The Dark (5 page)

On consideration Leah realizes it is hardly surprising this “ghost” has visited her family. Did not Grandma Rutan rise at night and follow premonitory funerals to the graveyard? Come morning, she would describe the procession in detail, often faulting the mourners’ attire. And what of Leah’s Aunt Beth? She dreamed the correct date of her death. Saw it carved on her tombstone and died to the day and year. Do I believe in such things? Leah wonders. Decides she does. After all, there is so much one must believe; another thing scarcely signifies.

Once the graveyard is behind them, the driver ceases whistling. He is a charming whistler, though Leah thinks it a pathetic superstition that a cheery tune would be enough to keep the dead at bay.

At last David’s farmstead comes into view. It is a whitewashed, rambling place with three outbuildings and what looks to be stakings
for a fourth. A giant oak is the only tree on the property. The foreyard is crowded with wagons and buckalls, even a brougham, a landau. The buggy draws up. The ancient piebalds drop their heads. Leah sees three strangers, all men, tromp into the house. At a short distance, David’s two boys and some others play at mumblety-peg. They laugh and yelp as the knife, balanced on a boy’s fingertip, falls and nearly skewers their feet. Such is what passes for entertainment in the countryside, Leah thinks, this nearly losing a thumb or a toe, nearly gashing a thigh, the horrified delight of it all. They will take up gander-pulling next. As a child Leah played mumblety-peg too, of course, though she had always insisted on a few simple rules before she did so.

She alights from the buggy.

“I guess I could stay on, ma’am,” the driver suggests. “Wouldn’t mind staying on, in fact, out of naught but a practical curiosity, ’course.”

“Why? To gawk? As if my family were an organ-grinder’s dancing monkey?” She is more abrupt than she intends, and so she adds with her dimpled smile, “Forgive me, I am close to fainting in exhaustion. Many thanks for your assistance. I shall send for you if you are needed.”

She lets herself into the back hall. Hangs her cloak and bonnet on the peg-rail. Doesn’t halloo. There is nothing wrong with a quiet entrance. Anywise, with the low din emanating from the keeping room she would not be heard. She pauses in the shadows aside the entry. The keeping room is crammed with perhaps twenty souls, all speaking with contained excitement. For this occasion of uncertain etiquette some folk are sombrely dressed, as if for a wake; others are in their going-out clothes. At least Leah will not be out of place in her one good day-dress with its subdued stripes of butternut and madder red. The sleeves are slashed to show a clean white. Her collar starched and spotless.

The men clumped about the trestle-table with its jugs of cider and platters of food are concerned, as ever, Leah thinks, about their manly appetites. The women form a gaggle around Leah’s mother, Margaret, who sits on the hearth stool and worries at the flaps of her old-style lappet cap. Mother is ashen-haired and pigeon-chested,
that is to say, the very picture of a settled matron. She is voicing, at the moment, her sentiments on the ghostly horrors, and the alarming effect of it all on her health. “And I haven’t slept a jot, have I? And, oh, how my old eyes ache and tear, as if filled with sand granules. I’ve used my eyestone thrice, haven’t I, but still they ache so.” She dabs her eyes with her handkerchief. Leah has ever been slightly disconcerted by her mother’s eyes, they being of such a pale aqueous blue one can practically see her thoughts swimming by. Not that one need look for them; Mother will readily proclaim her thoughts to all who care to hear, and to many who do not.

Just behind Mother stands Leah’s grown sister, Maria, nicknamed “the wall” by Leah’s younger sisters, Margaretta and Katherina. It is a fitting nickname, Leah thinks, given Maria’s brick-red complexion, her square figure and rigid posture. Maria’s husband, Stephan, is also in attendance, as is their youngest child, Ella—a sweet-faced creature, all eyes and all of four. She is a favourite of Margaretta and Katherina, Leah recalls.

