The Clairvoyant Curse (7 page)

“Oh, that’s easy. It was made
by a ghost.”

The Countess sighed with
exasperation. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“That’s what everyone says
until they get the shivers. Take this house. If you don’t believe
in ghosts before coming here you’ll believe in ghosts by the time
you leave.”

The Countess was annoyed with
herself and her annoyance was transferring itself to the young
woman with the annoying sing-song voice. It was one thing to look
like a fairy but quite another to sound like one, especially after
the age of about six. “Really?”

“
Bien sur
– it’s
haunted.”

“Is that so?”

“
Bien sur
. Wait a few
hours and you’ll see what I mean.”

“I doubt I will see anything
you mean.”

“I mean you will start to feel
a ghostly presence.”

“I doubt it.”

“Some people are more receptive
than others.”

“I guess it’s the same with
angels and auras.” The facetious tone did not seem to discourage
the fee-fey-fairy.

“Exactly,
bien sur
!
There’s a ghost cat here. I saw it the first night we arrived. It
was sitting on the doorstep and we hadn’t even crossed the
threshold.”

“A black cat, no doubt – do you
mind lying down here next to this shroud for a moment.”

“What for?”

“I want to ascertain how tall
the ghost was.”

“Oh, yes, of course,
bien
sur
!” Obligingly, the ethereal creature stretched herself out
on the floor beside the shroud. She was about six inches shorter
than the Countess which put the shroud at five foot and two inches.
“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Know that the ghost cat was
black.”

“I’m psychic.”

The young woman ignored the
cynical refrain, or perhaps she failed to notice it. For someone
who claimed to be receptive she was not very perceptive. She simply
moved right along as children do who are telling a story and will
not be silenced before they get to the end, no matter how unengaged
the listener might be. “Madame Moghra saw a little ghost girl with
a porcelain dolly in her arms. She was crying because she had lost
her mother.”

“That was careless. She should
have taken better care of her.”

“Oh, yes,
bien sur
.”

That particular phrase was
beginning to rankle. The Countess decided she would throttle the
young woman the next time she employed it and then there really
would be a ghost at Marsh House. She bent down to smell the cloth.
The smell was pungent and unpleasant but she couldn’t place it. She
tried again but it proved elusive.

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m trying to work out what
this cloth smells like.”

“Oh, that’s easy, it smells
like wee.”

“What?”

“I used to wet the bed and it
smells like that.”

Good grief! The annoying fairy
was right! The Countess almost hugged her. The wee word triggered
something new in her imagination. Urine had an ammonia smell. What
was ammonia used for? What was its property? What uses did it
have?

“Apart from when you used to
wet the bed have you smelled that smell anywhere else?”

The young woman shook her head.
“No, you won’t tell anyone will you?”

“Tell them what?”

“I used to be a
bed-wetter.”

“I won’t tell a soul, you have
my word.”

“I believe you because you have
an honest aura. Oh, I just told a lie!”

“A lie?”

“I said no when it wasn’t true.
I smelled that smell the other day in the locked-room.”

The Countess pulled herself up
and looked earnestly at the aggravating fairy. “Go on?” she
encouraged patiently.

“Yes, it was in the
locked-room.”

The Countess’s mind boggled.
She imagined something sinister, perhaps a hypnotist’s chamber with
lots of mirrors, or the diabolical torture chamber of Bluebeard, or
some sort of monstrous experimental surgery where corpses floating
in baths of amniotic fluid were attached to electric nodes in an
attempt to bring them back to life akin to the hideous chamber of
Dr Frankenstein. “The locked-room? Is that some sort of secret
chamber?”

“No, it’s the dark room where
Crispin, I mean Mr Ffrench, develops his photographs.”

Relief washed over the Countess
and she burst out laughing. “
Bien sur
!”

“Can you show me where the dark
room is?”

“Now?”

“Yes, now, right this very
minute.”

“I’m supposed to sing another
song soon.”

“We won’t be gone long,”
promised the Countess, desperate to win that bet. “You can show me
and then leave me to it.”

