The Dark (14 page)

Her mother does, though with cautious steps and darting, fearful eyes.

The vestibule is commodious, the hallway broad and painted a clear-day blue. The kitchen is tucked discreetly at the back of the cottage, along with the family keeping room. The parlour is set prominently in the front and is connected to the larder by a back stair. It has no furnishings except a sturdy organ, a chandelier hung on pulleys, and a nickle-plated parlour stove, nicely ornamented and surrounded by a wrought-iron guard.

“I suppose it is nice room,” Mother says. “But parlours, well, they do seem wasteful, don’t they? Being only for entertainment and for setting out the dead.”

“No decent family can live without a parlour these days, Mother.”

The mention of family must have brought Lizzie to Mother’s mind, for now she is grousing on about sending for her. “It has been long enough, hasn’t it? Yes? Now, poppet, I—”

“Ma … Mother. We have discussed this to bits. I shall send for Elizabeth the moment she regains her senses. Only, she must learn to govern her rage, a governance that I suspect shall take long and diligent practice.”

Her mother sighs. “Well, you know best about all that. I suppose the organ is fine, isn’t it?”

“In an antiquated fashion,” Leah says, and taps the keys. Winces. “It requires tuning. And we shall need purchase sandwich lamps and a good-sized table for the sittings. An ovoid one, yes, to show the equality of all souls, and—”

“Shhh, Leah,” Mother Margaret whispers, her eyes aswim with fright. Something, someone is in the room with them. Leah hears a suspiration. Her mother gasps. Leah slowly turns, then peers into the dimmest corner of the parlour, calls, “Hallo?”

He is of middling height and middling build. His skin has a greyish cast, as does his hair, his eyes, his clothes, his teeth. His expression is glum but not threatening. His voice when he bids them good day is flat-toned, unassuming. Leah doubts a more unnoticeable has ever lived. “Mr. Alvie Kincaid,” she says in delight.

“Alfie, ma’am, not Alvie. Alfie Kincaid.”

“Yes, that is it.” She turns to her mother. “Oh, stop fretting, Mother, the landlord informed me he came with the place.”

At Troup Street, once Mother and the girls are settled in, Leah arranges spirit circles for every weekday evening, and then for Saturday afternoons as well. The Posts, the Bushes, the Grangers, the Littles and the Willets; these are the regulars attendees, though Mrs. Lemira Kedzie visits often from Albany, and Ruth and Norman Culver come often from Arcadia. None of Leah’s close family visits, however, not David,
not Maria, and certainly not Leah’s father, though Leah has asked him to do so many times in letters, as has her mother.

By mid-summer of’49 the regular attendees are bringing friends and relations. Some are respectfully curious. Others respectfully dubious. All leave offerings: baskets of delicacies, tins of beeswax candles, bottles of costly whale oil for the lamps, bottles of wine, champagne, brandy. Leah asks for no monetary payment. The Fox sisters are answering a call; they are doing a great service. Foremost they are ladies. And ladies do not have paid “jobs.” However, if monetary gifts are obscured within the baskets and tins, Leah cannot object. Money is required, after all, to keep a good table, to pay the dressmaker (homespun is out of the question now), and to pay Alfie for his increasingly diverse services. Leah thinks him the ideal servant. Maggie and Katie do not. They think him nasty and unsettling. Those marl-coloured eyes. Those teeth.

One of Leah’s regular callers to the Troup Street cottage is Mr. Eliab Capron. He is pin neat, his dark hair smooth as a cap. He is a Quaker. An abolitionist. A natural philosopher. A newspaper man. A doubter. “Foremost I am a man of science,” he proclaims on this afternoon visit. “I cannot believe so readily in ghosts. Nor will I be swayed by what I wish to believe. Indeed, I am certain there is a scientific solution to the spirit phenomena. Consider the cholera that is wreaking such death and havoc in England and our own Southern states, even as I speak. Now, to the untrained eye it might appear that God has allowed one of his apocalyptic Horsemen out for a careless gallop, but on closer scrutiny the culprit is clearly only noxious, polluted air.”

“My heavens,” Leah says. “I must confess that all this science and philosophy is beyond our womanly ken. Do explain further, but slowly, if you please.”

