Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (21 page)

In the lounge car, the insomniacs:

a woman playing Solitaire,

the conductor

telling three Minnesota ladies

about his past lives,

a teenage boy, protected

by headphones, staring into the vast

darkness beyond the windows.

The cards

growl through her hands;

she lays them down,

making patterns, looking

for some small meaning.

The Black Death, the conductor

tells the ladies.

It was the third time I had

died in Rome.

The pattern comes to

nothing. She sweeps

the cards together,

shuffles brusquely,

lays them down again.

Egypt, says the

conductor. I

was a priest of Anubis.

I spent my

days among the dead.

A snarl,

a failure.

With impatient hands, she

gathers the cards, lays them down.

The teenage boy rocks

gently to the music only

he can hear. The night

pours past, another river,

like the Mississippi

they have already crossed.

But the night is a river

we are all still crossing.

I was a woman

once, the conductor says.

A Cherokee woman. I died

on the Trail of Tears. I remember

how tired I was, and

how everything tasted of destruction.

She picks up the

cards and deals again.

“I beg your pardon, my dear,” said the ugly little man in the amazing waistcoat, “but could you do me the inestimable honor of lending me a hand?”

Harriet Winterbourn paused in the doorway. “You’re the medium, aren’t you? Mr. Venefidezzi?”

“
Doctor
Venefidezzi. At your service.” He really
was
a most remarkably ugly little man, pug-nosed, with a wide, flexible mouth, and wide-spaced eyes of a nearly colorless blue. His fine, flyaway hair, too long for current fashion, was reddish-blond going gray. His diction was perfect Oxonian; despite his exotic name, Harriet suspected uncharitably that English was his native language. He was dressed with unexceptionable propriety in dark gray broadcloth, except for the black silk waistcoat embroidered in a barbaric welter of crimson and gold dragons. “It really won’t take but a moment.”

“What do you need?” Harriet said by reflex. For five years, she had been the paid companion of old Mrs. Latham—and unpaid seamstress, secretary, and general factotum for the younger Mrs. Latham and her daughters, Virginia and Claudia—and sometimes thought that helpfulness was the only personal characteristic remaining to her (if one could even call it that), all the others having been pressed to death between old Mrs. Latham’s venomous and ceaseless misanthropy and young Mrs. Latham’s iron dominion over the household of Chisholm End.

“It’s the epergne,” said Dr. Venefidezzi. “I don’t like it.”

Looking at the epergne, Harriet could not blame him. The room the younger Mrs. Latham had chosen for the night’s séance was the second-best drawing room, known in the parlance of the house as the Blue Room. It was supposedly haunted; no one seemed to know by whom or what, though the servants muttered that old Mrs. Latham had brought something with her when she married into the family. The Blue Room was unpopular, both with the family and with the servants; consequently it served as a sort of oubliette for furnishings unsuitable to the rigorously careful taste of the rest of the house. The epergne, Harriet remembered dimly, had been a present from old Mrs. Latham’s cousin Emmeline, who lived in Bath. It was the size of a Russian samovar and looked like the unfortunate offspring of a pineapple and the palace of Versailles.

“I was wondering,” Dr. Venefidezzi said, after a moment’s pause as if to let the vileness of the epergne speak for itself, “if there might be some place to which it could be relocated. The bottom of a nice, deep mine shaft would be my first choice, but I imagine that notion would not be well-received.”

“No, but there’s a closet under the servant’s stair where it won’t come to any harm. Does it disturb the vibrations?” Five years at Chisholm End had also given Harriet a good working knowledge of the parlance of mediums and mystics, both the dubiously genuine and the out-and-out fakes, and she asked mostly from malice.

Dr. Venefidezzi gave her a look of comic appallment which made her want to laugh, despite the tension throbbing in her head. “Well, of
course
it does, dear girl. Not to mention it would scare a gorgon into spasms. Where’s this closet of yours?”

“This way,” said Harriet. He picked up the epergne and followed her to the left down the hall, through the baize doors, to a low, white-painted door. “Here,” Harriet said. “Just remember to tell Mrs. Latham or Mrs. Brennigan what—”

“HARRIET!” The voice echoed only dimly down the stairs, but Harriet jumped as if she’d been shot.

“I have to go,” she said and scurried away, abandoning the medium and the epergne in the middle of the hall.

