The Dark (49 page)

“Kat. What happened between Leah and Elisha?”

“I really just wanted more cognac or a rum flip and—”

“And?”

“I didn’t hear the whole conversation. I swear on my cold, dead body.”

“All right.”

“So, Leah said she knew about Elisha’s ‘exploits’ and ‘conquests’ abroad. She said he had to cease toying with your affections and all that. But what she really, really wanted was to know if you’d told Elisha anything about our, you know, sometimes-tricks, the ones we have to use when the spirits are being old fuss-budgets.”

“I haven’t told him a damned thing!”

“And Elisha said he knew the all. The all, Mag. He said he’s not gullible, but that he doesn’t care. Alfie slithered up just then, so I went on back to our room.”

“Hell. What … conquests? Did she say?” Her heart sinks. Mountains. Rivers. Pyramids. That is what was meant by conquests. Yes.

“No, they talked then about reputation and all that, and whose was more important, Leah’s or Elisha’s. Elisha’s or Leah’s. It seemed a draw, more or less.” Katie closes the trunk lid. Locks it. Surveys the objects on the bed, then leafs through the newspaper clippings and obituaries for the president’s son. Maggie has already read the material dutifully. Train wrecks, as General Hamilton opined back in Washington, really are never short of terrible.

“Fuss-it-all, you’d think the Queen was coming, the way Leah’s going on, and not just about the First Lady. Come, Mag, let’s go visit Calvin before she arrives. He’s had some more of that cognac delivered.”

At two o’clock Lizzie returns. She heads straight up to Calvin, does not even wish Maggie and Katie a bonnychance, or whatever the word is in Lizzie’s beloved French.

At three o’clock Katie decides to have a last lie-down before the Big Occasion, and so it is Maggie who must wait with Leah in the vestibule. And wait she does, her throat dry, her hands atremble. Her nervousness has nothing to do with their imminent guests, but with Elisha’s plans for her, which will be coming to fruition any moment now. And it doesn’t matter a bit what Katie heard, she tells herself. Elisha’s heart is true.

Leah cracks open the entry door for the third time. No fine carriage as yet. Leah is arrayed in a day-gown of green and yellow tartan. The skirt yaws across the entire hall and is scalloped with bows the size of small cats. “Please be to God and the Spirits, you did not lunch on cider or toddies, did you, Margaretta?”

“No. And no again. Is that a new timepiece?” Maggie abruptly asks, having just noticed the thick chain that loops over Leah’s pleated bodice down to a fat watch at her waist. It looks, Maggie realizes, like a medieval flail. The thought hardly eases her mind.

“No, I have owned it for a good month now. It keeps perfect time, and now do cease looking down like a sullen housemaid. And what message were you giving to that post boy? And Katie? Where is Katie?”

“She’s having a fortifying rest.”

“She is fortified plenty, I am sure. And Lizzie?”

“Dosing up Calvin, just like you asked.”

“Ah, yes. A moment … there. I am near to fainting with nerves. I do hope the medicine is sufficient. We cannot have our Calvin coughing in such a horrid fashion, not while our guest is here.”

“No,” Maggie says, and feels alike some doll-form, emptied of substance.

Mother brushes past Leah with a platter of chutney and sweet
pickles. “Laws, but I can’t imagine she would actually favour these, can I?”

“What you imagine does not signify, Mother. A trusted source told me of Mrs. Pierce’s favourite edibles. Now, leave the platters in the front parlour sideboard, if you please. Here, let me help. And Margaretta, do lend us a hand.”

Maggie nods, and all three of them go to the front parlour, where the birdcages are already shrouded in white cloth, the thick drapes drawn, the lamps primed, and the lily box in full view on the marble-slabbed sideboard. Maggie lifts the lid. “Have courage,” Elisha told her.

“Close that, Margaretta.”

“Dandy-fine, but I won’t be the one who reads the letters out like Calvin used to. I won’t, Leah.”

