The Dark (55 page)

Maggie’s mouth is dry. Her feet cold. She tells him more. Of how the haunting of the Hydesville house came to be. Of the peddler. And why his corpse was not found in the cellar floor.

“I thought mayhap he died from the wound I gave him.” Maggie confesses. “I did hit him square in the head.”

“A capital shot from the window. Remind me not to cross you, my pet.”

“And then I worried that he’d get the law after us. And then I worried about the curse. Now I don’t worry at all. Not when you’re with me.”

“I’ve killed men,” Elisha murmurs, and kisses her.

“W
hatever are you fixing on?” I asked my patient. She had ceased her tellings (which had become more intimate that I needed hear, to be frank) and was now staring on the Edison bulb there in the vestibule. The bulb crackled and faltered, but held its sallow radiance.

“Perhaps it is possible,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve been mistaken all these years.”

“About what? The peddler?”

“Because I did see Elisha once after he died. And I’ve been hoping all these years that he would appear again, and that the vision of him would not be figment of my brain, nor of opiates, and that he would speak. He had answers to all things.” She smiled wryly.

“No one has those,” I said, but she continued as if I weren’t there at all.

If it did appear, Elisha’s ghostly self, apparently, would be as young as when they first met, there at the Webb hotel in Philadelphia. This time, however, he would be the one framed in the arched window, caught in a nimbus. He would be pale, his hair glossy-dark, his eyes even more blue than when he was alive, as if the Arctic waters had settled in. Not a large man, but a handsome man, and a famed one, for a time.

“What will he say?” I asked, trying to hide my interest.

She was quiet for the span of three breaths. Her face lost all expression. “Do you not pity those who come to you in grief, Tuttie? You
give them false hope. You make a parlour game of their loss. And surely we, the dead, do not wish to be hauled back to the living world with its stinks and melancholies, its misfortunes scattered random as buckshot. Listen, my sweet, touch me here, this is all we have.”

I should mention that her voice changed when she spoke this. Became deep and cultured and manly. And the garret had become, I swear, as chilled as a springhouse.

“And did then you see him again? Did you?”

“I’ll get to that,” my patient said, entirely her own perplexing self again.

E
LEVEN DAYS AFTER THEIR PARLOUR TRYST
, Maggie and Elisha clutch each other on the stoop of the Tenth Street town-home, oblivious, nearly, to the passing stares.

Elisha beseeches, “Command me to stay. Give me one word.”

“Stay.”

“But, pet, I cannot! Duty calls to me.”

“I thought it was Lady Franklin.”

Elisha frowns.

Maggie could slap herself. She knows her attempts at wit distress him. And now that they are married she must attend the right cues, say the proper lines. She simply must.

“Tell me you will dream of me.”

She reminds him that she doesn’t dream. Or that she can’t recall the dreams. Adds hastily that she will try.

“Try very hard. For I intend to come to you while you sleep in your sweet bed. I shall enter your dreams, your …” He stops. Clears his throat. Gives her a stack of envelopes lined with muslin. “These are addressed to my London lodgings. I want no prying eyes to view our correspondence. And these ones are to signal an emergency. If you send the one with the three little stars—see there, in the corner—then I will return to you immediately.”

She vows to write each day, asks, “You have the lock of my hair? My letters?”

He presses her hand under his travelling coat to the lump in his inner pocket. “They are close to my heart, as always. And Morton has packed Mr. Fagnani’s portrait of you as well as my cherished ambrotype.” He clasps her. “I can calmly part from all the rest, even from my mother; it’s parting with you, Maggie, that kills me.”

Then why go? Maggie would like to ask, but does not. He has his work. He must meet with eminent natural philosophers and fellow explorers, must accept accolades, give lectures, must listen to Lady Franklin’s ludicrous insistence that the search for her husband continue.

Morton, waiting beside the carriage, gives one of his odd little waves.

“I’m being told to make haste. Listen. I tell you again: If I should perish I’ve left a legacy for you, my dear wife, in my will. The legacy is in the trust of my brother Thomas, who loves you as a sister. Look to him. Thomas shall care for you. But you must renounce the vulgar spirit rappings. Promise me again.”

“I promise. I promise.”

“Now wait, wait there in the doorway so that I might see you until the last instance.”

The carriage draws away. Grows smaller and smaller yet, but Maggie doesn’t move, not even when an omnibus obscures the carriage entirely. But Maggie is not worried. She will see him again. Hasn’t Elisha, for all his talk of his own death, survived two Arctic winters, near starvation, a brutal trek? And no matter how wretched British food and British weather are reported to be, it seems unlikely that they, of all things, will be his undoing.

Over two months later, in March of 1857, William Morton, Elisha’s faithful valet, stands before Maggie. He is hatless and dishevelled and unshaven, is drunk as a lord or a pauper; nothing in between. He tells Maggie every detail of Elisha’s last days, and in doing so he breaches all propriety, all common sense.

He begins with himself and Elisha striding with Yankee confidence through London, that antiquated city with its musty aristocracy, its fetid river. Perhaps it was the brumous fog, the lingering sea-sickness from the three-week steamer journey, but Elisha was shivering, coughing. “A severe chest cold, no more,” said the good doctor Holland.

