Damsel in Distress
“A séance?” Daisy exclaimed. “I didn’t think you believed in all that tommyrot.”
“I don’t,” Lucy said languidly, locking the door of her mews studio behind her. “Absolute eyewash, and too, too tedious, darling! But this one should be rather a lark. Actually, Binkie asked me to trot along to keep an eye on his aunt, Lady Ormerod.”
“It doesn’t sound like much of a lark.” Daisy led the way across the tiny courtyard garden to the back door of the bijou residence she shared with her photographer friend. “Lady Ormerod’s the most fearfully depressing female.”
“That’s just the point. She’s been that way ever since Binkie’s cousin Jerome was killed in the trenches.”
“Her only son, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, and in her eyes, daughters definitely play second fiddle,” Lucy said tartly.
“She pulled herself together enough to do a couple of seasons in town and marry them off,” Daisy pointed out.
“Only just enough. Now she hasn’t even got that to take her mind off Jerome.
Of course one is sorry and all that, but after all, other people have it worse.
You lost your fiancé and your only brother in the War and your father soon after, and you haven’t gone around for the last five years looking like the middle of a wet week. ”
“Keep a stiff upper lip,” Daisy said ironically, trying not to remember the first few days, months, even years.
“Well, Lady O not only doesn’t want to hear about stiff upper lips, she spends simply pots of money trying to communicate with Jerome through those frightful mediums.”
“Lord Ormerod must be a bit peeved.”
“More than a bit. He called in one of those Psychical Research johnnies to investigate the last psychic Lady Ormerod patronized. She was arrested for fraud, but it doesn’t seem to have put Lady O off in the slightest. I think there are a couple of digestives in the tin.
” They were in the kitchen by now, and Lucy was at the sink, filling the kettle for tea.
Their daily, Mrs. Potter, went home at four.
Daisy set down the Royal Worcester cups and saucers on the well-scrubbed kitchen table and reached for the biscuit tin. “Aren’t there any choccy biccies left?”
“No, and it was you who ate them. Some of us watch our figures, darling.”
With an envious glance at Lucy’s boyish shape, sleekly elegant in her low-waisted, mid-calf-length voile frock, Daisy sighed. It was no use feeling guilty. However hard she dieted, she would never be straight up and down. All she could do was wait for hips and bosoms to come back into fashion.
“These have gone soft.” She took a digestive biscuit anyway, nibbling as she sat down. “So Lady O has found a new medium to put her in touch with Jerome?”
“Madame Vasilieva. The second consultation is tomorrow evening, and Binkie says his uncle has arranged for the scientific chappie to attend. He hopes seeing the woman exposed as a charlatan right before her eyes will disillusion Lady O. Binkie’s afraid she may be a bit upset, though.”
“I should jolly well think so,” Daisy said, her opinion of the strong, silent Lord Gerald Bincombe’s sensitivity soaring, “if she’s convinced she’s been talking to her dead son.”
“She is. She’s obsessed with it. Binkie has a feeling she may be heading for a nervous breakdown.
He’s rather fond of her, and he thinks she ought to have a woman’s support when the new psychic is unmasked, but Lord Ormerod has forbidden the family to go, so he asked me to. Be a sport, darling, and come with me.”
“Oh, right-o.” It sounded less and less like a lark, but Lady Ormerod might need more sympathy than she was likely to get from Lucy. “Where is it?”
“Maida Vale.” Lucy grimaced. “Too frightfully dreary, but Binkie will stand us a taxi. I’m going to take the new camera I bought at the Kodak place on Regent Street.
It’s small enough to hide in my handbag, and I’d hate to miss a chance to photograph an apparition.
Maybe you’ll get an article out of the unmasking. ”
“Now that’s a spiffing notion!” Daisy said with enthusiasm. “The whole beastly business is in the news at the moment, with Houdini’s exposés of just how the mediums create their effects. I shan’t mind adding my mite to bring down the rotters who exploit other people’s sorrows.”
The setting sun painted the smoky sky an angry crimson as the motor-taxi dropped Daisy and Lucy in a drab suburban street lined with semi-detached villas.
“The Laurels,” Daisy read on the gate, as Lucy paid the taxi-driver. “Trite, but at least appropriate.”
She regarded the high evergreen hedge with a jaundiced eye. Already the shiny new leaves of early summer had gathered a dingy film of city soot. It looked a fitting place for all sorts of horrid mysteries.
