The Seance (5 page)

Three days later, my mother emerged blinking into the light. Though she was not yet sixty, she might have been my great-grandmother, clad in a frayed mourning-dress of rusty brown and clinging tightly to my arm. Her expression, as she gazed about her, was bewildered but strangely incurious, and I became aware that she could not actually see the things I was pointing at; she had grown so short-sighted that her world had shrunk to a circle a few feet across.

Mrs Veasey had told me privately that she felt sure Alma would want to speak through me again, and thus it proved. I felt my mother’s hand quivering in mine as I began to sing in my Alma-voice, and though she asked more or less the same questions, and received more or less the same answers, as on the first evening in the drawing-room, she was still in tears of joy when the performance ended. We remained for some time afterwards talking to Mr and Mrs Ayrton, who had lost both their sons to the cholera, and I invited them to tea the following week, thinking that all would be well.

And so for a while it seemed. Mama remained obsessed with Alma to the exclusion of all else – she refused to be fitted with spectacles on the ground that there was nothing she needed to see – but I was so delighted to see her in company, I did not care that the talk was all of bereavements in this world and joyful reunions in the next. The Society met twice a week, and in between séances I would sometimes sit with Mrs Veasey on the bench outside the Foundling Hospital. There she would instruct me in the arts of mediumship, always on the understanding that we were simply helping the spirits in their task, and suggest messages that Alma might give to other sitters. I came to realise that she had chosen me as her successor, though I was never sure of her motives, just as I
was never quite certain whether she believed or not: I suspect that like me she had had glimpses of a power, fleeting and uncertain, coming upon one when you least expected it.

There was, she insisted, an affinity between us; but I was aware, too, that we were bound by our mutual confidences; neither could afford to expose the other, and I sometimes wondered if this was why she had chosen me. I noticed, too, that the contributions increased as our partnership developed; all of the money, of course, went to Mrs Veasey, but though my conscience often troubled me, the deception did not seem wicked, since it was done for Mama’s sake. Our Society was far from grand; it admitted both impoverished gentry and respectable women of the housekeeping class, people on the fringe of their station. Most of the sitters, including of course Mama, were eager, if not determined, to believe whatever the medium told them, and with Mrs Veasey’s assistance I began to gain a reputation, which was both exhilarating and alarming. I enjoyed, I confess, the power conferred upon me by having grown men and women hang upon my words. And sometimes – though I was never sure of it – I felt that my feigned trance was becoming a real one. Sounds would grow louder: the creaking of the coals in the grate, the faint whistle of Mr Carmichael’s asthmatic breathing, until the blood seemed to wash and boom in my ears, and then the sounds would begin to shape themselves into words, or rather the shadow of words, like conversation heard a long way off. And yet the more I practised, the less I believed in anything like the realm of spirits we invoked with such assurance.

I had hoped that Mama would be content with regular messages from Alma, but as the autumn advanced and the days grew shorter, the old haunted look crept back into her eyes. How could she be certain, she would ask, that it was really Alma speaking? And why could I not summon her at home? I had tried to forestall this by insisting that the first time had been Alma’s way of drawing us into Mrs Veasey’s circle, but my
reassurances sounded hollow even to my own ears. Hearing Alma’s voice was no longer proof enough; my mother wanted to see, to touch, to hold her, and having learned from the other sitters that there were mediums who could make spirits visible, she began to wonder aloud why I would not take her to see one. Mrs Veasey disapproved of manifestations: the use of the cabinet, she would declare in righteous tones, was a sure sign of trickery. This was not an argument I wished to pursue with Mama; I thought of contriving a message from Alma along the lines of ‘Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’, but I doubted whether it would subdue her craving. And so I decided to attend a manifestation séance myself, in the hope that I might stumble upon someone who could present a convincing Alma to my mother’s fading sight.

