But Cyma was nothing if not determined. Fear had that effect, even on a faerie. Nadrett had sent her to do this; Nadrett held her debt. Why Nadrett wanted a pet spiritualist, Cyma didn’t know, and didn’t ask. All that mattered was creating the vulnerability in Myers, the belief that his dead inamorata had a message she wanted him to hear. Mediums had not been able to contact Annie on his behalf, though not for lack of trying; but the woman might come to him in dreams.
So she gave herself the face, the voice, the manner of Annie Marshall, and she told Myers what Nadrett wanted the man to hear. That there were people who could help him; that he must seek them out, and they would give him the proof he so ardently desired, proof that the spirit could persist after death. That her suicide meant neither that she was gone from him forever, nor that she had been damned to some tormenting hell. He would have all the reassurances he could want, so long as he found the strangers and shared with them what he knew.
Tears streamed down Myers’s sleeping face, as the moon’s light carried Cyma into the defenseless realms of his mind.
He wasn’t the first man Nadrett had sent her to pursue. But with this one, she was sure, she would find success. He was the perfect target: a scholar of spiritualism, keeping company with similarly learned friends, but wounded at heart as the others were not. Once Nadrett had him, surely the master would be satisfied, and Cyma’s debt would be repaid.
She might even be free as soon as next month.
She believed it, as Myers believed in the ghost of Annie Marshall, and for the same reason. Because the hope kept her going, however impossible it might be.
Adelaide Road, Primrose Hilclass="underline" April 6, 1884
The lowering of the gas lights had given the room a chill, tomblike aspect. Outside, the night was shrouded in fog, the moon playing hide-and-seek among the clouds. Wind rattled the shutters from time to time, and created a faint moaning in the chimney. It was, in short, a poet’s notion of what a night for a séance should be like.
Cyma hoped it would inspire the medium to her best efforts. Mrs. Iris Wexford was typical of the breed: the wife of a vicar in Aylesbury, past her childbearing years, and bored senseless by her respectable life. She held fast to the conviction that spiritualism was the cure for Christianity’s ills, that it vindicated instead of disproving the Bible, as some claimed.
Like most of her kind, she was probably a charlatan. But Frederic Myers had great hopes for her, and so Cyma was here.
She fancied it was fate, encountering him again. Once Myers had been thoroughly ensnared by his dreams, Nadrett had taken over all dealings with the man, closing Cyma out. Without bread to protect her, she had no way to visit him, and so in time Myers had faded from her thoughts: one more mortal caught up in faerie matters, not likely to emerge intact.
Or for that matter, to emerge at all. That Frederic Myers was still a free man, not someone’s mad slave in the Goblin Market—or dead—told her Nadrett had not yet let go of him, not entirely. In which case it would have been far safer for Cyma to keep her distance. She was almost free of Nadrett at last, and had no desire to trap herself again. But Myers had intrigued her, with his melancholy grief and undying hope of seeing his lost love again, and she could not pass up the chance to see what path he followed now.
Much the same as when she first knew him, it seemed. Testing mediums, hoping to find one who could communicate with the late Annie on his behalf. He sat now around the table with his friends Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, and various others Cyma didn’t know; unlike those first two, they were not members of the new Society for Psychical Research. She had joined them as one “Miss Harris,” and now sat with her attention more on Myers than Mrs. Wexford. He had not changed: still the same tremulous eagerness in his wide eyes, his slightly parted lips, as Mrs. Wexford’s head sagged to touch the back of her chair.
In a husky voice, the medium said, “I feel the other world draw near!”
Miss Harris, of course, was not cynical in the slightest about these things; Miss Harris had her own ghosts she desperately wanted to see. A dead fiancé, most particularly, for whom she still pined. It gave her and Mr. Myers something in common. But Cyma, beneath her human mask, was impatient. In her time haunting Myers, she’d seen more than enough bored housewives go through similar acts—even exposed a few frauds, when they annoyed her too much—and her initial excitement had long since worn away. She endured this tedium only for the renewed connection to Myers, which she might make use of once she was free of Nadrett.
Then tedium fled, without warning, and every hair on the back of Cyma’s neck stood to attention. “A child,” Mrs. Wexford whispered. “A boy child—oh, he’s like a little angel.”
On the other side of the table, one of the sitters, an elderly woman whose name Cyma had forgotten, pulled her hands free of the circle and clasped them over her mouth, tears springing to her eyes. Sidgwick, who sat to the woman’s right; immediately turned a suspicious gaze upon her; he was far less credulous than Myers, and knew such movements were often used as cover for tricks. His wife Eleanor kept her attention on Mrs. Wexford, in case the upset woman was a diversion for the medium instead.
But if those two had any tricks planned, they could save themselves the effort. Cyma knew when she was in the presence of a genuine ghost.
Mrs. Wexford shuddered, then began to speak in a high-pitched voice. From the conversation that ensued between the medium and the crying old woman, Cyma gathered that this was the lady’s firstborn son, lost years ago, when infection from a rotted tooth spread to his brain. Next to her, she felt Myers heave a silent sigh. Once again, his lost love had failed to appear.
Cyma wondered how the mediums did it—how they called up particular spirits, long since gone. Regular apparitions were one matter, and the recently dead another; both were decidedly less common than they had been in centuries past, but contacting them had never been difficult for those with skill. The little boy’s spirit, however, must have moved on. How had Mrs. Wexford summoned him back? One of countless mysteries about the human soul, whose answers she could not fathom. Cyma was no Academy philosopher, but sometimes she understood what intrigued them so.
Her interest sharpened as something formed in the air behind Mrs. Wexford. Its shape was vague, but it was the right size to be a little boy. Cyma held her breath, teeth sunk deep into her lip. True visitations were rare; true physical manifestations might as well have been unicorns. Real, but almost never seen in this day and age. Myers had found himself a true medium after all.
Upon that thought, his hand slipped from her grasp. He and Sidgwick had promised this first sitting would not be any kind of formal test—too many mediums grew nervous and failed to produce anything at all when they knew scientists would be examining their every move—but it seemed Myers’s curiosity had overcome him, for he crossed the intervening distance in two quick strides and reached his hand out for the manifestation taking shape in the air.
It vanished with a startled jerk, and Mrs. Wexford’s eyes flew open. “I—what—”
She seemed genuinely disoriented, which happened sometimes. The old woman who’d lost her son burst into tears; Eleanor Sidgwick comforted her, while her husband bent over Mrs. Wexford, explaining what had occurred.
Cyma rose and went to Myers’s side, curious. “Was it truly physical?”
“For a moment,” he said distantly, still looking where the ghost had been. “I felt it, so briefly…”