The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

Lily tried to push the thought from her mind. This had never been about saving Estelle, she reminded herself. She knew better than that. The best she could hope for was justice.

  It felt like a slim hope.

  She rose, pulling on her slippers and dressing gown, then crossed to the stove to build back up the fire.

  Through the bare floorboards under her knees, she heard a resounding crash. A muffled, extended outburst followed from downstairs. Lily’s was fairly certain it would have turned her ears pink if she were capable of making out the words.

  She closed the stove, sighing, then headed down the stairs.

  Estelle’s door was cracked open, as usual. Lily still knocked before stepping inside.

  “Something wrong?” she called in greeting.

  “In here, darling,” her neighbor sang out, the words tinged with irritation.

  Lily followed the sound to a doorway at the far end of Estelle’s parlor.

  It opened into a room Lily knew of but had never seen before. It was the flat’s second bedroom, a space Estelle had converted to use for her weekly séances.

  It was not a large room. A massive round table dominated the space, circled by twelve chairs. The table had a thick central pillar and a round base. There was just enough room outside of it for someone to walk around and take their seat.

  The wallpaper, which was probably another dull floral print like the stuff that covered Lily’s walls upstairs, was hidden here, covered with curtains of a rich, dark purple. Tapestries billowed from the ceiling, draped to hang along the corners. A few fake potted palms added to the vaguely Eastern theme. The only other furnishing was a plain wooden cabinet, as tall as Lily, built into the far wall.

  In near-darkness or candlelight, the space would look exotic and mysterious. In the full glare of the gaslights, it felt a little tawdry.

  Estelle was under the table.

  “It’s these blasted wires,” she grumbled, her derriere shifting as she worked. “Something has gotten crossed.”

  She was wearing silk trousers and a kimono. Lily wasn’t entirely sure whether they were day wear or some form of nightgown. It was often difficult to tell the difference with Estelle’s wardrobe.

  Estelle climbed out from under the table and went to the cabinet. She threw open the door, then, with a soft click, triggered a hidden latch. The back wall of the wardrobe—which any casual observer would have assumed lay flat against the wall of the room itself—opened to reveal a hidden alcove. A series of bells and a tambourine were mounted inside. Lily could see wires running from the instruments into holes in the floor.

  She had seen such tricks before. Freshly escaped from Mrs. Finch’s, Lily had watched the magicians set up their tricks while she swept or scrubbed backstage. Their shows had involved all manner of wires, used to replicate the exact tricks used by spiritualist mediums.

  She felt a sharp, and unexpected, pang of disappointment.

  There was no reason for it, of course. Lily had never given much credence to Estelle’s claims to communicate with spirits. Why should she be surprised that the medium engaged in a bit of deliberate fraud, a few spectacles aimed at pulling wool over the eyes of her spectators?

  Estelle returned to the table. Lily could now see an open panel in its base. A series of metal rings were mounted there. As she watched, Estelle pulled each one. Back in the cabinet, bells rang and the tambourine jangled, delicate noises that would certainly have a ghostly impact when heard in a dark, atmospheric chamber.

  She pulled the last ring, peering over at the window, which was covered by a heavier black curtain.

  Nothing happened.

  “Stupid, useless . . .”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s the damned billows.” Estelle stalked over to the curtain and pulled it back. Mounted on the wall behind it was an ordinary fireplace billows. This, like the instruments in the cabinet, was attached to a wire that ran down the wall and then disappeared into another hole in the floor. “When I pull the wire, it’s supposed to compress, like this.” She demonstrated. “Except then it needs to billow again, so I can keep puffing. It’s not billowing.”

  “Why do you need it to billow?”

  “Aha!” Estelle said proudly. “My new toy. Allow me to demonstrate.”

  She closed the curtain, then turned down the gas lights. The room sank into moody gloom, the oriental tapestries glittering softly in the near-darkness.

