Czytaj książkę: «Mesmerized»

CHAPTER ONE

1876

THE OIL LAMP in the center of the long table was turned low, eerily lighting the faces of the people around it, throwing eyes and hair into deep shadows and dancing along the sharp lines of brow and cheekbone, making the silent attendees look gaunt and mysterious. All eyes turned toward the large wooden box a few feet from the table, dark and looming. There was no sound from inside it.

Then the lamp went out, and one of the women gasped. Blackness enveloped them. Hands turned cold, and pulses sped up. Everyone waited. There, in the dark hush, it was easy to imagine a ghostly finger trailing coldly across one’s shoulders, to think, with a heart-pounding combination of fear and anticipation, that someone might speak from across the black void of death.

Even Olivia Moreland, despite the fact that she was there for a far different purpose, could not help but feel a little thrill dart up her back. But it was not enough to keep her from her business. Slowly, carefully, using the tricks she had learned from the very people she intended to expose, she eased backward, shielded by the blackness surrounding her, and separated herself from the ring of people around the table.

She paused for a moment, giving her eyes a chance to adjust to the lack of light; then she started forward slowly. It was still difficult to see, as the only light in the room was the glow from the hallway creeping in around the door. She did not want to alert anyone to the fact that she was up and walking. It had to be a surprise to everyone when she reached the medium’s cabinet. All her attention was on the dark box before her; every nerve in her body seemed to quiver, tense with expectation. She was almost there....

A hand lashed out and wrapped around her arm, fingers digging painfully into her flesh.

Olivia shrieked and jumped. A deep masculine voice cried out, “There! I have you!”

All around the table, women echoed Olivia’s shriek, and there was the clatter of a chair overturning and a general hubbub of voices and movements.

Whatever instinctual, primitive fear had flooded Olivia at the sudden grasping of her arm, it subsided at the sound of a very real and human voice.

“Let go of me!” she snapped, trying to pull her arm away.

“I think not—until you have explained yourself.”

She continued to struggle, hissing, “Stop! You are ruining everything!”

“No doubt I am,” he replied in a faintly amused tone. “It is always so unpleasant to have one’s duplicity revealed.”

“Duplicity?”

As the two of them exchanged words, there was the sound of a thud, followed by a muttered curse, and at last a match flared into life at the table. A moment later, someone lit the oil lamp and there was light in the room. Olivia found herself staring down into the cool gray eyes of her captor.

A faint shock passed through her, a feeling almost of recognition, though she realized immediately that she had never seen this man before. She was certain that, if she had, she would have remembered him.

He was seated at the table, his chair pushed a little away from those on either side of him, and he was half-turned and leaning back in order to grasp Olivia’s arm. His shoulders were broad, and Olivia could well attest to the strength of his hands and arms. His face was lean, with high, wide cheekbones so sharp they looked as if they could have cut paper. It was a hard face, a look emphasized by the cold intensity of his eyes. Only his mouth—wide, with a full lower lip—would have softened his face, but it was at the moment pulled into a thin line. His hair, thick and dark, nearly black, was shaggily cut, as if someone had taken a pair of scissors to it—or, perhaps, a knife. The ungentlemanly appearance of his hair was echoed in his clothes—made of clearly fine materials, but just as clearly sewn by someone other than one of the well-known London tailors, as well as being a trifle out-of-date. She would have thought him foreign on an initial glance, except that his voice had been unmistakably that of an upper-class Englishman.

There was a moment of silence as everyone else in the room stared at the tableau.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you!” Olivia retorted, desperately searching for a good reason for her to have been walking about. She twitched at her skirts, which had managed to become twisted, showing an entirely inappropriate ruffle of her petticoat on one side. There was a lock of hair that had escaped from her neat bun, as well; she could feel it curling down beside her face. She realized that her appearance put her at a disadvantage, and she was made even more uncomfortable by that steady silver-gray gaze on her face. But she refused to let this man cow her. Olivia was quite aware that she was small and unremarkable in appearance—a little brown wren of a woman, she had more than once thought of herself, especially when compared to the other, more peacocklike members of her family. But she had learned to counter that impression with a steady and stubborn refusal to be intimidated.

She cast a disdainful look down at the stranger’s hand, curled around her upper arm. “I demand that you cease this bullying at once.”

“I think you have to explain yourself to the company in general,” he countered, but he relaxed his grip enough that it was no longer actually painful. “Exactly what were you doing sneaking about the room? Were you about to manifest yourself as a ‘visitor from beyond’?” His deep voice was laced with cynicism.

