Chapter Thirty-Two
At Madame Ivanova’s request, every jack-o’-lantern in the grange house was brought to the ballroom on the afternoon of Samhain.
“Won’t this scare away your spirits?” Father Yuri asked skeptically, placing his double-slashed Orthodox cross turnip next to Father Wheeler’s grinning one. “And ruin the show?”
Madame Ivanova shook her head, her ear tilted slightly to the side like she could hear them just now. “No. No, I’ve been using mine every night and had to make another. It is more of a … hmmm … like a cheesecloth or a sieve. It reduces the noise.”
Merlin looked across the room at Rhys when she’d said that, raising his eyebrows in acknowledgement.
She had answered the question he had posed on the night they’d done the carvings. They had an answer, after all.
“He asked me if they scare away all spirits,” he told Seph a little later, “or just the malevolent ones. I suppose that was sort of an answer.”
“I can’t imagine a soul who’s stuck here not turning to mischief,” she said to him, rummaging through her dresses to find the right one for a seance. “No matter how good they were in life.”
“Wear the red and black,” he suggested. “Samhain colors.”
She scoffed. “Who’s to say Samhain colors aren’t powdery, pale rainbow colors? Blue and yellow and pink?”
Rhys blinked at her and then jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the window, where an assortment of brown, orange, red, and gold leaves currently blanketed the ground outside.
She frowned. “Fine,” she said. “Point made.”
“Autumnal?” she said, once the dress was on.
“Leaning hibernal,” he confirmed, grinning at the sight she made. “Anyone dead you’re hoping to hear from tonight?”
“Just William Shakespeare,” she said airily, “so he can shame you for your disinterest.”
“That’s fine,” he returned. “We can have a chat about unjustly killing off your best character. At least he took out bloody Tybalt too.”
“Yes,” she said sarcastically. “At least there’s that. What about you? Any ghosts you wish to contend with?”
“A few,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “But I think she’s already got my uncle’s calling card, to be honest with you. She said something dead eerie to me the night at the priory.”
“Your uncle?” Seph said, pausing with her hair half twisted to meet his eye in the mirror. “The one who died in Aust?”
He nodded, wincing. “Maybe he’s upset I left him there in a pauper’s grave.”
“As opposed to what?” she said, hair still held in one hand while the pins were suspended in the other. “Dragging him out to the riverbank at the grand age of ten and building a marble crypt?”
He paused, holding a finger up as he tried to think of a rebuttal, then dropped his hand to his side, frowning.
“Fine,” he mimicked, doing his best impersonation of her voice and accent. “Point made.”
It made her give him a little, twisting smile in reflection and then finish pinning that golden mane in place, twisted and tamed for the sake of polite society. “Besides, even if your uncle is in her ear, tonight is bound to have many visitors. And we’ve got extras for the audience besides.”
“Oh, that is true,” he acknowledged. “Half of your provider chain from the Twittens is coming tonight.”
“More than half,” Seph said. “We’ve created a proper party here tonight, for All Hallows’.”
“And Merlin’s last supper,” Rhys added. “Or so he’d have us believe.”
They descended into a harvest feast, the ballroom separated into a small performance section for Madame Ivanova’s seance, and a long series of tables piled and spilling with the bounty of the season.
It smelled like cinnamon and cranberries and turkey and delicious woodsmoke.
There was fish and chicken and bacon, piles of little pies and turnovers and twists and cakes.
Enough for everyone who had come two or three times over.
Everyone and their changeling twin, Rhys thought to himself, pleased with the idea. He hoped the staff had remembered saucers of cream.
“Look at all these jack-o’-lanterns!” Seph marveled. “There must be fifty!”
Rhys nodded, running a hand along the small of her back and peering over her shoulder to investigate the things she was adding to her plate.
Not nearly enough sugar, in his opinion.
“I think people have made more than one, especially if theirs started going gooey. I saw the kitchen maid with a new crate of maips not a week ago.”
“Oh,” said Seph. “I haven’t even been remembering to light mine. Once I’m in the bedroom, I forget the poor little fellow right outside the door. Rhys!”
She slapped his hand as he reached onto her plate and stole a glazed cranberry tartlet. He tilted it outward in his mouth and gave her a jammy, red smile with no teeth, which made her laugh and slap him again.
“Get your own plate, fool.”
“Harpy,” he returned.
“Child,” she answered, moving farther down to investigate the meats.
