The Clairvoyant Curse (21 page)

It was Captain Lanfranc. He
thought she was suffering from
mal de mer
because she was
leaning over the rail.

“
Pas du tout
,” she
reassured, watching his inky outline emerge from the sea-fog that
had settled since dinner. “I never suffer from seasickness though I
admit the sea could be calmer.”

“The wind has turned to a
south-easterly. It is blowing 4 at the moment but by tomorrow it
will be a gale at 6 or 7. A heavy rainstorm is on the cards. If you
are planning an early night it might be a good idea. Tomorrow night
will be rough.”

“Rough seas hold no fear and
your ship inspires confidence. Is there any chance of a tour of the
wheelhouse?”

“
Mon plaisir, la
comtesse
. Not many women take an interest in such things. Your
companion was most interested in our new ship to shore wireless
device. Would you care to see that first?”

“
Oui, bien sur, je vous
remercie
.”

“I believe you received an
electronic message after dinner?” he said by way of conversation as
they skirted the darkened cabins and made their way to the well-lit
fore deck.

“Yes, a telegraph from my
London butler,” she lied. “I am hoping to have the Mayfair mansion
made ready for Christmas prior to my return from Biarritz. Is there
any chance of sending a
communique
?”

“
Le telegrapheur
will be
at your service,
la comtesse
.”

To maximize the natural light
filtering in through the magnificent roof lantern the public spaces
had been segregated using frosted glass screens and classical
marble columns, some in the form of giant caryatids. It was an
ingenious decorative strategy that opened up the spacious saloons
even further, making them appear larger and more airy.

When the Countess rejoined her
fellow passengers in the grand saloon Miss Morningstar was
performing a series of sea shanties with Mr Ffrench accompanying on
the piano. What a wonderful pair they made, and not just musically,
when they weren’t rubbing each other the wrong way.

Mrs Merle, ensconced in a
velvet
fauteuil
, with her feet on an ottoman in an effort to
appease her varicose veins, was ploughing through Moby Dick and a
tiered plate of petit fours, though every now and then she paused
long enough to join in the chorus…

Fifteen men on a dead man’s
chest,

Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of
rum!

Madame Moghra, visible through
the frosted glass partition separating the grand saloon from the
library, appeared to have tired of her planchette and was dozing in
a wing chair. Something was clearly troubling the medium and the
Countess made a mental note to broach the subject of old ghosts
straight after breakfast.

Drink and the Devil do for the
rest,

Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of
rum!

A Ouija board had been procured
by Monsieur Croquemort who was demonstrating its use to the gypsy
and the Chinaman who had never participated in a séance that
married Franco-Germanic occult lore with English spelling rules.
Reverend Blackadder joined them but he was sceptical of
prescriptive divination and didn’t stay long. Madame Sosostras and
Dr Hu were asking their spirit guides to settle the question posed
by Madame Moghra at dinner regarding the side-stepping of fate, but
the aerial angels were proving elusive. Monsieur Croquemort offered
his chair to the Countess when she appeared and retreated to the
library to check out the latest French novels which Captain
Lanfranc had assured him were to be found on the shelves. He soon
found one he liked and went to fix a nightcap prior to retiring to
his cabin to read.

Before long, Madame Sosostras
became frustrated with Dr Hu’s atrocious spelling and offered to
relieve Mr Ffrench at the piano. The gypsy was an excellent pianist
with a repertoire that included Chopin and Mozart.

Miss Morningstar watched Mr
Ffrench enter the library and ceased her warbling. She decided to
lubricate her throat and made her way to the dining room where the
samovar was still simmering. She wondered if Mr Ffrench might want
a coffee too but he’d already left the library and had gone to the
bar to join Monsieur Croquemort in a nightcap. Annoyed with him,
she went to see if Madame Moghra might want a cocoa but the medium
was fast asleep.

Reverend Blackadder retrieved
his cigarettes and lucifers from the library then made it his
mission to steer Crispin away from the absinthe.

