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  She gave a swift intake of breath; whether it was a gasp or a kind of laugh, he could not tell. “Reading souls is not as simple a matter as seeing a face.”

  Thomas refused to continue to be drawn along that track. “You have been giving audience all evening long. I ask for one now.”

  “In private.” For the first time, he detected an unmistakable tremor of fear.

  He leaned on her shoulder slightly, deliberately. “Most assuredly.”

  “And if I refuse?” she asked, unbending even though the fear still lay there, underneath her words.

  He bent so that his mouth was level with her ear. “How mysterious do you think Esmeralda will be once she has been unveiled?” He wound the fabric of the veil around his hand.

  “I will come.” The words were unhurried, but he felt for the first time that he had found a weapon to use against the word knives she wielded.

  “I am pleased,” he said, and he shifted his grip so that he held her arm, half lifting her from her chair. “Do lead the way I will follow.”

  The veil was smothering her, and the man’s hand on her arm felt like a vise. Esmeralda forced her breathing back under her control, willing her racing heart to slow. She had seen the exchange between Lord Varcourt and his mother—had seen Lady Hamilton’s hands flutter at the antique necklace at her neck, had seen the terror on her face as her son stalked toward Em. Stalked—not the vain, preening walk of a peacock but the deliberate movements of a predator.

  She had now seen him exactly six times. The first time had been when he had thrown the door open in the midst of a seance at Hamilton House, causing half the women present to emit faint shrieks and reach for their smelling salts. Then, he had simply called from the doorway, “My lady, mother. Mary. Elizabeth.” And the giggling twins had been instantly silenced, following their ashen-faced mother from the room.

  That had ended that afternoon’s session, but she had received a letter—and a payment—the following week to continue to meet more privately with Lady Hamilton alone. Em had been glad enough, for large shows were only good to impress an audience. It was only the small sessions in which her skills were best put to use—and her patron could be convinced most thoroughly of her powers. Still, whenever Em mentioned any sense that she had received from the events following Lord Varcourt’s interruption, Lady Hamilton would grow pale and nervous and would bring the subject firmly around to her dead son Harry.

  At first, Em had given her the usual palliative communications, feeding the poor woman a constant stream of reassurance about her son’s happiness on the other side of the veil. After that scene, though, a sense of self-preservation and a bone-deep dread had caused her to let doubt about the countess’s surviving son seep in to her communications, how much out of fear for herself and how much out of a genuine concern for her patroness, she didn’t know.

  Since then, Em had seen Lord Varcourt only across a parlor or a dinner table, as she had begun being included in social invitations during the past two months as a kind of joint entertainment and curiosity. When he had looked at her, she felt the animosity of his eyes boring through her, and she had grown cold inside at the thought that those eyes might have been the last things that his brother had ever seen. And now she was walking beside him, her arm in his hard grip as everyone in the parlor stilled to watch the two of them—the spiritualist and the skeptic—leave the room together.

  No one asked whether she was going willingly. It did not occur to anyone that she was a being whose will meant anything at all.

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  Shadows of the Night

  Copyright © Lydia Joyce, 2008

  ISBN: 978-0451223425

  SIGNET ECLIPSE

  First Printing, March 2008

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