“But the BLACK KEY, you see. How can I ignore the evidence of my own eyes?”

“The black key?” Weak he might be but his mind had cleared. She had said those words in capital letters.

His aunt looked away from him, lips pursed. In that pose, she might have been an elderly schoolteacher confronted with a moral dilemma outside her experience.

“I suppose it can’t hurt to tell you,” she said softly.

The Black Key was, it seemed, one of Madame Flaubert’s specialties. It could reveal the truth about people. It could seek out and unlock their hidden malign motives. Ford was sure that any malign motives were Madame Flaubert’s, but he merely asked how it worked.

His aunt shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not the medium. But I’ve seen it, my dear. Sliding across the table, rising into the air, turning and turning until it ... it pointed straight at the guilty party.”

Ford could think of several ways to do that, none of them involving magic or “higher spirits.” He himself was no expert but he suspected that Dupaynil could have cleared up the Black Key’s actions in less than five minutes.

“One of my servants,” Auntie Q was saying. “I’d been missing things, just baubles really. But one can’t let it go on. Seraphine had them all in and questioned them, and the Black Key revealed it. The girl confessed! Confessed to even more than I’d known about.”

“What did the authorities say, when you told them how you’d gotten that confession?”

Auntie Q blushed faintly. “Well, dear, you know I didn’t actually report it. The poor girl was so upset and, of course I had to dismiss her, and she had had so many troubles in her life already. Seraphine said that the pursuit of vengeance always ends hi evil.”