The Dark (59 page)

A few hours later, and Mrs. Simeon, the hostess for this evening’s sitting, is introducing Leah to Mr. Daniel Underhill, a thickset man with a quantity of light brown hair, a quantity of good teeth and a stick pin of diamonds and gold.

“He is the president of the New York Fire Insurance Company, Leah, the city’s largest, and he has long followed your career. It seems his sister is also a medium and can speak in tongues. And his mother can move tables merely by placing her hands upon them. Which must be so useful when rearranging the furniture.”

Mrs. Simeon moves off. Daniel says, “I must apologize. I am mortified beyond calculation.”

Leah smiles bravely, says in her trilling low-toned voice, “I hope the sitters do not expect great manifestations this night. The spirits so often refuse to co-operate for the disrespecting. Worse, they often get up to mischief.” She presses a hand to her chest. “A moment … There.”

Daniel offers Leah his arm. “I am your servant, Mrs. Brown. Indeed, I count myself among your greatest admirers.”

“My thanks, Mr. Underhill. No doubt the spirits will favour a gentleman such as yourself.” And so they proceed to the parlour, where the servants are already turning down the lamp wheels.

“W
HATEVER ARE YOU DRINKING?”
my patient asked.

“Absinthe, Maggie-duckling. I was once a faithful adherent to the green hour, which was five at any respectable tavern. How I loved pouring over the sugar-laden spoon. Ah, but little rituals do give credibility and justification, as you should know from your séances. Well, the green hour is gone now. Gone out of fashion, like bonnets. Like the good death. Like la-la, the rest.”

“Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Hah! But of someone else. That’s the last part of the poem—oh, everyone forgets the last parts, and damn it …” The bottle nearly slipped from my grasp. “No escaping me!”

To explain: the blue devils were swarming (Blue devils; how we love to colour our fears) and I had ever found that absinthe was a river they could not cross. Yet now they were crossing, and in miserable little boats.

“Nope, no escaping me at all,” I repeated once the absinthe was safe again in my hands.

“I am quite aware of that,” Mrs. Kane said, then asked if I could give her the hand cream. I did so, the neroli and rose scent wafting out as I unscrewed the lid.

“P
UT THAT DOWN
, it’s toile porcelain, a
bona fide
French one,” John tells Leah.

They are in the Greeleys’ parlour and Leah has snatched up the vase as if to smash it, her expression one of rage and woe, the selfsame expression she wore as a girl whenever a grand scheme went awry. The expression, John allows, is less charming now.

“Bona fide?” She glances sharp at him, as if he had just spoken Greek and not plain Latin.

“I bought one alike it for the Arcadia house. It’s naught but a melted lump now, ’course.”

Leah thunks the vase down. “I had a bad sense. A terrible sense. I should have heeded it. Ever since God and the spirits took Alfie I have known that a mischievous spirit would one day throw approbation upon me.” She speaks as softly as she is able, which is not soft at all.

The Simeons’ parlour was too crowded, she explains, the people jostling and talking and making jest, and so the spirits rapped that the party must split in two, that Leah should take a group of the most sensible and best-prepared into an adjoining bathroom. “The spirit lights had just appeared when my hands began to burn. Honestly,
I have never felt such pain, Father. Just look.” She holds out her red and blistered palms. “I nearly fainted.”

“Did you now … and then what?”

“I plunged my hands under a faucet of water and—”

“Inside a house?”

“Yes, inside a house. They have such things in the city. They have all sorts of marvels here. My spirits, you are worse than Alfie … Anywise, the water was not enough to quell the terrible pain, and so I rushed outside to the garden and plunged my hands into the dirt. And what came out? Tendrils of smoke and luminous spirit glows. None had ever seen the like.”

“Spirit glows, was it.”

“Yes, did I not just say so? It was Mr. Underhill who helped me to my feet, gallant man. But the next day Mrs. Simeon declared she had found granules of phosphorous in the dirt, just where I had plunged my hands, the lying old buffle-head.”

“Hmm, and what do you reckon happened?”

“I cannot say for certain excepting … excepting that it is well known that the human brain is a reservoir of phosphorous. Likely the spirits draw it out in some complex manner.”

“Out of the brain? Why, that’s mortal interesting.”

“Yes, the brain. Do not look at me so. I have had suspicious looks aplenty since this misunderstanding. Oh, indeed. And letters. From the Willets. From the Posts even. They are all asking me to explain what happened. They do not suggest … oh, but they do. They are. One scarcely needs a magnification glass to read between the lines. But I cannot explain what happened. It is beyond my ken. Only Mr. Underhill has been steadfast beside me. But then we Spiritualists are being assailed on all sides these days. We are like those poor early Christians. If there were lions in America our enemies would feed us to them, and just because of some dashed frauds. What of it? Of course some would hold false séances for monetary gain, the greedy pigs. And there’s some would use gadgetry. Oh, and then the Blue Book, such a fantasy, as if there were a regular underground correspondence among mediums, as if we lived in some secret, contrary world.”

