Chapter One
THE SPIRITIST
Ectoplasm was the tattletale of the amateur. That was the opinion of William Grant, and hadn’t he made a detailed and considered study of the phenomenon? Ectoplasm was, his opinion continued, trite and workaday and – worst of all – a mark of desperation. How poorly conducted must a séance be to require strands of extra-mortal material be produced to convince the sitters that the spiritist involved was worth the candle or, more exactly, the fee for the session? No, no, no. A properly conducted séance (note the acute accent) was, at its heart, a performance, and it is a poor performer who relies on props. Effusions of ectoplasm, accompanied by the undignified cacophony of rattles, tambourines, and trumpets played by an unseen ensemble, those might impress the yokels in the sticks and even the petite bourgeoisie in their homogeneous villas clustered in suburban cantons, but these were not the rabbits for which William Grant cared to set his snares. He preferred bigger beasts possessed of more rarefied sensibilities and substantially larger financial resources.
For an example, take the household of Mrs Iris Donnelly, a new widow of six weeks standing, and likely longer had she but known it. Six weeks since the Lutine Bell struck dolefully on the floor of the Underwriter’s Room at the Royal Exchange to mark the loss of Her Majesty’s gunboat the HMS Bellevue, overdue at Cape Town, presumed devoured by a squall somewhere down Africa’s western coast. Six weeks now, and for forty-six more shall the black crape hang upon the pictures and mantels of the house, the mirrors remain covered, and Mrs Donnelly wear the weeds. It was a large house and well appointed, for Captain Donnelly was, as an aside, independently wealthy thanks to the investments of his father, which – by dint of being an only child –he had inherited only a couple of years before. But now he was gone, and his poor widow was not so very poor. After a decent period, there were plenty of bachelors who would be laying their suits at her door. Before then, however, Mrs Donnelly’s worth would be decreased by a useful sum if William Grant had anything to do with it.
It had taken satisfyingly little work to gain an invitation; the reputation of Grant’s enterprise was good among the chattering class, and this privately amused him – so subtle was the manner of criminality that he practised nowadays that new victims lined up to be fleeced just as sheep follow the shepherd. It was all, he had long since concluded, a matter of managing expectations. That, and having the best partner a chap in his line could possibly wish for.
He had carried out his preliminary interview with the prospective client, Mrs Donnelly, and been pleased to note in passing how well appointed and tastefully the house was presented. He also noted a couple of items of Catholic iconography (on display but in shadowed corners, faith and society being slightly at odds). He didn’t care; if people wanted to believe in God or gods it was all the same to him, a vulnerability to the occult. An exploitable vulnerability. The interview had, otherwise, not been especially helpful. Mrs Donnelly was distracted by her abiding grief, and that was good in and of itself because the capacity of the distracted to accept the objectively absurd is so much greater. From the perspective of a reconnoitre into the blasted moor of her grief, however, it was useless, and Grant determined to be doubly sure of his background research. Lizzie was a wonder it was true, but he couldn’t send her in without at least some ammunition.
Except, now that they stood on the doorstep of the house some five days later, she was not Lizzie. No, “Lizzie Whittle” was not a suitable name, nor even “Elizabeth Whittle”, not for a spiritist renowned within the whispered conversations of the middle class. No, standing with Grant on that doorstep
was no less than the new darling of the metropolis’ darkened parlours, Miss Cerulia Trent. In her mid-twenties, fashionably coiffed, elegantly but not fustily dressed, understated jet jewellery, every detail was intended to project a quiet, otherworldly focus, right down to the careful softening and pumicing of her palms and fingers to remove every trace of her East End youth.
The door was answered by a middle-aged man, definitely not the butler and Grant read the situation immediately from previous experience. The servants had either been given the evening off and told in no uncertain terms not to be back until ten, or they were confined to barracks for the duration. This man was a friend, and Grant saw only curiosity in his face, not scepticism. Good. It was trite and uncomfortable if they had to trot out “negative emanations” from “unsympathetic minds” in order to put the kibosh upon a session. Lizzie could use a good sympathetic friend as a fulcrum to turn an evening to their advantage with such grace that it took an effort for Grant not to applaud at the sheer chutzpah of it. It was like being savvy with how a conjurer does a trick and yet still in awe at the flawless spectacle of expertise in motion.
