Season of Storms (18 page)

vii

“
I
can’t wait to meet her,” said Nicholas, drily. “She sounds a rare treat.”

“So anyway,” I went on, ignoring him, “Edwina said she’d gladly come and give a demonstration at rehearsal, if we wanted, of what a séance should be like.”

Madeleine, clearly interested, curled her legs beneath her on the crackled leather sofa. We were gathered in the Stanza d’Arazzo—the tapestry room—for drinks before our dinner, it being too cold and too wet on the terrace. This room, though dark and draped with the familiar rich fabrics that D’Ascanio had favoured, nonetheless managed to feel rather cosy. It might have been the warming pools of light cast by the floor lamps with their fringed silk shades, or the presence, in the corner, of a baby grand piano that had obviously been much played, its finish worn and mellowed.

Den had gravitated to the instrument the moment he’d come in, and now was sitting at it trying to assess whether it was in tune by playing arpeggios, with Poppy Hedrick sitting at his side on the piano bench, her thin legs swinging. She still looked deathly pale and, having only just woken from a long afternoon nap, had the groggy, half-sedated look of someone who was ill, but being around Den seemed to make her more cheerful. He’d actually got her to smile, just a moment ago.

I didn’t think she’d been listening at all to what I’d been saying, but she turned now and asked, “What’s a Spiritualist?”

Madeleine answered in the same way she appeared to answer all of Poppy’s questions, with patience and intelligence. “Well, Spiritualism, darling, is an actual organized movement, a kind of religion, whose members believe that people’s bodies die but their spirits don’t, and that these spirits can communicate through mediums—people who are especially sensitive, and who can act as go-betweens at séances. Like the woman I play in
Il Prezzo.
”

Poppy absorbed this. “And is Mrs. Farrow a medium?”

I was about to reply that she claimed to be, when Nicholas intercepted the question.

In a tone that knew better, he said, “Of course she isn’t.” He rolled his eyes at me. “I hope you didn’t encourage her.”

Madeleine smiled at him. “But darling, think of the fun. A séance! I’d love to see a real medium in action; it would help me with my part.”

“There’s no such thing as a real medium. And there certainly aren’t any spirits.”

Poppy turned to argue. “Yes there are. Mummy saw a ghost once, didn’t you, Mummy?”

Madeleine smiled. “Well, I
thought
I did, darling. I was very young.”

“There are too ghosts,” said Poppy in a stubborn tone, to Nicholas. She clearly didn’t like him much. I couldn’t say I blamed her, though it must have made things difficult for Madeleine.

Rupert, who’d been following the conversation from the corner where he’d quietly been studying the contents of the room’s only bookcase, said, “It’s very kind of Alex’s grandmother to offer. Shall we have her come tomorrow?”

“You’re not serious?” asked Nicholas.

“I don’t see any harm in it,” said Rupert. “I’m sure if we were playing this in London, Dennis and I would have thought about bringing in a medium to demonstrate séance technique for you. Wouldn’t we, Dennis?”

“Mm? Oh, yeah, sure,” came the absent reply from the piano corner.

Nicholas exhaled sharply in impatience. “She’s not a medium, she’s only a dotty old woman.”

“Not so dotty,” Den warned him, his smile showing briefly in profile. “Old she may be, but she’s sharp enough to kill a man at fifty paces, take my word.”

“Madness,” said Nicholas under his breath as he shook a cigarette loose from its packet and struck a match to light it. I frowned as I watched him, not because of what he’d said but because of the match—he’d never used matches before, at least not around me. He usually used his lighter . . .

And then all of a sudden my memory kicked in and I knew where he’d left his gold lighter. I’d seen it today, as a matter of fact—on a table by an armchair at the Villa delle Tempeste.

Edwina hadn’t mentioned him, which meant he must have been to see Daniela.
The rat,
I thought. I looked away, disgusted, and discovered I was being watched. Across the room young Poppy Hedrick glanced from me to Nicholas and back again, and sensing that she’d found a kindred spirit, shyly smiled.

viii

WE
worked through the second act just after lunch the next day, and Edwina, at Rupert’s request, came to give us a lesson on how to converse with the dead.

Poppy was there as well, all of us having given our consent to let her sit in on rehearsals, for Madeleine’s sake, although in Nicholas’s case that consent hadn’t come without grumbling. “She’ll throw me off,” he’d warned.

“You won’t even know that she’s there,” had been Madeleine’s promise.

