Silence fell around the table. Everyone was thunderstruck — everyone apart from Sherlock, who had been expecting this, and probably Amyus Crowe as well.
‘Good Lord!’ Quintillan exclaimed. ‘Ambrose, my dear fellow! What happened? Where have you been?’
Very convincing, Sherlock thought, considering the fact that you are almost certainly part of the conspiracy.
Albano collapsed theatrically into an empty chair. He gestured to a servant. ‘Wine!’ he said in his thin, reedy voice. ‘I need wine! I have neither eaten nor drunk since I was taken.’
‘Who took you?’ Herr Holtzbrinck asked, but Albano just waved an arm. ‘I meant when I was taken from my kidnappers to the Other Side.’
The servant poured a large glass of wine and placed it in front of Albano. He downed it in one go.
‘Tell us everything,’ Quintillan urged. ‘Leave nothing out.’
‘You remember that I had said I was leaving, following the attack on the British representative,’ Albano said. ‘I was, perhaps, being overly melodramatic, but I fully intended at the time to walk all the way down to Galway and find my way back to a large town where I could vanish for a while. You all saw the carriage that drove into the grounds of the castle, and the two masked men who leaped out and grabbed me.’ He glanced sideways at Amyus Crowe. ‘Except you,’ he said. ‘I do not believe that you were there.’
‘Amyus Crowe, representing the US Government.’ Crowe thrust his large hand out towards Albano. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.’
Albano gazed at the hand with palpable unease, as if Crowe were holding a fish out towards him. Eventually Crowe withdrew the hand.
‘They threw me bodily into the carriage,’ Albano continued, ‘which then clattered away so fast that I thought my teeth would fall out! There was another man in the carriage, one who hadn’t got out with the other two. Along with the driver, that made four men.’
Crowe glanced over at Sherlock meaningfully. Sherlock knew what he was thinking. Why was Albano making such a thing about the number of men who kidnapped him, unless it was somehow important?
‘This other man in the carriage put his foot on my chest, and said: “You, psychic. You will provide us with your services now, and you will provide them for free. We will not bid for them like common folk. You will put us in contact with the dead, or you yourself will die!”’
‘Did he have an accent?’ Count Shuvalov asked, leaning forward earnestly.
‘He did,’ Albano said, ‘but I cannot place it.’
Shuvalov leaned back again, disappointed.
‘I was terrified, of course,’ Albano continued. He glanced around the table, making eye contact with everyone sitting there. ‘I knew that I had fallen into the clutches of a group of bloodthirsty bandits who would exploit my abilities without cease.’ He made a fist of his right hand and banged it on the table. ‘And that was when I decided to contact my spirit guides and ask for help!’
‘Of course,’ von Webenau murmured.
‘I sent out waves of mental energy on the astral plane, through my psychic crystal.’ He reached up and tapped the false eye. It made a clicking sound. ‘And they responded. Feeling my distress and my terror, they came for me and took me up out of this world and into theirs. My body vanished from the carriage. I can only imagine the looks on the faces of the three men inside. After that…’ He paused dramatically. ‘I cannot speak of what happened here on earth.’
‘The carriage crashed,’ Quintillan said. ‘Perhaps the sudden shift in weight as your corporeal body vanished somehow unbalanced it. We all saw it crash, and we saw four masked men run away. That would be the driver, the two men who snatched you and the third that was inside the carriage.’
Again, Crowe glanced over at Sherlock. The message was plain: Albano and Quintillan between them were making a bit of a play over the number of men that were seen. But why?
‘Did you manage to capture the men?’ Albano asked. ‘Who were they?’
Quintillan shook his head. ‘They ran off. All attempts to trace them have failed.’
‘No doubt the employees of some unscrupulous foreign power that was not invited to this auction,’ Herr Holtzbrinck said grimly.
‘But where did you go?’ von Webenau pressed. ‘What was it like?’