Lizzie had always been good with people. Grant had seen that right from the first day he clapped eyes on her not even two years before. He’d not been long in the great city himself, and had almost instantly got himself the nickname of “Manchester” among the crowd within which he moved, out in his first digs in Spitalfields. It was not a nickname he wanted to keep. He’d left that northern city under, if not a cloud, then certainly a light mist of suspicion. Manchester Police’s detective division was starting to take an interest in his activities, and that was bad enough, but when he dabbled in quack medicines, he discovered too late that he had stumbled upon the personal bête noire of the great man himself, Detective Inspector Jerome Caminada. Caminada regarded quacks with a biblical loathing and, when Grant heard that he’d been asking around after his modest enterprise, Grant was off to Manchester London Road Station the next morning with a hastily packed trunk to buy a one-way ticket to the capital. A Mancunian born and bred, he hated to leave, but if there was one corner of Manchester that he had never yet experienced it was Strangeways Prison, and he would forego the pleasure of its hospitality all his born days if he had any say on the matter.
It had taken time and elocution lessons, but he no longer sounded Mancunian except in extremes when he might forget himself. Now he possessed a generic sort of London accent at which no one in that city would raise an eyebrow. He hated it – the accent sat in his mouth, throat, and sinus like a fistful of gravel – but it was camouflage. He hoped for the day when he was wealthy enough to go elsewhere, drop the pretence, and start enjoying vowels again. He just hoped that he hadn’t entirely forgotten how
to sound like a normal human being by then, and would not be forced to spend the rest of his days as a Londoner.
Elizabeth Whittle, by contrast, had been born in the East End, and when he first met her he had called her a cat because she yowled and spat so much. She wasn’t working the streets yet – a small miracle given her looks – but he could see that it was on the cards, and he decided on an impulse to take her under his wing. The act turned out to been more brotherlike than he had at first anticipated and, somewhat to his own surprise, he had never taken her to his bed. Soon enough, their relationship settled into those platonic lines, and he realised that he never would, a resolution that bemused him more than it disappointed.
For her part, Lizzie was an adroit pupil, shedding her own accent for something more refined far more easily than he had abandoned his own. What especially engaged him, however, was her way with people. It went far beyond simply being affable or approachable; she showed a, sometimes disconcerting, aptitude for reading people as easily as if they had stuck a scrap of paper bearing their intentions and inner thoughts upon their foreheads in a particularly frank parlour game.
“Regular Sherlock Holmes, you are, girl,” he had once said to her.
“Lay off!” she replied, laughing. She didn’t laugh often, the metamorphosis from Lizzie Whittle to Cerulia Trent having made her more serious and self-contained, and so he valued that sound.
As they were led into the Donnelly manse, the silence of the house weighed upon Grant, the air of an endless wake afflicting his nerve and, not for the first time, making him wonder how doggedly the Metropolitan Police might pursue harmless purveyors of useless medicines. But that was him; Lizzie – Cerulia – bloomed in that atmosphere of enduring grief; her eyes brightened, and she looked around the gloomy hallway – darkly and dirtily panelled a century before and the walls disfigured with unremarkable prints of assorted naval vessels – and smiled slightly as if she could see friendly spirits upon the parquet and stairs. The family friend paused to look at her curiously, and she turned her smile upon him.
“This is not such an unhappy house, I think. The dead are not resentful.” She closed her eyes and then opened them a moment later, focusing squarely upon the man’s own. It was a simple tactic, pure stagecraft, yet subtly mesmeric in its effect. “I think we may well find Captain Donnelly tonight.”
These latter words made the man blink and frown, and Grant instantly knew that all was not right. Lizzie must have, too, but she maintained her serenity because Lizzie was never aught but a marvel, and could show grace under pressures that would buckle a diving bell.
“But the intention… which is to say, the purpose of this evening’s meeting is not to speak to the captain,” said the man.
