“Sophie, dear child,” said the voice, “do not be afraid. I come to warn you of great danger, and to bid you follow the one your heart inclines to. Keep your own counsel, and expect a journey over water before the summer’s end.”
The hand brushed through her hair and then left in a whoosh, like air rushing into a jam jar when the lid is first popped open. Sophie wanted to jeer—she didn’t even believe in spiritualism, not really, not like Great-aunt Tabitha and her friends. The spirit’s words sounded awfully like the hoary predictions of a fairground fortune-teller. Nonetheless Sophie’s pulse was racing so fast she thought she might faint.
She clutched the hands of the women on either side of her and felt a welcome squeeze back from one of them. Most of the women had opened their eyes now, though the dim light made it difficult to see much.
The medium groaned. Then her face convulsed into a rictus so horrible it reminded Sophie of a gruesome illustration in a book she’d once seen, a police photograph of a dead woman lying on the floor of a grand Paris apartment with her throat cut. The shadow cast by the fastening on the medium’s cloak exactly mimicked the gaping hole of that wound.
Another voice began to speak, but this time Sophie thought she could see a very faint movement of the medium’s facial muscles. When the new visitor identified herself as Pocahontas and offered to serve as the spirit control for the evening, Sophie breathed deeply and tried to un-hunch her shoulders. It was awful but true to say that clear-cut fraudulence was vastly preferable to something that felt a bit too much like the real thing. “Pocahontas” transmitted various messages to the sitters from their dear departed: Miss Gillespie’s father was glad she had decided to renew her membership at the golf club, Miss Allison’s mother was no longer in pain now that she’d Crossed Over, Miss McGregor’s fiancé still cherished her memory as a Precious Jewel of his Former Life (tiny shriveled-up Miss McGregor actually cried when she heard the message from her lost love).
Sophie had a terrible itch on her nose, but releasing her neighbor’s hand prematurely would mean trouble later on with Great-aunt Tabitha. It was a great relief when “Pocahontas” departed and the medium came back to herself.
“Lights, please,” Great-aunt Tabitha ordered, the excitement fizzing in her voice.
All around the table, women were flexing their hands and turning to their neighbors, their voices rising as they began to dissect what they had just heard.
Peggy brought in a tray and began to hand around tea and coffee. She served Sophie first, giving her three lumps of sugar with the tongs and making a funny face that gave Sophie comfort.
“Coffee, cream, and two sugars,” the medium said hoarsely when Peggy came around to her. She was shivering, though the room was no colder than usual, and had drawn the cloak closer around her broad shoulders.
“Mrs. Tansy,” said Great-aunt Tabitha warmly, “you were simply magnificent. Can Peggy get you anything else to eat or drink?”
“I wouldn’t say no to a wee dram of port,” the medium said, licking her dry lips and warming her hands on the sides of the coffee cup.
Great-aunt Tabitha visibly recoiled. Spiritualism, vegetarianism, pacifism, and temperance: these were Sophie’s great-aunt’s gods, and all forms of alcohol were banned from the house except for a rather dusty decanter of whisky kept in honor of Great-aunt Tabitha’s long-deceased father.
Several other ladies crowded around Mrs. Tansy, wanting additional details and personal reassurances, but Great-aunt Tabitha brushed them all away.
“Can’t you see the poor woman’s done in?” she said. “Peggy will show you out when you’re finished with your coffee (Peggy, will you bring a glass of lemonade for Mrs. Tansy?), and Mrs. Tansy has thoughtfully provided cards for anyone who may wish to retain her services on a private basis. You’ll forgive me if I whisk her away just now for a breath of fresh air.”
She helped the medium to the door, jerking her head at Sophie to join them. Sophie followed them to the small study on the half landing, a room her great-aunt rarely used.
Great-aunt Tabitha put the medium into a heavy upholstered armchair (its ancient springs made it less comfortable than it looked; nobody ever sat in it twice) and took the chair behind the desk for herself. Sophie found a seat on the stepladder used for fetching down books from the top shelves.
