ES Chapter 6

The man had been watching her in quiet patience while she finished speaking. He opened his mouth.

'No matter how many times you looked—he truly was a man pulled from a painting.'

The formal title reached her before the admiration was done. Ayesha startled.

'Lady' Ayesha. The title settled onto her like a set of requirements—every movement henceforth enormously deliberate, every gesture composed. She was to be a noblewoman. A woman whose life had the correct shape.

'Hers did not.'

Hard rolls wedged with ham and cheese, bitten into on rushed mornings while she ran out the door. After a piece successfully filed: her regular pub, one cheap beer, and whatever snacks came alongside, which she ate without dignity because she was hungry and they were free. On the rare day an article occupied a visible position, there was something marginally better—alone, a small private toast. More often it had been pushed to the margins and read by no one.

Just imagining it, briefly, produced a specific discomfort—not embarrassment exactly. The sensation of being pressed into clothing cut for another body, her shoulders forced into seams that didn't fit. Something crawled beneath her skin.

She would never, no matter how many times she heard it, get used to that mortifying title.

"Please just call me Ayesha."

She corrected it before he could go further.

"Plain Ayesha is quite enough."

'Honestly. Anything above 'hey, you' was already an improvement.'

Chasing stories took you through all manner of people, and 'hey, you' was the mild version—there were days she'd been told to stop being a nuisance in terms that combined irritation with profanity. Among every person Ayesha had dealt with professionally, a man of this courtesy was not just rare. He was effectively singular.

"Very well. Ayesha."

He accepted it immediately. Understandably—insisting on calling her 'Lady' when she was by every measure not one would have made things awkward for both of them.

But what came next she had not anticipated.

"Then you must call me Cyrix in return."

"Pardon?"

"Surely that is only equitable."

'No. It is not equitable at all. We were not born equitable.'

She was a commoner in every particular. He was descended from the old royal line. Under any circumstances other than this one, their paths would not have crossed at all. The medium-and-client arrangement was unusual—but it was not equivalence.

"To be more precise," he added, "equitably at ease with each other."

"Once we arrive at Langfield Manor, we will likely need to speak about a great many things at some length. At such times, I would prefer that Ayesha not lose time to the obstacle of rank—calculating ceremony, taking the longer route around what she actually means to say. I want direct and unambiguous resolution. We will need frank discussion. For that purpose, it is best that we become comfortable with each other as quickly as can be managed."

Something sharpened in her.

He was speaking about it now. The Etheldore catastrophe. The reason a man descended from royalty had been searching out mediums and spiritualists. The reason Ayesha had made the long and difficult journey to Worsley.

Medium.

She turned her lie over again.

'Can I actually manage this.'

She had no honest answer.

"And there is one further clarification—Ayesha, I did not come out for a late estate inspection. I came to find you. You were expected today, and when the night grew late with no sign of you, I thought perhaps something had gone wrong."

"...For me?"

She could not quite believe it. A man of Cyrix Etheldore's standing, coming out himself in this weather, for the sake of a single medium. Langfield Manor had no shortage of people who could run such an errand—and Cyrix had chosen the complicated method anyway.

"My present situation is that urgent."

His manner was serious past seriousness. Ayesha found her spine straightening without deciding to.

"Would you believe it—if my life were to depend on Ayesha?"

'Wait. Hold on. Is it actually that dangerous?'

The corner of her mouth she'd been keeping raised—effortfully, it turned out—let go, settling without resistance.

The more she heard, the more heavily it was landing.

'This was somewhat different from the situation she'd been expecting...'

In truth, she hadn't come expecting this. Young as she was, short on experience—how much of an article could she write anyway. This hadn't been an assignment she'd set out on hoping for a great exclusive.

From the beginning, Ayesha had had one objective.

Gather just enough material at a reasonable level, then extract herself quietly.

But somehow, from the very first meeting, the atmosphere was running in a direction that felt entirely unusual.

'Can she get out of Langfield Manor in one piece, surely? She couldn't possibly be punished for daring to deceive a nobleman if her identity came out—could she?'

"Ah—for starters, aren't there other spiritualists already staying at the house, besides me? Didn't you ask any of them for some kind of protective measures?"

To escape the pressure, she simply blurted out whatever she could scramble together. But she knew better than anyone that it was something she didn't mean.

'Protective measures. She herself had believed, right up until arriving in Worsley, that everyone connected to the spirit world was either playing word games or running a con. In truth, that belief hadn't changed even now.'

However she turned the problem, she could not work it out.

'What on earth is happening at Langfield Manor.'

The simplest explanation was still that Cyrix Etheldore had inherited some unidentified condition from his forebears. Looking at that clean, composed exterior, she could not quite make herself believe it—but Cyrix Etheldore had grown up in terrible circumstances. A man formed by a dark and bleak history rarely arrived at a bright and healthy mind.

She glanced sideways at his face and frame and held in a breath.

'All that. To be gifted with a face and a frame like that, only for it to come to this. What a crying shame, honestly.'

Then again, perhaps he was testing her—throwing one serious subject after another at someone presenting herself as a medium, watching what she did with them. Nine out of ten people in the spirit-world were frauds; it would be the logical precaution.

If that was the case, she needed to be exceptionally careful.

'Don't walk into the trap. Not a single easy thing anywhere. And when the mind is unsettled you start reaching for things you don't even believe in.'

She found herself praying—silently, to a God she had not once believed in—that at least one person at Langfield Manor was competent at what they claimed, and that she could follow inconspicuously behind them.

Her prayer was immediately betrayed.

A bitter, thin line caught at the corner of Cyrix’s mouth, barely qualifying as a smile.

"They have all fled."

"All of them?"

"My request was beyond their capabilities, I was told."

Ayesha went blank.

'They walked into Langfield Manor, decided they couldn't run their con cleanly and get away, invented an excuse, and ran. And with no one left claiming this work, he came out himself to collect the last one —'

His actions made sense. That she herself was in no meaningfully different position from the ones who had fled made a different kind of sense. The two arriving together stopped her voice.

'The only medium remaining at Langfield Manor is me.'

Oh God.

Through the shock, her journalist's instinct fired without asking. She could not suppress it.

It was instinct.

"Were they credible—the ones who came before? In terms of their abilities, I mean. A verifiable record of cases resolved? Letters of introduction from anyone you could confirm?"

It was also, obliquely, a way of checking whether he was testing her, and if so by what method.

"I couldn't say. I don't know."

She hadn't expected that.

She tilted her head.

'He let every last one of them into the house without checking a single one first?'

"Ayesha. I have no time left to doubt anyone."

He continued.

"I have grown too tired for it—that capacity is gone. Each day presses. I can only proceed on the assumption that everyone is acting in good faith. I still believe this now. I have met a number of those who present themselves as experts in the spirit world, but not one of them proved to have the ability sufficient to address my situation."

She saw it then in his face—the fatigue. Dense, and run in deep, past the point where suspicion was a resource available to reach for. He had been accepting every last one unconditionally, charlatans and hopefuls alike, including herself; waiting on the vague possibility that this time, with this person, something might resolve.

Something solemn arrived in her alongside his desperation.

Nothing came to say. She stopped her pointless questions. She lowered her gaze.

"It seems we have arrived."