She coughed again, clutching her colored shawl tightly about her shoulders, as though wrapping herself against some ancient and invisible winter wind.
“Cross my palm with silver,” she demanded, sticking out a grubby hand.
“But I gave you a shilling,” I said. “That’s what it says on the board outside.”
“Messages from the Third Circle cost extra,” she wheezed. “They drain the batteries of my soul.”
I almost laughed out loud. Who did this old hag think she was? But still, she seemed to have spotted Harriet beyond the veil, and I couldn’t let skepticism spoil even half a chance of having a few words with my dead mother.
I dug for my last shilling, and as I pressed the coin into her hand, the Gypsy’s dark eyes, suddenly as bright as a jackdaw’s, met mine.
“She is trying to come home,” she said. “This … woman … is trying to come home from the cold. She wants you to help her.”
I leapt to my feet, bashing the bottom of the table with my bare knees. It teetered, then toppled to one side as the candle slid off and fell among a tangle of dusty black hangings.
At first there was a little wisp of black smoke as the flame turned blue, then red, then quickly orange. I looked on in horror as it spread along the drapery.
In less time than it takes to tell, the entire tent was in flames.
I wish I’d had the presence of mind to throw a wet cloth over the Gypsy’s eyes and lead her to safety, but instead I bolted—straight through the circle of fire that was the entranceway—and I didn’t stop until I reached the coconut pitch, where I stood panting behind a canvas drape, trying to catch my breath.
Someone had brought a wind-up gramophone to the churchyard, from which the voice of Danny Kaye was issuing, made nauseously tinny by the throat of the machine’s painted horn:
“Oh I’ve got a lov-ely bunch of coconuts.
There they are a-standin’ in a row …”
I looked back at the Gypsy’s tent just in time to see Mr. Haskins, St. Tancred’s sexton, and another man whom I didn’t recognize heave a tub of water, apples and all, onto the flames.