Mrs Merle remembered she needed
to find an almanac to check some facts for her lecture on Mercury
retrograde and went to the library, but one almanac was written in
French and the other in Arabic. What on earth would the Arabs know
about astrology! She swore in disgust and went to bed, but not
before topping up her plate of petit fours.

Madame Sosostras played one
more Chopin tune, yawned, stretched, went to locate the tarot cards
she had left in the library earlier that afternoon then practically
flew up the stairs in a swirl of coloured silk like an exotic
Rosella flitting through the treetops.

Dr Hu had already retired for
the night when he realized he did not have his precious I-Ching
with him. He returned wearing a wonderful blue silk dressing gown
covered in gold dragons, bowed winsomely at the Countess, located
his treasure in the library, bid Madame Moghra goodnight and
mounted the stairs like a water dragon swimming upstream.

Waves were pounding the sides
of the ship, giving the steel hull a bit of a battering, though
they were not yet swamping the deck. The Countess was the only one
left in the grand saloon. She decided to finish her cigarette
before calling it a night and was more than a touch surprised to
see Dr Watson descending the grand staircase. She watched him
through the frosted glass partition and presumed he was still
suffering from insomnia. Poor, restless, sleep-deprived spirit!
Perhaps she could offer to make him a hot tisane with lemon and
honey? She stubbed out her cigarette and made her way to the
smoking room, thinking that’s where he’d gone, but he was nowhere
to be seen. She checked the adjoining billiard room and spotted his
reflection in a large gilt mirror. He was moving in the direction
of the bar but when she got there he had moved on. She looked into
the dining saloon but he was not there either. She thought he might
have gone into the alcove where the card table was situated,
perhaps to play Solitaire, but no, he wasn’t there either. She
mounted the stairs and went onto the promenade deck, hoping to
catch up to him before he reached his cabin. The wind was ferocious
and the temperature had plummeted, flecks of freezing cold sea
spray stung her cheeks. No moon or stars were visible. Monsieur
Bresant and a handful of seamen were battening down the hatches.
They assured her they had not seen anyone pass by so she hurried
back to the grand saloon and saw the doctor through the glass
partition. He was standing in the middle of the library, looking
slightly lost. She wondered if he was sleepwalking. By the time she
skirted several
fauteuils
and coffee tables, whirled around
the grand piano and traversed the dance floor, he had disappeared
again.

Madame Moghra was still dead to
the world.

Countess Volodymyrovna awoke to
the news that Madame Moghra was dead. White light was just
beginning to touch the grey clouds banking up over the Irish Sea
when she first heard it from her personal maid, Xenia, who
understood that her mistress’s passion for sleuthing overrode her
desire for slumber or food.

Xenia and Fedir had been taking
their breakfast before any of the other passengers had risen
(entitled as they were with cabins on B deck but not wishing to put
noses out of joint) and had heard a distressing cry. One of the
maids cleaning up the glasses and ashtrays from the night before
had stumbled upon the dead body.

“Dead?” echoed the Countess,
sitting up and smoothing back her baroque brunette mane, her
faculties not yet honed to sharpness.

“In the library,” expounded
Xenia, passing her mistress a cup of tea.

“You mean she hadn’t been to
bed?”

Xenia nodded. “She die in her
sleep in library.”

The Countess digested that
extraordinary statement as she gulped back her tea, rushed through
her toilette and settled on the only navy and white nautical-style
costume in her wardrobe that was suited to shipboard life, and the
more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Madame Moghra
had foreseen her own death and the Countess had not taken her
premonition seriously enough. The medium had been pale and distrait
all of yesterday. She had seen something that unsettled her: A
ghost from the grave!

“Where’s Fedir?”

Xenia was brushing the
voluptuous rococo tresses, taming them into something that could
withstand gale force winds. “He go to cabin of Dr Watson with cup
of tea as you instruct and to make the bath for the doctor and lay
out his clothes.”

“Fedir’s English is not as good
as yours,” the Countess said, thinking quickly now. “Go at once to
the cabin of Dr Watson. Inform the doctor of the death of Madame
Moghra. Tell the doctor to meet me in the library as soon as he is
ready.”

