“Oh, I adore a good boiled pudding,” said Miss Charlotte.
Miss Ellery showed Miss Charlotte how to retrieve the pudding container from a basket. Of the others in the room, only Mrs. Crosby and Mr. Peters also dug into their puddings. Mr. Peters had the air of someone who simply needed more food but Mrs. Crosby seemed to enjoy her pudding as much as Miss Charlotte did, issuing a small sigh after her first spoonful.
For some time, the three ate, and the rest, drinking tea and coffee brought around by Miss Ellery, watched them with varying degrees of uncertainty.
Mrs. Crosby set down her spoon with another sigh. “Mrs. Watson, Miss Holmes, Mr. Peters and I plan to visit the sanctuary after dinner. It’s a tradition at the Garden to offer one’s gratitude there after a safe return from a trip outside. The sanctuary doesn’t open for many other occasions. But since we are going, would you care to join us? I would hate for you to leave without having seen its lovely interior.”
“Why, thank you!” said Mrs. Watson, her surprise genuine. Was this the sanctuary the inside of which Mrs. Felton had never seen, despite her years of service? “We did not expect this privilege but I assure you we are most appreciative of the opportunity.”
“Do be forewarned that the sanctuary is hardly mysterious. It was once the mess hall, when these cottages and lodges were intended as part of a seaside resort. We’ve made it prettier on the inside, but there are no arcane objects or phenomena to be had.”
“I enjoy a séance as an entertaining way to pass an evening, but please rest assured that I did not come to the Garden expecting the occult,” Miss Charlotte answered gravely.
Mrs. Crosby smiled. “Indeed, we have none of that here, only good people gathered together in search of the inner light.”
11
The inside of the former mess hall had been painted blue. The color began as an aquamarine that reminded Mrs. Watson of the clear beach-lapping waters of the Mediterranean, and gradually darkened as the eye traveled upward. Aquamarine, sky blue, twilight blue, and at last, overhead, midnight blue with constellations and their associated astrological signs depicted in gold.
The hall was oriented so that its long side faced the sea. Without the walls it would have offered a good panoramic view. But now all the windows were covered with thick curtains, a dark blue outer one and an inner one that was gold-flecked gauze.
The place felt romantic to Mrs. Watson. True, she was a romantic soul. But skies and stars and candlelight, who could object? Why, if one of these days, Miss Olivia married her dear Mr. Marbleton, Mrs. Watson could make her a wedding bower like this. Maybe not blue and gold but blue and silver. How lovely it would be, a ceiling full of silver stars overhanging a bed covered in blue silk and strewn with blush-colored petals. And—
“The eye is interesting,” murmured Miss Charlotte.
Mrs. Watson came out of her reverie. What eye? Miss Charlotte had her head craned back, looking directly overhead. Mrs. Watson, who was a little older, heard her neck creak like an insufficiently lubricated hinge as she, too, tilted up her chin so that the back of her head nearly paralleled the floor.
She almost fell in a heap.
What she’d earlier taken to be perhaps the sun at its zenith was in fact the pupil of an enormous eye.
The eye stared down at her. At first it appeared expressionless, as blank as those of stone statues. Yet the more she stared at it, the more coldly and malevolently it seemed to stare back, until she wrenched her gaze away, her heart thudding.
“An all-seeing eye,” said Miss Charlotte, with a tone someone else might use to say, Another overcast day, in the middle of an English winter.
Mrs. Watson, still unnerved, looked about for something less objectionable on which to rest her attention.
Directly beneath the eye stood a large altar shaped like a gourd, potbellied at the bottom, cinching in roughly three-fifths of the way up, and then bulging out a little again. After a moment she realized that it was meant to be a representation of the cucurbit, the lower portion of an alembic.
A canopy had been erected above the top of the cucurbit. Mrs. Watson stepped a little closer and asked with some hope, “Is the altar, by chance, shielded from the all-seeing eye?”
“Indeed not,” answered Mr. Peters who, alongside Mrs. Crosby, was lighting fat candles set on columns that rose four and a half feet from the floor. The columns were arranged in two concentric circles, two dozen in all, with the cucurbit altar at their center. “There is another iteration of the eye on the bottom of the canopy.”
Nothing occult, eh? Nothing occult, her foot. Mrs. Watson was beginning to yearn for a heavy cross to wave about.
When Mr. Peters and Mrs. Crosby finished illuminating the sanctuary, they bowed to each other and then to the altar.
“Now this next bit might seem a bit . . . unnecessary,” said Mrs. Crosby, “but it is simply part of the homecoming ceremony, during which those who have returned and those who have kept the fires of transformation burning in their absence unite to reaffirm their allegiance to the cause and to one another.”
Mrs. Watson forced a smile. “Please do not be hindered by our presence.”
A low table had been set before the altar with cushions to either side. Mr. Peters placed a large chalice on the table and poured what looked to be wine into it. Mrs. Crosby set an oil lamp beside the chalice. Now the two knelt down on cushions on opposite sides of the table and bowed to each other again.
Mr. Peters handed Mrs. Crosby a slender instrument. Mrs. Crosby passed the tip of the implement several times through the flame of the oil lamp and then jabbed it into the palm of her other hand.
Mrs. Watson’s gasp echoed in the sanctuary.
She gripped Miss Charlotte’s arm as Mrs. Crosby held her hand above the chalice. A drop of dark liquid fell inside. Mrs. Crosby passed the pick back to Mr. Peters, who heated it in the lamp flame for two seconds and did the same to his own hand, squeezing out a drop of blood for the chalice.
Surely . . . the thought bounced wildly in Mrs. Watson’s head, surely they aren’t going to . . .
But they did. They shared the wine, emptying the chalice with three draughts each.
It wasn’t until Miss Charlotte caught her hand that Mrs. Watson realized that she was rubbing her stomach in an agitated manner, trying to calm her nausea.
Mrs. Crosby and Mr. Peters wrapped their injured hands with handkerchiefs and bowed to each other one last time. Mr. Peters rose and carried away the empty chalice, the oil lamp, and the prick. Mrs. Crosby got up more slowly and smiled at the interlopers.
“As I said, ladies, a simple little ceremony.”
* * *
“A simple little ceremony?” fumed Mrs. Watson. “They were only this far from human sacrifice.”
She held her thumb and index finger a bare inch apart.
She and Miss Charlotte were walking the yarrow-lined path that surrounded the former dining hall. Mr. Peters had—maliciously, in Mrs. Watson’s opinion—inquired whether they wished to see the library and the meditation cabin and Miss Charlotte had leaped at the chance. But out of consideration for Mrs. Watson, she had said that they would wait outside while Mr. Peters and Mrs. Crosby finished cleaning up inside the sanctuary.
In fact, she’d told Mrs. Watson that she needn’t come with them, but Mrs. Watson, as much as she wanted to be gone, refused to leave the girl alone with two unpredictable occultists.