When Harriet came panting back up the stairs with the embroidery frame Mrs. Latham had sent her to retrieve, she closed her heart against the old woman’s abuse and offered no explanation of her “dawdling.” Mrs. Latham was a devotee of Spiritualism, in the same way another woman might have been a devotee of the theater; the information that Dr. Venefidezzi had asked Harriet’s help might well have appeased her. But Harriet found herself reluctant to talk of that brief encounter, the way the little man had treated her, as if she was a reasonable member of the human species, just as he was himself. She feared that anything she said might betray her liking of Dr. Venefidezzi. Mrs. Latham, who approved the plodding, dreary courtship of the fat curate, Mr. Benfelton, would instantly accuse Harriet of being “sweet” on Dr. Venefidezzi, smug in the knowledge that this tactic would prevent Harriet from showing the slightest interest in the medium ever again. Harriet was twenty-nine and plain, and she loathed being teased and pinched at as if she were a girl of Claudia Latham’s age.

Moreover, Mrs. Latham would make sure that the calumny reached the ears of Mr. Benfelton, and he would come to talk to Harriet in maddeningly vague terms about marriage and respectability and his ambitions—and doubtless contrive to stay long enough that he had to be invited to tea. This evening’s one mercy, Harriet reflected as she dressed for dinner, was that he would not be here. Mr. Benfelton was a high-minded man, and he did not approve of mediums.

That dinner turned out to be one of the least uncomfortable meals Harriet had sat through at Chisholm End; ugly and gaudy he might be, but Dr. Venefidezzi talked brilliantly. He told stories of Italia and Graecia and Macedonia, stories about werewolves and vampires and ghouls, and had the entire Latham household hanging breathlessly on his words. He even, at Claudia’s pleading, took off his coat and rolled back his sleeve to show them the scars on his arm, where a werewolf had bitten him. Harriet kept to herself the idea that any large dog could have done the same.

By the time the company rose from the table to make their way to the Blue Room, Virginia and Claudia were wide-eyed and peering nervously into the shadows. The younger Mrs. Latham was pretending indifference, but the way her head snapped around at the creak of a floorboard betrayed her. Old Mrs. Latham wouldn’t have been fazed by finding a vampire in her bed, and Mr. Latham had no imagination and scorned his wife’s habit of séances in any event. He took himself off to his study; Harriet, bringing up the rear of Dr. Venefidezzi’s little procession, wished she could have done the same.

Her place, however, was dancing attendance on old Mrs. Latham. She carried the candelabrum into the Blue Room and closed the door behind her at Dr. Venefidezzi’s request. The medium took some time arranging the Latham ladies around the table; Harriet examined the room, noting approvingly that Dr. Venefidezzi was what she thought of as a “sensible” medium. There were no cabinets for him to be locked into, no array of ropes, none of the paraphernalia that would indicate the tiresome manifestations of ghostly hands and ectoplasmic cheesecloth. His props consisted simply of candles placed on the sideboard, and a bowl with a plain robin’s-egg-blue glaze, filled with water, which was sitting in the middle of the table where the epergne had been.

Old Mrs. Latham was asking about the bowl, in a tone indicating she was ready to be offended at the banishment of her cousin Emmeline’s valuable gift.

“It is necessary,” Dr. Venefidezzi said, handing Claudia to a chair. “My control, you see, was drowned as a child.”

Virginia and Claudia shrieked and twittered with pleasurable alarm, but old Mrs. Latham was satisfied. Without old Mrs. Latham’s satisfaction, nothing happened at Chisholm End; Harriet could not quite tell, from the medium’s face, whether he had deduced that for himself or not.

He seated Harriet last, in the chair next to his own. She observed that he had contrived to place old Mrs. Latham as far from himself as possible, with her daughter-in-law beside her, so that the circle, starting from Dr. Venefidezzi and proceeding widdershins, went: the medium, Harriet, young Mrs. Latham, old Mrs. Latham, Virginia, Claudia.

Dr. Venefidezzi asked them to take hands, as mediums always did. Harriet’s right hand was pinched and prodded by young Mrs. Latham’s rings; her left hand found the medium’s hand, broad and stubby-fingered, warm and dry, unlike the hot, moist hands of Mr. Benfelton.