Leah, along with Maggie, Katie, Mother Margaret and Calvin, is receiving Eliab in the Troup Street parlour. They sit about the new ovoid table. Alfie has just brought in tea and a plate of Calvin’s lemon drops. Katie pops a lemon drop in her mouth and smiles at Eliab. Maggie, however, is frowning into her teacup, as if seeing unwelcome answers in the soggy leaves.

“I will gladly explain,” Eliab begins. “Do not hesitate to stop me if you cannot follow. You see, I believe Miss Katherine is the prime portal. I believe her bones conduct sounds from the earth’s core. Perhaps the rumbles of earthquakes undetectable to human ears, or else the bangs of distant thunder.” He turns to Mother. “Mrs. Fox, might I have your permission to take Miss Katherine to Auburn with me, the better to conduct experiments. All with the utmost discretion, by all means.”

“Katie? What are your opinions?” Mother asks.

“You want my opinion? Mine?”

“Her opinion?” Leah puts in.

“Don’t girls have opinions? I believe I did. Certainly you did, Leah. Gracious evers, did you have opinions. Well, Katherine?”

Katie takes another of Calvin’s lemon drops. “I’ll go hither and thither, but I won’t slither.”

Eliab smiles uneasily. “My wife and I will treat her as our own daughter.”

“She may go. Yes, she should. I think so,” Mother says.

“I must say that—” Leah begins.

“Poppet, if Mr. Capron can find an explanation to help end the hauntings, then who can argue? Who?”

“Not I,” Calvin says.

“Not me neither … either?” Katie says.

Maggie sets her teacup aside with a clatter. “Nor me. Argue? Nope. But I wonder if Lizzie would? We could telegraph and inquire, but she’s so really so far off now.”

Maggie’s tone is innocent, Leah notes, but her expression is grouty, devious. Honestly, Lizzie has been gone for nearly eight months now. You would think Maggie would have forgotten her by now. Leah sniffs. “Nor I, then. We cannot have discordance.” She glances at Maggie. “From anyone.”

“So, we are all agreed,” Eliab declares, and rubs his hands together. He looks to Katie. “You are the most remarkable girl, Miss Katherine. Alike … yes, as you said, Miss Margaret, a telegraph machine—”

“I did?”

“Yes,” Eliab says. “One that transmits betwixt the mortal and the immortal worlds and—”

Mother slaps the table. “No! I’ll not have my daughter compared to a machine, will I? Not one that men touch and operate and … No, no. That is that.”

“I agree, certainly, Mrs. Fox,” Eliab says hastily. “Yet, then what of a … a conductor, a conductor of energy. Or more precisely, a ‘spirit conductor.’ ”

“A conductor? As in a railway man?” Mother asks.

Eliab stands as if already at a lectern. “Yes. For is not the struggle for the dead to reach the living alike the struggle of those enslaved to reach freedom? Perhaps only now the dead are discovering the appropriate, yes, yes, conductors! Those who are pure of heart. Whose minds are free of the traps of intellect. The fetters of bookish knowledge. Yes, you girls are conductresses on a railroad, one that is no more wrought of wood and iron than the so-named railroad that takes slaves to freedom, but yet is of similar mettle, of similar God-given purpose.”

Leah tsks. “My dear Eliab,
conductor
brings to mind a hulking man in cover-alls, yanking at a whistle. It is untoward. And comic.”

Eliab taps his chin. “Comic? That won’t do. This is a matter serious as … serious can be. Then what say of … of medium? Ah, in that you ladies are like the medium of water or ether through which the spirits flow.” Eliab moves his hand as if writing some tome on the subject.

Katie pops another lemon drop into her mouth. “I like that.
Medium
. Um-um, mum. It reminds me of
hum
.”

“And dumb,” Maggie mutters.

Leah says, “It is a splendid suggestion, pitch-perfect.
Medium
is neither hot nor cold. Neither this nor that. It is exactly in the middle, which is where we are—in the middle between the living and the dead. And be assured we appreciate greatly, dearest Eliab, how seriously all this is being taken.”

“Laws, I don’t know. I suppose it will suffice. I think so,” Mother says.

