The Dark (13 page)

“It may offend the spirits,” Leah warns.

“Indeed? I ask again. Turn up the lamps. I must investigate.”

No one stirs. The reverend is left to do it himself. He peers under the rug, the table. Opens the drapes to a salvo of daylight. Presses his ears against the panelling. Admits at last that he is puzzled.

Calvin, quiet until now, asks, “Would Reverend Clarke like to see the table move?”

“Move? Indeed, I should like to see an object
move
by spirit power alone. Yet first I must ask all to push their chairs away from the table. Excellent. Now raise your hands and now—” He stares at the table, which trundles towards him, past the seated party, the tea board, the organ. Leah snatches the candelabra as it tips. Maggie, Lizzie and Katie all shift their feet out of the table’s path.

“Great heavens!” the reverend shouts. He sidesteps. The table halts. The reverend drops to his knees, peers again under the rug, then runs his hands over the curved table legs, apologizing to the ladies as he does so. The table nudges him. He stumbles back with a hoarse cry, swipes at his brow. “Never have I seen …” He trails off at the sound of sawing and hammering. “And what is that wretched noise? What?”

“Perhaps a spirit coffin is being made,” Leah suggests.

Reverend Clarke shudders.

Lizzie whispers to Maggie, “Or perhaps it’s just the men working on the larder. How obvious need it be?”

Maggie ignores her niece.

Leah says, “Yes, a spirit coffin, Reverend. The spirits, you see, are reminding us that we are mortal, that we could go to our Maker any moment. That disaster looms large for us all. One never knows when it may strike.” She eyes Lizzie, adds, “Now, do ask another question, Reverend. Ah, but first let us link hands again. A moment … there, as I said, it does help the spirit chain.”

“Spirit chain?” Lizzie mutters as Leah talks on. She shifts her foot along the floor. “There’s your spirit chain.”

“Liz. No,” Katie whispers.

Yet why not? Maggie thinks. What is the worst that can happen? She poses the question, then realizes the answer: Ruination. Damnation. Just as Lizzie herself said back at Mechanics Square.

Leah raises her voice. “Linking our hands not only helps the spirit chain, it also lets disbelievers know that none dare work mischief in the dark.”

Reverend Clarke looks chastised. He holds Adelaide Granger’s hand on one side, Leah’s on the other. He clears his throat. “Can God be known? That is to say, understood even? If one strives enough?”

Maggie thinks it a curious question for a reverend. He should know, if anyone does. Anywise, the answer will make a believer of him. He is at the tip-point. Maggie knows this. As Leah must. As Lizzie should.

Leah’s turns her chin to the left.

Under the table, out of sight, Lizzie pinions Maggie’s leg with her own. Atop the table she squeezes Maggie’s hand in a claw grip. Maggie squirms furtively. Silence grows large in the room.

Don’t, Lizzie, Maggie thinks. DON’T!

“Spirits?” Leah asks.

Nothing. The minutes stretch. Leah asks again. Then demands.

Leah looks at Maggie. Maggie hesitates, then dips her head towards Lizzie. Such a small movement for such a large betrayal.

Leah glares at Lizzie. And Lizzie? She meets her mother’s eyes with pure rebellion.

Leah stands and points at her daughter. “You! Elizabeth Fish.” And then … fury, the like of which Maggie has never seen. Not from Leah. Not from anyone. “You’ve done this. You! You wicked, wicked girl. You’ve grieved the spirits. You’re the cause. The sole cause.”

Lizzie is slack with shock. The entire party glares at her. Some stand. The Reverend Clarke looks on, appalled.

“Lizzie!” Calvin cries, and throws out his hand as if Lizzie were teetering on a precipice. Which she is—and the pit of ignominy for her entire family is beneath her, the desert of her own ignominy above. And if Maggie rescues her? The pit. The desert. They will be her and Katie’s fate as well.

Lizzie claps her hands over her ears as accusations fall about her like stones.

“It’s Lizzie’s fault.”

“All her fault they won’t speak.”

“Shall I never hear Harriet again? And because of you?”

“Cruel girl.”

