the pearl of his desire over the head and guided him into her. An explosion of pleasure surged through her. This was life, this glorious acceptance of ecstasy and need.
This was all she had ever wanted.
This was what she had lived for.
* * *
Jenny fought to still her breath when she first met Dr William Loomis. Words formed on her lips, though they did not arise from her own will.
‘It is my honour to meet you, doctor. I hope to repay your attentions with my ardour.’
Katie’s voice. How strange to hear the spirit speak in a lighted room with no prayers, no music, no faith to summon her. Jenny braced herself for whatever might follow the uncommon manifestation.
Dr Loomis took Jenny’s hand, his fingers firm and warm. She thought at first he meant to kiss it, but instead he found her pulse and measured her with his touch.
‘Your heart is beating very fast, Miss Sullivan,’ he said.
Again, it was not Jenny who answered him, but Katie’s teasing tone. ‘I am eager to show you all that I can do.’
Dr Loomis exchanged a significant look with Uncle Hughie. ‘I suppose, if you do not object to remaining awhile, Morton, we can run a test or two.’
‘Here?’ Uncle Hughie indicated the doctor’s drawing room, warmly lit by gas lamps and the filtered sunlight of afternoon.
‘Of course not. In the examining room.’
‘For a full materialisation, a cabinet is best.’
‘We won’t attempt anything so grand today, Morton, but, if Miss Sullivan has something to show me, I would hardly be a gentleman if I refused.’
‘I beg your pardon, doctor.’ Jenny’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. Her words rushed out with truth and an invitation to believe. ‘It wasn’t me that offered. It was Katie.’
‘Indeed?’ Dr Loomis pressed the back of his hand to her forehead. Heat bloomed between them like wax under a seal. ‘I do not believe you are feverish. You truly mean it was your spirit girl who spoke to me just now?’
‘It was my spirit guide, doctor. No other, and, although I wish to cooperate with you in every way, I am not nearly so bold as Katie. You need to know that.’ She wondered if he had heard any of the scandalous stories. More than once, Katie had planted harlot’s kisses on someone in the séance circle. A few times she had even dared worse.
Mr Hugh Morton – Uncle Hughie, as many in the spiritualist church called him – had arranged this meeting. Hugh Morton was leader of the church, president of the Psychical Research League, a friend of young Dr William Loomis and a major contributor to the downtown paupers’ clinic where Dr Loomis volunteered. ‘If Dr Loomis vouches for your abilities, Jenny,’ Uncle Hughie had entreated, ‘we can convert a multitude of needy souls to the church.’
‘But what if I can’t?’ she had asked, disappointed in herself as she pulled at her lace collar. ‘It will not be the same in his cold chamber, the way it is in someone’s parlour or the church. What if Katie will not come?’
But now, as Dr Loomis led her from the drawing room and into his examining room, Jenny felt Katie’s legs inside her own, the press of Katie’s breasts behind the stays of her corset, Katie’s rose-scented breath in her nostrils.
Katie would come. Jenny had no doubt of that now. But please God, make her behave.
‘Shall I disrobe?’ Again Jenny’s mouth formed the sounds, but Katie’s voice controlled them. Jenny wished that they were Katie’s cheeks burning hot with shame, not her own.
‘No need this time, my dear,’ Dr Loomis said. ‘This won’t be a controlled test. Not a test at all, really. Sit there.’ He pointed to a chair like a barber’s seat that could be made to recline. She settled into it, gathering her skirts modestly. Uncle Hughie stood against the plain wall while Dr Loomis stood beside Jenny. He looked into her eyes, and continued to hold her hand.
The doctor rose above her, like a handsome young god, strong-jawed with a trim moustache and steel-coloured eyes behind black-rimmed spectacles that did not diminish his virile aura one little bit. She wanted more than ever to make him a believer.
The mesmeric force of his gaze stroked her skin, her blood, unconscious but powerful, and she felt Katie’s face filling her own, ethereal flesh pushing past the thin wall between this world and the next.
‘Who am I speaking to now?’ Dr Loomis asked.
‘Katie.’
‘Where are you, Katie?’
‘I am here now, in the world of sorrows.’
‘Where were you before?’
‘Before when, William?’
‘Before you began to speak.’
‘I am always with Jenny, but I was also in the Summerland.’
‘Ah yes. And before you were in the Summerland?’
‘I lived in Tarrytown. I was a seamstress.’
‘What year was that?’
‘I left in 1832, when I was twenty years old. I caught a grippe and died in a week.’
Uncle Hughie spoke behind the doctor. ‘We have of course verified that a young woman named Katie Green died of disease in Tarrytown in that year, but I fear we know little else about her.’
‘I led a quiet life,’ Katie said and Jenny ached with Katie’s wistfulness. ‘I left almost nothing behind me save a gravestone.’
‘Why are you here now? Why do you manifest yourself in Miss Sullivan?’ As he asked the question, Dr Loomis disengaged his fingers and took a stethoscope from the little table beside the chair.
Katie shifted to accommodate him as he pressed the horn trumpet of the instrument between the buttons of her blouse. Dissatisfied, he unfastened her bodice for better access and she felt the warmth of his fingers, though his manner was cool and professional, as he listened to Jenny’s beating heart and to her breath.
‘I am here to tell you there is life after death, William, but more than that I am here to teach you that life must be lived with fullness. Poor Jenny needs my lessons most of all.’ Katie rested Jenny’s hand atop Dr Loomis’s, pressing the tips of his fingers against the swell of her bosom.
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