London
October 1926
Laura Dearborn dreamed about Stonecross Hall long before she ever saw it.
It had haunted her dreams ever since she was a child and her uncanny gifts began to strengthen. The house she dreamed of so often was more than just a house—it was like a person, with a character and personality so strong and overwhelming, Laura often felt as though it was watching her, even during her waking hours. After she had learned more about her psychic gifts and the power of the subconscious mind, she believed that the house of which she dreamed—looming, foreboding, and in many ways terribly, achingly sad—was some sort of dark personification of herself, her own deep and shadowed places. She had no idea then that the place was all too real, and that she belonged to it, and it to her.
Though she had been born with her powers, it wasn’t until after the Great War that Laura finally allowed herself to use them. Before then, she had always been afraid. Afraid of everything, really. But then the world had gone mad, and Laura, like most people, lost everything, and nothing much seemed worth being afraid over anymore. The horrors she had witnessed in the medical tents on the Western Front were so much worse than anything she could encounter through the palm of some poor soul’s hand, or in the tea leaves swirling at the bottom of a china cup. Her powers were all Laura had left of her former life. When she came back to England, she put her uniform away, bobbed her hair, took a flat in Piccadilly, and set up shop with her deck of tarot cards and spirit board at her kitchen table. Women flocked to her in droves. Before she knew what had happened, she had a reputation all over London as a girl who knew what she was about—a girl with a gift.
It had all begun with the other nurses, of course, girls who had lost their sweethearts, cousins, brothers, and friends in the trenches. After the war, they started coming to her, for some reassurance, a way of forging a link forever severed, a chance to move on and make new lives for themselves with the men England still had left to offer. Laura found she had quite a knack for communing with the dead. Even after the cards had been put away and the planchette stilled, she felt the way the dead clamored around her, clinging to her, trying to come through. The dead, like the living, were desperate to make a connection, to hold on to what remained of them on the earthly plane. They were so thick in the air around her that Laura sometimes felt as though she was breathing not air but ghosts.
Laura did her best to comfort them, to send them on their way to whatever rest awaited them. She wasn’t sure if she believed in an afterlife, though the men who had died so horribly on both sides of the war had certainly earned a sweet release. She was certain that clinging to a life that had been ripped from them was not in any way a good thing. She didn’t want the dead to stay, though they were her bread and butter. And she was the last person who should be counseling other souls about moving on. She certainly had not done so. She lived in a limbo of her own, had made it far too comfortable. She was afraid that there was nothing else out there for her, that her life had already been lived, the barrel well and truly scraped clean. Truth be told, though she claimed to aid the living, it was the dead she wanted to help. After all, she had more in common with them, for all that her heart still beat and ached and fluttered, as any living heart should.
It was a lonely life. Laura had never had many friends, except for the other nurses she had served with on the Front. None of her particular friends lived anywhere near her, and many of them had their own concerns, the remnants of their families to hold together as best they could as they struggled to make a life for themselves in the aftermath. England was not the same. The whole world had changed, and not for the better, despite the victory they had won at such great cost. Perhaps that was the problem. The cost had been far too great for the survivors to feel much like rejoicing. At best, they managed a cautious contentment. At worst, their lives were an utter ruin. Laura’s generation drank and danced and took strangers to bed, struggling to find a place in the world, a context for their lives—but they were lost, like children left behind in the woods to forage for themselves, alone. It was like some terrible cautionary tale in which the moral made no sense.
Laura had been luckier than most. She had lost her brother, Charles, who, though he was her whole family, was only one person. Some women lost every man they had ever known. Although heartbroken by the loss of her brother, Laura had no sweetheart or husband to lose, and likely never would have, now that the male populace of England had been so greatly depleted. Those left were the walking wounded, never to be the same strapping, joyful boys again, sauntering about the boroughs of London as if the entire city was their own. It was as though London had become half-peopled with ghosts. Which was a good business for people like Laura, and for those who pretended to be like her—the charlatans and the opportunists who rapped tables and rattled spoons and swallowed gauze they later retched up, claiming it to be the ectoplasmic residue of the beloved dead.
Laura didn’t go in for such parlor tricks, which disappointed some of her potential clients, who wanted the full theatrical show for their shillings. Instead, she told them the truth, firmly and clearly, with no hysterics. Those who looked for the comfort of reality came to her, and came again, and told everyone they knew. Laura was busy from sunup to sundown, when she finally locked her door, turned her lamps down low, and ate her small supper alone with the cat, who never asked her for a thing, cats being unconcerned with the state of their dead. Felines were very practical that way, which was why Laura liked them. She knew her cat would have done very well without her and needed nothing she could give him, not even the saucer of milk set on the windowsill. He stayed with her because he wanted to, and consequently, he was the nicest thing in her life.
