Chapter Text
Coined from the Greek (psyche, soul, and metron, measure) it literally signifies soul-measuring, being analogous to the words thermoetry, barometry, electrometry, and similar terms, which signify special measurements. The thermometer measures caloric (thermo, temperature). The barometer measures the weight (baro, weight) of the atmosphere; the electrometer measures electric conditions; the psychometer measures the soul. - Manual of Psychometry
“It is with true love as with ghosts. Everyone talks of it but few have seen it.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld
Chapter 1: how fearfully and wonderfully made
Caroline Catledge had not seen her brother leave his room in three days so when she opened the gleaming double doors into musty darkness, she was not entirely surprised by the smell that seemed to emanate from the thick canopy curtains that surrounded the bed. But that hardly made it tolerable.
“Dear God, brother, when was the last time you took a bath? It smells like regret and depravity in here.” She covered her nose with her slender fingers, glancing around the prison of shadows her brother had wrapped himself in. With the light from the hall, and as her eyes adjusted to the darker corners, she saw discarded plates and cups on his dresser, the wardrobe doors open with his fine clothes crumpled on the floor, and his small shelf of books he had acquired on his travels had been unceremoniously dumped to the floor. By all accounts, Brice Catledge had had a proper tantrum soon after his heart had been so thoroughly broken.
Caroline sighed and rolled her eyes, the bangles on her wrist clinking together as she put her hands on her hips. Tutting, she went to the nearest window and tossed back the curtains, startling the dust motes into dance as sunlight filled the room.
The knot of blankets and thick curtains around the bed had not moved nor made a sound since she entered. But whether or not he was asleep mattered little to her overall goal. What had happened between her brother and Sophie Baker was undoubtedly sad, yes, even tragic. Of course in that Brice had lost the woman whom he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with, but also that such a brilliant young woman had been swept off her feet by an old, nasty, bitter man who regarded her with a twisted set of both parental and romantic love. There were not many independent women, despite the moral degradation all the papers claimed the country was coming to, and Caroline thought it an absolute tragedy that another woman who was so financially free had been captured and put down like some lame dog. For all his faults, Brice never would have allowed her light to dim, to allow her to become second fiddle to a man, even to himself. If Sophie Baker was the kind of woman who could not see the kind of man that British idiot was, then Caroline had not only misjudged her psychic abilities, but her character as well.
So, all things considered, Brice should have considered himself lucky that he had not married the girl and dodged that proverbial bullet. Or, perhaps, an entire speeding train.
Caroline spied something beside the dresser, buried under a mound of clothes and hats. Brice always did love his hats. With a grin, she picked up the ukulele and strummed it experimentally. As expected, the canopy groaned. Caroline continued to play, a bounce in her step as she wandered over to the curtains and plucked at the cords with delight. The bed groaned louder.
“Stop it. If I ever hear that awful noise again,” the curtains lamented dramatically, “I swear I’ll kill myself.”
Caroline rolled her eyes and dropped the instrument against the bed frame. “For God’s sake, don’t be such a boor.”
Without preamble but at least confirmation he was in fact alive in his cocoon, Caroline yanked back the curtains and Brice, her older brother by nearly exactly eighteen months, yelped in the sunlight. He put up a hand, his eyes watering, as he adjusted to the light. His chest bare, his hair mussed and the faint hint of a beard clinging to his jaw, the inheritor of the very sizable Catledge fortune could have been mistaken for a common vagrant in that very moment.
“Do you know you look like you’ve just stumbled out of the poorhouse?” Caroline scolded and went to the pile of clothes in a corner to find him a shirt. “You certainly smell like it.”
With a huff, Brice rolled over and clutched a pillow to his chest. “Go away, Caroline. I’m not in the mood for your games.”
Caroline lifted one shirt then the next, looking for one that at least smelled clean or didn’t possess a large wine stain down the front.
