Dark Season (11 page)

Maybe she was some aristocrat’s by-blow. A bastard cut off by her legitimate siblings upon the old philanderer’s demise. She came to London and fell under the sway of some huckster spiritualist. The sort who read up on London’s tragic stories and used his pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to turn those tragedies into pounds and pence. He could picture the man: short and ferrety, with a pointed beard and round glasses. Always probing into past scandals, looking for a new shred of information. It would be easy to manipulate wealthy, bereaved widows and mothers if you uncovered the right tidbit. Not one of them knew her deceased husband or offspring as well as she thought she did.

Isidore didn’t doubt a hundred of these men existed within a square mile of where he stood. London was always creating new breeds of scoundrel. If opportunities for honest men were created as quickly, it might go a long way toward reducing the sum total of misery for the rich as well as the poor.

He’d save that sentiment for the House of Lords.

This huckster spiritualist, he would always need accomplices, women who fit certain specifications. Delicate and otherworldly, impressionable and adrift. Along came strange Miss Reed. He lured her in, twisted her to his own ends.

The more Isidore thought about it, the more likely it seemed that some version of this scenario pertained. He didn’t ascribe events generally to grand conspiracies, but criminal networks
did
exist. And they were adaptable. No sooner had London’s women of fashion decided they absolutely could not be parted from their toy greyhounds and Blenheim spaniels than organized dog-nappings took the city by storm. Why wouldn’t the fad for mysticism serve as a new pretext and point of entry for underworld masterminds? Miss Reed was not working alone. At the very least, Miss Seymour was involved; she made money from her séances but not enough. She probably designed her public appearances to facilitate private contacts for her girls. It was a time-tested model. Didn’t some mediums even call themselves madams?

He wondered suddenly if Miss Reed really was in mourning. Maybe mourning attire made her a more sympathetic figure to those she preyed upon. Maybe she knew black became her, emphasized that moony, haunted quality. The urge to laugh rose in his chest. No vulgarity for gently bred Miss Reed. No paint and dye. She must have cultivated those hollow eyes the way a soprano cultivated her voice. Instead of practicing scales, she practiced sleeping in fits and starts.

The idea of her sleeping caused an odd feeling to wash over him. Her hair was fair; he could see twin slivers peeking from beneath her bonnet, loops swept back from either side of a center part. It was unusual to see blond hair paired with such dark eyes. He couldn’t help but imagine that hair spread out on her pillow.

She came within two arm spans and stood returning his stare.

“Do we part ways so soon?” She couldn’t disguise the fact that she found this idea not altogether unpleasing. He smiled.
You won’t get away so easily.

“I said I would accompany you to Hyde Park.”

This flustered her. Confusion brought her thin, dark brows together. Or she pretended it did. He doubted she was as new to London as she’d claimed to Louisa. The more information she already had, about London, about the Tromblys, and the more ignorance she claimed, the more convincing her messages from Phillipa would be.

“Yes … ?” she said, searching his face for the answer. She didn’t look like she was pretending. She looked off-balance and irritated and a little self-righteous, as though
he
were the one playing games. He sighed.

“Hyde Park is that way.” He pointed back the way they had come. Heaven help him. He set the pace now, slower, back along Mount Street. Miss Reed walked stiffly, quivering with the suppressed energy that had sent her bounding from Trombly Place as though hell-bent to escape him.

“I didn’t realize I was walking in the wrong direction.” The indignation and chagrin in her voice sounded disturbingly authentic. As had her avowal that her swoon during the séance was
not
a performance. Well, what was a medium anyway if not an actress?

“You could have said something sooner.”

I could have.

“I’m glad to learn that we agree on certain points.” He smiled at her and watched with interest the way she compressed her full lips in irritation. He might come to enjoy torturing her. She was so jumpy and so desperate to contain her anxiety. It rather brought out the feline instincts. But he shouldn’t be thinking about enjoyment. He shouldn’t be savoring anything about the situation. He should be direct. Move in for the clean kill.

“Now that it’s just the two of us … ” he said pleasantly.
The two of us.
Intimate friends.
“We can speak frankly. Why are you living in Mrs. Trombly’s house?”