John chuckles.

“This is amusing?”

“You’ve been feeding yourself this cant year after year and now you’re swallowing it whole, Leah-Lou. Now you’re choking on it.” He does not say this as an accusation. Who is he to accuse? For after years of prayer he now believes wholeheartedly in God the Father, and God the Son, and in the Holy Spirit infusing all things. Believes in salvation and the resurrection and in winged angels. And in the Devil, surely.

“Will you speak plain, Father? No, no, do not bother.” She rubs her forearms, mutters, “My Good Lord and all that, you sound just like damned Chauncey.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. No one. No one of importance. Now attend me, please. I am speaking about my reputation, about the dolts-heads who are challenging it. How could they doubt me?”

“God sees inside our hearts. Our heads too. Even the ones stuffed with phosphorous. Reputation is a thing of the world and the flesh. It won’t be a help to you in Paradise. It don’t matter what other people think of you is what I’m saying,” John finishes, exasperated, for Leah is looking at him as if he were explaining algebra.

“Poppycock, you’re a man. You don’t require reputation as we women do. Reputation is what I survived on when you left me to fend for myself for ten long years.”

This again. “It were just … I couldn’t find you, that’s all.”

“Hah! You knew perfectly well that I was living in Rochester. I saw you that day when I was incommoded with child and that Bowman Fish was hauling me along.”

“Confound you, girl. You got eyes in back of your head? And he weren’t hauling you, if I recall. It were the other way, and—”

“And you didn’t come and speak to me. That is what matters. You cringed back into the shadows. Oh, I am sorry for my … suggestion that time in Arcadia. I would never hurt your reputation with accusations, false or not. It was only so you would not harm mine. Just imagine if your reputation were endangered. You would feel as I do, as if you could stab yourself through the heart.”

John looks at her fondly. Thinks how she would be the last person to stab herself through the heart, even if she could find it.

Tears runnel Leah’s cheeks. “It may not be figured like some, but I do have a heart, Papa. I do!”

John starts. He hadn’t spoken aloud. He is sure of it.

Leah continues, “I just … I cannot help who I am. I wish I could. I wish I were someone else entirely at times.”

“So you say and say again. But you, my girl, become someone else ‘entirely’ each time you take on a dead person’s voice with your so-called trancing and channelling.”

“Need you be so dramatic, Father?” she asks, cool of a sudden.

“Ecclesiastes says,
Let thy words be few and—
”

“I know how it goes.”

“Then say why you’re here, Leah.” He smiles grimly. “Your words, they’ve been few enough to me since I arrived in New York. Now you’re telling me all this about phosphorous and doubters. Why?”

Leah paces, this way then that. “Do you recall that little box you made for your playing cards? You showed it to me when I was a girl. There was a secret place within it and inside that was the King and Queen, and the Jester, of course. Ah, but you made such ingenious things once.”

“That I did. I made a whole ingenious house for you women. Noah never laboured harder at his ark. Lot of mortal good it did me.”

“It is just … just that I need an ingenious thing—a box, an
ingenious
box, to prove my innocence. I need your help, Papa.”

She kneels at his feet. Takes his roughened hands in her burned and blistered ones. She winces. At the pain? he wonders. Or the humiliation? What does it matter? His Leah needs him. Perhaps the house he laboured over all those years was not the safe haven he had imagined. Perhaps the haven was himself, all along.

He considers, then says, “You still got the bible box I made you?”

“The lily box? Why, yes. My spirits, I surely do.”

“H
ere, Alvah, attend.”

My patient lifted the lid of the bible box. It was a very thick lid, I noticed then. She ran her little fingers along the lilies on the topside and pressured it just so. Just then a little hatch slid open on the underside.

“Oh, how clever, clever.” I drank a nip of gin, and she drank a nip of laudanum.

“What is the hour?” she asked. “Is it night?”

I looked at my bracelet watch. It was a delicate gold creation that another patient, a French lady, had bequeathed to me. It had stopped at 2 p.m.—the time I usually arrived at the garret—and I told Maggie Kane this fact.

“But is it night? Day? I cannot tell the difference any longer.”

“That’s a common thing. It’s the body preparing for Eternity. Night and day are indistinguishable there, from what I’ve heard.”

“Ah, like the Arctic.”

“I don’t see how.”

“
Noonday and midnight are alike, and except a vague glimmer on the sky we have nothing to tell us that this Arctic world has a sun
 … That’s from Elisha’s book and—”

“No need to show off your memory, duck.”

“Dandy-fine, then … Perhaps you should wind it, your watch.”

“I can’t. The bit is too small—or my hands too large.”

“Here, let me have a try,” she said.

I shrugged and handed her the watch. Her little hands trembled faintly but were still deft enough to wind the stem. Afterwards my watch smelled of the neroli and rose oil hand cream I had brought her and I was pleased, to be frank, as one is when a gift is at last being used.

D
ANIEL NUDGES ASIDE
the silk rose at Leah’s ear, whispers moistly, “How is your tally of joy, my dovey?”