Free Dark Season by Joanna Lowell Page B

mad.
I
went mad. For years. You’re not cursed. No one is cursed.”
    “She could be so spiteful.” Daphne stared, not at him, but at the light streaming over his shoulder. Her heart-shaped face was illuminated. Eyes like blue fire. “She envied me. Do you think she’s happy? Knowing how I suffer?”
    “Stop it,” he said, muscles straining with the effort it took not to shake her. Her eyes focused on his.
    “You loved her,” she said. “I loved her too. Everyone loved her.” Daphne pulled out of his grasp, drifting to the other side of the room. She let her fingers trail across the mantel then picked up an antique pistol from its mounting and laid the barrel across her palm.
    “It’s heavy,” she said. He crossed to her in two strides and snatched the pistol from her hand. She smiled at him as though she’d scored a point.
    “Are you frightened?” she asked. “That hasn’t been fired since Waterloo.”
    He returned the gun to the mantel.
    “I’m not frightened,” he said. “I’m finished. I’ve played every sick game, indulged every morbid thought. I let a phantom chase me from London clear into the Sahara. It’s over. Five years, Daphne. Do you think she’s still roaming after five years? She’s at peace. Now it’s our turn. If I can try to believe that, surely you can too.”
    “If she’s at peace, why did Miss Seymour say she’s still in the shadows?”
    Isidore leaned against the mantel. He made his face a perfect blank. “You can’t bait me with a riddle,” he said evenly. “I’ve lived in the land of the sphinx. I don’t think all riddles need to be answered.”
    He waited. He figured she might last a minute. She didn’t.
    “Miss Seymour is a medium.” Daphne chose a newspaper from the table and handed it to him.
    He read the banner across the top. “
Spiritual Magazine.
” He flipped the pages so hard one tore with a dull, protesting sound. “That’s what this is about? Of all the faddish nonsense.” He thrust the paper back at her. “Daphne, you can’t be serious.”
    “Don’t look at me like that.” She flung herself into the armchair. “I’m not the one who started it. It’s Louisa Trombly. She hired a woman as a private medium.”
    “She
what?
”
    “She hired a medium,” repeated Daphne.
    “I heard you,” he grated. “I understand the concept of retaining an employee at wages for services. But this medium, what does she do?”
    “What all mediums do,” said Daphne. “She uses her mystical powers to communicate with the dead.” Her lips curved into her habitual smile, the teasing smile of a society flirt who wants to insinuate that she and her interlocutor are somewhat above the rest of the company.
You and I know better, of course.
But her eyes were still wide, and her smile slipped. “No one has ever heard of her. She doesn’t have a following.”
    He made a choked sound of disbelief.
    “Laugh all you want. There are quite a few very famous mediums in London. Americans mostly. You don’t have to subscribe to newsletters.” She threw
Spiritual Magazine
onto the table, where it blanketed the lemon tart. “You can read about them in the society pages. They’re popular at parties.”
    “She’s American?”
    “No.” Daphne tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair. He had never known her to fidget. Her movements had always been so sinuous, so practiced. She tried to smile again, but its falsity must have struck even her because she abandoned the effort. “I told you, she has nothing to do with all of that. She’s not established as a medium. She’s a non-entity. A woman from some backwater. Very shy, said Louisa. Not the sort who would ever go in for a spectacle. It
can
be a spectacle, you know.”
    He felt his patience thinning. “And how did Louisa come by this blushing damsel, this modest mystic who avoids spectacle but practices the dark arts in secret for a set fee? Did she find her mooning over a grave in Cornwall?”
    Daphne’s