“You shall stay at my estate,” declared Mr. Edward Sabine, a fellow Arctic explorer, a geologist and so forth.

“But you must get well. You must return to find him!” cried Lady Franklin, bending to Elisha’s sickbed, snatching the medicine from Lady Sabine to feed Elisha herself.

“Franklin’s dead as a fucking door, you stupid crone!” Elisha yelled. “Cannibalized, that’s what, and by his own men. I’ll wager they gnawed on his stringy thighs and popped his eyeballs down their thankless fucking gullets!”

Lady Sabine reeled back in shock. Lady Franklin gripped the spoon as if to gouge out Elisha’s own eyeballs. Morton soothed and assured them both that Dr. Kane was raving. That he was not in his right mind, not at all. Days passed before Elisha regained any semblance of his mind, right or otherwise.

“William Damned Godfrey, he’s planning to publish, isn’t he now?” Morton continues to Maggie, his brogue thickening by the minute. “As like he’ll say it were Elisha’s fault those miscreants betrayed him and struck off on their own. Bloody Godfrey, he’ll be spouting that Elisha acted the tyrant. But he didn’t, now. Is a father at his wits’ end with his misbehaving children a tyrant? Oh, there’ll come nasty rumours. It’ll be said Elisha tried to murder him. Murder! Godfrey would have deserved it so. Godfrey, that mutinous prick. And sure, but that damned Wilson and Bonsall and Hickey have told treasonous accounts. Sure, Miss Fox, but Elisha’s book will outlast them all, won’t it now.”

Miss
Fox? Maggie nearly stops crying.

Morton takes the liberty to pour them both a sherry. The glasses slosh overfull. “We didn’t find old Franklin. But sure we discovered the Open Polar Sea. Sure, but I spied it my own self. That is, Hans and me did. He was the Esquimau boy Elisha hired because he was handy with the spear. And what thanks did Elisha get? Hans deserted, too, and for good. He found himself some Esquimau girl and stayed with her up there, though wasn’t her home the bitterest place on this earth? Who’d give up that much for a girl?”

Morton drains his glass. Maggie does likewise.

“Anyhow, surely what we saw weren’t just a stretch of open water. Things can’t be two ways at the once.” He talks then about how, even though Elisha hated the hot places of the earth, he was sent to Havana for his “health.” How he suffered on that voyage from England. Heart. Stroke. Apoplexy. Elisha uttered these words like an apology, Morton said, and the words hung by themselves. His limbs refused him obedience. His speech become as thick as an Esquimau’s speech. At one point Morton swore Elisha sang the same dirge as did a young Esquimau man they locked in the hold of the
Advance
for thievery. The Esquimau escaped. Elisha was glad he escaped. Morton was also glad. His emotions were in tandem with Elisha’s; they were of one mind.

Morton holds up a finger before Maggie’s face as he says this. Studies the finger and then pockets it, his expression strange.

Elisha’s mother arrived in Havana as soon as she could. She was escorted by her husband and Elisha’s brother Thomas, but it was to his mother Jane that Elisha looked, and as might a sweet boy who so wanted to please.

Jane Kane pressed her hands to Elisha’s chest. “Be still,” she said kindly, and Elisha’s eyes leaked tears.

“Not because he was afraid like, not at all.” Morton explains. “He thought of death as like some impatient silly aunt tap-tapping her knitting needles. Those were joyful tears for his Mam’s simple kindness.”

“An uncle,” Maggie sobs into her handkerchief. “With a cane. That was his Death, not a wretched aunt. No.”

“Sure, but I knew his mind. Better than anyone.” It is as if Morton
hasn’t heard her. As if he has forgotten she is Elisha’s wife. Is that why Morton didn’t telegraph her and bid her come to Havana? Because he doubted their marriage?

“Only the Mrs. Kane was there, there for Elisha’s last words,” Morton slurs out. “His father, his brother, out they’d stepped for a nonce. It was only her and me, and I’d been told to stand apart, as if Elisha and me hadn’t been alike one soul, as if we hadn’t been through all kinds of Hell together.”

Morton tells Maggie, he was certain he heard Elisha’s final words, the truest words a man could speak. They were nothing profound nor original nor quotable for the ages. No, they were the ordinary sentimental ones of a son’s love for his mother. But Jane Kane did not hear, perhaps because she was looking so intently at her bible, her nail gliding along a passage.

“But now I see that she didn’t love him,” Morton continues. “She scorned him, like. And you could see the loss of her love were like a black pit under his feet. Sure, but love’s end is as mysterious as its beginning. It’s why Elisha tried so hard at all things, to regain her regard. And can you fashion a thing crueller? To not attend his last words?

Maggie cannot. She manages to ask if her name was uttered. If Elisha gave any message to Morton. For her.

“No, ah, he barely spoke, miss.”

“Mrs … it is
Mrs
. Kane.”

“What happened next, mind, is the reason I came to call. And that is to warn you about his mother. You need watch your back with her, she’s a Gorgon bitch in a fine lady’s hat is what.”