Woman Who Spoke to Spirits

by Alys Clare

  What is it? Why can Lily sense menace?

  For menace there undoubtedly is, and all at once Lily is very afraid.

  Ernest said that Albertina’s spirit guides were warning her that she was in danger. Can it be that Lily is picking up a little of what Albertina senses? Oh, but if this … this horror is directing its full force at the poor woman, how can she sit there and not leap up to flee to safety?

  Lily’s skin is crawling. She can almost see the menace, smell it, creeping over the walls and down from the ceiling as if black mould was suddenly spreading, far too quickly and profusely to have anything but supernatural origins …

  Stop it, she commands herself.

  She forces her attention back to what is happening around the table.

  There is a brief message of bland reassurance for Mr Haverford – Lily recognizes him as the man who shook Ernest Stibbins’s hand rather too powerfully last Sunday – and a longer one for Leonard Carter, whose grief for his mother produces tears which Albertina wipes away with a clean handkerchief and a gentle hand. She is in the middle of saying something about loss being the inevitable result of love when, as if somebody has reached down and twisted her head, all at once she is staring past Leonard and straight at Lily.

  She darts a hand across the table and grasps hold of Lily’s. Her grip is very tight, her hand hot and slightly moist.

  And she cries, ‘I see him falling! Oh, oh, and the water is so far below!’ She has gone very pale, and there are beads of sweat on her upper lip. ‘Oh, it’s terrible! And you, poor, poor you, you loved him so much and of course he loved you too, and it was far, far too soon to leave you!’

  Shaken to her soul, Lily shakes her head as if mystified, for it is difficult to see how this image can possibly relate to the story of Miss Maud Garrett and her fiancé Cecil, because she has hinted to Leonard Carter that he succumbed to TB. Risking a very quick glance to her right, she sees Leonard’s perplexed face. All she can do is shake her head and mutter, ‘He used to say how he liked to sit looking down at the sea …’ and then, reclaiming her hand and reaching in her little bag for a handkerchief, she presses it to her face and pretends to be overcome.

  And all the time, like the threat of darkness creeping closer and intent on harm, she feels the menace …

  Leonard is holding her up, supporting her as she slumps. She has no idea what has happened; why she’s leaning against him; why she feels cold with dread.

  The second lamp has been rekindled and both of them are now on the table, casting a glowing circle of light. Ernest is drawing back the curtains. Albertina has left the room, and as if from a long way away Lily hears the sound of water filling a kettle, the lighting of the gas.

  They are all very kind to her. ‘Your first time, dearie! It’s only to be expected,’ says old Mrs Sullivan, and, ‘Brace up, Miss Garrett, it can only be beneficial in the long run to have received such a powerful message,’ says the soldierly young man called Robert Sutherland. Ernest Stibbins hands her a wonderfully welcome cup of tea, and watches anxiously as she sips it. ‘Drink it up,’ he says, his face creased with kindly concern. ‘That’s the way!’

  At last the tea is drunk, the cups handed in to be stacked on the tray, the thruppences discreetly dropped into an empty sugar bowl and the session is over. Ernest sees them to the door, bids them goodbye until next time.

  Leonard seems on the point of escorting Lily back to the cafe where they met, but she cannot take any more for now. With an apologetic smile and muttering about a headache, she turns the other way, about to hurry off.

  Mrs Sullivan catches her sleeve, edging very close. Her face is lined with distress. ‘Oh, take care, Miss Garrett!’ she says quietly.

  ‘I’m quite all right now, thank you,’ Lily manages.

  But Mrs Sullivan shakes her head. ‘I do not refer to what went on within,’ she whispers, glancing back towards the Stibbins house. Then, her face right up against Lily’s, she says, ‘Have you far to go? Shall you be home before dusk?’

  ‘Not far, just over the bridge,’ Lily says, trying to sound confident; not easy, for, what with her recent experience and these alarming mutterings, she isn’t feeling confident at all.

