The Dark (28 page)

Horace looks near to tears at this. Then Pickie arrives. Three raps. “It’s a call for the alphabet,” Maggie says. She and Katie draw one up on scrap paper.

“I didn’t mind, Ma” is what Pickie says. “Father is a busy man with really important things to do.”

“Humph,” Mary replies. “You’re taking your father’s side just for spite. You always did.”

It is just past ten o’clock on the last evening of Maggie’s stay at the Greeleys’ and she wanders into the keeping room, unable to sleep, even with the rum toddy finally allowed her by wretched Mary Greeley. Maggie would rather not leave Katie here, but what choice does she have?
Our talents are much in demand
, Leah wrote.
You are needed here in Rochester
. Anywise Katie will soon be off at school. And this house, well, it is hardly a place one would want to kick around in for long. Horace’s dear Miss Fuller apparently dubbed it Castle Doleful, and Maggie can’t imagine a more fitting title.

I sure wish I could speak with Miss Fuller, Maggie thinks. They would be great friends, she is sure. Sometimes Maggie catches a whiff of Miss Fuller’s perfume, hears a rustle of her expensive silks, an echo of her knowing laugh, but that is all.

A whispering: “Miss Maggie. Miss Maggie.”

She whips round.

“Apologies,” Horace says. “I did not mean to startle you.”

“You’re home from work so early tonight,” she says, because Horace does often not arrive home until past the midnight hour.

“I felt unwell. How fares Mary?”

“I’ve not seen her today. She’s still abed, I believe.” Maggie smiles her helpful smile. “We gave her some of that new medicine, though, just as you asked.”

“And it eased her? The new concoction?”

“Yes, I believe it did.” A stronger draught of laudanum was all it was, Maggie thinks.

Horace fidgets with the papers in his pocket. “You must know that Molly—Mary—was not always like this. When we met she was a teacher. She had such a love of books and learning. Her students adored her. She was exacting, yes, but gay. And for a woman she had such interesting opinions on worldly matters. And then the babes … and so we thought here in the country she would be refreshed with all the unsullied air and trees and birdsong. There’s a fellow, Thoreau, who has a theory about nature, that it is a tonic for both mind and soul.”

Maggie hears the sagging wind. Sees the dark at the Greeleys’ undraped windows. Recalls Hydesville. That’s flat-out addled, she thinks, people need people, not birds and trees. They need illuminated things and shops and ice-creameries and theatres. Nature’s not a refreshing tonic. Nature’s boring. And doesn’t Maggie just know how boredom can cause all kinds of trouble? She feels a sudden, nebulous sympathy for Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary who is going mad from loneliness and isolation, her thoughts spin-topping in the quiet.

“It was the second one,” Horace says, sadly. “You hardly expect the first to live, but we had hopes for the second. He came early, that one. And Mary was injured. She might well have recovered but I, well, the wrong doctor was sent for. He operated but made a botch of things. She was never the same. And then the next ones died. Mary Inez was the one before Pickie. She was nearly four. The other three were babes of some months. It’s not unusual, I know, but for someone like Mary, who thought, well, that she had some guidance over things, it unhinged her, you see. We have Ida, I know, but Mary can’t even bear to see her until she’s at a safer age. That is why she’s staying with relations. And it’s just … I was hoping, I suppose, that you could, could … well, not only give her solace about Pickie and the others, but bring her back, Mary, as she was.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Greeley—Horace. Gosh but I am,” Maggie says, near to tears. “I can’t do much for the living. I can only bring back the dead.”

“Of course. I know. I shouldn’t have spoken so to you. It’s not
seemly.” His voice breaks and he brushes at his eyes. “I’ll leave you now.”

Maggie listens to the creaking of the stairs as Horace ascends to his private bed chamber. She hears the sough of the wind, the shush of the waves in the bay below. Maggie thought Horace spent his days away because he could not abide Mary, not because he couldn’t bear to see what she had become. Maggie imagines them as newly-wed and all the world a possibility. How can I hate her? When she is loved? Is loved even now?

Maggie makes her way along the hall passage, a candle-hold the only light. She passes the grandfather clock, the one Pickie broke and that is now suspended at ten past eight, on a day when Pickie lived. She climbs the stairs and then into bed beside Katie. Her sister stirs awake and they talk for a while, as they always do before they sleep. And what Maggie confides to Katie is that after her conversation with Horace she came to the abrupt understanding that any succour they offer is short-lived. “Gone in a nonce, Kat, like some vaporous cloud.”

“That’s true, all right. What I’ll just never ever understand is how our elders get so fussed and grieved about their children, seeing as when the children are alive they’re just plain old mean to them, or they ignore them, or tell them to be seen and not heard, or just consider them generally vexing.”

“That, now, is a conundrum I guess we can only sleep on,” Maggie says, and douses the candle.

“S
O THAT IS WHAT YOU CAME
to understand at the Greeleys’? That your succour is only a stop-gap? Surely you knew this before. Surely you didn’t think you could patch up the Greeleys’ household so neatly and so quick. Their griefs were beyond your childish management, duck.” I allow I said this not only out of sympathy for Mary Greeley, but also out of sympathy for Horace, and that this sympathy was unexpected and oddly welcome.

“Their guests were beyond anyone’s management,” my patient said, all peevish.

I took my knitting from out of my satchel. “And it is not a conundrum, not at all, what your sister said about her elders. She would understand this if she had her own babes.”

“But she did have her own babes. Years on. Two boys. And then, yes, she understood the fuss and grief all too well, particularly when Leah dared involve the boys in our drama.”

“Boys,” I said, and laid out the yarn skeins.