“To what?”

“To, er, to search for ghosts.
I’m starting to see what you mean about this house being haunted. I
feel a presence.” She concocted a little shiver.

Vindicated, the elfin-eyed
songstress smiled and turned to go. “I told you so. Follow me.”

The Countess waited until they
were in the passage. “By the way, I’m Countess Varvara
Volodymyrovna.”

“Is that your real name? I ask
because it sounds like a song I used to know.” La gamine hummed a
few bars. “La, la, la – la, la, la – lah, lah, lah!”

“Yes, it’s my real name.”

“It’s not French is it?”

The passage turned a corner and
went down a few steps. The Countess, who considered herself elegant
and light of step, suddenly felt like an elephant compared to the
thistledown fairy.

“Ukrainian.”

“Really! Madame Moghra said we
might visit Moscow and St Petersburg and Kyiv and Odessa after we
have visited America. The Tsar is a great believer in ghosts and
he’s very rich. I’m Melody Morningstar.”

They turned another corner and
descended a steep flight of servant’s stairs where a small high
window curtained in cobwebs provided the only light. The Countess
correctly surmised they had passed into the domestic wing of the
rambling old house. The layout was utilitarian, there were no rugs,
no candle-sconces, the floor boards were no longer polished and the
walls were devoid of hangings.

“Is that your real name?”

“Oh, good heavens no! I was
born Betsy Bottomley. Reverend Blackadder unchristened me and then
baptized me afresh. He thinks that someone who speaks to angels and
sees auras should have a name that signifies their
specialness.”

“Is he part of the troupe?”

“The horse.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He’s the horse.”

“Oh, the man who was part of
the hypnotist’s act, the one who came on after Sissy?”

“That’s right. He saw a ghost
on the stairs - a headless lady.”

“She certainly gets
around.”

“What?”

“The headless ghost must be
incredibly busy. I think she haunts the staircases of several
abbeys, castles, and inns.”

The lovely nymph nodded in
childish agreement as she came to a standstill and pushed open a
door set in a cruck frame. “Here we are. Please don’t break
anything. Crispin, I mean Mr Ffrench, gets really angry if anything
gets spilled or broken or moved out of place. I accidentally
knocked over one of his beakers the other day and he refused to
speak to me for hours. His aura is very murky. He’s very troubled.
I have to run. I can hear the musicians starting up. They’ll wonder
where I am.” She turned to go then spun back on tiptoe like a fairy
pirouetting on current of air. “I almost forgot, that ghost you
were after is now in Madame Moghra’s bedroom.”

“I’m not really interested in
the headless lady. When you’ve seen one headless ghost you’ve seen
them all.”

“Not the headless lady, the one
on the shroud.”

The Countess caught the young
woman by the sleeve. She was in two minds whether to slap the fairy
or kiss her.

“Where will I find Madame
Moghra’s bedroom?”

“It’s at the front of the
house, directly above the library, facing south onto the old sunken
garden. I have to run.”

Photography was the most
popular pastime in England. Most large country houses had their own
dark room and the Countess had visited enough dark rooms to know
her way around them blindfolded. She had almost lost her virginity
in one during a visit to Castle Coeur when Captain Longwyck offered
to give a demonstration of his box camera. Mmm, now there was man
who knew all about apertures!

This dark room was unlike any
she had previously seen. It was probably the old wash house, made
up of several small chambers. There was still a mangle in the
corner and a huge cauldron for boiling clothes. Suspended from the
ceiling were racks for drying bed-sheets and tablecloths and such.
A number of shrouds identical to one in the gallery, with exactly
the same image, were suspended from the racks. That did away with
the theory that the ghost shroud had been the burial shroud of a
Druidic priestess or even purloined from a cemetery. Someone was
mass producing them. A line of large buckets was giving off a
pungent odour that smelled like urine, most likely it was ammonia.
The Countess wondered if the cloths with the images had been dipped
in the ammonia buckets. Yes, they all had that same horrid wee
smell.