And in actual fact, the girl was quiet as a mouse. She was sitting now at the table next to Den, who appeared to have made her his unofficial assistant, giving her paper and pen and introducing her to the basics of running a rehearsal.

Not that he was really running anything, this afternoon. Edwina, from the moment she arrived, assumed control.

“Young man,” she told Nicholas, “kindly do
not
blow that smoke in my face when I’m trying to speak. Thank you.” Taking a chair between Madeleine and me at the small round table that formed the centrepiece of our set, she said, “Now then, Celia, what was it you told me was giving you difficulties? The placement of hands, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “We’ve tried holding hands, like this.” I reached out for Madeleine’s hands, to demonstrate. “But it’s awkward with the table, and there only being two of us.”

“I see, yes. Your play is set when?”

“Sometime during World War I.”

“Certainly hand-holding would have been popular then—table-rapping was still a common form of communicating with the spirit world, and holding hands kept people honest; let you know the person sitting next to you wasn’t doing the rapping himself, as a trick. But I sat for a time in the home circle of a man who would have been around in those days, and he always made us lay our hands this way, palms down, on top of the table. Is that easier?”

“Heaps,” I said.

Rupert agreed it looked better from where he was sitting. “Would you like the room darker?”

“Yes, please, if you can,” said Edwina. “They would certainly have dimmed the lights—gaslights, it would have been then, I’d imagine. But again, you’d want to see the members of your circle, to make certain they weren’t cheating, so you wouldn’t have the room in total darkness.”

Rupert looked at Den, who obligingly threw the switches for two of the three chandeliers. As the room’s walls and corners were swallowed by shadows I felt a childish tingle of anticipation, as though we were preparing to do this for real and not making believe.

“So,” said Madeleine, “how do we begin?”

“You’re playing the medium, yes? Ordinarily you’d start by inviting any spirits who are present to come forward. Although in this case, if you’re after one particular spirit, you might simply ask for him by name.”

Nicholas, standing behind us, gave a snort of derision that Madeleine tried to cover by saying, “Well, good, that’s just what my character does in the play. And then what?”

“Then we wait.”

Drily, and to no one in particular, Nicholas remarked, “
That
ought to be especially thrilling for the audience.”

Half-turning with the air of someone bothered by an insect, Edwina sent him the same sort of look that in my years with Rupert and Bryan had meant I was one step away from being sent to my room. “Of course when you’re playing the scene you may take a certain amount of dramatic licence, but there still should be a pause,” she went on, turning back to Madeleine. “The spirits rarely manage an immediate response.”

There was an obliging pause. Poppy looked around the room a little nervously, I thought, and asked, “How can you tell when the spirits are here? Do you see them?”

“Some people do, but not me,” said Edwina. “I’m not a clairvoyant, my dear, I’m clairaudient. I only hear their voices.” Getting back to the business at hand, she instructed Madeleine, “Now, let’s assume that you’ve asked this young man to come forward, this soldier. He may not be the first one who appears, there may be others more determined to be heard.”

“Oh, heaven help us,” muttered Nicholas, moving a few paces off in search of an ashtray.

“For instance,” Edwina went on, “Mr. Rutherford’s mother might want to cut in to remind him of manners. Or somebody else’s relations or friends who’ve passed over may want to send greetings, you never can tell. But eventually, if you’re in luck, the person whom you wish to speak to finally does turn up. And then you start to ask him questions.”

“So at this point, I’d be in a trance?” asked Madeleine.

“Oh, no. You can’t ask questions if you’re truly in a trance. When you’re in a trance the spirit speaks
through
you, you understand, uses your body. Your consciousness goes somewhere else entirely. It’s up to the others in your circle to ask questions of the spirit, then, because you’re essentially not there, and when the séance ends and you come out of your trance you haven’t a clue what’s gone on.”

“Ah.” Madeleine frowned. “Because the script, as it’s written, demands that I be in a trance, and I can’t seem to make that feel comfortable. It feels too . . . well, melodramatic.”

Edwina assured her it needn’t be. “Generally people in trances just look like they’re sleeping.”

“It’s the voice I have problems with,” Madeleine said.

Rupert, patient in the shadows, interjected. “Perhaps, Celia love, if you’d read a few lines from the scene, from the part where you’re trying to make certain that it really is your husband talking, then Edwina could show Madeleine the proper way to answer in a trance. Would that suit everyone?”

Madeleine thought it a wonderful idea. Passing her book to Edwina, she pointed out the page on which to start, and the lines she should read.

