Quicksilver

by Amanda Quick

  She pulled up the hood of her cloak and set off briskly into the fogbound afternoon. It was a fifteen-minute walk to the Leybrook Institute. There were usually a number of carriages and cabs parked in the street in front of the large building that housed the Institute’s offices and meeting rooms. This afternoon was no exception. Lectures on the paranormal and demonstrations of psychical powers were given frequently during the week. They attracted enthusiastic audiences, which, in turn, generated clients for practitioners affiliated with the Institute.

  Those who chose to associate with the Institute paid a portion of their fees to Gilmore Leybrook for the privilege, but Virginia considered the cost to be more than worthwhile. Her business had increased dramatically in recent months. She was now making twice what she had earned as a practitioner on her own.

  She went up the broad front steps and into the marble-tiled hall. Fulton, the porter who sold tickets to the lectures and demonstrations, signaled to her.

  “Miss Dean,” he said. “Mr. Welch said you were expected shortly. Asked me to send you straight to his assistant’s office. There is a young lady waiting to see you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fulton.”

  She went down a corridor lined with offices and demonstration rooms. A familiar voice drifted out from behind a closed door. Dr. Gatwood was giving a lecture to a group of fellow researchers.

  “It is clear from my investigations that psychical energy is similar to electrical energy, but rather than passing through wires, it flows in the form of currents through the ether.”

  She went past the door and on down the hall. When she reached Mrs. Fordham’s office she raised her hand to knock. For a few seconds she hesitated. What would she say to the sister she had never met?

  Before she could come up with an answer, Jasper Welch opened the door of the neighboring office.

  “There you are, Miss Dean,” Welch said. He was a serious, scholarly looking man in his early thirties with nondescript light brown hair that was starting to thin. He peered at her through his spectacles. “I see you got the message. Mrs. Fordham tells me the young lady is most eager to speak to you.”

  “I must thank Mrs. Fordham for being so prompt,” Virginia said.

  Welch lowered his voice and cast a meaningful glance at the closed door of his assistant’s office. “Mrs. Fordham informs me that the young lady is obviously very well bred. The girl wouldn’t give her name, but Mrs. Fordham suspects she is the daughter of a very fine family. Just the sort of people Mr. Leybrook likes to encourage as clients, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, Mr. Welch, I know what you mean. If you’ll excuse me?”

  “Of course, of course. See you at the reception tomorrow evening.”

  “Certainly.”

  Welch popped back into his office and closed the door.

  Virginia took a deep breath and knocked.

  “Come in,” Mrs. Fordham called, her crisp, no-nonsense voice tinged with impatience.

  Virginia opened the door. Mrs. Fordham was at her desk. She was a woman of a certain age, prim, gray-haired and a model of painfully erect posture. She regarded Virginia with sharp, birdlike eyes.

  “Miss Dean,” she said crisply. “This is the young lady who is asking for you.”

  She inclined her head toward the girl, who sat, stiff and uncertain, in a wooden chair.

  “Miss Dean?” Elizabeth asked with an air of barely suppressed hope. “I am Elizabeth.”

  My sister, Virginia thought.

  “Hello, Elizabeth,” she said quietly. “Your mother has been very worried about you.”

  Elizabeth blinked, startled. “She spoke with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not want to alarm her. But I had to meet you, and I knew that she would never approve.”

  “I am aware of that, but I must tell you that I sent word to her when I learned that you were here. She is no doubt on her way to collect you.”

  Tears glittered in Elizabeth’s eyes. “But I must talk to you, Miss Dean. I do not know where else to turn.”

  “Why don’t we go downstairs and have some tea while we wait for your mother?”

  The tearoom was located on the ground floor of the Institute. The high Palladian windows looked out onto a large garden planted with a wide variety of herbs and plants reputed to have psychical properties.

  Virginia and Elizabeth sat at a small table, cups and saucers, a pot of oolong and a plate of small, dainty cakes between them. The room was lightly crowded with a mix of outsiders who had come to attend the lectures and demonstrations, as well as a scattering of practitioners and researchers.

  “When I first began seeing lights around people, I thought it was rather entertaining,” Elizabeth said. She munched a bite of cake. “But Mama got upset when I told her about it. She said I must not tell anyone what I could see. Her reaction frightened me. I tried to stop seeing the lights.”

  “But you could not stop perceiving the auras,” Virginia said.

  “Well, I could stifle the urge for a time, but it was like closing my eyes or holding my breath. After a while I just had to look.”

  “That is because using your talent is as natural and intuitive as using any of your other senses, like vision or hearing or touch. It must have been very difficult for you, coming into your new senses with no one to guide you.”

  “Mama said it was just my imagination. She said that if I told other people, everyone would think that I was mentally unbalanced.”

  Virginia picked up her cup. “You wondered if that might be true.”

  “Yes. For Mama’s sake I tried to pretend that I was no longer using my other sight, but on a couple of occasions I felt I absolutely had to tell her what I had seen.”

