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These clients are a nightmare. A married white couple seeking information about the location of a dead family member’s missing inheritance shouldn’t be a difficult séance. And yet… Inez breathes deep, and doesn’t let her professional smile drop, the twenty-year-old sweating through the too-many-layers of her attire for this abominable London heat, no breeze indoors and the entire assemblage waiting for their own turn wiping at perspiration. And good god but the husband of the couple will not shut up about the ridiculousness of the situation, and how the phenomena presented to the other couples already satisfied are clearly faked, and to have to rely on a woman, and a Black one at that, for these paltry answers? Inez can see him seething as he says it, his mutton-chop whiskers frizzing as he fumes.
It’s 1858, by god. You’d think the man could at least be a little more modern in his thinking. And on any other night, Inez would ride out the problem, get the couple the information they need, and move things along. But tonight, the spirits are restless; they’re feeding on his distress. And it’s putting off the living clients, too – not many left in line before this circle’s work is done for the night. But enough that she wants to move things along.
Inez – Madame Inez, to her clients – takes a deep breath as she tries not to look at the sunken eyes, or the shrivelled and bluish skin of the cholera ghosts in the room with the living – so many of them tonight. It’s only been four years since the epidemic mostly ran its course in Britain. Though that hasn’t done much to mollify fears of a resurgence now another’s broken out in Japan.
The first time trade opens in almost 250 years, a treaty of commerce finally signed allowing the British access after so long denied, and it brings with it the spectre of still more death. How fitting: the British bringing death with them wherever they go. This modern age of industry and the world opening up bringing ever more dangers in their wake. Inez profits by it, granted. These white people’s orientalism and their hunger for the new-fangled American import of spiritualism letting her hide her gifts among charlatans and fame-seekers.
But it’s a dangerous thing to be possessed of real power among white people hungry for it. Literally so among these eaters of perceived power as they devour their pilfered Egyptian mummies at unwrapping parties or grind them down to powder as promised cures and aphrodisiacs and play at witchcraft and eagerly consume every hint of evidence of spirits and the afterlife. Hungry to know if there is more after – Inez certain they would send ships abroad to stake claim in that land too, to plant their sullied, blood-stained flags, if ever they could prove it was real.