“Of course not!” Color flared in Olivia’s cheeks. She was painfully aware of the gazes of everyone else in the room fixed on her. “How dare you?”

“Sir, this is scarcely the behavior of a gentleman.” One of the other men in the room spoke up, a portly fellow with a great curling mustache and plentiful muttonchop sideburns—such hirsute magnificence grown, Olivia suspected, to compensate for the man’s shiny bald pate.

Olivia’s tormentor did not so much as even glance at the other man; he simply continued to look straight into Olivia’s face. “Well? Why were you tiptoeing about the room?”

Another guest chimed in. “It is odd, Miss...um...dreadfully sorry, but I am afraid that I cannot remember your name.”

Unfortunately, neither could Olivia, or, at least, she could not remember the name she had given these people tonight when she had arrived. It had not been her own, of course. She knew that what she called her nondescript appearance was a blessing in that regard, allowing her to pass unknown through these gatherings as long as she used an assumed name. It was sheer bad luck that the excitement of the past few minutes had driven her evening’s nom de guerre right out of her head.

“Comstock,” she blurted out, the name coming back to her suddenly, but she could see by the expressions on the others’ faces that her hesitation had been too long. They would not believe her now.

“How convincing,” the man who still held her arm drawled sarcastically. “Now, Miss ‘Comstock,’ why don’t you tell us about your plans to—what, put a sheet over your head? Or were you simply going to make piteous moans?”

“I say,” said one of the men thunderously, rising to his feet. “What the devil are you saying, man? Are you implying that I would allow some...some damnable chicanery in my house?” He turned immediately toward the woman at his side. “Pardon me, my dear. Ladies. I forgot myself in the heat of my indignation.”

“St. Leger...” the man who was sitting beside Olivia’s captor said with distress, “whatever are you doing?” He turned toward their host, who was standing and staring with grim dislike at the man holding Olivia’s arm. “Colonel, I beg your pardon, Lord St. Leger meant no disrespect, I’m sure.”

“Of course not,” Lord St. Leger said shortly, glancing toward the colonel. “No doubt you were being duped, as well.”

“Duped!” squawked the colonel’s wife, her eyes bulging.

From inside the large box there came a moan, rising in volume when no one responded. The colonel’s wife let out another noise, this one more a bleat, and jumped to her feet. “Mrs. Terhune! Mercy! How could we have forgotten about you?”

One of the men rushed to open the door of the medium’s cabinet. There sat the gray-haired Mrs. Terhune on a stool, hands and feet bound just as they had been minutes earlier when they had closed the medium inside the box. The colonel’s lady and the man who had opened the cabinet rushed to untie her. Olivia watched with a cynical eye as the ropes fell easily away. She felt sure that the medium had herself untied the ropes, then hastily retied them when she heard the hubbub break out in the room. But, of course, she could not prove that now.

“There! You see what you’ve done!” Olivia snapped at Lord St. Leger. He turned toward her, his eyebrows rising lazily.

“What I have done?” he repeated.

“Yes! You’ve ruined everything.”

He smiled then, and it was astonishing to see the change it wrought in the man’s face. Looking at him, Olivia felt as if her stomach had just fallen to her feet, and she drew an involuntary breath.

“No doubt I have,” he agreed. “I apologize for interrupting you, Miss...Comstock. I should have let you play out your masquerade before I exposed you.”

“You didn’t expose anything, you dolt!” Olivia bit back, too disappointed and angry to worry about manners. “I was about to prove—”

“Who are these people?” the medium asked in a die-away voice that somehow brought everyone’s attention back to her. “I feel...so strange. I was deep in a trance, then these angry voices pulled me back. It makes me feel quite tired. Did I speak? Did the spirits come?”

“No,” barked the colonel, casting a flashing look toward Olivia and Lord St. Leger. “There was no visitation, no words from beyond. Nothing but these two people disrupting the séance.”

“Disrupting—” St. Leger gaped at the man. “I caught these people about to perpetrate a fraud upon you and all of us here, and all you can say is that I disrupted this little farce?”

“Farce?” The colonel’s face turned an alarming shade of red.

“Oh, dear,” moaned the man beside St. Leger, hastening to say, “Colonel, please, forgive him. Lord St. Leger has been living in America for years. I’m afraid that he has forgotten his manners.” The man turned and cast Lord St. Leger a significant look. “I am sure that he meant no insult.”

“Of course I didn’t mean any insult,” St. Leger replied. “You have been hoodwinked by this so-called medium and her partner, Miss ‘Comstock.’”

