The Last Serenade (Sybil Ingram Victorian Mysteries Book 2) Read online

With as much authority as I could muster, I commanded, “Magda, let your niece go. Tell me what it is that holds you here and how we may release you.”

  The figure did not move at once. Then, slowly, the knotted hands fell away from Patricia’s nose and mouth. Before I could fully taste victory, though, the dark shape lifted its head to stare at me with—

  No. It had no eyes. In a face as yellow as parchment two pits of darkness fixed upon me, narrowing as if in contempt.

  Through the roaring of blood in my ears I could hear Patricia take deep gasping breaths. My mouth was as dry as bone, but I had to challenge the haunt. I opened my mouth to accuse the shadowy figure. But before I could utter a syllable, the figure advanced on me, and then the pale, mottled lips parted.

  To my horror, although the ghost’s mouth formed words, the sound when it emerged came from my own throat. Without intention my mouth poured forth a volley of explosive words in what must have been German. I knew little of the language, but even I could tell that the harsh, guttural tones were brimful of malice, rage, and loathing—not only for her niece but for me as well.

  The professor gasped. He must have understood the words, and without releasing my hand or Patricia’s he began murmuring a prayer softly under his breath.

  I tried to force back the ghost’s words, to shut my lips against the filth that was spilling out of me. The venomous spirit was stronger, though, and as it advanced closer, its hands now reaching for my face, those gaping black holes seemed to bore into me.

  In my alarm I did the only thing I could think to do—I flung away the hands of my comrades and broke the circle.

  The figure halted, still looming over me but now wavering like a flame in a high wind. She was weakening, and I knew in an instant that my voice was my own again.

  “Leave this place,” I commanded, drawing on all the drama in my repertoire. “You have no dominion here. Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee. Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold!”

  The figure seemed to shrink. I rose to my feet and used the full force of my voice. “You shall torment your niece no longer. Begone, I say! Pass out of this human sphere and leave us in peace.”

  The echoes were still hanging in the air when the ghost dissolved into a waft of greasy smoke. Patricia put her hands to her face, her eyes staring around wildly.

  “Professor, some water—or brandy,” I said in my normal voice, and as he leapt up from the table to carry out this task I flung open the curtains to let in the pearly illumination of twilight. Moments later I had lit two of the lamps and restored brightness to the room.

  In the warm light, my hostess looked shockingly weak. Professor Hartmann held a glass to her lips, and she drank, but she kept having to pause for breath. The professor himself was as close to being shaken as I had ever seen him, and he dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief.

  “Sybil, my dear,” he said while ministering to her, “are you all right?”

  In truth, I was suddenly weary, and I would have been the better myself for a sip of brandy to chase away the sickening feeling of having been commandeered by the dreadful Magda. But these were minor considerations. “I’m well,” I said. “A little rest is all I need.”

  He regarded me thoughtfully. Then he gave a little chuckle. “Was that Macbeth you just gave us? Or something of Webster’s?”

  My laugh was a bit shaky. “The former, I think. Patricia, did you recognize the voice that spoke through me? Was it your aunt’s?”

  She nodded, and a lock of her hair came loose from its coil and fell across her brow, which was clammy with perspiration. I thanked providence that she had kept her eyes dutifully shut during the séance so that she had not seen the spirit in addition to hearing it. “The things she said...!” She shuddered. “I had no idea anyone could be so full of hatred.”

  The professor offered her the glass again, but she shook her head. “So it was not Peter,” she said to me. “Ever?”

  “It must have been your aunt all this time. I ought to have known when you said your hands were injured; she must have wanted you to suffer as she did. You did not say what her livelihood was before rheumatism put an end to it, by the way.”

  Her eyes went to the piano. “She was a concert pianist,” she said. “A brilliant one, I believe.” Her dark, expressive eyes shone with tears. “How bitter she must have been when the disease forced her to give up what she loved.”

  “And how envious she must have been of you,” the professor said, “for having had a long, successful career and even now to be poised to return to the stage.”