“Mrs. Tansy, you have greatly exceeded my expectations this evening,” said Great-aunt Tabitha once the medium had settled herself and taken a sip of the lemonade. “I had heard very good things about you and your friend Pocahontas, and I was not disappointed. Pocahontas brought wonderful news, and I hope she will pay our little circle many more visits before she passes further on into the Realms of Light.”
The spiritualist cosmology, an article of faith with Great-aunt Tabitha, made Sophie cringe. Her terror had gone; she felt tired and crotchety, but also intensely curious as to what had really happened just now. Surely the whole thing had been faked, but what motive could the medium have had for involving Sophie?
“I’m very pleased to hear it, ma’am,” said the medium, her voice still hoarse. “I am never aware of anything that passes while I am in the trance state, so I did not know until you mentioned it that Pocahontas had come.”
A lie, Sophie thought. The corner of the woman’s mouth had turned up just a little, giving her a look of smug contempt. She must think Great-aunt Tabitha a complete fool.
“You earned your fee and more,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, pulling out several drawers in search of a clean envelope. She gave a happy grunt when she found one and opened the large handbag sitting on the desk.
The medium colored as Great-aunt Tabitha counted out a small stack of pound notes. The memory of the woman’s raw scabbed flesh flooded into Sophie’s mind, and she suddenly felt horribly complicit in the nastiness of the night’s work. Aside from everything else, it seemed terribly thoughtless of Great-aunt Tabitha not to have let Mrs. Tansy put on her real clothes again.
“I said nothing to you before, so as not to disturb you,” Sophie’s great-aunt continued, oblivious to the medium’s evident embarrassment, “but the conservatory is equipped with highly sensitive equipment designed to detect the electromagnetic disruptions that attend spirit visitors. A device attached to my seat allows me to monitor the proceedings.”
“If I’d known,” said the medium, in a stolid way, “I’m sure I’d have asked you to turn off the devilish contraption. It might have stopped the spirits from coming at all!”
“On the contrary, my dear Mrs. Tansy,” cried Great-aunt Tabitha, throwing her hands in the air, “the readings went off the charts! Particularly during the first part of the conversation, the one with the well-spoken European gentleman who wanted a word with Sophie.”
Mrs. Tansy looked really surprised.
“I’m sure I don’t know anything about that, ma’am,” she said.
Sophie thought she might be telling the truth this time; she sounded genuinely unsettled.
“Of course you’ll have no memory of the words he spoke, or of his very refined aura,” said Great-aunt Tabitha in a manner that reminded Sophie of a cobra poised to strike. “But I’d like to know why you asked for Sophie to come and watch you be searched. It struck me at the time as an odd request, and it was impossible not to wonder afterward about the connection between that and the most particular attention the visitor paid to the girl.”
It was a relief to learn that the spirit visit had not erased all common sense from Great-aunt Tabitha’s mind. The same question had occurred to Sophie, and she eagerly awaited Mrs. Tansy’s answer.
“I just had a feeling,” said the medium, her eyes sliding away from Great-aunt Tabitha’s, “a strong intuition that the young one needed to see there was no fakery about the business.”
“What kind of a feeling?” Great-aunt Tabitha persisted. “Was it—?”
As Sophie leaned forward to hear what the medium would say, though, her arm brushed against a stack of books and papers. Sophie
reached out her hands just too late to prevent the whole mess from toppling slowly to the floor.
“Sophie—”
“I’m sorry,” Sophie gabbled, falling to her knees on the floor and desperately piling the things together again. What an idiot she was! Stupid, stupid, stupid…. “I didn’t mean to—I’ll—”
Great-aunt Tabitha cut her off. She looked at the enameled watch she wore pinned to her front.
“Goodness, Sophie, it’s hours past your bedtime. Off you go! No, not a word—we’ll talk tomorrow evening after you’ve finished your homework. Say thank you to Mrs. Tansy, please, and make sure to clean your teeth before you go to bed.”