He drifted toward Mags, the taxidermist, who was regaling Father Wheeler and Master Yuri with a tale of smuggling and clever distraction.
He was sad he’d missed the first part but happily chewed on a cheese and cherry pastry as she described finally removing the deceased platypus from beneath the decoy shipment of whale fat.
“It stunk so bad, no one noticed the dead body,” she said proudly. “And all the straw and cold insulation from the fat kept my little beauty preserved enough that I didn’t have to compensate for decay at all.”
“Did you bring her?” Father Wheeler asked hopefully. “The platypus?”
“Of course not, dear,” Mags said with a glint in her eye. “I don’t want her vanishing under a magic cloth and never coming back, do I?”
“We come back,” Rhys said smugly. “Eventually.”
“You had better,” Mags told him. “I’ve a good line on a wolf. Big ’un too.”
“Do you sell anything else?” Yuri asked, looking a bit green around the gills. “Or just dead things?”
“Parts of dead things,” Mags replied, blinking innocently. “D’you like shark teeth?”
Rhys brightened, his adolescence on the docks of Brighton waking inside him. “Now, depending on where you got those,” he told Mags, “they might be from a shark that’s still kicking around. They have endless teeth. Lose the same one five times? Grow five back in its place.”
Mags touched her jaw, where a few teeth appeared to be missing toward the back, and considered it. “Well, that’s clever of them.”
“A sailor told me once,” Rhys said, leaning closer, “that a lobster will never die of old age. It will just keep getting bigger and bigger until it’s too big to find enough food in a day to keep it going. They never expire from age, only hunger. Their own or ours.”
“Les crocodiles, aussi,” Mr. Charpentier said, hopping into their semi-circle with enthusiasm and miming a biting mouth with both hands. “A sheik told me! She is … immortelle, this green thing. A pet in their menagerie for four generations! Fearsome. Massive! Like a house!”
“So is my cat,” Merlin piped in from another group. “I was assured when I took her from the market that she would never die.”
“Is there a cat in this house?” Yuri asked, frowning. “I have seen no cat.”
“Of course not,” said Merlin. “I bought that cat thirty years ago.”
Rhys was still laughing as the conversation dissolved, and grazing diners began to mill curiously toward the seance table set up in the corner of the room.
Seph found him while she was still licking fig seeds off her fingers, and raised her brows at him, flicking her eyes toward the seats. He took her meaning immediately, pulling her toward the little cushy settee he preferred for the nights in the ballroom, but Madame Ivanova stopped them.
“Non!” she said, pointing at Rhys. “You are with me tonight, at the central table.”
“Both of us?” Seph asked, raising her tawny brows.
“Just the boy,” Madame Ivanova said. “If you please.”
Rhys frowned at how easily Seph released his arm and looked down at her. “She meant to say the man,” he informed her quietly. “I am a man.”
“Of course you are,” she answered, giving him a patronizing little pat on the bicep. “My man.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, but she only giggled, spinning away and claiming the spot beside Nini, as though the swap were no matter of great distress for her at all.
“Why me?” he asked Ivanova as he sat down. “I didn’t ask you to contact anyone.”
“Did you ask when you saw the apparition at your bed?” she pointed out, nodding when he shook his head. “Precisely. You are … hmm. How do I say this?”
“Bait,” Merlin suggested, taking the seat next to Rhys. “You are bait, my boy. You and I both.”
“Bait,” the medium repeated with a little nod. “Good, yes. Bait. You too, madam, if you please,” she said, pointing at Mags, who looked displeased with the honor.
Rhys twisted around and saw that the puzzlemaker boy, Gordon, who was sweet on Seph, had taken the empty spot to her left and joined in on the conversation Seph herself and Nini were having.
He narrowed his eyes at the lanky, little blond genius and whipped back around to Mags. “You look ravishing tonight,” he said petulantly. “Beautiful.”
“Aye,” she said, her deep wrinkles spreading around her smile. “I know.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “That Russian gent tried it on, you know, but I know the type. He’s more interested in the priest than any woman here.”
“He tries it on with every woman,” Rhys replied, knowing he was pouting now.
“Exactly,” said Mags, leaning back and resuming her normal volume. “Exactly.”
Rhys studied her, studied every deep rivulet in her handsome face, and nodded. She likely knew exactly what she was talking about.