Grant raised an eyebrow.
Inwardly, he stormed. He had spent days researching every publicly available fact about Captain Ernest Donnelly, late of the HMS Bellevue, late of this world. He knew his service career, his club, his family, his schooling, his interests. Ye gods and little fish, he knew Donnelly’s shoe size thanks to a chatty cobbler. He had rendered every fact onto lists written in clear block capitals, and Lizzie had sat and read them through time and again until she could rattle off anything with which he tested her. All that effort, and all for naught.
That is what he felt. What he said was, “Oh?”
At that moment, Mrs Donnelly entered the hall with a brace of spinster friends in tow. “Mr Grant!” she said, a far more alert creature than the one he had interviewed a few days before. She looked at Lizzie. “And you must be Miss Trent? I am so glad that you’ve come. I have heard such wonderful things about you!”
“Mrs Donnelly,” said Grant, “I think we must have been speaking at cross purposes when last I visited. I was given the impression that you wished to communicate with your husband?”
“Oh!” Mrs Donnelly considered this. “Did I say that?”
Grant thought back on it, and his heart froze. No, he didn’t remember her being so specific now he turned his mind to it. He had assumed that was what she wanted based on her recent bereavement, and had taken every reference to “him” to mean the lost captain. Now it transpired that the séance was for some other random soul of which they had no prior intelligence. It could be her childhood puppy for all they knew.
“Ah,” said Miss Cerulia Trent blandly, “then there has been an unfortunate misunderstanding. I have spent the last day or two attuning myself to find your husband.”
Grant could have kissed her. She was buying time to arrange for another session during which the mistake could be repaired.
Except… no, that wasn’t Cerulia Trent’s plan at all.
“But,” she continued, gifting Mrs Donnelly a strange, dreamlike smile, “paradoxically, James is closer still. I can offer no guarantees as to the clarity of communication, but…” the smile faded and Trent’s eyes – it was impossible to think of her as Lizzie Whittle when she was like this – lost focus, seeking out a higher plain just beyond the veil, “… he is here.”
Grant wracked his memory. James? That was the name of the Donnellys’ older son. Their younger, Reginald, was currently away at boarding school. Yes, James had died, what? Two, three years ago?
“He will not enter into me,” said Trent, her eyes closing, her forehead furrowing. “He is… diffident. Apologetic. I will speak as he speaks, an echo. I…” Her face slackened, and her eyes opened, exposing only whites. One of the spinsters behind Mrs Donnelly gasped at the sight. “Mama.” Her voice had become oddly toneless, the voice of a somniloquist. “I am so sorry,
Can you ever forgive me?”
“James?” Mrs Donnelly said in a ghastly whisper. “Is that truly you?”
“I should have said no to Papa. I would still be here for you now if I had.”
“Your father always had to have his way,” said Mrs Donnelly. Grant saw the tears start in her eyes and part of him curdled. He hated it when they cried, but he always forgot how much he hated it after their cheques cleared, only to be reminded the next time. “Now the sea has taken you both from me.”
“It was the yellow fever, Mama. I caught it when we went ashore at Maceio.” A ruminative pause. “I thought I was getting better.”
“He took you from me!” She was crying freely now. The spinster who had not gasped stood by her and put her arm around her. “Stupid, stupid man! He always had to have the last word!”
“Papa knows he was wrong.”
Mrs Donnelly looked up suddenly at this.
“He will not speak. He carries his own purgatory with him. I have forgiven him. Please, Mama, you must forgive him, too. He only ever wanted what he thought was best for me, and that was to be like him.”
“I cannot,” she said in a small voice. “He has taken too much from me.”
“Then think of Reggie. He is blameless in all this. Think of his future. I shall watch over you both, always, and so shall Papa. What is done is done. Please allow for my hope that, one day, you will forgive him, too. I love you, Mama.”
Miss Cerulia Trent blinked and, when she did, her eyes ceased to be so alarming. “He’s gone,” she said faintly. “May I sit down?”