Sophie’s great-aunt seemed not to know whether to treat her as a small child or someone quite grown-up. It led to an odd jumble of different kinds of advice. Sophie reached obediently to shake Mrs. Tansy’s hand, but when the woman clasped Sophie’s hand in her own, Sophie felt a sharp pain in her palm, and then a significant pressure.
She looked quickly up into the woman’s face; Mrs. Tansy pursed her lips and gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. She clearly meant Sophie not to attract her great-aunt’s attention.
Once she reached the upstairs landing, Sophie opened her hand. She was holding a miniature metal iron, just like one of the counters on the Capitalism board, and a business card with Mrs. Tansy’s name and address on it. How very strange!
In her bedroom, she draped her dress over the back of the chair, pulled on a nightgown, and tucked the card and the metal token into her school satchel for safekeeping.
Mrs. Tansy’s words about the “feeling” that made her ask Sophie to watch the disrobing had not been uttered with the same stolid certainty as everything else. Had she been lying? If only Sophie had been allowed to stay for the rest of the conversation!
Great-aunt Tabitha would almost certainly want to determine whether Mrs. Tansy’s feeling fell into one of the categories devised by Arthur Conan Doyle, the great detective novelist and theorist of the occult, who divided psychic intuitions according to whether they were based on precognition, telepathy, or some other, as-yet-unknown form of clairvoyance.
Sophie wanted to know something more practical. Who sent the warning, and what did it mean?
Could Sophie have a secret enemy?
It was easy to imagine how Nan, Jean, and Priscilla would react to the words secret enemy on Monday back at school.
The thought of her friends consoled Sophie and she rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position. But though her body was bone-tired, she had slept too long in the afternoon to fall asleep now. Despite the house’s heavy walls, the door to Sophie’s bedroom cleared the sill by almost an inch, and the parquet floors amplified every footfall. She listened to the medium getting dressed again in the room across the hall and being shown downstairs by the maid, and the sounds of the last visitors leaving. She heard Peggy locking the outside door and putting out the lights. She lay awake in bed long after the rest of the house had gone quiet, the hall clock striking three before she finally fell into a restless sleep.
FIVE
THE WEEKEND PASSED in a blur of homework and bad dreams. On Monday morning Sophie was woken earlier than usual by Annie, the maid whose job it was to bring up the brass hot-water can for the washstand. The house had no bathrooms, and Great-aunt Tabitha had refused to modernize on the grounds that what was good enough for her father was good enough for her and Sophie.
The maid blethered away self-importantly as she shook the warm towel off the top of the can and poured the water into the basin. Sophie felt strangely groggy, almost as though she were still dreaming.
“A bomb?” she echoed stupidly, sitting up and trying to collect herself.
“Yes, Miss Sophie, didn’t you hear the telephone first thing this morning? The crack of dawn, it was.”
Now that Sophie thought about it, her morning dreams (a dark confusing blur of unpleasant emergencies) had included the buzzing of an egg timer and the beeping of a radio-wave apparatus for detecting enemy aircraft.
“It was the minister of public safety,” Annie continued, opening the curtains and picking Sophie’s clothes up from where they had fallen on the floor. “Calling to tell Miss Hunter that a bomb’d gone off in St. Giles’ Cathedral.”
“But surely the cathedral must have been quite empty?” Sophie said, her brain finally starting to work.
“Aye, that’s right,” said Annie, “it went off at the wrong time, they say, and the only one in the building was the night watchman, and he was knocked out but said to be doing well in hospital. Hours ago, it was.”
Though it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, the thought of another bomb going off made Sophie’s eyes water. As she washed and dressed and packed her things for school, she pretended not to have heard anything about the latest attack, but she felt jumpy and upset.
To get to school she walked through Queen Street Gardens and down Hanover Street past the George Hotel to the Princes Street tram stop. The throngs of people passing up and down the street seemed more subdued than usual, and Sophie had the feeling that any small unexpected noise would set off a mass panic.