  Estelle reached under the lip of the table. Lily heard a click. Suddenly a ghostly, glowing figure appeared on the surface of the black curtain.

  The effect was startling.

  “Isn’t she magnificent?”

  “What on earth is it?”

  “A magic lantern!” Estelle announced proudly.

  Lily bent down for a better look at the device.

  “It uses an electric bulb, powered by a battery. The light only lasts for a few minutes, but that’s really all I need. Any longer and she might start to look a bit cheap.”

  Estelle flipped a switch and the device powered off. She turned on the gaslights, then pulled a thin piece of glass from the mounting over the lens and handed it to Lily.

  “I call her Desdemona. I picked her up at a pawn shop in Notting Hill. I painted out the background in black so it wouldn’t show—she was in the most dreadful approximation of some sultan’s harem. I’ve been considering adding a little rouge to her cheeks, but then, she’s supposed to be dead.”

  She plucked the plate from Lily’s hand and slipped it back into the lantern.

  “The problem is, she’s utterly lifeless if she’s just hanging there on the curtain. The zing factor is ever so much bigger if there’s movement. A little rustle of the curtain—that’s all it would take and she’d be undulating her hips like any proper inhabitant of a seraglio ought to be.” She stalked over to the curtain, ripping it back again and pointing accusingly. “Yet my billows stubbornly refuses to billow.”

  Lily considered the arrangement.

  “That’s because you’ve got it hooked up backwards.”

  “I do not,” Estelle countered pertly. “The wire has to run through the floor. There isn’t any other way it can go.”

  Lily walked over to the device. “What you need is some sort of hook—or preferably a ring, so you don’t have to worry about the wire slipping out—right here. That way, the wire actually runs up, rather than down. And then you add a counter-weight to the bottom of the billows, and—”

  “Brilliant! Magnificent, darling! Who knew you had such hidden talents?”

  “I have some experience with illusions,” Lily replied, keeping her tone even.

  Some note of disapproval must have slipped into it in spite of her efforts. Estelle regarded Lily steadily, her tone shifting. “You’re wondering if it’s all just tricks.”

  Lily felt a quick pang of guilt.

  “I never said that.”

  “Well, I gave up trying to convince people a long time ago. So you can either believe it or not. I don’t care one way or another.”

  “If you’re not trying to convince people, what’s all this for?”

  Estelle dropped down into one of the chairs, stretching her legs out in front of her.

  “A show, darling. A performance. What else could it be?” She leaned forward. “Do you think most people really come here to contact the dead? They don’t want to hear what the dead have to say. I tell them anyway, of course. It’s the least I can do for the poor departed things. But the living are far more likely to listen if you warm them up first with a few spectacles. It’s the spectacles that turn them into private clients, which is the real bread-and-butter in this enterprise. It’s also what they tell their friends about, which is how the new clients keep coming. Now . . . why don’t you tell me who you snuck in here at one in the morning last night? Don’t bother trying to deny it. I could hear you both chattering in the hall.”

  “I was out with a friend when we got caught in that storm. This was the
sensible place to take shelter until it was possible to find a hackney.”

  “Was this friend a certain broodingly handsome baron of our mutual acquaintance?”

  Lily forced herself not to show any reaction.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Not that I disapprove. I don’t know the fellow particularly well, but if Robert likes him, he must be decent. And it can’t be anything but good for you to get out and stretch your legs a little.”

  “Stretch my legs?” Lily echoed in shock.

  “Oh.” Estelle’s eyes widened. “I see. You haven’t done any leg stretching as of yet. After bringing him home with you in the middle of the night? Hmmm. I hope that doesn’t imply that he’s . . . well, you were in theatre. You know what I mean.”

  Lily was speechless.

  “No. I don’t believe that’s the issue here . . .” Estelle continued, musing. “But there’s certainly something the matter . . .”

  “Perhaps he’s simply a gentleman,” she managed to choke out.

