The Clairvoyant Curse (10 page)

After the Theosophy lecture Dr
Watson found himself drifting toward the dining room where the
sight of food made him realize just how hungry he was. The lecture
had gone much longer than he anticipated.

“Did you enjoy my lecture?”
asked the reverend, appearing suddenly at his side.

He admitted it was all very
interesting but it was not a philosophy he could personally
adopt.

The siren songstress joined
them.

“Have you met Miss
Morningstar?” said the reverend, sensing some negativity.

The doctor was delighted to
make the young woman’s acquaintance and watched her dance around
the dining table, heaping food on her plate.

Quite a few of the guests began
to drift away. He found a quiet spot on a window seat in the dining
room and was soon joined by the singing siren.

“You’re a friend of the
Countess’s?” she said, sitting alongside him.

He nodded.

She could breathe, talk and
chew at the same time and did most of the talking which suited him
because most of the time his mouth was full and he was not blessed
with the same tripartite talent. She had been with the troupe four
years. She was nineteen years of age but looked much, much younger.
It was on account of having a heart-shaped face and big eyes and
being small-boned and always looking like she was smiling. Most
people thought she was still a girl of thirteen or thereabouts.
Reverend Blackadder told everyone she was his niece to save awkward
questions being asked. They both had fair features so it fooled
most people but it wasn’t true. She was an orphan with no family
whatsoever and had only met him after she joined the troupe. That
was shortly after the terrible accident when the girl died and they
needed a replacement. Monsieur Croquemort was a magician then and
it was a magic show. Magic shows were very popular back then but
phantasmagoric shows are all the fashion now. He knows just what
people want. A bit of comedy, a bit of singing, something scary
with the magic lantern, a bit of hypnotizing, and Madame Moghra to
finish. All their shows were sold out.

“How did the girl die?”

She stopped talking and looked
at him with wide-eyed stupefaction. “What girl?”

“The one you just mentioned who
died in a terrible accident.”

“Antoinette?”

“If you say so – how did she
die?”

“She lost her head like the
French queen.”

“Like Marie Antoinette?”

“Yes, that’s the one – it
happened the same way.”

“By guillotine?” he said
sceptically.

She nodded with tremendous
animation. “It used to be part of the magic act. It was the grand
finale. Monsieur Croquemort, or the Grand Maestro as he was known
back then, had a guillotine and Antoinette was his assistant. She
would put her head on the chopping block and he would strut about
and wave his magic wand and say abracadabra and that sort of thing.
Crispin, I mean Mr Ffrench, would bang on the piano to get everyone
feeling rattled and then down would come the blade – bang!”

The doctor jumped.

“What are you blathering on
about now, missy?”

The squeaky rebuke came from
the vicinity of the door. It was Reverend Blackadder.

“How you can prattle on, young
lady! I swear you could talk underwater. But we’ve got a busy day
tomorrow; bags to pack and a million things to do. It’s off to
Glasgow on the 11.45. Give your uncle a kiss and off you go to
bed.”

She bounced dutifully to her
feet, giving the doctor a wink out of the side of her face, kissed
her so-called uncle and skipped out of the room like an obedient
child. The reverend waited until she had vacated the room.

“A case of arrested
development,” he sighed half-humorously. “I wouldn’t be surprised
to discover her mother, my dear sister, had dropped her on her head
when she was just a baby. But seriously, she can talk without
drawing breath. I hope she did not bore you to tears, Dr
Watson?”

“Not at all,” he returned
tactfully.

The doctor checked his pocket
watch only to find the hands had stopped at twenty minutes past
eleven. He had better track down the Countess and get her home.
Hopefully she would have slept off the worst of the wormwood elixir
and learned a bitter lesson. She had once said she never made the
same mistake twice. Let’s hope she stayed true to her word. Still,
he had won the wager. That was a blessed relief. Some people were
interesting and tolerable in small doses. And that went double for
phantasmagogic types. That beautiful girl with the sublime voice
was as nutty as a Christmas cake and the rest of the troupe were
not much better.

“Can you direct me to Madame
Moghra’s bedroom? I better collect Countess Volodymyrovna and get
her home to bed. I didn’t realize the lateness of the hour.”

