The Dark (36 page)

“You’ve found them, haven’t you?” Mother says. “We are they. Or is it ‘them’? Anywise, we’re not taking anyone till after one. And who are you, if I may ask, sir?”

“Forgive me,” he says, and utters his name. Maggie still refuses
him attention. She turns back to her book of German verbs. The sun warms her neck, her spine. Meanwhile, the whom-evers in the room exclaim and gather closer to this man, this Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. He has no need to boast. The whom-evers do it for him.

“His father is Judge Kane, and wasn’t his mother a famous beauty in her time?” asks a woman with a blithe, high voice.

“She was Miss Jane Leiper. Lafayette escorted her to a dress ball when he toured here. She went as Mary Queen of Scots. Everyone knows this,” says the usual know-all man found in every congregate of souls.

“Wasn’t the doctor in the Mexican war? I heard he was sent on a secret mission of some kind to get rid of General Pot, or was it Scots?”

“Scots. And it’s hardly secret if everyone knows of it,” says Know-All.

“And hasn’t he explored the seven continents?” continues Blithe Voice. “And didn’t he climb a Chinese volcano of some sort and meet, too, the heathen King of Dahomey? And wasn’t he the one who cured the Sultan of Whampoa, or was it Goa? And, yes, that was it, he nearly died in a fall when he was trying to scale a statue in Karnack.”

“It was the fall out of the barge on the Nile that nearly killed him,” Know-All declares. “And it was not a Chinese volcano, it was in Talel. Is no one listening to me?”

“And isn’t he returning to the Arctic to find Sir Franklin, this time with his own ship under his own command?” Blithe-Voice asks, clearly not listening at all.

“My, my, but that Arctic!” puts in an elderly female voice. “Such a terrible place! Imagine an ice-wagon the size of a continent!”

“Not his own ship—Grinnell’s ship, the
Advance
,” Know-All says, exasperated. “Henry Grinnell is sponsoring the second expedition, just as he did the first. The papers are full of it. One only has to read them.”

“My, my, but is there anything the man cannot discover?” Elderly-Voice wonders.

Maggie lays a red ribbon in the pages. Closes the book with a sigh.

Mother says to the whom-evers, “My daughter doesn’t read those vulgar newspapers, does she? I don’t allow it. She has her studies to
attend to.” She turns to Dr. Kane. “We can’t make exceptions. You understand, don’t you?”

“Forgive me, of course,” he says. Then presses and cajoles, and soon enough, Maggie finds herself seated at the table with this Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. Mother and several whom-evers are seated with them. Maggie promptly forgets about their presence, her attention caught up with this celebrated man.

“I wish to know of my brother,” Elisha says, though in a bored manner, as if he doesn’t wish to in the least.

“Do we need the alphabet board, Maggie? Do we?” Mother asks.

“No, no,” she replies, at which the knocks sound on the table, then the walls. Maggie cants her head towards Elisha, “He is in Heaven, your dear Willie.”

“You know his name? Impressive.”

“
I
do not know it.”

“Thus he is in Heaven. Capital to have the intelligence. And how old is he, in Eternity?”

“Fifteen. He hopes you are proud of his death. He tried for a good death, a brave one, so that your mother would not be so grieved.”

Elisha studies his cuffs.

Knocks sound along the floor, an interior rain. “And he says he’s forgiven you completely,” Maggie adds.

“But I did not, that is, I did not apologize.”

“There’s no need now, really, it’s clear you’re sorry.”

“Miss Fox. I came here to merely, merely to … no matter. Now I must—”

“He loves you. Willie. He knows you did all you could to save him.”

Elisha pinions her with his blue gaze. “You are a riddle of a girl, Miss Fox. Yet this much is also obvious: this is no life for you.”

Elisha comes again, this time with his colleagues—men of learning and high standing—bearded and amused, professional discoverers all. They don’t worry Maggie. But Elisha? It is as if he has already discovered her.

He says to his colleagues, “She may help us find Sir Franklin. Then we needn’t brave towers of ice and days of endless night. We
need merely sail the
Advance
to the spot and bid him a capital day.” Elisha says this seriously, yet he gives Maggie the slightest smile. Maggie gives the slightest smile back. Feels a grand relief. He is not pursuing her, then, not in that fashion.

And the sum of the spirits’ knowledge about Sir Franklin? He may be alive. Or. He may be dead.