“She asked me to,” came the ingenious reply. Miss Reed had decided to take shelter in a country mouse routine. She was making a show of looking up at the grand homes. He wouldn’t be surprised if she suddenly tugged his arm and asked him to take her to a shop to buy hair ribbons.
I’ve never been behind those big, plate-glass windows before!

“Indeed,” he said shortly.

“You will remember, my lord”—Miss Reed flashed a quick glance in his direction—“that Mrs. Trombly and I agree on
that.
She brought me into her house and begged that I stay. The arrangement took me quite by surprise.”

“What if I go and speak with Miss Seymour?” He expected to see her start in fear at this proposition, but the arrow missed its mark. Miss Reed only looked at him gravely. He wondered if it were possible that Miss Seymour was not involved. She had to be. The setup was too perfect.

Louisa had described the scene in more detail than he cared to see it. Miss Seymour had felt a presence in the shadows—young, black eyes, black hair. When Louisa stood, sobbing out Phillipa’s name, Miss Seymour had stretched out her arms.

Come, Phillipa
.
I will bring thee where no shadow stays
.

And Miss Reed had been taken, possessed, and consumed by the spirit.

How many times had they done it before?

“I wish you’d bring me.” Miss Reed’s voice was low and steady … and sincere. “I want to speak with Miss Seymour as well. About what she thought she saw when I … ” Miss Reed broke off then started again. “She reminded me of a vulture. Or a crow. She croaked like a crow.”

“Crows feed on the dead.” He said it to disturb her, but she nodded as though he were raising a point she had considered.

“I thought of that,” she said. “That was part of it. She was feeding on something. If not the shadows themselves, then on sadness. I’d never been to a séance. I only went because a girl at the boardinghouse … ” She caught herself and changed tack. “I went imagining I’d find it silly,” she said, “but I didn’t. It was different than I expected. Have you ever been to a séance?”

“No,” he said. Her conversation disarmed him. Its searching quality. She sounded for all the world as if she were really trying to figure out what to think about it. The séance. Her subsequent employment. That didn’t fit at all with his theory about the huckster spiritualist or Miss Seymour, grand madam. “No, I haven’t.” He gave her what he hoped was an enigmatic smile. “But I
have
seen men walk on fire and swallow live snakes. Does that seem more outlandish to you?”

“Where did you see these things?” she asked.

“Cairo.” He winked at her. “Would your answer be different if I said Berkeley Square?”

She laughed at that, a brief, halting laugh. He saw a flash of her small, white teeth. The front two angled backwards just enough for her incisors to seem slightly prominent. He found the imperfection beguiling. He found
her
beguiling. He hated to admit it even to himself. It was probably what she was counting on.

“I suppose they’re equivalent,” she said, a hint of smile on her lips. “Conjuring a spirit out of a cabinet. Walking on fire. England isn’t any less bizarre than Egypt.”

“Do you know why they’re different?” he asked softly. “The firewalker and the medium?”

She looked at him, and the traces of laughter disappeared from her eyes. They were solemn again, round and black and wary.

“Motive,” he said. “The firewalker is undergoing a rite of purification, a stripping away of the self to come nearer to his god. The medium is charging admission. The medium wants something from the people watching, and the firewalker wants nothing.”

She dropped her gaze to her boots. Maybe she was imagining fire beneath them.

“I’m going to ask this a different way,” he said. Then, as slowly as he could: “What do you want from Mrs. Trombly?”

“I want what she said she’d give me.” Miss Reed still walked looking down, the brim of her bonnet obscuring her face. “A reference, so I can earn my own keep.”

“That’s all?” He shook his head.
Not good enough.
“Miss Reed, you’ve chosen a roundabout way of getting work as a governess.”

“I didn’t
choose
it.” She sounded as though her teeth were gritted.

“I know, I know.” He tipped his head back and blinked up at the blue sky. “You just happened to fall over at the wrong time.”

At this, her head rose and snapped toward him. Her upper lip lifted in a snarl, baring those small, crooked teeth. “That’s right.” She almost hissed it.

“And you had no acquaintance with Miss Seymour before that night?”