Laura went to bed tired every night, and a few pounds richer than she had been when she woke up—all of her uneasy lucre locked up in an old money box that had belonged to her grandfather, who had once been a greengrocer. She took money for what she did because it was the sort of transaction that needed to be balanced. People did not like her for what she did for them. They felt beholden to her. Paying her a set fee assuaged the feeling that they owed her for something more than could be bought. Even so, Laura’s clients never felt fully caught up on their bill. They scurried away as fast as they could, after she had told them what she could and communicated what was possible to the dead. Laura often went to bed sick at heart because the only people she could really talk to were on the other side of the dark river all must cross in their time.
Despite this, Laura had invitations from people she didn’t know well, to parties thrown by the bohemian social elite, many of whom were her new clients. They threw lavish soirees in the jazz clubs of Piccadilly, some of which lasted for days. The tabloid papers called them the Bright Young Things, but it was a terrible irony. There was nothing bright nor particularly youthful in their haggard, glazed expressions, addled with drink and opium. Still, sometimes Laura longed to join them, and on a rare occasion, she slipped down the stairs in a cheap synthetic-silk frock to dance and drink among them in the club below, fierce as any of the lost girls and boys who had found their way back out of the forest only to find their country half-deserted. Dancing didn’t make her happy. She didn’t think it made any of them happy. It was more like a ritual bloodletting, a catharsis no one else needed or understood. Sometimes, Laura danced alone in her flat, the music thrumming up through the floorboards, vibrating through her whole body until she was slick with sweat and her heart beat against the cage of her ribs, frenetic and wild, as though impaling itself on the music, on her body’s need to escape her mind.
And then, inevitably, almost nightly, she dreamed of the house that had haunted her all of her remembered life.
It was a large house—massive, even. The sort of house the very rich had built for themselves as country retreats in the past century: decadent, sprawling, monumental. Like a tomb, a mausoleum ready-made for the future generations of the rich. Many such houses had been turned into convalescent homes for the wounded during the war, and some of them had stayed that way for a time after. Laura herself had worked in one of them in Kent for a while, before being discharged and returning to London. She had never much liked the house she had worked in. It was stuffy and smug, far too ostentatious. She always felt as though all the portraits of the great family’s ancestors were watching every movement, every single thing she did as she moved through the illustrious rooms with her basins of blood, vomit, and night soil, and as though they were wrinkling up their noses. They died for you! she wanted to shout. For your children! For your bloody England that will never thank them, could never thank them enough, for what they have done, all they have sacrificed. But it was no more good shouting at the portraits than it ever was shouting at the dead, or those who tried so desperately to cling to them.
The house she dreamed of was not like the house in which she had worked. While her dream house was little more than an abandoned shell, the house in which she had been a nurse was still living, still had life in it. There was a sense that its life was, in a way, greater than any that had been lived in its walls, that its vitality would go on and on forever. The house in her dreams was very much dead. It was the skeleton of a house, with the wind blowing through it, scattered with the dead leaves of many decades past. It clung to rocky cliffs above a vast and tumultuous sea that licked up at it, as if to pull it down. It was the ghost of a house only, and Laura knew what to do with ghosts. At least, she usually did. But this house wasn’t real. There was no exorcising it with a gentle incantation, a few candles, and an exhortation to move on. This house was a part of her, a part of her own mind. To be rid of it was to be rid of some part of herself she didn’t really recognize or understand.
Or so she thought, until the day the solicitor showed up, briefcase in hand, to knock diffidently at her door.
It hadn’t been a particularly good day. Laura was tired. She had a headache. Her normally inquisitive brown eyes had become hazy with the sort of pain that results from too many spirits trying to climb right into her, as though she was some sort of sanctuary. Laura did not, as some mediums did, allow the dead to use her body. Fighting them off was a difficult and wearying battle, and some spirits were stronger and more insistent than others. The day of the solicitor’s visit was a very trying one indeed, and she almost cried when she heard the polite but insistent knock on the door just as the kettle was coming to a boil and her bit of soup had started to warm on the stove.
“I’m taking no more clients for the day,” she called through the door, not even bothering to open it. She was so tired she was literally drooping, her blouse untucked and her hair in wild disarray. She wanted no one to see her in such a state. She patted at her hair absently, as though the visitor could somehow see her right through the door. If she wasn’t so tired herself, she could certainly have seen him or her—it was part of her gift, and helped her to feel much more secure about opening the door to perfect strangers, day in and day out. But her mind was clouded, and the door blocked the person from her mind’s eye, as though Laura was any other person with an unwelcome visitor.
The person knocked again, and she sighed in exasperation, closing her eyes. “Please, go away! Come back tomorrow morning, after nine o’clock, and I’ll see you then.”
