The Seance Read online

  The Séance

  John Harwood

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  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  Boston · New York

  2009

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  ALSO BY JOHN HARWOOD

  The Ghost Writer

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  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2008 by John Harwood

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  [http://www.hmhbooks.com] www.hmhbooks.com

  First published in 2008 by Jonathan Cape

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harwood, John.

  The séance/John Harwood.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Haunted houses—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction.

  3. Extortion—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.4.H37S43 2008

  823'.92—dc22 2007046029

  ISBN 978-0-15-101203-9

  Text set in Adobe Jenson / Designed by Cathy Riggs

  Printed in the United States of America

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  For Robin

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  TO MANIFEST A SPIRIT, TAKE TWENTY YARDS OF fine silk veiling, at least two yards wide and very gauzy. Wash carefully, and rinse seven times. Prepare a solution of one jar Balmain's Luminous Paint; half a pint of Demar Varnish, one pint odourless benzine and fifty drops lavender oil. Work thoroughly through the fabric while it is still damp, and then allow to dry for three days. Then wash with naphtha soap until all the odour is gone and the fabric is perfectly soft and pliable. In a darkened room, the fabric will appear as a soft, luminous vapour.

  —Revelations of a Spirit Medium (1891)

  Part One

  Constance Langton's Narrative

  JANUARY 1889

  If my sister Alma had lived, I should never have begun the séances. She died of scarlatina, soon after her second birthday, when I was five years old. I remember only fragments from the time before she died: Mama dancing Alma on her knee, and singing as she would never do again; reading my primer aloud to Mama while she rocked Alma's cradle with her foot; walking beside Annie, our nurse, while she pushed the perambulator past the Foundling Hospital with me holding on to the frame. I remember coming home after one of those walks and being allowed to nurse Alma by the drawing-room fire, feeling the heat of the flames on my cheek as I held her. I remember, too—though perhaps I was only told of it—lying in a cot and shivering, looking up at a window which seemed very small and far away, and hearing the sound of weeping, muffled as if through thick cotton wool.

  I do not know how long my own illness lasted, but it seems, in memory, as if I woke to find the house shrouded in darkness, and my mother changed beyond recognition. She kept to her room for many months, during which I was allowed only brief visits. The blinds were always drawn; often she seemed scarcely aware of my presence. And when at last she began to sit up, and then to emerge from her room—stooped like an old woman, her hair thin and lank—she remained sunk in lightless misery. Sometimes she would send for me, and then seem not to know why I had appeared, as if the wrong person had answered the summons. Whatever I ventured to say to her would be met with the same lifeless indifference, and if I sat in silence, I would feel the weight of her grief pressing upon me until I feared I would suffocate.

  I wish I could say that my father grieved too; but if he did, I saw no sign of it. His manner with Mama was always polite and solicitous, very like that of Dr. Warburton, who would call from time to time and go away shaking his head. Papa was never ill, or cross, or out of sorts, and would no more have raised his voice than appear in public without waxing the points of his moustache. Sometimes in the mornings, after Annie had given me my bread and milk, I would creep downstairs and watch Papa and Mama through a crack in the dining-room door. "I trust you are feeling a little better today, my dear?" Papa would ask, and Mama would rouse herself wearily and say that yes, she supposed that she was, and then he would read The Times until it was time for him to set off for the British Museum, where he worked each day on his book. Most evenings he dined out; on Sundays, when the Museum was closed, he worked in his study. He did not go to church because he was busy with his work, and Mama could not go because she was not well enough, and so each Sunday Annie and I went to St. George's by ourselves.

  Annie explained that Mama was grieving because God had taken Alma to Heaven, which I thought very cruel of Him; but then, if Alma was happy, and would never be ill again, and we would all be together again one day, why was Mama so dreadfully distressed? Because she loved Alma so dearly, Annie replied, and could not bear to be parted from her; but when the time of mourning was over, Mama would recover her spirits. In the meantime, all we could do was accompany Mama, once she was able to leave the house, to the only place she ever visited, the burial ground near the Foundling Hospital, and arrange fresh flowers on Alma's grave. I wondered why God had left Alma's body here, and taken only her spirit; and whether He was looking after Mama's spirits until she recovered them, but Annie declined to answer these questions, saying that I would understand when I was older.

  She had dark brown hair, pulled back very tightly, and dark eyes, and a soft way of speaking; I thought her very pretty, though she insisted she was not. Annie had grown up in a village in Somerset, where her father was a stonemason, and had four brothers and three sisters; five more children had died when they were still very young. I had assumed, when she first told me this, that her mother must have been even more grief-stricken than mine. But no, said Annie, there had been no time for mourning; her mother had been far too busy looking after the rest of them. And no, they had not had a nurse; they had been far too poor for that. Things were much better now, though, because three of her brothers had gone for soldiers, and her two elder sisters were in service like herself, and they were all (except for one of the brothers, who had fallen into bad company) sending money home to their mother.

