7.
The Christmas rain lulls my scrambled mind to sleep. It is still sluicing when I’m jolted awake, gagging, panicked, unable to breathe.
The thin chain of my necklace is wound like whipcord around my throat. I clutch at it and hear a whisper fast in my ear. A rush of words just outside my reach.
“Stop it! Stop!”
I kick and thrash, struggling against the stranglehold, but it’s as if invisible hands clamp a vice round my neck. The whispering intensifies. The words seem purposefully distorted. I can’t make any sense of them. All I know is I need to get out of this room at once. Coughing, fighting to breathe, pulling up from the bed, unable even to see my own hands in front of my face, I stumble to the door, yanking it open, and I run into darkness.
At the landing I stop, bending double, heaving wretched gasps as my hands lock my knees. My throat feels crushed, my breath so dry it pains my lungs.
“Another nightmare,” I whisper hoarsely. My eyes roam, adjusting to pick out the outline of the furniture down the corridor the slipper chair, the console. “That’s all.” That whispering was no more than the hum of my own pulse. And that necklace is long lost, strewn and trampled into some bloody Southern field, or tucked into the fat purse of a grave robber.
This lingering sensation of being watched hangs heavy on me. My toes and fingertips are ice, my heart is pounding. But I won’t return to my bedroom. Not just yet.
I hasten down the corridor and the stairs. On the second floor, I follow the weak bar of light under the library door. I peek in. Uncle Henry is slumped in his armchair, staring into the dying embers. His decanter of whiskey is nearly finished. The flickering light scoops dark hollows into his eyes.
“Uncle?” I open the door.
His gaze shifts in my direction. “Amelia?” For a moment I’m confused, and then I remember.
“No, Uncle,” I say quickly. “It’s only Jennie.”
Little Amelia was Uncle’s and Aunt Clara’s daughter, who would have been nearly my age had she lived past her fragile cradle years. Once last summer, when Tobias and I were playing spies in the garden, we’d overheard Aunt and Uncle speaking of their phantom daughter as if Amelia had never died.
“It’s a game,” Toby had said, “to give themselves comfort.”
“A horrid, morbid game,” I’d asserted as we’d sprung like a pair of frightened grasshoppers back to the safety of the house.
“Jennie, your niece,” I prompt, for Uncle’s expression frightens me. Everything in me wants to turn my heel and run. Instead, I venture into the room.
Uncle has gained weight. His chin folds like dough over his neck, and his buttons strain his waistcoat. He is holding out Amelia’s memento mori. I suppress a shiver. Images of the dead provide not an ounce of comfort for me. The body present, stiff as an unlit candle, with the soul extracted from it.
“Jennie, yes. Come in.” No, not Amelia’s last image, which I had folded into my book years ago with a delicious shudder, but a tintype of Will taken last year, to commemorate his acceptance to Harvard. He’d been there only a few months, though, before yielding to Quinn’s belief that one shouldn’t hide from military duty.
I take the print hungrily and resolve to add it to my collection once Uncle Henry is out at his office. Will looks so alive that I cannot believe he isn’t anymore. I remember precisely the expression on his face when he used to kiss me, the way his eyes had searched mine, those lips on my skin, his fingers tracing the outline of my chin and neck, sketching my body. Even the memories can turn my insides molten.
Uncle Henry breaks my concentration. “Jennie, I am obliged to ask a favor of you.”
“Yes, Uncle?” I wait, vulnerable. At the mercy of whatever this request might be.
“A delicate matter.” He reaches for his drink, his fingers clumsy. “So delicate, in fact, that I cannot make inquiries at the bank, or even the club.”
I nod as he drains the glass, though this couldn’t be good news. What sort of task would be beneath Uncle Henry but proper for his sixteen-year-old niece?
“There is a photographer in Boston. Not the usual sort, this gentleman.
He goes by the name Geist,” says Uncle. “He claims that he can conjure images of the departed. A medium, I think he is called.”
Photographing spirits. “I’ve heard of this.” From Rosemary Wortley, actually. She is fascinated by séances and likes to show off her invitation to a meeting she attended last summer while visiting her Milford cousins. Where, she claimed, she had helped to raise the turbulent soul of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Why would Uncle want to speak with me about such a matter?
“Quite. And I suppose that your father, my late brother-in-law, with all his daft ideas, might have had his hand in something like this. Didn’t he have some like-minded cronies who all gathered at that church on Irving Street?” Uncle strokes his bald patch and continues. “Jennie, with your late father’s connections, I’d like you to make some further inquiries.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Although I am quite sure that I do.
Uncle turns and squashes my hand into his. His palm is damp, his eyes bulge with entreaty. “For God’s sake, listen to me, girl. Imagine if Mrs. Pritchett and I could glimpse our son again. Or commune with his spirit, just once more, before we die!”
For all of Aunt Clara’s caterwauling, I suppose I hadn’t given much thought to how Uncle Henry has been affected by the loss of his eldest child. Certainly Uncle was always puzzled by Will, whose tender warmth stood in contrast to both parents’ stylized graces. But Uncle never struck me as the sort to keep company with Spiritualists. Did he and Aunt Clara devise this plan together?
In the pause, Uncle Henry’s fingers tighten, pulling me so close I smell the whiskey on his breath. “We have suffered so much already. And we have been kind to you, haven’t we, Jennie? Frankly, I think it is the least you could do while you remain here at Pritchett House, reaping the benefits of our hospitality.”
Heaven above, he is threatening me.
Spiritualists have no place in upper-class, conservative society. Possibly, neither do I. And so I am the correct choice for this matter.
“Yes, Uncle,” I say. “I will do what I can. I promise.”
8.
Heinrich Geist is a large, bewhiskered man, younger and stouter than I’d imagined. Under caterpillar eyebrows, his eyes are blunt as bullets. I imagine those eyes staring at us now through his camera lens, and a chill creeps up the back of my neck.
Crammed onto one side of the gravy-brown love seat in Geist’s sunlit parlor, which serves as his studio, with the perfume of Aunt Clara’s oiled ringlets sticky in the air, I wish I’d had a bite to eat this morning. But I’d simply been too nervous. I was ten years old the last time I sat for a formal photograph. Even now I can almost feel the press of Toby’s hand slipped into mine, for comfort.
“Chin up,” he’d told me. “A weak chin is the sign of a traitor.”
“Another minute,” commands Geist, his voice muffled under the drop cloth.
I hold my chin high.
Standing behind me, Quinn exhales through his nostrils, signaling his displeasure.
Today is January the eighteenth in the new year of 1865. “A significant date,” Geist had assured us as he’d