“Miss Dearborn, I am not a client of yours,” a pleasant, even rather genial voice said clearly and distinctly through the door. “Rather, you are something of a client of mine, and I really think you’d better hear what I have to say. You don’t have to say a word, only listen, though I suspect you will have more than a few questions for me.”
Laura stared at the door, considering. She could insist that the fellow come back the next day; after all, it could be a ruse, a manipulation that would force her to see a client so desperate he could actually force himself to sound quite reasonable. She had met people like that many times before, and at the moment, she had no defense whatsoever against such machinations other than the strong oak door and deadbolt that now stood between her and the man on the other side.
And yet, here was her hand, reaching out.
Before she knew what she was doing, Laura found herself unlocking the door. She squared her shoulders as she opened it a minimal amount, just enough to get a good look at her visitor. She arranged her face into as bland an expression as possible before looking her trespasser in the face.
“Yes?” she said coolly.
The stranger’s expression was equally nondescript, but remained attentive, polite, and entirely benign. He was well dressed, his hair brushed smoothly back from his brow. He had the sort of face belonging to so many well-to-do, middle-class Englishmen that they seemed not so much a demographic of people but a family with so many members that they seemed to populate half of London entirely on their own. He was young enough to have seen some action during the war, but seemed so entirely unscathed that Laura took an instant and uncharitable dislike to him, simply for having made the choice to escape what so many others not only could not, but would not. When she looked at him, she saw yet another living, breathing, unjustly spared stand-in for her brother, who had drowned in his own blood at Passchendaele.
The man smiled, and there was more of a personality to him than Laura had originally imagined. His face crinkled pleasantly, like the face of someone’s kindly bachelor brother, and Laura relaxed slightly. She knew she had been unkind. She had no right imagining she knew the truth about the living simply because she so clearly understood the dead. Her face softened, and she opened the door a few inches wider, so that her full face and body could be seen.
“What may I do for you, Mr. … ?”
“Tisdale. James Lawrence Tisdale. And it isn’t what you may do for me, Miss Dearborn, but what I am about to do for you.”
“I am not interested in a new carpet sweeper just at present, Mr. Tisdale,” Laura said tolerantly. “One of your colleagues was here just the other day, and as I told him, I’m quite satisfied with the carpet sweeper I’ve got. So if you will please excuse me, my supper is about to boil over.”
“I assure you, dear lady, I am no salesman.” Mr. Tisdale chuckled again good-naturedly, despite the slight, and this time Laura could see the prosperous glint of a gold crown in his easy smile.
She narrowed her eyes, understanding dawning at last. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”
The man raised his hands in mock surrender. “Guilty as charged, Miss. I come from Beckett, Tisdale, and Roe, and we are solicitors—have been for several generations, in point of fact. Which is, in a way, all part of why I stand before you today. With your permission, Miss Dearborn, I would like to step inside and discuss a rather significant and delicate matter with you in the privacy of your flat. This is not at all a frivolous call, I assure you.”
Laura looked at him for a moment longer, and he gazed back at her gravely, waiting for her to decide. She had a feeling he would wait for as long as he must, that she could stand here considering him for an hour, and he would let her. It was this sort of endearing, canine quality that finally decided her. After all, she allowed total strangers into her home all day long between the hours of nine and six o’clock, with a hypothetical break for tea that she rarely took. She spent most of the day tired and ravenous, bombarded by the emotionally needy. What was another hour without her supper, and another stranger at her table? This one at least said he wanted nothing from her, that he wanted to give her something. Or at least, do something for her. Which was enough of a rarity in her life that she was intrigued.
She sighed, and opened the door fully, gesturing for him to come in. He did so diffidently, though his eyes darted around her dismal little flat with great interest. She flushed when his gaze lingered on the portrait of Charles in his uniform, which was the sole decoration on her mantel.
“Sweetheart?” he inquired.
“Brother,” Laura replied flatly.
He nodded with true sympathy. “I lost a brother myself. His name was William, but we called him Bill. It was a terrible shock to my poor mother. He was to have come into the firm as well, you see, but …” He shrugged.
Laura stared at him. He went a little pink, as if embarrassed to have told her so much. “It’s quite alright, Mr. Tisdale,” she said, with a deprecating smile. “I have that effect on people. If you will please follow me.”
He did so meekly enough, taking the chair she offered him at the scuffed kitchen table where she did her readings and channelling. She set a cup and saucer down in front of him, and another for herself. “Tea?”
“Please.”
“Cream? I’ve no lemon, I’m afraid.”
“Black will do just fine, Miss Dearborn.”
She nodded, and measured the tea leaves into the pot before adding the water. She set it down on the trivet to steep before finally taking her place across from the preternaturally patient solicitor.
“I suppose you’re wondering what all the mystery is about, Miss Dearborn.”
