Chapter Eighteen #2
“Twenty-seven years, and you still think it was her?” Sam pressed.
“We can’t rule it out,” Van Helsing maintained stubbornly.
“Fine. I will find out,” Sam said. Already she was thinking of her vision.
Alice Grey was a channel. If she wasn’t trying to murder Sam, which she sincerely doubted she was, then Sam could trust her enough to tell her about her Aunt Lucy.
Perhaps even get a lead on the ruins where Sam’s grandfather had been sighted last.
“No. It’s too dangerous,” Hel said at the same time Van Helsing said, “Not a chance. You’re biased.”
“Am I a part of this investigation or not?” Sam asked stubbornly. “Trust me, I can handle this. She likes me, remember? She even gave me her calling card.”
“I’ll go with you,” Hel said at once.
“No,” Sam said. “She won’t trust you.”
“I don’t like this,” Hel said. “What’s her interest in you, anyway?”
“We’re channels,” Sam said. “I imagine what she wants is a little conversation with someone who understands what that’s like.” So, for that matter, did Sam.
“Fine,” Van Helsing said, as if he had the final say. “We’ll regroup for dinner at the Shelbourne and share our findings. Good luck.”
Sam checked the address on the calling card and looked back up at the marble townhouse on the corner nearest the Merrion Square gardens, feeling her impressions of Alice Grey shift and take new form.
At a time when the majority of Dublin lived twenty-two persons per tenement, Alice’s front door had its own columns and pediment, like a Roman temple in the heart of the city.
“What’s wrong, dear?” Alice said when she answered the door, shooing away the raven that perched outside. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“More channel humor?” Sam suggested.
“Forgive me.” Alice chuckled, her sun-wizened skin crinkling.
“It’s just so nice to speak with another channel again.
I’m afraid I have years of pent-up wit for the occasion.
” No longer in mourning dress, she wore a lace tea gown the color of burnt sugar, which set off her crown of silver hair perfectly.
A peculiar scent lingered on her green-stained fingertips, like sweet apricots with an undercurrent of what Sam could have sworn was rancid peanut butter.
“Come in, come in. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you, I—” Sam started. It seemed rude to say she was just there for business. But she didn’t want to accept any kindness from a woman when she intended on dredging up the death of her husband and the suspicions that had fallen upon her.
“I’ll pull out two teacups, just in case,” Alice said.
The room into which Alice led Sam was papered a moody blue green with gold tracery, like sunlight on stormy waters.
A pair of emerald sofas were set before a marble fireplace, over which hung an enormous mirror with an ornate frame.
Alice brought out a silver teapot and matching teacups and settled on the sofa across from Sam, crossing her ankles.
The air was heavy with the earthen scent of dirt and growing things—looking around, Sam could see why.
Some sort of feathery, fernlike vine climbed over one of the rounded doors and up the wall.
A barren hawthorn tree stretched its branches near the windows, and a profusion of unseasonable flowers had settled on every available surface like snow.
“Your plants are . . .” Sam trailed off, in search of the right word.
“Everywhere?” Alice suggested as she poured them each a cup of tea, with four scoops of sugar and a generous splash of milk.
Sam blanched. How sweet, precisely, did she take her tea?
“One of the advantages to being an eccentric old widow—I can do as I like. But I know you didn’t just come to compliment my taste in decor.
What brings you to my abode? Unless it’s for more of my exquisite humor? ”
Sam leaned forward. “I did what you suggested.”
“I knew it.” Alice’s grin spread at the expression on Sam’s face. “Clever girl. I could sense it when you came in. It feels good, doesn’t it? To use your gifts as they are meant to be used.”
“It did,” Sam admitted, fighting the urge to glance over her shoulder, to make sure no one might overhear. It had felt like she was using her gifts, instead of being used by them.
“We can do more, you know,” Alice confided, leaning in. “We don’t have to be at the mercy of the visions—we can learn to control them. I can teach you, if you’d like.”
“I’d like that,” Sam said hesitantly. “But first . . . the ghost showed me a place I need to go, only I’m not sure where it is. It’s somewhere in Ireland, I think. Do you think if I—”
“Please,” Alice said, her grey eyes sparkling over her tea. “This is the most excitement I’ve had in months. Tell me everything.”
Sam did, describing the vision of the haunting ruin between sips of tea. It was sweet—with four sugars, it could hardly be otherwise—and smooth, with a metallic tang to it that put Sam in mind of the air before a storm.
“Scratches?” Alice frowned when Sam described the deep gouges that marked the standing stone. “Like from a pick, or from a beast?”
“Feline,” Sam said. Like a mountain lion in the American West, marking its territory. She’d seen sketches of the trees with gouges as high as the animal could stretch. But she’d never seen a cat whose claws were strong enough to mar solid stone.
“That’s Montpelier Hill, then, there’s no mistaking it.” Alice sipped her tea. “The building itself is known by many names, most commonly the Hell-Fire Club. But that is no place for you.”
“Why?” Sam asked. “What is that place?”
“It’s cursed,” Alice said. “Nearly two centuries ago, William Conolly built the place on a rath, desecrating its standing stones for the foundation. The way the locals tell it, a man like that, born in Ireland of Gaelic stock, ought to have known better. But he found out soon enough. Just as the last stone was set, the Otherworld sent a storm. Took the roof right off. They rebuilt it, of course, only for it to become a den of debauchery and demon summoning for the Hell-Fire Club. The stories of that place: kidnappings, murder, violence, even cannibalism . . . No one was surprised when it burned down only twenty years after its founding and a monstrous black cat began stalking the grounds. For the last century or so, it’s been a haunted ruin. ”
In short, it was the perfect place to hide your pet medium. The hauntings would be of little matter to a medium, and what better way to ensure your privacy? No one would risk venturing into a place known to be haunted. Not after enough people died.
