The Truth About Verity Sparks Read online

  Mrs Morcom’s studio was a little room off the conservatory. In it was a large desk, another easel, and shelves from floor to ceiling, full of books and jars of brushes and tablets of paint and dried plants and shells and tangles of snakeskins and bones and birds’ nests and catkins and goodness knows what else. I bet the housemaids cursed when it came to dusting. The portfolio – which was a big cardboard folder – was where she said, on the desk.

  “Open it, my dear,” she said as I came back out into the conservatory. “You’ll like that lot. They’re all flowers.”

  “Mrs Morcom, they’re beautiful.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “What’s that one, ma’am?” I asked, pointing.

  “A waterlily.”

  “And that one?”

  “A magnolia. Magnolia campbellii. I painted that in the foothill of the Himalayas, in India. And the waterlily was done in India too.”

  India! I wondered for a second if Mrs Morcom was a missionary, but somehow she didn’t seem the type.

  “Aunt is a botanical illustrator,” explained Judith. “That was why she was in India. She has travelled all over the world drawing and painting plants.”

  “She has had several books published,” said SP. “And there is a gallery dedicated to her works in Kew Gardens.”

  That meant nothing much to me until SP explained that all the most famous plant scientists in the world came to study at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew.

  “Aunt Almeria is a very famous lady,” added SP.

  “Piffle,” she said. “I’d rather be rich than famous, but I haven’t done so badly. After all, it is unusual for a woman to earn her own living as I do.”

  “Is it?” I said, surprised. “I know lots. Why, there’s Madame and Miss Musquash and …” I trailed off. They were all looking at me. Had I said something wrong?

  Mrs Morcom was nodding her head. “It is unusual for ladies, Verity dear. It seems that the more wealth and respectability a woman has, the less independence she is allowed. I count myself very lucky. Ah, Etty. What is it?”

  Etty had a message for SP. “Mr Opie is waiting for you, sir.”

  “Opie? Capital.” SP jumped up. “Thank you, Etty. You’ll excuse me, Aunt?”

  “Why don’t you bring him in here? I like the boy. I’d like to see him again.”

  Judith made a funny noise in her throat, halfway between a cough and a sob.

  “Now, Judith,” Mrs Morcom said in a very gentle voice. “Steady, my dear.”

  “I’ll go and see him in the study, Aunt.” SP got up to go, but Judith rushed out of the room in front of him. That was the second time she’d left the room rather than meet Mr Opie. Why didn’t she like him?

  “Oh, dear.” Mrs Morcom chewed the end of her paintbrush, turning her lips bright green. “Oh, dear. That was stupid of me.” She looked at me and sighed. “I suppose she has gone to her room and is crying her eyes out.”

  “Why, ma’am?”

  “Why? Because Judith is breaking her heart over Mr Opie, that’s why.”

  “I see.” I said. A broken heart. Now Judith’s behaviour to Mr Opie made sense.

  “Daniel Opie is not only extremely handsome,” she said. “He’s also extremely nice.” She sighed again. “He and Judith are made for each other, but he’s got an over-developed sense of honour, the silly boy, and says it can never be. Never is a long, long time, don’t you think?”

  I couldn’t disagree with that.

  “Daniel’s father was an attorney in some mill town up in the North. He was a bright boy, but there wasn’t the money to put him through university. Still, he got a position as an articled clerk with a firm of lawyers in Frogmouth Court. Rumbelow and Budd, they were called. One day young Mr Budd asked Daniel to get a letter from a file. Which he did. Well, it turned out that Mr Budd lost it, there was no copy made, it resulted in the loss of a case, and Mr Budd put the blame on Daniel. He was disgraced, dismissed and, without any money, was soon out on the streets without food or shelter. When SP found him, over a year ago, he was about to jump into the river and end it all.”

  “SP saved him?”

  “Grabbed him by the arm, wrestled him to the ground and talked sense into the young fool. SP recognised him, you see. He and the Professor had done a little work for Rumbelow and Budd, and he’d noticed young Daniel. It was a very lucky thing.”