“Games? No games here. Believe me if I could somehow trick you into taking a shower, I would. But such as it is, if you do not get out of this place soon, I fear the cleaning staff will call the police on the account of the dead body smell wafting down the halls.”
“Then let them,” he said quietly. “Let them carry me off and dump me into the sea. It’s a preferable existence to this hell I am in.”
With a rueful glare at her brother’s shoulder, Caroline snatched up a tailored shirt, much more suited for an evening at the theater than rousing her heartbroken brother from his stupor, but at least it was clean.
“Darling, you can’t be this upset over a woman you met less than a month ago.”
“And why not? I loved her. I still do.”
Caroline sat down behind him with a sigh, holding the shirt by the collar. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I understand that, but you simply did not know her enough to love her like this. I know it hurts now, but I can promise your broken heart will mend.”
He was quiet for a minute, Caroline unable to see the expression on his face. “It’s not just her. I mean, it is – I loved everything about her – but she saw me . . . in a way that was different from everyone else.”
“How do you mean?”
Brice swallowed. What did he mean?
Of course, Sophie’s talent for knowing all about his trips and travels, things he saw only by himself, was incredible. She reminded him of memories he thought he had forgotten, of people that made every journey so incredibly special. But it was the way she spoke about him that made him feel that she was The One — because she knew him, intimately.
You won’t run your father’s business into the ground, she said late one night by the pool, casually and without concern, completely unaware that she had just cracked open one of his deepest and most paralyzing fears. You are a smart, thoughtful guy who works really hard to please the people around him. But if you keep filling everyone’s cup, you won’t be left with anything for yourself.
He had fiddled with the button of his swim trousers, unable to look at her as she sat next to him on the edge of the glowing, green pool. My father left this company to me, but sometimes I think he made a mistake.
She had regarded him with such a soft expression, it was one of the moments he looked back on fondly to convince himself she did love him . . . briefly, if at all.
You don’t have to be useful to be loved, Brice Catledge.
That was the first night he had kissed her and would happily have spent the rest of his life kissing her just like that. But he didn’t, and he couldn’t, and she left. In the end, when he stopped being useful to him, she left him for someone who was.
If she couldn’t love him, who would?
He squeezed his pillow, the weight of his sister’s hand on his shoulder almost too much to bear.
“I can’t explain it, Carrie,” he said, using his childhood nickname for Caroline. “I don’t even know if there are words for what I’m feeling but . . . I just wish she would have told me. I would have let her go in an instant if I had known she was so unhappy.”
He had cried alone in the darkness before his sister came – for himself, for Sophie, for being such a fool for loving someone who was so without remorse, for the idea that he would spend the rest of his life alone because he could no longer tell a lie from love, or the reverse. But he didn’t now and only wished to succumb to the sheets and disappear.
“Oh my sweet Brice, I am so sorry for all the pain that plain little woman has caused you.” She stroked the back of his head like their mother did when he was sick as a child. “One day you will look back on this and laugh because the new love you have found is all-consuming, all passion, and all for you. Please try to remember that.”
With another stroke, Caroline continued. “Let us leave this place, then. All of it. We can sell this damned vacation home and return home, to Pittsburgh. Perhaps working at Father’s office will help you forget this darkness, make moving through the grief easier with something to focus on.”
The thought of being surrounded either by stuffy company partners or dirty, grouchy coal men did seem appealing. Not a single woman in sight.
As though she could see him considering this idea, Caroline leaned down and kissed his temple, her grin some sort of infectious disease. “And we shall have tea and drink wine and eat sweet cakes and dance until our shoes fall off!”
In spite of himself, Brice grinned as he rolled over to face his sister. “You know I can’t dance worth a damn.”
“That is why, brother, it is important to practice!” She leapt off the bed, in high spirits that her brother might not mope in this bedroom for the rest of his life. “Come now, I shall have Kingsley prepare you a late breakfast while our footmen pack up your room. Hear that, America? We return to you anon!”
