The Dark (6 page)

Leah smiles. “Now, that I can believe.” She looks about. “And where has Pa disappeared to this time?”

“Oh, your pa has not a jot of interest in all this, does he? The raps sound out when he’s praying, but you’d think they were flies the way he ignores them. Anywise, he’s all intent on building a house, isn’t he?”

“A house?”

“Yes, poppet, so we can all be together.”

“Why, just there,” David adds, and gestures north. “Close on.”

“Together?”

“Yes, together. You and Lizzie. Maria and her family. The girls. Gracious evers, it’ll be wondrous-fine, won’t it? At least if the ghost is gone?”

“Wondrous, yes,” Leah agrees. “Just like a fairytale.”

Katie whispers to Maggie. “Didn’t Leah say she’d rather cut her own throat with a rusty ole fish-knife than live in Hydesville?”

“A butter-knife,” Maggie corrects. Then adds, “Stay-down, Kat,” as Mother pulls Leah into the hall.

“Poppet, I don’t want the others to hear this, do I?” Mother says.

“My Lord, what is it?”

“How to say? How?”

“Slowly?” Leah suggests.

“It is just that the ghost. He
is
here and, yes, we all hear him, don’t we? But, ah, there’s more.”

“I know there is, and you simply must tell me.”

Katie shifts Miss Nettie, clanking the doll’s wooden limbs together. The sound seems a gunshot. Maggie holds her breath, but neither Leah nor Mother seem to have heard.

“It is just that I … I suspect Margaret and Katherine, don’t I? Yes. I suspect your sisters.”

“Suspect them? In what fashion?”

“That the ghost has to do with them. And, oh, from the very beginning.”

“Honestly, I do not understand.”

Maggie’s world shrinks to a pin-dot. She takes Katie’s hand.

“Poppet, the ghost, he favours them entirely, doesn’t he? It is …” Mother becomes resolute, as she does on inexplicable occasion. “Leah, it is they, your sisters, who are haunted.”

“Haunted? Haunted as a house is haunted? My heavens! A moment … there.” Leah drums her fingers on her collar. “And why would this be?”

“Their purity and innocence. Yes. That is it. It attracts him. Like a, a …”

“A light?”

“Yes, laws, but you’re clever, aren’t you?”

“I shouldn’t say that exactly. By the by, Mother, where are the girls?”

Mother doesn’t answer. More guests have arrived and she is hurrying off. Not that it matters, for Leah gives a secretive smile and looks straight up at Maggie and Katie, there on the second-floor landing.

A short time later, Leah herds Maggie and Katie above-stairs and into David and Beth’s sun-bright bedchamber. Maggie twists her hands and contemplates the elaborate patchwork quilt so tidily laid there on the bed, decides she would rather be doing anything else at the moment, even sewing. Katie chews her braid and studies the polished floorboards as if longing to slip through the cracks.

Leah bolts the door. “We shall all three of us stay here until you show me this marvellous knockabout ghost of yours. Not to worry, sweetings, I know how to keep a secret locked tight.”

The girls shift their feet. Look nervously at each other. And then Katie shows their sister. And then Maggie does. She is surprised at
her tremendous relief. It is as if she has been carrying some spiked and heavy burden of which she was unaware.

“Honestly, the way you’ve improvised this all!” Leah exclaims. “The way you hit upon just the right composition. So many girls—even my own dear Elizabeth—can only see what is noted before them. Their imagination is stymied by convention. Improvisation is quite beyond them.”

And then Leah asks if she may join in their delightful, harmless game.

That evening, a baker’s dozen worth of folk cram into this same upstairs bedroom. Maggie huddles with Katie at Leah’s feet. Mother sits on the bed with the neighbours. Ruth Culver stands by the window. A tallow dip is the only illuminate. “Too great a light makes our ghost go silent, doesn’t it?” Mother says. “Now, Leah, two raps means
yes
. One rap means
no
. Silence suggests he doesn’t know. Our peddler can’t know everything. We can’t expect him to, can we?”

Leah agrees this would be selfish. Unwise.

The tick of a pocket watch. Suspiration. Rustlings. A thin cough. Maggie recalls the piano recital she attended with Leah at one of Rochester’s lovely churches. She recalls how the player sat and sat as if transfixed by woe, and how the audience grew restless, how some tapped their fingers to fill the silence. Others hummed. Waved fans. Then, just as the expectation became unbearable, the first note sounded.

A rap. Clear and sharp, followed by a collective gasp, as if the company have not expected this. A neighbour, Mrs. Redfield, asks the first question. “Our Agnes. Is she joyful in the beyond? Does she have a friend to play with? Please tell me.”

Two raps. A pause. Two more. Agnes is joyful. Agnes is not alone.

Another woman asks, “My dear husband, he’s been dead these two years. Lord, how I miss him, but I’ve always pondered, were it his true intent to leave me without a penny to my name?”

A single rap.
No
. The woman humphs in disbelief.

A man-shape asks if God is a Methodist.

Two raps. Then one.

“Yes and no?” Mother says. “How is that? I don’t under—”

“The question is of poor tender,” Leah cuts in. “I surmise, that is.”

“I have one,” Ruth Culver says. “A fella came to my door last month asking for refreshment. I swatted him with a broom. He was lousy in my opinion. But I query now if he weren’t an angel come to test me, and how I’m to know the difference? An angel you’d want to give cakes and such. Those beggars got to be sent packing.”

“That’s too long of a question, isn’t it?” Mother says.

Two loud raps in acknowledgement. Then a thud. Another.

A perplexed whisper runs through the crowd. “Fuss-it, that ain’t the ghost,” Katie says.

A heavy bang.

“Get back from that window!” Leah shouts to Ruth.