•••
William Grant didn’t know whether to be delighted, angry, or terrified, so he settled for astonished. They were in a hansom on its way to the Kensington house where they both had rooms. Miss Trent had neither offered nor been pressed to repeat the experiment, and the next hour had been occupied by a gathering in repressed spirits while the little visitation had been discussed. Miss Trent had, he had noted, got in quickly with an explanation that the late James Donnelly had not communicated with her in words exactly, so she had interpreted his intentions into the clumsy mode of mortal speech, thus forestalling any pettifogging complaints as to “That is not how he used to speak”. As it was, Mrs Donnelly said that was exactly the way James used to speak, and this was confirmed by those of her friends who had known the man in life.
“There weren’t nowt in what I wrote about yellow fever, Lizzie. Where’d that come from?”
In the oblique light from the streetlights as the hansom rattled along, he could see her profile and that she was smiling. “You’re talking like a northern barbarian again, Bill Grant,” she said.
She was right, which didn't
improve his temper. He realigned his speech into the hated mode, and tried again. “Don’t change the subject. How’d you know about the yellow fever? And wherever he caught it?”
“Insurance. I went to the library and went through the newspaper archive. You read the captain’s death announcement, didn’t you? The one for James is very different. Chalk and cheese. The one for James is much more personal. Flowery, even. Losing him broke his mother’s heart. Captain Donnelly’s loss was presented as dry as sand in the Sahara.”
“And it mentioned yellow fever?”
“Oh, no. Just a fatal sickness. So I dressed as a scullery maid looking for work and got chatting with their butler at the back door. He was very helpful.” She laughed a half-laugh that emerged from her nostrils as a derisive snort. “Men are such awful gossips.”
“You did what?”
“I got the job done, didn’t I? Told me about the old man bullying his son into the service, and then what killed James in Brazil.” She reached into her reticule and produced a small bag that chinked pleasingly when she shook it. “No idea how much is in here, seemed rude to ask at the time, but it’s gold. Certainly worth the effort we expended to get it.”
“Lizzie bloody Whittle.” He shook his head. “You’re a prodigy at this game.”
“The name’s Miss Cerulia bloody Trent,” she replied and there was a smirk in her voice as she said it.
•••
The house in Kensington was cosmopolitan enough that smelling salts were not required at the sight of a single woman entering the apartments of a gentleman, or vice versa. Grant preferred to visit Miss Cerulia Trent than have her visit him, as he felt his rooms were, at best, utilitarian and, at worst, boring. He had never quite got the hang of decoration. There were some bits and pieces of exotica that he had bought off market barrows with the hope that he might seem travelled and worldly-wise, but there was no coherence in his choices and the effect was of somebody who’d just randomly bought a lot of things off market barrows. He had also bought a collection of eighty year-old hunting scenes and hung them around the place, having thought they might lend it some old world gravitas. The first time Lizzie, which is to say Cerulia, had clapped eyes upon them, she had said nothing but only given him a sideways glance that he did not like at all. Now, the ludicrous men in their hunting pink, jumping over hedgerows on anatomically unlikely horses embarrassed him, and it was only the spectre of blank walls that prevented him selling them again. He needed something better, but what constituted “better” evaded him in his wounded aesthetic.
The rooms of Miss Cerulia Trent, in comparison, were lavishly appointed and perfect as
a consultancy space for those clients that wished to come to her. Gewgaws and bric-a-brac from Rome to Tokyo clustered the surfaces and the walls, silken embroideries draped the furniture which itself was tastefully outré and more than enough to satisfy any visitor that they were in the den of an impressive intellect out of the norm. That it had all been selected by a former market girl out of the East End with no formal education but yet possessed of a quick, resourceful, and hungry mind may have amused Lizzie. It certainly amused Grant, who had appreciated from an early age that the greatest asset of the upper echelons lay in their inherited wealth and the opportunities it offered, not in their breeding such as it was.
Grant liked those rooms. Sitting there amidst the artefacts of a dozen other cultures, he felt somehow transported himself, and that beyond the heavy velvet curtains upon the windows lay something greater and more unfathomably exotic than a grimy city full of coppers who would have him up before the beak in a heartbeat if they should even once get an inkling of what he was up to.
