The Dark (18 page)

Back in the dressing room Chauncey scrubs at his makeup. The applause should have been louder, longer lasting. The audience wanted more. But bloodyo what?

“Fiske Fisko, what is the date, exactly, of the ghost ladies’ little demonstration?”

Fiske glances over the pamphlet. “November the 14th. Two bits gets you in. You thinking of getting on the committee?”

“What fugging committee?”

“The one the audience gets to choose. Five respectable types they’re to be, though. And they’re to do their own private investigations and then … look here, damn it, read for yourself for once.”

Chauncey runs oil through his hair, then cracks his knuckles—a sinister and practised sound.

“Right to that,” Fiske mutters. Reads: “ ‘The committee is to report at the following evening’s lecture whether there is collusion
or deception in the knocks. COME AND INVESTIGATE.’ That’s in capitals.”

Chauncey grabs the pamphlet from Fiske. “Capitals, is it!” He thwacks the dressing table instead, right aside Fiske.

Fiske jumps. “Hell, Chaunce, what you—”

“What? What Fiske Fisko? Didn’t see it coming? Hah! Our petticoat competition won’t see us coming neither. Make ready, man.”

Close on a month later and Chauncey and Fiske spill out of the Corinthian Hall into the November evening. They halt outside the entrance and let the crowd roil round them. A woman slips on the wet and flashes her red petticoat, drawing hoots, a catcall. Horses and hacks clatter in the street. A newspaper boy hollers about the latest revolution in distant Europe. The ill-bred spit tobacco juice into the snow. And all this racket is as fuel for Chauncey’s racketing thoughts. He hikes his muskrat collar, lights his pirate-head pipe, then rounds on Fiske, as if Fiske were responsible for the sideshow of superstition they just witnessed.

“Their promoter, that elf, that cheapjack magician Capron and his bloodyo jabber about a New Age. That’ll never stand the test of time. The corporeal and the spiritual dwelling together? What a damnedo mishmash. When I was in the pulpit did I trumpet electric magnetism and mesmeric forces? No, I did fugging well not! It was all God and the Holy Ghost and lakes of hellfire. Science and religion should never meet. It insults them both. Faith and bended knee on the one; rigour and intellect on the other.” Chauncey slaps his own knee, adds, “What ho? Mediums, that’s what he called the females, eh? Making his own lingo already?”

“Sure to that, but some were mighty convinced, though,” Fiske puts in. “ ’course they as like used plants in the audience for the correct answering. But those knocks. I tell you, I’m still stumped as to them.”

Yes, indeedo, those knocks, Chauncey thinks, they emanated, loud and sharp, from all areas of the hall. And all the while that Leah Fox Fish might have been on some high throne the way she held herself, the way she bestowed her benevolent, dimpled smile on the crowd. Chauncey barely noted the supporters flanking her onstage,
barely noted her doll-sized sisters Margaret and Katherine. No, only Leah worthied his gaze. Her rounded figure, her hair agleam like a crown of copper in the kerosene light.

“What you thinking, Chaunce? You got that squint-eyed look.”

“The crowd, they should have chosen me for the damnedo committee. I’d have investigated, what ho!”

Fiske kicks at the tobacco-pocked snow. “Mayhap you shouldn’t have called the audience a lot of deluded dumbwits.”

The competition for the audience’s attention had been fierce, Chauncey allows. One idiot vowed to eat his hat if he couldn’t uncover the Fox women’s means of deception. Another vowed he’d hurl himself over the Genesee falls if he failed. “The truth is ever a painful item, Fiske Fisko.”

“Could be that the doctors, the ones the audience picked for the committee, could be they were plants too, though.”

Chauncey studies his pipe. The pirate’s fierce eyes resemble Chauncey’s own, he likes to think, as does the pirate’s grin. “I suspect not. A doctor’s pride knows no bounds. To agree to assist? Why? To what endo?”

“If the docs weren’t plants, if they’re not in on it, then they’ll find the females out. Doctor sorts like that, they’ve got smarts galore.”

“Hah, bloody, hah. They’ll not find out a fugging thing, Fiske Fisko. To find out a charlatan you need be a … Fiske, an idea has just sprung to my brain.”

“An idea? What sort?” Fiske asks, stepping back.