  I knew about people jumping in the river. From Cook, of course. If you didn’t drown, then you caught typhoid and died anyway.

  “Is … is the Professor against it, then?” I asked.

  “No, not really. It’s Daniel himself; he declares he isn’t fit to black her boots and so on and so forth, like the hero of some rubbishy novel, and so that’s why Judith’s breaking her heart upstairs. He’ll get over it, though,” she added confidently.

  “Over Judith?”

  “No, over the high morals.” She chuckled. “High morals are such a bore, dear. Never had much time for them myself.” She mixed another splodge of green, and I went back to the portfolio.

  I must have been there ten minutes or more. Silk flowers on bonnets was all the botany I knew, so I’d never seen the likes of these. There was one like little velvety claws, and another like a bright red bottlebrush. I peered closer at the paper. How clever Mrs Morcom was. All those dozens and dozens of fine brushstrokes.

  Suddenly, my fingers began to itch, and just as suddenly they stopped. But instead of the paper and the bottlebrush flower there was a blinding light, and a thin high piping sound. Something slid past my feet, and then there was blackness, and misery, and the most awful pain in my heart. And I was sitting on the floor, with Mrs Morcom holding a glass to my lips. The water was green from Mrs Morcom’s paintbrush, and I shook my head.

  “I’m … I’m not sick, ma’am. It’s just … when I looked at that picture …”

  “You mean this one? The bottlebrush?”

  “Yes. I saw … I saw something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” Tears began running down my face. I couldn’t help it.

  “What?” Mrs Morcom shook me. “What?”

  “I think it was a snake, ma’am.”

  Mrs Morcom stepped back and sat heavily on her stool. “It was a snake that killed him,” she said in a small, calm voice.

  9

  A VISIT TO MISS LILLINGSWORTH

  “I haven’t thought about Charles’s death for a long time,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry …” I faltered.

  “No, no,” she said. “You have nothing to apologise for.”

  “Should I – do you want – shall I ring for tea?”

  “Do you want tea? After all, you’re the one who saw …”

  I shook my head.

  “I would like to tell you about it, Verity. Can you bear it?”

  “If you can, ma’am, I can.”

  “Charles and I had only been married six months, and we were on our first overseas trip. A sort of honeymoon, if a forty-year-old spinster can be allowed such romantic notions. We were staying with friends on Mount Macedon. That’s in Victoria, my dear, in Australia.” She paused, gathering her thoughts, and I thought her face seemed very old all of a sudden. “I had gone out sketching, and Charles was with me. I painted that bottlebrush – Callistemon citrinus is its botanical name – and then … then we started walking back to the house. Charles stumbled over a stick. Or I thought it was a stick. When it went darting away, I realised it was a snake. It had bitten him on the leg and on the hand. He lost consciousness soon after, and died later that evening.” She sat staring at me for a while, and then asked, “What exactly did you see, Verity?”

  “I saw brightness. I heard a noise too – a kind of shrill piping.”

  “Cicadas,” she said. “They are insects.” She hesitated and then asked, almost shyly, “Did you see him? Did you see Charles?”

  “No. Just the snake.” I didn’t tell her about the blackness and the misery.
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br />   She sat without speaking for a while, and then said, “My brother told me that you were a very special child. He was right. I am afraid for you, my dear.” Mrs Morcom took my hand in hers. “Don’t tell my brother, Verity. He will want to investigate and … I believe some things are meant to stay hidden.” She held my hand for a few seconds and then let it go. “I’m very tired. I need to rest now.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Do you want me to help you up to your room?”

  “No, dear. I’ll lie down on the sofa.”

  When I looked back, she was sitting on her stool, very still, looking straight ahead at her painting. Antony and Cleopatra, in their case beside her, had rat-sized lumps halfway down.

