The Medium's Truth

The drawing room at 13 Belgrave Square was arranged with meticulous precision. Heavy velvet drapes blocked every trace of natural light. Black crepe shrouded the mirrors—ostensibly to prevent spirits from becoming confused by their reflections, but actually to eliminate any possibility of detecting my assistant's movements. The round mahogany table stood in the center, its surface polished to an obsidian gleam, surrounded by seven chairs upholstered in funeral black.

I adjusted the final candelabra, ensuring the flames would cast precisely the right shadows, then turned to inspect myself in the one uncovered mirror I kept hidden behind a Japanese screen. The woman looking back at me was a masterpiece of theatrical design: Marguerite Vale, London's most sought-after spiritualist medium, draped in layers of midnight silk and jet beading, my dark hair arranged in elaborate coils, my face painted with just enough white powder to suggest otherworldly pallor without crossing into the grotesque.

I looked exactly like what I was: a fraud. An exceptionally talented, extraordinarily profitable fraud.

"They've arrived, Miss Vale." My assistant Clara appeared in the doorway, her plain face flushed with excitement. "Lady Pemberton brought her entire party. And there's someone new—a gentleman. Very handsome, very skeptical-looking."

"Skeptics are my favorite audience," I said, adjusting my shawl. "They're so desperate to prove me wrong that they interpret every coincidence as confirmation of my powers. How much did Lady Pemberton pay for tonight's séance?"

"Fifty pounds, miss. Plus the usual fee for each additional guest."

I nodded, calculating. At this rate, I would have enough saved within two years to leave London entirely, to reinvent myself somewhere far from the spiritualist circuit. Perhaps Paris. Perhaps America. Somewhere I could finally stop performing grief for wealthy fools.

Not that I was entirely without sympathy for my clients. Most of them were genuinely suffering, desperate to contact deceased loved ones, hungry for any reassurance that death was not absolute annihilation. I understood that hunger. My own mother had died when I was sixteen, leaving me alone in a world that had no interest in poor orphaned girls with no prospects. I had learned quickly that the living would pay handsomely for elaborate lies about the dead.

"Show them in," I instructed Clara. "And remember—you're my cousin Millicent tonight, recently arrived from Hampshire, subject to mysterious fainting spells during which the spirits speak through you."

"Yes, miss." Clara bobbed a curtsy and disappeared.

I settled myself at the head of the table, arranging my features into an expression of serene spiritual openness. The performance was about to begin.

Lady Pemberton entered first, her conside...