She tossed the shirt in his face as she trotted to the door, but paused with her hands on the knobs of the double doors. “But I am not going anywhere with you if you continue to smell like that. It’s either take a very long, hot bath, or ride in the cattle car the entire trip home.”
“Caroline.” His voice was again serious, the smile he momentarily wore gone now, and her own threatened to fade. Brice sat at the edge of his bed, running his fingers over the starched collar. “Caroline. Do you think I’m a . . fop? Foppish? One of the papers called me a fop and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Was that why she left me?”
His sister frowned, a sudden spark of anger and resentment sparking in her chest. Ruining your own life was one thing, but that Baker girl really had left a sour taste in her big brother’s mouth. If she ever caught sight of that particular doll . . .
“No, Brice, you’re not a fop,” Caroline said with a scowl. “You smell. Now get up and do something about it.”
With the whistle screaming sharply in the white steam rising in the soft dawn, the train pulled out of its last station before Pittsburgh and you leaned back against the hard wooden seat with a sigh of relief. For a moment, it hadn’t seemed real. All of it — the frantic packing the minutes before your husband got home, the tightness in your chest as you lay next to him as he slept inches from you, the surreal hysteria you felt as you locked your battered and decrepit front door for what really could have been the last time, the tense anxiety as you clutched every memorable possession you owned in that ratty little valise to your chest as you boarded the train to Pittsburgh. As the dawn broke and that dark, cruel shadow that was Tom your husband hadn’t made its terrifying appearance, you could finally imagine what the dawn of a new day could look like. What a life you had always wanted to live would feel like. What your gifts could be if they were your own.
You stared at your gloved hands in your lap, trying to imagine if there was even a life to live outside of the grief and struggle your so-called gifts had caused. First, it was your mother. Your mother who at first hadn’t believed you when you somehow knew it wasn’t the servant girl who had stolen your mother’s necklace, but in fact, your nasty little cousin Beatrice. Although you couldn’t explain why when you touched your mother’s jewelry box you somehow could taste Beatrice’s jealousy, her rage that your mother had finer things than hers, and her wicked little plan, you knew firing the maid was unfair. When you tried to explain this to your mother, she thought you were, like most of your feelings and ideas, ridiculous. But then as the years went on and you again just knew that your aunt’s son would not make it home from the war by touching his photo on the mantel, or that distant Uncle David had misplaced his glasses in his new motorcar and not the office, or that baker’s would inherit a small fortune from a dead relative when he touched your fingers as he passed over the basket of scones — there was a pattern that not even the gin and tonics your mother consumed like air could miss. Your father briefly mentioned something about a doctor, but that sort of testing would require multiple trips, multiple visits, maybe multiple doctors and that was simply too much risk. Too much was at stake to get you the help you needed so your symptoms were mitigated.
Your mother came home with a pair of white gloves one day and made you swear to never, ever, ever, ever take them off. When the washing was required, you were to sit in your room on your bed, not speaking to anyone, not being around anyone — sit, with your feet on the floor and wait until the gloves were given back to you. And to her credit, it worked. You no longer saw things you weren’t supposed to, no longer knew secrets that were meant to be just that — secret. And you got to swallow buckets and buckets of shame that your mother force-fed you because how in the world did she end up with a daughter like this?
So when you met Tom at seventeen and he asked about the gloves and he assured you he wouldn’t run away if you showed him what you could do, you thought all your prayers had been answered. God, after all these years, had finally sent you someone who valued your gifts, who saw your abilities as not something shameful or bad, but something tolerable. So when you left with him, you left behind a childhood of lonely rooms, of queasy guilt, and detached rejection.
And entered into an adulthood of servitude and submission.
Toms’s ideas had been suggestions, really, in the beginning.
Have you ever thought about doing some good with your gifts?
Hey, my buddy Rob is coming over today, why don’t you show ‘em what you can do, eh?