Leah now searches out her brother, David. Easily done. He towers over everyone. Looks alike a benevolent giant in a fairy book with his flaxen hair and heavy limbs, his genial face. His wife, Beth, bustles up to him with a mug. She is a bustler through and through, is plump and short with coppery curls and a cheery face. And why should she not be cheery? Her home is a fine one, even for the country. The chairs are upholstered, the floors laid with rugs, the walls papered, the candles all of beeswax. Davey must be profiting well from peppermint, Leah thinks, not for the first time. She adjusts her stance. Sees David conferring with the same three men she saw entering. They wear their coats still, their hats. The men look around, appraising, angered, then leave by the foredoor. The hazel nailed over the lintel trembles. Hazel, Leah recalls, is protection against evil spirits and must be her mother’s idea. It is surely not her father’s. And where is her father? She peers here and there, but he is nowhere in sight. Not that he ever has much to say to her or to anyone.

A calm, obliging expression is best, Leah decides, and forms her features accordingly before she steps into the keeping room.

O
n my third visit, Mrs. Kane reached for the tumbler of laudanum even before I had finished pouring. “That is a scanty amount,” she complained.

“It is sufficient. I have measured exactly for your size and level of habituation, which, I must say, is prodigiously high.”

“Well, yes.”

“I should add that you fell asleep whilst talking away.”

“And did you watch over me while I slept? Is that part and parcel of your duty?”

“No, duck. I have better ways to apply my time.” If her tone had held less challenge I might have told her the truth: that I
had
watched her, and for an hour or so, but only because she had a peaceful presence, unlike a good many of my patients, who tussle with fate until the last hours.

“Well, Katie and I were watching, but then we were watchful girls for all our giggling.”

“Watching who? Whom?”

“Leah, of course, as she stood in the hallway of David’s house and spied out the keeping room. We were contriving a game out of eavesdropping, and out of discerning words from lips alone. Katie was already very good at the former, and both of us became, in time, crackerjacks at the latter.”

“L
EAH’S ARRIVED,”
Maggie whispers to Katie. “But whatever is she doing? She’s just standing there in the hall like some statuary.”

The girls are peering through the balustrades on the second-floor landing. They are supposed to be resting. “All this excitement will flay your poor nerves,” their mother warned Maggie. Maggie hadn’t argued, for now she and Katie can sleep till noon if they choose. Now they have attention galore. The run of brother David’s charming home.

“Is Lizzie with her, Mag? I don’t see her.”

Maggie cranes her neck but sees no sign of their niece. She shrugs.

“Fuss-it-all. I’ll just die if I don’t see Lizzie soon.”

“I doubt you’ll die of that.”

“And what about Calvin? Is our Calvin here? I’m dying … oh, fine, not dying, I’m starving for his lemon drops.”

“Nope, he’s not with Leah either.”

“Then he can’t know about it all. He’d be here in a blink if he did.”

Maggie agrees. Calvin Brown—aged twenty-three and gangly handsome as the dickens—is the orphaned son of a family friend. He stays with the Fox family so often on his holidays from military school that Maggie and Katie have come to think of him as a kind of brother. He is aiming to be a confectioner, of all things.

“I’m going on down to Leah,” Katie announces. “She’ll understand.”

“Understand what? No, no. Wait. Best we listen first. We can’t be willy nilly anymore. We agreed on that.”

“Then what do we do? Pretend we’re not here at all?”

“Well, yes.”

“Fine. Wait, wait, but don’t be late. You hear that, Miss Nettie?” Miss Nettie wags her wooden head from under Katie’s arm. She has articulated limbs and a swivel neck and is their father’s handiwork. He made a similar doll for Maggie, but she lost hers recently. Not that she cares, not really. She is too old for child’s play.

Maggie and Katie peer on down at Leah as she hangs up her cloak, peels off her gloves, smoothes her chestnut hair, then enters the
keeping room to a storm of greetings, explanations and tales, to myriad flourishments of the Lewis pamphlet. Leah flourishes her own copy.

“Did you know these are being sold in Rochester?” she exclaims. “And in the street. My heavens, to see my family’s name so publicly writ. It did give me a turn. A moment … there.” She presses her hand to her chest, says to Mother: “And why was I not informed straightways? Why did I need to find this out from a pamphlet? It was no small humiliation, I must say.”

“But you’re always so busy, aren’t you? And your father, he … that is, he thought it best that we wait before making a fuss.”

