by Jerico Lenk
“Out to the races with Dr. Lowells and the wife,” she conceded, bordering on unease as she eyed me with furrowed brow. “Is something wrong?”
“No, and that’s the thing!” I could scarcely contain myself, wild and winded. “Zelda, I’ve been bad to you. I didn’t tell you about the other night. On Waterloo, I ran into Black Cross Spiritualists. They gave me a card. I went to meet them. Zelda—they want me to work for them!”
Zelda dropped a starched shirt and gave me a look of such horror, the smile crumbled from my face.
Perhaps … I had been a bit rash.
After a terrible pause, she set the clothes aside neatly and smoothed her dress. Confused and suddenly crestfallen, I waited, heart pounding, hating how betrayed I felt by her lack of equal exhilaration.
Thinly, she said, “Come with me.”
I followed her to her room, where she opened the small jewelry box her grandmother had given to her before she’d come to London. There was nothing in it now but small sentimentalities, some bank notes and a string of yellowed pearls. Out from under them all, she pulled a key, and all the waiting excitement fell through my stomach as I realised what she meant to show me.
We went down to my mother’s room, and Zelda unlocked it.
“You’ve something to see,” she said in a mindful, quiet way.
The room was stuffy and stale, its air thick with secrets. And yet it felt vaguely intimate, somehow, as if my mother’s presence had been closed up there with all her old belongings like a tomb. A French Louis Vuitton trunk of shoes, a box of jewels, yellowed lace. A wind-up automaton and porcelain figurines, furnishings like ghosts under grey sheets, lonely silhouettes with the curtains drawn tight on the windows.
A book of fortunetelling cards. An overabundance of candles, all different shapes and colours and states of use, along a shelf of pendants, feathers, dried flowers, books on horticulture and metaphysical studies. Charlie and Colette standing in the dark corner, all pasty faces and wide, intelligent eyes.
I reared back, startled to see them there. Zelda’s grip tightened on my arm. She hadn’t seen them; she thought I was upset. I flashed them a frustrated look.
Zelda pulled the cover back from a vanity table, glass foggy with age. I wasn’t prepared for my reflection. I looked a mess. A disheveled, wide and wild-eyed mess. Finally, in my mother’s room, and hollow inside where perhaps something like sadness or anger should have been.
Dust turned Zelda’s fingertips grey as she drew a little calotype from the top drawer of the vanity table. It was a photograph of her—my mother. Signed on the edge: Kisses, Margot; 1867.
A wistful chill wound through me as I realised I had already forgotten what she’d looked like.
In the image, she was so young, so beautiful in a dark and dreamy way. We shared the same face shape and eyes, the same brooding curve to our lower lips. Without thinking of it, I dusted my knuckles along my mouth as if I needed proof. The way she peered past the photographer was almost devious, a secretive little glint in her eyes caught for all time.
“Why did she leave us?” I asked. It was not lamentation. It was honest curiosity. It seemed too possible to me now that anything my father had ever told me about her was untrue. Margot Winchester, corrupted by the age of Spiritualism, the mother who left.
Zelda let me hold the photograph. I ran my fingers over it like it might make her more real to me. “She was unfaithful,” Zelda said. “That puts a strain on the marriage, a lady rendezvousing on the side like that.”
“Did she work for him? Or was she … ?”
“Oh, no, she came from money and status.” Zelda clucked her tongue as if to say, Shame. “The townhouse was hers. Until marriage, that is. Your father, he never appreciated her more unconventional interests, and surely that also lent sway to her imminent departure.”
“You mean the Black Cross.”
Zelda’s glance jumped to me. It was enough for confirmation. “He accommodated all her hobbies, even when she vowed she saw and spoke with spirits, but … ”
I put the photograph down, gaze swerving her way.
“I’m sorry?” I whispered.
Zelda nodded with a tight little frown, as if ashamed to say it again. My heart lurched but I could not tell whether it leapt or sank.
My mother had seen the Missing as I did.
Zelda tossed her blonde braid over one shoulder and stooped to throw back a corner of the faded rug.
