The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

  There would be no other monster to rise up and take its place. Not for a crime like this. If she could eliminate the threat, she stopped the future horror from coming to pass.

  The equation was unimpeachable. It also begged a desperately uncomfortable question.

  Should she try?

  She was not a police inspector. She had no knowledge of tracking murderers to their lairs. But if there was even the slimmest chance that she might find the killer before he got to Estelle . . .

  The vision had taken place in the snow. It was more than halfway through February. Winter was nearly done. She might have months to accomplish it, the better part of a year.

  Or perhaps it was only a matter of days.

  Did she dare take that terrible chance again and risk all the guilt and grief that failure might entail?

  The cart turned from the drive, rumbling toward the village of Highgate. Gazing back, she watched Lord Strangford swing up onto his incongruously named horse. He took the reins in his gloved hands, as natural in his seat as a centaur, then rode away.

  At the gate, Edna Sprout watched both of them go, hands on her hips, and shook her head slowly.

  Lily knew now what that strange emotion was, the one that started to rise as she read the article in that battered newspaper. It was a feeling far more uncomfortable than the wound in her thigh or the rage that had sent her racing out onto the heath.

  Hope.

  TWO

  NIGHT WAS FALLING.

  Lights flickered on in the windows of the tall brick facades that lined March Place, the quiet, respectable little street in Bloomsbury where Lily rented rooms.

  The pavement was busy with men returning home from work, dressed in sober suits and carrying briefcases. Children played in the small, tidy front gardens, the sound of their laughter ringing off the close-packed townhouses.

  Lily was wearing a skirt, blouse and jacket, her hair maintaining a semblance of being pinned into place. She had accomplished the latter without a mirror in the shadows of the rented bay in Highgate where she stored her Triumph, and where the proprietor, Mr. Plunkett, would do the necessary work to make the motorcycle usable again.

  There were still abrasions on her cheek and chin. She was fairly certain a large bruise was forming on her forehead. The net effect was rather less than respectable, though the denizens of March Place were too carefully polite to do more than cast her a quick, sideways glance before continuing on their way.

  She was exhausted. The stitches in her thigh throbbed, burning as though someone had put a brand to her. The sensation stood out against the increasing chill of the evening. The brief warmth of the day had faded with the sun and sharp gusts of a cold, still-wintery wind cut through the tweed of her coat.

  At Number 702, a lamp flared to life in the first-floor window—Estelle’s window. She was home. The sight of it sparked another quick pain, a sharp stab of guilt.

  She had come to her senses on the long ride back to London.

  The tram from Highgate was packed. Lily was far too stubborn to admit she needed a seat, so she had stood the whole ride from the heath to the city, then limped into Bloomsbury from her stop on Tottenham Court Road. It had meant the novelty of using her walking stick—a straight staff of yew topped with a brass globe—for the purpose it was ostensibly intended.

  Her usual reasons for carrying it were decidedly other than supporting a lame leg. They dated back to her sixteenth birthday, when she was cornered in a dark space by a man who thought to help himself to something she had no desire to offer him.

  It was shortly after she ran away from school. She was working in a theatre, scraping a living by sweeping sawdust from the wings or sanding the paint from old set pieces. A pair of builders came by as Lily clawed and fought. Though they did nothing to intervene, the distraction they provided was sufficient to allow Lily to twist out of the rotter’s grip and get away.

  The next day, she approached the company’s rigger, Bay. Like many riggers, Bay had once been a sailor. Like many sailors, he was also foreigner, his particular place of origin being the East Indies.

  During the late hours of the night, long after the rest of the cast and crew had departed for their homes or their pubs, Lily had seen Bay on the empty stage acting out a graceful and brutal warfare against some invisible opponent.

  “Will you teach me how to fight?” she asked.

  His eyes flickered to the bruises on her face.

  That night, as she swept the dust from the stage, Bay dropped a long, straight stick at her feet.

  “Use this,” he informed her. “It is better for you than a knife. Harder for you to stab yourself with it.”