The camera and the slides had
been packed away. There were only a few stragglers in the great
hall, putting on their cloaks and hats and gloves. Monsieur
Croquemort was conducting the farewells. The performance was almost
over. The medium was nowhere to be seen.

Madame Moghra was not entirely
surprised to find the Countess fast asleep in a chair in her
bedroom. She had been eagerly looking forward to receiving her
‘valuable’ gift from Lady Moira Cruddock all evening and several
times had made a discrete exploration of the grand rooms on the
pretext of circulating amongst her guests but the Countess remained
elusive. At one stage she concluded the Countess had left the
soiree early but then she spotted Dr Watson inspecting the
levitating chair or chatting to Monsieur Croquemort in the library
or listening to the Theosophy lecture and realised that was not the
case.

Orphaned early in life, she had
been a member of one travelling circus or performing troupe most of
her life and recognized intoxication in the fair members of her sex
when she saw it. Men tended to become belligerent and violent but
women tended to go to sleep. She sent Sissy to make some strong
coffee. Sissy was due back any moment. While she waited she lit
some candles and added some more coals to the fire. These old
houses were perpetually draughty and she gave a shiver. She was
looking forward to some warmer weather in Biarritz. The Hotel du
Palais was built as a summer villa for the Empress Eugenie on the
Bay Basque and was now a grand hotel with electric lighting, a
French chef and lots of interesting people to impress. It was just
the ticket. She would be in her spiritual element.

Despite Champollion’s plans,
she had no intention of travelling to America. Once the World
Spiritualist Congress came to an end she would bid
adieu
,
not
au revoir
, to the menagerie and travel to Monte Carlo
where she would rent a villa overlooking the bay. Why go to
America, when the Americans were willing to come to her? Her
reputation was established. Her star had finally risen. She could
hold séances in the comfort of her own drawing room and give
private spiritual readings to rich clients. Yes, she would break
the news to Champollion straight after they boarded ship. He
wouldn’t like it, of course. He would try to talk her out of it.
She was the star of the show. He would struggle to find a new draw
card but she was sick to death of living out of a suitcase. The
gift from her friend, Lady Moira, was a godsend. She wondered how
valuable the brooch might be and aimed a shrewd glance at the
sleepy Countess.

Curiosity got the better of her
and she was about to check the beaded evening bag in the Countess’s
lap when there was a rap on the door.

“Come in,” she called, putting
a diplomatic distance between herself and the Sleeping Beauty.

It was Reverend Blackadder and
behind him came Dr Watson. The doctor apologised for the intrusion
and went straight to the chair to rouse his companion. Slowly, she
stirred.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in my bedroom,” replied
Madame Moghra somewhat shortly, keen to receive the gift she had
been eagerly anticipating since yesterday and keen to see the backs
of her last two guests.

The Countess straightened up
but her head pounded and the room continued to sway. She felt
seasick and wondered if they were already sailing on the SS
Pleiades down the Irish Sea to Biarritz. Reality dawned suddenly.
“What time is it?”

“It is five minutes past
twelve,” replied Dr Watson calmly, checking the time on the bracket
clock, a note of ineluctable triumph evident in his tone.

“Oh, no!” she cried, sitting
bolt upright. “Too late! I lost!”

He tried not to smile too
broadly.

Madame Moghra became alarmed.
“Lost what, my dear Countess? You don’t mean to say you have lost
the gift from Lady Moira Cruddock!”

Everything came flooding back –
the wager, the gift, the statue! The ghastly shock was just what
the Countess needed to snap her out of her absinthe-addled state.
She checked a cry and gesticulated wildly, pointing at the marble
statue in the corner of the bedroom like someone pointing at a
hideous apparition.

“There! There! That’s it!” she
stammered, looking desperately at her companion and disregarding
her hostess, making her feel as invisible as one of the ghosts
haunting Marsh House. “The image on the shroud! I know how it was
done!”

“Too late,” Dr Watson said with
sobriety, hardly giving the statue a second glance. “You lost and I
won.”

The Countess’s head fell into
her hands and she almost wept. She had a massive thumping headache
but it was nothing compared to the pain of losing the bet. She
would have to forfeit all those prepaid tickets but even that was
nothing compared to the ignominy of failure.

