What a humiliation to discover that she couldn’t summon them by herself, that she needed that fool Octavia to help her. After Ellie was gone—Ellie, with her blond hair and innocent-wise eyes, who missed nothing, who asked questions of everything, whose emotions played across her face so easily—Octavia had seemed like a replacement, but she’d been nothing except a disappointment. You couldn’t replace Ellie with a girl like that. It turned out you couldn’t replace Ellie with anyone.
But she’d swallowed it and called Octavia, squeezing money from her at the same time—it was ridiculously easy—and at first the session hadn’t worked. She’d faced the possibility that that was it, she would never see her brothers again, and then—and then she saw Tommy. He was just there, not some shambling semblance of him but the real man, wearing his army uniform with his hair cut short and combed down, so unlike his usual unruly self. He’d seen her, and she’d felt a swell of pain in her head that was unlike anything she’d ever felt before, and then Harry was there, making it worth it. Harry was in uniform, too, and she heard a rasping cough (gas—my brother was gassed before they patched him up and sent him back to the front), but she’d been able to inhale him in, his handsomeness and sweetness and confidence. Seeing them was worth everything. Octavia had been saying something shrill, and through the fog she had summoned Colin, looking for his serious face.
She saw Colin all right, but he wasn’t in the room. He was standing outside across Harriet Walk, watching the windows of Octavia’s apartments with an intent look on his face, as if he could see through the drawn blinds. Colin and yet not Colin, not really, because his near-comical seriousness had turned to cold and hatred. He moved away and disappeared, vanishing into the streets of London, and Gloria remembered George sending her a telegram—a bloody telegram—telling her to be careful, that he wanted to speak to her. And suddenly she understood. Colin wasn’t even dead. They’d all been fooled, all these years—even all-knowing George.
She said good-bye to her darling brothers and found she was crying. She remembered nothing about the next few minutes, about getting rid of Octavia and leaving the house; all she remembered was standing on the sidewalk, looking for a figure that had already disappeared, and thinking, I might be in danger. Octavia’s father had pulled up in his Alvis, sitting in the seat behind the driver, and given her a disapproving look. She had no time for snobbery, not much time left at all, so she simply walked up to the motorcar and leaned in. Get her out of England as soon as you can, she’d said to his surprised face. If you love her at all. Then she’d walked away. Either he’d take her advice or he wouldn’t; it was out of her hands.
She’d gone home and gotten into bed fully dressed and drank until the headache faded. Lying there with her dress wrinkling and her makeup smearing onto the pillow, she could no longer see Colin’s strange new face. Davies had knocked, but she hadn’t answered, and eventually Davies had gone away. She’d stared at the wall and thought about what she could do, who she could call on. George knew something about this, but as always he wanted to play games, games in which she was the loser. But there were games she could play, too.
The next morning she rummaged through her things until she found an old handkerchief of George’s. It took nearly half an hour—sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing only a man’s shirt she’d found under the bed and a pair of drawers, the handkerchief clutched in her lap—before the information came, but finally she picked it out of her throbbing brain. Davies knocked on the door again, the sound like gunshots in her skull, but she ignored it. Then she wrote a note and got dressed.
A little sleight of hand trick, leaving the note at George’s hotel. She could simply have sent the note to Ellie, but Ellie might not have opened it, or she might have read it and thrown it away. It was always difficult to predict what Ellie would do.
No, she had given the note to George instead. George would be furious that she’d pulled such a trick after turning down his offer to talk, and he would go to Ellie and push her into action. That would be one good thing—Ellie in action. Besides, it amused her to imagine Ellie and George having a conversation.
But most of all, no matter what happened, eventually Ellie would come. And that made the rest of it almost bearable.
* * *
I opened my eyes to the smell of smoke.
George Sutter pulled away from me, staggering, his mouth open, his face sagging in shock. “What was that?” he hissed. “What did you do?”
“I found Gloria,” I said, part of me wild with sharp, triumphant joy. “I called her. That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it?”
“My God,” he said. “I saw things—heard things—”
A rifle shot cracked through the trees, and then another. Above us on the rise, James fired his own rifle, then lowered it and scrambled down. “Something’s burning,” he said.
He was right. Through the pulsing in my head—slick and powerful, out of my control, the way it had been at Ramona’s séance—I could feel the pungent sting of smoke in my nose, though I couldn’t see any flames.
George tried to pull himself together, looking from me to James. “Colin,” he said. “Instead of coming for us, he’s burning us out.”
“This way,” said James.
More gunshots sounded through the trees. Was Inspector Merriken still alive? Or were the men he had called for reinforcements shooting? There were shouts, but I couldn’t tell what direction they came from. I followed behind James and George, moving as fast as I could as they led me through the still, quiet woods.
“Not the house,” I heard George say. “He’ll burn that, too.”
“I know,” James replied. He was barely out of breath while I was staggering, the smoke growing stronger in my throat. “Do you smell that? Petrol. He’s using accelerant.”