Oh, doll, I’ve lost my hat. Can you find it for me?
But then when you thought about maybe doing good, when you showed Rob what you could do, and you found Tom’s hat, all his gentle nudges turned dire, always with a focus towards money.
Sweetie, I’d love to take you out but times have been so hard. Maybe you could set up shop and help folks find their lost things and charge ‘em five cents. Just for a while.
Baby, there’s a man at the butcher's shop who’s looking for his cat. Maybe you can find it with a fee?
Honey, I’m hungry. Can’t we do better than mutton?
Maybe that’s all you could do. All you could do was make him money.
Despite your begging, and your pleading, and your hopes that maybe, just maybe, you hadn’t fallen in love with a monster masquerading as a man, Tom open-hand slapped you the week before Christmas because you said no to becoming a medium just one too many times. It was an accident, of course, never would happen again, he assured you. But you had seen too many frightened women at church, had accidentally brushed up against too many girls in the dark streets, to know that this was the beginning of the end.
So, like the hopeless coward you have been your entire life, you got up in the dead of night and ran. Ran into the big city and hoped to disappear completely.
The gloves around your thin hands had become gray, tattered. You had never been able to afford another pair after your nineteenth birthday but because of the quality, they had held up over the years. The train rattled around you, and behind you a baby cried, and in front, an old man puffed on a cigarette.
You had nightmares that one day you would take off your gloves and your hands would simply be gone. That there was nothing left of you except that which you kept hidden. You woke up from those nightmares, panting and sweating, and you’d turn on the oil lamp by your bed, just to make sure your hands were still there. You’d stare at them as long as you could, desperately imprinting their curves, the whorls of your fingers, the cracks in your knuckles in your memory until Tom barked at you to put that damn light out.
No one sat next to you on the entire train ride and given that you were minutes from Pittsburgh, it seemed unlikely that anyone would suddenly choose the empty space now. So, with your heart and new life trembling in your chest, you slowly eased your gloves off and stared in amazement that these hands, that both damned you and set you apart from anyone in this world or the next, were still your own.
“If I had known that bringing you back to Pittsburgh would make you such a drag, I’d have left you in that damn chateau in France.” Caroline slumped down in the seat, carefully balancing her small cup of espresso, and toed the paperwork Brice had spread out across his lap and his side of the train car. He eyed her red-painted nail with disdain and used the end of his pen to remove her from his work. Caroline smirked and slid her shoes back on as her brother made another note.
“As much as this physically pains me to say this,” Brice said without lifting his gaze, “you were right, Caroline. To get me out of there. To get me home.”
He dared a glance because Brice Catledge was anything but subtle even when he wanted to be and Caroline laughed at the red on his cheeks. “And what, rot alone in that big empty house with Mother and my dear George? It was entirely a selfish gesture, I assure you.”
They both knew that was a lie but being who they were, that was the end of it.
“Are you looking forward to seeing George again? After all this time?” Brice asked, glancing out the window at the first streaks of sunlight breaking up the low-hanging clouds at the horizon.
Caroline sighed in her put-upon way and sipped at her espresso. “I’m still angry he left me so soon after that media frenzy to open just another silly little hospital.”
“The foremost research center on mental health on the eastern seaboard? That hospital, Caroline?” Brice asked, a grin on his face.
Despite her attitude, Brice very well knew she was incredibly proud of her husband’s medical research. But to act upon it would faze the ditzy flapper girl image she worked so hard to cultivate. As a younger man, it irritated him immensely that his sister, who could be anything she wanted with her natural intelligence and wealth, chose to be this underestimated little waif. And yet, as time went on, and men young and old dismissed her only to be humiliated or proven wrong each and every time, it occurred to him that this wasn’t some fashion style his sister had chosen, but a suit of armor.
George knew exactly who she was, as well as her brilliant mind, the moment he met her. He might have been the only man who had seen her with such clarity and that was most likely why she married him.
