The Sapphire Brooch

Act I — The Summoning

The drawing-room fogged at the edges, though it was midsummer and the windows were thrown wide to Belgrave Square. Gas-jets hissed behind ground-glass shades, their flames banked low by some unseen current that made the candles gutter and pool their wax upon the silver trays. In the centre of the room stood a cabinet of dark walnut, draped in black crepe, and within it Miss Eleanor Shaw sat upon a straight-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed upon a point somewhere beyond the wall.

Arthur Pemberton stood in the corner, his fingers resting lightly upon the brass dials of the galvanic apparatus—a contrivance of his own invention, built from telegraph components salvaged from the line between London and Portsmouth, wired to a pair of copper ear-cups that rested upon Miss Shaw's temples. He had spent three weeks constructing the instrument and four more calibrating it. The instructions provided by the Spiritualist Society were, in his opinion, the sort of nonsense that kept the movement alive: trust in the vibrations of the spirit world, let your heart be open, the medium will serve as conduit. Arthur trusted nothing. He calibrated dials and adjusted resistance, and that was all the trust he required.

"Begin," Miss Eleanor said. Her voice was thin, papery, like the leaves of a book that had not been opened for decades.

Arthur turned the first dial. A low hum filled the room, barely audible, the sort of sound you feel in your teeth more than you hear with your ears. Miss Eleanor's breathing slowed. Her eyes closed. Arthur watched the galvanometer needle twitch, then settle, then twitch again—a rhythm that meant something was happening inside the cabinet, though Arthur could not say what that something was. It might be suggestion. It might be muscle. It might be nothing at all.

But then Miss Eleanor spoke, and her voice changed.

"George," she whispered. "George, is that you?"

The voice that answered was not Miss Eleanor's. It was deeper, rougher, the voice of a man who had smoked too many cigars and swallowed too much whiskey. Arthur felt the hair rise on his arms. He told himself it was mimicry—the kind of parlor trick any skilled medium could perform. But Miss Eleanor had never employed a medium. She had come to him directly.

"George," she said again, and her voice broke. "My dearest. Do you remember the day we met? At the station? I was wearing—"

"A blue ribbon," the voice said. "In your dark hair. You looked— God, you looked like sin and salvation combined."

Miss Eleanor sobbed. It was not an acted sob. Arthur had heard actors cry in music halls and he knew the difference. This was the real thing—the sort of grief that had been banked for twenty years and had only needed a spark to burst into flame.

Arthur turned down the current. The hum died. The galvanometer needle settled to zero. Miss Eleanor opened her eyes, and for a moment she looked as though she had aged a decade. Then she smiled.

"He was real," she said. "He was so real."

Arthur packed his instrument in silence. He had heard this before—twenty-three times in as many months, counting the widows and the bereaved mothers and the lovers who wanted to hear one more word from the dead. He knew the script. He knew the music. He had built the machine that played it.

He did not know, and could not have known, that the blue ribbon was the first.