Leah glances over at Maggie, then Katie. A rap sounds. Eliab looks up, astonished, eager. “Do they agree? The blessed spirits?”

He does not seem like a man of science now, Leah thinks. More like a boy at a country fair. “Yes, they do agree,” she says. “For which, dear ones, I am most grateful and relieved.”

“T
ell me that is not a perfect gusset!”

“Do caps require gussets?” my patient asked. Saturday had come round again (it was a Saturday when I first arrived) and my patient and I were, by this time, all at ease with each other.

“No, duck, but mittens do.”

“We have mittens now?”

“Yes.”

She gave her mischiefed smile. “You have many skills, Mrs. Mellon. What of exorcism? Of demons and the like? Can you finagle that as well?”

I did not smile back. It was, to be frank, a question I am too often asked. “No, for that I call on a priest or rabbi sort. I don’t hold with this do-it-your-own business. Why do you ask?”

“We became well-known in Rochester that summer and into the autumn of’49, you see. Talked about, noticed when we went out. Leah downplayed our notoriety, made light of it all, but then a preacher came and tried to exorcise the Troup Street cottage. Well, that’s when even I knew we had crossed some murky threshold.”

“Were you not afraid? Folks usually are.”

“Of the preacher? No. I thought him a benighted addle-wit.”

I had meant the demons, but did not quibble as she continued, “If the spirits had talked to a man, none would have questioned God’s intent. But to a woman? Why, hadn’t the Devil just tipped
his hand, or so Leah said … But alas and such, perhaps that preacher was correct. Perhaps something squatted inside me, dark and wanting. I had ever disliked church, you see. The exhortations of preachers worked like some sleep charm. Many a whump did I get from the damned church stick. And those preachers, they were ever so certain about God’s purpose. How could they be? How could anyone claim such certainty?”

“I surely don’t,” I allowed, and shifted in the ladderback. “Though some say His doings are alike those of a prankster.”

“Ah, Some-say,” she murmured. “Why does Some-say say that?”

“Why, in the fashion that He, God, sends us trials and privations and humiliations, but for such obscure purposes that it seems He might be playing a prank or a jape upon us, or even some manner of hoax or confidence trick, for we are let in upon neither the purpose, nor the truth of it.”

“The good grief. I’ve had those thoughts precisely,” my patient said, and with a satisfied air, as if we had agreed on new draperies.

T
HE PREACHER HAS A CHIN BOIL
, a filch of black hair, a chalk in his chilblained fingers with which he marks crosses on the new-waxed floor.

Maggie counts out his followers on this chilled September morning. They are eight in all and are as dark-dressed, nasty-visaged and fearful as one would expect of people casting out demons. One follower even clutches an ancient copy of the
Malleus Maleficarum
. The cover image is of a witch being burned at the stake. How very quaint, Maggie thinks as she holds tight to Leah’s hand.

These unwelcome visitors cram into the parlour of the Troup Street cottage. Maggie stands in the entry with Leah. Mother dithers about the interlopers. Calvin has gone off on a military drill. Alfie is at the butcher’s. Katie is staying, as Mother insisted, at the Caprons’ in Auburn. Eliab Capron’s experiments are going badly—or well, depending on one’s perspective. Anywise, he has written that he has found nothing yet to explain the spirits. Maggie had been worried about Katie being at the Caprons’ on her own.
Now she is relieved Katie is not here at Troup Street, for if these superstitious niddy-noddies were to witness one of Kat’s little fits it might well bring back the fashion for tarring and feathering.

A follower gasps at the white imprint of a hand on Mother’s cheek.

Mother wipes her face with her apron. “But it’s not … that is, I was just baking bread, wasn’t I? Yes.”

“Where is your reason, Mother?” Leah hisses. “Where? Why-ever did you let them into my house?” Leah’s rage is barely contained. Maggie knows the signs: the drumming vein on her temple, the rising heat of Leah’s hand, held fast to Maggie’s.

“I had no choice, did I? He’s a man of God.”

Leah snorts. Maggie feels her sister’s nail scratch twice in her palm: the signal for
wait
.

“Laws, but this is all because of the money. I told you not to charge, Leah, didn’t I? I said folks would think it untoward, oh, and worse.”