Several members of our circle had spoken, though not within Mrs Veasey’s hearing, of a Miss Carver, whose sittings were held in her father’s house in Marylebone High Street. Katie Carver was said to be very pretty, and capable of summoning not only her ‘control’, an equally attractive spirit by the name of Arabella Morse, but a whole troop of them. Only after I had secured my place at a sitting, and handed over a guinea (‘for charitable causes’), did it strike me that I should have given a false name. Miss Lester, the young woman who had taken my money, showed me into a dimly lit room furnished, like our own in Lamb’s Conduit Street, with a large circular table, but richly carpeted. Candles burned upon the table and within an alcove in the far corner. The alcove was about six feet square, with heavy curtains draped from the ceiling to the floor, tied back at the front to show that there was nothing inside except a plain upright chair.

When all the places had been taken (there were, I think, about fifteen of us), Miss Carver herself appeared, and all the gentlemen rose to their feet and bowed. She was certainly pretty; small and buxom and fair, with her hair plaited and wound about her head, and clad in a plain white muslin gown. Miss Lester introduced us one by one; the sitters were more elaborately and expensively dressed than Mrs Veasey’s, but the only
name I would recall was that of Mr Thorne, a tall, fair-haired young man sitting across the table from me. Something in his expression – a hint of sardonic amusement? – attracted my attention, and I noticed that Miss Carver looked very hard at him when his turn came to be introduced.

I knew that in these séances the medium sat within the cabinet, but I was surprised when, at a signal from Miss Carver, several of the gentlemen (but not Mr Thorne) accompanied her to the alcove and watched while Miss Lester, using what appeared to be silk scarves, tied her securely to the chair. The knots were examined; the gentlemen returned to their places; Miss Lester extinguished the light in the cabinet, drew the curtains, and asked us all to join hands. ‘You must not break the circle unless a spirit invites you to,’ she said. ‘The manifestations are a great strain for Miss Carver, and she may be harmed if you do not do exactly as instructed.’ She then invited us to sing ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, took up the candelabra and went quietly from the room, leaving us in complete darkness.

We had sung perhaps half a dozen hymns, led by a strong baritone voice somewhere on my right, when I became aware of a faint glow from the direction of the cabinet. It brightened into a luminous halo, hovering around the outline of a head, and seemed to unfurl downward into the figure of a woman, veiled in draperies of light. She glided away from the cabinet and began a circuit of the table. As she came nearer I could see the movement of her limbs beneath the veil, and then the gleam of eyes and the suggestion of a smile. Her effect was manifest in the quickened breathing of my companions.

‘Arabella,’ said a male voice from the darkness to my left, ‘will you come to me?’

She passed behind my chair, trailing a distinct odour of perfume (and, I thought, of flesh), drifted closer to the table until the man who had spoken was faintly illuminated by the glow of her robes, and kissed the top of his bald head, prompting a deep sigh from the audience before she glided away again. She had gone about three-quarters of the way
round when I heard a muffled exclamation and the scrape of a chair, and another light floated up from the darkness in front of her: a small phial of radiance, lighting up the face of Mr Thorne as he stretched out his other hand and grasped the retreating spirit by the wrist.

‘There is no need to struggle, Miss Carver,’ he said drily. ‘My name is Vernon Raphael, from the Society for Psychical Research. Would you care to explain yourself to the company?’

The room was suddenly in uproar. My hands were released, chairs were overthrown, and several matches flared, showing Mr Thorne – or rather Mr Raphael – holding at arm’s length a very angry Miss Carver, whose stays and drawers were plainly visible beneath diaphanous layers of what appeared to be butter muslin. A second later she had torn herself free and darted back into the cabinet, wrenching the curtains closed behind her.

I expected the sitters to drag her out again, but to my astonishment several of the men seized Vernon Raphael instead, calling his intervention an outrage and a violation and a damned disgrace as they propelled him towards the door. On impulse I rose and followed them. ‘All right, all right; I’ll go quietly,’ I heard Vernon Raphael say as they hustled him down the front steps. His hat was flung after him into the street. With no one taking the slightest notice of me, I took my cloak and bonnet from the hall-stand and followed him down the steps. There I waited until I heard the door close behind me; Vernon Raphael was walking slowly away, brushing the dirt from his hat.

