Her family specialised in sudden death.
As Roach searched in the little chamber of his emotions for a rarely expressed affection that might assuage his wife’s palpitations, another disbelieving member of the audience received a lightning bolt of sorts.
His name was Gilbert Morrison, one of two brothers in the shipping business. A dry stick with a cruel streak, it was an accident of sorts that he had found himself in these quarters.
Accidents do happen.
He had been walking along George Street when struck by a poster outside the hall that housed the Spiritualist Society.
An image of Sophia Adler met his narrow gaze, with fulsome tribute in words below as to her abilities in the realm of cryptaesthesia. Her face was partly in shadow, the eyes hidden, but it had a susceptible, waiflike air that provoked a whiplash sentiment in Mister Morrison normally expressed in very different surroundings.
On an impulse, Gilbert, this rare occasion, let his darker compulsion influence the public persona.
Fate works that way sometimes.
Yet before that he was intercepted, as all the attendance including an irritated Roach had been, by a gaunt figure with long white hair who stood at the entrance of the hall with a placard raised high.
The message was succinct enough.
The man’s name was Jupiter Carlisle. He was to be found in front of most theatres in Edinburgh most nights railing against the sins of the flesh as depicted by lewd actresses and seemed to have transferred his implacable hatred of evil over to mesmerism for this evening.
Jupiter was haggard with rectitude and fixed Gilbert with pale blue, washed-out eyes gleaming with a zealot’s fire. There was an unhinged quality to the man, and though he was mocked and reviled by the very folk he sought to save from sin, he inspired a strange trepidation. No-one wanted him too close lest lunacy contaminate.
The Ancient Mariner.
His voice was high-pitched and parched as if he were drying up inside.
Thus he addressed Gilbert.
‘Enter into this place,’ he pronounced, ‘and you enter a palace of iniquity where the Lord dwelleth not.’
Gilbert pushed past but Jupiter persisted.
‘Only the Lord raises the dead. This woman Sophia Adler is against Christ and must suffer consequence.’
As Gilbert went through the door and was nodded past by a sleepy old gateman, the judgement followed.
‘He will strike her down. The Lord anoints, the Lord provides. This mesmerism is of Satan’s making and you will lose your soul, sir. The flesh is aye weak and you are of the flesh!’
A confused message to which Gilbert had paid no attention, the very essence of spiritualism being a lack of corporeal form; however in this case flesh was his motivating force, his darker compulsion.
So perhaps Jupiter had a point.
Gilbert had been one of the last to enter and so found a seat at the end of Conan Doyle’s row on the extremity just by the door, closed behind by an obliging usher.
There was a stronger light by this portal and so the maritime merchant was picked out by the downward shaft as if illuminated by doom or destiny.
It illustrated a long hatchet of a face with deep-set eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth that invited the inserted envelope.
None of the strange auditory happenings had made much impression upon Gilbert.
He was distant by nature, worshipping two forces – power and money – both of which he now possessed in quantity sufficient to justify the vicious greed that had driven him from one act of treachery to another.
Morrison was a ruthless man. Predatory. He gave thanks to the Almighty on Sunday and the rest of the week was his own; exemplifying the Presbyterian edict that a grim heart leads to God.
Indeed the idea of a voluptuous or delicious deity would have sent him scurrying to a hole in the ground.
As Sophia writhed in her chair, his thoughts were not of a spiritual nature but more to indulge the dark wish that put an image in his mind of acquiescent supine surrender.
Therefore it was a great surprise to Gilbert when the woman suddenly whipped her head round and stared wildly, it would seem, straight to where he was sitting, surrounded by a halo of light.
Slowly one bare arm, flesh that he had been regarding with detached relish, rose from the body and pointed an index finger towards him.
For a moment her mouth opened and closed but no words emerged, then she let out a stifled shriek and fell abruptly back in the chair exposing a flash of white throat as if to a lover’s kiss.
Or bite.
The stirring in Gilbert’s loins was matched by an agitated rustle in the audience but Magnus Bannerman announced softly that they must compose themselves, this was a delicate moment, anything might happen, the sensitive must be left to replenish her vital sources, otherwise she might be torn to pieces by the spirits.
And so they fell silent. And waited.
Then with a shocking crash the door burst open with a sound like a thunderclap and two howling figures ran inside to chase each other dementedly round the room.
One was a devil, the other a ghost, and they emitted high-pitched screeches and cursing as they moved like will o’ the wisps in the gloom.
Two young well-to-do louts in costume, who were anticipating Halloween by some days, had crept into the halls past the dozing caretaker and thought it a great diversion to join the whirling spirits in satanic caper.
To add to the mayhem, Sophia’s head snapped up, the veil fell aside, and her white face shone in the darkness.
At the same time the nonplussed Muriel heard a ghostly voice echo in her ears.
In fact this was a distant malediction from the departing Jupiter Carlisle, out in the street, which had floated in the still air and wafted through a partly opened small high window below which she sat at the back of the hall.
In a state of susceptibility, Muriel received the arrow of accusation straight into her guilty heart and what had made it worse was that the reedy, querulous quality of Carlisle’s voice bore an uncanny resemblance to that of her dead husband.
Meanwhile the devil and ghost had skipped nimbly under the unavailing grab of the ushers but then ran into the governance of Conan Doyle who had recovered from his surprise, having wrenched his arm away from Muriel’s panicked grip, and proceeded to exercise a rugby-honed ability to take the slippery customer in tight embrace.
He tucked the cursing, fractious hooligans, one under each arm, strode out to the street and deposited them on the cobblestones with a hefty boot in the backside to speed them on their way.
From a far point down the street Jupiter Carlisle howled some words at the scene, dismissing them all as heathens who merited burning in the fires of Hell.
As Doyle walked back inside, brushing his hands in satisfaction, because nothing pleases a man more than to mete out summary punishment, he crossed paths with a tall thin person who brushed past without acknowledgement but was recognisable as the target of Sophia’s pointed finger.
And he had met the fellow not long before when the University had put on a rowing competition, which Arthur’s boat had won.
Various shipping merchants had been invited in the vain hope that they might contribute something to the club’s coffers and this thin man and his fat brother had attended, eaten the food, drunk the beer but given damn all.
‘Good evening, Mister Morrison,’ Doyle said to the man’s back and received a mumbled, belated response.
Perhaps he was embarrassed. In truth Conan Doyle would not have placed the merchant as a seeker after truth.
When Arthur returned to the hall, the chair on stage was empty and Magnus Bannerman was soothing the