  Whenever the weather was fine, Annie and I would go out for a walk in the afternoon. Our house was in Holborn, and on these walks we would sometimes pause at the Foundling Hospital to watch the foundling girls at play in their white pinafores and brown serge gowns. It looked as grand as a palace with its avenue of lamps, and more windows than you could count, and a statue of an angel before the entrance. The foundlings, Annie told me (she had a friend in service who had grown up here), had been brought here as infants by their mothers, who were too poor, or too ill to care for them. And yes, it was very sad for their mothers to have to give them up, but the foundlings had a much better life at the Hospital. The infants were all sent to good homes in the country until they were five or six years old, and then brought back to the Hospital for their schooling. They had meat for their dinner three days a week, and roast beef on Sundays, and when they were old enough, the boys would be sent for soldiers, and the girls for ladies' maids.

  I wanted to know all about the mothers who had given their babies up for foundlings; after all, Annie's mother had been very poor, but she had kept them all at home. Annie seemed reluctant to answer, but eventually she told me that most of the foundlings were here because their fathers had run away and left their mothers alone.

  "So if Papa were to run away," I asked, "would I be sent for a foundling?"

  "Of course not, my child," said Annie, "your papa's not going to run away, and you've got me to look after you. And besides, you're too old for a foundling."

  Later that afternoon, while we were standing beneath the angel, watching the foundling boys p
laying in their part of the grounds, she told me the story of her friend Sara, whose mother had given her up to the Hospital because her father had run away before she was even born. Sara had kept her mother's name, which was Baker, but could remember nothing of her, whereas she had grown very fond of her nurse, a Mrs. Garrett, in Wiltshire, and had cried very much when the time came for her to return to the Hospital for her schooling. Mr. and Mrs. Garrett would dearly have liked to keep Sara, because all of their own children had died, but they were very poor, and the Hospital wouldn't have paid them to look after Sara once she was old enough for schooling. And yes, the nurses in the country were sometimes allowed to keep the children for their own, but only if they could prove to the Hospital that they had enough money to care for them properly; just as the mothers who had had to give up their children could come and get them back if their fortunes took a turn for the better.

  I was, I think, about six or seven years old when it first occurred to me that I too might have been a foundling. It would explain why we lived so close to the Hospital; and we had lived in the country before Alma was born, though I had only dim memories of that time, and Annie could not help, because she had come to us after we moved to London. Of course I might have been another sort of foundling; Annie had told me that there were other Hospitals (and looked at me rather strangely when I asked if we might visit them). I had heard, too, of infants being left on doorsteps in baskets; I might have been one of those. Perhaps Mama had had other children who had died and never been spoken of; or else she had been barren, like Abraham's wife Sarah, and had taken me in as a foundling and decided to keep me. And then the Lord had given her Alma ... though that made it doubly hard to understand why, if He was a kind and loving God, as Mr. Halstead insisted in his sermons, He had taken her away again so soon. Had He done it to test Mama's faith, as He had tested Job's? "The Lord giveth, and the Lord hath taken away," Job had said. "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

  I could not understand it, but nevertheless the suspicion took root and grew. It explained why Mama had loved Alma so much more than me, and why I was never any comfort to her, and even why, as I sometimes guiltily suspected, I did not love her as much as I ought to. Though I prayed constantly for her to be happy again, I dreaded being alone with her in the dark drawing room where she passed her days. I would sit on the sofa beside her, picking at my work or pretending to read, feeling as if a leaden band were slowly tightening around my chest, repeating silently to myself, I am a foundling, she is not my mother; I am a foundling, she is not my mother, until I was allowed to leave; and then I would reproach myself bitterly for want of sympathy. Indeed everything I felt for my mother was compounded of guilt—even guilt at being alive at all—for I knew that she would far rather I had died and Alma had lived. But at least she had not given me back to the Hospital, and since she and Papa had evidently resolved not to tell me that I was a foundling, I knew it would be wrong to ask them.

  I tried in all sorts of ways to approach the question with Annie, but somehow she never seemed to take the hint, and the more I tried to steer our talk toward foundlings, the more she seemed to veer away, until, without anything being said, we had ceased to pass the Hospital on our walks: it was always "next week" or "another day." I once asked her whether she thought it was my fault Alma had died, and was frightened by the vehemence of her denial; she asked me quite fiercely who had put such an idea into my head. And what if Mama and Papa had not told her the truth about me? She would think me wicked for imagining such a thing; and besides, I was never quite certain how far I believed it myself.

  So long as I had Annie, there was always something to look forward to each day. She had friends who were nurses who would bring their children to play in the square, and I would join in their games, and run about, and laugh, and forget about being a foundling. But listening to their talk of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and cousins and grandmothers reminded me that I had never seen any of my own relations. As I grew older, I learned that Papa had a widowed sister in Cambridge, who did not visit because Mama was not well enough, and that Mama had a younger brother called Frederick, whom she had not seen for many years. I had no living grandparents, because Papa and Mama had been quite old when they married; her own father had been ill for a long time, and she had had to stay at home and look after him until she was almost forty.

