Baroness Sylvie Devereux would enjoy her life a lot more if she wasn’t haunted by the fear that her past might catch up to her. Before she married her baron, Sylvie and her sister Charlotte were the Mothe sisters. They conducted seances and banished ghosts for whoever could pay. Now that she’s a member of respectable society, Sylvie does her utmost to keep that past far away from her. Unfortunately for her, that past has just turned up across the street from her home in the opening pages of Carmella Lowkis’s intriguing novel, Spitting Gold.
When they were children, Sylvie and Charlotte’s mother read a story to the two sisters that stuck with them forever. One sister, the good one, fetched water for an old woman (fairy in disguise) and was rewarded with the ability to drop gold from her mouth. (I would be worried about chipped teeth, personally.) Her sister, the not-so-good one, waited at the well for the old woman, only to be fooled when the fairy took the shape of a wealthy woman. This sister’s punishment for telling the woman to get her own water was to start spitting out toads when she spoke. (Gross, but easier on the teeth, maybe?) Sylvia and Charlotte have always wondered which of them was the good sister and which the not-so-good.
Charlotte has arrived on Sylvie’s street with a proposition: one last gig in exchange for not ratting Sylvie out to her husband and promising to leave Sylvie alone forever. With deep reluctance and a lot of fear, Sylvie accepts. The job is to find out who is haunting the de Jacquinot family. The family was once very wealthy and is hanging on to their status by their collective fingernails. The youngest de Jacquinot, Florence, and her grandfather, Ardoir, say that they have seen the ghost of Sabine de Lisle. Florence is terrified but Ardoir believes that this ancestor (murdered during La Terreur) might point them to lost family treasure. If the Mothe sisters can figure out what the ghost wants, they will be handsomely rewarded.
The whole thing is a scam, of course. Sylvie knows that neither she nor her sister can actually talk to the dead and, besides, ghosts aren’t real. Except, strange things start to happen at the de Jacquinot house that Sylvie can’t explain. Charlotte swears up and down that she didn’t create fake ectoplasm for Florence to spit out of her mouth when Sabine appears to speak through the girl. No one takes responsibility for the damage done to the portraits and walls in the library.
There are plenty of twists in Spitting Gold‘s plot and almost as many macabre revelations as a sensational Victorian novel. I had a great time teasing out who was scamming who, discerning who was really telling the truth, and wondering what on earth was going to happen next. This was a very fun read. I encourage fans of historical mysteries to give it a try.