The Dark (22 page)

“Y
OU’RE AS QUIET AS A
church mouse, aren’t you poppet? Are you feeling poorly? Do you need more brandied tonic?”

“I have had sufficient, Mother,” Leah says. They are in David’s keeping room. Leah sets the kettle over the smoldering hearth. Mother diligently polishes the table-tops. Above stairs her sisters play at games. It is the day after Leah’s father refused to help her with the spirits and so, yes, Leah is quiet, and filled with that same distasteful sensation as when she hears a song played off-key. Just then John enters and drops a bundle of kindling into the wood bin. He leaves without a word or nod. Mother casts Leah a bewildered glance. Leah pretends nothing is amiss. “This fire is not drawing. Not at all,” she proclaims and jabs at the fire with a poker.

Leah’s sisters now tumble into the keeping room, all-agiggle. Maggie’s belly-ache has passed and she has sworn off slip-gut pudding for life. Katie has recently returned from the Culvers’ and she and Maggie are delighting in making sport of Ruth Culver once again.

“Old Ruthie wanted the spirits talking constant, Mag,” Leah hears Katie say. “She reckons she’s got medium qualities too. And she really tried. She even invited her wall-eyed cousin Orville over to hear her ghosts rapping away, but the dead can’t abide her, not at all. No wonder, she’s such an old nasty. She wanted to drown her poor old cat because it wasn’t catching mice enough. She said it was to teach it a lesson, but if you’re dead you can’t learn much, can you?”

“Well, no. Not usually,” Maggie replies, and adds that Ruth is so sour she could curdle milk with her eyeballs.

“She said she’d teach me a lesson, too,” Katie continues. “Said I was a lazy skeezick and ungrateful, and just ‘cus I didn’t want to do her nasty old scullery work.”

“A lesson?” Leah puts in. “What sort of lesson?”

“I dunno. You know how old Ruth gripes on.”

“Come, lamb, that’s unkind, isn’t it?” Mother says.

“Gripes on? How, Katherina?” Leah insists.

“I dunno. I guess about it not being fair that she can’t get the ghosts talking. Oh, but I hate, hate, hate her. I thought I’d just suffocate if I had to stay there any longer. The only thing that helped
was this refreshment that Norman makes out of juniper berries. Mag, you got to try it.”

Leah looks at her two young sisters. She sets down the poker, having forgotten she was even holding it, then turns to leave the room. My Lord and the spirits! she thinks. These two.

“Leah? Poppet? Where are you off to?”

“The veranda, Mother. The smoke in here. Honestly, how can you bear it?” She ignores her mother’s warnings of the night air’s noxious qualities, her brother David’s offer for company, her sisters’ questioning eyes.

She holds vigil on the verandah, watching as the last brindled light fades into the drumlins and the dusk overtakes the world. There is the smell of spring roses, the fairy blink of lightning bugs, the mutter of the Ganargua River.

She hums the
Moonlight Sonata
. Delights in the nacreous blue and green lines it evokes. Music rarely reveals its colours to her nowadays, thus the appearance of the colours is a sign of renewed prospects, surely.

She ceases humming. Gasps. Strains to comprehend what she is witnessing: a black tower rising out the woodlands some rods distant. The tower builds itself higher and higher yet as if to reach the sash of stars, the gibbous moon.

Leah is about to call her family to come bear witness, then decides, no, if
this
is her sign—and not the coloured music—then its agent might be questioned.

The tower begins to break apart into fragments, fragments that wing hither and yon across the ashen skies. Bats, Leah realizes with some relief. The tower is composed of thousands upon thousands of bats, creatures who have no need of light. Some consider them malignant—harbingers of misfortune and misrule. Leah has her doubts. Perhaps bats are merely fortunate to see in the darkling hours. Perhaps to them night is a transparency.

She hears her sisters’ giddy laughter. Hears Mother scold them for their mollyhawking of all and sundry. Mother has her power, Leah knows, and likely more than all the Fox women parcelled up. She wonders now if some portion of Mother’s frettings and
questionings are a pretense. Not that Leah would judge her for that. Has there ever been a woman who has not fretted or trembled or uttered inanities at times, as befits her sex? Has there ever been a woman who has not once worn a cloak made of modesty and manners and piety? Soon the cloak hardens into a shell, which is quite useful, as it keeps one from screaming.

A hammer’s staccato tat-tat. Leah looks over to her father’s house. The windows are slabs of yellow light. Outside the house, the sawhorse stands like some skeletal creature at sentry. Inside the house, her father’s shadow passes the open door. She cannot see the man himself.

Where-ever have you gone, Pa? Leah wonders. She recollects an evening back when she was seven or eight and they lived still in Rockport. She had hidden in the barn to watch her father with his sporting friends. The men wore their Coke hats tipped back. They rattled dice on tins. Drank whisky straight from bottles that glinted in the lamplight. She was hiding because her father had already sent her back to bed twice, and she always wanted to be near him in those days.