Albano smiled, and shook his head. ‘There are no words to explain. The astral plane is… unlike anything you have ever experienced. Time flows differently there. The spectrum has five more colours than we are used to on earth, and there is no need of conversation as thoughts can be heard directly. Food and drink do not exist — instead, the spirits of the deceased feed off the very light itself, which provides all the nourishment they need. It is a beautiful, remarkable place. I wish I could have stayed, but my rescuers explained that I was needed back on earth. I am, they said, destined to be the bridge that connects the worlds of the living and of the dead. So, when they determined that it was safe for me to return, they placed me back here, with you —’ he threw his arms wide — ‘my friends.’
It was, Sherlock had to admit, a very convincing dramatic performance. If he hadn’t seen the paraphernalia of Albano’s tricks hidden in the man’s room and discovered that the carriage had been sabotaged then he might even have been taken in.
‘But surely you can tell us something of the astral plane?’ von Webenau pressed. ‘Did… did anybody there give you any messages for anybody here?’
‘There were spirits eager to talk to me,’ Albano admitted. ‘I told them to wait — that there would be a chance this evening to hold another séance during which they could talk with those here.’ He looked over at Quintillan. ‘That will be all right, will it not? The séance will still take place?’
‘I fear you may be too fatigued,’ Quintillan said. ‘Perhaps we should let you rest.’
Sherlock was fairly sure that Quintillan was protesting for effect rather than seriously. The sudden protests from Holtzbrinck and von Webenau made Sir Shadrach raise his hands up in surrender. ‘Very well — we will go ahead. If you are sure you are strong enough.’
‘I will have to be,’ Albano said, raising a hand to his head. ‘The spirits on the astral plane are depending on me.’
Dinner, when it arrived, was just as varied and as interesting as it had been the night before. The soup was seafood again, but instead of being cream of turtle it was a lobster bisque. The main course was braised rabbit in a cream and mustard sauce, with asparagus and sea kale as accompaniments. The dessert was a trifle.
All the way through the meal the talk was of what had happened to Ambrose Albano. The Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian representatives pestered him with questions about what it had been like on the astral plane, how he had felt when he was there and whether or not he had met any famous dead spirits. Albano answered the questions with long and convoluted replies, accompanied by much arm-waving and elegant, flowery descriptions, but Sherlock noticed that his answers contained a lot of words and not very many hard facts.
Sir Shadrach Quintillan acted as a kind of orchestrator, Sherlock noticed. He asked some questions, but they were very generic and easy to answer, and his main role seemed to be to interrupt politely if the questioning became too intense or pointed and move the conversation on to something simpler which Albano could illustrate with more ambiguous examples. Sherlock wasn’t sure whether the other guests had spotted Quintillan’s role as distracter-in-chief, but the American representative certainly had. Amyus Crowe’s face was fixed in an interested smile, but his right eyebrow was raised in a manner that Sherlock knew expressed scepticism and irritation. He didn’t ask any questions, which was probably for the best. Sherlock suspected that if he did, then he would try to trick or trap Albano, and with Crowe’s sharp mind it would be a massacre.
Every now and then, during the meal, Sherlock became aware that either Virginia or Niamh was looking at him. He glanced back, but they looked away quickly. He felt awkward; as if there were something going on that he wasn’t quite aware of, a subtext to the glances that was lost on him.
He did notice, in passing, that Count Shuvalov’s manservant was missing. The burly Russian with the severe haircut wasn’t at his usual place, standing behind his master. Instead, one of the castle servants was filling in.
Sherlock did ask Ambrose a few questions of his own. During a lull in the conversation, he said with apparent naivety: ‘Were you scared when you were threatened in the carriage?’
Albano smiled in a kindly way. He had already answered that question during his speech when he had first reappeared, and he obviously thought that Sherlock had forgotten, in his nervousness at replacing his brother at the table. That wasn’t the case: Sherlock remembered the answer very well, but he wanted Albano to repeat it so that he could use the answer as the basis for his real question. It was like bowling an easy ball to a cricket batsman, knowing that he would take the easy course and hit it to where you wanted it to go — where a fielder was waiting to catch it.
‘I was scared,’ Albano said, as if talking to a child. ‘The kidnappers, whoever they were, threatened to kill me if I did not cooperate with them.’
‘But if the astral realm is so warm and peaceful, and so full of interesting spirits,’ Sherlock said innocently, ‘then why be scared to die? Why should anyone be scared of death any more?’