Dr. Venefidezzi said, “I will ask you not to break the circle, no matter what I may say or what strange sounds you may hear. Nothing in this room can harm you unless you let it.”

That
was rather less comforting than the normal line of patter. Harriet felt a faint stirring of unease, a sense that perhaps Dr. Venefidezzi was not what she thought him. But she glanced sideways at his astonishing waistcoat, his ugly, good-natured face, and told herself not to be a goose.

“My control’s name is Francis. He is a child, and I will ask you not to frighten him. Ask him your questions, ladies.”

Dr. Venefidezzi lowered his head. They sat in stiff, uncomfortable silence for several minutes before the medium threw his head back and cried out, a shout with no words in it. Harriet and Claudia both flinched involuntarily and probably would have broken the circle, except that Dr. Venefidezzi’s hands had tightened on theirs, and he was stronger than he looked.

His eyes came back into focus, but he was someone else. He looked around the circle, wide-eyed and pleased, and said, “Tell me your names!” The voice was a child’s treble—a young child, no more than eight—and the accent sharper, harsher than Dr. Venefidezzi’s perfect Oxford English. A city child, Harriet thought, even a Cockney. The women around the table, nervously impressed by this demonstration of Dr. Venefidezzi’s powers, said their names, and the child repeated, “Harriet, Cecilia, Esther, Virginia, Claudia—pretty ladies! What do the pretty ladies want to know?”

“I want to speak to someone, please,” Virginia said. “James Milverton is his name.” James Milverton had died of influenza four years ago, two months before he and Virginia would have been married. It was the only good thing Harriet knew of Cecilia Latham, that her passion for Spiritualism was at least partly caused by her desire to bring Virginia some comfort.

“Miss Virginia wants Mr. James,” Francis said. “Mr. James is here.”

That was fast, Harriet thought, her unease growing. The medium’s face changed again; it seemed to narrow and lengthen. A trick of the shadows, Harriet told herself desperately. That was, after all, why mediums liked to work by candlelight. But then the medium spoke.

“Ginnie?” he said. His voice had dropped nearly an octave from Dr. Venefidezzi’s normal register, and his vowels had shifted again.

“James!” Virginia gasped.

“Ginnie, I want you to stop this séance nonsense.”

“Oh, James!”

“You’re wasting your life,” the spirit said sternly.

“But, James, I promised. I promised I’d always love you.”

The smile was James Milverton to the life. If Harriet had not been sure herself, the quick indrawn breaths of young Mrs. Latham and Claudia would have told her. “That doesn’t mean you have to be married to my grave.”

Virginia’s eyes were wide, brilliant in the candlelight with her tears. She whispered something, too softly for anyone else to hear it, and managed a small, tremulous smile.

“Good girl,” said James Milverton. Then the medium’s face shifted; the child returned. “Mr. James is gone,” he announced. “Another lady, ask a question! Mrs. Esther? Miss Claudia? Miss Harriet?”

Harriet nearly jumped out of her skin when Francis turned toward her. Before she could come up with any kind of an answer, he said, “There is a spirit who wishes to speak to Miss Harriet. It is an unhappy spirit, Miss Harriet.”

“Oh, go on, Harriet,” Claudia said, giggling.

“Very well,” Harriet said.

The medium’s face changed; she recognized it immediately, painfully: the frowning eyebrows, the drooping mouth. “Papa?”

“Harry, are you all right? I am so sorry.”

“I’m fine, Papa. Really.” She locked her jaw and throat and treacherous heart against the things she wished to say.

One eyebrow quirked. “Are you warm, my daughter? Are you warm?”

And Harriet could not help smiling back. “Quite warm, King Frost.”

“You’re a good girl, Harry. I shouldn’t have left you like that. I am sorry.”

“It’s all right, Papa. I . . . ” She could not say she forgave him, but perhaps that was not what either of them needed. “I love you.”

And her father smiled through the medium’s face and was gone.

“Another question?” said the child.

The Latham women said nothing, Virginia and Claudia and their mother eyeing Harriet as if she were some unexpected and exotic species of snake. The elder Mrs. Latham, as complacent as a snake herself, a well-fed python, was quite visibly storing away Harriet’s revealed weakness for later use. Harriet’s weary hatred of her rooted itself another inch deeper.