Woman Who Spoke to Spirits Read online

  ‘My fiancé was called Cecil Sanderson –’ she has no idea where the name has sprung from but it will do as well as any – ‘and, sadly, it soon transpired that he was not robust. He became pale and ill at the start of the year, with a persistent cough, and all too soon he began to spit blood.’

  Oh, poor Cecil Sanderson, she thinks, still writing, to be brought into existence, even if only in somebody’s mind, and to be dismissed from it again so soon!

  ‘Despite careful nursing and exorbitant doctor’s bills,’ she goes on, ‘Cecil died a month ago.’ She makes a note in the margin to the effect that she must wear mourning when she attends the seance. ‘I am finding it very hard to go on without him, and there are one or two particular questions to which I would very much like answers.’

  She sucks at the end of her pen, wondering what these questions should be. But slowly, as she sits there deep in the spaces of her own mind, something else arises, pushing aside her preoccupation with the forthcoming seance and the questions she will ask. And it is this: that if by some mystic mechanism she really could turn into Maud Garrett, then the events in her past that still haunt her and give her nightmares would no longer exist …

  When Lily’s father Andrew Owen Raynor died, her mother remarried with unbelievable, hurtful haste and Lily went to live with her paternal grandparents and her spinster aunt Eliza in the rooms above Raynor’s Apothecary, later renamed Raynor’s Pharmacy. Once she was over the first profound grief, Lily came back to herself from whatever dark, lonely and sad place she had been inhabiting and discovered that her new life suited her rather well.

  For a start, she loved the apothecary’s shop and everything about it: the smell, the fastidious neatness, cleanliness and order (Lily’s mother had never been a good organizer and dismissed routine and order as ‘boring’); the perpetual parade of customers and their intriguing requests (although quite often she would be kindly but firmly ushered out of the shop and into the family’s private quarters when someone had something of an intimate nature to discuss); the sense that, even at twelve years old, she was a useful and valued member of the family business.

  Most of all it was the quiet, habitually undemonstrative love of her grandparents and her aunt that made her smile again. She understood, devastated, grief-stricken child that she was, that her grandparents mourned their son, and her aunt her brother, just as profoundly as Lily mourned her father. Grief, she learned, had many faces and all of them hurt.

  Abraham and Martha Raynor were thoughtful, cerebral people, and their daughter Eliza was highly intelligent. It did not even occur to them that Lily would not want to learn everything they could teach her, and fortunately they were quite right because she did.

  Aunt Eliza had begun giving her niece lessons even before the death of Andrew Owen Raynor, every morning except Sunday, upstairs in Eliza’s book-lined room above the apothecary that always felt much more like a study than a bedroom. To begin with, Eliza had been confident that she could teach her as well as anybody but when Lily was nine, Eliza decided that the child’s clear interest in and facility with the sciences deserved a more knowledgeable instructor, and arranged for Lily to have two lessons a week with Eliza’s schoolteacher friend, Susan Heale, in biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics.

  Back then, when Andrew Owen Raynor was still alive and Lily lived at home with her parents, it was with her mother that she spent most of her time, her father being so often away working. And her flighty, vain, childish, empty-headed, very beautiful but dim mother didn’t think girls needed to be educated, but was quite happy for others to take on the responsibility.

  Then, in September 1862, after Andrew’s death and Lily’s move to live with her grandparents and her aunt and just before her thirteenth birthday, Lily became a full-time pupil at Miss Heale’s Collegiate School, across the river in Battersea. There she remained for the next five years, leaving in the summer of 1867 and spending the next few months working alongside her grandparents in the pharmacy.

  She knew now what she wanted to do, and to her great relief Abraham, Martha and Eliza backed her up. Lily wanted to be a nurse, and on the eve of her twentieth birthday she embarked on five years’ training. She developed a particular interest in midwifery, and her hard work in the training hospital earned her a much sought-after place with St Walburga’s Nursing Service, an organization of nursing nuns who specialized in midwifery and battlefield medicine. The SWNS – or Swans, as they were affectionately known – were attached to the British army, and, since soldiers very often took their families with them when posted overseas, the two particular skills of the nursing nuns were vital.

