Mesmerized

“Allow me,” he said, reaching out and taking the cloak from Olivia’s fingers. A quick shake straightened it out, and he placed it around her shoulders. His fingertips brushed over her shoulders, and even through the cloth of her cloak, the touch sent a shiver down Olivia’s spine.

When he reached for the ribbons of her cloak, as if to tie them, she grabbed them herself, saying, “I can do that myself. You have done quite enough already.”

He raised an eyebrow, then said, “Is it true what that woman said? You are an enemy of mediums?”

“I am an exposer of charlatans,” Olivia responded tartly. “I stand ready to believe anyone who can prove to my satisfaction that they have contacted the otherworld, but as I haven’t yet found a medium in London who can do that, I cannot label them as anything but frauds.”

“So you were not helping out Mrs. Terhune tonight?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why were you sneaking about in the dark?”

“I was not ‘sneaking.’ I was walking quietly and carefully,” Olivia corrected with a haughty look, “to the medium’s cabinet to expose Mrs. Terhune, untied and about to hold up this silly daguerrotype that she displays over the top of the cabinet door and pretends is a spirit. I had a sulfur match ready to strike.”

She sighed at the thought of the opportunity lost, and Lord St. Leger looked slightly abashed. “I beg your pardon. I thought I had caught a conspirator.”

“Yes, well...” She turned and gestured, and a carriage down the street began to roll forward.

Olivia started to descend the steps, and St. Leger followed her. “Tell me, do you do this sort of thing often?”

“Get into séances and try to expose their frauds?” Olivia sighed again. “No, unfortunately. If a medium knows me, they will not let me attend. My ‘lack of belief’ disturbs the spirits. And few people hire me,” she admitted candidly. “I find that almost no one wishes to ‘let go of their delusions,’ as you pointed out tonight.”

He stared at her. “Hire you? What do you mean?”

“I have a business,” Olivia told him, reaching into her reticule and pulling out one of her cards. She was rather proud of them, really, and never failed to hand one out, though the response she received was more often one of shocked disapproval than admiration.

St. Leger took the card and glanced down at the neat black script: “Miss O. Q. Moreland, Investigator of Psychic Phenomena.”

He looked back up at her in amazement, a hundred questions buzzing through his brain. But the first one that came out was, “Q?”

Olivia’s mouth tightened. “It is a family name,” she said, and reached out to snatch the card back, but he quickly pocketed it.

“And does your family not mind that you—”

“My family is quite open-minded,” Olivia told him tightly. The carriage had pulled up in front of the colonel’s house, and she went to it, waving the coachman to stay on his high seat.

St. Leger, following her, reached out to open the carriage door for her, but she grasped the handle before he could. Turning to him, she said significantly, “My family is not so archaic as some and see nothing wrong in a woman exercising her mind in pursuit of a career.”

“They see nothing wrong in your chasing ghosts?” St. Leger asked mildly, reaching toward her to help her up into her carriage.

Olivia narrowed her eyes and started to reply, but stopped as she saw realization dawning on St. Leger’s face. He looked at the carriage door, on which her father’s ducal crest was tastefully drawn, then pulled out her card to look at it again.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, with some amazement. “You’re not—you’re one of the ‘mad Morelands’?”

Olivia jerked the door open and stepped up into the carriage, shrugging off his helping hand. She turned and sat down, leaning forward and saying, “Yes! I am definitely one of the ‘mad Morelands.’ Indeed, I am probably the maddest of the lot. If I were you, I’d burn that card, lest some of it rub off on you.”

She slammed the door on his hurried words: “No, wait! I didn’t—I’m—”

Olivia rapped sharply on the carriage roof, and the driver started like a shot, cutting off the rest of her companion’s words.

* * *

“—SORRY,” Stephen St. Leger finished lamely. He looked down at his polished leather boots and elegant silk trousers, now splashed with dirty water from the carriage wheels. He suspected that the driver had been well aware of what he had been doing.

Of course, Stephen thought ruefully, he could scarcely blame the man. His words had been clumsy and boorish. His cousin Capshaw was right: he had spent too long in the United States, or, more accurately, he had spent too long in the lonely wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. He was no longer accustomed to being in polite society or, indeed, much of any kind of society at all.

He had not really meant anything bad about the woman’s family. He had merely been shocked when it registered on him that the young lady he had thought he caught red-handed aiding a medium had in fact been the daughter of a duke, a gently reared young woman of good lineage and a hefty fortune. He had simply blurted out the name by which her family was largely regarded in London society. The “mad Morelands”...they must be mad, indeed, he thought, if they found nothing wrong with letting one of their daughters traipse about London alone at night, attending séances and confronting charlatans. It seemed a risky business.

Her having a business surprised him less. He had seen enough wives and daughters helping to conduct family businesses—or widows left to run one on their own—in his time in the United States. It was, however, somewhat startling to find a young, unmarried lady in England doing so, especially one from one of the most noble families in the country. Her family, he would have thought, would have moved heaven and earth to keep her from doing so.

