“Madam, I am delighted to make your acquaintance, even under these trying circumstances. Ambrose has told me of your sorrows, but even his powers of expression could not convey the full impact of what is here.” She raised her nose and daintily sniffed. “Your daughter's aura is as strong as any I've ever encountered. She must have an urgent need to contact you.”
Edney, however, could sense nothing but cigar smoke. It swirled in gouts behind Miss d'Espereaux as a thick, burly figure emerged from it. This turned out to be a man of about thirty years, brown-suited, his face as rough hewn as the young woman's was delicate. He sported untrimmed ginger sideburns and his cheeks were badly pockmarked, but there shone the same quick light in his eyes, though they were small and set deep in his chiselled face.
Miss d'Espereaux introduced the man as Mr. Collins, her assistant, then said, “Is not the aura of unusual strength, Francis?”
“I have never known the like before,” he said enthusiastically and nodded at Edney. Then he resumed puffing on his cigar.
Ambrose Richardson cleared his throat pointedly, but the man ignored him. Miss d'Espereaux hastened to continue.
“She must have been very close to her sister. I believe it's the younger girl who lies ill upstairs?”
“Louisa,” Edney said and could not keep the tears from her eyes.
“Yes. Louisa. It is she who holds the veil. In her presence, I have every confidence, madam, that we will be able to lift it.”
Ambrose Richardson asked if they might be allowed to go to Louisa.
“Go to her?” Mary said. The lines on her brow and at the edges of her mouth deepened. “What do you mean to do?”
Miss d'Espereaux smiled and lightly fingered the jewels at her throat.
“Yes. The portal will be widest in Louisa's presence. It's a rare thing, in my experience, to have a spirit so close and in so much need of contact. Your daughter, Mrs. Lansdowne, must love you greatly.”
Edney's tears were heavy, but they would not fall from her eyes. She could hardly keep her own daughters separate. But why should a mother's love for her children be divided by their bodies and souls? A family was but a single child, after all.
Mary turned her anxious gaze to the American gentleman. She seemed to be fading in the swirls of cigar smoke.
“Louisa is very ill. I don't know that it's wise for you to . . .”
“Dearest lady,” he said. “Don't be alarmed. I personally guarantee that no harm will come to the child. On my honour.” With the same watery blue gaze to which Edney had become accustomed, he addressed her, his voice as tender and modest as a man's could be. “Edney, I implore you, hard though it seems, you must try to recognize in this affliction a rare opportunity. Miss d'Espereaux and I have discussed this matter at some length, and she shares my feeling that your lost daughter is using the illness to expedite contact. It has been known before. The boundary between life and death is more fragile than we dream. If we but lift the veil and let her speak, I am certain the illness will release its hold upon the child. Miss d'Espereaux is a most expert spirit healer.”
This gentle yet impassioned speech was abruptly followed by a gruff voice from the corner.
“It's the Lord's gospel, ma'am. One time Lizzie removed a lady's tumour all the way in Australia.”
Miss d'Espereaux smiled thinly. “Thank you, Francis. But Mrs. Lansdowne does not require a history of our successes.” She paused and floated closer. Edney could smell violets through the smoke. The young woman's face was blurring with mercy. She took Edney's hands in hers. “Will you trust me? Shall we go up to them now?”
“Them? Oh, Edney, I don't think that Henryâ” Mary turned her head rapidly, as if in search of her husband's guidance. “It is not perhaps quite proper, after all . . .”
Edney hardly heard Mary's objections. She felt herself drawn upward by Miss d'Espereaux's eyes. But she managed to allay her sister-in-law's concerns.
“It's fine, Mary. What harm can be done? Dr. Baird said the crisis would come in its own time. And besides, we have Mr. Richardson's word of honour.”
“No harm but rather a blessing that is not given to many,” Miss d'Espereaux said as she released Edney's hands. “Your daughter has something she must communicate. We will ease her burden as well as yours. I have never known the spiritual plane to be so close. Mrs. Lansdowne, please, allow me to be your servant.”
Edney had not felt such lightness in months. The sympathy of Ambrose Richardson seemed magnified in this beautiful young woman and was therefore even more to be trusted. With sincere hope, and against Mary's faltering protestations, Edney led the way out of the parlour and to Louisa's room.