“We didn’t mean … It was only—” Maggie cries, but she is silenced by the shouts from below: “Deceivers! Blasphemers! Witches!”

A whack on the window lite. The glass spiders, but holds. Maggie sees then the torchlight, fiery red, reaching up from below. She shrieks out a warning just as Leah presses her and Katie to the safety of the floor.

“A
ND THEN WHATEVER HAPPENED?”
I asked, my curiosity having bested me.

“Oh, my brother, David, ever the peacekeeper, went on out to them and sent them off placated. But I should have told the truth then … yes, I should have.” My patient fell into a study. There came the muffled noise of the street, the wail of a babe some floor down, the variant rattle-chug of the furnace heat.

“Alas and such,” she continued at last. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Every time I tried to tell the truth I was gainsayed, interrupted, ignored. Or else some event would drown my voice, thwart my plan. Anywise, no one wanted to hear the truth excepting Leah, and then only on that occasion in the bedchamber. After that she, too, went on as if the ghosts were genuine. It scarcely helped that soon folks started hearing sounds that we had not made and saw ghosts and felt ghosts that we had not fashioned. And so Katie and I, but Katie in
particular, began to wonder if the spirits weren’t genuine after all. It was, dear Mrs. Mellon, as if the secret had an agenda of its own and we were powerless to stop it. As if we were only its agents.”

She had an agitated air and so I poured her some laudanum, which she quickly drank. “We had meant only to terrify our mother,” she continued. “It was all quite innocent. Our poor Ma, she was so gullible, and we were so full of jack-mischief. Ah, but then all children are resentful, plotting, molly-hawking creatures, and hold themselves superior to their parents.”

I disagreed with the last, quite strongly to be frank. “Some children are not resentful in the least. Some would never cruelly tease. Some children are full-up with kindness. And this, too, can be a failing if not nurtured aright.” I was thinking of my own son, I allow, and how he was lost in the war, but I did not ever mention his name, nor ever speak of him. I must be absolutely clear about this.

My patient was quick to recant. Quick to say that yes, certainly some children are sweet as a poem, kind as milk. “But does that matter where love is concerned?” my patient mused. “Our father, you see, I do think he loved Leah best, and she had more mischief in her than any. Not that I was jealous of the love he bore her. Men’s love is ever conditional. I knew that at a tender age.”

I twisted at my ring finger, as I did whenever the wretched Mr. Mellon came to mind. There was still a scar from when I had hacked off the ring with a coping saw. I had been in a fury, I should add, and the ring resistance to the usual offing. Conditional, I should also add, would be a generous way to describe Mr. Mellon’s love for our son and my own self.

“Are your hands cold?” my patient asked, all-concerned. “Should you draw on some gloves?”

“I should surely not. What proper physician wears gloves? It is just, just that I am unaccustomed to having idle hands. I might bring my fancy work next time. Knitting. Yes. I will bring my knitting. Now, weren’t you speaking of Leah and your father?”

“Y
OU WISHED TO SEE ME
, F
ATHER?”
Leah has found him in the oat field out back of David’s house. He is praying on his knees, his broad hat in hand, his round glasses steamed white, a small man in a large field. He holds up his hand. Continues praying.

Leah counts out in compound meter—One
lee la
Two
lee la
—as this helps control her impatience when forced to wait. She is not the only one waiting. Margaretta and Katherina are sitting eager-eyed in the wagon for the ride to the canal dock in Newark. Mother is in complete agreement with Leah. The girls must return to Rochester with Leah. They cannot remain in Arcadia, with its superstitious louts, its threat of lynching by country mobs. If the ghost follows the girls then it will be proved: they are being signaled out, haunted in some novel fashion. This was decided two nights ago, when those twenty-odd men hurled rocks and dirt clods at David’s house, then ranged menacingly in the foreyard, carrying torches, as if in a medieval pantomime. Leah’s father oiled up his flintlock. “Why, that’s scarcely necessary, Pa,” David said, peering out the door. “I can’t think they mean to harm us.”

Leah caught her father’s eye. She knew his thoughts. They were the same as her own. David was acting the fool. What else could these men mean but harm? She watched from the kitchen with the other women, the children, as David went outside, arms wide in a gesture of peace. Her father followed close behind him with his flintlock. Just then a woman, bleary-eyed and dishevelled, popped through the kitchen window. “Is this the house of the blasphemers?” she hollered.

Leah grabbed a poker. “No, nor is it the house of drunken sluts!” Her fury approached the operatic, but she did not skewer the woman. No. She stayed quite calm. Katherina and Margaretta looked at her with admiration. Her mother merely looked horrified. The woman yelped and crammed herself back out the window. Outside, the riff-raff was also leaving, their leader apologizing. He had recognized David as an upstanding member of the community. They would all come again, he promised, but in the daytime, like respectable folk.

“Father? Pa?” Leah asks now, his praying having lasted to the compound count of ten.

He stands. “I got something for you.”

“You do?” She is oddly pleased, expectant. He made such ingenious toys for her once—a dog-cart, a string of fluttering birds, a mechanical tiger with teeth of iron nails. She recalls chasing David and Maria with that tiger; how they shrieked.

He leads her to his makeshift work-shed. It is chock with tools and barrels and planks. A house plan is unfurled on the sawbuck table. Leah notes the smudged lines where he has changed the drawings to allow for gingerbread scrollwork, a veranda, gables.

John follows her gaze. He taps the plans. “Don’t trouble your head. It won’t be any slipshod, balloon-framed house. Any mortal idiot can raise one of them.” He tells her about mortise-and-tenon, his home-forged nails. He goes on, as he sometimes does, about his planned contrivances. Explains how his house will bring them all together again, shelter generations of the Fox family, hold against any vicissitude. “This house here, it’ll have no history but our own.”