“None.” Her eyes were sparking, and he felt his own anger kindle.

“You did not know what that night was? The significance of that night?” He’d stopped walking and was shouting down at her. A couple passing with a Cocker Spaniel on a short leather lead turned their heads and looked at him with widened eyes. Hoping to sniff out some scandal. He nearly growled at them.

“I did not know.” Miss Reed sought his gaze and held it. With the sun’s light falling across them, her dark eyes glistened. Black pools, fathomless. And suddenly, they no longer glared defiance. They held a sorrow too deep for tears.

“I did not know then,” she said. “I know now.”

“What do you know?” He turned from her abruptly to hide his own response. A throng of children barreled by and forced her to step forward, brushing against him. He looked down at the curve of her cheek, the swell of her lower lip. Her lips were so red, so lush, so unexpected in that face as white as powder.

Too red, he tried to tell himself. Like a poison berry. But he watched the corner of her mouth, fascinated. He watched those lips move as she began to speak.

“I know Phillipa died that night, five years ago. I know she fell from a balcony and that you carried her back to Trombly Place. You sat up in the room with her all night.”

This recital took his breath away. He didn’t want to remember it. To travel back to that night. He looked away from Miss Reed, concentrated on the everyday sights and sounds of the street. The gorgeous weather had called everybody with two hale legs, and some without, into the street. He saw a man with a wooden leg on the corner selling nuts. Charwomen and countesses alike were making their way down the thoroughfare. The handsome equipages of Mayfair’s finest, drawn by glossy horses, better fed than a good three-quarters of the citizenry, rolled toward the park with pedestrians weaving in and out in little groups, brightly clad in afternoon dresses and suits dyed blue and green and that suddenly ubiquitous shade of chemical purple.

What a pair they made, he and Miss Reed, both in matte black, except for the glimmer of black silk at his throat, both silent, both still, locked in struggle over a ghost.

He did not want to travel back to that night, but he could do it so easily. He could get back there so quickly.

Yes, he had sat up with her, gazing at her face, always so mobile, a thousand expressions flitting across it, gone cold and fixed. Gazing at the glimmer of her eyes just barely visible beneath the lids he’d pressed down. He had taken off her gloves and held her hands.

Yes, she had fallen from a balcony. She was drunk that night. They were all drunk. There was rum in the punch, gin in the lemonade. Everywhere: glasses of sherry, claret, champagne. Clement had lit a cheroot in the ballroom, and other men had followed their host’s example, lighting cheroots, cigars, pipes, filling the house with smoke. Many lovers had quarreled that night. Tipsy spats punctuated the music. Other pairs had disappeared upstairs. The party had started late—after the opera let out—and the good little debs in their pastel silks should never have ended up there. He should have turned Phillipa around at the door. Instead, he followed her up the stairs.

No one had seen it happen. He didn’t look for her on the balcony. He didn’t realize she’d gone in that direction. He thought she’d run downstairs. No one knew
how
it had happened. She might have hoisted herself up onto the balustrade as she often did and toppled over. But she was so lithe. She had such balance. Even as distraught as she’d been … racing away from him … sobbing … flinging her body about as though she wanted to punish it … would she have slipped?
Could
she have slipped? Phillipa, who could stand on the back of a cantering horse? Could she have fallen … if she hadn’t wanted to? If at least one little part of her hadn’t desired that spiraling moment, that leap into oblivion?

Suddenly, he wanted Miss Reed to be genuine. He wanted her to
know
. He wanted her
to speak the truth. He wanted her to be absolutely guileless, undesigning, no purpose whatsoever other than to act as Phillipa’s mouthpiece. He wanted her to put him out of his misery. To pronounce judgment. Exonerate him or seal his doom. He wanted it so badly he would almost, in that moment, do anything to believe in her.

He became aware again of her slender, upright form. She was so close. Vibrating with that odd tension. The top of her bonnet came up just past his shoulder. If he lifted his hand, he could stroke the exposed curve of her cheek, brush his thumb across the ravaged flesh of her swollen lower lip. Catch her chin and lift her face, hold her still, and plunge into those eyes until he drank in their darkness, glutted himself on the black knowledge that brimmed there.