The child still slept, still burned. She lay in the day's subsiding light with the rich brine of the tide flowing over her, so that she might have been adrift on the river itself. Edney touched her cheek, lifted a wet strand of hair from her dry lips.
“A lovely child,” Miss d'Espereaux murmured. “Worthy of heaven, but she will remain in the material sphere a full life's course, I sense it. Please, everyone, be very still.” She slowly circled the room, gazing around her, her body moving like a dowser's branch. At different points, she paused before a tall mahogany wardrobe, then before a plain deal dresser, her gaze fixed on the unblinking eyes of a small boy china doll seated on its surface. At last, she lingered before a small oval mirror on the wall, into which she stared as if seeking those same changeless eyes in the glass. Then she began to move again, almost gliding, past the wooden doll house with its eerily darkened little rooms, past the shut closet containing the child's dresses and shoes, past a table with a cracked porcelain basin on it, and finally past the simple needlework on the wall opposite the child's bed that announced in red stitches the biblical phrase, “He shall gather the lambs with his arms.”
Edney's pulse quickened. She yearned to see with the younger woman's eyes, she held her breath and put a hand to the child inside, asking without words for it to be calm.
Suddenly Miss d'Espereaux froze, her body rigid, her chin raised so that the white of her throat appeared to spread. In the middle of the room, with her eyes fixed on the open window in which the curtains billowed gently, she waited. Minutes passed.
Finally, she turned slowly, as if following the flight of a bird. Now she looked at a portion of wall just beyond Edney's shoulder. Louisa moaned and twisted her head on the pillow, then fell silent. Several more minutes passed. Miss d'Espereaux did not even blink. Her lips were slightly parted. At last she spoke, but only to the air. “Yes, I understand,” she said, and her voice was different, more of a monotone than the usual trill. She approached the bed. For a painfully long period, she stood there, her spine seeming to tighten as if with screws. Then she began to breathe out slowly and evenly, through pursed lips.
“It's all right, ma'am,” Edney heard from behind her. “It's only the start of the insufflations. Lizzie always uses them on the sick cases.”
“Sir, you must be silent,” Ambrose Richardson said in a low voice.
The other man bristled. “You'd think I'd never been to a healing before. I know I need to be quiet. But the lady here was getting kind of upset.”
He meant Mary. Edney glanced at her, saw that she was trembling, her eyes widening like a frightened horse's. But Edney felt no such terror, only an ever-increasing wonder. Even as Miss d'Espereaux bent to Louisa and began to breathe on her bare arms, a cloth placed between the young woman's lips and the child's skin, Edney remained calm. But Mary did not.
“Oh, what is she doing? Mr. Richardson, can this be proper?”
Francis Collins spoke up forcefully. “Oh, it's as proper as the Sabbath, ma'am. The insufflations always come before the curing passes. It's all very proper procedure. There's no harm in it. Why, I'd almost welcome the fever just to have it done to myself and that's the honest truth.”
“Will you or will you not hold your tongue?”
But Edney did not look away to witness Ambrose Richardson's temper. She was, instead, entirely absorbed by Miss d'Espereaux's powers of concentration. The young woman had breathed her way up Louisa's arm to her shoulder, and now drew back. She folded the cloth and placed it to one side on the bedsheet. Her face was rapt, slightly dewed with effort: the light in her eyes had a candle-flickering quickness. Amazed, Edney stared as the young woman slowly drew the palms of her hands over Louisa's face, just above the skin. Then, suddenly, she put her hands together and shook them, a look of distaste on her features.
In a voice barely hushed, Collins said, “That's the bad magnetics she's shaking out. See. It's like washing the dirt off your hands, that's all.”
Miss d'Espereaux's touch again hovered an inch from Louisa's brow, then passed all the way down her body to her feet. Again, the young woman clasped her hands and shook them. Then she picked up the cloth once more. This time, she very discreetly spat onto the cloth and placed it over one of the crimson spots at Louisa's throat.
Mary gasped. Edney noticed out of the corner of her eye that Ambrose Richardson had stepped to the side of her sister-in-law. He bent his white head to hers.