“Come now, people, have pity. Mercy even,” Reverend Clarke says.

“Meanie, meanie, meanie!” shrills little Betty Granger.

“This has to do with her behaviour of yesterday,” Leah cuts in, her voice above the other voices, above Lizzie’s sobbing. “She must repent and beg forgiveness. And on her knees.”

A slow rap-rap of agreement.

Lizzie buries her face in her hands.

“Will the spirits speak to us again if Lizzie begs forgiveness?” Leah asks. Nothing in her voice suggests she will relent, Maggie realizes.

“I can’t help it,” Lizzie says. “I just said what I thought and if I’m to blame I can’t help it. I can’t.” She sobs a torrent. The Reverend Clarke offers a brief hand on her shoulder. Maggie doesn’t dare offer comfort, not with Leah so near. Katie sits slumped like a rag doll.

Leah tells the sitters how yesterday Katie was overtaken by the spirits while harmlessly dancing. How Lizzie shouted she wanted the spirits to go away. How she blasphemed. “My daughter does not trust the spirits, dear people. She believes, actually believes, they would cause us injury. She believes they would allow us to be labelled frauds.”

Frauds
. The word stands giant and stark.

“Yes, Elizabeth Fish would have us labelled as frauds,” Leah continues, softly now.

The reverend swipes at his brow again. Agrees a plea for forgiveness might be warranted. Maggie understands his thinking. For if she and her family
are
frauds, would they dare utter the word? Would they dare place that thought in any mind? No. Certainly not. Only the innocent would dare. Only the innocent have nothing to fear under eyes both mortal and divine.

More raps. They are are followed by bangs, thuds. The air in the room is thick and heady, like the air before a storm.

“Now, Lizzie. Now. Repent!” the company hollers. There is more name-calling: “wicked girl,” “heartless thing,” “unnatural creature.” Maggie hears Katie call out, “Repent, you niddy-noddy!” At this, Maggie, to her own surprise, calls out, “Yes, now, Liz. Get it done with.”

Maggie had meant to keep silent as a show of sympathy, but she has been swept along. I’m only fourteen, she thinks. And Katie is only eleven. It isn’t fair.

Lizzie does not hold out long. She clutches her hair. Drops to her knees. Chokes back her sobs. “Forgive me, spirits. Oh, do so. Forgive me and, and, come back.”

“And?” Leah asks.

Lizzie squints at her mother’s face. Sniffs. “And I’ll never doubt you again, spirits. Nor ask you to leave. Oh, crumb, but I promise. I promise.
Je promets
.”

“Spirits? Will that suffice?” Leah asks.

A heavy rapping. The company sighs. Maggie smiles with relief. Now things can go on as they have before. She will even get Lizzie to laugh about this incident once they are back at Mechanics Square. And then Maggie, with Katie’s help, will cajole and jest and Lizzie will indulge her young aunts, as she did when she visited them in Hydesville, and help pass the dreary hours.

Lizzie meekly asks if she may leave; Leah says no, absolutely not. The Reverend Clarke wants to test the spirits with questions of his personal life and Leah does not want the spirit chain broken. Lizzie looks stricken. For pity’s sake, Maggie thinks. Wouldn’t it be a kindness to let her go?

The reverend asks the colour of his favourite pen-knife. When his mother died. If his son has passed his exams. The answers are all correct. “How can they know this?” he wonders aloud. “My dear friends might know all this, but no one else.”

“Would the spirits like to hear the music?” Leah asks.

The spirits would; they are always in the mood for music.

Leah sits at the Grangers’ fine organ. She scales on the reedy keys and then sings “Barbara Allen,” her voice swelling out strong and toffee-warm. And without a single faltering note, Maggie realizes.

Reverend Clarke bows his head. “The visible and the invisible worlds have met together this day. I’m convinced even to the marrow.”

Convinced, yes, and now suggesting that all and sundry should know of it.

Maggie presses a palm to her brow. Isaac’s remedy must be wearing off, because her head-pain has returned, and in one telling shot.

T
he garret’s ladderback chair creaked as I settled in. I spread my skirts to create a dish for my knitting. My patient smiled. “You look to be floating on air.”