“An exposé sort. We’ll hang it on the what-end of our lecture.”

“Exposé?”

“Of the Fox knocks, you cotton-brain. We’ll show how the ghosties are created by legerdemain, by the mesmeric forces of a person’s own mind seeing and hearing what it chooses.”

“But those knocks, you don’t know how they’re done? Do you, though?”

“I’ll fathom them in good bloodyo time. See if I don’t. What ho! We’ll set it up like in Hamlet. When that lawyer goes knock-knocking at the Gates of Hell. Hah, what a comedic aside. But instead of a sniffling lawyer knocking it’ll be the Fox women. And
I’ll be the gatekeeper asking who’s there, and they’ll admit who they are at last, and on their knees: The Fugging Fox Frauds Three! That’s who.”

“I don’t recollect a lawyer knocking. Mayhap a tailor and a farmer, though. And isn’t that from Macbeth?”

“Who gives a ratter’s arse which pommy bastard wrote it. Let’s say we knock-knock the Fox females straight to ignominy!”

“D
o you hold with bloodletting?” my patient asked.

“What is that? … Ah, this,” I said, and held up the steel fleam I was using to prod alive the foot-stove’s coals. “The letting does ease some people. Older folk for the main. The efficacy is mostly in their heads, but it can’t hurt. We’ve all too much blood in us from what I’ve seen.” At this I shut the little door and set the stove at the end of her bed.

“You are a fine physician, Mrs. Mellon. Has medicine always been an interest of yours?”

“I am not precisely a card-holding physician,” I allowed. “I am a lay physician. Women were not allowed the doctoring profession in my day, not in any fashion.”

“So you’ve had other occupations.”

“Certainly. Women must earn money how they can. Money does not rain from clouds and … The fumes! Here,” I said, and trudged to the garret’s linked windows and hefted at the sash of one of the small side windows, grateful to have my back turned away from my patient. I felt an old shame, I allow. For just after the abolition war I engaged in an occupation I would rather not mention, although I daresay it is an older profession than doctoring.

The stubborn sash at last creaked open, but just a crack.

“Charcoal fumes,” I continued. “They can create visions and figments, I’ve heard. Indeed, all your ghosts might be naught but
trapped, invisible vapours working havoc on the brain.” I was still facing the window and was looking through to the smoke palled buildings across and below. I noticed my reflection in the glass just then, and I was amazed at how pale I was, how muzzy my features.

“Mayhap that is all they were, then,” my patient murmured, as if to herself. “Fumes. Vapours. Reflected forms.”

“Who? Your knocking spirits?”

“No, no, the Fates, the three old women who assisted the doctors at the ‘investigation’ that followed the Corinthian Hall display. They were cramped, sin-ugly creatures, all dark-garbed and fetched up from God-knows-where. I dubbed them the Fates because I forgot their names as soon as they were uttered. I was beginning to do that a great deal, choosing to forget names and, oh, many other things besides.”

“T
O ENSURE YOU’RE NOT CONCEALING
any mechanicals beneath,” the doctors explain as the Fates tie Maggie’s skirt about her ankles, then tend to Leah’s shirts. Amy Post and Machteld wait in a room down the corridor of these dusty, untenanted offices. No one else has been allowed to accompany Maggie and Leah.

The doctors number four in all. One of them presses Maggie’s throat with his cold, blunt fingers, then slides a stethoscope over her chest. It is all Maggie can do not to slap him.

Another doctor—a short-necked, squat man—does the same to Leah; Leah reaches for Maggie’s hand. “Toad,” she says to Maggie, and in the barest whisper. Maggie nearly laughs aloud. Because who fears toads? Creatures of such serious mien, and yet such stupidity withal.

Maggie and Leah are now instructed to stand atop glass plates, which are in turn set atop two close aligned tables. “We are testing,” this Dr. Toad explains, “to ascertain, I should say, test, whether the knocks are caused by what is known as electrical energy. And whether this energy is somehow vibrating between you two women. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Well, yes,” Maggie says tartly, and nearly asks if Dr. Toad believes them children or half-wits.

“We do understand, good sir,” Leah says. Because you explain so very well.”

“Spirits? Give us a knock if you please.” This from Dr. Blunt-Fingers, as Maggie now thinks of him. Leah still holds Maggie’s hand. She scratches Maggie’s palm.