  I could not speak for a moment. I had felt that lacerating envy and fury directed at me. Even now I could see the gnarled phantom hands approaching. Whether she resented me as another performing artist or simply for interfering with her, in my brief career as a spirit medium I had never before encountered so hostile a phantom.

  Suddenly I could not leave the apartment quickly enough. I was nearly certain the ghost had been routed, but I did not want to risk being wrong.

  “You had best move in with me until you can find new quarters,” I told her. “I propose we leave within the next quarter of an hour. You should take only the necessities now and have your maid send the rest of your things after you. I would advise not setting foot here again, just in case.”

  She nodded and got to her feet. Already she was looking more resolute. “I hate to ask even more of you, Miss Ingram,” she said, “but since I sent my maid out for the evening...”

  “I shall help you pack,” I assured her.

  Chapter Two

  “A third above G, you said. Now you’re telling me it’s a third above C. Which is it, man?”

  The shouted words coming from the other side of the door were unmistakably those of my fiancé, Roderick Brooke, known in his younger days as Roaring Brooke for reasons obvious to anyone within half a mile.

  The professor and I exchanged knowing smiles. Both of us were well acquainted with Roderick’s tendency to express himself at the top of his lungs when his volatile temper came into play.

  Fortunately his bark was much worse than his bite. Roderick merely enjoyed making a scene quite as much as any actor I had ever known. When not expressed through shouting and bluster, his artistic temperament found outlet in the violin, an instrument with which he was exceptionally talented. In his youth he had toured Europe, only ceasing when a series of catastrophes caused him to set aside his violin. During the months in which I had known him, however, he had taken it up again to find that all of his old skill remained.

  With a perfunctory knock, the professor opened the door, and we entered Roderick’s suite of rooms at the hotel that was our home in Vienna. In my rooms, across the corridor, my maid had made Mrs. Spiegel welcome and was now helping her unpack and make herself at home. Even though I was still feeling drained after the séance and ready to retire, I could not do so without stopping to visit Roderick, who stood, violin in one hand and bow in the other, glaring at a bearded man who sat at the professor’s piano responding in voluble German to Roderick’s demand.

  Roderick’s dark, curly hair was rumpled as if it felt his agitation, but his deep-set hazel eyes brightened as they took me in. Never one to care much about how he dressed in private, he wore blue serge trousers and shirtsleeves, with his collar unfastened and no necktie in sight. He complained that everyday clothing restricted his movement when playing, but fortunately at all public performances he resigned himself to wearing appropriate garb.

  “You’re back early,” he observed, in far more pleasant tones than those with which he had addressed the pianist. “Couldn’t bear to be away from me, I take it.”

  “On the contrary,” I returned. “I knew that you would be pining for me, and the only merciful course of action was to cut my errand short and put an end to your lonely misery.”

  That made him set his instrument aside and stride across the room toward me. “Such vanity!” he exclaimed, but his husky voice w
as warm, as was the smile that curved his mouth. “You’d have us believe that only your gracious presence prevents all mankind from crying itself to sleep each night.”

  “At least I am a welcome sight to most of our acquaintance,” I teased him, “if for no other reason than because I interrupt your tirades. If you persist in abusing your colleagues so, no one will ever consent to work with you again.”

  He brushed aside my chaffing with an impatient gesture. “Lehmann is a professional. He is accustomed to some give-and-take during the rehearsal process.” Slipping an arm about my waist, he bent his head to kiss me lingeringly. Even though this was probably an underhanded means of silencing me and having the last word, I did not object. Indeed, had we been alone, I would happily have given up conversation altogether in favor of this delightful activity.

  The circumstances under which Roderick and I had met, fallen in love, and become engaged were unusual, to say the least. This past January I had left England and my theatrical troupe to marry an American hotel magnate, Alcott Lammle. This decision had not been made lightly, but once I set upon that course, disaster followed soon after. Alcott’s business partner had left his empire and his health in ruins, so mere hours after I was married to him at his sickbed, his soul slipped from its earthly domicile and joined the choir invisible. Alone in an alien country with only my meager savings, I had retreated to Brooke House, Alcott’s first wife’s residence in the Hudson River Valley.

