The Luminaries

in the very room in which this woman had been killed.

‘A gentleman in our group—not the medium, but another spiritist of high renown—happened to be wearing a pocket watch that evening. The watch was tucked inside his vest pocket, with the chain pinned to his breast. He had wound it, he assured us afterwards, before he arrived at the house, and the piece kept very good time. Well, that night—during the seance—there came a queer little whirring noise from his vest. We all heard it, though we did not know what it was. He retrieved the piece, and found to his astonishment that the dial now read three minutes past one. He insisted that he had wound the watch at six o’clock, and it was not yet nine. There was no way that the hands could have moved so far on their own accord, and he could hardly have turned the knob by accident! He tried the knob—and found that it had stuck. It was broken. In fact the piece never worked again.’

‘But what did it mean?’ someone said. ‘Three minutes past one?’

The widow’s voice became low. ‘We could only assume,’ she said, ‘that the spirit of the dead woman was trying to tell us something, very urgently. The time of her death, perhaps? Or was she delivering a warning? A death that was yet to come?’

Charlie Frost found that he was breathing shallowly.

‘What happened next?’ Nilssen whispered.

‘We decided to stay in the drawing room until three minutes past one in the morning,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘Perhaps, we thought, the spirit was inviting us to stay until that time—at which point something was to happen. We waited until the hour struck one; we waited in silence for one minute—two minutes—three—and then, exactly at that moment, there was a terrible crash: a painting tumbled from its hook upon the wall. We all turned, and saw, behind it, a hole in the plaster. The painting had been put up, you see, to mask the hole.

‘Well, the women in the group were screaming; there was noise all about; you can imagine the commotion. Someone found a knife, and cut out the piece of plaster—and lo and behold, lodged into the plaster, there was a ball of shot.’

Frost and Nilssen exchanged a quick glance. The widow’s story had reminded them both of the bullet that had vanished from Anna Wetherell’s bedchamber, in the upper room of the Gridiron Hotel.

‘Was the case ever solved?’ somebody said.

‘Oh, yes,’ the widow said. ‘I shan’t go into the details—there are too many—but you can look it all up in the papers if you’re curious. You see, the woman was never savaged by a dog at all. She had been murdered by her own husband—and he’d shot the dog, and slashed her throat himself, to cover it up.’

There were murmurs of distress around the room.

‘Yes,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘Tragic, the whole story. Elizabeth something, the woman’s name was. I forget the last name. Well, the good news was that when the case reopened, they had two clues on their side: first, that she had been killed by a ball from a Colt Army handgun … and second, that the precise time of her death was three minutes past one.’

The widow was quiet for a moment, and then she laughed. ‘But you aren’t here tonight to hear me tell tales!’ She rose from her chair. Several of the assembled men made to rise also, out of politeness, but the widow put up her hand, stalling them. ‘I regret to say that the sceptics of the world are very many,’ she said, ‘and for every good-hearted man, there are ten more who are not good at all. There may be men among you who will attempt to deny whatever happens tonight, or who will attempt to discredit me. I invite you all to look around you, now, and to reassure yourselves that this room contains no tricks or deceits or follies of any kind. I know as well as you that there are many pretenders in the art of fortune telling, but you may rest assured that I am not one of them.’ She spread her arms and said, ‘You can see that I am concealing nothing on my person. Don’t worry—you are free to look.’

There was tittering at this, and much shuffling as the men looked around them, examining the ceiling, the chairs, the paraffin lamp on the table, the candles, the rug upon the floor. Charlie Frost kept his eyes on Lydia Wells. She did not look tense. She twirled around, revealing that she was hiding nothing in her skirts, and then seated herself very easily, smiling at the room at large. She picked at a loose thread upon her sleeve and waited until the men were still.

‘Excellent,’ she said, when the collective attention had focused upon her once again. ‘Now that we are all happy, and ready, I shall cut the lights, and await Anna’s arrival.’