Laura shrugged, though she was growing rather curious, and not a little apprehensive. She couldn’t read Mr. Tisdale. The living were not at all her speciality, but she had learned a few things during her years nursing the nearly dead and irretrievably wounded—not to mention those who survived them. But Mr. Tisdale was kindly, jovial, and completely locked away inside of himself. He was not a man who displayed his secrets as most people did, although Laura had a feeling he had more than a few. But his secrets were none of her concern. She looked at the surface of him, and decided to deal only with what she could see: a man with something important to tell her. Something that may change her life, whether she wanted it to or not.
“Go on,” she said.
“Miss Dearborn, I am here on behalf of Stonecross Hall.”
Laura Dearborn, consummate stalwart, felt punched in the gut. Her heart started to pound painfully in her chest, and her lungs felt as though they could take only the shallowest of breaths. Her fingertips began to tingle as they did only when she was about to encounter the most powerful of channellings. Her ears rang, flooded with the noise of a hundred wireless stations gone off air. Stonecross Hall. So that’s what it’s called.
She took hold of herself, firmly and calmly. “I have never heard of it,” she said. She picked up the teapot to pour, and to her great relief, her hands were completely steady.
“Well, I am here to tell you that it has most certainly heard of you.”
Laura emitted a short laugh. “That is utterly preposterous. How can a house hear of anyone?”
He chuckled. “Fair enough. What I meant to say was that the house has very much to do with you. You see, Miss Dearborn, Stonecross Hall is yours.”
Laura’s mind raced, her thoughts forming unbidden. Of course it is. It always has been mine, and I its … She struggled to repress the rush of thoughts, her visage unmoved, her brow maintaining the shape of polite skepticism.
“How is that possible?” she said evenly, taking a sip, and not even flinching as the boiling liquid scalded her tongue. She couldn’t feel a thing. She was utterly numb—whether with anticipation or with dread, she couldn’t tell. She was an automaton, a doll, dancing on invisible strings. Strings that tie me to Stonecross, she thought, absently. The whole thing was ridiculous.
“This is absurd,” she said. “I’ve never owned anything in my life. I have no family, no connections. Just how is it that I’ve come to own a house?”
“It was left to you by the last person ever to own the house, by the family name of Storm.”
“And are they distant relations of mine? I’ve never heard of them until now.”
“No, Miss Dearborn. In fact, no living member of the family has existed in quite some time.”
“I don’t understand. Then who has made me the beneficiary of the house?”
“A Mr. Alaric Storm the Third.”
A ridiculous name, like something straight out of a penny novel. “I was not aware of having been known to a Mr. Alaric Storm, of any numeral.”
“You aren’t. In fact, you could not possibly be known to Mr. Storm, Miss Dearborn, as the gentleman in question died thirty-five years ago.”
“I am only twenty-eight.”
“Just so.”
“Therefore, Mr.—Storm, was it?—died nearly ten years before I was born!”
“Precisely.”
“I … I am at a loss. This makes no sense whatsoever.”
“Indeed it does not. And yet, here we are.”
“If Mr. Storm died thirty-five years ago and left his house to me in his will, why is it I am only hearing of it now?”
“You mean, why were you not made aware of the bequest for so many years?”
“Indeed. I should have been very glad of a house at many times in my life. How is it that I am being given one at precisely the time when I need it least?”
Mr. Tisdale didn’t make any reference to the shabby state of their surroundings. He did not even seem to be thinking of it, and Laura was absurdly grateful to him. “The will stipulated that the house should not be bequeathed until the occasion of your twenty-eighth birthday. Which, I am sure you will recall, is in fact today. So here I am.”
Laura was more than a little astounded. Was it really her birthday? Was she really only just twenty-eight? Twenty-eight might not be particularly young, but on her best days, she felt forty-five when her sessions were finished and she turned in for the night. If she was lucky, she would rise feeling only marginally younger—a sprightly thirty-eight, most days. At any rate, she hadn’t celebrated her birthday since before the war, when she had been an impossibly naïve young girl.
Mr. Tisdale patted her hand kindly, bringing her back to herself. “Happy Birthday, Miss Dearborn,” he said with a grin. “You, my dear woman, are an heiress of no inconsiderable fortune and property. I must say, this has been a curious undertaking. It isn’t often one must wait for one’s client to be born before bestowing upon her a bequest.”
Laura nodded absently, only half listening as he prattled on. It was a dream. It had to be a dream. She looked at the papers Mr. Tisdale laid before her without seeing them. She took up the pen he offered her without feeling the weight of it in her hand, and signed the places he indicated without consciously remembering her own name. In a trice, it was done. She was a rich woman. She owned a house in the country. She need never work for pay again, and more importantly, she need never speak to another ghost for as long as she lived.