“I am not her partner!” Olivia cried.

“Sir, I assure you, I have never seen this woman before in my life,” Mrs. Terhune said, looking at Olivia blankly.

“Then what was she doing walking about during the séance?” St. Leger asked.

“I have no idea,” Mrs. Terhune returned calmly. She fixed a stern gaze on Olivia. “Miss, I specifically told everyone not to leave the table. It is very important. Our friends from the other side are very particular about such things.”

“Yes, no doubt they are,” Olivia replied dryly. She wondered if there was any hope of somehow managing to pass this off as her having to get up because of an unmentionable emergency.

But at that moment, one of the other women at the table said suddenly, “Wait, I know you. You aren’t Miss Comstock at all. You are that woman who dislikes mediums. My brother was telling me all about some symposium he attended—”

“Good Gad!” the colonel exploded. “The two of you came here purposely to cause a disruption! How dare you enter my house under false pretenses? I’ve a good mind to thrash you, sir.”

St. Leger released Olivia’s arm and rose to face the other man, his height and the breadth of his shoulders rendering the colonel’s threat rather empty. “Don’t trouble yourself, sir,” he said coolly. “I will leave now. It is clear that everyone here would prefer to retain their delusions.”

He strode from the room, and, as the colonel started toward Olivia, she decided it was best to follow St. Leger rather than be forcibly escorted from the house. The host was on her heels, calling for his servants. A stone-faced footman handed them their coats and hats and swept the door open, closing it with a snap as soon as they were outside.

St. Leger stopped abruptly on the stoop, and Olivia bumped into his back, letting out an annoyed “Oof.”

He turned and met her glance. She glared at him, but she knew the look was rendered ineffective by the fact that she was struggling to hold her bonnet and put on her cloak at the same time.

St. Leger took in the struggle over her cloak, which had inexplicably gotten turned inside out, and a smile tugged briefly at the corners of his mouth. Naturally he had already popped on his top hat and shrugged into his light coat.

“Allow me,” he said, reaching out and taking the cloak from Olivia’s fingers. A quick shake straightened it out, and he placed it around her shoulders. His fingertips brushed over her shoulders, and even through the cloth of her cloak, the touch sent a shiver down Olivia’s spine.

When he reached for the ribbons of her cloak, as if to tie them, she grabbed them herself, saying, “I can do that myself. You have done quite enough already.”

He raised an eyebrow, then said, “Is it true what that woman said? You are an enemy of mediums?”

“I am an exposer of charlatans,” Olivia responded tartly. “I stand ready to believe anyone who can prove to my satisfaction that they have contacted the otherworld, but as I haven’t yet found a medium in London who can do that, I cannot label them as anything but frauds.”

“So you were not helping out Mrs. Terhune tonight?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why were you sneaking about in the dark?”

“I was not ‘sneaking.’ I was walking quietly and carefully,” Olivia corrected with a haughty look, “to the medium’s cabinet to expose Mrs. Terhune, untied and about to hold up this silly daguerrotype that she displays over the top of the cabinet door and pretends is a spirit. I had a sulfur match ready to strike.”

She sighed at the thought of the opportunity lost, and Lord St. Leger looked slightly abashed. “I beg your pardon. I thought I had caught a conspirator.”

“Yes, well...” She turned and gestured, and a carriage down the street began to roll forward.

Olivia started to descend the steps, and St. Leger followed her. “Tell me, do you do this sort of thing often?”

“Get into séances and try to expose their frauds?” Olivia sighed again. “No, unfortunately. If a medium knows me, they will not let me attend. My ‘lack of belief’ disturbs the spirits. And few people hire me,” she admitted candidly. “I find that almost no one wishes to ‘let go of their delusions,’ as you pointed out tonight.”

He stared at her. “Hire you? What do you mean?”

“I have a business,” Olivia told him, reaching into her reticule and pulling out one of her cards. She was rather proud of them, really, and never failed to hand one out, though the response she received was more often one of shocked disapproval than admiration.

St. Leger took the card and glanced down at the neat black script: “Miss O. Q. Moreland, Investigator of Psychic Phenomena.”

He looked back up at her in amazement, a hundred questions buzzing through his brain. But the first one that came out was, “Q?”

Olivia’s mouth tightened. “It is a family name,” she said, and reached out to snatch the card back, but he quickly pocketed it.

“And does your family not mind that you—”

“My family is quite open-minded,” Olivia told him tightly. The carriage had pulled up in front of the colonel’s house, and she went to it, waving the coachman to stay on his high seat.