  I had not known at the time that the son of said wife, Roderick, was not a child who would benefit from my guardianship but an adult antagonist who would vie with me for the right to reside at Brooke House. Ultimately, however, and most unexpectedly, we discovered a kindred spirit in each other. Though the house itself had burned down during a fraught encounter with an unbalanced neighbor, we had found a home in each other.

  “Your manners are deplorable,” I told him as soon as he had freed my lips. “This is not the way to behave before the professor and your colleague.”

  His rakish grin quickened my heartbeat. He murmured, “If they find the spectacle of my embracing you too agitating, they are free to examine their cufflinks, the carpet, or the coal scuttle.”

  “How magnanimous of you,” I said, “and how alliterative.”

  At this point the professor, knowing from past experience that this sort of exchange could continue indefinitely if not forestalled, cleared his throat. “Your betrothed has been through a difficult evening,” he pointed out to Roderick. “As reluctant as I am to interfere with two people in love, Sybil probably needs rest and recovery more at this moment than stimulation.”

  “Stimulation, eh?” Roderick repeated, with a suggestive lift of one dark eyebrow that made me bite my lip to hold back an undignified giggle. Being with him was doing more to help the frightening incident in Mrs. Spiegel’s apartments recede than any amount of quiet time to rest.

  Indeed, I was on the point of saying something to this effect when the room seemed to tilt before my eyes, and involuntarily I clutched at Roderick to steady myself. Somehow my legs were buckling, and darkness crowded the corners of my vision.

  “I think I had better lie down,” I said faintly.

  Instantly Roderick bent to scoop one arm under my legs and pick me up. “What a minx you are,” he said, “forever looking for ways to make me take you in my arms.” But there was a worried note in his voice, and he did not bait me further as he carried me out the door and to my rooms.

  My head was heavy, and I let my eyes close, feeling weariness settle over me like a heavy counterpane. Even my hearing was blurred, and the voices of Roderick and the professor in conversation with my maid were muted as my senses shut down and I was overtaken by the sleep of exhaustion.

  It was morning before I opened my eyes. My maid was bustling about my room making little attempt to be quiet, which told me that she believed it was time for me to rise.

  “What time is it, Mrs. Vise?” I asked, pushing myself into a sitting position.

  She turned to regard me, her lips pinched in equal parts concern and disapproval. “Time for you to be dressed long since,” she said shortly in her dry American accent. “Have you recovered from your ghost chasing?”

  Though I referred to her as my maid, Mrs. Vise had been housekeeper in my late husband’s New York City hotel suite. When the bank had seized the hotel, I had taken Mrs. Vise with me to Brooke House. Though about as cheerful and nurturing as a chip of flint, she was reliable and even devoted to me in her way—though she would have denied this—and I felt a responsibility to keep her employed.

  Our arrangement worked surprisingly well. She served as a kind of combination of nursery maid and policeman, strict with me and especially quick to monitor Roderick’s behavior. In essence she was my chaperone as much as my servant, and I found that I rather liked having her present to discourage improprieties. Some of the more bohemian people we had encountered thus far had assumed that I was Roderick’s mistress and thus amenable to extracurricular propositions, but having Mrs. Vise’s thin, rigidly disapproving presence hovering one pace behind me had discouraged most of these would-be suitors before they could become truly offensive and risk Roderick’s anger as well as my own.

  “How is Mrs. Spiegel?” I asked instead of answering her question. We had installed her in the parlor of my suite, having transformed a divan into a bed.

  “Well enough, I suppose. She ate a good breakfast and has begun searching the advertisements for a new apartment.”

  “Excellent.” I reached for a lacy peignoir and drew it on, but without my usual energy. My resources were still depleted from the night before. “Has Mr. Brooke asked for me?”

  A disapproving sniff always preceded Mrs. Vise’s comments on this gentleman, though I knew she secretly liked him. “More than once, madam. He seemed somewhat agitated. I’ll let him know you’ve awakened.”