Not that anything a medium could produce, from ectoplasm to levitation, was a mystery to Daisy any longer.
A visit to the Chelsea Free Library had produced Harry Houdini’s recent book, Miracle-Mongers and Their Methods.
In the Times and Manchester Guardian files, she found newspaper reports of discredited and confessed frauds.
The only thing still capable of astonishing her was how otherwise intelligent people allowed themselves to be taken in.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes, was not merely a firm believer but a proselytiser. He remained convinced his friend Houdini performed his feats by psychic means, even after the magician explained his methods!
What struck Daisy most was the meaningless triviality of most phenomena.
Why should the dead bother returning from beyond the veil simply to make knocking noises, move a table, or play a few notes on an accordion?
The voices and automatic writing tended to produce pure drivel, or garbled, rambling messages at best, as open to interpretation as the Oracle at Delphi.
If the spirits really wanted to communicate, surely they’d do better than that.
Adding to Daisy’s disillusionment was the fact that almost every aspect of the subject had been written about extensively.
The only opening she found for a fresh point of view was to portray the grief of those forced to acknowledge that the manifestations of their dead loved ones were nothing but trickery.
And that, she felt, would exploit their grief as surely as did the crooked mediums. In particular, she could not do it to Lady Ormerod, whom she had come to comfort.
“Here’s Lady Ormerod,” Lucy said as a gleaming silver-grey Isotta Fraschini, chauffeur-driven, drew up at the curb.
“Does she know we’re coming?”
“Yes, Binkie asked her to take us in with her, in case they wouldn’t let us attend a private sitting otherwise. Not without paying through the nose, anyway. Remember we’re just interested observers.”
“Right-o.” Daisy wanted to ask if Lucy knew how the Psychical Research man intended to sneak in, but Lady Ormerod stepped down from the motor and greeted them.
In their alter egos as, respectively, daughter of a viscount and granddaughter of an earl, Daisy and Lucy were distantly acquainted with Lady Ormerod.
A tall, gaunt woman, clad in unrelieved black draperies with a black veil over her face, she drooped.
That was the only word for it, Daisy decided.
She drooped along the short garden path and stood drooping as they waited for the doorbell to be answered, whereupon she drooped into the house.
“I have brought friends,” Lady Ormerod told the tall, fleshy man in evening dress who admitted them. “I hope their presence will not discommode Madame Vasilieva?”
He bowed. “My wife is always happy to accommodate believers, milady,” he said suavely, in a deep, sonorous, accented voice. The accent sounded Russian to Daisy—unless she was just influenced by the medium’s name, for somehow it did not quite ring true.
“Miss Fotheringay and Miss Dalrymple.”
He bowed again as Daisy followed Lucy into a commonplace entrance hall such as might be found in any of thousands of small, middle-class suburban houses.
At least, it would have been had not the wall opposite the hall table been hung with far from commonplace photographs.
Each showed a woman with masses of black hair, her eyes closed, and hovering above her one or two misty faces.
Daisy recognized the late czar of Russia and the Czarina Alexandra in one.
Another had Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, and a third Queen Elizabeth, dead centuries before the invention of photography.
Lucy looked at them and gave a quiet snort. “I could fake those,” she muttered to Daisy.
“Hush!”
At the last moment, a small, nondescript man in a bowler hat and a baggy suit slipped in behind them.
Removal of the bowler revealed thinning grey hair and steel-rimmed spectacles with thick lenses which effectively hid his eyes.
The investigator from the Society for Psychical Research, Daisy guessed, glancing sidelong to avoid drawing attention to him.
She had read about the Society. For the most part, the members were not, as she had assumed, sceptics out to show up Spiritualism as sheer hocus-pocus.
On the contrary, they were would-be believers.
Their merciless denunciations of fraudulent mediums sprang from their eagerness to discover true psychics.
The little man made no attempt to introduce himself, and no one took any notice of him. Presumably Vasiliev assumed he was one of Lady Ormerod’s friends, and her ladyship thought he belonged to the medium’s entourage.
Vasiliev ushered them towards the back of the house.
He moved with a lightness which belied his bulk and reminded Daisy of her mountainous friend, Detective Sergeant Tring.
As with the sergeant, the result was a feeling of leashed energy, of power held in check, an uncomfortable feeling when the man responsible was not on the side of the angels.