The Wizard of London (10 page)

“Are
there other spirits here tonight?” Two raps. “Is there a spirit for
the child Nan?” Two raps. “Is it her father?” One rap.
“Her mother?” Two raps, and Nan had to control her temper, which
flared at that moment. She knew very well that her mother was still alive,
though at the rate she was going, she probably wouldn’t be for long, what
with the gin and the opium and the rest of her miserable life. But if she had
been a young orphan, her parents dead in some foreign land like one or two of
the other pupils, what would she not have given for the barest word from them,
however illusory? Would she not have been willing to believe anything that
sounded warm and kind?

There
appeared to be no spirit for Sarah, which was just as well. Madame Varonsky was
ready to pull out the next of her tricks, for the floating objects settled to
the table again.

“My
spirit guide was known in life as the great Paganini, the master
violinist,” Madame Varonsky announced. “As music is the food of the
soul, he will employ the same sweet music he made in life to bridge the gap
between our world and the next. Listen, and he will play this instrument before
us!”

Fiddle
music appeared to come from the instrument on the table, although the bow did
not actually move across the strings. Katherine gasped.

“Release
the child’s hand a moment and touch the violin, dear Katherine,“
the medium said, in a kind, but distant voice. Katherine evidently let go of
Sarah’s hand, since she still had hold of Nan’s, and the shadow of
her fingers rested for a moment on the neck of the fiddle.

“The
strings!” she cried. “Isabelle, the strings are vibrating as they
are played!”

If
this was supposed to be some great, long-dead music master, Nan didn’t
think much of his ability. If she wasn’t mistaken, the tune he was
playing was the child’s chant of “London Bridge Is Falling
Down,” but played very, very slowly, turning it into a solemn dirge.

“Touch
the strings, Isabelle!” Katherine urged. “See for yourself!”

Nan
felt Mem’sab lean forward, and another hand shadow fell over the strings.
“They are vibrating…” she said, her voice suddenly uncertain.

The
music ground to a halt before she took her hand away—and until this
moment, Grey had been as silent as a stuffed bird on a lady’s hat. Now
she did something quite odd.

She
began to sing. It was a very clever imitation of a fiddle, playing a jig tune
that a street musician often played at the gate of the school, for the pennies
the pupils would throw to him.

She
quit almost immediately, but not before Mem’sab took her hand away from
the strings, and Nan sensed that somehow Grey had given her the clue she needed
to solve that particular trick.

But
the medium must have thought that her special spirit was responsible for that
scrap of jig tune, for she didn’t say or do anything.

Nan
sensed that all of this was building to the main turn, and so it was.

Remembering
belatedly that she should be keeping an eye on that suspicious square above,
she glanced up just in time to see it disappear. As the medium began to moan
and sigh, calling on Paganini, Nan kept her eye on the ceiling. Sure enough,
the dim line of light appeared again, forming a grayish square. Then the lines
of the square thickened, and Nan guessed that a square platform was being
lowered from above. Pungent incense smoke thickened about them, filling
Nan’s nose and stinging her eyes so that they watered, and she smothered
a sneeze. It was hard to breathe, and there was something strangely,
disquietingly familiar about the scent.

The
medium’s words, spoken in a harsh, accented voice, cut through the smoke.
“I, the great Paganini, am here among you!”

Once
again, Katherine gasped.

“Harken
and be still! Lo, the spirits gather!”

Nan’s
eyes burned, and for a moment, she felt very dizzy; she thought that the soft
glow in front of her was due to nothing more than eyestrain, but the glow
strengthened, and she blinked in shock as two vague shapes took form amid the
writhing smoke.

For
a new brazier, belching forth such thick smoke that the coals were invisible,
had “appeared” in the center of the table, just behind the
candlestick. It was above this brazier that the glowing shapes hovered, and
slowly took on an identifiable form. Nan felt dizzier, sick; the room seemed to
turn slowly around her.

The
faces of a young woman and a little boy looked vaguely out over Nan’s
head from the cloud of smoke. Katherine began to weep—presumably she
thought she recognized the child as her own. But the fact that the young woman
looked nothing like Nan’s mother (and in fact, looked quite a bit like
the sketch in an advertisement for Bovril in the
Times
) woke Nan out
of her mental haze.