The men spoke of quims and snatches. Of where in Gotham to find the cherry whores. They spoke of cock-chafers and sodomites. Of men who went at their own daughters. At that, John, who had been silent through it all, said, “That’s enough of that damn talk.” His eyes never rose from the cards, but his words held pure menace. The other men fell quiet.

Young Leah had never heard such talk, and yet she knew it was vile. She felt something splinter inside. Her innocence, she supposes now. Of course Pa … her father never touched her. Not that way. But then why, yesterday, did she suggest he had? Perhaps as a small retaliation, she decides, for being given the unwanted knowledge of such depravities. Anywise, both of them understood she would never accuse him to the newspaper men, nor to anyone. Both of them knew she was bluffing. Had he not taught her that very term?

From within David’s house comes singing and then the sounds of a mouth harp as Leah’s family makes a celebration out of the
cholera’s swift passing. Presently, she will go in and take her place at the organ. In a few days she and her sisters will return to Rochester and begin preparations for their tour.

She looks over the yard once again. Nothing forms out of the gloaming. No torches wielded by men featureless as paper cut-outs. No preachers shouting “blasphemy.” Leah and her family have been warned that some are blaming the Foxes for the pestilence. Medieval dolts, Leah thinks. She knows, however, that as long as she is watchful no harm will come to those she loves. And love them she does. No matter if they ever think otherwise.

The hammer tat-tatting on the new house ceases. Her father will cross the foreyard soon. Leah tenses and waits. Best to make amends now, she thinks. As like he will call her a Jezebel again, but she can hold herself above such discourtesies.

She waits and waits on the veranda, counting out to a compound meter of twenty, then twenty-five, but still her father, stubborn man, does not appear.

“Leah,” Mother calls from the doorway. “You’ll get the catarrh, won’t you? Come in this instance.”

David looms behind Mother, puts in, “Why, our music cannot succeed without your voice, sister.”

“As ever,” Leah mutters, and turns into the house.

“M
Y, BUT YOUR
L
EAH NURSED A GRUDGE,”
I said, and sliced at a bread loaf.

“Yes, she did, and better, I’d wager, than you have nursed the most grevious-ill patient.”

“Oh, you are a one, but should she not have gone to your father? Made amends before it became too late and … damnation!” I cried, the bread-knife having slipped and gashed my finger.

My patient sat upright. “Ah … you’re bleeding. Are you in pain?”

“Pain? Do I seem a spleeny sort? A cosset? The sort to make a brouha out a nick?”

“Apparently not … How bad is it?”

“It’s not to the bone, duck, and that is the important matter,” I said, and wrapped my finger up snap-quick in a bandage.

She indicated the laudanum on the nighttable “Would you care for measure or two?”

It was a generous offering, I thought then, knowing how possessed she was of her medicine. I eyed the bottle. Thought, too, of gin, and how that perilous drink was surely the “juniper refreshment” that Katie tasted at the Culvers’, and how this did not bode well for her, gin being gin and of such easy imbibing.

“Go on, Mrs. Mellon, I would not think you are a, what was it … a spleeny, nor a cosset, nor a—”

“Your father,” I said abruptly. “You must have thought him dead when he vanished for those ten years. You must have given up hope. Waited till doomsday for some letter or note.”

She settled back, and did not offer the laudanum again, for which I was grateful. “I wasn’t born at the time he abandoned the family, recall? But it was peculiar, my father’s conversion. I wonder, Mrs. Mellon, do you think a grown man can be a changeling?”

“No, that is a ridiculous superstition,” I said, and gave her a bowl of milk-sopped bread, keeping my bloodied finger off the rim. “People change, certainly, they take on this profession or that. Alter appearances, character even, but they still have a human soul and heart. A true changeling has neither, being, of course, a hobgoblin in disguise.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true. Yet a changeling returning home would be better than nothing—returning, that is.”

To this fact I agreed. Or perhaps I kept my counsel. I can’t recall. To explain: The conversation had brought my son to mind and in those days any thought of my son was often accompanied by a harsh white emptiness, a nothing, as it were. I do recall that my patient asked if my finger still hurt, and if the pain had grown worse, and that she ate a small portion of the bread-sopping, then asked for her medicine, and then her bible box, and then her father’s letters.

W
HEN
J
OHN SEES
L
EAH
on the veranda, silhouetted as if on a ship’s unreachable prow, a certainty comes upon him, the sort God grants him on rare occasion. He waits until she returns to David’s house, then rummages out an inkwell, blotter and pen nib, and then hefts out the quire of paper he had intended for expense calculations, for sketches of porticos and gables. He draws the lamp closer and pinches his nose so hard the bone aches. He might reach her yet. His first letter, written just after the knocking began, had made no inroads. Had likely only been tinder firing her plans. He need take a different tack now.