  Lily worked as hard as she knew how, sometimes exhausting herself to the point of collapse, when the nuns would pack her off back to the rooms above the pharmacy for some of her grandparents’ and her aunt’s loving care. But the effort was worth it in the end, for Lily graduated with excellent marks and the SWNS offered her a post nursing with the army in India.

  During her the years of service in India with the SWNS – looking after pregnant, labouring and nursing mothers and at regular intervals being deployed to strange places with outlandish names to nurse soldiers with horrific wounds and terrifying illnesses – Lily’s life was hard but it was also everything she had ever wanted. Even the news that her beloved grandparents were dead, dying within three months of each other, did not cast her down for long.

  But then something terrible happened.

  Lily shut it out, for it was too awful to think about, and referred to it in her mind simply as The Incident.

  It had shocked her to her core. She had gone to the defence of the defenceless, believing others would agree with her, fight with her, side with her in the righting of a grievous wrong. But she had gravely misjudged, and those she had trusted to support her and help her had let her down.

  She abandoned India, abandoned nursing, and took the first available boat back to England. But it was to find that everything was different: she was devastated to find on returning to Raynor’s Pharmacy that her beloved Aunt Eliza had succumbed to fever only the previous month. The letter informing Lily of the sad news had arrived in India some time after she had left.

  She didn’t know what to do. She had to earn her living, but the one thing she knew – nursing – she had quit for ever.

  And so the World’s End Bureau came into being …

  Lily comes out of her long reverie. She sighs, stands up and clears away the remains of her abandoned supper. She knows she should return to work on Maud Garrett, but just now she has little heart for it. I shall go to bed, she thinks, and trust that sleep will restore me to myself.

  For she was herself, will go on being so and has no choice. No matter how alluring it might seem to take on the persona and the history of somebody else, it cannot be done. Or rather, she amends, she cannot do it, for if she abandons Lily Raynor it means she must obliterate all the good things along with the bad. Her father. Her good, hard-working grandparents, Abraham and Martha. Aunt Eliza. And how would they react to that, those kind, loving people? How deep would be their hurt if she denied them?

  No. Despite everything, despite The Incident, she is Lily Raynor, and so she will remain.

  And, eventually, that firm, confident resolve is sufficient to send her to sleep.

  FOUR

  Felix hears Lily’s voice in his head as he walks swiftly away from Hob’s Court towards the King’s Road and transport towards theatre land. I didn’t necessarily expect you to start immediately, she just said. Well, he thinks now, full of the fire of the chase, his legs reacting to the adrenalin and forcing the pace, that’s just what I’m going to do.

  He knows his way in the world of actors, the stage, agents, reviews, trade publications. Solange, bless her, had believed she was an artiste manquée, and after a bottle of champagne or so she would begin describing outlandish and usually very risqué incidents in her colourful past on the stage. Felix had always been pretty sure this past existe
d solely in Solange’s lively imagination, but she was so entertaining, so funny, that he never said so. Besides, Solange had the endearing gift of being able to laugh at herself, and he had sometimes thought that she knew full well he didn’t believe her and it didn’t bother her a jot.

  There are two avenues open to him, he thinks as he sits on the tram heading east. First, he could purchase one of the theatrical papers and browse through the pages until Violetta da Rosa’s name leaps out. There is the Era, commonly known as the Actor’s Bible, but it costs sixpence and, despite now being in employment, still Felix is being careful with his pennies. There is also the Stage Directory, a new paper which is rapidly gaining popularity in the theatrical world, but even that costs thruppence. He can do as he has so often done on the past, and go to a news stand, pick up the relevant paper and pretend to be checking that it’s the one he wants before purchasing it, but news vendors are wise to that old trick and Felix isn’t in the mood for verbal abuse.

  The second option is to go to the theatre where Violetta was engaged and simply ask someone for the information he wants. Julian’s father told Lily the location, and Felix knows it: the Aphrodite Theatre is a pretty little place in a narrow street off the Strand, and there, once, long ago, he seduced a beautiful married woman who very much wanted to be seduced, so much so that it had been she who purchased the tickets for the private box. Until a week ago, Violetta da Rosa has been appearing there in an extremely popular melodrama entitled Her Father’s Beloved.

