A Rich Full Death

immediately afterwards, and was most embarrassed to discover that Beatrice had also turned, so that she caught me apparently staring after her. But she did not seem at all put out, but simply smiled. For a moment I thought she was going to say something, but in the end she turned away. There was of course nothing to say. It just now occurs to me that I should have asked her about the writing on the wall at the villa-perhaps she could have thrown some light on the meaning of that word ‘Riminese’. If only I could find some way of discovering where she lives or works, I might yet be able to do so. I will give the matter some thought.

Ever most affectionately yours

Booth

P.S.

A note has just this moment been delivered, inviting me to a ‘spiritualist gathering’ to be held tomorrow evening at the house of Miss Edith Chauncey, a noted ‘medium’. The purpose of the event, it seems, is to attempt to make contact with Isabel’s spirit, and a group of her closest acquaintances here in Florence have been invited to participate.

Now between the two of us, I am inclined to think this spiritualism a great nonsense; but as it is a sine qua non of social acceptability in at least some of the most important and sought- after households in Florence, I have been careful to keep my views to myself — unlike Mr Browning, who is a great heretic where the spirit world is concerned, loudly proclaiming it all to be a fraud, its practitioners charlatans and their followers credulous dupes (this despite the fact that his wife is prominent amongst the latter). The result is that I pass for a lukewarm believer, ripe for total conversion to the cause, and it is no doubt to this that I owe my invitation.

I was at first inclined to refuse, for the idea seems to me to be in rather poor taste. But on second thoughts it occurred to me that I should go-if only to see who else has been invited. Who were Isabel’s other close friends in Florence? Is it not possible that her murderer is to be found among them? Yes, I think upon the whole that I shall go.

13

17th Feb.

My dear Prescott,

The above date will be sufficient to indicate that there has been no respite in the storm of events which continues to rage here. Three days, as you see, have yielded enough for another lengthy letter-and yet everything can be traced back in one way or another to the ‘seance’ to which I was invited by Edith Chauncey, our leading practitioner of the spiritualist art.

It was at eight o’clock on Wednesday evening that I set out for the ancient palace in one of whose remoter nooks and crannies the Misses Chauncey live, as frugally as a pair of Reformed Church mice. The palazzo in question is one which really merits the name, which is applied here to any sizeable pile. It dates from the early Fifteenth Century, and originally belonged to a more than usually unpleasant branch of the Strozzi family. This clan having killed themselves off long since, the place is now divided into a multitude of small shops, offices, suites of apartments, storerooms, studios and garrets. In addition to the obligatory private dungeon, the entire structure is rumoured to be a maze of secret passages and concealed doorways, without which no well-appointed residence of the period was deemed complete. In short, the place fairly reeks with ‘atmosphere’, giving the impression of being packed like a sponge with History-the contents oozing out at the lightest touch of a sympathetic imagination. For anyone with an interest in spirits and ‘the other world’, no more suitable address could be imagined.

I was welcomed on my arrival by Miss Kate Chauncey, the younger of the two sisters-although ‘younger’ is very much a comparative term in this case, for neither of them will see fifty again. She stayed in the background for the rest of the evening, as indeed she must have done for the rest of her life; for it is Miss Edith who has ‘powers’ and ‘gifts’ and is in short a ‘medium’-and one whose reputation is such as to allow her to live, albeit modestly, on the offerings of her followers.

My contacts with this lady had thus far been of the slenderest. I had heard of her-one could not help hearing of her-on every side, for spiritualism is very much the vogue here. How can it fail to be, offering as it does both mystical experiences and practical advantages? It is as though it were discovered that viewing Canova’s ‘Pauline Bonaparte’ by moonlight was a cure for consumption. On the one hand, you are offered beauteous visions from the land of faery, and on the other the chance to commune with your late spouse, or chat to Napoleon. Indeed, I suspect that my resistance to the movement hitherto may in the last resort have amounted to little more than a feeling that it was all rather too good to be true.

However, I never dreamed of mocking the spiritualists to anyone here: they are much too influential for that. There are of course a few die-hard sceptics-notably Mr Browning, who seems to regard spiritualism with a particularly virulent fury, as something not merely untrue but unclean, like a nigger fetish cult. Indeed, his behaviour has apparently been so extreme on some occasions in the past that some spiritualists here regard him as little short of deranged.

The whole movement is of course still at a pre-Nicene stage of indulgent toleration, but despite this, I was extremely surprised to find that the first person I saw on entering the Chauncey’s sitting-room was Miss Jessie Tate. This female is really the most extraordinary personage, even by the standards of the Florentine exile community. She is about thirty-five years of age; strong, stocky, almost burly in appearance, with a shock of fiery red hair and an almost violently animated manner; lives alone, smokes the local cigars, and worships Giuseppe Mazzini, whose daggers and bombs she believes will liberate Italy-although who is to liberate it from such liberators she does not say. She talks so hard you seem to hear the tumbrils rolling and the guillotine swish, and although radicalism is rife here-indeed it is as much de rigueur as spiritualism in many circles-Miss Tate is generally considered to take things a deal too far. To come upon her there in the Chaunceys’ old-maidish parlour was therefore as unexpected a shock as finding a tarantula in one’s bed.

Far more disturbing, however, was to learn why she was there. The discovery that Jessie Tate is an adherent to the spiritualist cause was not in itself any particular cause for astonishment: spiritualism appeals to all manner of people for all manner of reasons. As far as Miss Tate is concerned it is apparently part of something called ‘the wave of the future’, which as far as I could gather means that faith in kings and priests is to be replaced by the scientifically demonstrable doctrines of socialism and spiritualism, the latter providing the transcendental ingredient without which the former would become a mere mechanistic materialism incapable of satisfying mankind’s higher needs.

This, then, was enough to explain why Jessie Tate was attending a ‘seance’; it did nothing to explain why she was attending that one. For the intention was apparently to assemble a group of people whose relations with Isabel had been particularly close; since, as Miss Chauncey explained, ‘the spirits will only respond if the ectoplasmic vibrations are in harmony’: which I take to mean roughly that the inhabitants of the spirit world, like the rest of us, are more likely to accept invitations when the company is agreeable. If close relations with Isabel had been the criterion of inclusion, then what on earth was Miss Jessie Tate doing there?

Well, I was not long in finding out, and the answer left me feeling even more ‘streaked’ than the discovery that Isabel and DeVere were lovers. For what did I learn but that Miss Tate and Mrs Eakin had been the greatest of friends, and used to meet tete-a-tete at least once a week!

What they found to talk about I find as difficult to imagine as I do what possible attraction Miss Tate’s society could have had for a woman like Isabel. The inverse appeal is of course no very great mystery, given Jessie Tate’s presumed amorous propensities. I can only suppose that all her talk of a brave new world proved titillating to Mrs Joseph Eakin. After all, she had hooked herself a millionaire and could therefore afford the luxury of cultivating revolutionary blue-stockings. No doubt realising, however, that her ideas would cut precious little ice with Joseph Eakin himself, Miss Tate always took care to visit Isabel in her husband’s absence.

The only other person present on my arrival was Seymour Kirkup, a fantastic old gentleman whom I was surprised to see there only in the sense that it seems as remarkable to see him out of his own home as to see a turtle walking about without its shell. To do justice to this extraordinary character I should require Mr Dickens’s genius for caricature, combined with the antiquarian charm of a Walter Scott, a touch of Sterne’s crankiness, and