The Dark (16 page)

Katie rolls her eyes up, as if to read her own thoughts. “Mag said we got each other and that should be enough.”

“It is,” Maggie says from behind Leah. Katie looks from one to the other.

“ ‘Have’ each other, my girl, not ‘got,’ ” Leah says. “And what I meant to ask was: do you wish them to return?”

“I do really like them, I reckon, I mean, I suppose.”

“As do I.”

“Well, I don’t,” Maggie puts in. “I’m sick to the teeth of them.”

Leah ignores her. “Just consider how nicely you are treated when the spirits are about, Katherina, how special you become.”

Katie plucks forlorn at the jackstraws. “That’s all-true, I guess.”

“You’re special anywise, Kat,” Maggie says. “Don’t listen to Leah.”

“Katherina, would you care to visit with the Caprons in Auburn again? Stay for another nice interlude there? The spirits so enjoy Eliab’s ‘experiments.’ They are rather like games, are they not? Indeed, our dear spirits might consider returning if you were there. And Eliab is such a respectful man, and so kind, and his wife keeps such a costly and gracious table.”

“I got to … I mean I
should
ask Ma first,” Katie says, near to tears. “When is she back from market? Is she back yet?”

“This is your decision, Katherina. You are hardly a child. Do you wish to go or not?”

“I dunno. I really, really don’t. Why is it up to me?” Katie whacks at a jackstraw. It breaks into pieces. “Now what have I done? I didn’t mean it. Poor thing. I’m sorry, sorry.” She shuffles the pieces together.

“I am sure Mr. Jack has forgiven you,” Leah says. “Ah, here comes Mother back from market.”

Maggie follows Leah’s gaze out the kitchen window to where their mother trundles up the back walk. She hefts a large package from which blood drips, an eye bulges.

“How savoury,” Leah says to Maggie. “A calf’s head … that brings to mind the bedtime tale. Of the Goose Girl? Wasn’t it about a common serving girl who impersonated a princess. And wasn’t there a calf’s head that was hung from a gate?”

“A horse’s head,” Maggie mutters, feeling dizzy. “From an archway.”

“No matter. The point is that the bleeding head gave her advice,
but did she listen? No. And look what happened. The foolish girl was caught out for her lies. She was stripped and nailed in a coffin and dragged behind a coach until she was dead.”

“That wasn’t fair at all,” Katie pipes in.

“Naturally, it wasn’t fair, my dear, and—”

“And I never ever liked that story,” Katie continues. “I didn’t get the point of it all.”

“The point, Katherina, Margaretta, is that once the serving girl began her charade, there was no backing down … ah, Mother,” Leah says, because Mother has entered the kitchen and dropped the calf’s head on the table.

“Have we a bag for the brains? Girls? Have we?” Mother asks.

“There,” Leah says, and indicates the linen bag near to Maggie. “I do hope the butcher chalked that head, Mother, for our money is nearly gone. Soon we shall be as penniless as Mozart in his pauper’s shroud. Soon we shall be dining on bread crusts and water alike prisoners or … inmates,” Leah says, as if an idea has just come to mind.

“Dandy-damn-fine by me,” Maggie mutters.

“Is it,” Leah muses, as if she hasn’t noticed Maggie’s cussing at all.

Thirteen days later, Maggie, Leah and Calvin alight from a hired coach. They are on the outskirts of Rochester. The building before them is stark and low-built and girded by a high, wrought-iron fence. It is late September and leaves skitter in a cool wind and cling to Maggie’s pelisse coat.

“But what is this place?” Maggie asks, appalled. “I thought … thought we were going for pastries, and for a gander at the big falls.”

“We are, after,” Leah says. “Have courage, my dear, this is dear Amy and Isaac’s latest concern. The mad and the wretched need somewhere to live, like anyone, apparently. Now come, we must support their Godly efforts.”

“Support? How?” Maggie asks, her voice an unheard croak.

Calvin holds open the heavy door of the asylum. The gloomy corridor is rank with despair. Someone chants a child’s rhyme. Someone else interrogates the furniture. There is a cackle of laughter. A shriek. Another.

God-in-all, I wish Ma were here, Maggie thinks, but their mother, upon Leah’s urging, left a week ago for Arcadia. “The spirits are no longer tormenting us,” Leah told her. “There is no need to stay.” Mother asked Maggie to return to Arcadia with her, but Leah said, “Impossible. I cannot be alone here with just Alfie and Calvin. Consider the talk. Though if Margaretta truly wants to return to the quiet, distant countryside …”

Maggie did not. But with Katie staying once again with the Caprons in Auburn, the Troup Street cottage has become quieter yet. The news is out that the spirits have gone, and thus no longer do people leave their cards, begging a sitting. Close friends rarely stay long, having as they do their own businesses, families, lives. And Leah is gone most days, doing what Maggie can hardly guess, though often she is in the company of Calvin, who holds her arm with brotherly aplomb. Even Alfie is often away on personal business. Money. Well. Suddenly little is about. No more oranges and macadamias. No more shopping for reticules and point lace. Fewer outings altogether—thus Maggie’s delight at Leah’s suggestion for pastries and an outing to the Genesee falls.

“Afterwards, Margaretta, you may watch the water falling until you’re mesmerized,” Leah says now. “Afterwards, you may eat all the pastries you wish.”

Maggie’s voice fails her, as does her appetite. Really, she cannot imagine eating anything, not for a good while. Each cell has the semblance of a room—chairs and tables, beds and linens. But no lamps, no candles, nothing that might ignite. And nothing sharp-edged. She watches as a woman threatens an unseen mocker, as a man croons to a fly on his fist. A girl, near Maggie’s own age, grins lasciviously at Calvin.