  It never occurred to me that Annie and I would not continue thus indefinitely. But when I was eight years old, she took me into her own room, and sat me down on her bed, and put her arms around me, and told me that I would soon be going to Miss Hale's day school, which was only a short walk from our house. She was trying to make it sound like a treat, but I could hear the sadness in her voice. And then she confessed that she was leaving us; Papa had decided that I had grown too old for a nurse, and that Violet the maid could look after me from now on. I did not like Violet, who was fat, and had cold hands, and smelt like washing which had been left too long in the basket. In vain I pleaded with Papa to let Annie stay; we could not afford to keep her, he said, with Miss Hale's fees to think of. I told him I did not want to go to school, and could learn everything I needed from books, and then Annie would not have to go; but that would not do either. If I stayed at home I would need a governess, which would be even more expensive; and no, Annie could not be my governess because she knew nothing of French, or history, or geography, or any of the things that I would learn at school.

  Though I went to Miss Hale's resolved to hate everything about it, I was unprepared for the sheer tedium of the classroom. My reading at home had never been supervised, for Annie knew nothing of books and could scarcely construe a primer. Papa kept his study locked, but not the library next door, a room no larger than a bed chamber, but to me a treasure-house to which I was tacitly admitted, so long as every volume was restored to its exact place before he came home. And so I was quite accustomed to reading books I scarcely understood, puzzling out the sounds and meanings of unfamiliar words with the help of Dr. Johnson's dictionary. Whereas at school everything had to be learned by rote, except for the endless sums in arithmetic, which I found pointless as well as baffling. And again, with the other girls in my form, I was acutely aware of my lack of brothers and sisters and relations; I had nothing to talk about but the books I was reading, and I soon discovered that a premature acquaintance with the works of Shelley and Byron was not something to boast of.

  Yet for all the tedium, Miss Hale's became a respite, of sorts, from the darkness which had engulfed my mother. Instead of tea with Annie in the nursery, I had now to join Mama at the dining table, and make effortful conversation—mostly a recital of what I had learned at school that day. And then we would sit silently in the drawing room, Mama stitching mechanically or staring vacantly into the ire while I picked at my own work and listened to the heavy ticking of the mantel clock, counting the quarter hours until I could go up to my bed in the attic, where I would read for as long as I could be sure to blow out my candle before I went to sleep.

  In my second year at Miss Hale's, I won a prize for recitation: a book of Greek myths with wonderful pictures. The stories I liked best were those of Theseus and Ariadne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and especially Persephone in the Underworld. Anything to do with the Underworld fascinated me—I used to imagine that it was just under the kitchen floor, and that I would find steps going down to it if I were only strong enough to lift up one of the flagstones. I had a seashell in which I could hear the sound of the sea, which had always comforted me; I would read my book and gaze at the pictures, listening to the sea, and make up my own stories of Persephone in Hades. Six pomegranate seeds did not seem very much of a sin; later I learned from Papa that it was really a story about the seasons, seeds waiting underground for spring to arrive—a clever man at Cambridge had said so—but this seemed so dull and trite, and left out everything interesting, Charon the ferryman and Cerberus with his three heads, and Hades with his helmet of invisibility, in which he could go about the upper w
orld unseen. I asked Papa if the clever man thought the same about Eurydice, but apparently the clever man had not yet made up his mind.

  Strangely, perhaps, the souls of the dead had no part in my Underworld. It was a mysterious place of tunnels and secrets, dark and sombre and yet somehow enthralling, in which I would be free to wander if only I could find the way in. I dreamed once of a cave in which I found an elaborately carved chest full of gold and silver and precious stones, from which light poured as you opened it, and this became part of my imagined Underworld, together with its opposite, a plain wooden box which seemed empty at first, but as you watched, darkness began to well up like cold black mist and spill over the sides and across the rocky floor of the cave. There were the Plains of Asphodel, which sounded beautiful and sombre, carpeted—or so I imagined them—with flowers of the richest purple, and when you were weary of tunnels, you could ascend to the Elysian fields, where the sun always shines and music never ceases.

  At home, however, my dead sister was always with us. Mama had made a shrine of Alma's room, a small chamber opening off her own bedroom, keeping everything as if Alma might reappear at any moment: the sheet turned down, Alma's favourite rag doll by the pillow, her nightgown laid out, a posy of flowers in a vase upon the dresser. The door was always open, but no one else was allowed across the threshold; Mama did all the dusting and polishing of it herself, which suited Violet well enough, for she was lazy and hated climbing stairs. Violet slept in the attic bedroom across the landing from mine; sometimes at night I would hear her grumbling and puffing on her way up to bed.

  I wonder now why she stayed with us so long, for our house had so many stairs that you could scarcely go anywhere without climbing at least two flights. Apart from Violet, we had only Mrs. Greaves the cook, who lived entirely in the basement. Mrs. Greaves was a widow, grey-headed, stout and red-faced like Violet, but whereas Violet wobbled like a blancmange tied up in a cloth, Mrs. Greaves was as round and solid as a barrel. Though the kitchen had only one grimy window into the area below the street, it was the brightest and warmest place in the house, for Mrs. Greaves kept the gaslight turned as high as it would go, and in winter she would heap up the coals in the range until you could see the red glow pulsing through the cracks around the door. It was she who gave Violet her orders, which were carried out slowly and sullenly, but obeyed nonetheless. There was no laundry; the washing was sent out to a laundress.