And
so did Grey.

She
heard the flapping of wings as Grey plummeted to the floor. The bird sneezed
urgently, and shouted aloud, “Bad air! Bad air! Bad, bad air!”

And
that was the moment when she knew what it was that was so familiar in the
incense smoke, and why she felt as tipsy as a sailor on shore leave.

“Hashish!”
she choked, trying to shout, and not managing very well. She knew this scent;
on the rare occasions when her mother could afford it—and before
she’d turned to opium—she’d smoked it in preference to
drinking. Nan could only think of one thing; that she must get fresh air in
here before they all passed out!

She
shoved her chair back and staggered up and out of it; it fell behind her with a
clatter that seemed muffled in the smoke. She groped for the brazier as the two
faces continued to stare, unmoved and unmoving, from the thick billows. Her
hands felt like a pair of lead-filled mittens; she had to fight to stay upright
as she swayed like a drunk. She didn’t find it, but her hands closed on
the cool, smooth surface of the crystal ball. That was good enough; before the
medium could stop her, she heaved up the heavy ball with a grunt of effort, and
staggered to the window. She half-spun and flung the ball at the draperies
hiding the unseen window; it hit the drapes and carried them into the glass,
crashing through it, taking the drapery with it.

A
gush of cold air, as fresh as air in London ever got, streamed in through the
broken panes, as bedlam erupted in the room behind Nan.

She
dropped to the floor, ignoring everything around her for the moment, as she
breathed in the air tainted only with smog, waiting for her head to clear. Grey
ran to her and huddled with her rather than joining her beloved mistress in the
poisonous smoke.

Katherine
shrieked in hysteria, there was a man as well as the medium shouting, and
Mem’sab cursed all of them in some strange language.

Grey
gave a terrible shriek and half-ran, half-flew away. Nan fought her dizziness
and disorientation; looked up to see that Mem’sab was struggling in the
grip of a stringy fellow she didn’t recognize. Katherine had been backed
up into one corner by the medium, and Sarah and Grey were pummeling the medium
with small fists and wings. Mem’sab kicked at her captor’s shins
and stamped on his feet with great effect, as his grunts of pain demonstrated.

Nan
struggled to her feet, guessing that she must have been the one worst affected
by the hashish fumes. She wanted to run to Mem’sab’s rescue, but
she couldn’t get her legs to work. In a moment the sour-faced woman would
surely break into the room, turning the balance in favor of the enemy—

The
door did crash open behind her just as she thought that, and she tried to turn
to face the new foe—

But
it was not the foe.

Sahib
charged through the broken door, pushing past Nan and using his cane to belabor
the man holding Mem’sab; within three blows the man was on the floor,
moaning. Before Nan fell, Karamjit caught her and steadied her. More men
flooded into the room, among them, Selim and Agansing who went to the rescue of
Sarah and Grey, and Nan let Karamjit steer her out of the way, concentrating on
those steadying breaths of air. She thought perhaps that she passed out of
consciousness for a while, for when she next noticed anything, she was sitting
bent over in a chair, with Karamjit hovering over her, frowning. At some point
the brazier had been extinguished, and a policeman was collecting the ashes and
the remains of the drug-laced incense.

It
was a while before her head cleared; by then, the struggle was over. The medium
and her fellow tricksters were in the custody of the police, who had come with
Sahib when Nan threw the crystal ball through the window. Sahib was talking to
a policeman with a sergeant’s badge, and Nan guessed that he was
explaining what Mem’sab and Katherine were doing here. Katherine wept in
a corner, comforted by Mem’sab. The police had brought lamps into the
séance room from the sitting room, showing all too clearly how the medium
had achieved her work; a hatch in the ceiling to the room above, through which
things could be lowered; a magic lantern behind the drapes, which had cast its
image of a woman and boy onto the thick brazier smoke. That, and the
disorienting effect of the hashish, had made it easy to trick the clients.

Finally,
the bobbies took their captives away, and Katherine stopped crying. Nan and
Sarah sat on the chairs Karamjit had set up, watching the adults, Grey on her
usual perch on Sarah’s shoulder. A cushion stuffed in the broken window
cut off most of the cold air from outside.

