The Seance (37 page)

Edwin had made a tour of the rooms on this level, and pronounced them safe enough, provided no more than two people at a time ventured along any of the corridors: ugly stains on the ceilings and chunks of fallen plaster along the corridors suggested that water had indeed got into the floors above. He was however uneasy about the gallery floor immediately beneath the armour; there was, he said, too much play in the boards for his liking. Now he was moving about the study: I could hear him taking down volumes and opening drawers. With all this activity going on around me, the house did not seem especially sinister, and when the worst of the chill had left me, I slipped away to see the room which had been Nell’s.

The shattered door hung open on its hinges; the linen had been stripped from the bed, but strangely, a pen with a rusted nib and a dried-up bottle of ink – surely hers? – lay on the table beneath the window. Puffs of dust stirred about my feet as I went on through to the boxroom where Clara
– where I? – had slept. A low wooden cot, also thick with dust, stood in the centre of the floor. The room was even smaller, and much darker, than I had imagined from Nell’s description, and prompted not the faintest stir of recognition – scarcely surprising, I reminded myself, when I could recall nothing of my childhood before the house in Holborn. There was a tiny window, a few inches square, set deep into the wall. The window did not open; with the door closed, which I had not the nerve to try, the little room would have been almost pitch dark. I could see no ventilation of any kind.

I had glanced into the other rooms as I came along the corridor – all bare of furniture, but some considerably larger than these two combined. Nell must have insisted upon an adjoining room for Clara, but why had she not demanded something better when she saw what had been prepared for her?

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I noticed that in the corner opposite the door, the edge of the carpet had been drawn back. Moving closer I saw a gap in the floor where a piece of floorboard about eight or nine inches long had been taken up; and there was the missing piece, underneath the cot. Dust lay thickly over everything. I knelt down and peered into the cavity, but it was too dark to see, and I did not like to put my hand into it. This, I realised, was surely the ‘perfect hiding-place’ that Nell had discovered for her journal.

I had brought the journal with me, and on impulse I went back along the gloomy corridor, glancing nervously about me at each turning, and around the landing to fetch it. Faint tapping sounds emanated from the gallery; if I had not known who was making them, I should have fled in terror. The cold had set me shivering again; I added more coal to the fire in my room and crouched before it, wondering whether I could endure a night alone in here. Nell had endured several, I reminded myself, in far more terrifying circumstances; but then she had had Clara to protect.

But why had she left Clara to sleep in that dark, airless cell? (Again, I
realised, I was thinking of myself and Clara as two different people – as sisters, in fact.) Because it meant that there were two locked doors between Clara and harm? The answer did not satisfy me, but I could think of no other; and so I returned to the boxroom and very cautiously slid the journal into the cavity, a little at a time, until I could see that it would fit.

Dr Rhys said in his testimony that he had seen a hole in the floor, in the corner of the nursery, soon after the door was broken down. Which meant, surely, that Nell must have left the hiding-place open when she took Clara down to her accomplice early that morning. Her journal had been found lying open on the writing-table . . . but if she had taken something else out of the cavity – papers? money? jewels? – would that not have reminded her to pick up the journal, which was in plain view?

My thought was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the corridor, and Edwin’s voice calling my name. I slipped the journal beneath my shawl as he appeared in the outer room.

‘Have you found anything?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said despondently. ‘Raphael has just expelled me from the library; he says he wants to test the influence machine. They’re being very secretive indeed; I offered to help them look for a priest’s hole – there’s bound to be something of the kind – but they spurned my assistance. Still, it scarcely matters; it would take weeks, or months, to search this house for papers; my idea of finding anything that would exonerate my father seems more and more a pipe dream. This is a deathly place; I have never felt so cold.’

On that sombre note we retreated to the sitting-room to lunch from the hamper I had prepared. Edwin built up the fire into a blazing mass of coals, but it did not seem to lift his spirits, or mine; there was, as he had intimated, something beyond the physical chill of the house, no mere absence of life but an active hostility to it. After a while he left to resume his search; I meant to return to Nell’s room, but instead remained huddled
in a musty armchair until I fell into troubled dreams, from which I woke to find the room already dark, and Edwin tapping at the door to warn me that the rest of the party had arrived.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you would care to take your seats, we are almost ready to begin.’

Shadows darted along the walls as Vernon Raphael raised his lantern and led us towards a row of chairs arranged like seats in a theatre, facing the armour at the other end of the room. Coals glowed in a small fireplace nearby. Though the fire had been burning for hours, it had made little impression on the deathly chill of the gallery. The only other illumination came from a candelabra above and to the right of the armour. Higher still, its flames were dimly mirrored in the blackness of the windows.

‘Miss Langton, pray take the chair nearest the fire.’

His pale face and white shirt-front dipped towards the floor as he bowed, indicating my place with a theatrical sweep of his arm. He was dressed in evening clothes, with a long black cloak draped over his shoulders. Edwin moved closer and offered me his arm, which I declined, indicating that I needed both hands to manage my own cloak. Our footsteps reverberated as if we were a party of twenty.