Albano struggled with an answer. Sherlock didn’t take his gaze off Albano’s face, but out of the corner of his eye he could see Amyus Crowe grinning.
‘Death, it is true, is merely a portal between this place and a better one,’ Albano said slowly and eventually, ‘but sometimes the transition can be… painful. There are many ways to die, and I suspect that my kidnappers would have chosen a particularly unpleasant one for me. I confess, with some embarrassment, that although I am not scared of death, I am not keen on being hurt, especially for any length of time.’ He smiled. ‘Does that answer your question, young man?’
‘Do you wish you were still there?’ Sherlock asked innocently in response.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If the astral plane is so welcoming and comfortable, do you wish you had stayed there?’
Albano frowned. ‘Well, to an extent, yes, I suppose I do. Existence there is so much more peaceful than it is here.’ His voice took on a more dramatic tone, as he started slipping into what Sherlock recognized as a standard answer which he had used several times, with variation. ‘There is no pain, no unhappiness. There is only… peace and great joy.’
‘Then why did you come back?’ Sherlock asked simply.
‘I… I still had work to do here.’ Albano looked as if he wished he were somewhere else. ‘And, of course, I could feel the mental call from the gentlemen here, who wished me to return so that I could bring them the glad tidings from the Other Side. Does that… does that answer your question?’
‘It does, thank you,’ Sherlock said. Before Albano could say anything more, he added: ‘Do bad people go to the astral plane?’
‘What?’ Albano’s face was creased in confusion.
‘Well, you said that the astral plane was a warm and peaceful place filled with friendly spirits, but there have been a lot of evil people in history. Are they on the astral plane too, because you haven’t mentioned them? If they are there, are they still evil? If your kidnappers had been killed in the carriage crash, instead of escaping, would they have ended up on the astral plane with you? What would you have talked about?’
Albano’s silence this time was longer than before. Quintillan tried to interrupt, but Amyus Crowe raised a hand to stop him.
‘It’s a good question,’ Crowe said, ‘and I’d like to hear the answer.’
‘There are many… ah, degrees, or… or levels… of existence in the astral plane,’ Albano said slowly. ‘Which level you end up in depends on your deeds during life.’
‘So it’s like heaven and hell,’ Virginia interrupted from further down the table. ‘Just like we get taught in church.’
‘It’s not like heaven and hell at all,’ Albano snapped. ‘Those are absolute and opposite things. The astral plane is more nuanced than that, more subtle. The concepts taught by the Christian church need to be updated to reflect the reality.’
It would have been easier, Sherlock thought, if he’d just said that he didn’t know. He’s got himself into a hole now.
‘So there’s no concept of punishment for sin in the astral plane?’ Herr Holtzbrinck asked, confused. ‘That seems unreasonable and unfair.’
‘No,’ Albano said, and then quickly added, ‘Well, yes, but it is not punishment as we on earth would understand it…’
Sherlock risked a glance at Amyus Crowe. He nodded at Sherlock, and made a small clapping motion with his hands.
‘You mentioned colours that the astral realm has which we do not,’ Quintillan interrupted. ‘Is there any way you can describe these new colours to us?’
‘Ah,’ Albano said, obviously relieved to have been rescued from a difficult conversation. ‘Yes, there is, for instance, a new colour located between green and blue which we have no word for and no conception of, but which the spirits of the astral plane call elichori. Staring at that colour can bring feelings of intense focus and concentration…’
The conversation went on like that for a while, and Sherlock didn’t feel any great desire to interrupt again. He had already shown, to his own satisfaction, that Albano was making it all up as he went along, and had no real coherent vision of the astral plane.
After plates of cheese and biscuits had been served, followed by small cups of coffee, Quintillan said to Albano, ‘My friend, I have no wish to put you under any undue stress, given the terrible events that have befallen you, but do you feel strong enough to take part in a small séance? These gentlemen have travelled a great distance to see you at work, and it would be a shame to deny them.’
Von Webenau and Holtzbrinck were nodding like eager puppies at this. Count Shuvalov was more restrained, sitting back in his chair casually, but he was nodding slightly in agreement. Amyus Crowe glanced at Sherlock and shrugged as if to say: Why not? Let’s let him demonstrate his tricks.