He looked at me ruefully as I came up beside him.

‘Have you too come to reproach me with cruelty to spirits, Miss er –?’

‘Miss Langton. And no, I have not; I only wanted ...’

I paused, wondering what exactly I did want of him. In daylight his hair was straw-coloured, with a reddish tinge; his eyes were an intense, rather cold shade of blue, and his face had a slightly vulpine cast, but I liked the humorous edge to his voice. We began to walk again; it was late in the afternoon, and the street was relatively quiet.

‘Are you employed by the Society, Mr Raphael, to seek out fraud?’ Mrs
Veasey had warned me against the Society for Psychical Research; sceptics and unbelievers, she called them, with no respect for the departed.

‘Well yes, in a way; I am one of their professional investigators, but detecting fraud is only part of my work – more of a hobby, in fact. And you, Miss Langton? What brings you to Miss Carver’s parlour?’

Again I wished I had not revealed my name; what if he were to turn his attentions to Holborn? But then it struck me that we had little to fear, now that I knew him.

‘Curiosity,’ I said. ‘Do you think, Mr Raphael, that all spirit mediums are cheats?’

‘All manifestation mediums, yes.’

‘And mental mediums?’ I had heard the term from Mrs Veasey.

He looked at me curiously.

‘I see you know something of the subject. Some are frauds; the others mostly self-deluded.’

‘Mostly?’

‘Well ... I am a sceptic, not an out-and-out atheist – not yet, at any rate. Gurney and Myers – you know of them? – have assembled some very remarkable cases; they are looking at subjects who claim to have seen the apparition of a friend or relation at the moment of that person’s death, but the verdict is not yet in. And you, Miss Langton? What do you believe?’

‘I do not know what I believe, but . . . my sister died when I was five, and my mother has been prostrate with grief ever since. Frankly, Mr Raphael, if I could find a medium who could convince her that Alma is safe in heaven, I would want her to have that comfort. And so I wondered ... whether there is anyone you could recommend.’

‘My business, Miss Langton’ – he sounded more amused than indignant – ‘is to expose frauds, not to recommend them.’

‘It is all very well for you, Mr Raphael, who are clever and confident and at home in the world, but for those like my mother, who are simply crushed by the weight of grief, why deprive them of the comfort a séance can bring?’

‘Because it is false comfort.’

‘That is a harsh doctrine, Mr Raphael; a man’s creed, if I may say so. Have you never lied, or kept silent, to spare the feelings of another? If you had lost a brother, let us say, and your mother were to be as stricken as mine has been, would you sternly insist – as my father did – that she take no comfort in séances?’

He looked, to do him justice, a little abashed.

‘I confess, Miss Langton, that I should be reluctant to disabuse her. But, to take the other side of the coin, what of those mediums who prey unscrupulously – for monetary gain – upon the bereaved? Do you think they should be allowed free rein?’

‘I suppose not,’ I said reluctantly. ‘But they are not all like that.’

‘You speak from experience, evidently.’

‘Only a little ... So there is no one, then, that you are prepared to name?’

‘Surely, Miss Langton, your mother needs the help of a doctor, not a medium.’

‘A doctor has been seeing her for the last twelve years,’ I said, ‘without doing her the slightest good.’

‘I see ... The difficulty, Miss Langton, is that if I were to direct you to a known, or even a suspected fraud, I would be breaching my duty to the Society. And besides ... Miss Carver is generally considered the best in London; you have seen for yourself how zealously her admirers defend her.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘after today, her reputation is lost for ever.’

‘Not at all,’ he said cheerfully. ‘There will be a furore in the spiritualist press, and some of her followers will fall away, but others will replace them. It is all part of the game.’

‘Is that how it seems to you?’

His reply was lost in the cry of a street vendor; we were approaching Oxford Street and the traffic was increasing.