Page 73 of Death at the Dower House
I strode into the parlor without giving either of them a second look. I could feel eyes following my progress, though, and I could also sense Christopher’s amusement. My performance, and Crispin’s, seemed to meet with his approval. And it was obvious that Lady Laetitia had bought into it. She was staking her claim on St George just as hard as she could to keep him away from me.
However, Marsden detached his sister from Crispin’s arm as soon as they entered the parlor, and took her aside for a stern talking-to about proper behavior, so the romantic stroll through the garden didn’t come off. Laetitia pouted about it, but Crispin looked relieved, unless that was just in my imagination. And it was Laetitia who finally came up with the evening’s entertainment.
“Maybe we should have a séance.”
There was a beat of silence.
“A séance?” I repeated, incredulous. If music and dancing were improper, surely a séance was abominably so?
She tossed her neck. Her hair swung. “Just think about it. If Johanna’s spirit is still around, we could ask her what happened. And then the crime would be solved and the police would go away…”
And we could dance again, I realized. “Surely you understand that it would be in atrociously poor taste?” Not to mention that the detectives from Scotland Yard wouldn’t take the results of a séance as evidence of anything whatsoever.
But Gilbert, surprisingly, seemed in favor. “It can’t hurt, certainly. I’m sure none of us are believers—” he gave Laetitia an apologetic look, “—but if we’re wrong, maybe we’ll learn something, and if not, maybe it will be fun.”
“I don’t know…” Constance demurred, with a glance at me. We had certainly sat around on the floor of our dormitory at Godolphin back in our school days on plenty of evenings, playing spiritual games in the dark with nothing but a lot of frissons down our spines to show for it. I thought it was a load of tosh, personally, and if it had been my mother who died last night, I wouldn’t have wanted to turn her death into entertainment for Lady Laetitia. But I wasn’t in charge here. The Dower House wasn’t mine—nor was it Constance’s, actually; it was really more Laetitia’s, wasn’t it?—and perhaps she felt like she couldn’t say no in stronger terms than she already had.
So we ended up around a table in the darkest corner of the parlor, with all the electric lights out—the spirits are affected by too much light, Lady Laetitia claimed. I could see Christopher’s lips compress at the sound of that, and had to agree that it was ridiculous. Spirits aren’t physical, so why would anything in the physical world bother them?
It was, of course, much more likely that Lady Laetitia didn’t want anyone to know that she was pushing the planchette—or more accurately, the glass.
We played the old-fashioned way, with circles drawn on pieces of paper with letters and numbers and ‘yes’ and ‘no’ scribbled on them, and with a cocktail glass with a stem—that was important, somehow—that Laetitia held over the flame of a candle before putting it down, bottom up, on the table.
“Everyone put their fingertips on the glass,” she instructed.
There were eight of us, so sixteen fingertips, which of course took up rather a lot of room. But we managed, somehow, to each rest the tips of two fingers on the edge of the glass.
“Elbows off the table,” Laetitia ordered. We all obeyed. And there we sat, while the candles flickered, and the darkness got darker, and the silence more oppressively silent. Marsden took a finger off the glass to rub his nose, and Laetitia scowled at him. “You’re not taking this seriously, Geoffrey!”
“No,” Geoffrey said. “This is silly, Letty. Let’s just play Ludo.”
“Hush!” someone hissed—I think it might have been Gilbert Peckham—and they both fell silent.
Constance tittered nervously. Marsden, directly across the table from me, pressed his foot down on top of my toes. I moved my foot out of the way and accidentally nudged Gilbert instead. He was next to Marsden, on the other side of Constance (and Francis, who was to my right). Gilbert smirked. I scooted my chair an inch closer to Christopher, on my other side, and tucked my feet underneath, out of the way. Crispin, on Christopher’s other side, glanced my way and arched a brow. I shook my head, and saw that Laetitia had noticed the by-play.
“No talking,” she said severely. “Everyone look at the glass.”
We looked at the glass, with its smoky inside. There was something very hypnotic about the whole thing, and of course that was the point. When Laetitia finally intoned, “Is there a spirit present?” in her best sepulchral voice, both Constance and I jumped. Gilbert giggled.
Apparently no spirit was present, because nothing happened. We sat in silence for a while longer. My own nose itched, but I knew if I took my fingertips off the glass to rub it I would be yelled at, and the longer we sat here, the more annoyed I got. I leaned over and rubbed my face against Francis’s shoulder instead. He grinned.
“Shhh!” Laetitia hissed. “Is there a spirit present?”
Apparently there was, because the glass jumped. Or perhaps—much more likely—it was just one of us.
Laetitia decided on the former. “Can you tell us who you are?”
The glass hesitated, and then moved, with increasing speed, toward the letter R. When it went from there to the letter O and then B, I felt Francis stiffen beside me.
“Robert?” Laetitia said. “Is that right?”
The glass zoomed, with all our fingers on it, to the circle with the word ‘yes.’
“No,” Francis said and took his fingers off the glass. “Absolutely not.”
Laetitia hissed and Marsden grumbled, but I nodded. “I agree. Parlor games are all well and good, but some of us here have suffered losses, and dredging up our dead is not going to win any points.”
Christopher nodded, and so, a little to my surprise, did Crispin. Laetitia pouted but relented. “Oh, very well. Sorry, Robert.”
