would have broken the circle, except that Dr. Venefidezzi’s hands had tightened on theirs, and he was stronger than he looked.
His eyes came back into focus, but he was someone else. He looked around the circle, wide-eyed and pleased, and said, “Tell me your names!” The voice was a child’s treble—a young child, no more than eight—and the accent sharper, harsher than Dr. Venefidezzi’s perfect Oxford English. A city child, Harriet thought, even a Cockney. The women around the table, nervously impressed by this demonstration of Dr. Venefidezzi’s powers, said their names, and the child repeated, “Harriet, Cecilia, Esther, Virginia, Claudia—pretty ladies! What do the pretty ladies want to know?”
“I want to speak to someone, please,” Virginia said. “James Milverton is his name.” James Milverton had died of influenza four years ago, two months before he and Virginia would have been married. It was the only good thing Harriet knew of Cecilia Latham, that her passion for Spiritualism was at least partly caused by her desire to bring Virginia some comfort.
“Miss Virginia wants Mr. James,” Francis said. “Mr. James is here.”
That was fast, Harriet thought, her unease growing. The medium’s face changed again; it seemed to narrow and lengthen. A trick of the shadows, Harriet told herself desperately. That was, after all, why mediums liked to work by candlelight. But then the medium spoke.
“Ginnie?” he said. His voice had dropped nearly an octave from Dr. Venefidezzi’s normal register, and his vowels had shifted again.
“James!” Virginia gasped.
“Ginnie, I want you to stop this séance nonsense.”
“Oh, James!”
“You’re wasting your life,” the spirit said sternly.
“But, James, I promised. I promised I’d always love you.”
The smile was James Milverton to the life. If Harriet had not been sure herself, the quick indrawn breaths of young Mrs. Latham and Claudia would have told her. “That doesn’t mean you have to be married to my grave.”
Virginia’s eyes were wide, brilliant in the candlelight with her tears. She whispered something, too softly for anyone else to hear it, and managed a small, tremulous smile.
“Good girl,” said James Milverton. Then the medium’s face shifted; the child returned. “Mr. James is gone,” he announced. “Another lady, ask a question! Mrs. Esther? Miss Claudia? Miss Harriet?”
Harriet nearly jumped out of her skin when Francis turned toward her. Before she could come up with any kind of an answer, he said, “There is a spirit who wishes to speak to Miss Harriet. It is an unhappy spirit, Miss Harriet.”
“Oh, go on, Harriet,” Claudia said, giggling.
“Very well,” Harriet said.
The medium’s face changed; she recognized it immediately, painfully: the frowning eyebrows, the drooping mouth. “Papa?”
“Harry, are you all right? I am so sorry.”
“I’m fine, Papa. Really.” She locked her jaw and throat and treacherous heart against the things she wished to say.
One eyebrow quirked. “Are you warm, my daughter? Are you warm?”
And Harriet could not help smiling back. “Quite warm, King Frost.”
“You’re a good girl, Harry. I shouldn’t have left you like that. I am sorry.”
“It’s all right, Papa. I . . . ” She could not say she forgave him, but perhaps that was not what either of them needed. “I love you.”
And her father smiled through the medium’s face and was gone.
“Another question?” said the child.
The Latham women said nothing, Virginia and Claudia and their mother eyeing Harriet as if she were some unexpected and exotic species of snake. The elder Mrs. Latham, as complacent as a snake herself, a well-fed python, was quite visibly storing away Harriet’s revealed weakness for later use. Harriet’s weary hatred of her rooted itself another inch deeper
.
But Francis was waiting. After a moment, Harriet managed to say, her voice only slightly unsteady, “Thank you, Francis, but I think maybe we’ve had enough for the night.”
“You’re sure, Miss Harriet?” He leaned a little closer and whispered, “He likes you.” Then he straightened, looking around the circle again. “Are you sure, pretty ladies? No more—”
He stiffened suddenly, his hand clamping down on Harriet’s; from the gasp, she thought the same thing had happened to Claudia. “There is another spirit.”
