Quicksilver

“Mrs. Tapton was deep into her gin when I found her. She talked quite freely. Told me that Lady Hollister was mad but that Hollister himself was the one who terrified the staff. The only reason Mrs. Tapton stayed was out of loyalty to Lady Hollister. She had been with her since Lady Hollister was a girl in her teens. When Lady Hollister entered the mansion as a young bride, the housekeeper went with her.”

“Did the housekeeper and the rest of the staff know what was going on in the basement of the Hollister mansion?” Charlotte asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Crofton said. “I’m sure they sensed that something dreadful was happening inside that house, but they took the sensible approach.”

“In other words, they did not go looking for trouble,” Virginia said.

“They were paid well to look the other way,” Mrs. Crofton said. “And it is not as if the Hollister household was the only one in London that held secrets that the staff preferred not to know.”

“No,” Owen said. He caught Virginia’s eye. “Every house holds a few secrets.”

“Some secrets are decidedly more dreadful than others,” Virginia said briskly. She frowned in thought. “There is still one question that we have not answered. Who helped Lady Hollister stage the scene in the mirrored room under the mansion so that it would appear that I had murdered Hollister?”

Mrs. Crofton looked at her, surprised. “Isn’t it obvious? Who else could the lady of the house count on at such a time?”

“Of course,” Virginia said. “The housekeeper.”

FORTY-SIX

Well?” Virginia said. “Have you decided whether or not to make an appointment with Dr. Spinner?”

“I have decided that I won’t require Dr. Spinner’s therapy after all.” Charlotte poured tea into the pot with a serenely confident air. “As it happens, I have recently discovered another very effective cure for female hysteria.”

“Have you, indeed?”

“It is, I suspect, the same therapeutic remedy that you have begun to employ.”

Virginia smiled knowingly. “I had a feeling that might be the case when I saw you with Nick this morning. There was a certain energy in the air around you.”

“I love him, Virginia.” Charlotte carried the pot to the table and sat down. “I don’t understand it, and I certainly cannot explain it, but I realized the day I met him that deep inside I recognized him. It was as if I had been waiting for him to walk through the door of my shop my entire life.”

Virginia thought about the night that she had met Owen’s eyes in the mirror at the Pomeroy reading. “I know what you mean.”

“It was all very odd and confusing, I must admit. Nick says it was the same way for him, but he claims that it always happens like that for the men of the Sweetwater family when they find the right woman. He thinks it is a side effect of their talent, something to do with their ability to survive their peculiar psychical natures.”

They were seated in Charlotte’s small kitchen. Outside, the morning was sunny and warm. It felt to Virginia as if all of the shadows and darkness that had haunted her world for the past few weeks had been burned away by the fires that had been unleashed in Alcina Norgate’s mansion.

There would be more shadows and more darkness in the years ahead for both Owen and herself. It was the nature of their talents and the work that their abilities compelled them to do. It was also the nature of life. In that sense the Sweetwaters were no different from any other family, she thought. But she knew now that the bond of love that she shared with Owen would see them through the years ahead, regardless of what the future held.

She picked up the teacup that Charlotte had filled. “Perhaps it’s true what they say about love between two strong talents,” she said. “It does forge a metaphysical connection.”

“Just like in a sensation novel,” Charlotte said.

Virginia laughed. “Something tells me that no sensation novelist would approve of the heroine marrying into the Sweetwater family. That particular family does possess some unusual secrets.”

“Bah. Every family has secrets.”

“You’re right.” Virginia raised her cup in a small salute. “And you and I will keep those secrets.”

“Absolutely,” Charlotte said.

The bell over the door tinkled. Owen walked into the shop. Nick was with him.

“We’re in here,” Virginia called through the doorway of the back room.

Owen came to stand in the opening. He looked at the pot on the table and smiled.

“Excellent,” he said. “There’s tea.”

Nick ambled into the room, rubbing his hands in anticipation. “I am sorely in need of a cup. Are there any biscuits to go with the tea?”

“In the cupboard,” Charlotte said. “Help yourself.”

“Thank you, I’ll do that.”

Owen sat down next to Virginia. He took her hand underneath the table, gripping her fingers tightly. She felt the energy of his love enveloping her and knew that she would sense that energy for the rest of her life.

“My Aunt Ethel has given strict instructions for Nick and me to bring both of you to dinner this evening,” Owen said.

“We are to meet the rest of your family?” Charlotte asked, startled.

“Some of them.” Owen made a face. “They won’t all be there this evening, but there will more than enough, believe me.”

Nick opened a cupboard and took out a package of tea biscuits. “It will be relatively painless, I assure you,” he said. “Everyone is very excited to meet both of you. They had almost given up on Owen, and they were starting to fret about me. They will all be overjoyed to make your acquaintance.”

“No need to be concerned,” Owen said. “Talent aside, Sweetwaters are actually a very ordinary family.”

“Right,” Nick said. “Ordinary to the point of being rather dull.” He came back to the table with the biscuits and sat down. “Is there any tea left?”

Virginia and Charlotte exchanged glances, and then they looked at Owen and Nick. Both men munched on biscuits, oblivious.

“Ordinary,” Charlotte repeated.

“Dull,” Virginia said.

Owen smiled, his eyes heating.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll both fit right in.”

FORTY-SEVEN

What was Papa like?” Elizabeth asked.

Virginia put her teacup gently down on the delicate china saucer. She thought for a moment. “While you do not remember Papa at all, my own memories of him amount to little more than fragments of a photograph. The only reason I can recall what he actually looked like is because I do have a photograph that was taken the year that he and my mother died.”

Virginia had arrived at the Mansfield house a short time earlier. She had sent around a note declining Helen’s offer of the Mansfield carriage. Instead, Owen had escorted her in a Sweetwater carriage. He was now waiting for her in the park across the street.