  “Yes, I suppose that could be it. How dreadfully inconvenient.”

  Lily’s thoughts flashed back to the night before, to that racing flush of desire she had felt when standing with Strangford in the kitchen.

  It had been far too narrow an escape, and not because of any lack of gentlemanly consideration on Strangford’s part. It was Lily who had nearly lost control.

  She must never forget the unalterable truth: she was a bastard. She would always be an outsider in his world, her father’s world. At best, she might be tolerated or ignored. At worst . . .

  Deveral’s words the night before came flooding back to her, all his vile insults designed to inflict the maximum pain on someone he believed could not strike back.

  That memory lead to another, one far more shattering than any of Deveral’s deliberate verbal blows.

  He dared ask us to accept you.

  What might her life have been if her father had gotten his way? If she had been brought into his house, raised as his acknowledged daughter? How would the world view her then? An alliance with an illegitimate daughter might not seem so beyond the pale, if it meant a closer connection with one of England’s most powerful men.

  Yet it was something else that put a vise grip around Lily’s heart when she thought of Deveral’s revelation, something that struck at the core of her vulnerability: the vision of being part of a family.

  Sitting down together for dinner every night. Opening presents on Christmas morning. Racing around the house with an army of wild brothers, bickering over borrowed toys.

  To have had a home. A father.

  She reminded herself, fiercely, that it could never have been like that. Even if her father had chosen to exercise his authority, that home would still have been filled with people who hated her. Nothing the earl did could change that, nor could his influence ever completely stop the whispers, the quiet set-downs, the reminders from the aristocratic circles in which he mingled that she was there on tolerance. That she didn’t belong. That she never would.

  “Is something the matter?” Estelle asked.

  “No. Not at all.” Lily smiled forcefully. “Have you any hardware? Perhaps I can rig up that billows for you.”

  Estelle plucked a toolbox out from under the table and presented it to her.

  Lily picked out the pieces she needed and moved over to the window, setting to work with the screwdriver. Behind her, Estelle reclined in the chair, her feet up on the table.

  “Where is Miss Bard today?” Lily asked to fill the air.

  “Oh, she’s flitted off to an auction out in some twee place with ‘shire tacked onto its name. She’s hoping to secure a folkloric what-not she has her eye on. I suppose you heard about the murder?”

  Lily paused only a moment, then continued turning the screwdriver.

  “Which murder would that be?”

  “The one they’re accusing your brother of having committed. I know you pretend to disdain the newspapers, but you can’t tell me you weren’t aware of that story.”

  “Half-brother,” Lily replied. “And I can’t say I’ve been following it.”

  “It’s remarkable, really. They’re actually bringing him up on charges. It could be the first time a peer is indicted since Lord Cardigan, and that was in my grandmother’s day.”

  An indictment, one where the evidence against Lord Deveral would be listed before a grand jury—evidence that made for what looked like an ironclad case.

  How could she possibly hope to counter that and convince anyone of his innocence?

  Her thoughts shot back to Dr. Joseph Hartwell.

  She could not shake the instinct that the renowned physician was involved in this somehow, but that was all she had—an instinct. There was no evidence, nothing beyond the most thin conjecture to connect him to the crimes.

  That was not a lead. It was another dead end.

  Frost crawled up Estelle’s windowpane. It didn’t care that Lily was out of ideas. The events she had foreseen were wending toward her, regardless of her efforts.

  She felt a hot burst of frustration and an equal burden of guilt.

  “It’s none of my business,” she lied. With a tug, she loosened the wire that held Estelle’s trick together.

  “So it has nothing to do with your father calling here yesterday morning.”

  “No.”

  “Or why you were in Abney Park on Thursday night.”

  Lily dropped the screwdriver.

  “What did you say?”