“Much like any of us,” Elisha muses. During a break for tea he passes Maggie a note:
Were you ever in love
?

Ask the spirits
, she writes back, suppressing a laugh.

Is this him? The one she has imagined so often of late? He is thirty to her nineteen, true. But he
is
handsome and though not overly tall he gusts with energy and confidence. And he is heroic, though not, it must be said, a true hero yet. That will come when he finds Sir Franklin. When he conquers the Arctic for America. Maggie knows this because she
does
read the newspapers, though always once Mother is asleep. Mostly she reads the obituaries, but also the Society Page, and the news both local and foreign, there being much to keep up with in these hectic times.

Maggie’s outings with Elisha throughout November involve numerous carriage rides about Philadelphia and its environs. For chaperones they have Maggie’s mother and Elisha’s valet, William Morton, a ruddy Irish youth with pea-green eyes.

Elisha tells Maggie of the fever that nearly killed him at sixteen. “The physician said that with my injured heart I should never reach thirty and so my father advised me that if I must die young, I should die in the harness. I couldn’t agree with a sentiment more.” Elisha strokes his jaw. “But God, I despise being ill. I want to leap out of my skin, to not waste a day, and this because each day has been given me for some greater purpose. I feel that as a certainty, Miss Maggie. Did you know that I am a veritable connoisseur of fever? I’ve survived rice fever, Nile fever, rheumatoid fever, septic fever even, after the lance wound in Mexico. Sometimes I think of Death as a sly uncle. Pocket watch in hand. Tapping with his cane. ‘Get on with it, boy! No time to waste. Get yourself a name!’ Any second he’ll snap his watch shut, and … it’s not fair. I’ve more to do than most men.
I do. It’s why I carry on with five, six projects at once. I feel like one of those Indian deities with their many arms whirling about and brandishing tools and weapons and, ah, forgive me, death is a tiresome topic, let us speak of life.”

And he does talk Life, henceforth. Talks of what he will do, not of what has been. Doesn’t boast overly, as Maggie presumed he would, of his adventures abroad. And when she talks, he attends her every word. And every day he writes her letters, even on the days when they meet.

On this particular day he writes:
You are a strange mixture of child and woman, of simplicity and cunning, of passionate impulse and extreme self control
.

Maggie peers into a looking glass. He sees me thus, but am I thus? It is an odd, disjointed feeling to be seen so differently from one’s own perceptions. Cunning? With passionate impulses? He makes her sound so intriguing. She has a modest wit, a decent penmanship, a face prettier than some. She knows that. But she does not have Leah’s musical gifts, nor Katie’s ethereal beauty. And besides talking to the dead, she can’t claim supernatural talents either, unlike Leah, who sees thoughts captioned over people’s heads. Unlike Katie, who seems to hear the utterances of insensate objects. Unlike Mother even, with her knowledge of the old magic, its spells and remedies.

Maggie puts down the looking glass. Leastways Elisha sees her as something more than a nervous battery, a blank conduit to the Other Side. A witch. In time, he might see her as a nice, ordinary girl, caught up in extraordinary circumstances, which is how she sees herself.

At the beginning of December, Elisha departs for New York for several days, on exploring business, he explains. Maggie now has time to write to Katie of this admirer, of their outings, of his presents—white camellias, white handkerchiefs, a white ermine stole so well dressed the creature seems to breath at her neck. All this white because of the white dress she wore when he first beheld her sitting by the arched window of the Webb hotel. “And you were haloed by golden light, alike the spirit of light herself,” he told her. “And so raptly attentive to your book of French poetry.”

“Oh, it was a German one, a manual, on verbs.”

“An irrelevance.”

Maggie writes his name slowly, twice dipping her pen to ensure the name is dark and bold and lavish.
Elisha Kent Kane
. Before she can post the letter, however, she receives one from Katie. It is much more coherent than usual, but then Katie, like Maggie, has so improved her speech and deportment and mature habitudes that it could never be guessed that their father is an out-of-work blacksmith, their place of origin a back-country hamlet where the dominion of night is still respected and feared.

How has Elisha managed it? Maggie wonders. As if he can be everywhere at once. As if he is one boot step in front of her.