The steam whistled at the front of the train, indicating they were about fifteen minutes out from Pittsburgh station. The porter came by to announce as such, knocking on each of the cabin windows and taking trash. Caroline sipped up the last bit of her espresso and tossed her croissant into her bag. Brice barely rolled his eyes at that kind of behavior any more. Instead, he gathered the documents from the seat and slid them back into what was his father’s and was now his briefcase. He dropped his pen into its holding and clicked the buckle closed. Etched in gold were his father’s initials.
The day he officially took over the company, his mother gave him the briefcase as a gift. To remind him how proud his father was. But all it did was remind him that his father would have chosen Caroline instead in an instant if he could have. How at least Caroline, despite expressing a frighteningly natural business acumen, never once out loud voiced how much she wished she could run the company because it wasn’t in her nature to express disappointment. How she should be running the company, not him.
Brice ran his thumb over the engraving, half wishing he was still back in that chateau and half wishing he had never met Sophie Baker.
For a train scheduled to arrive at dawn, the swarm of people — old, young, and new — was thick as it streamed onto the platform. Nerves made your hands jittery and as you stood to join the lines spilling out the glass doors, you struggled to fit your glove on properly. The man behind you who had smoked at least three cigarettes since his stop was pushy, using his girth to edge you along faster than you were ready. You could almost smell the smoke clinging to his bristly, white mustache as you glared at him over your shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice you as he not so gently jostled you forward. The glove was still not fitting right on your hand, but you had to hold your bag with your other hand, so you tucked your arm closer to your chest, not wanting even for a moment to know a single thing about this walrus of a man.
The line let out and you stepped onto the platform in Pittsburgh. The air smelled, the steam was hot from under the tracks, the chatter of people around you so loud you could barely think — but you were free. Tom could never find you in a city this big.
But no one seemed to care that this was a particularly big moment for you as you stood still on the platform, realizing for the first time you had no idea of what to do next. The crowd grew even bigger around you as all passengers from all sections of the train pooled together and the noise was even louder.
Someone knocked into your elbow, nearly knocking the glove from your hand.
“Hey!” You snapped at the man you think bumped into you and took off the glove to finally readjust it. “You could apologize, you big —,”
Someone knocked into your shoulder and you stumbled, gasping from the brunt of pain that spiked up your back, forward into a very solid shape in front of you. You reached forward automatically to stop yourself just as the shape, the man, turned just as you collided with him.
Two things happened at the exact same time.
You realized how warmly brown his eyes were. And you touched his outstretched hand, the one meant to catch you.
Skin to skin.
Palm to palm, he held you and you saw everything. A rush of images whirred across your mind — a tennis racquet — a wide endless lawn of perfectly cut grass — the dip of the horizon as fighter plane went down, flames everywhere —
But then came a series of images that repeated. Over and over. As someone was violently shaking your shoulders and demanding that you look.
A great oak library. Red and green and navy books like rubies and emeralds and sapphires.
A cave cut into the shoreline, drinking in cool, blue water.
The yellow paper of a stack of personal checks, the recipient line empty, but the dollar amount coming to ten thousand dollars.
A pair of cufflinks.
The sound of a gunshot.
Blood. Lots of blood.
And this man, those warm, gentle eyes closing, the light fading as this man bled out in front of you and died.
You shudder, feeling the gunshot split open your chest as it would his in only a few days time.
“Two days,” you gasped, your knees buckling as the strength of your vision dragged you to the ground. Hands, unseen hands, held you up and you clutched at whatever was near. “Two days — you’re going to die in two days—,”
A great oak library.
A cave cut into the shoreline, drinking in cool, blue water.
The yellow paper of a stack of personal checks.
A pair of cufflinks.
The sound of a gunshot.
Blood. Lots of blood.