Beneath it was painted rough and dark on the floor a large circle, with a second circle scrawled within, and diagonal lines that came to a point as if below the rest of the rug hid some collage of geometric shapes. Eerie symbols and markings, smudged and faded, followed the painted lines, the alphabet of some unknown tongue.
I’d seen something similar before. At a Spiritualist gala, a gentleman who’d called himself a daemonologist had displayed diagram after diagram, each similar to this. But …
Guardian angels, my mother had said when I first saw Charlie and Colette. But I hadn’t a doubt, now—she’d known them for what they were, my unearthly little playmates.
“She spent all her time at those ghost conjuring parties,” Zelda muttered, frowning. “What do they call those ladies?”
“Planchettists,” I offered.
“It was good-natured and harmless, until she changed. Oh, please don’t think it too bold of me to say, but it was her insistence she was a witch that finally had your father fed up with her.”
Witch. Never mind; that was a laugh. Witches were superstition, the craft of simple village folklore—the history and study of which was, surely, what Westwood had meant when he mentioned it earlier in that stuffy office of his.
Zelda reached to take the little calotype back. I grabbed it. I needed to keep it. With a sigh, voice like fine old velvet, she said, “She knew she wouldn’t win you in a petition against your father’s custody. The eyes of any court would have judged her unwell.”
For a moment—just a brief, fretful moment—I felt a stab of regret. My father had only been doing his best. To keep me with him, to keep me from finding out about my mother, to keep me from following in the same path.
Yet, somehow, he’d hidden this from me my entire life, and when I’d gone to him, he’d failed to mention my very own mother had been the same.
The things I could have asked her, that we might have spoken of together! Imagine how alone and misunderstood she too had felt!
Zelda reluctantly passed me an obituary from 1878. Mrs. M. Winchester, it read. Her body had been found on the Chelsea Embankment, assaulted. Murdered. Not quite as monstrous as but certainly a premonition of last year’s Whitechapel Ripper’s.
A dismal chill crept through me. She was so estranged, so distant and nearly unreal, and I should have been anguished by the tragic revelation. Murdered. I only felt in a dull daze. Selfishly frustrated she was gone. Shocked, and cold, and a little hurt—liberated by the knowledge, but empty of trust.
It seemed to me, much as I didn’t want it to be so, that despite our shared audience to the dead, my mother wasn’t any better in truth than she was in talk. The fact of the matter was that I’d never truly know. My father felt safe with commercial frauds, psychic hoaxes and séance party parlour tricks. But he had no idea what to do about a child who could see actual spirits just as his mad wife had.
“They never found the assailant,” Zelda whispered as I passed the obituary clipping forth.
“I’ve joined the Black Cross,” I whispered back, sick with anticipation. I glanced up at her, guilty but unable to disguise my relief, my resolve, just as she did not hide her woeful fear. “I interviewed this morning. They’re employing me. I’m not running away, it’s just that they require new members to board there at first. It’s not very far. It shall be as though I’m away at school.”
For all the times she’d indulged my stubbornness over the years, surely this would be the day Zelda refused it. I waited, not sure how to go about arguing.
&nbs
p; But she just smiled at me, very faintly. “Darling,” she said softly, “you know if you leave for that place, you’ll hardly be welcome home again?”
The silence rang around us. Dread knotted in my stomach. I hadn’t stopped to think about this adventure being forever. But she was right. It changed everything.
“I know,” I whispered.
***
With my mother’s room locked up again, I went with Zelda down to the kitchen.
“Will’s leaving,” she told Cook. Cook slid a noontime sandwich and cup of cocoa across the table to me, nodding idly. But then he understood the tone of Zelda’s voice and looked over in shock.
“For good?” he pressed.
“I’m not sure,” I said, and I wanted to believe it for some reason the same I wanted it to be untrue.
Zelda clapped her hands together and announced warmly from behind a weak shield of pride, “He’s found employment outside the house!”
“Well!” Cook blinked a few times, smiling as though he almost wasn’t sure how.