  Virginia sipped some tea and lowered the cup. “Your talent is a form of intuition that allows you to tell a great deal about another person’s character.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Elizabeth said eagerly. “For example, a couple of months ago I was visiting a friend, Sophy Wheeler, when her elder sister’s fiancé arrived at the house. He was shown into the library to discuss the marriage settlements with Mr. Wheeler. Before they closed the door I saw the two men talking. I opened my other senses, and I knew at once that the fiancé was lying about the state of his finances.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I did not say anything to Sophy, but when I went home, I told Mama. At first she said it was none of our affair. But I knew she was concerned. The next day she went to see Mrs. Wheeler. She told her that she’d heard rumors about the fiancé’s finances and that it might be wise to make a few inquiries. The next thing we knew, Mr. Wheeler announced that the fiancé was nothing but a fortune hunter. The marriage was called off. After that, Mama has paid more attention to my warnings. But she still insists that I not talk about my abilities with others.”

  “I must tell you that I think your mother’s advice is sound,” Virginia said. “Generally speaking, unless one is in the business, as I am, it is not a good idea to talk about one’s paranormal senses with those who do not possess them. People are likely to think that you are odd, to say the least.”

  “But the public is fascinated with the paranormal,” Elizabeth insisted. “They come to hear lectures here at the Institute and to watch practitioners give demonstrations. They hire consultants like you.”

  “Just because people are fascinated with the paranormal, it does not follow that they accept it as normal, if you see what I mean. People in your world will look at you askance if you claim to have psychical abilities. At best you will be considered eccentric, and that is not a good thing for a young lady of your rank and station.”

  Elizabeth flushed a deep red. “Forgive me. I never meant to bring up such a delicate subject.”

  “I was merely stating a fact. That does not mean that there are not a number of psychically talented people who move in your world, just as your father did. But they tend to keep quiet about their abilities. Some of them belong to a very re
spectable but secretive organization known as the Arcane Society, however.”

  “I have never heard of it.”

  “It maintains museums and conducts serious research into the paranormal.”

  “How does it differ from this Institute?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Arcane is considerably more exclusive in the sense that all of their members actually possess genuine talents. I’m afraid the same cannot be said for many of my colleagues here at the Institute.”

  Elizabeth looked troubled. “But your talent is real. Why don’t you join Arcane?”

  “The Society frowns on those of us who must use our abilities to make a living. They believe we give the public a poor impression of the paranormal because there are so many frauds in our ranks.”

  “For my part, I am very happy to discover that I have a sister who also possesses a psychical talent,” Elizabeth said. “I have felt so very alone.”

  “I remember how hard it was for me after Mama and Papa were killed. I was sent away to boarding school. It was a very good school, and everyone was quite pleasant, but none of the teachers took the paranormal seriously. I felt that I had to keep my own abilities secret.”

  “You must have been very lonely,” Elizabeth said.

  “That was the year that I came into my own talent. I had no one I could talk to about the things I was seeing in mirrors, but at least I knew something of what to expect because Mama and Papa had prepared me. I am sorry that you had no one you could talk to this past year.”

  Elizabeth glanced toward the door. “Oh, dear, Mama has arrived. I can see that she is quite upset. I shall have to go home with her. But I would very much like to meet you again for tea. Would that be possible?”

  “I’m not sure your mother would approve,” Virginia said gently.

  Helen arrived at the table. She looked at Virginia.

  “Thank you for sending me word that Elizabeth was safe,” Helen said in a very low voice.

  “Certainly,” Virginia said, keeping her own voice just as soft.

  Helen looked at Elizabeth. “You gave me a terrible fright.”

  “I am so sorry, Mama.” Elizabeth blinked back tears and hastily jumped to her feet.

  “Come,” Helen said. “We must go home now.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Helen inclined her head at Virginia. “I am in your debt, Miss Dean.”

  “No,” Virginia said. “You’re not. I would have done the same for anyone in your situation.”

  “Yes, I believe you would have. Good day, Miss Dean.”

  “Lady Mansfield,” Virginia said.

  Elizabeth smiled at her. “Good-bye, Miss Dean. I am sorry that I frightened Mama, but I am so happy we got to meet.”

  “Good-bye,” Virginia said.

  She drank her tea and watched Helen and Elizabeth walk out of the tearoom. Neither of them looked back.

  After a while she got up from the table and went upstairs to her small office. She unlocked the door, went inside and sat down behind the desk. She looked around, taking in the client chairs, the filing cabinet and the most recent issues of the Institute’s Journal of Paranormal Investigations.

  This was her world, she thought. This was where she belonged. She had a career that was important to her, and she had friends. She did not need her father’s other family.

  But it would have been nice to have had a family of her own.

  TWENTY-ONE

  This was the first time you met your sister?” Owen asked.

  “Yes,” Virginia said. “I knew of her, of course. My father told me about Elizabeth when she was born. But I had never even seen her. To be honest, I was shocked today when Lady Mansfield showed up on my doorstep, asking if Elizabeth was with me.”

  They were in a carriage headed toward the scene of the second glass-reader murder. It was late enough to allow Virginia to read glasslight accurately.