  ‘Hurry home, and do not tarry!’ Mrs Sullivan says in a sort of strangled hiss. ‘It is not safe, Miss Garrett, for a young woman on her own! There have been far too many—’ Abruptly she stops. Watching her closely, Lily thinks that it is as if she has forced herself to bite back the words that were about to spill out. With a curt little nod, Mrs Sullivan turns away and, falling into step with George and Robert Sutherland, who have courteously been waiting for her, trots away.

  Lily takes her advice. By the time she reaches the river she is all but running. She doesn’t even begin to feel safe until she is back on the north side of Battersea Bridge and hurrying into Hob’s Court.

  SIX

  The house is empty and it looks likely to remain so for the rest of the evening. The Little Ballerina won’t be back until the small hours, and in any case Lily would have to feel a good deal more desperate before turning to her for company. Felix is in, or at best on his way back from, Tunbridge Wells, and anyway it’s Sunday, and not a working day.

  Lily is alone.

  She pretended not to recognize the meaning of Albertina’s terrible words, but she does and she is shocked to the very heart of her.

  It was her father, Andrew Owen Raynor, who fell.

  He was a civil engineer and when Lily was twelve he worked away from home for many months on the construction of a bridge high above a Scottish firth. He was killed when he fell hundreds of feet into the sea below.

  Very few people know of the tragedy and none of them is now in Lily’s life. Her mother, almost as swiftly as it could be arranged, married the man with whom she had been having an affair and by whom she was already pregnant at the time of her husband’s death. She, her husband and the two sons she bore him live in Argentina, where the husband has interests in beef.

  Lily’s grandparents and her aunt are dead.

  Who, then, told Albertina Stibbins that, nearly nineteen years later, Lily is still haunted by her father’s death?

  The distress is refusing to dissipate; in fact, it is intensifying. Lily needs help, for she doesn’t think she can deal with this alone.

  She knows who she needs to talk to.

  She puts her hat and jacket on again and leaves the house. She walks down to the river and turns west, hurrying along until she reaches the small basin where the boats tie up. Four or five craft lie along the little quay. One of them she recognizes. She approaches it and calls out softly to attract the boatman’s attention. He opens the hatch and his head and shoulders appear. He gives her a smile. She says, ‘Please, have you seen The Dawning of the Day recently?’

  He nods. ‘Aye. He’ll be on his way down from Oxford.’ They both know who the boatman means by he. ‘Want me to pass on a message? He’ll be here later, like as not.’

  Thank God, Lily thinks. ‘Yes, if you please. Just that Lily wishes to see him.’

  He nods again. ‘Right.’

  Then he descends below deck again and quietly shuts the hatch.

  The master of The Dawning of the Day is called Tamáz Edey. His mother was from Galicia, his father a Fensman. One night in the autumn of the previous year, he and Lily met in a way that seems to have thrown them straight into the sort of friendship, if that is what it is, that will probably endure for a lifetime.

  It was late at night, and Lily knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had only recently returned from India, and The Incident was still so fresh and so horrific in her mind that she found it very difficult ever to sleep. In addition, her panicky dash back to England brought dreadful news, learning on arrival as she did that her beloved Aunt Eliza had died soon after Lily had boarded the ship bringing her home.

  In her shocked and panicked state she had acted with uncharacteristic precipitateness, closing the shop, packing away and disposing of most of the s
tock, finding workmen to take down the sign that said Raynor’s Pharmacy.

  None of which made her feel any better.

  She was about to make her weary way up to bed, sick at heart, grieving – for not only had she lost her aunt but she had also been forced to flee from her life as a nurse – and knowing sleep was still far away, when she heard a soft tap at the street door.

  She wasn’t aware of being afraid, or even apprehensive. So much had happened to her recently that she sometimes felt all emotion was dead. She opened the door a crack and said dully, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have need of the apothecary,’ said a low-pitched male voice. Lily was aware of a bulky silhouette, above average height, made taller by the battered top hat.

  ‘The apothecary has gone,’ Lily replied.

  ‘But this is Raynor’s Apothecary? Raynor’s Pharmacy, as it became?’

  ‘It was,’ she corrected. ‘My grandparents are dead, as is my aunt, and the pharmacy is no more.’ She had given too much away by letting him know of her blood connection to the erstwhile apothecaries and, suddenly defensive, she clutched at the door. ‘I am unable to help you.’

