Sarah Penner - The London Séance Society

Praise for
The London Sance Society

Penner brings history to vivid life in this atmospheric and evocative whodunnit.

Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid

Readers will savor this suspenseful tale. Penner shines, and the result is breathtaking!

Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Sapphire

Penner has conjured up another winner. Haunting in the best of ways.

Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Magnolia Palace

Brilliant An explosive, immersive time-bomb of a novel.

Laurie Lico Albanese, award-winning author of Hester

An evocative and delicious read with a mystery that will have you turning pages late into the night.

Madeline Martin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London

At turns spooky and sexy, sly and subversive.

Natalie Jenner, internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society

Mesmerizing, seductive and absolutely irresistible The London Sance Society is completely spellbinding.

Hank Phillippi Ryan, USA TODAY bestselling author of The House Guest

A Victorian whodunit crackling with tension and lavished with ambience. A winner!

Heather Webb, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Next Ship Home

SARAH PENNER is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary, which will be translated into forty languages worldwide and is set to be turned into a drama series by Fox. Sarah spent thirteen years in corporate finance and now writes full-time. She and her husband live in Florida. To learn more, visit sarahpenner.com.

THE LONDON SANCE SOCIETY

Sarah Penner

harpercollins.com.au/hq

For my big sister, Kellie.

(And for you, Mom. After all, you were the first to say, Lets go to a sance)

Contents

Graves, yawn and yield your dead...

William Shakespeare

I

Ancient Devils Incantation

The medium recites an incantation to protect
sance participants from rogues and fiends.

II

Invocation

The medium issues a summons to all
nearby spirits to enter the sance room.

III

Isolation

The medium rids the room of all spirits except
the target spirit, i.e., the deceased person whom
the sance participants intend to contact.

IV

Invitation

The medium compels entrancement
by the deceaseds spirit.

V

Entrancement

The medium is entranced by the deceaseds spirit.

VI

Dnouement

The medium ascertains the information desired.

VII

Termination

The medium expels the deceaseds spirit from the room,
ending the entrancement and concluding the sance.

LENNA

At an abandoned chteau on the wooded outskirts of Paris, a dark sance was about to take place.

The clock read thirty-two minutes after midnight. Lenna Wickes, spiritualist understudy, sat at an oval table draped in black linen. A gentleman and his wife, the other sance participants, sat at the table with her. Their faces were somber and their breathing uneasy. They were in what was once the parlor of the dilapidated chteau, which had not been inhabited for a hundred years. Behind Lenna, blood-colored paper peeled from the walls, clusters of mildew hiding underneath.

If all went well tonight, the ghost they soughtthat of a young woman, murdered here in this very placewould soon appear.

Above them, something skittered. Mice, surely. Lenna had seen the droppings when they walked in, the tiny black kernels scattered about the baseboards. But then the skitter turned to a scratching noise andwas that a thud shed just heard? She fought off a chill, thinking that if ghosts did indeed exist, this derelict chteau would be the place to find them.

She glanced quickly out the window into the darkness. Fat, wet snowflakes, rare for Paris, drifted down around the chteau. Theyd set a few lanterns outside, and Lennas eyes fell on the metal gate at the front of the estate, wrapped in dead ivy vines and quivering in its brace. Beyond it stood dark, thick forest, the needly evergreens dusted with white.

The sance participants, called sitters , had gathered at midnight. The parents of the victimwhom Lenna had met several days prior to this eventarrived first. They were followed soon after by Lenna and her teacher, the renowned medium who would lead tonights affair: Vaudeline DAllaire.

All of them were dressed in black, and the energy in the room was neither warm nor welcoming. As the parents waited in their seats, their movements were nervous and abrupt: the father knocked over a brass candlestick and apologized profusely. Lenna, opening her notebook from across the table, couldnt blame him. They were all anxious, and Lenna had wiped her damp palms on her gown a dozen times already.

No one wanted to spend this agonizing hour under Vaudelines guidance. The price of admission was terribly high, and that wasnt accounting for the francs she required up front.

The spirit they meant to conjure tonight was not of the everyday sort, but nor were any of the ghosts Vaudeline invited to come forth. These were not old grandmothers in white nightgowns, lives lived long, stalking through corridors. These were not the casualties of war, valiant men whod known what they were getting themselves into. No, these ghosts were victims of violence, and gone too soon. Theyd been murdered, every one of them. And worse, their killers had gotten away.

This was where Vaudeline came in, and it was why people sought her out. People like the couple trembling across the table now. People like Lenna.

Vaudeline, aged thirty, was known throughout the world for her skill in conjuring the spirits of murder victims in order to ascertain the identities of their killers. An esteemed spiritualist, she had solved several of Europes most baffling murder mysteries. Her name had made headlines dozens of times, especially after her departure from London early last year, the circumstances of which yet remained unclear. Even still, this hadnt dampened her loyal, worldwide following. She lived now in Paris, her city of birth.

The forgotten chteau was an unusual place for a sance, but then, much was strange about Vaudelines methods, and she claimed spirits could only be conjured at the location where theyd died.

Two weeks earlier, on the first of February, Lenna had crossed the English Channel to begin studying under Vaudeline. Lenna knew she wasnt her teachers most devoted student. She wavered in her beliefs often, struggling with the necessity of the Ancient Devils Incantation or the palo santo or the bowl of warbler shells. It wasnt that she didnt believe; she simply couldnt be sure . None of this could be proved. None of this could be weighed or analyzed or turned over in her hands like the stones and specimens she kept back home. Where other students might have readily accepted even the most far-fetched theories about the occult, Lenna found herself constantly asking How? How do you know for sure? And though shed attended one sance a few years ago, nothing convincing had come of it. Certainly, no ghosts had appeared.

It was maddening, this truth-versus-illusion business.

In her twenty-three years of life, Lenna had never seen an apparition. Some claimed to feel a cool presence when walking among old estates and cemeteries or said theyd seen a flicker in the candlelight or a humanlike shadow on the wall. Lenna would nod along, wanting badly to believe. But couldnt these be explained by something more...reasonable? Tricks of the light existed everywhere, prisms and reflections easily explained by science.