Albano took a deep breath. ‘This excellent dinner has helped to relax me,’ he said. ‘And the fact that I was only recently in the astral plane means that I still feel a strong connection to it. I believe I might be able to manifest a few spirit appearances, but I cannot promise anything. My passage there and back has stirred up the psychic currents, and the spirits may not have the strength to make the journey across.’
Which was, Sherlock thought, a great excuse if the séance was a failure: it sounded mysterious and convincing, but it meant absolutely nothing.
As he stood up, Sherlock surreptitiously removed a knife from the table and slipped it into his sleeve. The knife was made of silver, and was heavy. He could feel it pulling at the material. If knocked against the table in the room where the séance was going to be held it would make a loud noise, and Sherlock had a suspicion that he might need to do that, if only to throw Albano off his game.
The seven men sitting around the table — including Sherlock — made their way to the drawing room where the séance had taken place the night before. Niamh Quintillan attempted to appeal to her father to let her watch, but he said no. ‘You and Miss Crowe go to the sitting room. I’m sure you have a great deal to talk about.’
Looking at the scowl on Virginia’s face, Sherlock wasn’t so sure, but he said nothing.
The arrangements were exactly the same as the previous night. They all sat around the table which was still marked with letters, numbers and the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, and the blank slate was set on the table in front of Albano. The psychic made a big thing of asking someone — Amyus Crowe this time, given that he had not been present the night before — to examine the slate and the table to ensure that there were no tricks, no hidden messages, no extra slates, but Sherlock was sure that he would already have hidden the white thimble with the chalk tip inside his jacket, held by the elastic cord so that it could be quickly pulled back when he had finished with it.
Outside the window, lightning flashed again, outlining the curtains with white light. Moments later, Sherlock heard thunder once more. It was, he thought, a perfect backdrop to a séance. Albano and Quintillan couldn’t have arranged for anything better if they had tried.
Quintillan glanced around the table. ‘Gentlemen, are we all ready?’
Everyone nodded.
Albano placed his hands on the table, palms down, and threw his head back. ‘Is there anybody there?’ he called. ‘Spirits of the astral plane, I ask again: is there anybody there? Does anybody have a message for someone around this table? If you can, knock once for “Yes” and twice for “No”.’
Nothing happened. The tension in the room was so tangible that it was, Sherlock thought, almost like a form of ectoplasm in its own right.
He wondered briefly if the spirit of the dead servant — Máire — might appear and answer questions about where she had died and why her body had been moved, but that was perhaps too much to hope for. Nothing was that convenient.
‘I ask again: is there anybody there? Does any spirit have the strength and the will to cross the astral currents to be with us here tonight?’
Again, for a long moment, there was nothing, and then a loud bang echoed around the room. Von Webenau jumped in his seat.
‘Do you have a message?’
Another bang.
‘Do you wish to spell the message out using the letters, numbers and words around this table?’
Bang! Bang!
Now that he was aware that the séance was entirely trickery, Sherlock wondered how the knocking was being done. It had to be something simple, like Albano, or possibly Quintillan, hitting their shoe against one of the legs of the table. Whoever it was might even have a wooden reinforcement on their sole to make the sound louder.
‘Is this the spirit known as Invictus?’
Bang!
‘Can you write the message for us on this slate?’ Albano asked, touching the slate in front of him.
Bang!
Albano picked the slate up in both hands and held it up so that it was clear there was no message on it. He turned it over so that everyone could see both sides, and then clutched it to his chest with both hands. He rocked forward and backwards a few times, still holding the slate, but Sherlock noticed that as he rocked he moved the slate further and further down, until it was beneath the level of the table, relying on the movement of his body to keep everyone’s attention. Sherlock watched his upper arms carefully, and spotted the moment when Albano let go of the slate with his right hand, slipped the thimble on his index finger beneath the table and blindly scribbled a quick message.
The psychic threw his head backwards as if in some kind of trance state or fit, but Sherlock noticed that he used the movement to distract attention from the fact that he had brought the slate up from beneath the table again. It wasn’t that he was trying to convince the watchers that the slate had always been above the level of the table — he had already gone to some efforts to show them that there were no tricks or props beneath the table — but it was more, Sherlock assumed, that he didn’t want them thinking too much about where the slate was or what was happening to it. Albano held the slate up, facing the watchers. ‘Is there a message?’ he asked.