“There are travel cases in the coat room,” Zelda said, stroking the hair at the crown of my head. “Take what you can at the present. Cook and I shall bring a trunk with the rest after … well, once your father is distracted.”
I left the two of them whispering together as I fetched one of the boxy, handled travel cases and made my way upstairs. Agatha and Daphne were in the sitting room, Agatha embroidering the hem of a dress with ribbon, Daphne curled up on the divan with a book. I stopped in the doorway.
“I’m leaving,” I declared. The more it was said, the more I realised I really was … wasn’t I?
“Ooh, off to where?” Agatha hummed.
I cleared my throat. “It’s not a short trip. I’ve found employment.”
Agatha looked up sharply.
“Good,” Daphne whispered, and something in my chest tightened. Uncertain how to reply, I said nothing, and just listened to the echo of my own footsteps as I climbed the stairs to my room to pack my belongings.
Agatha followed me back down to the kitchen. “What do you mean you’ve found employment?”
“I mean just that,” I said, heart in my throat.
“And you must leave?”
“They’re letting out a room to me. It’s a unique sort of work.”
“You’re sure you’re needed immediately?” Zelda pressed, hands wringing together unless she kept them busy rearranging the things in my travel case.
“When else should I go?” I asked, and tried not to let the sudden sick nervousness change my mind. Leaving. On my own. Without telling my father. Without saying good-bye. And Charlie and Colette—did it matter if I said farewell to them?
“Sit still,” Agatha said, and took a comb to my hair.
“New employment!” Cook paced for a moment, rolling a cigarette and nibbling at the inside of his own smile. “Yes, when I was your age, I was outside the house working, too!” When I wasn’t looking, he placed a little leather-held knife on the table before me.
“My son’s,” he said. He struck a match; cigarette smoke curled up between the four of us. “From his time as a soldier. Protected him well, Will. Can’t protect from cholera, but protects ’gainst most else well enough.”
I slipped the knife from Cook into the back of my shoe, where the worn leather sheath of it wasn’t too uncomfortable.
“Will,” Daphne said in a small voice as she stepped into the kitchen. She gestured for me to hold out a hand, and placed in it her tiny prized ring with the blue stone. “For you,” she murmured.
That something in my chest tightened harder. I waited for her to meet my eyes before I said, “Thank you, Daphne.”
“And from me!” Agatha pushed into my free hand the pearl-studded comb with which she’d fixed my hair.
“Listen, all of you,” I insisted, laughing weakly, “I very well might be back sooner than you think. At any rate, I won’t be that far away.”
I doubted any of us really felt that was the truth. Something new was beginning but something had to end for that, and what was ending, I did not want to imagine just yet.
“At any rate,” Zelda echoed, “you might want to hurry on now, as your father and Miss Valérie are sure to be home soon.”
“You aren’t telling him?” Daphne’s gaze swung around to mine.
Mutely, as I pulled my cap down snug, I shook my head.
I wanted to; I really did. Despite everything, it pained me not to at least say good-bye. He was my father … and yet despite that, part of me felt he was deserving of the shock.
Cook tucked a pasty in my coat pocket. Daphne clasped my face in her hands. There was unfinished business between us after her almost-jump from Waterloo, and it pained me to leave it unresolved. I didn’t want to abandon her. She was a sister to me. But her eyes shone with apology and the better kind of heartache, and she leaned to plant a kiss at the corner of my mouth. I blushed, flustered, smile twisting politely.
“I wish I ached to live life as much as you do, Will,” she whispered, stroking a thumb over my cheek. “My valourous hero.”
My brow knotted. I didn’t trust myself to say anything without stammering it into nonsense, so I simply nodded and held her a little tighter in our hug.
Zelda followed me out the kitchen door. Daphne, Agatha, and Cook watched from over her shoulder, clustered there in the doorway; I jumped off the stoop into the alley, clutching my travel case with both hands, then frantically turned around and blurted, “What will you tell my father when he asks where I am, Zelda? He’ll come after me—”
Zelda snagged me by the collar and crushed me close in the most earnest embrace. Her braid tickled my cheek as I set down my case and clung tight. Trying to take note of the way she felt, the way she smelled.