No knocks. Only faint taps, a good dozen of them.

Dr. Blunt-Fingers scowls. He turns to the Fates. “Escort them into the anteroom. There please disrobe them entirely.”

Entirely? Maggie cannot recall ever being entirely naked, and certainly not in front of strangers. “I can’t, Leah. I just can’t. It’s grievous. Awful.”

“Just this once, dear sister,” Leah says quietly. “We must pass this test. We must.”

Maggie shakes her head, then wearily nods.

Once the two are in the anteroom, once they are disrobed by the black-garbed Fates, Leah’s calm demeanour nearly cracks. Her lips are clenched as if she’d rather scream, and that vein at her temple is throbbing as if fit to burst. Maggie feels a knife-keen sympathy for Leah then. Leah’s breasts swag to either side. Her belly is striated with purple. In comparison, Maggie’s figure is as smooth and unmarked as a marble statue. Poor Leah, Maggie thinks, bearing a baby so young, bearing up for us all.

The Fates asks for the knocks, but the knocks, faint or otherwise, do not come. Maggie feels equal measures of relief and trepidation. Perhaps everything will end now. Just like that. Done.

And then? Knockings. Loud. Unmistakable. The Fates hop about as if the floor were afire. Somehow, I’m again rescued, Maggie thinks wearily. At this the door bursts open to show Amy Post.

“What have they done to thee!” Amy cries. “This is beyond all cavil. It has gone far enough.”

No face is more formidable than Amy Post’s when she is angered. The Fates look chastised. Embarrassed. As well they should. Amy is the fierce upholder of all that is true and just, everyone in Rochester knows this. Maggie reaches for her dress. At that moment she
glimpses Machteld trotting briskly down the corridor with a broom, as if, being a maid, she likes to sweep wherever she finds herself.

It is the evening after the doctors’ investigation and Maggie, nerve-shot and sleep-deprived, sits beside Leah on the Corinthian Hall’s platform stage. It is the final night of their display and the hall is filled to a jam, the crowd an even rougher assortment than on the first night. Ranged about Maggie and Leah are Amy and Isaac Post, George Willets, Lyman Granger, Lemira Kedzie and the Reverend Lemuel Clarke, a firm believer now. Katie is not with them this night. She had one of her little fits and is resting up with Mother at Troup Street. Damned good thing, Maggie decides, because the mood of the crowd is decidedly unpleasant.

Eliab Capron takes the lectern. He looks smaller than usual. Polishes his spectacles and calls for attention. The crowd settles with difficulty. Money passes among four young swells with soap-locked hair. They spit tobacco. Laugh high. Are they betting? On what? Maggie has never been to a cockfight, of course, but surely this is how a cockpit smells—of onions and ale, of cheap cigars and cheap perfumes, of people steaming in their own woollens, of the desire for blood. Leah told her only the most respectable people would attend. Respectable? What of that burly man with the black-spade beard who, on that first night of their demonstrations, jumped up like a jack-in-the box and called the crowd a lot of deluded dumbwits? What of the man who’d said he’d eat his hat if he couldn’t find the means of their deception? And the one who said he’d throw himself over the Genesee falls if he didn’t uncover all. “I so hope he can swim” was what Leah said before taking the stage tonight.

Maggie looks to Leah for counsel and support, but Leah is too busy smiling blithely at the crowd to notice her sister. The sympathy Maggie felt for Leah during the doctors’ investigation abruptly vanishes. Indeed, Maggie longs to slap the dimples right off her face. She twists her hands instead, then looks down to the comforting sight of Calvin waiting just below the platform stage.

And Machteld.

Machteld looks up at Maggie and presses a finger to her dour lips,
then bites it so hard Maggie expects to see a line of blood. “I not like you,” Machteld told Maggie just before they entered the hall for this evening’s demonstrations. “No. But I love Amy. I love Isaac. They save me. Understand?”

“Well, yes,” Maggie replied. “Do I got a choice?”

Onstage Eliab is speechifying. The far audience demands he speak louder. Eliab polishes his spectacles again. Rustles his papers. Maggie thought he would be better at this. Hadn’t he insisted she and Leah rehearse endlessly for the show?