“Did I ask you to?” Leah is breezing about the parlour, checking the table, the rugs. “Oh, I know you think the lily box trite, but a president’s wife will want assurances she is consulting ladies of the most stellar reputation, ladies who are highly thought of by the most moral people, that she is consulting the originals and not their imitators like Cora Hatch, that mincing coquette, with her cow-eyed trances, or that Daniel Home with his sideshow levitations. Heavenly spirits, why are men taking on mediumships? They have enough occupations of their own, and their manifestations are only theatre. They cannot manage a jot of the divine.”

Maggie says nothing. What to say? Leah owns the floor, the house, Maggie’s fate.

“Surely the First Lady will write a recommendation letter of her own,” Leah goes on. “It will be the pride of the lily box, a seal on our reputation. None will ever dare say again that our acceptance of currency is in any way untoward, or unladylike, or that our ghosts are in any way reluctant.”

From upstairs comes hacking and a hoarse call for Leah.

“Calvin wants you,” Maggie says.

“Obviously.”

“Do go up, will you, poppet?” Mother says.

Leah checks her fat watch. “There is no time.” She hurries into the hall and calls up the stairs, “Lizzie, dear, shut his door. We
must have quiet. Give him an extra measure of sleeping draught if you must.”

Lizzie’s reply is muffled. But a door closes. The coughing quiets. Poor Calvin, Maggie thinks. How can any man linger so long? She studies her reflection in the hallstand mirror. The reflection is of a petite young woman, eyes wide and brown and long of lash. She is fetching, even pretty. She is also nervous, but resolute. She faces the door.

“The carriage will be most elegant, but discreetly ornamented so as not to attract attention. Do you not think so, Margaretta?”

“Well, yes.”

Leah loops her arm through Maggie’s. “Dearest, I know we have had our little squabbles, what with that Dr. Kane of yours, but this marks a point of turning. Ah, I hear it. I hear it! No, do not look out. Katherina! Mother! Alfie!”

The others rush in. Katie wears a delicate duff-coloured gown. She gives Maggie a questioning glance. Practises a curtsy. Alfie practises a faint bow. Mother worries at her lace-trimmed sleeves. No apron today; Leah has abolished it.

Alfie opens the door before the bell is pulled. Stands aside.

Leah is all dimpled smiles, until, that is, she recognizes the ruddy-cheeked young man. “You! You’re Morton!” She rounds on Maggie.

Katie looks surprised. Though why? She saw Maggie write the note replying,
Yes, come for me, Lish
. Did she think Maggie would lose courage just because of some overheard gossip?

“Don’t look at me so!” Maggie cries. “Any of you! Elisha asked me not to rap for Mrs. Pierce. I thought hard on it. I did. And then I promised him I wouldn’t. I couldn’t refuse him. And Elisha’s not feeling well. All those fevers he had, they nag him sometimes … And he needs me.”

“
He
needs you? Margaretta Fox! We must appear in harmony. I, that is,
we
need you for the spiritual battery to be at its strongest. We cannot turn Mrs. Pierce away. It would be the gravest insult. She is the First Lady of our land. And she needs to speak to her poor dead son. To hear about the train wreck. How can she understand such a horror if … Sister! Do not leave. If you leave now … if you step out this door … Where is your damn head?”

“Exactly here!” Maggie says as she pins her little hat onto her head, which is clearly on her shoulders. Morton takes her arm.

They are nearly out the door to the brougham where Elisha awaits when Lizzie rushes down the stairs, calling for them all. Her bodice jacket is mapped red with blood.

“P
oor soul,” I said. “To pass away amid all that brouha. You should have been with him.”

My patient sighed and owned that was true, at which I felt badly. I was becoming far too familiar with her.

“And I had the selfish thought, Mrs. Mellon, that Calvin’s last was part of some larger plan to thwart me, even punish me.”

“Chalk and nonsense. It had naught to do with you.”

“No. Nothing?”

“No,” I said, surprised at my own firmness. To explain: I had often had similar “selfish” thoughts. For I viewed my son’s death as God’s way of teaching me a lesson for my pride, as if the Deity were merely the cruellest of schoolmasters. Thus, when I said “no” to my patient just then it became apparent that my mind had altered on this score, though when and how I couldn’t say.