  “I had it from Agnes,” Estelle explained breezily. “It’s one of the easier things to pick up, you see—places, if it’s someplace you’ve both been before. I don’t know who Agnes has there, but my great-aunt was a famous Dissenter. I have to pop by on occasion to keep the ivy from completely overgrowing her grave or she starts turning up in my dreams. And I have much better things to dream about than Great-Aunt Prudence.”

  “I see,” Lily replied carefully, retrieving the tool from the floor.

  “Agnes says you went there to talk to someone, though I can’t quite settle on who. She just keeps showing me those gas lamps. So of course, I’m dying of curiosity.”

  Estelle settled back in her chair, smiling patiently.

  Lily’s head spun.

  Was it luck? Some bold streak of intuition? Estelle could certainly have discovered that Lily had been out on Thursday, but how could she have guessed where Lily had gone?

  She might have learned it from Sam or Dr. Gardner . . . but Lily found it almost as hard to believe either of those two would spill their story of casual grave-robbing with one of London’s most notorious gossips.

  The only explanation left was that Estelle was, in fact, communicating with the spirit of a murdered medium.

  Lily waited for the familiar skepticism to return.

  It did not. Instead, she found herself wrestling with an unfamiliar and far less comfortable sense that Estelle was telling the truth. Despite the bells and whistles of her evening performances—the evidence of which Lily held in her hands—Estelle’s ability was as genuine as Lily’s.

  She set down the screwdriver and turned.

  “How does it work?” she demanded.

  Estelle did not need to ask what she meant.

  “Well, it’s not exactly like sitting down for a chat over sherry.”

  “Then what it is like?”

  “Like . . . daydreaming, I suppose. As much as it’s like anything.”

  “Daydreaming?”

  “The dead don’t speak in words. They communicate in ideas. So you have to open your mind. Put it out there that you’re here, and that you’ll listen, and then be absolutely open to anything that comes into your head, no matter how absurd.”

  “Then how do you tell the difference between something you get from the dead and something you just dream up yourself?”

  Estelle shrugged. “You just do. The hard part is having enough faith in yourself to make sense of it.
An impression of a rose can mean love, or a flower shop, or a name. It’s all in the sense of it . . . whether it feels like a flower shop or a name.”

  “What did Agnes show you about me?”

  “I saw the cemetery where my peevish great-aunt is buried. A telephone ringing in an empty room. And a single orange calla lily—that was you.”

  The calla lily. She thought of the blooms that had decorated Evangeline Ash’s portrait, elegant blossoms tumbling over the sides of an antique vase.

  “Oh. And the gas lamps, of course. They were part of it as well. Funny, isn’t that? The image Agnes gives me any time I try to ask her who it was that murdered her, and it shows up when she’s telling me about your little excursion.”

  Lily could hear the nuance in Estelle’s tone.

  She knew.

  She knew that Lily was interested in the murders. That Lily was keeping something from her.

  The urge rose in her again, wild and fierce, to warn her—to try to tell her what was coming.

  Should she? Was there a chance it might actually make a difference?

  Lily knew from hard experience how unlikely that was. If she gave into the urge and let herself warn Estelle, she would fill the woman’s last days with fear and worry as she struggled to escape the horror destined to overtake her.

  If there was any hope, even the slimmest chance, of changing what Lily had foreseen, it would not lay in another fruitless warning.

  It required action. And all Lily’s actions so far had led her to a hopelessly dead end.

  She twisted the last bit of wire, fastening the weight into place, then tugged on the shining filament that ran from the floor up to the ring she had just mounted on the wall. The billows collapsed, the puff of air stirring Lily’s hair, then fell open again as the weight did its work.

  Estelle applauded.

  “Wonderful!”

  “You’ll want to cover the weight in felt so it doesn’t make an audible scrape against the wall as it moves.”

  “Felt. Yes. Certainly. How convenient to be neighbors with a woman of such diverse and useful skills. Where would I be without you?”

  “Short one undulating Desdemona,” Lily replied automatically, but her thoughts had skipped ahead.