She leaned forward and doused the paraffin lamp, plunging them all into the gloom of candlelight. After several seconds of quiet, there came three knocks at the parlour door behind them, and Lydia Wells, still fussing over the lamp, called, ‘Come!’

The door opened, and the seven men turned. Frost, forgetting Pritchard’s instruction for a moment, looked too.

Anna was standing in the doorway with an expression of ghostly vacancy upon her face. She was still wearing the mourning dress she had been gifted by Aubert Gascoigne, but if the dress had been ill fitting once, it looked wretched on her now. The gown hung from her shoulders as though from a rail. The waist, though plainly cinched, was loose, and the tatted collar masked an almost concave breast. Her face was very pale, her expression sombre. She did not look at the faces of the assembled crowd. With her eyes fixed upon the middle distance, she came forward, slowly, and sank into the vacant armchair facing Lydia Wells.

Why, thought Frost, as she sat down, she is starving! He glanced at Nilssen, meaning to catch the other man’s eye, but Nilssen was frowning at Anna, an expression of grave perplexity upon his face. Too late, Frost remembered his own assignation, and turned back to the widow— who, in the brief moment while every man’s head was turned towards the door, had done something. Yes: she had done something, certainly, for she was smoothing down her dress in a self-conscious, satisfied way, and her expression had suddenly become brisk. What had she done? What had she altered? In the dim light he could not tell. Frost cursed himself for having looked away. This was just the kind of subterfuge that Pritchard had predicted. He vowed that he would not look away a second time.

The corners of the room had now vanished entirely into black. The only light came from the flickering glow of the candles in the centre of the group, and around it the eleven faces had a greying, ghostly look. Without taking his eyes from the widow’s face, Frost noted that in fact the circle of chairs was not perfectly circular: it was more nearly an ellipsis, placed with its longest axis pointing to the door, and Lydia seated at its farthest end. By placing the seats in this configuration, she had been able to ensure that every man’s head would turn towards the door— and away from her—when Anna arrived. Well, Frost thought, the Chinese men, at least, must have seen the sleight of hand that she had performed in that quick instant when Anna appeared in the doorway. He made a second mental note: to question them once the seance was over.

The group now joined hands, at the widow’s instruction; and then, in the fluttering light of the candles, Lydia Wells heaved a great sigh, smiled, and closed her eyes.

The widow’s visitation took a very long time coming. The group sat in perfect silence for nigh on twenty minutes, each man holding himself very still, breathing rhythmically, and waiting for a sign. Charlie Frost kept his eyes on Mrs. Wells. At length she set up a humming sound, low at the back of her throat. The humming thickened, acquired pitch; soon one could make out words, some nonsensical, some recognisable only by their shapes, their syllables. These too thickened into phrases, entreaties, commands: finally Mrs. Wells, arching her back, made her request of the world of the dead: to give up the shade of Emery Staines.

Later, Frost would describe the scene that followed as, variously, a ‘fit’, a ‘seizure’, and a ‘prolonged convulsion’. He knew that none of these explanations was quite right, for none conveyed, accurately, either the elaborate theatrics of Lydia Wells’s performance, or Frost’s acute embarrassment, in witnessing them. Mrs. Wells called out Staines’s name, again and again, intoning the words with a lover’s dying fall—and when no answer came, she became agitated. She suffered paroxysms. She repeated syllables, like a babbling child. Her head lolled against her chest, reared back, lolled again. Presently her convulsions began approaching a kind of climax. Her breathing became faster and faster—and then suddenly quelled. Her eyes snapped open.

Charlie Frost felt a cold jolt of unease: Lydia Wells was staring directly at him, and the expression on her face was unlike any he had seen her wear before: it was rigid, bloodless, fierce. But then the flames from the candles ducked and leaped and he saw that Lydia Wells was not looking at him, but past him, over his shoulder, to where Ah Sook sat in the corner in his Oriental pose. Frost did not blink; he did not look away. Then Lydia Wells gave a strange sound. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The muscles in her throat began to pulse. Her mouth