Read Online Ghost Song by Sarah Rayne - Free Book Online

wouldn’t have seen me. And now I’ve lost that beautiful hour being here on my own.
    â€˜I’m truly not here to disturb you, Toby,’ said Alicia, mounting the steps to the stage. ‘This is your time before the performance—I do understand that’s important to you.’ She had the knack of saying what people wanted to hear, and once or twice it had occurred to Toby that born into a slightly different social stratum she might have become a very successful, very high-class courtesan.
    He murmured something about needing an extra rehearsal before the evening.
    â€˜Yes, of course. Your new song. I shall be watching from my box,’ she said, and a different, less attractive image came uppermost: that of the female counterpart of the stage-door Johnnie. Is she just slumming? thought Toby. Is that what this is?
    â€˜But,’ said Alicia, ‘I have an invitation for you, and I wanted to issue it before the performance.’
    It would be supper at her house most likely, and the meal would start in the small elegant dining room and finish in the perfumed bedroom looking out over the park. Toby had twice been invited into Alicia’s bedroom and both times had found it a remarkable experience, visually as well as sexually. In her own way Alicia was something of an actress: she liked to set branched candlesticks in front of the mirrors to create the impression of an amber-lit cave, and to offer her guest a sensual meal in which dainty morsels of chicken, petits buerres, or grapes dipped in chocolate could be erotically shared. Toby had no objection to any of this, but at the moment he could not really think any further than eight o’clock this evening, with the Tarleton packed full of people. (Would Frank get that second set of chords right so that it suggested the butler being so drunk he tripped over his own feet? Would Toby himself make a sufficiently descriptive gesture to indicate tipping the bottle into the mixing bowl in the first verse? Would an audience even turn up to listen?)
    But it was not supper at Alicia’s house she had in mind at all.
    â€˜I wondered,’ she said, ‘if, after the show, you would care to come to a meeting of a small society I occasionally patronize. All rather secret, you know, which is why I didn’t want to ask you in front of anyone else. But I think you might find it interesting. A small group of friends who have similar tastes and aims in life. It will began at half past eleven this evening.’
    â€˜Secret society? Half past eleven?’ Half past eleven was not particularly late for Toby’s theatre friends, but it was rather late for most other people.
    â€˜Do come, Toby. They’re all longing to meet you.’
    They’re all longing to meet you…
    For some reason the words sent a faint chill through Toby’s mind, but he murmured a vague acceptance—it did not seem as if Alicia was going to brook a refusal anyway—and then escorted her to the stage door. It was raining in earnest now, and the thunder was unmistakably closer. Toby asked Shilling, the stage doorman, to get a cab for her, then went back to his preparations for the evening.
    But her words stayed with him. They’re all longing to meet you…
    Who were they, these unknown people who were longing to meet him at this secret-sounding meeting? Wild visions of devil worship and bacchanalian orgies nudged at his consciousness, which was irritating when he wanted to concentrate on ‘Tipsy Cake’.
    By now the other performers had arrived, grumbling about the heavy rain which had turned Platt’s Alley into a river of mud, ruining people’s shoes and coiffures. The musicians were in a bad temper—the flute player had dropped his music in the gutter and would have to dry it over the gas ring in this flippin’ heat. The Rose Romain dancers had all had their hair dressed by Monsieur that very day and said it was a