A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(85)

“By preying upon the hopes and fears of the grieving?” Stoker demanded.

She canted her head. “I will not justify myself to you. We all live in a man’s world, do we not? And you are a man.”

“Are you saying that I cannot understand your choices?” he said, dropping the lid of the trunk with a crash.

“No. I am saying that Miss Speedwell will understand them better. Tell me,” she said, turning to me, her eyes wide in the lamplight, “was there ever a time when you worried about keeping the wolf from the door? You earn your bread. Was there ever a day when you were down to your last crust?”

“Yes,” I told her. Stoker’s head snapped up, but I kept my eyes fixed upon Helen Romilly’s. She stroked her cat, running one long white hand down the ebony fur over and over again. “More than once, if I am honest.”

“Then you know,” she said simply. “You know what it means to have to think about what you will and will not do in order to stay alive.”

“I, too, have been poor—” Stoker began.

She cut him off with a sharp laugh, causing the cat to stir. “Until you have been forced to contemplate selling your body, you have not been poor. Do not compare your situation to ours,” she instructed. She turned those lamplike eyes to me once more. “Imagine how much greater the consequences of that choice when you have not only yourself to think of but your child as well. I have led an exhausting life, Miss Speedwell. It has been my misfortune to love feckless men, first my husband and now my son. And make no mistake, I love them truly. But it is a tiring thing to be the person upon whom all things depend. If a meal was to find its way to the table, I had to provide the coin. The same with the roof over our heads and the shoes upon our feet. I knew what I was doing when I married Lucian. He made no pretense at being a practical man, but I daresay you are woman of the world enough to understand my motivation there,” she hazarded with a glance towards Stoker.

“I might understand the attraction but not the compulsion to marry it,” I replied.

“Oh, we should have been friends under other circumstances!” she exclaimed.

“Can we not be friends now?” I asked.

“Not so long as you suspect my son of murder,” she answered. She gathered Stoker in with a look. “I assure you both that I know his faults better than he does. I was cataloging them in his father’s character before he was born. You have never seen two men cut so closely from the same cloth. But their impracticality, their scenes and dramatics, are nothing more substantial than that bit of muslin in your hands. Caspian has made a hobby of throwing tantrums simply because he thinks it makes him interesting. He might have taken up hunting or the glockenspiel, but he does this instead. There is, beneath it all, not a malicious atom in his person.”

I would not quarrel with a devoted mother’s assessment of her child. I tried a different tack instead. “Surely Malcolm would have helped if he had known there were difficulties with money,” I ventured.

“Malcolm! Bless you, he was unable to help himself. When Rosamund disappeared, he fairly went out of his mind. The letters I sent went unanswered for months. By the time he was able to respond, I had already chosen. I did not wish to sell my body, so I sold my soul.”

“That is when you became Madame Helena?” I asked.

“There was an annuity that Lucian had secured for us from the Romilly estate, but he left debts as well, heavy ones. I have struggled to pay them. In the end, I thought it best to bring Caspian here to see his uncle, to remind Malcolm that he had a ready-made heir in his brother’s son.”

“And perhaps to feel guilty enough about cutting Caspian out via his marriage that he might make him a separate allowance?” I ventured.

She shrugged. “Why not? It was possible. If nothing else, it meant a few months of room and board I did not have to pay. So I wrote and Malcolm invited us for the summer. We stayed through the wedding and when Rosamund disappeared, it was clear there would be no additional money for us. Malcolm asked us to go. In London, it became apparent that we could not continue on as we had been. I considered every possible method by which I might assuage our financial difficulties. In desperation, I went to a medium and attempted to contact Lucian. I’ll admit I was influenced by the effects of the last of Lucian’s excellent wine cellar. But I had my wits about me. I knew the woman for a fraud within the first two minutes. I was never going to hear from Lucian, but as I left, it occurred to me that I had discovered an answer after all. I was more presentable and better spoken than that charlatan, and I had a better way with people. I needed only a few props and a new persona. Thus, Madame Helena was born,” she finished with a flourish.

“Why have you come now?” Stoker asked.

Her smile was mirthless. “Because I may have kept the wolf from the door but I can still hear him howling. With Rosamund gone, Malcolm’s only heir is Caspian. He needed reminding of that. If he wanted to invite me here to conjure her spirit, I was too happy to play along.”

“You have never actually been witness to a ghost?” I asked.

Her expression shuttered and her hand stilled on the cat. “Only once.”

“Rosamund’s,” Stoker said gently.

“I don’t know what happened. I began the séance as I always do, invoking the spirits. And then things began that I cannot explain.”