“Yes, and I helped Katie name her boys. Such a list we considered, names galore: Matthew. James. Paul. John. Robert …”

I purled and knitted smoothly while my patient ruminated on names (if she had said “Rumplestiltskin” I would not have been amazed, so obviously was she trying out names that might be of import to me). “… Michael, Isambard, Alonsis, Cole, Morris and … Your mittens, Mrs. Mellon. They’re conjoined. And big enough for a giant.”

I held up my handiwork. “Mittens? No. This is to be a scarf, a very long one I should think, for winding. And what were their names? Her sons?”

“Ferdinand and Henry. As for me, I never had children.”

“I’m aware of that. Would I not have found them out otherwise? Would not they be here at your side and not me? Kinfolk. No one else can be counted on for help when one is in distress.”

“That certainly is the fiction,” she allowed, then asked me to turn down the medical lamp and fire the candle. Her eyes ached these days, she said, and she had come to appreciate a mellowed light.

L
ETTER CLUTCHED
, Maggie wanders around the Troup Street cottage. It is four o’clock and already downright stygian outside. The sittings are finished until after supper. And then there will be yet another go round the parlour table. How she misses New York. Such a success the Fox sisters were there. Such a nice passel of citizens they met, so modern, admiring, polite. In New York night is a merry time, the avenues lined with gas lamps, the theatres lit with a limey glow, the oyster cellars with their painted lamps casting painted shadows on the sidewalks. And, ah, the Drummond beam atop Barnum’s museum.
Such a creation: a man-made sun revolving and illumining both the heavens and all of Broadway, even at night’s darkest hours, at which time the streets are still peopled and noisy. Little wonder Maggie is melancholy now that they’ve returned to provincial Rochester. To make matters worse, Katie is still at Castle Doleful being educated to be a lady. Mother, laden with city gifts, is in Arcadia visiting Father and assorted kin. And Calvin is off on some month-long military drill. All of which means that Maggie has only Leah for company. Not even Alfie is about. Leah terminated his employ back in New York and left the man behind at Barnum’s Hotel. He was stealing from the takings-box, Leah insisted. His tallies were not any kind of square.

Maggie breathes deep, then enters the reading room.

“Have a seed, my cheery dearie, my sweeting,” Leah coos to Vivace, an Amizonian parrot of emerald green. She bought him in New York along with a wicker cage shaped like an Ottoman temple.

“I’m-so-sweet. I’m-so-sweet,” Vivace caws back.

“I’ve been invited to Troy,” Maggie says, holding up the letter. “By the Boultons.”

Leah pats at a flounce. Her dress today is a primrose concoction all figured with lace and hung with galoon. You’d think she was expecting the Queen-of-Where-ever, Maggie thinks.

“The Boultons? Of Troy? Ah, yes, they were such a help with the tour. A most respectable family. And they had that lovely large home, nearly a mansion … Well, do you plan to go?” Leah asks this as if she has no say in the matter.

“I do plan to. Yes, yes, I do. If I can’t go back to New York, then I’d like to be in a new place. They’ve asked me to stay for a fortnight or more, for as long as I please, in fact.”

Leah shrieks, and Maggie starts back.

“Bad Vivace, biting me like that! No fly-about for you today.” Leah wags her nipped finger at the cage, says to Maggie, “Indeed, you could get some practice raising the spirits by yourself. The Boultons are known in society and have a wide circle of prosperous, upstanding friends. And that sister-in-law of Mr. Boulton, she took a shine to you. I suppose you require a friend, what with Katherina at the Greeleys. And a change is always good, I say.”

Maggie thinks, And I could get some respite from you, sister-of-mine.

Leah looks troubled, as if she has heard Maggie’s thoughts. “Dear Margaretta, I know you find me difficult at intervals, but since all this began I have come to love you, not just as a sister, but as another daughter, in particular since Lizzie refuses to come home and hardly even writes, wretched girl. And, honestly, I do loathe it when we are discordant. We must stay as one mind, my girl, we simply must.”

“One mind, of course,” Maggie says. For what choice does she have when their thoughts collide like so many blinded birds?

“And so, yes, do go and stay the fortnight,” Leah says. “And be charming to all and sundry. And do secure as many cards as possible, though without seeming forward. And certainly do not allow people to place their monetary gifts directly in your hands or, spirits forbid, aside your bed. Allowing them to slip notes into your reticule is best. And do not worry on how I shall fare without you and Katie. Our sitters have come to love my trancing as much as your knocks. And I will ask Amy or Adelaide to stay with me now that Alfie has left our employ, the thieving ingrate.”

Worry about Leah? Maggie thinks. Gosh, that’d be a first. “I’ll try my heart’s best not lose sleep over your situation, Leah,” Maggie says, and as if she is perfectly sincere.

Leah contemplates her, then shrouds Vivace’s cage with white sheeting. “But do be careful when alone there,” she says. “I recall now that some of Troy women, those who were not associated with the Boultons, were awful and common and of jealous aspect. Indeed, I must say, Margaretta, that whole town gave me something of turn.”

A few days later, the Boultons’ brougham rattles through the town of Troy, then down, down a frost-heaved road. The brougham has Moroccan seats and glazed windows. November dusk, and the glassed-in world shifts by in greys and blacks. No ice. No snow. No moon. No whiteness at all, except that of Maggie’s face reflected in the scene.

Alice Boulton holds Maggie’s gloved hand in hers. She is newly wed to Mr. Boulton’s brother and she giggles and whispers like the
schoolgirl she so recently was. Mr. Boulton, Dundreary-whiskered, in a frock-coat of checks, orders caution of the driver. “We want not a speck of harm to come to our guest.”