“Never you mind that,” she said firmly. “Be clever but also be wise.”
“I love you,” I mumbled against her shoulder.
“Go on, now, dear, and Cook and I shall bring your trunk first chance we get.”
I blew kisses to the others. Zelda waved as off I went, jogging first until I was at the street, terrified that if I looked back, my father’s face would be there—home from the races, in the window, watching.
But soon I was at the street, and the sun was warm through the morning chill. I pulled the Black Cross calling card from my pocket just to hold it, and felt again the glow of fate.
A quiver of terrified excitement ran through me as I stood at the edge of the romantic little Black Cross courtyard. It didn’t seem inclined to leave me be any time soon. I didn’t want it to, in all honesty.
I should have waited more than a quarter of an hour for Research Inspector d’Pelletier, the guide for whom Commissioner Westwood called to show me my room, but the longer I waited and looked around, my hands clammy on my travel case, the more restless I became.
Surely when my father discovered this turn of events, he would know precisely to where I’d gone and would send someone to fetch me. Or—and I wasn’t sure which was worse—perhaps he wouldn’t much care.
I struck off across the humble courtyard for the wing opposite the main offices.
The door there opened on the simple, light-coloured sitting room at the end of a wide hallway, with a few chaises and chairs under the French windows, small potted palms stretching towards the light.
Not far down the corridor was a large dining hall. I peeked in as I passed, finding it just as unassuming as the sitting room save for a scattering of old, old candelabra cradling fat candles. A man seated in the far corner with a paper and cup of tea glanced at me over his round glasses.
“Lost?” he asked. “If you’re looking for the main offices, they’re … ”
“Oh, I’ve already been,” I replied, blushing faintly. “Thank you.”
He raised his brows. “Well, did they direct you along the wrong way on your errand?”
“Oh … no, I’m not an errand boy, sir, I’m an inspector here.”
His
brows climbed higher; he looked me up and down, then cleared his throat and went back to his paper.
Mildly irked by his obvious contempt, I caught the pucker of my mouth before he could notice it and hurried on, putting a comfortable distance between the dining room and myself before slowing to a stroll again. The sound of my footsteps bounced around the empty corridor, as did whisper-soft conversations and the occasional open and close of a door somewhere else far away in the grand building. Like the echo of ghost people, there to hear but still somewhat removed.
The light fell through the windows at a slant between thick taffeta drapes; in a room down the hall, someone played at a piano. Two ladies drifted past me arm-in-arm.
“They say Welsh,” one said. “But I’ve spoken with him before, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“I don’t even care what,” the other remarked. “He didn’t even say hello.”
“You know he’s a singular fellow, Evie … ”
“Peculiar, I’d say!”
I went the direction from which they’d come, to a set of broad doors of thick black walnut, designed as richly as Flemish furniture. They hung open on a modest music room occupied by a zoo of instruments—pianoforte, dusty harpsichord, a cabinet of lyres and a set of violins. The grate of the marble mantle was empty and charred, guarded on both sides by little stone lions, and someone at the old French pianoforte in the patterned shadow of the mullioned windows let his fingers dance over the faded black keys with an easy passion.
It was Inspector Clement, from Waterloo.
He might have been a ghost himself, he looked so detached from the world, playing with a slow intensity that shouldn’t have been called concentration, because it wasn’t. He just seemed lost in thought. For whom was he playing? No one. Well, me.
I was a bit afraid to approach him, though I wanted to very badly. Instead, I just set my case down at the door and wandered around the spacious room, hoping he’d notice me. The occasional discordant and awkward note made the music all the more genuine. Something close to a Chopin piece, but there was no sheet of music before him. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if he’d seen me yet. The swell and jut of his shoulder blades under the fine grey of his waistcoat and the way his hands seemed so intimately acquainted with every black and yellowing key as he watched them with distant eyes distracted me, which made me run into a loveseat, which jumped an inch or two with a harsh scrape upon the floorboards.