I settled myself as requested, with Edwin next to me. On his left was Professor Charnell, a desiccated, white-bearded little man, active as a monkey, and then Professor Fortesque, a florid, porcine gentleman with a confiding manner and small glittering eyes. Last came Dr James Davenant, who stood for a moment longer, surveying the gallery. He was the tallest of the party, very spare and upright. His iron-grey hair was brushed straight back from his forehead, but the lower part of his face was obscured by a full beard, side-whiskers and moustache. By day he wore tinted spectacles; he had, according to Edwin, been injured in
a fire while travelling in Bohemia in his youth, and his eyes had been permanently weakened. His voice had a slight huskiness to it, as if he were recovering from a cold. He seemed content for the most part to watch and listen, but I noticed that all the other men deferred to him. According to Edwin, he was the one member of the Society whom Vernon Raphael genuinely admired. He was also a distinguished student of crime, and had been consulted by Scotland Yard on several sensational cases, most recently the appalling murders in Whitechapel.

Vernon Raphael moved away down the room until he was standing next to the armour, where he set down his lantern, closed the shutter, and turned to face us. In the wavering light of the candles, the armour seemed to sway back and forth; reflections shimmered up and down the blade of the sword. I could just make out the wires snaking away from the plinth, past Vernon Raphael’s feet, and away under the connecting door to the influence machine in the library. At his request we had examined the machine; still, he said, in perfect working order after twenty years. It resembled a huge spinning-wheel made of brass and polished wood, but with half a dozen massive glass disks side by side instead of a single wheel. St John Vine – a dark, silent, saturnine young man whom I had scarcely seen all day – had turned the handle, slowly at first, then faster and faster until the disks were spinning blurs of light, while Vernon Raphael held two wires with wooden batons, bringing them gradually closer until a fierce blue spark leapt between them with a vicious spat and a smell of burning.

‘Ladies and gentleman,’ he repeated, as if we were an audience of fifty, ‘you are about to witness the séance – the psychical experiment, if you prefer – that Magnus Wraxford intended to conduct on the night of Saturday, the thirtieth of September, 1868. No guesswork is required, because, as we know from Godwin Rhys’s testimony’ – this with a sketch of a bow towards Edwin – ‘he described precisely what he meant to do. You may well wonder, what is the point of reconstructing an event that never took place, but for the moment I can only ask you to suspend your disbelief.

‘If Mrs Bryant had not died on the night of the twenty-ninth – we shall come to that a little later – there would have been five persons present at the séance: Magnus and Eleanor Wraxford; Mrs Bryant, Godwin Rhys and the late Mr Montague. Magnus Wraxford would doubtless have asked the other four to form a circle and join hands in the conventional manner; Eleanor Wraxford, as we know, was to play (however reluctantly) the role of medium. But he also said that if no spirit materialised, he would instruct his man Bolton to operate the influence machine at full power, and occupy the armour himself – as I am about to do.

‘We ask that you observe in silence, and without conferring, so as not to influence your fellow witnesses’ perceptions. It will take several minutes before the armour is fully charged; I trust that your patience will be rewarded.

‘One last word: the demonstration is not without risk. No matter what happens, you must not leave your seats until we have indicated that it is safe to do so; your lives may depend upon it.’

He bowed to us again, turned with a swirl of his cloak, and grasped the hilt of the sword. Though the others had examined the armour in daylight (I could not bring myself to approach it) there was a collective intake of breath as the monstrous figure seemed to lunge at Vernon Raphael, its blackened plates opening like jaws eager to devour him. He stepped inside the casing, and darkness closed over him.

I tried to keep my eyes fixed upon the armour, but the movement of the candle flames distracted me. I was not aware of any draught, yet every so often the flames would sway in unison, as if someone had passed along the floor below. The heat of the fire was perceptibly diminishing. Every sound – the creak of a chair, the ticking of the coals, the occasional rustle of clothing – seemed an intrusion upon the deathly stillness of the gallery. The glittering blade of the sword (which Raphael and Vine
had evidently polished during the day) was another distraction from the dark mass of the armour, which seemed to absorb all of the light that fell upon it.

Or almost all, for there was a faint yellow spark – no, two faint sparks of light side by side on the front of the helmet. They did not look like reflections, for they did not waver when the candles did, and the more I stared, the brighter they became.

A sharp intake of breath confirmed that someone else had seen it. The gleam was coming from within, shining through the slits where Vernon Raphael’s eyes ought to be. I glanced at Edwin and saw my own fear reflected in his face.

The light strengthened and changed, darkening from yellow to orange to a fiery blood-red glow. As it did so I became aware of a low, vibrant humming, like the sound of bees swarming; I could not tell where it was coming from. Edwin grasped my arm and was making as if to rise when a voice – Dr Davenant’s, I thought – said quietly but forcefully, ‘Do not move, upon your lives.’

Dazzling white light filled the gallery, followed an instant later by a thunderclap that shook the house and left me blinded and deafened, with the diamond patterns of the leadlighting etched upon my vision. As the after-image faded I realised that all of the candles had gone out; beyond the faint glow of the fire at my side, the darkness was absolute.