The Dark (44 page)

T
HE BEGINNING OF
M
AY
and Maggie has just returned from her short spirit-rapping tour to Philadelphia with Mother. She is determined, despite Leah’s dark looks, to spend her every available moment with Elisha before his early June departure for the Arctic, and before her own mid-May departure to Washington with Katie. It is a tour she would love to cancel, but cannot, apparently, not without bringing disgrace upon them all, or so Leah has asserted. Leah. Thank Christ, Maggie thinks, that at least here in New York Leah is too preoccupied with Lizzie and Calvin and her clients to make much fuss over Maggie and Elisha’s many outings.

On this balmy afternoon Elisha escorts Maggie to New York’s Lyceum of Natural History, where he is set to lecture and raise last-minute funds for his expedition supplies. The
Advance
, Elisha has informed Maggie, must be stocked with several years’ worth of foodstuffs and sundries in the off-chance she becomes trapped in the polar ice.

“Which is nothing, nothing alike to this,” Elisha explains as he shows her the enfilades of saw-cut bergs, the walls of glacial ice and the wooden shores painted with birds. “And, ah, behold, my pet, the
aurora borealis
!”

Maggie looks up at the dangling bits of coloured glass. “How pretty they are!”

“Pretty? They are tawdry, a far-fetched illusion, an artifice. The sublimity of the Arctic can only be painted with words. I have informed the manager of this, but that cretin hardly cares.”

“He should attend you,” Maggie says gravely, and wonders how she could have misjudged his tone. She vows to do better, to attend every shift in his voice, every nuance of his expressions.

“Yes, he should. Ah, Tuttie, the Arctic is such a clean, white place, even when assaulted with endless dark. The dawn when it comes is a purpled blue, alike a bruise or, no, alike a raven’s wing in angled light.”

“Bishop’s blue,” Maggie offers, and thinks: Not blue, not purple, but both at once. A lovely shade. I’ll have a dress made forthwith.

“Bishops have no place in the arctic, pet,” he says wryly. “It is a queer, immutable world. Deathless and yet the landscape of death
itself.” Elisha shakes his head. “I do so despise this vulgar business of raising funds. I’d rather raise the dead as you do … I jest. But little wonder my mother—that is, my parents—begged off attending my lecture.” He faces her. “Did you know I’m being called a celebrity?”

“A what?”

“A celebrity, as if I were something to celebrate, a party of a man, if you will. Something to enjoy and then forget the next day. It is an insult, nothing less.”

Maggie frowns, shocked, though she can think of worse things to be called. Has been called worse things aplenty. “I do believe I’m becoming one of them … of those celebrities too.”

“Dreadful enough in a man, pet. Anywise, it’s hardly the same, your celebrity and mine. Mine is chanced to become something greater.” He gives an intricate wave to Morton, who is busy pointing out the lime-lights to Maggie’s mother. Morton nods, then ushers Mother out the back door, as if to show her something more delightful beyond.

Elisha cups Maggie’s elbow. “Have you told your family? Of our plans? Have you told that tigress of a sister?”

“Should I? That is, should I now? Calvin is so sick, it might seem selfish.”

Elisha nods. “Selfish, yes. You’re correct. To be wholly quit of your profession, timing is of paramount import. I will tell you when to cease. When you return from Washington perhaps. Yes, that will be your last tour before you are stashed away for tutoring. How different you will be when I return. As will I.”

Maggie, gusted with faintness, puts her hand on a glacial wall. She half expects to feel a coldness, so real does it look, feels instead the sticky wetness of fresh paint. “Why is that bird by himself?” she asks of a sudden. The bird is glossy-black in the well-lit hall and is shaped like a large, fat urn. It has white patches about its eyes and a witless look.

“Himself? No. That is the female of the species. A Great Auk.” Elisha explains how, on his first expedition to the Arctic, he and two companions found her on the barrows, how the bird cocked her head as if trying to recognize their faces, then waddle-climbed up the hummock, her stubby wings used as a propellant. Elisha’s companion
shot the bird and she slid down to where her green-hued egg was sitting on open ground.

“We were delighted at the time. We had bagged, you see, what was certainly the last Great Auk in existence. The captain and I decided to have her stuffed for the ship’s library.”

Elisha strokes his jaw. “I told the stage painter to put her there because I admit it nagged at me, the shooting of that beast. Though, why so greatly? Why at all? Consider my little brother. He was the last of William Kane, never the like to be seen again. Every death is the same and yet unique and comes to all without favour. Thus what could it possibly signify, the death of one dumb animal on an Arctic plain?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know these things at all, Lish,” Maggie says softly, desperately. “And that’s why, why I need tell you the how of it all.” She looks to where her feet might be if they were not encircled by layers of skirting and petticoats.

“Ah, God. Stay alike that, my love,” Elisha says, his voice catching queerly. “I see an image of you. You are looking down, your countenance pensive just as now. But your body erect, yes, also just as now, as if you are determined for something. You are dressed as an enchantress, as Circe. A white sheath but no … corset. Your hair is loose. An ambrotype. I must have one made. Only glass could do such an image justice.” He trails off into his own imaginings. Maggie makes bold and reaches for his hand. She slides her fingers between his. His fingers tremble, then tighten. She would give her soul, or some portion of it, to remain fixed with him on this stage, amid these painted shores and bergs, beneath these sparkling bits of cut glass. She makes to speak again. To tell. To make things plain and honest between them.

“You’re so wondrously mysterious, Tuttie, promise you will always stay so,” Elisha says, at which Maggie blinks and finds herself as mute and witless as any Great Auk.