That was a nice touch, Sherlock decided. Of course there was a message — he had written it himself — but asking the question made it sound to the watchers as if he were being taken by surprise.
‘Yes,’ von Webenau exclaimed.
‘Please, read it out.’
‘Someone around this table,’ von Webenau read slowly, ‘does not believe! ’
The chalk message on the slate was perfectly legible — at least, to Sherlock — but having it read out was a touch more dramatic.
Albano glanced around the table. ‘Is it true?’ he asked, shocked. ‘Is there someone here who does not believe? It is not an easy thing for the spirits of the dead to pierce the veil between the worlds. If they thought their time was being wasted, they might decide to stop.’
Von Webenau and Holtzbrinck protested their belief loudly; Shuvalov, Crowe and Sherlock protested in slightly less voluble terms. Albano nodded. ‘Very well.’ He raised his voice. ‘O spirit, we beseech you, please continue to communicate with us. Is there any other message — perhaps for someone specific?’
Bang! The table vibrated, knocking the wooden plaque sideways from where it rested in the centre.
Albano went through the same routine as before, rocking back and forth and holding the slate beneath the table. This time Sherlock knew that he was wiping the first chalk message away with the side of his white gloves before writing a new one.
When he brought the slate up from beneath the table, the chalk writing said: I have a message from the wife of one present.
Sherlock’s eyes were drawn to Amyus Crowe. He knew that Crowe’s wife had died on the ship that had brought the family from America to England. Crowe rarely talked about his wife, and Sherlock wondered whether the man would react now.
Crowe’s jaw was clenched tight. Sherlock could see the muscles tense beneath his cheeks. He said nothing.
‘Is there someone here who has lost their beloved wife?’ Albano asked. ‘If so, rest assured that she is happy and well.’
Sherlock looked around the table. Shuvalov, he knew, was unmarried. Mycroft had mentioned it at some time in the past. Von Webenau and Holtzbrinck he wasn’t sure about, but judging by the expectant looks on their faces they were both waiting for someone else to come forward. Quintillan had lost his wife, of course, but he was part of the plot, not a victim of it: none of the foreign representatives would be impressed by a message from a psychic to the man who was organizing the séance. No, this had to be aimed at Amyus Crowe, and Sherlock felt a spark of anger fan into flame within his chest. This was a step beyond trickery and into abuse. Quintillan and Albano must have researched each of the international representatives before they arrived, looking in particular for any relatives or friends who had died. They had played on Holtzbrinck’s dead brother the night before, and now they were using Crowe’s dead wife. There would, if Crowe came forward and accepted the communication, be some meaningless message about her being happy, and urging him not to grieve for her. For some this might be a comfort, but Crowe would know that he was being tricked, and the anger he would feel might cause him to do something that, as a representative of his government, he might later regret.
‘Sir Shadrach,’ Sherlock whispered, looking across the table at the man in the bath chair. ‘Is it possible that the message is for you?’ He knew that it wasn’t, but he wanted to give Crowe the chance to calm himself down.
Quintillan’s gaze flickered to Albano and then back to Sherlock. He obviously didn’t want to accept the message himself — he wanted Crowe to accept it — but theoretically it could have been for him.
‘Is the message for Sir Shadrach?’ Albano asked the air above the table, coming to Quintillan’s rescue.
Bang! Bang!
‘Then there must be someone else here who has lost their beloved companion,’ Albano persisted. He glanced around the table, not letting his gaze fix on Crowe, as that would have given away the fact that he knew very well who was being targeted, but making sure that he at least glanced at Crowe on the way. It was a battle of wills between the two men; one that Sherlock knew he had to interrupt, otherwise there might be violence. Crowe was not going to come forward and admit that his wife was dead. He would not let her memory be defiled by trickery and deceit.
‘Is the message for von Webenau?’ Albano continued.
Bang! Bang!