“I
can’t believe I was so foolish!” Katherine moaned.
“But—I wanted to see Edward so very much—”

“I
hardly think that falling for a clever deception backed by drugs makes you
foolish, my dear lady,” Sahib said gravely. “But you are to count
yourself fortunate in the loyalty of your friends, who were willing to place
themselves in danger for you. I do not think that these people would have been
willing to stop at mere fraud, and neither do the police.”

His
last words made no impression on Katherine, at least none that Nan
saw—but she did turn to Mem’sab and clasp her hand fervently.
“I thought so ill of you, that you would not believe in Madame,”
she said tearfully. “Can you forgive me?”

Mem’sab
smiled. “Always, my dear,” she said, in the voice she used to
soothe a frightened child. “Since your motive was to enlighten me, not to
harm me—and your motive in seeking your poor child’s
spirit—”

A
chill passed over Nan at that moment that had nothing to do with the outside
air. She looked sharply at Sarah, and saw a very curious thing.

There
was a very vague and shimmery shape standing in front of Sarah’s chair;
Sarah looked at it with an intense and thoughtful gaze, as if she was listening
to it. More than that, Grey was doing the same. Nan got the distinct impression
that it was asking her friend for a favor.

Grey
and Sarah exchanged a glance, and the parrot nodded once, as grave and sober as
a parson, then spread her wings as if sheltering Sarah like a chick. The
shimmering form melted into Sarah; her features took on a mischievous
expression that Nan had never seen her wear before, and she got up and went
directly to Katherine. The woman looked up at her, startled at the intrusion of
a child into an adult discussion, then paled at something she saw in
Sarah’s face.

“Oh,
Mummy, you don’t have to be so sad,” Sarah said in a curiously
hollow, piping soprano. “I’m all right, really, and it wasn’t
your fault anyway, it was that horrid Lord Babington that made you and Papa
send me to Overton. But you must stop crying, please! Laurie is already scared
of being left, and you’re scaring her more.”

Now,
Nan knew very well that Mem’sab had not said anything about a Lord
Babington, nor did she and Sarah know what school the poor little boy had been
sent to. Yet she wasn’t frightened; in fact, the protective but calm look
in Grey’s eye made her feel rather good, as if something inside her told
her that everything was going wonderfully well.

The
effect on Katherine was not what Nan had expected either. She reached out
tentatively, as if to touch Sarah’s face, but stopped short. “This
is you, isn’t it, darling?” she asked in a whisper.

Sarah
nodded—or was it Edward who nodded? “Now, I’ve got to go,
Mummy, and I can’t come back. So don’t look for me, and don’t
cry anymore.”

The
shimmering withdrew, forming into a brilliant ball of light at about the level
of Sarah’s heart, then shot off, so fast that Nan couldn’t follow
it. Grey pulled in her wings, and Sarah shook her head a little, then regarded
Katherine with a particularly measuring expression before coming back to her
chair and sitting down.

“Out
of the mouths of babes, Katherine,” Mem’sab said quietly, then
looked up at Karamjit. “I think you and Selim should take the girls home
now; they’ve had more than enough excitement for one night. Agansing can
stay here with us while we deal with the results of this night’s
adventure.”

Karamjit
bowed silently, and Grey added her own vote. “Wan’ go back,”
she said in a decidedly firm tone. When Selim brought their coats and helped
them to put them on, Grey climbed right back inside Sarah’s, and
didn’t even put her head back out again.

They
didn’t have to go home in a cab either; Katherine sent them back to the
school in her own carriage, which was quite a treat for Nan, who’d had no
notion that a private carriage would come equipped with such comforts as heated
bricks for the feet and fur robes to bundle in. Nan didn’t say anything
to Sarah about the aftermath of the séance until they were alone
together in their room and Karamjit and Selim had returned to Mem’sab and
Sahib.

Only
then, as Grey took her accustomed perch on the headboard of Sarah’s bed,
did Nan look at her friend and ask—

Sarah
nodded. “I could see him, clear as clear, too.” She smiled a
little. “He must’ve been a horrid brat at times, but he really
wasn’t bad, just spoiled enough to be a bit selfish, and he’s
been—learning better manners, since.”