Lizzie was standing before the guarded fireplace, looking at the brass Buddha that sat there on the mantelpiece beside a quietly ticking French carriage clock. “Do you believe in God?” she asked suddenly.
Inured to her odd little moments of philosophical inquiry, he replied, “Yes”, instantly.
“Why?”
That stumped Grant, for the honest answer would have been, “Because everybody else does”, but that didn’t strike him as very satisfying even to himself.
Lizzie watched him struggle in unfamiliar territory for a few seconds before saying, “What sort of kind, benevolent god would have killed James Donnelly like that, and driven a wedge between his father and mother such that she could hardly give a tuppenny damn when her husband died?” She touched the cheek of the Buddha with her fingertip. “I sometimes think the Buddhists might be onto something, you know. What goes around comes around.”
“Is that what they believe?” said Grant, who had no idea what Buddhists might think, or even where on the globe he might find Buddhaland.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but in essence, yes.”
“Well,” said Grant, rising and helping himself to a sweet sherry from the unlocked tantalus as it was becoming evident that Lizzie wasn’t going to offer him one, “given what we’re up to, it’s probably just as well that they’re wrong.”
She looked at him. “So, you prefer Hell?” He had no answer to that, either, so she added, “To the Buddhists, life is a treadmill to become divine. To them, we’re
already living in Hell.”
Grant busied himself with his glass; there was no talking with Lizzie when she was being so very Cerulia. “They may be onto something, there. Drink, Lizzie?”
She shook her head. “Divvy up the take, Bill, there’s a love. I’m tired.”
He took the bag from her reticule and emptied it onto the table. He whistled at the sight of so many gold sovereigns before starting to separate them into two equal mounds. There was an uneven number, and he slid the spare to Lizzie’s stack without hesitation. The evening had gone from near disaster to unexpected triumph thanks to her after all, and William Grant was the fairest of criminals. “How are we going to move next with Mrs Donnelly? Have you got anything in mind?”
Lizzie shook her head. “For her, nothing. If she invites us again, I shall regretfully tell her ‘no’. Her son has moved on to a better place and her husband is too ashamed to ever speak to her again. She still has Reginald and should concentrate her efforts on raising him properly. At some point, her anger with her husband will fade and then her grief will open like a wound. Her suffering isn’t over yet. We won’t add to it.”
Grant scooped up his share and put it in his pocket. “Is that a conscience you’re getting, girl?”
She turned to face him, crossing her arms. “I’ve never lacked for one, Bill Grant. And nor have you. I saw your face tonight. Next time, let’s stick to people what have got it coming, eh?” She considered her words. “I mean, let’s stick to people that have it coming. Bloody hell, I’m sounding like I’ve just walked off selling oranges in the halls. I truly am tired. Go on, Bill, sling your hook. I need some sleep before I forget how to be Cerulia Trent altogether.”
Grant laughed, but accepted the cue gracefully. He drained his glass, gathered up his overcoat and hat and went to the door. “Not you, girl. You’re a natural. But I know what you mean. Let’s make our pile and go and do something that won’t get the boys in blue excitable, eh? Mayhap we should leave London, hmmm? Try our luck in France.”
Lizzie smiled and shook her head. “You and bloody France. You don’t even speak the lingo.”
“I speak a bit of the parlez-vous,” he said, stung.
“You’ll need more than a bit if we’re going to be the wolves over there and not the sheep.” She looked off into the middle distance. “Maybe I could learn it.”
“Maybe you could,” said Grant, confident that she probably could and would certainly have a better accent than him, but mainly pleased that she was at least accepting the possibility of falling upon the monied French. He’d heard stories of Gallic wealth that he wished to test and, in any case, it felt more patriotic to rob foreigners.
She read him as easily then as she read any of the other books she had amassed in the adjoining room it pleased her to call her library. “No promises, Bill Grant, but maybe a change of scenery wouldn’t be so awful. Now clear off. Madam Cerulia Trent requires her beauty sleep.”
Chapter Two
TWO VISITORS
And so this was the nature of the business of Miss Cerulia Trent and Mr William Grant: ...
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