In an adjoining room, cloths
with no images were hanging up to dry. These had a different smell.
They hadn’t been dipped in ammonia. The Countess conducted a quick
search and in a corner, behind a line of shrouds, she found an old
copper bath full of silver sulphate.

Aware that time was of the
essence, she moved on, despite needing time to process it all. An
adjoining windowless room was being used as a proper dark room for
developing photographs. There were the usual trays of chemicals and
a Belfast sink. Another windowless room at the rear was being used
as a storeroom. There was another camera obscura on a tripod stand.
This one had a bi-unal lens. On a table were several Kodak box
cameras.

Ammonia? Silver sulphate?
Shrouds with images? Shrouds with no images? Cameras? She was sure
there had to be a link, a cause and effect, but it proved as
elusive as fairy dust. She returned to the first room with the
ghost shrouds smelling of ammonia, sat down on a creepie stool and
closed her eyes in an effort to block out extraneous thoughts.

Something the young woman said
began stirring vaguely in the back of the Countess’s mind, floating
in the ether of unconscious thought, shapeless, formless, out of
reach. Just as her thoughts began to take semblance she felt
something brush her leg and got such a fright she fell backwards,
landing inelegantly with her legs in the air. From the corner of
her eye she spotted a weird black shape dart across the room. It
leapt onto the windowsill where eerie moonlight bathed it in
surreal bluish hues. When it meowed to be let out through the
casement window left slightly ajar, she laughed at herself. This
was no ghost moggie…Ghost?

Bien sur
!

She was about to set the cat
free and then go directly to Madame Moghra’s bedroom when she heard
the door to the passage open and close and decided to stay put on
the floor. A tilt of her head gave her a reasonable view of the
room through the gaps in the hanging ghosts.

The cat meowed louder and the
person who had entered the room shuffled to the window to let it
out. The ghost shrouds seemed to sough and sigh at the passing.
Moonlight caught the figure full on the face and for one horrible
moment the spooky immobility of that pale face framed in the
gloaming marsh light made the visage look slightly mad. It was the
brooding magic lantern expert, Mr Ffrench. He opened the casement
window using one hand and watched as the cat leapt out. The draught
from the open window endowed the shrouds with a life of their own
causing them to waft to and fro like ghosts. Real ghosts! He did
not bother to secure the window, most likely thinking it might help
the ammonia fumes escape or possibly he was thinking of the cat. In
his other hand was a bottle of lurid green liquid. The Countess
watched, horrified, as he tilted back his pale head and took a
gulp, winced, shivered, stiffened, and then took another swig
straight from the bottle. The Countess gasped, leapt to her feet
and battled her way through the hanging ghosts.

“Give that to me!” She wrenched
the bottle of green stuff out of his hands.

“What the hell! Where did you
spring from?”

“Never mind that! You cannot
drink this stuff!”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s poison!”

“So?” He looked past her
shoulder as though expecting more apparitions to emerge from behind
the ghost shrouds. “If I choose to drink poison, that’s my choice,
surely? Maybe you should try it! Go ahead! Try it!”

She would not be goaded by the
disturbed young man and averted her face.

“One swig won’t hurt,” he
persisted. “The little green fairy might be a godsend. You’ll sleep
like a baby.”

“The little green fairy?” She
checked the label on the bottle and kicked herself. “Absinthe!”

A convulsive, mocking laugh
erupted from his throat. “What else!” He laughed again, spitefully
and sarcastically, snatching back the bottle. “What did you think
it was? Oh, don’t bother answering. What are you doing down here
anyway?”

Feeling suddenly stupid, she
snatched the bottle back and took a gulp. What a night! She’d
developed a taste for absinthe in Melbourne after the death of her
aunt. There were several things about the death that troubled her.
She couldn’t put her finger on them and turned to the green fairy
for enlightenment but all the fee-fey-fairy did was cloud her
judgement. Jack did not discourage her dependence, in fact, it
seemed to amuse him. She had acquired a taste for it before she
realized how addictive it was. It was addictive still. She took
another gulp.