  He called the art kali. Over the course of the next year, Lily received lessons in how to defend herself and the sailor gained an opponent to practice against. By the time he left for a better-paying job with an electrical firm, Lily was quite capable of disabling the average lecher with nothing more than four feet of stout wood.

  She had chosen the yew staff from a prop box in the attic because it was both light and flexible. She could wield it more nimbly than some heavy block of oak and it was flexible enough that it did not break when it came up against an immovable object.

  In the tram, the stick served to take the weight off her wounded leg as she stood crammed between bricklayers reading newspapers, a woman with a dachshund on her lap, and three unruly boys.

  As the wound flared with every jolt of the car, Lily had admitted the truth. She did not know how to catch a murderer. If the police, who were trained to do this and had all the resources they could ask for at their disposal, were unable to find the monster who was killing London’s mediums, how could Lily possibly presume to do better?

  It didn’t matter that the threat to Estelle rested in a single person. Lily was not capable of finding him. She admitted how foolish she had been to even consider it. It was another dead end, just as it had always been before—another example of how her ability to glimpse the future was only a freakish anomaly that would never be anything but painful.

  Standing at the edge of a stream of evening commuters passing in front of her building, she felt the tiredness sink into her bones. She wanted to crawl into her bed, pull the blankets over her head and shut the world out.

  She stepped forward, weaving through an opening in the flow of wool-clad bodies to mount the front steps.

  In the hall, paisley wallpaper, faded with age, complemented her landlady Mrs. Bramble’s choice of decor—the oil painting with the off-looking pilchards mounted alongside a photograph of kittens having a tea party, wearing costumes and standing in poses no live kitten would possibly submit to. The smell of Mrs. Bramble’s signature nettle pudding permeated the air, leaving Lily both starving and glad that she had missed dinner. She could hear dishes clanging in the kitchen, the sound of the stout woman clearing up.

  She forced her feet up the stairs. As she climbed she watched for Cat, an enormous orange beast who did not belong to anyone in the house but was impossible to eradicate. Cat had a penchant for sleeping in places designed to endanger the lives of unsuspecting passers-by. This included the more shadowy parts of the stairwell.

  Her path was Cat-free but felt longer than usual. She paused on the first-floor landing outside the door to Estelle’s rooms. She felt a sharp urge to slip inside, fall onto Estelle’s purple jacquard settee, and let herself simply exist as Estelle buzzed about the room.

  How could she, knowing what waited for Estelle around the turn of some unknown—but limited—quantity of days? She did not have the energy to pretend that all was well. It wasn’t.

  She moved on until, two paces up from Estelle’s door, the stair beneath her foot gave off an alarming squeal.

  It should not have been a surprise. There was always a stair that screamed beneath her foot as she climbed to her flat on the second floor. Yet Lily could have sworn it was usually three steps further on, or perhaps back on the floor below. Maybe it simply moved about on
a whim to spite her.

  The door behind her flew open. Estelle’s head emerged, covered—as it generally was—in an elaborate silk turban fastened with a glittering paste brooch.

  “Lily! Thank god you’re here. Come in for a moment. I’m in desperate need of a fresher set of eyes.”

  She disappeared back into the flat without waiting for an answer, clearly expecting Lily to comply.

  The only alternative was to ignore her and retreat to her room, a move sure to draw even more of Estelle’s notice. The far more sensible choice was to play along for a little while until she could make a plausible excuse to escape.

  Scraping together her remaining resources, Lily turned back, limped down the two steps, and entered the drawing room.

  It was an eclectic space.