“The Posts and some of their Quaker brethren are advocating more humane treatment for these unfortunates—that is, no chains nor beatings and such,” Leah says, looking around. “My heavens, but I do hope they can manage that.”

Maggie can still say nothing. She trails behind Calvin and Leah as they enter a courtyard. The inmates here, all women, seem less afflicted. “Mild lunatics,” the matron informs them. “They look normal. Then they get their fits or hear things talk. Sometimes they
come at you. I teach ’em not to.” She pats the strop at her waist. Just then Maggie sees a small, thin woman, standing alone by the sundial. A spare rains begins and this woman holds her palms up, weighing one drop, then the other, like some mad lady justice. Her black hair straggles over her face, hiding her features. “Kat?” Maggie whispers in horror. The woman pulls her hair back. Shows her lined and tragic face. Maggie’s heart steadies. She is not Katie. No. Of course not.

“Well, should we head on before we get too chilled?” Leah asks.

Maggie huddles silently in the carriage seat for the seemingly endless ride back to Rochester. “Why-ever did you take me there, Leah? Why?” she demands once the aqueduct is in view.

“You know, dear.”

Maggie doesn’t answer.

“Margaretta. Attend me. Please. The world is cruel to women with any kind of talent, any kind of power. It must be guided aright or it is misunderstood. Consider that harridan with her strop just now, and that preacher who came dousing for devils, who hallelujahed to beat the band. His ilk must be guarded against even more. And I have been thinking, too, about those girls in Salem long ago. Honestly, I cannot get them out of my mind. Do you know of them?”

Maggie surely does. She has seen depictions aplenty. The Salem story is popular enough. The girls in their old-timey dresses writhing as if bewitched and bedevilled. The accused witches hanging from gallows. A four-year-old imprisoned. An old man crushed by stones. Appalling how it could have gone so far. That so many lost their reason.

Maggie manages the barest nod.

“Evil was done, Margaretta, when the wrong people, with the wrong understandings, took notice of those girls. The girls themselves were not evil, but they could not help themselves.”

“I can,” Maggie says sullenly.

“Perhaps, but Katherina cannot. That is why she needs our guidance so.”

Back at Troup Street, Maggie re-reads Katie’s latest letter from Auburn. Not an easy task given Katie’s imaginative spelling, her joining hand that resembles a nailed fence.

Maggie folds the letter tighter, tighter. She wanders to the kitchen. Leah is nowhere in sight, though a pot simmers on the cookstove. Maggie peers in. Flesh floats off a bone. A cow’s tongue turns in the broth. The cuts of meat are becoming cheaper and less appetizing by the day. Soon Maggie thinks, there’ll be nothing to chew on but viscera and hung meats.

Into the parlour now. No Leah here either. No Alfie. We need more furnishings, Maggie decides. And the walls should be jammed with paintings and lithographs. Nothing bucolic, nothing with horizons or cows. Just scenes of bustling streets or crowded rooms. She would like
the latest gasolier lanterns as well. Light and more light, until even the bleakest corners are illuminated. Katie. Kat. Maggie only now realizes how much she fears for her sister. And how fiercely she misses her. Is it possible I miss
them
also? Maggie wonders. Possible that I miss the spirits? That even the dead are better company than no company at all? Because it is only when Maggie is alone, as now, that she senses not the dead, that chorusing multitude—but death, which is the void, loneliness incarnate, the dark itself. Her mother warned her of it back in Hydesville, even before the peddler’s ghost arrived. “The dark is at the approach,” she told a bored Maggie at autumn’s end, but Maggie didn’t listen, because Maggie always listens too late.

A day later the Posts, the Grangers, the Bushes and young George Willets all arrive at the Troup Street cottage, and to a riot of knockings and raps. The alphabet board is dusted off.

Leah says, “Just as I suspected, the spirits left because they were angry. Angry that we would not proclaim them to the wider world. Is not that so, Margaretta?”

Maggie looks at Leah, then at Amy Post, at her long, plain face alight with expectation. “Yes, it can’t be just about us anymore,” Maggie says, and is astonished yet again at how Leah can turn a set-back to an advantage, amazed she had imagined she could best Leah in any fashion.

The spirits’ first message is that Mother Margaret should return to Rochester forthwith. The second message is:
Hire Corinthian Hall
. The spirits then instruct Eliab Capron of Auburn to be their spokesman. George Willets to be their manager. The Posts to head a spirit committee.

“The spirits are so very correct,” Leah says. “The best way to silence our challengers is to meet them head-on, as distasteful as that is. But the spirits shall lend us courage. They shall lead us to victory.” She gives Calvin a dimpled smile. “We simply must, as this one says, rush headlong into battle without shirking.”

Calvin looks up, awed; no other word suffices.

Maggie sits back, vastly relieved. She need only follow now. She need not think, nor wrangle with choices, nor make decisions. She will be safe as any prodigal.

“Now, of course, the adherents to the cult promulagated by the Fox sisters will claim that these are the bones of the peddler whose spirit cried out in vengeance away back in 1848. The skeptical will aver that these bones were placed in their hiding place by the Fox girls at the time of the excitement, with the expectation that they would be found by investigators, and their story thus corroborated. However that may be, the facts are as stated above, and the bones found in the old wall are in the possession of Mr. Hyde, the owner of the property. We are told that they have evidently been in their hiding place for at least 50 years judging from the appearance.”

ARCADIAN WEEKLY GAZETTE
,
NOVEMBER, 1904

“Charles Chauncey Burr was one of the most enigmatic and colorful characters of American magazine journalism. While today many of Burr’s views seem outlandish and absurd, his apparent erudition, his dexterity with language and logic, and his fervent emotion will strike the reader of his publications as powerful and persuasive—even if it’s hard to imagine Burr surviving without capital letters and exclamation points.”

DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY