I was earning my rent by playing widows' dead husbands when a fourth hand took my wrist under the table. It was wet, and it was not a hand I had arranged. Then the door opened on a man who has brought down twenty-nine séances in London, the one person alive who can sum up my lies in three lines.
In a London where the fog covers everything, Hester Wren makes her rent by lending out the voices of the dead. The candles and the levers are all counterfeits worked from her own fingertips, but her eye for whether a person is telling the truth or a lie is genuine. Then, one night, something she never performed begins to answer from under the table. That same night Barnaby Holloway comes through the parlour door: a field investigator for the Society for Psychical Inquiry, a man who has pulled down séance after séance, and the one man who writes her tricks down at first sight. Deceive him and she keeps her room; tell him the truth and the gaol comes nearer. And the single hand her eye cannot read is the one sitting in the investigator's chair.
- The moment Holloway, who has broken twenty-nine séances, stops his pen at one voice you never counterfeited and goes to relight the dead candle first.
- Of the five hands joined around the table, only you can see which one is holding a lie, and the one hand you cannot read is sitting in the investigator's chair.
- The moment the man who has finished writing the fraud charge against you uses that very paper, the ink not yet dry, to dry your soaked wrist.
The moment Holloway, who has broken twenty-nine séances, stops his pen at one voice you never counterfeited and goes to relight the dead candle first.