If Harriet had not been so disconcerted, first by her father’s return and then by that whispered confidence, she might have been able to stop the séance simply by freeing her hand from young Mrs. Latham’s. She wondered, later, if it would have done any good, or if it had already been too late.
The younger Mrs. Latham said, by rote, “To whom does the spirit wish to speak?”
“Mrs. Esther.” Francis’s voice was shaking and shrill.
“I am here,” said old Mrs. Latham. Her expression was sneering, and Harriet knew she still thought this was just an act.
“Mrs. Esther, be careful,” the child moaned, and then he was gone.
“So you married that moron Latham, did you?” said a new voice, a young woman’s voice, merry and light. “Oh, how the mighty are fallen. I’d have thought, once you got me out of the way, you’d at least have landed that poor chinless viscount. What was his name?”
“Who are you?” demanded old Mrs. Latham.
“Oh come now, Esther,” the young woman said with a trill of laughter. “You know who I am.”
“Dr. Venefidezzi,” old Mrs. Latham said, “I insist that you stop this nonsense at once.”
“He can’t, Esther. I’m afraid I’ve frightened his control. I can’t imagine why.” She smiled with Dr. Venefidezzi’s face; while her voice was light and charming, the effect of the smile was grisly, like the rictus of a skull.
Mrs. Latham pulled her hands free with an angry snort, her granddaughter on one side and her daughter-in-law on the other uttering identical gasps of protest.
“Don’t be silly, Esther. It seems as if I’ve been waiting forever for this chance to talk to you. You don’t think I’d let some silly medium’s silly mumbo-jumbo get in my way, do you?” She let go of Harriet’s and Claudia’s hands and held her own up, laughing again.
“What do you want?” old Mrs. Latham said.
“Revenge, darling, revenge. Shall I tell your granddaughters what you did? Shall I tell them about their Great-Aunt Enid?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I think this joke is in exceptionally bad taste.”
“You always were pig-headed. She murdered me, my dears. Poisoned me. What was it, Esther? I’m afraid I never had the faintest idea. Arsenic? Strychnine? Deadly nightshade?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Latham repeated obdurately.
“Dr. Venefidezzi,” said the younger Mrs. Latham, “I really think this has gone far enough.”
“And I’m sure Dr. Venefidezzi agrees with you,” Enid said. “But the matter is no longer in his hands. I have been waiting to have this conversation with my sister for forty-five years.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” old Mrs. Latham said, getting up. “Cecilia, if you pay this man, you’re a bigger fool than I take you for. Come, Harriet.” She left the room as magnificently as a man o’ war under full sail.
“I hope her pig-headedness isn’t hereditary, or you’re going to have an awful time marrying those girls off,” Enid said to the younger Mrs. Latham. “Don’t worry. My business is with Esther, not any of you.” And she was gone. Dr. Venefidezzi fell forward across the table, his head narrowly missing the blue bowl. And, perfectly predictably, Virginia Latham went off in strong hysterics.
The séance was over.
The medium had fainted, Harriet was told by Wilson when she brought the tisane that Mrs. Latham claimed kept off her “spasms.”
“Out cold,” the housemaid said, her air of concern marred by the ghoulish delight in her voice. “They thought he was faking—Mrs. Cecilia said that was all his séance was, parlor tricks and such—but he wasn’t. Mr. Latham told Jasper to go fetch the doctor.”
Mr. Latham, Harriet reflected, taking the tisane to old Mrs. Latham, had the virtues of his defects. Cold-blooded, phlegmatic, and unimaginative, but he did not lose his head in a crisis, nor ever doubted the right course of action. She tried not to imagine how they might have “proved” that Dr. Venefidezzi wasn’t faking, and felt sick and cold.
It had taken over an hour to pacify Mrs. Latham. The old lady was not, so far as Harriet could tell, in the least frightened; she was enraged, accusing the medium of prying and meddling and mockery. Harriet was not quite sure what it was that Dr. Venefidezzi was supposedly mocking, but she knew better than to ask. She said nothing but, “Yes, Mrs. Latham,” and “No, Mrs. Latham,” cramping her fear and grief and worry—her self—into a box as small and dark as a coffin.
You have nowhere else to go, she said grimly to herself, just as you have had nowhere else to go any time these past five years. Nothing has changed.