You groaned, the images shattering against your brain one after the other in a rising tidal wave of agony. You could smell the flutter of the paper in the books in the library, taste the salt in the air by the cave. You felt the wetness of drying ink and the clutter of metal cufflinks. You could smell the noxious smoke from the gun and that made you sad, very very sad, for some reason. The nausea building, the line between the dream reality and the train platform blurred and you leaned against something solid to keep from falling. And yet the ground seemed to rise up to meet you. Cold metal met your cheek. You heard something, maybe someone saying something, but it wasn’t clear. Nothing made sense in the dense swirling fog.
“Two days,” you moaned. “Two days . . .”
Two days . . .
Two days . . .
You’re going to die in —
Two days . . .
Your eyes opened to the steel girders and high glass ceiling of the Pittsburgh train station. Your head ached and there was a dull throbbing in the middle of your forehead, always where it hurt after a vision. But it had been years since you’d had one one that strong, that powerful. It was not a good omen, you decided, to start your new life with a vision so strong it made you black out.
You groaned and pressed your thumb to where it hurt the most on your forehead.
“Oh, darling, look — she’s coming around.”
A pair of intelligent and curious eyes flitted into your gaze. Bright-red-tipped fingers touched your cheek, pressed themselves to your forehead as if checking for a fever.
“You pretty thing, can you hear me? Are you alright?”
As your eyes focused, a woman with short dark brown hair, marcelled exquisitely in the peak of high fashion, stared down at you from an elegant travel coat. Her dangling earrings spoke of wealth and salons, hardly the time or place for a grimy train station. But they fit her heart-shaped face well, as if she couldn’t be anything other than extremely striking.
You were more concussed by this beautiful woman standing over you than you were by the psychic images that just bombed your brain from the inside out.
You nodded. The woman sighed with relief. “Oh, thank the stars. You went down like a pile of bricks. I was worried you’d never get up again. Here, let me help you up.”
Her slender, bejeweled hand went to your elbow as she gently pulled you up right. “Easy does it, easy does it.”
Your head still swimming, you blinked as you realized you were in the train station police office. Cramped, small, most likely for infirmed or elderly officers, someone had laid you down on a bench, perhaps meant for those waiting to report a crime. There was one officer at a desk typing up a report and he didn’t look up as you got your bearings.
Your vision refocused as the woman with dark hair caught your gaze again.
“Now, my husband’s the doctor between us, but I’ve seen him inspect enough patients to know the basics.” She raised her red-studded finger again. “How many am I holding up?”
You cleared your throat. “Hmm, three.”
“Good. Can you touch your nose?”
You did without trouble.
“Wonderful. Any pain?”
You shook your head, which was the truth. The throbbing was subsiding just as it always did. But as it always did, it left a weight of exhaustion on your shoulders. As the fog cleared, you remembered what, or rather who, held you on your feet.
“I’m sorry,” you said, blinking roughly as the memories of the images from your vision came without the pain. “There was a man. Before. He — I — I think he —,”
The woman rolled her eyes. “That would be my brother. He’ll be disappointed to know he can’t actually make women faint on the spot.”
As if on cue, two men walked through the small door at the front of the room. One was a police officer, wide as he was tall. And then came the other man.
Curled, dark hair, like his sister’s, but while hers came clearly from careful design, his were loose, natural. His thick eyebrows seemed painted on, flawless, and curious, and perfect. He was tall, amazingly so, and he moved with an affected ease that appeared just as designed as his sister’s hair: practiced over and over until just right.
When he glanced across the room to you, it was those same eyes that came at you out of the fog. Kind. Gentle. So gentle in fact, a cruel man might mistake him for a fool, kindness a sign of nativity and idiocy. As if it were an indication of a weak mental constitution.
But a man like that would be very wrong.
“My name is Caroline Catledge,” the woman said as her brother approached. She extended a hand, those nails beautifully red and glossy. You took it, muttering your own name numbly. “Pleasure to meet you. And that man whom you so elegantly collapsed into is my brother, Brice.”