St. Leger, following her, reached out to open the carriage door for her, but she grasped the handle before he could. Turning to him, she said significantly, “My family is not so archaic as some and see nothing wrong in a woman exercising her mind in pursuit of a career.”

“They see nothing wrong in your chasing ghosts?” St. Leger asked mildly, reaching toward her to help her up into her carriage.

Olivia narrowed her eyes and started to reply, but stopped as she saw realization dawning on St. Leger’s face. He looked at the carriage door, on which her father’s ducal crest was tastefully drawn, then pulled out her card to look at it again.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, with some amazement. “You’re not—you’re one of the ‘mad Morelands’?”

Olivia jerked the door open and stepped up into the carriage, shrugging off his helping hand. She turned and sat down, leaning forward and saying, “Yes! I am definitely one of the ‘mad Morelands.’ Indeed, I am probably the maddest of the lot. If I were you, I’d burn that card, lest some of it rub off on you.”

She slammed the door on his hurried words: “No, wait! I didn’t—I’m—”

Olivia rapped sharply on the carriage roof, and the driver started like a shot, cutting off the rest of her companion’s words.

* * *

“—SORRY,” Stephen St. Leger finished lamely. He looked down at his polished leather boots and elegant silk trousers, now splashed with dirty water from the carriage wheels. He suspected that the driver had been well aware of what he had been doing.

Of course, Stephen thought ruefully, he could scarcely blame the man. His words had been clumsy and boorish. His cousin Capshaw was right: he had spent too long in the United States, or, more accurately, he had spent too long in the lonely wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. He was no longer accustomed to being in polite society or, indeed, much of any kind of society at all.

He had not really meant anything bad about the woman’s family. He had merely been shocked when it registered on him that the young lady he had thought he caught red-handed aiding a medium had in fact been the daughter of a duke, a gently reared young woman of good lineage and a hefty fortune. He had simply blurted out the name by which her family was largely regarded in London society. The “mad Morelands”...they must be mad, indeed, he thought, if they found nothing wrong with letting one of their daughters traipse about London alone at night, attending séances and confronting charlatans. It seemed a risky business.

Her having a business surprised him less. He had seen enough wives and daughters helping to conduct family businesses—or widows left to run one on their own—in his time in the United States. It was, however, somewhat startling to find a young, unmarried lady in England doing so, especially one from one of the most noble families in the country. Her family, he would have thought, would have moved heaven and earth to keep her from doing so.

But, he supposed, the reason they had not lay in the very epithet that had slipped off his tongue. The Morelands, while not actually legally mad, were generally considered to be, well, off. The old duke, Miss Moreland’s grandfather, had been famous for his various bizarre and intense “health treatments,” which had ranged from mud baths to foul-smelling restorative drinks to being wrapped in wet sheets for hours at a time—the latter of which was generally considered to have been what sent the man at a relatively young age into his last, fatal bout of pneumonia. He had spent much of his life traveling in England and the Continent, consulting with quacks and chasing the latest fads. His wife, it was said, had a peculiar tendency to talk about her ancestors as if she had daily conversations with them. The duke’s younger brother, the present duke’s uncle, was reputed to spend much of his time playing with tin soldiers.

The present Duke of Broughton, Miss Moreland’s father, was obsessed with some sort of ancient subject—Stephen wasn’t sure what, though he had it vaguely in his mind that the man collected statues and broken bits of pots and things. And he had married a woman well-known for her unusual views on social reform, women, marriage and children. Even more horrifying to London society was the fact that the current duchess had not been born to the nobility, being merely the daughter of country gentry. There were several Moreland children, most of them younger than Stephen was, and he did not know much about them, having left the country before most of them were old enough to enter society, but from everything he had heard from his mother and friends, he had gotten the impression that they were an odd lot.

What he had seen of Miss O. Q. Moreland certainly had done nothing to change that impression. She was decidedly peculiar—going out alone in the evening to attend séances, sneaking through darkened rooms to pounce on a fraudulent medium and expose her practices, even carrying on a business of doing such things!

Stephen idly rubbed his thumb over the engraved letters of her card. Investigator of Psychic Phenomena. He couldn’t help but smile a little, thinking of her feisty stance, hands on hips, looking up at him with those big brown eyes that looked as though they should be soft and melting but were instead fierce. Small and dainty, yet looking as if she were ready to take on any opponent.