  “Agitated” was an apt description for Roderick when he joined me on the terrace of my suite, where I was taking a light breakfast. He had been awake for hours, he said, and I noticed that he could scarcely stand still, so restless he was. His dark brows were drawn down in a glower over his luminous eyes, though the frown was not directed at me.

  “Why are you so fidgety?” I inquired after he had greeted me with a kiss and an approving glance at my peignoir.

  “I’m not,” he said, taking a seat. “It merely seems so to you because you haven’t recovered fully from last night.”

  This was merely a diversion, but no doubt he would tell me in his own time. I shrugged and took another sip of coffee. In the last few months I had learned to tolerate and even begin to like this beverage, though I would never prefer it to tea. No matter how much time I spent in other countries, I was still an Englishwoman at heart.

  “It worries me to see you so exhausted after a séance,” he continued, leaning forward in his chair to tip my chin up so he could scan my face. The concern in his eyes filled me with a warmth more comforting than the sunlight. “I don’t like how long it takes your vitality to return. If this continues—”

  “It’s nothing to worry about, Roderick. If I can help people, really help them, and in a way that no one else can, what does it matter if I’m tired for a day afterward?” Then the memory of that sunken yellow face with black pits for eyes sprang into my mind, but I willed it away. “I’ve not suffered any lasting harm,” I told him.

  “That doesn’t preclude the possibility in the future. I care for nothing as much as your welfare, Sybil. How do you think I would feel if you—if you were to fall into a decline after one of these sessions? I could never forgive myself if I were to lose you that way.”

  “I am touched that you care so much,” I said slowly, “but this is a realm in which I must consult my own judgment.” What if his masculine pride made this an ongoing source of discord? The thought was distressing, but I could not let his fears control my decisions.

  “The professor said you seemed shaken,” he said doggedly.


  That was true enough. I did not want to think about what might happen the next time I found myself facing so hostile a spirit, especially if it did not respond to my command to depart. But that was something for me to solve on my own rather than troubling him with it.

  “I’m perfectly fine now,” I said.

  “Hmph.” He flung himself back in his chair with a hint of a pout, crossing his arms and thrusting his feet out before him. This demonstration of pique almost made me smile, but a second glance at him stilled that impulse. His eyes were stormy, his jaw fixed. Something in addition to my welfare was troubling him.

  Questioning him when he was in this mood would get me nowhere; this much I had learned from our months as an engaged couple. Instead I feigned nonchalance and reached for a roll. “I had a letter from Mr. Bascombe,” I said. “The art from Alcott’s estate is finally being sold. He said he anticipated no difficulty in having the Leighton painting sent to us as soon as we have a fixed address.”

  “Painting?”

  “You know, the mermaid and the shepherd. The one I asked if we could keep.” To my mind, the figures rather resembled me and Roderick: the pale golden-haired mermaid embracing the olive-skinned youth with dark curly hair. When I had mentioned it to him some time back, he seemed to be as taken with the romance of it as I. But now his mind was clearly somewhere else. “Roderick,” I said gently, but he seemed not to hear me. I took another roll from the bread basket and threw it at him, and when it struck him in the waistcoat he finally looked at me.

  “What the devil—oh. I’m sorry I’m distrait, Sybil. The thing is, I’ve had a letter too.” Reluctantly he drew an envelope from a breast pocket, but he did not hand it to me. “It’s from Julia,” he said slowly.

  Too thunderstruck to speak, I must have gaped at him like a rabbit. Julia de Lioncourt, famed beauty, actress, and coloratura, had been Roderick’s mistress for two years, which ended when he had proposed marriage to her and learned that she had been married all along. Hot-tempered, passionate man that he was, he had believed her stories about her husband’s oppression of her and had challenged the man to a duel. Roderick was the only one to emerge alive, and the weight of what he had done, in addition to an injury sustained in the duel, had prompted him to retire from performing four years ago and sink into a year-long solitary debauch that might have killed him had his old friend and mentor Professor Hartmann not gone in search of him.