“Did he.”

“Yes, but I am so very relieved you’re here now, aren’t I? And I am so sorry for not telling you sooner. Should we call on Calvin also? He is always ready to protect us, isn’t he?”

“True. I counsel we wait, however. Too many opinions can obscure the right course.”

“Then you’ll sort this out? Laws, but it is such a perplexity.”

“I will sort it, Mother. Yes.”

“Have I told you about my humours? They are completely wayward. Dr. Hyde said he’d never seen such wayward humours. I’ve taken my grandmother’s everlasting pill, but it hasn’t worked at all, has it?”

Maggie nudges Katie, mimics their mother’s voice again: “Laws! Isn’t that a wayward humour now? Trundling down the public road? Catch it! Will you please?”

Katie stifles a giggle.

Below, Leah is asking for more information about the ghost, and in a fashion that suggests he is no more than a distant, unpleasant relation.

“But this ghost, Leah,” Mother cries. “He knows more than peoples’ ages, doesn’t he? And much more than the whereabouts of lost keys.”

The company agrees. Voices stack one upon the other. Questions have been asked of the Glory, of what lies beyond, of how the dead fare. The peddler’s ghost seems to know everyone.

“But what fashion of spirit is this?” Leah asks, as if she is puzzling out the answer herself. Maggie catches her breath, strains to hear.

“That’s what we’re trying to fathom, isn’t it?” Mother exclaims. This begets a heated discussion of will-o’-wisps, poltergeists, revenants, fetches and
giengangers
, the distinctions and subcategories. It seems impossible, however, to find a category for this ghost. He is heard, but never seen, and he comes in the broad of day, though he does prefer the night. And thus far he does not seem malevolent. No rattling of chains, no muttered prophecies, no pans hurled about.

“Why, he’s a real polite sort,” David puts in.

“Polite or no,” Ruth Culver says, “in my opinion he’s nothing but an interloper. Toss salt all about and clang every bell in creation, that should fix him. I’ve said this thrice or more, but does anyone notice?”

“Nope,” Maggie says softly. Poor old Ruth. She is related by marriage somehow. Is ever about, ever poking at the fringes, her gaze as resentful and sorrowing as a sin-eater’s. Maggie adopts Ruth’s wheedling tone and whispers to Katie, “I’ve been dead myself for ten years. Here I am a half-rotted skeleton, but does anyone notice?”

Katie snickers; Leah’s head tips towards the stairway. The girls hold their breath until David says to Leah, “Why, it’s become our belief, dear sister, that we can choose not to be afraid.”

Everyone agrees on this. Is being afraid a choice? Maggie wonders. She surely hopes so.

Mother says, “Laws, but that poor peddler had no choice, did he? He was murdered, and with a butcher knife, just like those rumours said. But we found no body, did we?”

“Murdered? You discovered all this through the knocks?” Leah asks.

“Why, yes, and more besides,” David asserts.

“My word, such a clever ghost,” Leah says, her voice raised.

“Clever. Ever. Never,” Katie whispers.

“Quit that prattle,” Maggie whispers back, and shifts to get a better vantage of Mother. She is gripping Leah’s elbow. “Poppet, do you think the peddler wants us to avenge him? We’re not the avenging sort of family, are we?”

Leah considers this. “No, we are not. And, no, I cannot believe he wants vengeance. As like he merely wants someone to attend his tune, someone to let him know he is of import. And at least he is not the Devil—that would be another matter entirely.”

“No, no. Our Katie called him Mr. Split-Foot, but she was merely teasing, wasn’t she?”

“I have no doubt of that,” Leah says.

Maggie glances sideways at Katie.

“No, no, our ghost is not the Horned Gentleman in disguise,” Mother continues. “We sorted that straightaways. But does it matter? The rumours are still flying thick as pigeons. The Reverend York has banned us from church, Leah. As if we’re heretics.”

“Truly? And what did Father say of this banning?”

“Nothing. Not a word. He just glared at the reverend, didn’t he? And in that way he has, you recall it? Laws, but it did stop the reverend up short, mind.”