“All right,” said Edwina, positioning the open book between her hands, still flat upon the table, as she straightened her shoulders and bent her head forwards. “I’m ready.”

Finding the page, I began with the series of questions my character asked of the spirit, to prove that he actually was her dead lover. “Won’t you tell me your name?”

“Don’t you know it?” Edwina’s voice came very calmly, relaxed, almost drifting, as though she were speaking from out of a dream.

“Why must you play games? I do want to believe, but—”

“Then ask me. . .” She paused, and her head angled slightly as though she’d heard something just off to the side. Then she slowly went on, “. . . ask me something more personal, something that matters. My name will prove nothing.”

“All right then, your mother’s name. What was that?”

“Rose.”

“And your father’s?”

Again the pause. “Edward.”

“And where did you live as a child?”

“By the sea, in a house with a beautiful . . . beautiful . . .”

She’s lost her place,
I thought, and tried to help her with a prompt. “Beautiful garden.”

“The garden—oh, yes, I can still smell the roses. They seemed to be always in bloom.” She was improvising now, creating lines that weren’t in the script, but I didn’t react. After all, Edwina wasn’t young, and the script’s type was small—she likely found it difficult to make out the words.

“Where was this house?”

“Sussex.”

It was definitely her eyesight, I decided. The proper word was
Surrey
but again I let it pass. “Tell me, how did you die?”

“I was murdered.”

That
one I had to correct, I thought, smiling, or else the rest of the reading would be nonsensical. “No, Edwina, that’s wrong, you’re supposed to—”

“
She
did it; she wanted me dead.”

She said it so matter-of-factly I stopped, and leaned closer to look at her face. Her eyes were closed, her features relaxed and quite free of emotion. She carried on speaking: “She said she would tell him that I’d run away, but I didn’t. I’m here. I’m still here . . .”

I tried prompting her again. “Edwina?”

Poppy’s voice, out of the darkness, said anxiously, “Mummy . . .”

“It’s all right, dear,” Madeleine said. “Don’t be frightened. It’s only a play.”

But it wasn’t the play anymore. Edwina slowly turned her head towards me, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she could see me through her still-closed eyelids. Whispering, she told me, “Do be careful. There is evil in this house.”

I felt a slow chill on my spine. “Edwina . . .”

“Celia,” she replied, and in my slightly rattled state I half-believed she wasn’t calling me by name so much as telling me her own.

Only Madeleine was close enough to hear. For a moment the hush held, and we exchanged glances.

And then Edwina stirred between us, opening her eyes. “Oh, I
am
sorry,” she said, seeing us staring. “Did I fall asleep? The curse of age, you know—this room’s so very warm. Well, shall we try that bit again?” she asked us, picking up her book. “From the beginning?”

ix

I
couldn’t sleep. Above my bed the portrait of Celia the First gazed down with newly haunted eyes, and every creaking timber of the old house had a voice.
Evil,
breathed the walls around me . . .
evil in this house.
And then a whisper, even fainter:
I was murdered
 . . .

In childhood I’d have only had to call out for Rupert or Bryan and one of them would have been there at my side in an instant, turning the light on, dispelling my fears, even sitting as sentinel close by my bedside to hold all the monsters at bay till I’d fallen asleep. But I wasn’t a child anymore.

Which left me uncomfortably tossing and trying to be brave. To this end I reminded myself that Edwina’s performance, her séance, was all of a piece with Sally’s much-consulted tarot cards—a simple entertainment, rather eerily close to the mark at times, maybe, but not to be taken too seriously.

Not that I thought for a minute that Edwina had deliberately tried to lead us down the garden path; but people who believed in things could sometimes fool themselves, could shape reality to suit their expectations. Just as the faithful might swear they saw tears in the eyes of a marble church statue, I thought, Edwina heard the voices of spirits. And being convinced of their realness, repeated their words without ever once doubting that she was relaying not thoughts that had sprung from her subconscious mind, but the words of the dead.

But she didn’t intend to deceive. And she had been surprised to learn what she had said while she was ‘napping’ at rehearsal. “Extraordinary,” she’d pronounced it, eyebrows raised. “I haven’t gone into a trance for some years.”

Madeleine, eager, had asked, “Could you do it again?”

But Edwina had turned her attention to Poppy, who sat very straight and waiting, eyes intense. As though she’d realized she was frightening the child, Edwina had said, “I’m afraid not. The spirit is no longer with us. She’s gone.”

Round my bed now the walls changed their whisper.
I’m here . . . I’m still here
 . . .

