Three o’clock. The same hour I woke up last night. The hour Alex first slipped into my nightmares here at Godwin House and the grandmother clock stopped working. I’d calculated it after that: three was also the time it had been when Alex and I left that party, when she chased me onto the cliffs.
“An unlucky number, three,” Ellis muses. “You know it took three years after Flora Grayfriar’s murder until all of the Dalloway Five were dead. Three years to the day.”
I do know.
“I see your research is going splendidly.”
Ellis smiles. “Don’t act so cantankerous about it, Felicity. I’m hardly going to start believing in magic and demons and so on just because I read about them.”
Well, that makes one of us, I want to snap—but Ellis doesn’t mean anything by it. She doesn’t know.
Ellis Haley is a lot of things, but willfully cruel is not one of them.
Even so, I have to fight not to let my reaction show on my face. I don’t want her to know how sharp those words cut. “An unlucky number,” I agree instead.
“Are you done with your tea?”
“Oh. Yes. Thank you.”
“Excellent.” Ellis produces a book out of her satchel and sets it on the table, tapping her fingers against the spine. “Bring it here.”
I don’t question her. It occurs to me only after I’ve adjusted my position on the sofa to face her more properly and slid my cup and saucer across the table that it was a strange request. Still, now I’m here, sitting opposite Ellis in her brown pin-striped blazer, with the dregs of my tea going cold against the porcelain.
“Have you heard of tasseography?” Ellis asks. I can see now that the book she pulled out of her bag is titled Reading the Future in Tea. She must have gotten it out of the occult collection in the library.
“Tea leaves?”
A smile curls one corner of Ellis’s mouth; her lipstick isn’t even smudged. For some reason that frustrates me. “I thought you might. It seems very like you, with the whole interest in tarot and so on.”
“You make me sound like—” I can’t finish the sentence, but I’m sure my flushed cheeks communicate most of what I’d intended to say.
“No, I think it’s endearing,” Ellis says, which serves to make me feel even worse. “I’ve been reading about it for my book, of course. I think I’m going to write Tamsyn Penhaligon as a fortune-teller, so I’d better learn how to fortune-tell myself. Do you mind?”
I arch my brows questioningly.
“Can I read your tea leaves?” Ellis clarifies.
“Oh.” I almost don’t want her to. Every time I’ve read my own future in the cards, it’s been dark and incomprehensible. I’m not sure I want Ellis to see me so keenly. But I find myself saying, “All right,” and the grin that splits Ellis’s face is almost worth it.
“Fantastic. Go on, pick up your cup…No, other hand. Left hand. Swirl what’s left of the tea three times from left to right.”
“Now what?”
“Now put the cup upside down on your saucer and leave it there.”
I do. The clink of china is too loud in the quiet room. “I can’t believe you decided to learn how to read tea leaves.”
“Method writer, remember?”
Perhaps it’s not that Ellis learned tasseography that surprises me. It’s that she chose to learn about it from that book she’s now perusing so closely, finger skimming down the text on the page as if to keep her place. It’s easier to imagine her learning from experience instead of from a book: Ellis in some smoky London salon, lounging on a silk chaise and smoking opium while a veiled mystic reads her future from the grounds.
We sit there for about a minute before Ellis gives me permission to rotate my cup three times then lift it upright.
“Which direction is south?” she asks, and when I tell her she makes me point the cup handle that way, then reaches across the table to slide my saucer toward her.
Ellis curves over the cup, her gaze flicking from the little bundle of leaves clustered opposite the handle to the flecks smeared about its belly. Her face is set in a mask of concentration; I wish I had the ability to slip into her mind and page through her thoughts, to read them as easily as she seems to read me.
“Was I supposed to think of a question?” With tarot, usually you ask a question. I don’t know if the same holds true for tea leaves.
“Oh, I have no idea. I suppose I can read your fortune more generally, if that’s all right with you.”