Four days later, and Morton, Elisha’s valet, opens the carriage door for Maggie, Mother and Elisha, and they rattle-tattle out of Philadelphia along the newly laid macadam. Elisha has not yet told them where they are bound, only that it is a place near to his heart’s heart. The mid-December sun is glaucous and unseasonably warm. The tattered snow shows its under-green.

Elisha wraps his overcoat over Maggie’s shoulders. “Your delicate form! Such wintry air!”

Maggie decides against telling him that as children she and Katie used frosted windows for writing slates; that they were quite accustomed to wintry air, both inside and out.
Get Gone
was what they scratched on the kitchen panes one frigid Hydesville morning a few weeks before the peddler came to them. Their mother gasped in terror at sight of the ghostly script, and this was of keen amusement to both Maggie and Katie. Recalling this and other past collusions, Maggie wishes again that Katie could have joined them today, but her sister was exhausted from her journey to Philadelphia by steamboat and rail and wanted only to curl up with a toddy and then a mulled wine. “Just give me all the hoary old details,” she told Maggie.

“There shall be a small ramble,” Elisha announces as the hired carriage passes the gatehouse of the Laurel Hill Cemetery. The main of the cemetery is carved out of a vertiginous hill that overlooks the broad and abiding calm of the Schuylkill River. They walk down and down, and then along a cat-scratch path. Statuary blends into the ashen sky. Neat rows of evergreens alternate with wild groves. A crow caws and a woman in mourning black kneels at a plot of four small graves.

The tombs and cenotaphs are of modest size and are over-clasped with hawthorn and ivy. Elisha explains to Maggie how there is room aplenty for many more dead, of any religious persuasion. For this cemetery, unlike the old-fashioned churchyards, welcomes all and sundry.

Maggie replies, “How interesting,” and “How modern.” She is sincere. Because it
does
sound as new information when Elisha tells of it. She certainly doesn’t mention how she spends time aplenty in cemeteries and graveyards studying the epitaphs scripted on gravestones and the like, and has done so ever since Leah took her and Katie to Rochester’s Hope Cemetery and bid them make a game of recalling dates, names, beloved remembrances.

Elisha halts them up before a tomb that boasts Grecian columns, a cartouche of flying doves, a statue of a woebegone cherub. “Of what are these monuments made?” Elisha asks.

Maggie taps the cherub’s stunted wings. “Granite?”

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean what material of the gross earth, my pet, but rather what ideals.”

“Of course. I see. It’s just that I remember my pa talking about granite. Where he came from in Rockland County there was such a bucket-lot of it. I recollect him saying that if you dug anywhere you’d ring into it straightaways. He said Rockland was a fine-all place for a gravestone carver to live, but no one else.”

Elisha chuckles. Was what she said so humorous? With Elisha, when she attempts wit he looks displeased. When she attempts gravity, he laughs.

“A monument crumbles to dust, Tuttie. And when it does, all that remains are the remembrances of a man’s valiant deeds. Valour, mind, is not enough in these modern times. A man must invent, discover, reveal! A man must leave a legacy to be immortal. These stones—which are marble, actually—are naught but dreams made manifest.”

Maggie looks again at the cherub. He is grey and coarse-grained, but, ah, Elisha must be correct. Marble he must be. But would Mother think so? She does know her rocks, Maggie recalls, and even had a collection of “curiosity” stones lining her herb garden back in Hydesville. At this thought, Maggie looks down to where Mother, escorted by Morton, pauses to rest on a grave slab some distance behind. Elisha follows Maggie’s gaze and then makes a complicated gesture that would not be amiss in charades. Morton nods and sits aside his charge and directs her attention to where a barge endeavours to ford the distant river.

Elisha whispers into Maggie’s hair, “Close your eyes, my pet. Open them only when I give word.” Maggie obliges, and then allows him to steer her over the path. She hears the seep-seep of a winter bird, the rustling of Elisha’s trousers, the squeak of his boots, the creak of her corset, the thud of her heart, and another thud-thudding—an inconstant, palpitate sound. The heart of Elisha? It must be so. Her attenuation to this sounding world happens in a nonce. And if she waits, and if she strives, she can become as one blinded at birth. Listen: the funeral monuments are slowly crumbling; the worms are moistly chewing; the wind is sawing at branches, and that, in the far-off, is the ring of the gravedigger’s shovel finding stone, frozen ground. Maggie squeezes her eyes shut even tighter. Surely below these soundings are murmurs, whispers, sighs.