But something had. When Harriet was finally able to escape from Mrs. Latham, she went up to her small, drab room, propped the chair beneath the doorknob, and sat down on the bed, intending to calm her mind by reading her Testament—the only book she could own in Chisholm End without questions and disapproval and Mr. Benfelton’s opinions on education for women. She was quite accustomed to opening the limp leather-bound book and beginning to read perfectly at random, a species of Sortes Biblicae which had never offered her any insights into either the future or the ethereal plane. But this time, the book fell open and Harriet stared at the page without reading it, her mind full of crimson and gold dragons, of an ugly little man smiling at her, of a dead child’s voice whispering, He likes you. And, a nagging thread of disquiet, those terribly specific facts offered by something that claimed to be Esther Latham’s long dead sister. Harriet knew all about Mrs. Latham’s viscount; he had been carried off by a pleurisy of the lungs before he ever actually breathed a word of devotion or commitment (or even, from what Harriet could tell, inclination), but it was accepted family history that Claudia and Virginia had almost been descended from a viscountess. Mrs. Latham hadn’t mentioned the lack of chin.
Harriet thought, coldly, If Dr. Venefidezzi wasn’t faking, then he was telling the truth.
Decisively, she smacked the Testament down on the bedside table, bounced off the bed in an unladylike fashion, swung the chair aside, and went back downstairs. She pretended to herself that she was on an errand for Mrs. Latham—a story which no one in the Latham household would dare to disbelieve—and walked briskly into the library as if she had every right to be there.
It was deserted; from the noise, she guessed the center of the crisis had moved belowstairs, with an outpost in Virginia Latham’s bedroom, where she was doubtless weeping on her sister’s shoulder while her mother watched helplessly, faced with the only problem her iron decisiveness could not solve.
They won’t throw him out, Harriet thought, not sure why she was offering herself reassurance. Mr. Latham sent for the doctor.
She knew where the family Bible was, and knew that it had been the Grimshaw family Bible before it had come to the Lathams. Harriet knelt, opening the glass-fronted bookcase, and pulled the Bible out. It seemed to weigh as much as a small child. She opened the Bible to its flyleaf, where the long decorous progression of Grimshaw ancestors was inscribed, with Mr. Latham, his wife, and his daughters added in old Mrs. Latham’s crabbed, ungenerous script.
Harriet looked at the lines above and found there what she had known she would find: Enid Charlotte Grimshaw, born the same day as her sister Esther, dead at the age of twenty . . . forty-five years ago.
“What was it, Esther?” Harriet quoted softly. “Arsenic? Strychnine? Deadly nightshade?”
She shuddered and slamm
ed the book shut, as if it contained some evil thing which might escape, even though she knew that whatever evil there might be in Chisholm End was already abroad.
The house had changed. It was nearly ten o’clock; there was no reason to be disquieted by darkness. But the shadows seemed too thick, too heavy. After returning the Bible to its rightful place, Harriet paused uneasily in the doorway of the library, and a whispering noise, like the sound of her skirts and petticoats, seemed to run on and on into the corners and there to die in sly susurration. She closed her mind against the conclusions that waited, circling like carrion crows, but instead of retreating upstairs, she went in search of the medium.
She found him alone in the housekeeper’s sitting room, white-faced and wild-eyed. He whirled as she opened the door, and all at once he was clutching her hands, staring up into her face. “Miss Winterbourn, you have to help me. I have to get out of here.”
He was fully clothed, and the doors were not locked. “What . . . ”
“The bowl. I have to get the bowl back, and they won’t tell me where it is.”
He seemed half-mad between fear and fury. Carefully, Harriet disengaged her hands and stepped back. “Dr. Venefidezzi—”
“That isn’t my name! Surely you know that isn’t my name!”
“What is your name?”
“Far. Far Faithwell.”
“Mr. Faithwell, then, what is in this house?”
“It’s her,” he said, for a moment sounding and looking like Francis. “That iron-plated bitch’s—I beg your pardon. The elder Mrs. Latham’s sister.”
“Enid Grimshaw.”
“If that’s her name, yes.”