Page 41 of Mesmerized

Lady St. Leger took up the task of pouring the cups of tea, saying, “I don’t think we’ll wait for the others. They should be here soon. Lady Olivia? Sugar, I believe?”

“Yes, thank you.” Olivia accepted the cup gratefully and took a sip, looking over the array of cakes and breads.

Amid the clatter of forks and plates and the bits of conversation, she did not at first notice the odd sound. It was Belinda who paused, cocking her head to one side and said, “What is that noise?”

“What, dear?” Lady St. Leger looked up.

Madame Valenskaya blinked, glancing around the room, and Olivia replaced her cup in her saucer, listening.

“That funny little sound. Almost like a kitten mewling.”

“Or a person crying,” Olivia countered. She leaned forward, and the noise became a little louder.

“Oh, dear.” Lady St. Leger looked concerned. “Someone crying? But who? Where?” She turned to look around the room, frowning. “Perhaps it is one of the maids in the hall.”

Olivia put down her saucer on the table and got up to go to the doors into the hall. She looked up and down the hallway, seeing no one, and came back inside, shaking her head. “There is no one there. And I cannot hear it in the hall.”

The crying was definitely louder now. The four women were hushed, listening.

“It sounds like a child! But where is she?” Lady St. Leger said, frowning. “It sounds as if—as if she is here.”

The sobbing continued, hanging eerily on the air, disembodied and forlorn. Madame Valenskaya’s voice sounded in the hush, a low, sad whisper. “A lonely soul. She is lost...lost.”

Lady St. Leger gave a visible shiver, her face turning even paler. “It is a spirit?”

The Russian woman nodded solemnly. “The dead mourn.”

Olivia ignored the goose bumps that arose on her arms at the woman’s words. “Nonsense,” she said stoutly. “It is a person crying right here and now.”

She walked around the room and quickly realized that as she moved away from the group the noise became quieter and as she returned, it grew stronger. She stepped past the tea table and Belinda. The sound was loudest here, by the fireplace.

“The fireplace!” she cried suddenly. “It must be coming through the fireplace.”

She whirled and ran from the room.

Chapter Eight

OLIVIA PAUSED OUTSIDE in the hall, casting a glance at the stairs in one direction, which led down in grand sweeping fashion, then at the less grand staircase at the other end of the hall, leading up. Belinda came hurrying out of the room after her, and Olivia swung toward her.

“What’s above the sitting room?”

Belinda hesitated, thinking, then said, “The nursery, I think.”

“And below?”

“The small ballroom.”

“Up,” Olivia decided. On instinct, it seemed more likely to her that someone would use the unoccupied nursery to perpetrate their fraud than a large, open public room where a servant might walk by at any moment.

She took off down the hall and up the stairs, lifting her skirts to run better. Belinda stayed on her heels. They reached the nursery and looked in. There was no one in the large, central schoolroom. Olivia went inside and peered into each of the small bedrooms that opened off it, with Belinda trailing after her. She came back into the central room, frowning. At that moment the weeping sound came again, faint but distinct. Olivia darted into the hall. The sound, she thought, came from the other end of the hall.

She moved lightly and quickly. The sound was becoming louder. Then it stopped, and Olivia broke into a run. The hall was long and narrow and low-ceilinged, with doors opening off either side. It was here that the servants slept, and during the day there was no one up here. Olivia’s and Belinda’s footsteps echoed hollowly on the wood floor. There was no muffling carpet runner here.

Tucked away under the eaves of the house, there were no windows except one at the end of the hall, so it was much darker than it had been on the floors below. The sound came again, a mournful weeping, echoing through the silent gloomy hall. Olivia’s skin prickled. Belinda shot her an anxious glance, but she stayed with her as Olivia pressed onward, following the distant crying.

The top floor was a warren of rooms and hallways, and they twisted and turned through the cramped corridors. At one point they reached a closed door at the end of the hall, and they hesitated. Then the weeping came faintly from behind the door, and Olivia pulled it open. It led into yet another hall.

“We must be in the old wing of the house,” Belinda whispered, intimidated by the profound hush of the corridor in front of them. “Well, it’s not actually older, of course. The main wing is the oldest, really, but when they renovated years ago, they only did the main wing. This part of the house is closed off and never used.”