“No,” I said again. “We are none of us of such importance.”

At this there came the lightest tap-tapping. Only the rain on the garret’s three linked windows, I realized; yet the tapping seemed as if in agreement with my words, and was comforting withal.

“A
ND SO IT WAS FOR THE BEST
, wasn’t it. John? That the séance was cancelled?”

It is nearly June. John and his wife are taking the warming air on the near-completed veranda of his house. His wife’s weeds are rust-shaded at the elbows, the skirt spotted from rain. She can afford new mourning attire but her old weeds give her comfort. She peers through the crepe streamers on her black cap, her pale blue eyes aflutter, her round face anxious. It is a face John finds lovely even still.

“You should have come to the funeral, John, oh, but you should have. You could at least have met us in Rochester for the interment. The coffin was so heavy with ice that—”

John interrupts his wife to explain he’d had some employ at the village forge. An imperative, lucrative job. His wife resumes talking. Maggie is still living at the New York brownstone, yes, but she and Leah are cold as ice tongs with each other. And Maggie will not speak of her plans, not to any of them. And she is certainly no longer giving sittings or raising any spirits, what- or whom-soever.

As John listens to his wife talk on, he measures the alcohol and turpentine for the lamps. Cautiously, mind. He is no fool. But this combination, though highly combustible, burns far cleaner and brighter than lard or rapeseed oil, and is far cheaper than whale oil or even this newfangled kerosene.

The parlour behind them is crowded with tools and debris—sawdust and planks and wallpaper lengths. His women have shown no interest in decorating their home and so it has fallen to him. Thus far he has chosen some pictures of the British being cut down by the ragtag Americans at Bunker Hill, a brass cuspidor for male guests, a conversation chair, and some flocked paper for the keeping room, where the family will sit of an evening round the hearth, the women chatting and sewing while he reads scriptures. His pleasure in choosing patterns and furnishings has surprised him, as has the reasonable price of it all. Mechanicals have made things once available only to the tony set available for all. True, the woods are veneered, not solid; the pictures are lithographs, not oils; the wallpaper roller-printed, not painted by hand; and the ceiling roses are of papier mâché, not plaster. But who are his women to quibble about verisimilitude?

“… and the eulogies were lovely, weren’t they? And given by important sorts, though our Lizzie was so distraught you’d think Calvin’s death had been unexpected.”

Over at his son’s house, Leah’s silhouette, plump and stately, frames itself in a window. Above the house a gibbous moon rises. John prays for Calvin, certainly. He loved Calvin, this sort-of son. And thus he grieves, but it is an interior grieving. He cannot abide the theatre of lamenting and handkerchief crushing that has been going on since his women arrived.

“… and here is the curious thing, John. When the main had left and it was just the family and the closest of friends, Dr. Kane stared into poor Calvin’s face, then ordered Maggie and everyone else to gather round the coffin. He said, ‘I have something to say, and it must be said in front of all who love truth,’ or some such. Anywise, he gripped Maggie’s hand overtop Calvin and toppled a candle as he did, too, didn’t he? And it fell on poor Calvin’s breast. Katie thought quick and tossed her cup, but it just made the flames worse—I can’t imagine what she was drinking—and Calvin’s waistcoat was singed. After all that, Dr. Kane asked our Maggie if she’d marry him when he returned from the Arctic. He declared he’d be true to his Maggie until he was as dead as the corpse before them. It was a definite promise this time and couldn’t be mistaken, could it?”

John pours the mixture into the lamps’ reservoirs, his nostrils searing with the reek. “Young people are mortal romantic these days. They entertain gratuitous talk.”

Margaret huffs. “I shouldn’t say Dr. Kane is so young. And I didn’t find it all that romantic, did I? Gracious evers, it was over a corpse … Oh, and then the doctor insisted this great secret of the engagement not leave the room. Oh, it was all very hush-hush, wasn’t it? I almost thought he’d want us to write out the promise in blood.”

“Need it be so difficult? If he loves her, he should marry her. Be done with it. It were that way between us.”