Once again, Katherine gasped.
“Harken and be still! Lo, the spirits gather!”
Nan’s eyes burned, and for a moment, she felt very dizzy; she thought that the soft glow in front of her was due to nothing more than eyestrain, but the glow strengthened, and she blinked in shock as two vague shapes took form amid the writhing smoke.
For a new brazier, belching forth such thick smoke that the coals were invisible, had “appeared” in the center of the table, just behind the candlestick. It was above this brazier that the glowing shapes hovered, and slowly took on an identifiable form. Nan felt dizzier, sick; the room seemed to turn slowly around her.
The faces of a young woman and a little boy looked vaguely out over Nan’s head from the cloud of smoke. Katherine began to weep—presumably she thought she recognized the child as her own. But the fact that the young woman looked nothing like Nan’s mother (and in fact, looked quite a bit like the sketch in an advertisement for Bovril in the Times) woke Nan out of her mental haze.
And so did Grey.
She heard the flapping of wings as Grey plummeted to the floor. She sneezed urgently, and shouted aloud, “Bad air! Bad air!”
And that was the moment when she knew what it was that was so familiar in the incense smoke, and why she felt as tipsy as a sailor on shore leave.
“Hashish!” she choked, trying to shout, and not managing very well. She knew this scent; on the rare occasions when her mother could afford it—and before she’d turned to opium—she’d smoked it in preference to drinking. Nan could only think of one thing; that she must get fresh air in here before they all passed out!
She shoved her chair back and staggered up and out of it; it fell behind her with a clatter that seemed muffled in the smoke. She groped for the brazier as the two faces continued to stare, unmoved and unmoving, from the thick billows. Her hands felt like a pair of lead-filled mittens; she had to fight to stay upright as she swayed like a drunk. She didn’t find it, but her hands closed on the cool, smooth surface of the crystal ball.
That was good enough; before the medium could stop her, she heaved up the heavy ball with a grunt of effort, and staggered to the window. She half-spun and flung the ball at the draperies hiding the unseen window; it hit the drapes and carried them into the glass, crashing through it, taking the drapery with it.
A gush of cold air, as fresh as air in London ever got, streamed in through the broken panes, as bedlam erupted in the room behind Nan.
She dropped to the floor, ignoring everything around her for the moment, as she breathed in the air tainted only with smog, waiting for her head to clear. Grey ran to her and huddled with her rather than joining her beloved mistress in the poisonous smoke.
Katherine shrieked in hysteria, there was a man as well as the medium shouting, and Mem’sab cursed all of them in some strange language. Grey gave a terrible shriek and half-ran, half flew away. Nan fought her dizziness and disorientation; looked up to see that Mem’sab was struggling in the grip of a stringy fellow she didn’t recognize. Katherine had been backed up into one corner by the medium, and Sarah and Grey were pummeling the medium with small fists and wings. Mem’sab kicked at her captor’s shins and stamped on his feet with great effect, as his grunts of pain demonstrated.
Nan struggled to her feet, guessing that she must have been the one worst affected by the hashish fumes. She wanted to run to Mem’sab’s rescue, but she couldn’t get her legs to work. In a moment the sour-faced woman would surely break into the room, turning the balance in favor of the enemy—
The door did crash open behind her just as she thought that, and she tried to turn to face the new foe—
But it was not the foe.
Sahib charged through the broken door, pushing past Nan to belabor the man holding Mem’sab with his cane; within three blows the man was on the floor, moaning. Before Nan fell, Karamjit caught her and steadied her. More men flooded into the room, and Nan let Karamjit steer her out of the way, concentrating on those steadying breaths of air. She thought perhaps that she passed out of consciousness for a while, for when she next noticed anything, she was sitting bent over in a chair, with Karamjit hovering over her, frowning. At some point the brazier had been extinguished, and a policeman was collecting the ashes and the remains of the drug-laced incense.
Finally her head cleared; by then, the struggle was over. The medium and her fellow tricksters were in the custody of the police, who had come with Sahib when Nan threw the crystal ball through the window. Sahib was talking to a policeman with a sergeant’s badge, and Nan guessed that he was explaining what Mem’sab and Katherine were doing here. Katherine wept in a corner, comforted by Mem’sab. The police had brought lamps into the seance-room from the sitting-room, showing all too clearly how the medium had achieved her work; a hatch in the ceiling to the room above, through which things could be lowered; a magic-lantern behind the drapes, which had cast its image of a woman and boy onto the thick brazier smoke. That, and the disorienting effect of the hashish had made it easy to trick the clients.
Finally the bobbies took their captives away, and Katherine stopped crying. Nan and Sarah sat on the chairs Karamjit had set up, watching the adults, Grey on her usual perch on Sarah’s shoulder. A cushion stuffed in the broken window cut off most of the cold air from outside.
“I can’t believe I was so foolish!” Katherine moaned. “But—I wanted to see Edward so very much—”
“I hardly think that falling for a clever deception backed by drugs makes you foolish, ma’am,” Sahib said gravely. “But you are to count yourself fortunate in the loyalty of your friends, who were willing to place themselves in danger for you. I do not think that these people would have been willing to stop at mere fraud, and neither do the police.”
His last words made no impression on Katherine, at least none that Nan saw—but she did turn to Mem’sab and clasp her hand fervently. “I thought so ill of you, that you would not believe in Madame,” she said tearfully. “Can you forgive me?”
Mem’sab smiled. “Always, my dear,” she said, in the voice she used to soothe a frightened child. “Since your motive was to enlighten me, not to harm me—and your motive in seeking your poor child’s spirit—”
A chill passed over Nan at that moment that had nothing to do with the outside air. She looked sharply at Sarah, and saw a very curious thing.
There was a very vague and shimmery shape standing in front of Sarah’s chair; Sarah looked at it with an intense and thoughtful gaze, as if she was listening to it. More than that, Grey was doing the same. Nan got the distinct impression that it was asking her friend for a favor.
Grey and Sarah exchanged a glance, and the parrot nodded once, as grave and sober as a parson, then spread her wings as if sheltering Sarah like a chick.
The shimmering form melted into Sarah; her features took on a mischievous expression that Nan had never seen her wear before, and she got up and went directly to Katherine.
The woman looked up at her, startled at the intrusion of a child into an adult discussion, then paled at something she saw in Sarah’s face.
“Oh, Mummy, you don’t have to be so sad,” Sarah said in a curiously hollow, piping soprano. “I’m all right, really, and it wasn’t your fault anyway, it was that horrid Lord Babbington that made you and Papa send me to Overton. But you must stop crying, please! Laurie is already scared of being left, and you’re scaring her more.”