  Every surface was augmented with decorative pieces. A stuffed cockatoo perched on the branch of a ficus. A candelabra in the shape of a three-masted schooner rested on top of the bookcase. The lamps were pink ceramic with lace-fringed shades, the curtains a forest green velvet. There were other more unusual artifacts scattered among the bric-a-brac. An enormous straw goat head stared out from beside the coat rack. The stone carving of some old god, framed with vines, was mounted on the wall between a photograph of someone’s great aunt and a painting of a pig in a dress carrying a bunch of pussy willows. The goat head and the god belonged to Estelle’s companion and flatmate, Miss Gwendolyn Bard. Miss Bard was a renowned scholar of folklore, publishing under the pseudonym of G.W. Bard. Only a select few knew that the illustrious Bard was not, in fact, a gray-bearded gentleman but rather a plump, pretty woman of middle years with a delightful laugh.

  Miss Bard acquired pieces like the straw goat from villages across England to help her with her studies, but Estelle insisted on plucking items she deemed “less gruesome” and incorporating them into her unique sense of decor.

  Estelle was just as eccentric as the drawing room. She was tall and willowy, with graceful lines of age marking her face. She wore a flowing silk caftan in a bold peacock print, and gilded bobs dangled from her ears. She held up a large green vessel, executed in Chinese style. The handles took the form of curling dragons and the lid appeared to be crafted in the shape of a crouching Shih Tzu.

  “I’m looking for the right spot for my latest objet d’arte and I’m simply at a loss. I thought it might fit on the mantle next to the shepherdesses, but there are too many of them—I haven’t another square inch up there. It would look marvelous on the plinth, but then where do I put the cupid?”

  Lily set her stick in the stand by the door and glanced over at the plaster cherub in question, who was balanced with surprising grace on a single pudgy leg atop a fat marble column.

  “Where’s Miss Bard?” she asked.

  “Gwen? She’s at a lecture on Celtic solar deities. Or maybe it was a ladies’ suffrage bake sale? I can never keep track. And anyway, she’s no use for this sort of thing. She just keeps rattling on about how the dragons ought to have legs.”

  “What is it?” Lily asked.

  “An urn, darling.”

  “A funerary urn? Is there anyone inside?”

  Estelle plucked off the lid, peered in, and plopped the Shih Tzu back into place.

  “No.” She looked up at Lily and frowned. “What happened to your face?”

  “It’s nothing,” Lily replied quickly.

  Estelle popped the urn onto the seat of a worn, mustard yellow armchair. She took Lily by the arm and tugged her closer to the lace-fringed lamp.

  “It looks like you took sandpaper to your chin. And that bruise! You had an accident with that contraption of yours, didn’t you? How many times do I have to tell you, it’s a death trap—though admittedly very exciting. Sit down. How could you let me keep rattling on about the decor when you’re suffering from the aftereffects of a road accident?”

  Estelle pushed Lily onto the purple settee, then lifted her feet and set them on the matching ottoman. She turned to the bar, splashing something into a crystal sherry glass. She extended it to Lily.

  “Drink this.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “It’s a restorative. Drink it.”

  “Is it the vermouth?”

  Estelle had an inexplicable preference for a particularly vile brand of Italian vermouth, one that tasted like over-sugared cough syrup.

  “No. Why? Do you want some vermouth?”

  Lily sniffed the glass. It smelled like brandy.

  “No, thank you. This is fine.”

  Estelle filled her own glass with the vermouth, then plopped down next to Lily on the settee.

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing. It was an accident.”

  “Was anyone killed?”

  “No. It wasn’t a collision. The drive chain broke and I fell. That’s all.”

  “Hmmm. You’re sure there wasn’t a man involved?”

  Lily nearly choked on her brandy. The image of Lord Strangford rushed into her mind—the feel of dark-gloved hands on her waist as he helped her off his horse. She controlled the reaction, knowing Estelle fully capable of picking up on any sign of discomfort she might show.

  “What makes you think there was a man involved?” she replied casually.

  Estelle fluttered her long fingers.

  “Just a little voice whispering in my ear.”

  Lily knew what she was implying. Estelle had a habit of casually referencing the departed in her conversations. Lily tried to view it as just another bit of charming eccentricity.