Three nights later Maggie sits in the audience with Katie and their mother. Katie wears her favourite gown of cream and fawn, Maggie a new-sewn gown of bishop’s blue. Mother, at Maggie’s insistence, wears a brown silk gown instead of her usual fit-out of brown woollens, and a band of faux flowers instead of her usual fussy lappet
cap. Leah has not come, to Maggie’s relief. A new doctor is examining Calvin, and as his wife she is apparently required.

I am in love, Maggie decides. She must be. The feeling—giddy and sapped and anxious—is alike that described in the novels she reads. And how can she not be in love with Elisha Kent Kane, given his station, his handsome countenance, his erudition, his renown and reputation, even his “celebrity,” as he so mockingly called it?

Elisha takes the stage to polite applause. He invites the audience to play “detective” and discover, as he had on his first expedition, the remains of Sir John Franklin’s encampment, the abandoned sledges and heaps of discarded food tins. And then, the stone-heaped graves of three members of Franklin’s party. Elisha asks why no written record was found, no brave notes as is usual when all is lost. The audience confers.

“The Open Polar Sea, dear listeners!” Elisha exclaims. “The evidence for its existence is overwhelming: The warming currents as one travels upwards. The birds that have been seen to migrate north. The perpetual rays of summer that could not allow for an icy cap on our world. No, no, good people, at the top of our world are warm shores bounded by vivid trees and strange grasses. Food is abundant there—fishes the colour of the
auroras
, sea-hogs that can feed a man for months, and creatures unnamed and strange beyond telling with jellied limbs and a multitude of eyes to see during the six months of utter dark. Sir Franklin and his men are there! Surviving in that undiscovered realm. Awaiting, nay, praying for rescue. I have volunteered to lead the next Grinnell expedition. And I give you my heart’s vow that I will not rest until Sir Franklin is found, until we, the Americans, succeed in this noble search.”

The audience claps. Some listeners huzzah. Many reach for their pocketbooks.

After the lecture, after the applause, Maggie, Katie and their mother wend through the milling audience towards Elisha. He is still onstage, tight-grouped now by admirers. Closer and Maggie realizes these “admirers” have the proprietary air of close kin. She steadies her breath. His family has come after all. The older man, upright as a post and all distinction, is no doubt Judge Kane, Elisha’s father. The
youngish man, who looks a better-fed version of Elisha, must be his brother Tom-the-lawyer. And the woman? She is taller than any of the men, her beauty astounding though she must be past sixty. Her features are delicate and pale, as if cut for a cameo. Her hair a vivid gold, her slender figure arrayed in forest green. Maggie finds it hard to believe she has borne seven children, of which Elisha is the youngest.

Maggie readies a demure smile, adjusts her gloves. Decides she is glad to meet his parents at last. They are always out of town when she asks to meet them, or moving house, or indisposed.

Mrs. Kane sweeps something minute from Elisha’s collar, then swivels her lovely neck an almost imperceptible degree. She might not be seeing Maggie at all.

Maggie whispers to Mother and Katie, and the three move forward as one. Just then Morton appears. “Miss Fox, I’ll be honoured to see you home.”

Maggie looks in dismay at Elisha. He is nodding to his mother. His face has a strange, tight expression. Embarrassment? Surely not. He darts Maggie a pleading glance. She understands then. Understands completely. His expression is not embarrassment but that of a little boy about to cry. Volcanoes. Wars. Fevers. Foreign heat. The endless Arctic ice and dark. He fears none of these. Fears only his mother. Yearns for her. Resents her. A suffocating quilt of emotion, perhaps alike what Maggie feels for Leah.

She lets Morton shepherd them away, ignoring her mother’s queries, Katie’s disgruntlement, her own frustration, and all because the pity has allowed a revelation: Maggie loves Elisha with all her heart. Loves
him
, not his “celebrity” and station and all that. And I will love him, she decides, for everlasting more.

“B
UT DID HE HAVE IT MADE?
The ambrotype?”

“Oh, yes.”

I knitted a line or two. “I’ve heard said your sort can hold a picture, an image, and then scry what happened to the person, or some such. That is superstition, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have it still, the ambrotype?”

“It met a bad end. Then again, it
was
made of glass. Why?”

“No reason. Such images are pleasant to have, is all.”

“Has anyone taken an image of you, Mrs. Mellon?”

“No,” I said. This was not entirely untrue. The image I had—a tin-type clasped in a velveteen case—was not of me alone, but of me and my son. He was fifteen at the time. We looked out all stoic and grim (as does everyone in such images, to be frank), but we had been laughing the moment before.

“I am sorry for that,” my patient said, and in such a way that she might have heard me screaming at Mr. Mellon as he threw the tin-type on the hearth, where the flames blackened and bent it, and erased it of any image. Not even a silhouette remained.

“It ain’t natural,” Mr. Mellon had sneered, “for a woman to love her son more than her husband and sit with the milk-sop for images, alike they are a married set.”

I took up the cover-all, my needles. “If I were the gambling sort, I would bet that your Elisha was prone to ludicrous jealousies—for anything or anyone. I would bet that he wanted your attention and regard only for himself.”

“Well, yes. He wished to plant his flag, as it were, on my person. But I can’t say I was devoid of the green demons either. This I learned when in Washington in the mid of May of’53, not long before Elisha was set to sail for the Arctic, where he hoped to rescue Franklin and set his flag on the shores of that chimera, the Open Polar Sea.”