  At the side of the house there was a courtyard with an ivy-covered wall, a fish pond and a stone seat, where no one ever seemed to go. After leaving Mrs Morcom, that’s where I headed. I needed to be on my own and think.

  It was a fine day, but even sitting in the sunshine on the sun-warmed bench I felt cold. To tell the truth, I was scared. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I didn’t want it to happen again. If only I could go back to being an ordinary milliner’s apprentice. But I knew I couldn’t. During these last months at Mulberry Hill, what with the lessons, the experiments and the Confidential Inquiries, I knew that my life had changed forever.

  Mrs Morcom had said I was a very special child. Well, I had a special gift; there was no getting away from it. But surely finding lost things was special enough. It made me feel cheerful and useful and good about myself. This was awful. I’d seen something from another time, another place, a place half a world away. But what worried me most was that I’d seen it through someone else’s eyes. Dead eyes. What if … what if it happened all the time? Stands to reason half the things you touch or handle every day have been in a dead person’s hands. I suddenly felt weak and wobbly.

  “Verity! Verity, are you unwell?” I opened my eyes to find SP right in front of me. “What’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I think I have,” I said.

  He sat beside me on the bench. “What do you mean?”

  “I was looking at one of Mrs Morcom’s pictures, and it came to me – in my mind’s eye – the snake and her husband …”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Playing with cards and tokens was fine. Finding things – it’s harmless, like a game. But this! Verity, please don’t tell Father–”

  “Don’t tell Father what?” This quiet little spot where no one ever came had turned out as busy as Piccadilly Circus. Now the Professor was there, on the other side of the wall, peering at us through the ivy. He walked through the gate and into the courtyard. “What is it, Verity, that you’re not to tell me?”

  SP gave a big sigh. “Go on, Verity,” he said. So I did.

  “Ah, poor Charles.” The Professor sighed very deeply. “Poor, poor Charles.”

  “Father,” said SP, coming to stand behind the Professor and putting his hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s all right, my boy. The way forward is to observe,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself. “To study and observe, to formulate our hypotheses, to test them against our observations, and then to devise carefully considered experiments.”

  Experiments? That was why Mrs Morcom didn’t want him to know. Like SP said, cards and lost toasting forks were all very well, but this was playing with things that oughtn’t to be played with.

  “No experiments, Father,” said SP, giving me a reassuring glance. “Verity was frightened.”

  “Frightened? Yes, I suppose she would be,” he said absent-mindedly. Then he brightened up. “Verity, what you have just experienced is called Psychometry. From the Greek psyche – spirit or soul – and metron, measure. The term was coined by Joseph Buchanan about thirty years ago. He believed that all objects give off vibrations, and the psychic individual acts as a kind of mental sponge.”

  “Father, please stop.Verity doesn’t want to be a sponge. Can’t you see that she is distressed?”

  The Professor looked at me properly. “I’m so sorry, Verity.” He thought for a few seconds, and then his face brightened again. “Maria!” he cried. “I shall take you to see Maria Lillingsworth.”

  “Mr and Mrs Rhodes, Father,” SP reminded him. “We are calling there to discuss their case at four.”

  “They’re on the way, aren’t they? Why, that’s splendid. We can see Maria afterwards. I’ll send her a note straightaway.” He rubbed his hands together, beaming and nodding like his old self. “What d’you think, SP?”

  “If you say so, Father,” he said, but I could tell that he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy at all.

  I dozed a little in the carriage on the way to Carisbrook Grove, and then when the Professor and SP went in to the house (I wasn’t to come in, they said, for the Rhodes were a very old-fashioned couple, and might take exception to a female taking part in the investigation), I dozed a little more. It was a warm afternoon, and it was nice to lay against the padded leather seat. Before I knew it, I wasn’t just dozing, I was asleep.