  The main doors of the Aphrodite are very firmly closed, so Felix makes his way round the back. As he walks along the mean little piss-smelling alley to the workmen’s entrance, he hears sounds from within: as he hoped, the stage hands are working on the set for the next production. He opens a battered door and walks soft-footed along a dark, dusty passage that smells of sweat. In a little booth to the right sits a man reading a newspaper. After one or two suspicious glances, this man accepts Felix for what Felix says he is – a devoted fan of Violetta da Rosa who arrived in town too late for the actress’s last appearance in Her Father’s Beloved and is determined to see her in her next production – and provides the information that Felix is after.

  As he leaves the theatre a short time later, Felix hurries back to the Strand and then takes out his notebook to record his findings. Violetta’s agent has his offices in the New Inn Chambers, Wych Street, but Felix doesn’t think he’ll need to be bothering the man, whose name is Maurice Isaacs, since the chap at the Aphrodite told him that Violetta da Rosa has landed herself a new role in a Drury Lane theatre, where she will now be busily rehearsing.

  ‘If you’ll take my advice,’ he added, ‘you’ll get hold of your ticket straight away, since she’s so popular that the show’ll soon be sold out for the foreseeable future and you may well already be too late.’ He gave a self-satisfied smirk at this, as if Violetta’s popularity is somehow directly attributable to the Aphrodite Theatre.

  ‘Oh, I hope not! I’ll do as you suggest, and thank you for the good advice,’ Felix said sycophantically.

  But now, as he hurries along to Drury Lane, he is not in the least perturbed by this latter information, having little wish to watch the lady on stage. He does very much want to see her, but not in her working mode. He finds the Glass Slipper Theatre and unobtrusively merges with the crowd of young – and not-so-young – men, and quite a few women, who are waiting at the stage door in the hope of seeing their beloved Violetta da Rosa as, once rehearsals are finished for the day, she makes her regal way out.

  ‘Did you see Her Father’s Beloved?’ he asks the sandy-haired and bespectacled man standing next to him. The man is forty or so, his suit is shabby, he has dandruff and he smells of fish.

  ‘Of course I did!’ he replies indignantly.

  ‘Lucky you,’ Felix says, adopting a suitably resentful expression. ‘I couldn’t get a bloody ticket.’

  The sandy-haired man looks smug. ‘Yes, I heard it was booked solid.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Felix asks wistfully.

  ‘She was wonderful!’ breathes the sandy-haired man, his eyes misting. ‘She had us all in tears when she leaned over the bed of her dying father, and as for that solo speech she did at the end, my goodness, I don’t know how she could do that, night after night!’

  ‘What about this new one?’ Felix asks. ‘What’s it called?’

  But this, he instantly realizes, is a mistake, for a true fan would know. The sandy-haired man is eyeing him suspiciously, as if about to demand that he shows his credentials as a true and devoted follower.

  ‘I’ve only just arrived in town,’ Felix says apologetically. ‘I haven’t caught up with the news.’

  Accepting this with a disapproving sniff, the sandy-haired man relents. ‘It’s called Miss Sanderson’s Fortune, and she plays a young woman who doesn’t realize she’s the heiress to a huge fortune, and she spends her life caring for the poor and doing good works, and—’

  Felix shuts out the eager voice – the man is all but salivating – for he has no interest in the plot or the details of the lead actress’s role. One thing, however, has caught his attention: Violetta, apparently, is still playing the ingenue role.

  ‘She’s looking as good as ever, they say,’ Felix remarks when the sandy-haired man has at last finished. ‘Perhaps a little more mature and stately in Her Father’s Favourite, I believe I read, but I dare say that was demanded by the role?’