  But the low voice said urgently, ‘A young woman – a girl – lies on my boat and she is in labour. I have done what I can for her but something is gravely amiss.’

  Something in Lily shrivelled away as if it had been scorched with acid. She had turned her back on nursing, put that life behind her; and, of all things, obstetrics and the care of women in their reproductive role was the very thing she could not bear to think about.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘As I said, I cannot help you. You must find someone else.’ She closed the door.

  But it stopped about five inches from the jam, because the low-voiced man’s foot in its big boot was in the gap. ‘I believe you can,’ he said. How did he know? ‘If you don’t come she may very well die. If you have the skill and yet you do not try to help, will you be able to live with that?’

  You have no idea what I’m already living with, she thought.

  But she didn’t think she could bear to add to those burdens.

  With a curt, ‘Wait there,’ she rushed into the room that had once housed the shop counter and, from the very bottom of the corner cupboard where she thought she had hidden it away for ever, took out her medical bag. She grabbed a cloak, put the door key on its chain around her neck and followed the man into the night.

  He led the way out of Hob’s Court and turned right towards the river. Then right again, past the ends of rows of houses and on beyond the patch of waste ground, on the far side of which was a basin in which the river and canal boats moored. He strode on to the last boat, and she had an impression of a long, low craft, its foredeck shrouded in tarpaulin and the living quarters at the stern. A lantern shone from a tall post and in its soft light she saw that there was a name written in cursive script beneath the gunwale: The Dawning of the Day. He jumped aboard, held out a hand to help her, then opened the hatch and led her below.

  She had heard the screams as they hurried along the quay. Now, in this small but, she noticed, extremely clean and well-arranged space, the sound was deafening. Two young men stood awkwardly against the far wall of the cabin, their expressions saying very clearly that they wished they were anywhere but there. On the single bed along the opposite wall lay a girl.

  And girl was right, Lily thought as she approached, for the straining, sweating, grossly swollen figure could have been no more than fifteen and perhaps less.

  The big man said right in her ear, ‘It is not my child.’

  Lily nodded. She turned to him, and seeing him properly in the lamplight and without his hat, she saw short brown hair, deep eyes, good features and a beard in which his teeth looked very white. ‘I am Tamáz Edey,’ he added.

  ‘Lily Raynor,’ she replied. Then, turning with her eyes and all of her attention to her patient, she said quite firmly to the girl, ‘Now, I want you to stop screaming and together we shall calm your breathing, make you a little more comfortable and then, when you are ready, you will talk to me.’ The girl stared up at her wide-eyed, mouth open. But the screaming had stopped.

  Lily propped her up, straightened her body out of its grotesque twisting and laid her straight. Then she said over her shoulder, ‘Please ask the young men to leave.’

  The bearded man – Tamáz – muttered some soft words and the two youngsters fled up the steps and away. Tamáz had begun to climb after them but Lily said, ‘No, not you, for I shall need you.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I require water,’ Lily said, ‘and a wash cloth.’

  Tamáz fetched a basin of warm water – there was a kettle on top of the stove – and handed her a piece of flannel. Like everything else in the cabin, it was clean. It smelt faintly of lavender and herbs.

  ‘Now,’ Lily said to the girl in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I am going to examine you.’ The girl shrank away, but Lily went on, ‘I am sorry but I have to see what is happening with the baby, for quite soon you will feel the need to push – you will, my love,’ she added, for the girl was frantically shaking her head – ‘it’s nature’s way and cannot be gainsaid. My job is to make sure that your body is sufficiently open for this pushing to begin.’

  She wasn’t sure the girl understood but she had no option, for the contractions were coming quickly now and birth was surely close.

  Swiftly she sponged the girl’s face, pushed back the sweat-soaked hair, and wiped her neck and throat. She wanted this first touch to be of a less intimate nature than what she must do next, and even as she ministered to her patient, she felt her relax a little. Then she said gently, ‘Now, bend your knees and let your legs drop apart. Yes, good, very good, that’s right! I’m going to look inside you.’