Xenia finished pinning a jaunty
straw boater into place then hurried away while the Countess rushed
off to the library, hanging onto her hat to avoid losing it
overboard. Captain Lanfranc and Monsieur Bresant had arrived ahead
of her and the two men were surprised to see a passenger up and
about at first light, especially
une jeune femme
a
particule
.

The maid who had discovered the
body was standing by the bookshelves, wringing her hands and wiping
her runny nose with her apron as she stuttered out her story. She
had come in to clear up and straighten the furniture when she saw
the lady slumped in the chair. She thought the lady was asleep and
went about her task quietly, but then she noticed the lady seemed
very still. She tried to rouse her, to tell her it was morning, but
the lady did not wake. When she touched the lady’s hand it felt
like ice and she jumped back, knowing then that the lady was dead.
She cried out, not because she was frightened of death but because
the body slumped to the side and the lady’s hair slumped too. It
looked like a soufflé after someone had opened the oven door too
early. She tried to straighten it but one of the curls got caught
in her cuff. She jerked back her arm and the hair fell off. It gave
her a shock.

Captain Lanfranc indicated with
a nod of his head for the maid to leave. She shuffled to the door,
then paused and looked back as though she had something further to
say on the subject of soufflés or wigs, but a dark look sent her on
her way.

Madame Moghra did indeed look
shocking without the customary pompadour pouf perched on her head.
Baldness on men was common and could look quite handsome, but on
women it looked unnatural and freakish. The Countess picked up the
bouffant wig which had become wedged between a stiff cold shoulder
and the wing of the chair and noticed a red dot on top of the
medium’s head. She peered closer.

“What are you looking at?”
quizzed Captain Lanfranc.

“I’m not sure,” she said,
indicating the red dot. “It looks like a drop of dried blood.”

“She might have pricked herself
when pinning her wig in place,” he suggested.

Monsieur Bresant took a look
for himself. “A mole that has been scratched, I think.”

Captain Lanfranc addressed the
Countess forthrightly, though years of practice as master of one
vessel or another ensured a diplomatic tone. He relieved her of the
wig and placed it on the dead woman’s knees. It looked like a
fluffy white lap dog curled up to go to sleep.

“Did Madame Moghra move from
this chair last night?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“She was here when you went to
bed?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who went last to
bed?”

“It was me.”

“Do you remember who was the
last to go into the library?”

“Dr Watson – although I cannot
say what happened later in the night; if anyone came and went
unseen.”

The captain turned to his chief
steward. “What think you, Bresant?
Le crise de coeur
?”

Bresant nodded sourly, defacing
his good looks, as if he had just sucked on a lemon. The death of a
passenger on an inaugural voyage was a bad omen. The men would not
like it. Sailors were the most superstitious of all breeds. He
remembered being on a ship when it was discovered someone had
smuggled a cat on board. It had almost ended in mutiny. He knew
Captain Lanfranc was thinking the same thing about bad omens,
though hopefully this leg of the journey did not qualify as the
maiden voyage and this bizarre group of clairvoyants did not
qualify as genuine passengers.

“I have seen this sort of thing
before. The passengers over-eat and over-drink when they make the
holiday cruise. That big American will be next.”

“Dr Watson is on his way,”
intervened the Countess helpfully, catching the worried exchanges
between the two men. “He can examine the body and give us a more
definite cause of death.”

“I think not,” contradicted the
captain tensely. “This ship is French territory. The police surgeon
in Biarritz will tell us the cause of death. Until then the body
will go into cold storage.” He turned to his steward. “Bresant,” he
instructed curtly, “take care of it.”

“Are you thinking it could be
murder?” challenged the Countess, who was thinking the exact same
thing, and had in fact been thinking it all morning.

The captain shrugged casually
in an effort to downplay his uncertainty. “Who can say? Not me. Not
you. And not all the clairvoyants in the world!” He smiled at his
little joke as he turned to go.