When the tram came, she wedged herself into a seat near the back as the vehicle began climbing Calton Hill in the direction of some of her favorite Edinburgh landmarks: the full-scale replica of the Parthenon built to honor the Scots who died in the Napoleonic Wars; the column in the shape of a telescope marking the achievements of Lord Nelson, whose great victory at Trafalgar had been the last bright spot before Wellington’s awful defeat at Waterloo. Sophie’s school sat on the hill’s lower slopes. Modeled on a classical temple, the Edinburgh Institution for Young Ladies had an enormous Doric portico with columns in the center of the main building and walkways along either side leading to the two wings.
Not until after supper did Sophie find herself alone with Nan, Jean, and Priscilla, and it was a great relief when they behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened on Friday morning. Priscilla asked Sophie for help with her sums, Nan gave a tedious account of the Saturday afternoon lacrosse scrimmage, and Jean returned Sophie’s buttonhook, borrowed the week before when her own went missing. Everything felt so familiar and comfortable that the strange feeling in Sophie’s stomach finally went away.
In English that morning they had written responses to a famous writer’s assertion that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country. It was almost bedtime, but the girls were still arguing about whether it made any sense.
“No true friend would ask such a thing,” Nan said. “A real friend would help you serve your country, not betray it.”
“But that’s not the point,” Jean argued. “Isn’t there anybody in the world you care about so much that you’d really do anything for them?”
“I’d give up my life for any one of my brothers,” said Nan, looking determined. “But my brothers would kill me—literally kill me!—if they thought I was about to betray my country.”
“What if your brothers were all up in front of a firing squad and you could only save one of them?” Sophie asked. She liked this kind of conversation. “Which one would you pick, and why?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly choose between them,” said Nan, her mouth set in a stubborn line.
“But you must have a favorite,” Jean said, pressing for a better answer. “Everyone has a favorite, if they’re really being honest.”
“That’s not true,” said Nan.
“Yes, it is,” said Jean. “There are lots of people I love—my mother and my baby brother, for instance—but my favorite person in the world is Priscilla.”
Priscilla looked entirely unmoved by this tribute. Typical, thought Sophie, feeling annoyed.
“I’d do anything to make sure Priscilla was safe,” Jean continued. “Even if it meant betraying my country—which it probably wouldn’t, of course.”
“I agree with J
ean about having a favorite person,” Priscilla said in a softer voice than usual. Sophie looked at her, thinking she sounded almost human for once. “My favorite person’s my father. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him.”
“What about you, Sophie?” Jean asked. “Who’s your favorite person, the person you’d do anything to protect?”
Sophie couldn’t help it. Mr. Petersen’s face came irresistibly into her mind, and a flood of heat spread up over her neck and face.
The others began to crow.
“Sophie loves Mr. Petersen,” said Jean through giggles.
“Yes,” said Priscilla, “in the breast of Sophie Hunter lurks unbridled passion and a love that dare not speak its name. Love for the most boring man in the world!”
Sophie felt upset and mortified. She took a few deep lungfuls of air, a breathing technique Great-aunt Tabitha had learned from a Yogic guru and practiced every day before breakfast. It was meant to calm people down, but it didn’t seem to work very well.
Just then the housemistress appeared to check that they were all in bed; Sophie almost felt she should say a prayer of thanks for the convenient timing. A moment later the second bell rang for lights-out.
SIX
ALL THE GIRLS WERE seated and waiting attentively the next morning by the time Miss Chatterjee strode into the room and set her books on the table at the front of the class. Born in Calcutta and educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, Miss Chatterjee spoke in a crisp, fancy-sounding English accent that stood out amid everyone else’s respectable middle-class Scottish voices. She was hands down the most exciting teacher in the school.
Modern European history was a subject one couldn’t not be interested in, at least in Sophie’s opinion. Every one of the abuses and atrocities that filled the daily papers could be traced back in one way or another to the fatal day in 1815 when Napoleon defeated Wellington and slaughtered the British forces at Waterloo.
The previous week they had been reading Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution.
The Explosionist Page 4
