Chapter Three

1921  New York, Mrs. Mullridge’s

Mrs. Mullridge was stouter than Lucy remembered from their brief first meeting at the Belmont races. It had been one of many such social encounters, arranged by David, to introduce her to the favored subscribers of the opera and theater, and she only vaguely recalled this woman as one more matronly face, smiling from under a wide-brimmed hat as they sat over a lunch of Shrimp Louie.

But tonight she seemed bigger, more animated than had been expected.  She greeted her guests warmly and laughed loudly at marked intervals, not in response to any particular witticism, but as if in dread of missing a tender morsel of sarcasm tossed just out of earshot.  She would throw her head back at random moments and laugh, causing the silver, beaded stars on her shapeless gown to rage in a stormy torrent across the panoramic midnight blue satin of her ample bosom.

The house, in itself, was truly worth the excitement of an invitation.  With its carriage entrance, marble foyer and music room, it held its position on Fifth Avenue as one of the few remaining bastions of the brownstone splendor of the former century.  As office buildings and department stores sprang up to replace the grand houses of the very rich, the Mullridge townhouse, curiously named Willow Place, remained.  No one in recent memory had any recollection of where the name came from, or even why one might burden a city dwelling on New York’s busiest street with such a fanciful moniker. There was not a willow tree within sight and, by collective recollection, there had never been since the house was built in the mid-eighteen fifties.

But where respectability and correctness had been the watchwords of her mother’s generation, Mrs. Mullridge’s tastes ran more to the experimental, and she furnished the vast rooms in singular themes, creating a Celtic drawing room, a Turkish smoking room and even outfitted what had once been a ballroom with several dozen fruit-bearing trees, referring to it as “the grove.”  In many ways, she cast aside the restrictions of what was deemed correct and opened her doors to artists and intellectuals of even the most inflammatory sort.

At first appraisal, Lucy was not disappointed with the diversity of the dozen or so guests who spanned the social spectrum, from the elegantly attired members of Mrs. Mullridge’s usual set to the shabby little bearded man, who she had inadvertently caught pocketing a handful of fine cigars from a box in the Chinese library, as she wandered about looking for a place to freshen up.

A nervous small woman of indeterminate age, dressed as if in mourning, stood off in the shadows of the main salon, peering out with bruised eyes, like a small animal cornered for a fight; while in the very center of the light, a woman from Texas, surrounded by attentive admirers, drank a glass of champagne and spoke of money and amusements, the pursuits of the living.

“I find the idea of speaking with the departed very romantic don’t you?” A pretty young girl remarked to the lady from Texas.

“Don’t you mean necromantic?” a gentleman with a heavily waxed moustache suggested slyly.

The girl stared back puzzled.

“A Romancer,” the man explained, “makes love to you in any number of clever and pleasurable ways.  A Necromancer communicates with the dead… hopefully, in less physical ways.”

“It sounds horrible when you put it that way,” the girl said, dropping the expression of amusement from her face.

There was a momentary silence as the realization spread among them. The lull was broken by an older woman with a fire-burst diamond brooch clasped to her bosom.

“How do we know we aren’t going to get something evil, a devil, or worse yet, some disembodied saint who’d never let you hear the end of participating in a pagan setup like this?”

The man with the moustache, who clearly had some experience in these matters, chuckled.

“What could be more pagan than the saints?  Don’t you realize they are all taken directly from the ancient gods and goddesses of Greece, Rome, and God knows where else, even down to their function?”

There was no reaction from those around him, so he continued.

“For instance, Saint Elias, worshipped in the mountains by shepherds, has replaced Apollo, the sun god of Greece.  Saint Michael has replaced Mercury as the messenger. Fortuna, the goddess of common good and happiness in Antiquity, has now become Saint Felicity.  And Saint Anthony is said to have taken the place of Neptunis Equester, the god of the Roman circus, and become the patron saint of horse racing.”

“I’ll have to be more pious the next time I go to the track,” the lady with the diamond brooch remarked.

At dinner, Lucy surveyed the odd assortment of faces around the table for some telltale sign of who the Medium might be.  They all seemed more or less accustomed to this social set, with the exception of the Trotskyite with the beard and the hungry-looking little woman in black.  She was apparently the one most likely to lead a journey into the beyond, although, by the look of her clothes and the unfathomable expression of remembered horror on her face, one might easily mistake her for the conjured rather than the conjurer.

After a hasty meal, with only the most perfunctory attention to conversation on the part of the hostess, they were herded into the library and sat around a large mahogany table, six people along its length and one at either end, fourteen in all.

Mrs. Mullridge had tried to restrict the number to the mystical, unlucky thirteen, but none in the company was willing to sacrifice their place at the table, so she was forced to content herself with the thought that fourteen was a multiple of the magic number seven, representing some spiritual property that at the moment escaped her memory entirely.

Lucy was flanked on one side by a stout man wearing silver-grey evening spats over his shoes, and on the other side by the unsettling diminutive woman in black.

To Lucy’s astonishment, the Medium proved not to be the creature from the shadows who sat beside her, but the bright and bubbly woman from Texas, with her henna-colored hair and a hand covered in diamonds.

Lucy could find no bit of small talk that might lighten the burden of the strange woman’s company at her side.  When the possibility had existed that she might be the Medium, called there to entertain this superficial group of seekers with eerie stories about their own dead and departed, she had seemed somehow validated, but now her penetrating gaze and insinuating presence were intolerable.

“Take hold of each others’ hands, creating a link of safety,” the Texas Medium instructed them.  “Do not, under any circumstances, break the link.”

The light from the chandelier overhead slowly dimmed, leaving only the flame of a single candle in the center of the table and the glow of a small table-lamp, positioned near the door, where a maid sat precariously outside the charmed circle, clutching a bottle of smelling salts.

The room was airless. Lucy felt dizzy, a lightness in her head that made her question the contents of the chowder.

The hand that linked her to the pale creature beside her felt damp, and a shiver of electric shock ripped through her body, as if racing through her blood.

This woman has murdered her mother, Lucy thought with sudden clarity.  The thin, anguished face turned to regard her, without expression, aware of the thought that had conveyed itself as if by the electric current from her mind into Lucy’s.