Sherlock knew what was going to happen. Albano was going to go around the table. Given that he was making the knocking sound himself, he would be able to choose the man he wanted — Amyus Crowe — and Crowe would either have to accept that he was going to be the victim of their trickery or he was going to have to protest.
Sherlock slipped the knife — the one he had taken from the dinner table — from his sleeve. The weight rested in the palm of his hand beneath the table. He turned it over so he was holding the blade, and the handle — the heaviest part — was pointing up.
‘Is the message for Mr Crowe?’ Albano asked, deliberately not looking at Crowe.
Before Albano’s foot could hit the table leg, or whatever he was doing to make the noise, Sherlock hit the handle of the knife hard against the underside of the table, twice.
Bang! Bang!
The noise wasn’t quite the same as the one Albano had been making, but it was near enough. Most of the men around the table took it in their stride, but Ambrose Albano and Sir Shadrach Quintillan twitched. They knew that it wasn’t Albano making that noise. More than that, they knew their plan to get Crowe to accept a fake message from his dead wife was now finished. The problem was that they couldn’t say that this knocking was a fake without admitting that they had been doing the knocking up to now.
Albano’s mouth twisted in anger — a momentary expression that only Sherlock, and probably Crowe, noticed. His gaze flickered around the table, trying to spot who it was that had made the unexpected noise. One by one he asked a succession of spirits if they had a message for the rest of the men — Herr Holtzbrinck, Shuvalov, von Webenau, Sherlock himself and even the absent Mycroft — but his heart obviously wasn’t in it and the repeated double-knocking was perfunctory. When he had exhausted all the possible candidates, he announced: ‘I fear that the spirits must have become confused by the turbulence of the psychic currents. The message they hold must be for another person, somewhere else. Never mind. We shall press on.’
Sherlock glanced briefly across at Amyus Crowe. His friend and mentor’s face was white and strained, his lips tight with anger, but he nodded his gratitude towards Sherlock.
‘I sense that no more messages will be forthcoming tonight,’ Albano continued testily, ‘but if we are fortunate then one of the spirits may feel able to manifest itself directly in front of us. Please, everyone, concentrate on making the spirits feel welcome here. Ask them, in your minds and your hearts, to appear for us. Suppress any disbelief in your hearts.’
He bent forward and raised his hands to his face. This time, knowing what was to come, Sherlock realized that he was using the theatrical gesture to mask moving something from his hand to his mouth — almost certainly a tightly wadded pill of thin material from his hidden box, the one that he would then produce as ectoplasm — but he couldn’t spot the actual moment of transfer.
Albano now waved his hands in the air. Sherlock looked closely at him, and saw that his right cheek was slightly swollen. Something was in his mouth that hadn’t been there before.
‘I can feel them!’ he cried, his voice slightly muffled by the object in his mouth. ‘They come!’
His hands were making clutching motions at the air, and Sherlock realized that he was feeling for very fine hooked threads that must be hanging from the ceiling and which would be used to pull the material into the shape of a shroud, or a spirit. In the darkness of the room, they would be invisible. The night before, his gestures had looked reasonable, if exaggerated, but now that Sherlock knew what the man was doing he couldn’t see how he could have been fooled.
Albano’s grasping hands must have found the hooks at the ends of the threads, because he pulled his hands back towards his mouth and coughed convulsively — once, twice — to expel the material and surreptitiously attach the threads to it. Jerking his head back, he slowly brought his hands away from his mouth again. Between them, a ghostly white shape began to expand.
Gasps filled the darkness as the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German representatives reacted to the appearance of the spiritual form.
The hooks and threads pulled the material into a rough approximation of a shrouded human form. Inside the shroud, a face swam into existence. Last night it had been a young girl’s; tonight it was an old woman’s, lined and creased. Sherlock glanced around, trying to place where the light projector had to be, but he couldn’t see it. The lens must be shrouded somehow, so that only the person directly in front of it — Albano — would be able to see it, but the expanding material provided a perfect screen for the illusion.
Sherlock could still feel the anger in his chest that had been there since Albano had tried to force Amyus Crowe to accept a fake message from his dead wife. He couldn’t sit there and let this farce go on any more. His brother would almost certainly have let it continue, but Sherlock felt cheapened by it.
‘Stop!’ he cried, and stood up.