  ‘She’s not mature or stately!’ the sandy-haired man protests forcefully, a belligerent expression contorting his bland features. For a moment, Felix wonders if he’s winding up to punch him. ‘She’s as fresh and beautiful as she ever was!’ But then, with quite a hard and undoubtedly deliberate dig in Felix’s ribs, he adds, ‘Look sharp, now! She’s on her way!’

  Glancing round, Felix sees that the crowd has grown. There is a sense of expectation, swiftly escalating. Those present seem to have the theatre’s timings in their blood and be aware that rehearsals must now have finished. They are quite right, for, even as Felix is being squeezed by a general push forwards, the stage door opens and the woman they are longing to see stands there at the top of the short flight of steps, bathed in the light from within.

  Violetta da Rosa most certainly is not as fresh and beautiful as she ever was, Felix thinks. And he should know, for he saw her on stage thirteen years ago when he was fourteen and, staying with his school friend Humphrey Copland in Hampstead, had sneaked out of Humphrey’s parents’ home to go to the theatre and see the famous young actress in a salacious little play concerning illicit love affairs and a nun who had to dispose of a baby. Violetta, tightly laced into a very revealing costume, had been every adolescent boy’s dream, and the crudely coloured postcards bearing her image that Felix and Humphrey had managed to acquire in the theatre foyer had been sold at many times their face value once the boys were back at Marlborough.

  Felix, who has now wormed his way to the front and is taller than most of the crowd, is near enough to see the actress in unforgiving detail. There are lines around her tired eyes, her teeth do not sparkle as once they did, her fine jawline is sagging a little and she is probably a stone or two heavier than when she played the part of the dewy-eyed innocent in the play about the nun and the baby. How old is she? Felix wonders. Thirty-five? Forty? At least, he answers himself.

  But still she has the indefinable quality that makes a woman attractive, appealing and adored, despite the passage of time. She is beautifully dressed – mauve gown trimmed with purple that hugs closely and shows off her splendid figure, fur-collared evening cloak, well-fitting gloves in fine calfskin – and her glossy brown hair under the bejewelled headdress with its flirty little veil is dressed to perfection. Her smile is warm and she manages to look modestly surprised by the size of the crowd awaiting her and their obvious devotion.

  Felix watches, a smile on his face, as Violetta da Rosa responds like the artist she is to the adulation of the crowd. She is waving, accepting a si
ngle rose from one hand, a small (and rather crushed) posy from another. People cry out their appreciation, their admiration, their love, and she responds with a becoming little blush. From his vantage point, Felix observes a tall, swarthy, thick-set man on the far side of the steps draw close, and is near enough to hear him say to her, ‘No rehearsal tomorrow, so you coming to the Tom?’

  She nods, flashing him a very quick glance. Then she hisses out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Don’t call for me, because I’ll need to shake off Little Jack Horner first. I don’t want him seeing you, it always makes him suspicious and querulous and likely to weep. I’ll see you there.’

  The dark man, grinning, melts away.

  Someone is shouting over on the far side of the crowd. A hackney carriage is drawn up beside the pavement, a young man leaning out of the open door. ‘Make way, make way!’ he cries. Then, since his shrill voice is having absolutely no impact, he jumps down and tries to force a path between the surge of packed humanity. He has a bouquet of mixed roses, lilies and carnations in one hand, so enormous that it is larger than all the other floral offerings put together. The bright orange-gold of the pollen on the lilies’ stamens has made a series of marks on his dark lapel. Felix knows from experience that they will be the devil to get out.

  He watches, feeling suddenly sad. The man – he’s not really a man but a boy in grown-up’s clothing – has very fair curly hair, worn daringly long, and a pink and white complexion, at present darkened by a flush of embarrassment or perhaps anger. Everything he wears shouts wealth and privilege, yet not one person present, including, it seems, the actress he has come to meet, has an iota of respect for him.

  ‘Violetta! Violetta!’ he shouts, and as the tension and the anxiety escalate, his voice breaks into the soprano range. One or two of the men begin to chuckle, and someone says something about it being past his bedtime.

  At last Violetta da Rosa takes pity on him. In a first-class impression of only just having noticed him – she is an actress, after all – she shouts, ‘Julian! Wait there, I’ll make my way to you!’