“Air?”

“Your skirts, they hide the legs of the chair so that you seem magicked, so that—”

“Not everyone is small as a mustard seed. Some of us need a tad more space to hang our hats.” (I am, as I said, a fleshy woman and of decent height.)

“Do you live near to here, then?”

“Not so near, nor far.”

“A walking distance?”

“At times.”

“At times you need the omnibus?”

“At times I walk.”

“You must have a very practical home.”

“I move hither and yon, if you must know. To the precincts where I’m most needed. Such is my duty.”

“I see. I moved a great deal also. No place seemed a home. I moved and moved. Was never quite here, nor there. As such, I don’t wish to move again, is that clear, Mrs. Mellon?”

“As Heaven’s bells,” I said, and frowned over a lax cable stitch.

“Yet if I were ever to name my favourite place it would be the
Troup Street cottage.” She paused, waiting for some response, but I was too intent on my task to give one, though I was thinking, certainly, of my New England cottage, of the whales slaughtered on the beach below, their bloody flesh laid out in strips long as roads, their illuminating oil filling barrels upon barrels. Of the scrimshaws that Mr. Mellon carved (his one and only talent). And of the sand carpets my son and I delighted in making for the keeping room. We changed the pattern each week. I should add that my son had an artist’s keen eye, and these sand carpets were a marvel to all who saw them.

“Leah chose it, of course.”

“Chose? Chose what?”

“Troup Street, the place I should like to return to, if ever I could. But I can’t.”

“No,” I said. My patients are ever on about returning. But we are knit in our places and must make the best of it. I told her this fact, and she agreed. But she told me of Troup Street regardless, and when Leah first beheld it.

“W
E ARE ARRIVED
, M
OTHER,”
Leah announces, and stops outside the cottage on Troup Street on this blustery March day of’49. The cottage is incongruously modest amid the mansions and stately homes of Rochester’s Third Ward, but the path to the cheery red door has been cleared of any snow, the boxwood hedging is neatly trimmed, the lion’s-head knocker fresh-oiled and agleam.

“It is the pitch-perfect residence for our spirits,” Leah declares, as Mother huffs up beside her. Leah’s sisters remain behind at the Mechanics Square walk-up. Their opinions on the new rental hardly matter. And they have been acting oddly—guarded, even surly—since Lizzie’s departure, which was just before the Yuletide. But those two will sing a new tune, Leah thinks, once the merry times begin. For the Reverend Clarke has indeed been telling all and sundry about his meeting with the spirits. And these all and sundry have been clamouring to meet the spirits. And both sides, the visible and the invisible, need to be entertained in proper style. Leah finds
it nearly impossible to believe that only a year has passed since the peddler’s ghost started up, and then promptly knocked open the door to more worthy spirits. But only
nearly
impossible. Nothing is
wholly
impossible to believe. Not any longer.

The red door swings open at Leah’s touch. No rattling. No difficulties. Ah, Elizabeth. Lizzie. The girl, granted, had been contrite after her abominable behaviour at the Grangers’, but she still wants nothing to do with spirit sittings. And her reluctance will raise questions, questions that might weaken the spirit chain. Leah explained this to Lizzie no less than three times, and yet she remains obdurate; thus Leah had no choice but to send the girl to her father’s in Illinois. Lizzie had been reluctant, true. She had wept and wailed. Likely because Leah has always talked about Bowman Fish as if he were pure evil. He is not, of course. Leah has met pure evil aplenty in her life, and Bowman is not of such mettle. No, Leah has lately understood that Bowman is a man much like any other. Prey to animal urges. Believing a woman the same.

Leah turns to her mother. She is plucking at a yew tree and muttering what might be a spell.

“My heavens, Mother, cease that, you will give the neighbours cause for gossip.”

“But the yew … It takes its nourishment from the dead, doesn’t it?”

“That is mere superstition. Besides, the owner assured me the place is not haunted. There have been no murders committed here. Nor has this house seen any deaths from strange maladies or from unexplained circumstances. No, it has known only the ordinary deaths, of infants and the aged and such. Now follow me.”