Rolling over, I deliberately drowned out the voices with Alex’s calm one, recalling what he’d said to me that evening before dinner. He’d come looking for me, purposely, with Max and Nero padding at his side as soft as shadows. They’d found me alone in the long empty room overlooking the terrace, across from our rehearsal room—the room through which Madeleine had ushered me the morning of that first appalling read-through, when she’d taken me outside to have a chat.

We couldn’t have stood on the terrace this evening. The rain had returned with a vengeance, transforming the wide stretch of stone to a mournfully grey and abandoned place, lost in a landscape of mist.

I’d been watching the scatter of raindrops on puddles when Alex had suddenly spoken behind me. “You haven’t had very good weather,” he’d said, in a tone of apology.

Wheeling, I had willed my startled heartbeat to return to normal, gathering my thoughts. “I didn’t hear you,” I’d explained, as an excuse for my reaction.

“No? I’m sorry.” Stepping forwards, he’d drawn something from a pocket, held it out. “You’ve had another e-mail.”

“Oh.” I took it from him. “Thank you.” Unfolding the single page I scanned it and smiled. Just a small bit of nonsense from Bryan—a joke he had heard at the office, that’s all—but it helped to restore my lost balance and grounded me after the day’s goings-on as surely as if Bryan himself had been standing there telling it to me.

“I thought you might want to reply,” Alex said.

“Now?” I glanced at my watch. “But it’s nearly dinner . . .”

“There is time.”

“All right,” I said, deciding that as master of the house he wasn’t likely to be punished if he turned up late for dinner, and by being in his company I could expect a similar immunity. Truth be told, I liked being in his company. He wasn’t one of ‘us’; didn’t belong to the world of the theatre, a highly charged world in which places like Il Piacere seemed wholly at home. No, Alex, like Bryan, was solid and real, and in his presence things seemed very plain and reassuring. Mountains were mountains and molehills were molehills. It was too bad, I thought, he was already taken.

I walked with him through the long corridors, letting my eyes roam a few of the portraits and paintings that lined the walls as thickly and as randomly as posters pasted on a hoarding. In the quiet space beside me Alex coughed as if to clear his throat. “I heard about what happened in rehearsal.” I felt his gaze slant briefly down at me, and away again. “I feel responsible. I’m sorry. I should perhaps have warned you of my grandmother’s . . . eccentricities.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” I told him. “And besides, I’m the one who sort of egged her on to do it in the first place—hold the séance for us, I mean. There’s a séance in the play, you see . . .”

“I know, I’ve read it,” he said, reminding me that this entire project was his brainchild, after all; that he was not simply the descendant of the playwright and our host, but our producer, and as such was probably at least as familiar with the material as any of us.

“Yes, well,” I covered my embarrassment, “we’ve been having a problem with blocking that scene, and it sometimes helps to have an expert show you.”

“Expert.” The word came out softly, between speech and laughter. “She would like to hear you call her that, I’m sure.”

“Well, what I mean is, she’s a Spiritualist, and she knows what a séance should look like.”

“You might have asked me,” he replied, and the trace of amusement still left in his voice was surprising to me, unexpected. “I sat in on enough of the damned things when I was a boy, I could have told you exactly what they looked like.”

We turned a corner in the corridor. Encouraged by his open mood, I asked, “And what were you doing sitting in on séances?”

“Part of my penance. I went to school in England—part of my mother’s dying wish, I’m told, that I should know her homeland. And it suited Father well enough. He didn’t have the time to take care of me, so most half-terms and holidays I was sent to my grandmother’s. She has a very draughty house,” he said, “in Norfolk. With a forest out the back. And ducks,” he added, as though it stood to reason that a woman like Edwina would keep ducks. “She had a group of friends who met on Saturdays—they probably still do—and she insisted I sit in,” he said, “to broaden my horizons.”

“And did it?”

“Most times it put me to sleep.”

“Oh.”

“I’m only saying,” he went on, “that you shouldn’t take it seriously, all the things my grandmother believes.”

“I don’t.” And to prove it I told him about Sally and her white-witchcraft. “It’s the same sort of thing, though Edwina’s not so flaky.” I didn’t tell him Sally, too, had talked about an evil in this house—I was trying my best to ignore that part, actually.

“My grandmother,” he said in full agreement, “is a woman of intelligence.”