“Bonsoir, friends,” Madame Ivanova said, clapping loudly and bringing everyone’s attention around. “And blessed All Hallows’, or as my new friend Mrs. Caradoc has taught me, Oíche Shamhna Shona Duit.”
Rhys whipped around at Seph again, the secretive wench, and caught her giving a silent mime of applause to Madame Ivanova.
He narrowed his eyes and bit his thumb at her, which only seemed to confuse her.
He’d explain that later.
And she’d said he didn’t know his Shakespeare. Bah.
“We will dim the lights now,” Madame Ivanova continued. “I find that I hear better when I cannot see as well. If any are not yet where they intend to stay, I suggest they move to a comfortable place forthwith.”
There was some jostling around, bodies slumping into cushions or moving to a better vantage point, and then the nod was given and the lights were lowered.
She picked up a crystal glass from the center of the table and filled it a little past half with water.
“This might seem odd to you,” she told her audience as the light from half a hundred jack-o’-lanterns bounced off the crystal facets.
“But this is how I learned myself how to adjust my ear. Crystal tones are pure and strange. You may listen too, and perhaps you will hear something from beyond.”
She dipped her finger in the water and began to rotate it on the rim of the crystal goblet. Rhys watched in fascination as the glass itself began to sing, a ghostly, sweet peal that rose and fell as Madame Ivanova moved her finger around its circumference.
She stopped abruptly, the sound lingering in the cool autumn air and then dissipating, like the song itself were now a ghost and fading from the world.
Madame Ivanova reached down and picked up a squat, brown bottle made of glass and brought the rim to her lips. She blew over it like a flute, and this time, the sound was deep and masculine, like a war horn a mile away.
She blew three times, each one a long, sustained note, and then stopped, letting those two sounds find one another in the silent, darkened space of the vaulted ceiling. Next, she tapped both the bottle and the crystal goblet with her fingernails, alternating deep and high sounds.
When she stopped this time, she did not let the song linger. Instead, she held her hands up and said, “Yes. I hear you!”
It seemed to Rhys that everyone held their breath. Even the candles inside the turnips seemed to go still.
“Cousin Maggie, small and queer,” Madame Ivanova whispered. “Plays with dead things, so steer clear.”
Next to Rhys, Mags gasped.
“They are sorry,” Ivanova said, her eyes still closed. “They are sorry they teased you. And they are thankful for how you treated them, once they were gone.”
There was another beat of silence, another tap on the rims of the glass and bottle. “Watch for sharp stones,” Madame Ivanova said, her eyes flickering open and focusing on Rhys. “Ha,” she said without amusement. “Twpsyn.”
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He averted his eyes from her and they fell on those mirrors by the curtain panels from the Changeling performance the night before.
In the reflections, he swore he saw people moving. Walking past.
But everyone was seated.
It was likely the flicker of the lanterns, he decided. Likely just that.
“Aust sounds like lost,” Madame Ivanova finished, trembly and wavering, “but you were not.”
He clenched his teeth together, a thrill running through his spine, and he sank lower in the chair.
She paused, her posture suddenly coming up rigid, and looked at Merlin. “You must not speak during the demonstration,” she said to him, chidingly. “But yes, I will ask.”
Merlin only blinked.
He hadn’t said anything at all. Not aloud, anyway.
She nodded, her hand drifting out in Merlin’s direction. “Some of them,” she said to him. “Not all. Madame Guillotine was not the end. We await you, Martin.”
She breathed out, her shoulders sagging, and shook her head. “Does anyone have a thing they wish to ask our guests?” she murmured, sounding very tired. “A question for the other side?”
Rhys wanted to ask for Willa.
He wanted to ask for his pocket watch.
But he couldn’t find the will to speak.
He heard people ask about missing heirlooms, about pain, about their long-lost dog, about goodness and badness, and finally, at the very end …
“What does it feel like?” Merlin asked gently. “To die?”
Ivanova turned to him and frowned. She batted around her hair like gnats were clamoring to answer, a thousand voices all overlapping.
She snatched up the bottle and blew hard into it again, making a loud horn sound as though she were punishing the spirits for being unruly. And then, she tilted her head to the side one last time, sighed, and nodded.
“It feels different for everyone,” she said. “Some have pain, some have drowse, some have surprise. That part remains a mystery, but it always … hmm …” She paused, listening again, and held her hands up to her cheeks, breathing softly.
“Death,” she told him, “is only an illusion.”