  Lily had never seen any evidence that the claims of mediums like Estelle were true. On the contrary, during her theatre days she had known a stage magician with a particular dislike for spiritualism who made a point of unveiling the various tricks London’s psychics used to convince those attending their séances of their legitimacy.

  She couldn’t believe that Estelle was a deliberate fraud, but her friend had a remarkably sharp sense of intuition and an almost preternatural talent for collecting gossip. Perhaps she took those things for something more, interpreting the insights they gave her as something otherworldly.

  “The Triumph threw a chain, and I fell. That’s all,” Lily asserted.

  “If you say so.”

  A silence followed. Both women sipped their liquor. Lily was left with the distinct feeling that Estelle knew perfectly well she was hiding something but allowed the matter to rest because she was entirely confident she would—eventually—wrangle the truth out of her.

  It would have been a plausible confidence. Estelle was a master at getting things out of people. Lily was equally skilled at keeping secrets—like the one she currently carried inside of her, of what waited for Estelle after the next snow.

  If anyone in the room was a fraud, it was Lily, she thought guiltily. Here she sat, quietly drinking her brandy, knowing full well that a horrible threat was closing in on the woman beside her . . . and doing absolutely nothing about it.

  There was nothing she could do, she reminded herself forcefully. She had been down this road before, more times than she could count. It was always the same. The only difference here was that she usually didn’t have to sit and gossip with the people she knew were about to fall victim to horrors she had foreseen.

  Pretending nothing was wrong was hard. It made her miserable, far more so than the throbbing pain in her thigh or the ache in her bruised ribs.

  She emptied her glass, then set it down on the table.

  “Thank you for the brandy, but I really ought to be—”

  She was cut off by the sound of a sharp rap on the door. She glanced over at it.

  “Don’t mind that. It’s just Agnes,” Estelle said, waving a hand dismissively.

  “Are you just going to leave her out there?”

  “Out where?”

  “On the landing.”

  “There’s no one on the landing.”

  “What about Agnes?”

  “Agnes?”

  “The one yo
u said just knocked.”

  “Oh! Agnes isn’t on the landing, darling. Agnes is dead.”

  Estelle reached a long arm back and plucked her vermouth bottle from the bar. She filled her glass, then set the bottle on the coffee table.

  “She’s been knocking about the place since last Thursday. Gwen keeps threatening to call a plumber. She thinks it’s air in the pipes, if she notices it at all. You know how she gets when she has her nose in a book.”

  A gust of wind hit the house, rattling the panes of the windows. Of course, the knock at the door must have been the bones of the house protesting against a gusty winter evening.

  Estelle went on.

  “She’s a bit of a nuisance, but I can’t bring myself to tell her to move along. I mean, the poor thing has been through enough, being murdered in her sleep. One can hardly blame her for being a mite restless.”

  “Oh. She was murdered, was she?” Lily asked casually.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Estelle answered through her vermouth. “You might have heard about it. It’s been all over the newspaper.”

  Lily’s attention sharpened.

  “Which paper is that?”

  “Any of them that matter. ‘Spiritualist drained of blood in her sleep.’ It’s been quite sensational. Really, darling, you must get out a bit more.”

  Dora Heller, Agnes McKenney, Sylvia Durst—those were the three victims named in the article Lily read earlier that afternoon.

  It’s just Agnes.

  Estelle possessed a wild imagination. She also poured through several newspapers daily, culling gossip from the society columns. She must have read the same story as Lily and convinced herself that she was communicating with one of the victims.

  “You’re talking about the vampire,” Lily asked carefully.

  Estelle snorted.

  “There’s no such thing as vampires.”

  “I read that this killer was targeting mediums,” Lily said slowly, keeping her tone casual.

  “Yes, that seems to be the rub of it.”

  “You haven’t started advertising again, have you?”

  Estelle held séances twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. They were open to the public and served as the primary means by which she recruited customers for her real source of income—private sessions with individual clients. A few months ago, sheer word of mouth had made these events so busy, and Estelle’s consultation schedule so full, that she had withdrawn her advertisements.