“Five minutes!” she moaned. “A
lousy five minutes!”

“What are you talking about?”
intervened Madame Moghra tetchily, not taking kindly to being
ignored in her own bedroom.

Dr Watson, wearing a winning
smile, explained as succinctly as possible. “The Countess and I had
a bet regarding the shroud. She said she would be able to ascertain
how it was made. I said she would not. The bet finished at
midnight.”

Madame Moghra followed his
winning smile all the way to the bracket clock on the mantel. “That
clock is fifteen minutes fast. I always set the time on the clock
in my bedroom fifteen minutes early so that I am never late for a
show. It is the habit of a lifetime. A show must run like
clockwork.”

That bit of news reanimated the
Countess. Red blood pumping through sluggish veins brought her back
from the land of green fairies. She still had a few minutes to
explain her theory. She talked quickly and slurred most of the
words but she was desperate to get them out before the clock struck
twelve.

“Crispin washes the linen cloth
in silver sulphate to give it a quality not unlike photography
paper. He then drapes a cloth in front of that statue and sets the
camera on long exposure, about eight hours. The image of the statue
is thus transferred to the cloth. It looks like a negative
photographic image. He then rinses the cloth in ammonia to remove
all traces of the silver. And
voila
! He is left with a ghost
image of a woman on a linen shroud. There are dozens of the same
images hanging in the wash house!”

By the time she finished her
heart was beating fast and she felt like she was going to vomit.
The hand on the bracket clock flicked up to twelve and the clock
gave a dull dong. At the same time all the antique
pendules
and
horloges
scattered throughout the rambling Tudor manor
chimed the midnight hour. It was the sweetest sound the Countess
had ever heard.

Dr Watson sank into the nearest
chair and groaned.

The next morning found the
Countess and the doctor ensconced in separate corners like a pair
of po-faced prize-fighters about to go ten rounds. They were in a
first class smoker rattling toward Glasgow and hadn’t spoken since
the night before. Dr Watson was still seething about losing that
bet at the eleventh hour – make that the twelfth hour! He couldn’t
believe anyone would set a clock fifteen minutes ahead of time.
Where was the logic? What was the point? Why bother with a clock at
all? If Madame Moghra wanted her life to run like clockwork why not
run it according to Greenwich Mean Time like everyone else! It was
just one more thing to dislike about the medium as far as he was
concerned.

The Countess lit up one of her
gold-tipped foreign cigarettes while she perused
The
Quotidienne
. She had woken with a splitting headache and had
carefully avoided the doctor’s glowering face all morning. But,
really, she was just thinking of him. He’d had a frightful cough
for months and it wasn’t getting any better. In fact, it was
getting worse. And his bronchitis was beginning to seriously worry
her. If he wasn’t careful he would end up with pneumonia or become
permanently consumptive. What he needed was a rest cure. A calm sea
voyage and a week or two of bracing sea air to clear out his lungs.
It would be just the ticket before they returned to London for the
busy Christmas season. Men were all the same. They needed an uppity
woman to take them in hand and do what was best for them, even if
that meant acting against their express wishes. He would thank her
later.

Unfortunately, there was also a
downside. A vacation in Biarritz would delay her Christmas
shopping, meaning she would not be able to order that velvet
smoking jacket which she had set her heart on. She drummed her
fingers on the padded leather seat while she pondered all the
possible avenues and the answer came like a bolt from the blue. The
Mayfair residence, which she had inherited from her late aunt, had
been shut-up for months but the full retinue of servants was still
on hand, presumably twiddling their thumbs. She would telegraph to
the butler, Ponsonby, and instruct him to allocate the Christmas
shopping to the parlourmaid, housemaid, footman, hall porter and so
on according to the list she would send through the post. The trip
to Savile Row he could undertake personally. He could also oversee
the putting up of the Christmas tree and the Christmas wreath and
the distribution of alms to the poor. She wanted her first
Christmas in London to be jolly and festive and memorable even if
she had to spend it by herself. Feeling immeasurably happier she
extinguished her cigarette, pushed to feet and addressed her sullen
travelling companion in the peremptory tone of a stern mater to a
sooky la-la.