“You say the cat is monstrous?” Sam pressed.
“I suppose I ought to say demonic,” Alice mused.
“I heard from McLoughlin, just down the road from that old ruin, his father knew a priest who tried to exorcise the thing once. He was found dead the next morning, his face rent clean off with deep claw marks running through his features—just like those on your standing stone. Later that night, the whole hillside went up in flames.” She hesitated.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, I might not listen to that ghost of yours.
It doesn’t sound as if she has your best interests at heart. ”
“Thank you, that was very—” Sam’s breath caught in her throat as her eyes lit on the flowers on the table beside her. “Those flowers.”
Sam hadn’t recognized them with their petals twisted up against the light.
Mad seeds, they were called, moonflower, and devil’s trumpets.
Her brother had gone through an obsession with them.
The stories said witches had used them to fly and change men into beasts.
But their proper name was datura—a vespertine-flowering plant that belonged to the nightshade family.
Moderately used, they could provide sedation for medical treatment. At high levels . . .
“They’re poisonous,” Sam said. They smelled faintly of apricots, and beneath that, the faint stench of rancid peanut butter. Sam’s heart quickened, her gaze dropping to Alice’s fingers and the scent that clung there.
“Are they?” Alice said. “Well, I thought they were pretty.”
“The two are hardly exclusive,” Sam said.
“My gardener—”
“Wouldn’t have access to them,” Sam said. “Unless he moonlights at Kew. They don’t grow here, not without a great deal of help.”
“They are a bit troublesome,” Alice admitted.
“They cause delirium, hallucinations, and death,” Sam said flatly. Like Alice’s husband, who had died after seeing ghosts. More damning, they were the same flowers as were in the photograph the Viscount had taken.
“Ah,” Alice said, setting down her teacup as she caught Sam’s drift.
“Your husband didn’t die due to the Wild Hunt, did he?” Sam demanded.
“I’m afraid not,” Alice admitted, as if she were talking about the rain and not murder. “Though it was convenient timing, was it not?”
Sam stood, feeling sick to her stomach. Her skin felt feverish. Oh God, she’d drunk the tea. How much did it take? No wonder Alice had added so much sugar—datura was bitter. Hel and Van Helsing had been right. Just because someone was kind to you, it didn’t mean they hadn’t gone mad or monstrous.
“The tea—”
“Is perfectly safe,” Alice said, her hands folded neatly in her lap.
“Death sleeps within the seeds, but also release. If it was in the tea, you would feel their strength running like sunlight through your veins. Used to a limited extent, they can enhance a channel’s abilities, or help a man see a sliver of what a channel can.
Too much, and, well . . . My husband learned where that road ends. ”
She’d done it on purpose, she wasn’t even trying to hide it, her face sleek with satisfaction. “How could you? He was your husband.” Twenty-seven years.
“Do you know how I found my way out of the asylum?” Alice asked.
Sam shook her head. She imagined she hadn’t escaped, as Sam had.
“I was bought. My family had no use for me, a channel who might ruin their good name. He was my only chance at freedom—stay in the asylum or be a stranger’s wife.
I thought it couldn’t be that bad. He was rich, after all, even if we never found love, at least I’d be comfortable. Shows you what I knew.”
“He was a member of the Vespertine,” Sam guessed.
“Indeed. And I thought that meant I would be,” Alice said. “But I wasn’t. The man wanted a channel, not a wife. I was welcome in their rituals, as a source of blood, or a conduit. But I was never let into their secrets, never treated as one of them.”
Sam remembered the way the Golden Dawn had treated her in Paris, as if she were Hel’s possession instead of her partner.
Looking at Alice’s scars, Sam couldn’t help but wonder what precisely the Golden Dawn had meant when they said they only took what was freely offered.
Whether Hel’s offering would have sufficed. Whether Alice’s husband’s had.
“Why didn’t you go to the civic guard?” Sam asked. “I should think they’d be eager for a lead on the Vespertine.” Their proclivities were all of them highly illegal.
“I think you’ll find that spending any time in an asylum has a . . . sobering effect on your credibility,” Alice said. “Spend ten years in one, and, well.”
“You might have left, then,” Sam said. “Fled to England, or America.”
Alice shrugged. “I tried. But when he caught me, he threatened to throw me back into the asylum from which he’d bought me. I knew too much to be allowed my freedom, and there were plenty of channels in the asylum who would be glad for a chance at fresh air. In the end, I found my own way out.”
By murdering him. But could Sam truly blame her when she couldn’t say she wouldn’t do the same thing, if that was the cost of freedom?
Sam didn’t want to believe murder was the answer, that sometimes it was the only way out.
But ten years in an asylum, simply for being a channel, followed by decades of abuse by a man who had sworn to love her until death . . .
And they called channels monstrous.
“So, should I get on my walking shoes?” Alice asked.
“No,” Sam said. She didn’t believe Alice was behind the attacks, even if she’d killed her husband.
It would be impossible, even if she’d wanted to.
There had been multiple witnesses to the Wild Hunt; she could hardly have poisoned them all.
Like the separatists, resorting to poison meant she was unlikely to be behind something truly supernatural. “No, I’m sorry.”
Alice smiled. “I knew you’d understand. Come back anytime. I will help any way I can. And thank you for being so . . . understanding.”