They were a pair, brother and sister. Tall, both gorgeous in their own right, like exotic birds that languished on the grounds of a zoo. You felt positively pigeon-like in front of them.
And then you realized that softness in the brother’s eyes was gone.
“See, I told you she’d make a miraculous recovery.” He said tightly. “Let’s have the officers’ gather her things and we’ll all be on our way, shall we?”
Caroline scowled at him. “You’ve still got your shorts in a bunch over the fact that she predicted your death, don’t you?”
You felt the blood run from your cheeks. “I did what?”
“Oh, yes,” he said with an empty smile. “It was all very convincing. You really should thank your acting teacher for all their hard work.”
“Brice Catledge!” Caroline snapped. “You are being a thug. Whatever you feel about mediumship, this poor girl has taken a serious fall. Go sit over there until you’ve decided not to be so intolerable.”
His cheeks flushed. “You know I’m older than you, right?”
“Well, you’re acting like a child!”
“Please, stop.” You stand between them and they look at you as if you’ve started speaking gibberish. “Please. Ms. Catledge, Mr. Catledge, I am very sorry for the inconvenience I’ve caused. But whatever I said or did, I . . .”
You could still feel his blood beneath your hands. You swallowed. You had never ever been wrong once before and it felt irresponsible to stand there and lie and say that you were wrong.
“I . . . I hope it hasn’t caused you too much distress. But you . . .” you swallowed, mustered all the courage you could grasp at and looked at Brice Catledge. Had you been a different person, running a different life, that wonderful head of curls would have been entirely distracting. He regarded you with light disdain but also something that resembled weariness, a tiredness that didn’t seem to fit the wealth exuded by his clothes. He carried something, some sadness.
The spirits whispered, shellshock. And then, heartbreak.
But you shook your head.
“Mr. Catledge, please be careful.”
For a moment he looked genuinely shaken. But the shock faded from his eyes, replaced by a cold fury, the pink on his cheeks turned red and he stepped away from you as if disgusted.
“Caroline, I will see you in the car.”
And Brice Catledge turned on his heel and went (what you thought would be) out of your life forever.
But Caroline only rolled her eyes. “Brice always has loved his drama, so I apologize if he’s hurt your feelings. He’s recently had some bad trouble with a medium and he’s a bit . . . lost because of it.”
“Because of her. He fell in love with someone who . . . hurt him,” you heard yourself say.
Caroline blinked at you, momentarily shocked and showing it, before the mask of relaxed composure returned. “Yes, that’s right. But despite his abysmal behavior, I can’t leave you here with nothing. Do you have a place to stay? Family in town?”
Collapsing into the arms of a strange man who clearly wanted nothing to do with you would take some time to heal your ego, but the thought of charity from his sister was nearly intolerable.
“No, Caroline, please, I couldn’t. I don’t want money or anything. I’d just rather be on my way.”
The Catledge sister regarded you for a moment, her expression unreadable as if she was calculating your very moral fortitude. “A girl on her own. I can respect that. Well, if you ever change your mind, check out Martina’s Boarding House on South street. Martina is a good friend of mine and she’ll give you a night or two to get on your feet. I’m really very sorry it was my brother whom you had to run into.”
She turned and motioned to the officer to bring you your bag, but you had to restrain yourself from grabbing desperately to her arm. “Caroline — Ms. Catledge — I promise you I’m not a charlatan. But I saw something when I touched your brother. I’m not lying when I say I’m worried about his safety.”
Caroline smiled at you, but not one full of warmth or joy. “You don’t seem like someone who is after our money, but then again, the truly devious ones never do.”
Something dark flickered in her eyes, standing a bit back as the officer dropped your bag at your feet without so much as a sideways glance. “Call on Martina, darling, if you can. She’s a hoot. I think she’ll like you.”
Caroline Catledge, not dignifying you by waiting for a response, tilted her velvet hat squarely on her head before heading out the door after her brother.