Miss d'Espereaux's hand passes resumed; it was as if she were covering the child in fine silk. Long moments passed. The room filled with dusk. From outside came the crying of gulls and the lowing of cattle, the life of the ordinary day nearing its end. The creamy colour of Miss d'Espereaux's throat darkened. Her eyes lost their quickness. When she spat on the cloth again and prepared to lower it, the sound assailed Edney's ears as if a drunkard had hawked in a gutter. Edney couldn't move. Something had changed, but she did not possess the strength to stop the young woman's ministrations. All at once, the room was dark. Mary made soft protesting sounds, almost like whimpers. When Francis Collins began to reassure her, Ambrose Richardson hissed, “Enough!”
Suddenly Miss d'Espereaux stiffened.
“No, no, no!” she cried and put her hands over her face.
In the darkness Edney thought the young woman was striking herself.
“It was well, but there is evil here, a terrible evil.”
“What?” Francis Collins exclaimed. “Liz, what are you saying? That's not the usual . . .”
“Damn it, man!” snapped Ambrose Richardson. “Have you no sense?”
“Look here, colonel, I've had about all I'm going to take from you. Can't you tell you're only wasting your time? Liz, I'm done putting up with this one. Do you hear? I wouldn't care if he was missing both his arms.”
But Miss d'Espereaux had risen from the bed. Her voice was strange, shrill, her eyes glassy. “Mother! Mother!”
Edney clutched at her stomach. The cry seemed to come from inside her. The dark swirled and then rushed into her eyes. Alone at the foot of her daughter's bed, she fell.
“Watch it!” a man yelled.
Edney heard herself hit the floor. On her knees, she listened to her heartbeat running fast over the bare planks, louder and louder.
“Mother, oh, Mother,” Miss d'Espereaux whimpered and slumped almost without sound or contact to the floor a few feet away from Edney.
“Lizzie! What is it? For the love of God, girl!”
Edney sensed bodies rushing toward her. A lamp sizzled on, the light burned across the floor and ceiling. Miss d'Espereaux's horror-stricken face, the beauty shocked out of it, roiled below, as if risen from a current. Then the faces of the men plunged down from above. The footsteps came closer until they reached Edney's heart. Just as the door burst open, she closed her eyes and let Mary support her weight.
IV
July 1881, Crescent Slough, British Columbia
Anson paid the Indian for his rowing services, then climbed out of the skiff onto the small wharf and looked toward Dare's operations. His cannery was oddly quiet in the mellow mid-morning sunlight. Only the constant keening of gullsâa sound that at Chilukthan seemed as continuous as the noise of the cannery workingsâreminded Anson of the particular slaughter occurring along the river. But there were visual triggers too: a few square-bottomed skiffs pulled up on the dike, some Indian children running silently in the distance, a listing scow on the near bank. Yet, compared with Chilukthan, Crescent Slough seemed almost abandoned. Of course, the fishing hadn't ended; doubtless many of the skiffs Anson had seen on the river, their occupants hunched over in the sterns, picking fish out of the nets, worked for Dare. His cannery would likely explode into life as the fresh catch came in.
Anson proceeded slowly up the gangway, his eyes trained on Dare's plain house. There was no sign of life anywhere near it. But then, Dare himself would be either at the cannery or on the river. Anson knew his old comrade-in-arms was every bit as industrious as the Englishman, and Thomas Lansdowne certainly would not have stepped foot inside any house during the past week had his daughter not lain delirious and fevered in her sickbed.
The smoke, therefore, brought Anson up short. It trickled thinly up from behind the house, its white almost transparent against the pale blue of the sky. Anson felt tethered by it, but he resisted the pull. Suddenly he realized that his eagerness to see Dare had been replaced over the past few days with dread. They had not met since shortly after the war, and there was no guarantee there'd be any ease between them. But much more disquieting than that was the old spectre of deceit that always seemed to accompany their relationship. Anson had lied to Thomas Lansdowne about Dare's blood, he had shaken hands to “prove” that his old friend was white, just as he had once forged papers to prove that a runaway slave named John was a dead and forgotten farm boy and soldier in the Union Army. That had been a simple enough deception: the dead farm boy remained dead to everyone who'd ever known him, and Anson had made certain, initially, that Dare remained out of sight in a tent with some rebel wounded. Later, as it turned out, the deception proved even simpler: the dead soldier had been a recent arrival and had kept to himself. No one seemed to notice his resurrection in the form of a tall white soldier who was, in fact, the mulatto killer of his master.