  Owen was not certain what to make of Virginia’s mood. She was composed, but he had the impression that her thoughts were focused on something other than the case.

  “Lady Mansfield obviously realized that it was only logical that her daughter would turn to you for answers about her talent,” he said.

  “Helen will have to confront the fact that Elizabeth cannot simply pretend she does not see auras. Elizabeth may be able to conceal her talent from her friends and acquaintances, but she can’t deny her ability to herself.”

  “No, it is as much a part of her as her other senses. She needs guidance.”

  “I suggested to Elizabeth that she consider joining the Arcane Society.”

  “Good advice,” he said.

  “She wanted to start attending lectures at the Institute. I explained that Arcane did not approve of the organization, due to the high percentage of charlatans associated with it.”

  He watched her face in the shadows. “What was it like for you when you came into your talents?”

  “I was thirteen. My parents had been killed a few months earlier. I was living at Mrs. Peabody’s School for Young Ladies. I had been seeing shadows off and on in mirrors for some time, but nothing distinct. I will never forget the first time I saw a true afterimage burned into a mirror. My mother had explained to me how her talent worked so I understood what I was perceiving, but it was still a great shock. The images really do look like ghosts and spirits.”

  “Where was the mirror?”

  “In the school library. The school was housed in a mansion that had been the property of a wealthy family for several generations. Some of the mirrors were very old.”

  “You saw something terrible in one of them?”

  “Yes. The mirror was at the far end of the library. I had not been comfortable in that room, but until that day I hadn’t understood why. That afternoon I walked past the mirror and felt that sensation of awareness that one sometimes gets in the vicinity of strong, violent energy.”

  “I know what you mean,” Owen said.

  “Instinctively I heightened my talent and looked deep into the mirror. That was when I saw my first murder victim, a woman of perhaps nineteen or twenty.”

  “Surely the murder had occurred long before you went to live at the boarding school?”

  “Yes, but I hadn’t yet learned to sort out the sense of time that comes with the images. And murder always rattles the nerves, even if it is an old crime. I had to know what had happened, so I talked to some of the people who had worked in the school for a long time.”

  “Did you learn anything?” Owen asked.

  “The old gardener had been employed by the former owners of the house. He told me the story. The young woman was a governess who was seduced by the eldest son, who was, in turn, engaged to an heiress. The governess got pregnant. The lady of the house let her go without a penny. The desperate governess tried to extort money from the lady by threatening to tell the son’s fiancée about the pregnancy.”

  “So the lady of the house murdered the governess to make certain she did not jeopardize the marriage plans.”

  “There was a fortune at stake,” Virginia said without inflection. “The family could not afford to have the fine marriage put at risk. So the lady of the house struck the governess on the head with a poker. The servants, including the gardener, were told that the governess had fallen and hit her head on a table, but they all knew the truth. One of the maids found the bloodstained poker.”

  Virginia fell silent. She went back to watching the scene outside the carriage window.

  “How did you end up at the boarding school?” Owen asked after a moment.

  “Hmm?” Virginia did not take her attention off the street.

  “I have heard of Miss Peabody’s school. It is not a charity orphanage. The fees are quite high. It takes in the illegitimate offspring of wealthy families who feel an obligation to care for the results of their indiscretions. The girls are educated for careers as governesses, ladies’ companions and teachers. They are taught manners and etiquette. They do not go out into t
he world to work as maids or shopgirls.”

  Virginia turned back to him, eyes widening a little, as she refocused on the question. “My father provided for me in his will. The school fees were paid until I left at seventeen, and I even received a small bequest when I was ready to go out on my own. It was enough money to allow me to start my career as a glass-reader.”

  “That explains it,” Owen said.

  The carriage clattered to a halt. He opened the door, got out and turned to assist Virginia down to the pavement. They walked through the park and along a quiet street of modest houses.

  “Mrs. Hackett lived in Number Twelve,” Owen said.

  Virginia studied the dark windows. “I wonder if there will be another clockwork device on guard.”

  “At least this time we will be prepared.”

  He used the lock pick to open the kitchen door of Number Twelve.

  “I really must look into purchasing one of those tools,” Virginia said.

  He looked at her as he rose and twisted the knob. “Why?”

  “I fancy the idea of being able to go through locked doors, I suppose. I’m not certain why. Perhaps I have a criminal mind.”

  “I don’t think so. I believe you are attracted to mysteries because you have encountered so many that you have not been able to solve.”

  “I had not thought of it in quite that way. You may be right.”

  He opened the door into a darkened rear hall. Whispers of energy wafted through the atmosphere like an ominous scent.

  “I think it is safe to say that Hackett did not die of natural causes any more than Ratford did,” Virginia said.

  “No. It was murder. But then, I have known that from the beginning.”

  They made short work of the ground floor and then climbed the stairs, listening for the thump and clank of a clockwork guard. This time there were no deadly surprises.

  Virginia looked through the open doorway of one of the bedrooms. “I wonder why he did not leave a device behind at this house.”

  “He has concluded the experiment,” Owen said.

  “What an unpleasant thought.”