The Dark (54 page)

“Get gone!” she yells.

At this Elisha dashes up the stairs and catches Maggie as she turns to flee. He kisses her brow, her lips even, proclaims, “By God, what a vision you are. God, but I love you. I adore you!” He attempts to kneel but it seems the breeches of his uniform are too tight. “Keep
the letters, dear heart. Morton misunderstood entirely. We shall be married. I give you my word. And my heart.”

He guides her down to the parlour, continues more sedately, “I have walked these streets the night through, pondering our course, and then seeing you draped in light … well, my mind is set. Attend closely, my pet, I have been promised a great deal of money for my account of the expedition. It will be unlike anything yet written. And then I, you, we, shall be free to do as we please. God, but I wish I were not born to status. It is an enchainment. The reputation of my family rests upon me. And my mother … my mother has been distraught about our, our, connection, and she will cut me off from all funds if she believes we are engaged. I’ve not a cent to my own name, Tuttie, thus …”

He draws an official-looking paper out of his inner pocket, and then a handy travel pen with its own little inkwell. It is part of the grander plan, he tells Maggie. She need only sign here, where Elisha is said to be her concerned patron, his interest in her brotherly, nothing more. “Do it for me, Tuttie. You shall never suffer. It is for my mother.”

“Don’t, Mag!” Katie warns.

“She’s right, lamb. It’s abominable. Isn’t it?” Mother adds.

But Maggie has already taken up Elisha’s little pen. She sobs as she signs her name, then looks aghast at her own signature. What in bloody tunket is she thinking? “But you have sworn to marry me, Elisha Kane.” She snatches at the document, just as Elisha tucks it away.

“You’re a coward, that’s what. Not a hero at all!” Katie shouts.

“A cad!” Maggie shouts.

“Get out!” Mother demands.

All three of them thrust him out the door, skewing his epaulets, ignoring his please and protests.

Elisha is back promptly the next morning. “Damn my mother and her demands,” he tells Maggie. He is still in his Navy regalia, though the braids are squashed, a gold button hanging. “I didn’t sleep a jot last night. I roamed the streets once again, espying you at every corner.” He hands Maggie the document. “Destroy it, my love. I will defy my family, my mother, the world entire for your love and regard.”

In a nonce paper fragments are spinning out from Maggie’s wrenching hands.

Elisha watches her raptly. “Tear it, Tuttie! Oh, do. That’s it, don’t stop. Allow me to help!”

Folding and tearing. Tearing and folding. Until both she and Elisha are exhausted, exhilarated, the paper fragments like snow at their feet.

“Gracious damned evers,” Mother grumbles. “You two should be a theatre act.”

Two weeks later and Maggie and Elisha are shuttered-up in her private parlour. It is a pink-hued space with silken shadows, a nacreous light. “Alike a seashell.” Elisha says. “And we curled up inside safe from all eyes.”

They have just returned from mass at St. Ann’s Church. Elisha assured Maggie she would be awed by the sublime arch of the dome, the stained glass windows, the organ, the theatricality, in all, of the papist religion, and Maggie was indeed awed. The soaring cathedral was so unlike the workaday churches of her girlhood, the Latin liturgy—mysterious and rhythmic—so unlike the exhorting, condemning services of the Methodists, and the kindly old Father Quinn so unlike the severe ministers she has known. And then there was the exotic scent of the smoke wafting from the censers, the gleaming chalices, the turning to the strangers aside her:
Peace be with you, and also with you
. What affected Maggie the most, however, was the little candle-lit shrine she found tucked into a side alcove, the five crowned, elegant ladies set there. They were made of wood and no more than two feet high, and their articulated arms were held out as if in supplication. Three of the ladies bore expressions both wistful and mysterious, the fourth looked as dolorous as could be, the last was faintly smiling, as if privy to some delicious, long-held secret. What was most arresting, however, even unsettling, was that they had only skirt-shaped cages for their lower halves. These cage were empty of limbs, but not empty. No. Inside were hung objects of devotion: papers writ with prayers, crosses of silver, rosary beads of clay and stone, and hearts of reddened glass.

“Ah, you’ve discovered the Santos dolls,” Elisha said when he saw her puzzling over these figures. “Lovely, queer females, are they
not? They were once used to convert the heathens, but are now banished to the distant fringes of belief, they having misfortune to be considered graven images, idols. Many of them were burned during less encompassing times.” Elisha then added that the one lady, there, the faintly smiling one, resembled Maggie, his tuttie, and to perfection. At this put Elisha delved his hand inside the lady’s cage and gently touched the heart hanging there.