He remembered the odd feeling that had gone through him when the light had been turned on and he had first looked at her. He had thought her a part of the medium’s act, helping to hoodwink an innocent public. Yet when he looked at her, something had shot through him, some strange current of emotion and physical attraction that jarred and surprised him. It had been something like desire...and yet something more, as well, something he could not remember ever feeling before.

Frowning, he turned and started to walk away, but the man who had been beside him at the séance came out the front door at that moment and hurried down the steps toward him, saying, “St. Leger!”

Stephen turned, surprised. “Capshaw. I thought you must have decided to stay.”

The other man made a face. “I doubt that I would have been welcome, frankly, after the scene you made. But I had to do what I could to calm down Colonel Franklin. I told him that you were my cousin and a gentleman and would not spread scurrilous lies about him.”

“I don’t give a damn about that pompous colonel,” St. Leger said, grimacing.

“What were you doing, by the way?” Mr. Capshaw went on curiously. “Did you go there to expose the medium? I must say, I didn’t think it sounded like your sort of entertainment.”

“Hardly. But I wasn’t planning to do anything. It was just that when I heard her rustling about in the dark, I could not resist the opportunity to catch one of the charlatans red-handed.” He shrugged. “I went merely to—I don’t know, see what sort of thing they do. Try to understand what their hold is on otherwise rational people.”

“There are more than a few who believe in it,” Capshaw commented. “I’ve seen one medium who did things that, well, frankly left me wondering.” He glanced over at his friend. “Don’t you ever think that maybe it’s a possibility? That people can speak to us from the other side?”

“It strikes me as highly unlikely,” Stephen said shortly. “If they could, surely they would tell us something more important than the wretched pap these mediums put out. And why do they spend their time knocking on things? One would think that they would have better things to do with their time than play parlor tricks.”

Mr. Capshaw chuckled. “That sounds like you.”

“They are playing on people’s grief,” St. Leger went on grimly. “Using it to gain money.”

His friend glanced at him. He had heard that Lady St. Leger, Stephen’s mother, had been attending the séances of a popular Russian medium, and the anger in his friend’s voice confirmed his suspicion. Stephen’s older brother had died almost a year earlier, and their mother was said to be still mired in grief over his death.

“Sometimes,” Capshaw said carefully, “it helps a person get through it, thinking that they can contact their loved one.”

“It helps the damned medium acquire money,” St. Leger growled. “And how do you know it helps them? What if it just keeps them in that same painful place, constantly mourning their loss, never getting on with their lives?”

He stopped and looked at his companion. “I thought Mother was getting better, that she was not so wrapped up in sorrow as when I first came home. And when she wanted to take Belinda to London, it seemed a good sign. But then she fell in with this Valenskaya woman, and now she seems deeper in mourning than ever. I told myself the same things you said, that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t real, that it would help soothe her. What did it matter if she went to a few séances? But when Belinda wrote me and said that Mother had given this medium her emerald ring out of gratitude for all she’d done... Father gave her that ring! I have never seen it off her hand until now. Obviously this woman is exercising great power over her. That’s why I came to London. And it didn’t help my fears any when I saw Mother, either. She is forever talking about what this woman says, she and Belinda both, and it all sounds like the most blatant nonsense. Yet they seem to swallow it without a moment’s thought.”

Capshaw gave him a sympathetic glance, but, as Stephen knew, there was little he could say to help him.

“If only I could prove to her that the woman is a fraud!” Stephen went on. His thoughts went then to Miss Moreland of the snapping brown eyes and the business card, but he pushed her aside immediately. A man could hardly ask a woman to get rid of his problems for him, after all, and, besides, he could not expose his mother to the embarrassment. Besides, the woman was probably as peculiar as everyone said all her family were.

They continued for a moment in silence; then Stephen said, with studied casualness, “What do you know of the Morelands?”

“Morelands? Who do you—oh, you mean Broughton’s brood? The ‘mad Morelands’?”

“Yes.”

Capshaw shrugged. “I don’t know any of them personally. Although the eldest was at Eton at the same time I was—some damned peculiar name, I remember that. They’ve all got peculiar names. Roman or Greek or something. Broughton’s always been mad for antiquities, you know.”

“Yes, I remember that much.”

“He was a daredevil—the one at Eton when I was there. Always into some scrape or other. Not the sort of chap I was mates with. It was enough to make one tired just hearing all the things he’d done. Theo—that was what we called him. His real name was something longer, Theodosius or some such. He’s an explorer now, I’ve heard. Always off paddling up the Amazon or trekking through Arabia or something.”