But, he supposed, the reason they had not lay in the very epithet that had slipped off his tongue. The Morelands, while not actually legally mad, were generally considered to be, well, off. The old duke, Miss Moreland’s grandfather, had been famous for his various bizarre and intense “health treatments,” which had ranged from mud baths to foul-smelling restorative drinks to being wrapped in wet sheets for hours at a time—the latter of which was generally considered to have been what sent the man at a relatively young age into his last, fatal bout of pneumonia. He had spent much of his life traveling in England and the Continent, consulting with quacks and chasing the latest fads. His wife, it was said, had a peculiar tendency to talk about her ancestors as if she had daily conversations with them. The duke’s younger brother, the present duke’s uncle, was reputed to spend much of his time playing with tin soldiers.

The present Duke of Broughton, Miss Moreland’s father, was obsessed with some sort of ancient subject—Stephen wasn’t sure what, though he had it vaguely in his mind that the man collected statues and broken bits of pots and things. And he had married a woman well-known for her unusual views on social reform, women, marriage and children. Even more horrifying to London society was the fact that the current duchess had not been born to the nobility, being merely the daughter of country gentry. There were several Moreland children, most of them younger than Stephen was, and he did not know much about them, having left the country before most of them were old enough to enter society, but from everything he had heard from his mother and friends, he had gotten the impression that they were an odd lot.

What he had seen of Miss O. Q. Moreland certainly had done nothing to change that impression. She was decidedly peculiar—going out alone in the evening to attend séances, sneaking through darkened rooms to pounce on a fraudulent medium and expose her practices, even carrying on a business of doing such things!

Stephen idly rubbed his thumb over the engraved letters of her card. Investigator of Psychic Phenomena. He couldn’t help but smile a little, thinking of her feisty stance, hands on hips, looking up at him with those big brown eyes that looked as though they should be soft and melting but were instead fierce. Small and dainty, yet looking as if she were ready to take on any opponent.

He remembered the odd feeling that had gone through him when the light had been turned on and he had first looked at her. He had thought her a part of the medium’s act, helping to hoodwink an innocent public. Yet when he looked at her, something had shot through him, some strange current of emotion and physical attraction that jarred and surprised him. It had been something like desire...and yet something more, as well, something he could not remember ever feeling before.

Frowning, he turned and started to walk away, but the man who had been beside him at the séance came out the front door at that moment and hurried down the steps toward him, saying, “St. Leger!”

Stephen turned, surprised. “Capshaw. I thought you must have decided to stay.”

The other man made a face. “I doubt that I would have been welcome, frankly, after the scene you made. But I had to do what I could to calm down Colonel Franklin. I told him that you were my cousin and a gentleman and would not spread scurrilous lies about him.”

“I don’t give a damn about that pompous colonel,” St. Leger said, grimacing.

“What were you doing, by the way?” Mr. Capshaw went on curiously. “Did you go there to expose the medium? I must say, I didn’t think it sounded like your sort of entertainment.”

“Hardly. But I wasn’t planning to do anything. It was just that when I heard her rustling about in the dark, I could not resist the opportunity to catch one of the charlatans red-handed.” He shrugged. “I went merely to—I don’t know, see what sort of thing they do. Try to understand what their hold is on otherwise rational people.”

“There are more than a few who believe in it,” Capshaw commented. “I’ve seen one medium who did things that, well, frankly left me wondering.” He glanced over at his friend. “Don’t you ever think that maybe it’s a possibility? That people can speak to us from the other side?”

“It strikes me as highly unlikely,” Stephen said shortly. “If they could, surely they would tell us something more important than the wretched pap these mediums put out. And why do they spend their time knocking on things? One would think that they would have better things to do with their time than play parlor tricks.”

Mr. Capshaw chuckled. “That sounds like you.”

“They are playing on people’s grief,” St. Leger went on grimly. “Using it to gain money.”

His friend glanced at him. He had heard that Lady St. Leger, Stephen’s mother, had been attending the séances of a popular Russian medium, and the anger in his friend’s voice confirmed his suspicion. Stephen’s older brother had died almost a year earlier, and their mother was said to be still mired in grief over his death.

“Sometimes,” Capshaw said carefully, “it helps a person get through it, thinking that they can contact their loved one.”

“It helps the damned medium acquire money,” St. Leger growled. “And how do you know it helps them? What if it just keeps them in that same painful place, constantly mourning their loss, never getting on with their lives?”

He stopped and looked at his companion. “I thought Mother was getting better, that she was not so wrapped up in sorrow as when I first came home. And when she wanted to take Belinda to London, it seemed a good sign. But then she fell in with this Valenskaya woman, and now she seems deeper in mourning than ever. I told myself the same things you said, that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t real, that it would help soothe her. What did it matter if she went to a few séances? But when Belinda wrote me and said that Mother had given this medium her emerald ring out of gratitude for all she’d done... Father gave her that ring! I have never seen it off her hand until now. Obviously this woman is exercising great power over her. That’s why I came to London. And it didn’t help my fears any when I saw Mother, either. She is forever talking about what this woman says, she and Belinda both, and it all sounds like the most blatant nonsense. Yet they seem to swallow it without a moment’s thought.”