Now Elisha edges closer to Maggie on the settee. Gone is his hearty-walrus health. He is gaunt and pale from writing day and night. He has admitted his journals are a bit … raw, given the circumstances, and need to be entirely re-worked, made more tally-ho and all together.

An organ grinder’s music drifts up to them. A street-monger calls out his wares. No sounds stir below-stairs. Mother and Katie are out. Mother has, to Maggie’s astonishment, allowed her and Elisha unchaperoned time. She has, indeed, withdrawn objections altogether, as has Leah. Not that Maggie sees Leah much anymore, for which she is glad, though she does, on occasion, miss Leah’s decisiveness, her praise, her rare and genuine laugh.

Elisha strokes the blue veins on the underside of Maggie’s wrist. “Brother Tom came to see me today. God, but he rides on my coattails. He gave me quite the lecture and said that I must let the nation make a pet of me. That I should practise sham modesty, be more respectful of the newspaper men, and praise my colleagues, by which I suppose he means I should not admit to wishing I’d murdered that William Godfrey. He said that my tack will be ‘the official scientific’—science, with the brevet of sword, spunk and gentlemanly
savoir faire
.”

“Your tack?”

“Yes, the image that will spring to mind when my name is mentioned in any region of this country.” Elisha chuckles. “There ought to be a name for someone who manages the … what? The reflection of another. The image?”

“There should be, you are so right.”

“At least one day I shall be sung of by school children. They’ll gnash their little teeth over having to read my epic when they’d
rather play skin-the-eel. That’s immortality enough for me, an epic with my name, like Achilles or Odysseus. You, my pet, can have my soul if you wish. Decorate your parlour with it. Or let it seep into your lucent skin, as you please.”

“You sound like an, an atheist.”

He chuckles into her neck. “What a dread thought. Oh, I don’t doubt the existence of God’s Paradise any more than I doubt the existence of the Open Polar Sea. What I doubt is whether I’ll enjoy myself there. It’s unchanging by all accounts and my soul is like a leaping fish, my mind aswim with my ideas, projects, ambitions. Pity I can’t have a thousand lives, all conjoined perhaps, like bubbles in a tin tub. Imagine: in this life my heart is strong as a metronome and I’m a designer of grand edifices. In the next I command an army. In another I find Franklin and his men, safe and alive. In yet another life we grow old together, you and I, my pet; I write amusing little books for a living and we sit by the hearth of an evening and have our passions still.”

He shakes his head. His dark hair is arrowed with grey, his pale eyes fierce with intensity. “I’m delighted you enjoyed the mass and all the gold and embellishments. You could do worse than to be a Catholic, Maggie-love, for they are not allowed to raise the dead.”

The dead are distant these days, she tells him. And she does not miss them. Not at all.

“Then perhaps we should both become Catholics. They’re given to visions and I had visions in the Arctic that would have made a pope proud. You recall the cosmoramas? Ah, no, you failed to meet me there. Well, my visions are alike to those. Imagine, Tuttie, peering into a scene of such veracity you swear it can be touched: the Temple of Karnack, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colosseum of Rome. And yet something is awry. The proportions? The shadows? It is as if you are the false vision. Does that make sense?”

Maggie says it does, certainly.

“My first vision was of my family. They were feasting at Christmastide. The vision was so real that I could smell the roasted pheasant. My family was laughing and talking, having a merry time. My mother looked terribly beautiful. She said she wished that I were with them, but she said it in such a manner that I leaped up and cried
out that I was here. Here! And then they vanished, and I was alone again in the ship’s hold, and it was dark as pitch but for the blubber lamps. And my men were groaning like spectres in their frozen sacks, and the ice was slowly crushing the ship, like a giant crushing the ribs of a choice victim, and then there was that sense of betrayal, the stench of it even. Ah, but I’m rattling on like some near-naked mystic.”

“You must have been so hungry, poor Lish.”

“Yes … Just thank God for roast rat. It’s not so bad with a touch of salt. I shall cook some for you.”

“How awful!” Maggie declares, and laughs with him. This could be our tomb, she thinks. It’s even nicer than the Kane tomb at the Laurel Hill Cemetery. It has windows at least.