  I was asleep, and watching my mother. She was stitching something. In my dream, I moved closer, and saw that it was white and soft. White velvet. Swags and folds of white velvet lay on her lap like snow. There was a tangle of white fur trimming on the table beside her, and a fur hat too. Madame didn’t make that sort (it was a furrier’s job) but they were all the mode last winter. À la Russe, they were called. Russian hats. Ma’s fingers were moving like lightning, and she was frowning with concentration, just the way I remembered. Suddenly, she looked up from her sewing and smiled.

  “Verity?”

  Ma vanished, and I was back in the carriage outside Mr and Mrs Rhodes’s house. I sat up straight and tried to tidy myself up. I must have pulled at my clothes in my sleep, for my top button was undone and the lucky piece was hanging out.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, my dear. We have finished with the Rhodes.”

  “I wish we never started,” muttered SP.

  “Quite so, my boy. And now it’s time to go and see Maria.”

  Miss Lillingsworth’s house was less than ten minutes away, but as I knew from my days delivering hats, streets can be close together and yet far apart in London. Carisbrook Grove was toffee-nosed and genteel, whereas Canning Street was a little bit shabby, and Miss Lillingsworth’s house was the smallest and shabbiest in the row. She opened the door herself, wearing a big white apron.

  “Saddy!” she said, holding out her hand to the Professor. It was bright purple, and I wondered if she was another artist. She looked down at it, then up at us, and explained, “I am helping Millie with the plums today.”

  “Miss Maria,” a cross voice panted from behind her in the narrow passageway.

  “Yes, Millie?”

  “I’ll answer the door, Miss Maria.” Millie was large and red-faced and it was clear she bossed her mistress round like nobody’s business. “Take your apron off now, and I’ll bring your tea.” She bobbed a curtsey to SP and the Professor, but she gave me the once-over as I walked in, and I knew by her stare that I didn’t measure up. “If you’ll be so good as to step in ’ere, sirs,” she said, all but shoving them into the front parlour. “Miss,” she added as an afterthought.

  “You’ll have to forgive Millie,” said Miss Lillingsworth. “She’s terribly embarrassed for me because I’ve been caught helping in the kitchen.”

  “We are early, and I’m sorry to have interrupted the plums. We spent much less time with our clients than I’d anticipated. Are you embarrassed, Maria?” asked the Professor.

  “Of course not, Saddy. It’s lovely to see you. And you must be Verity.” She turned to me with a smile.

  Miss Lillingsworth was a tall, thin, middle-aged lady with a lot of nose, not much chin, and such big teeth she could have eaten an apple through a picket fence. She was badly dressed, and very, very plain – but when she smiled, you forgot what she looked like. And her eyes were lovely.

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nbsp; “Saddy wrote me a brief note this morning, my dear, telling me you’d had an experience that worried and frightened you. Would you care to talk to me about it?”

  I glanced at the Professor, and he nodded encouragingly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She waited for a few seconds, and then she nodded encouragingly too. But I didn’t know what to say.

  “You had an experience,” she prompted.

  I was embarrassed to find myself trembling and near to tears. The Professor spoke for me.

  “It seems that Almeria was showing Verity some of her flower pictures. Verity had this particular one in her hands, and …” He turned and gestured for me to go on.

  “It was horrible, ma’am,” I whispered. “I felt like I was drowning under a black wave.”

  “You were in the water?”

  It was so hard to explain. “It was a wave of feelings, ma’am. Hopeless and miserable and sad.”

  “And did you see anything?”

  “Just bright light and a black thing sort of darting.”

  “The snake,” said the Professor. “You remember poor Charles, don’t you? Almeria had just sketched that very picture when it happened.”

  “I see.” Miss Lillingsworth looked at me kindly. “Nothing like this has happened before?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  The Professor couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

  “May I suggest an experiment, Maria?” He explained that he had with him a client’s letter, and he proposed that Miss Lillingsworth and I both attempt a reading from it. His eyes sparkled with excitement. “The thing is, some subtle influence from Almeria may have affected Verity the other day. So this way we can compare–”

  “Father,” interrupted SP. “I think poor Verity is tired of experiments.”