  She acted as she spoke and found that, as she had thought, the girl’s cervix was well dilated. ‘Very good,’ she repeated cheerfully, ‘I don’t think it will be too long now, and you’re doing splendidly.’

  But as she withdrew her fingers she touched something that surely shouldn’t have been there: a raised line of scarred flesh …

  Questions flew into her mind and she began to suspect what had happened. But she put it aside, for the girl was pleading for her help and needed all her skill and concentration.

  After a short while Lily said to Tamáz, ‘You need to put water on to boil. Oh, and have you a knife?’

  Looking slightly surprised, he reached behind him and drew from his belt a twelve-inch knife with a broad, wicked-looking blade. ‘This?’

  ‘Good God, have you nothing smaller?’ she hissed. ‘It’s to cut the cord!’

  She caught a brief flash of white teeth amid the heavy beard as Tamáz grinned. ‘I will find something,’ he said. She heard him refilling the kettle and returning it to the stove, then rummaging in a drawer. He held up for her approval what looked like a small vegetable knife.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘When the water’s boiling hard, put the knife in it and leave it there for several minutes.’ He nodded.

  Lily knew some time before the baby emerged that it must surely be dead.

  Labour continued for a while without very much progress, then, as sometimes happened, suddenly the contractions merged into one long contraction, the girl drew her legs right up to her chest, clenched her teeth, then screamed and yelled a curse, and the baby’s head crowned. Calling instructions – ‘Stop pushing till I tell you’ – ‘Now. Now!’ – Lily eased out the bulge of the head, turned the shoulders, and the rest of the still little body followed. The baby – it was a boy – was grey-blue and lifeless and lay like a perfect little statue between the girl’s thighs. Then a gush of blood burst from her, showering the tiny corpse.

  Tamáz, right behind her, said some soft, quiet words that sounded like a prayer. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’ he whispered, his mouth so close to her ear that his beard tickled her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she whispered back. Tamáz handed her the knife, its handle
wrapped in a piece of cloth against the heat, and she cut the cord. ‘This little boy has been dead for some time.’

  Her hands flew as she tried to stem the haemorrhage. Tamáz, understanding, said, ‘I will take him. Do not worry,’ he added, ‘I will care for him.’

  She stood back briefly and he reached down and took the body from the bed.

  Lily returned to the girl.

  Some time later, she became aware of soft singing.

  She stood up – she had slumped onto the other, wider bed at the rear of the cabin, half-concealed by a curtain – and was taking a short rest, for her back was aching. The girl was asleep. Lily had delivered the afterbirth, checked that it was entire and managed to stem the bleeding. She had washed the girl, told her gently that the baby had died and done what she could to comfort her. She had dressed her in a clean nightshirt – a man’s garment, very obviously, and a large man at that – and removed the blood-soaked sheets. Then she helped her to lie down, drew up the blankets and, with a deep sigh, the girl closed her eyes. Within moments, the deep, regular breathing told its own story.

  Now, intrigued by the singing, Lily got up and very quietly climbed the short flight of steps to the deck.

  Tamáz Edey was pacing slowly up and down on a patch of shingly beach that was gradually being taken by the last few inches of the incoming tide. The tiny shape of the dead baby was cradled in his strong arms. Noticing for the first time, Lily saw that, despite the chill of the night, he wore no coat or jacket but merely a shirt with its sleeves rolled up, beneath a waistcoat. His breeches were tucked into boots very similar to her own.

  The baby’s little body was wrapped snugly in one of the soft cloths that Lily had brought with her. Its head lay against Tamáz’s heart. She recognized the song now; he was singing the child a lullaby.

  She couldn’t look away and, as she watched, he reached down and selected a large, round stone. He slipped it inside the shroud, wrapping a fold of cloth round it and tying it firmly. The singing went on. Then, slowly, gracefully, he crouched down and laid the infant in the rising water. He supported its small weight for quite a long time, then, as all but imperceptibly the tide turned, gradually lowered his hands until the body sank. She hadn’t realized, but there must be deep water just beyond the narrow stretch of beach, for the pale shape of the wrapped body swiftly dropped down and out of sight.