“Tuttie, listen, you must promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“Do not read William Godfrey’s account. It is all lies.”

“Why in tunket would I? He’s a Judas to you and a deserter. I despise him.”

“Good. Stopper your ears when he is mentioned. Listen to none but me. Swear it?”

“Of course I do.”

“That’s my sweet girl.” He kisses her hand. Says, “Now I must tell you of my second vision. It was of you. You came as an undine—Undine, the water nymph. She is—”

“Oh, yes, Undine. That’s a Germanic story. I know it from Miss Turrner.”

“Ah, yes, your Teutonic studies, I’d forgotten. Well, let me continue. I was hunting for seal. There I was, crouched before a round of water in the ice. I was in my furs and must have looked like a bear halfway to being man. My gun was poised. And then the green water rippled and you climbed over the rim. You were so graceful, as if you could swim in air as well as water. Your hair was unbound and tumbled wetly to your knees. A pale dress clung to your form. You did not shiver. You did not seem cold at all. Your skin had the sheen and cleanness of ice. Your lips were the red of the reddest carnelian and you were not … not wearing a shift, nor a corset.”

“Those undines don’t have souls. Now I remember.”

“Ah, yes, dear heart. Until they marry a mortal man and then they, too, are mortal and know all the sorrows and pains of mortal life.” He kisses her hand. “As we are married.”

“We are?”

“Consider the Quakers. They have no need for intermediaries to sanctify their marriages, only declarations of love, devotion.” He kisses her neck, her collarbone. “I take you as my wife, Maggie Fox. Now say you’ll take me. Say that I am your husband.”

She does so.

“Now stand fast.” He unhooks her gown and unties her five petticoats, sliding each one down her legs, all while she is obediently stilled, scarcely breathing. He studies her standing there in the pool of her fallen garments. Maggie shivers. The room has become cooler, larger.

He unpins her hair. It is oil dark in the lamplight. He arranges it over her shoulders. His fingertips continue down her spine to the lacing of her corset. It hinges open at his deft tugging. She wears only her white chemise now, her white pantaloons, her black stockings that are tied just over her knees.

He steps back. “Am I your captain?”

He is, absolutely.

“Do you obey me out of love? Only love?”

She does. She does.

“Then you are now Mrs. Elisha Kent Kane.”

“I am. I do.”

“And I am yours, yours.”

Now he orders gently, firmly that she take off her pantaloons, her stockings. She does. Her face burns, but she does not look away from the pale regions of Elisha’s eyes. He shrugs off his vest, his shirt. His body is thin and ribbed, but he does not look weak. His hands and neck and face are dark against the white of his torso. It is an odd figuring.

“Recline there on the settee. Good … how delicious you are. And now I must tell you of my voyage and how it began. How up and up Smith Sound I went.” He runs his hand under her chemise, over her knee and thigh. “I wanted to go farther than any man had gone. And there I found a safe harbour and there I stayed locked within.”

Maggie can barely breathe. His fingers find her furrows, her untrammelled interior. Is this pleasure? It must be, for she wants him to continue his exploration to wherever such things lead.

He kisses her throat, her lips. He eases the chemise away from her breasts. “Ah, such a discovery. So lovely, so …” He strokes them, presses briefly so hard that his thumbs leave an impress. Presses her hands aside as he suckles, like a babe might. Maggie bites her lips at the quick, gorgeous pain. Is this a natural thing? Is this what is done between men and women in darkened rooms across the city? The world?

He wears his trousers still. Now he takes her hands and presses them between his legs. Why is he whispering of envelopes, and that he has none? Why is he thinking of letters at this time?

He groans and says she has achieved him. They lie in silence for a time, until his fingers walk up her arm, her shoulder, to rest in the dip at her throat. “You would not betray me, my love, my darling, would you?”

“Never. Never. How could I?”

“You’d not desert me? My men … some did so.”

Again she swears no.

“There can be no secrets between us now.”

“No, Lishy, no. None,” she agrees. Yet he still does not ask how it is the dead can speak. It is beneath him to ask. She understands that.

So she tells him at last. Shows him. Her legs and feet are bared; it is a simple matter. He takes each of her toes. Makes the child’s rhyme of piggies and markets and crying home. Says he knew. She is not as clever as she had thought. “It’s just that I wished that you would tell me, willingly and without guile, and now you have.”