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Charlotte lifted her teacup and peered into the darkness of the liquid. “I don’t know. Do you suppose the mystic will tell me that if I ask her?”
“I hope you won’t waste your session with the mystic with silly questions,” Louisa affirmed.
Charlotte turned her eyes back to Margorie, yearning to plead with her for a bit of normality. Margorie just gave a lacklustre shrug and sipped her tea.
“Margorie! Don’t sip the tea,” Charlotte cried.
“Why not?” Margorie demanded. “It’s not as though this man wants to be responsible for our deaths.”
“There’s very little we know about this situation at all,” Charlotte affirmed. “They could very well want to poison and kidnap us. If we don’t keep our guard …”
“Charlotte, I don’t wish to run with your fantasies any longer,” Louisa interjected. “In any case, it’s essential that we focus on the various elements of our existence that we wish to ask the mystic about. I’m sure she has a limited amount of time; we must help her focus her energy on what we care most about.”
Louisa’s eyelids dropped; her lashes fluttered across her cheeks. Margorie turned her eyes back towards her tea. Her nostrils squeezed upward.
“Not so tasty?” Charlotte asked.
“It’s rather … different,” Margorie said.
“Poisonous?”
Louisa’s eyelids shot upward once more. “Charlotte! You’re ruining a day I’ve looked forward to for some time.”
“Some time,” Charlotte scoffed. “You only informed me of the mystic four days ago.”
“Yes, but I’ve wanted to meet one for nearly a decade.”
“We’re only twenty-three years old,” Charlotte said. “You didn’t have such fancies surrounding a mystic at age-thirteen.”
“I did,” Louisa said.
“Did she?” Charlotte demanded of Margorie.
Margorie shrugged. “I was rather busy courting back then.”
This cast everyone into silence. Nobody liked to be reminded of Margorie’s past: the fact that she’d married a man for love, and he’d ultimately left her for a woman on the other side of the country, taking his money along with him. This had left Margorie essentially penniless.
Now, at the age of twenty-eight, she’d moved back in with Louisa and their parents and spent a great deal of time in the garden with tears glittering across her cheeks.
Suddenly, a woman appeared in the doorway dressed in what seemed to be four or five different layers of red and green and blue robes, with one wrapped elaborately around her head.
Her eyes peered out, green and glittering, and her hands clenched either side of the doorway, as though if she let go, she would be cast upward towards some impossible heaven. Her scarves seemed to flutter, despite the lack of wind.
Louisa let out a little, tender shriek—the sort of sound a younger girl might have made. Charlotte yearned to roll her eyes but maintained her alertness instead.
“Ladies,” the mystic began. Her voice was all watery, hazy, and she blinked skyward, as though she spoke instead to an invisible force above their heads. “It is with great joy that I welcome you here this afternoon. I can feel it in the air above you: there’s tension within this room. Is there not?”
Louisa spun her head around to glare at Charlotte as if to say,See? You’ve upset her—yes—but she sees all.
“My name is Florentia,” the mystic continued, bowing her head as she said it—as though the act of articulating her own name demanded trumpets and harps. “I’ve travelled far and wide, studied countless languages, gone under hypnosis many times, and studied the secrets of the universe from the comforts of a cave at the top of a mountain. I’ve seen it all: what has come before and what will be. As a result, I comprehend the weight each of you has, as it relates to the texture of the universe. I see it within each of you. Each of you is a smaller world within this greater one—but you’re no less complex.”
Nobody spoke. Florentia dropped her palms to her sides, tilted her head, then stepped into the room, her shawls fluttering.
“It’s best we begin when our energy remains high,” she said. “Who shall follow me first?”
Charlotte furrowed her brow. Louisa turned back, her lips parted.
“We think it best that we enter together,” Charlotte affirmed.