“Was your mother very like her?” I asked, tentatively treading on this new uncertain ground.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t remember my mother. She died when I was very young. I’m told she was an affectionate woman,” he said. And then, after a pause, “My grandmother’s not overly affectionate, but she notices. She noticed me.” He smiled a tight, self-conscious smile. “She bought me models, model ships, because I liked to build things.” And then, as if he’d felt he had revealed too much, he’d almost visibly withdrawn inside himself, his shoulders straightening, his tone of voice more formal. “That’s why I asked her to bring Madeleine’s daughter down here, on the train. I knew she’d look after the girl.”

I personally hadn’t thought Poppy Hedrick needed much looking after, and had said so. “She seems quite a clever young lady, and very mature for her age.”

At least, that’s what I’d thought then, in that hour before dinner, when I’d walked and talked with Alex.

Only now, as I lay huddled in my bed, my racing thoughts were interrupted by a sudden wild commotion on the landing—a pounding and sounds of a childish sobbing that showed me my opinion had been wrong. Poppy wasn’t as poised and mature as she tried to appear. She was twelve, and in need of her mother.

“Mummy!” More pounding. Her voice rose in panic. “Mummy, please!”

When the sobbing went on, without any apparent response from Madeleine, I rose and shrugged into the sleeves of my dressing-gown, belting it tightly around me as I went through to the sitting-room and opened the door to the landing a crack—only enough to see by, not enough to intrude.

Poppy, her pale face streaked with tears, had plastered herself to the door of her mother’s room, as if by sheer will she could force her body through the solid wood. Arms outstretched, small fists pounding, she seemed to be nearing a state of hysteria. “Mummy!”

I pushed my door all the way open. “Poppy?” I said, hesitantly. “Poppy, what’s the matter?”

I was completely unprepared for her response. No longer the self-controlled almost-adult, she rushed headlong towards me and clung like a child being chased by a legion of bogeymen. Taken by surprise and oddly touched, I wrapped my arms around her narrow shoulders, holding her more closely as she cried. I asked, more gently, “What’s the matter?”

The answer came out muffled in my shoulder. All I heard was: “. . . my bed.”

“What about your bed?”

“
She
was standing beside it.”

“Who was?”

“The woman in the photographs. It was her ghost Mrs. Farrow talked to, Mummy said.” A shuddering sob. “She tried to t-touch me.”

“Oh, darling.” My hand moved of its own accord to stroke her hair, to calm her, as long ago Rupert and Bryan had sought to calm me in the wake of a nightmare. “It was only a dream, you know—that’s all it was.”

She sniffed, and moved her head a fraction. “Where’s my mother?” she asked, sounding even younger than she looked.

I hadn’t a clue, though given the noise that Poppy had been making I felt reasonably certain that Madeleine wasn’t asleep in her room. I couldn’t imagine where else . . .
Oh,
I thought. “Why don’t I go and ask Nicholas?” I said. “Perhaps he knows where your mother is.”

I’d been trying to be diplomatic in my phrasing, but Poppy’s eyes told me she knew all about the nature of her mother’s relationship with Nicholas, and she had no intention of letting me leave her alone on the landing. “I’m coming, too.”

Nicholas’s room was round the corner from the ladies’ wing, strategically placed, Den had told me, so that he shared an outdoor balcony with Madeleine, and thus had easy access to her room without it being obvious. Knowing of Galeazzo D’Ascanio’s legendary sexual appetite, I assumed he’d had the rooms designed that way so he could visit chosen female guests at night without his Celia catching on. Rather brazen of him, really, considering that her rooms were next door, but then a man who’d kept his wife down in the Villa delle Tempeste while living with his mistress mustn’t have worried too much about protocol.

Nicholas wasn’t answering his door, either.

I knocked again, feeling at a loss for what to do but wanting to look competent for Poppy’s sake. I sympathized entirely with how she felt—my own tossings and turnings and uneasy imaginings had left me as on edge as if I’d had a nightmare myself, and this was not a reassuring house to be in after dark. The narrow corridor pressed closely and the musty smell of the oriental carpets underfoot when combined with the uncertain light of the wall sconces made the atmosphere darkly Victorian, morbid, decaying, like the stage set for some creepy Gothic melodrama.

I could have simply invited Poppy into my own rooms, and made her a temporary bed on the sofa so she wouldn’t have to be alone, but it wasn’t my company she wanted, it was Madeleine’s.

I thought, and on a sudden inspiration asked, “Poppy, when your mother wakes up at home and can’t get back to sleep, do you know what she does?”

She reflected on this for a moment. “She eats something.”

“Then let’s go look downstairs,” I said, taking her hand, “in the kitchen.”