The Dark (61 page)

Katie takes Maggie’s arm. Steers her back into the front room. “I was giving a sitting at Mr. Livermore’s and I saw the storm coming on. I was really worried. You nearly froze to death the last time.”

“I was … down the hall. There’s a woman whose baby died.”

“There always is.” Katie sighs. “Leastaways they’re easy to roust up. Babies don’t have much to say, seeing as they didn’t talk much in life.”

“Well, yes.”

“I’m glad you weren’t out in the storm, then, Mag. I don’t know why you think you’ll spy Lish when there’s a storm raging. I’ve never seen a spirit out in ugly weather. They like nice warm parlours.”

“And how is the nice warm parlour of your Mr. Livermore?” Maggie asks, changing the subject. “Or should I say your Charles?”

“Handsome and gladsome and rich as ever,” Katie replies. Katie’s reputation is such that she no longer has to offer sittings for the general public. Instead she lives comfortably thanks to a few select clients. And Charles Livermore is one of these. His wife, the lovely Estelle, died in 1860. Two years on, and Maggie would bet that Katie has raised Estelle perhaps a hundred times.

Katie pours them both a claret. “The trouble with Charles is that he’s always wanting more and more again.”

“More will always be required,” Maggie says. This being something she realized a long, long time back.

“That’s the thing. More and more for Mr. Livermore. He’s tired of the simple old rappings, and even of mirror writing and trancing talk and sparking lights. Hell, I even manifested up a glimpse of Estelle’s face in a luminous orb. But, no, he wants her full form to materialize. I warned him that’s unlikely. They’re not called the Invisibles for nothing, I said.”

“That’s what Leah always says.”

“So she does. Here’s to that.” Katie raises her glass.

“And here’s to Her Fatness. And so, are you going to give it to him? The full-form?”

Katie bites her palm, an odd habit she has taken up of late. “I’d like to. I think it can be done. I just have to write to Pettifew. He’ll send advice and all the magic tools.”

“Have you ever met him? Pettifew? You know, in-the-flesh met him?”

“What’s that? No. I’d have told you. But he does send me round the Blue Book from time to time. Handy item that … Did she know it, I wonder?”

“Who?”

“Estelle.”

“About the Blue Book?”

“No, silly. How fortunate she was to be loved so much after death and forever. Not that … oh, give me another.”

Maggie pours Katie’s glass full. They discuss love, or rather other people’s experiences of it: Leah and Daniel with their separate sleeping chambers, their chummy habits.. Amy and Isaac with their shared love of good causes, their austere affection. Their own parents, who have become embarrassingly intimate.

Poor Kat
, Maggie thinks now. Her sister often wants to talk about love these days, but though she is still slender and lovely and still possessed, of course, of those curious eyes—heavy lidded, violet-grey—her clients only ever look upon her as a device, nothing more.

Katie is talking now about her other select clients: Dr. George Taylor and his wife, Sarah. Katie raises their two dead children,
Leila and Frankie, nearly every week. In return Katie makes use not only of their grand house, but also of Dr. Taylor’s Swedish Movement Cure Hospital. He specializes in the female complaints, this Dr. Taylor. His hospital boasts hydrotherapy baths, a back massager and a former wrestler who can realign bones. It is the pelvic table Katie likes best, however.

“He calls it the ‘vibratory cure.’ You’ve got to try it, Mag. You lie face down, and then there’s this steam-powered sphere and then … Anywise, afterwards you feel like a straw doll. It’s even better, maybe, than a rum flip. I mean, for a time.”

“They don’t want my acquaintance, you know that. Not the Taylors. Not your Charles Livermore. They think I’m a terrible influence on you. And
I
don’t want to meet them. Why would I? Christ-in-all, they treat you like a house pet.”

Katie shrugs, and peers out the window. “The storm is abating.”

Maggie looks over Katie’s shoulder. Barclay Street is sheathed in white. The wrought-iron fences turned to lace. The single gas lamp jaunty-capped. The pedestrians who push through the snow are mostly women but for an old man or two, a few boys. The young men are piling up in fields, their last words unheard, their graves often unmarked. Maggie could be busy at sittings every hour of every day. But a promise is a promise is a promise, Maggie reminds herself. And she promised Elisha she would relinquish her rapping career. Thus Maggie lives on the pitiful annuity Elisha’s brother Thomas Kane has finally granted her, as well as on money that Katie surreptitiously leaves behind when she visits. And though Leah also attempts to give Maggie money from time to time, Maggie always refuses, seeing the marionette strings behind Leah’s every offer.

Maggie opens another bottle and she and Katie pass it back and forth in companionable silence. By the advanced hours of the night, they are singing and dancing, are tipping tables, lamps, are speaking in that garbled nonsense language they invented ages ago to perplex their mother.

Maggie drops in a chair. She admits that she lied. She was not out consoling some neighbour lady about her dead babe when Katie arrived. No. She had, indeed, been roaming the New York streets,
calling for Elisha, just as Katie feared. “Where else would he be found, Kat, but in such Arctic weather, in a such an adventurously, icy storm?”

Katie chants, “And did you find him? Or something akin?”

“Nope. No. Nothing.” Although Maggie had seen something “akin”—a small, ageless man with a limping gait. He wore a tophat and swank Chesterfield coat. Still, Maggie knew him. Would have known him anywhere—the peddler, surely, come to make good his curse. She glimpsed a manicured beard over a twisted mouth before the snowy night obscured him.

Katie rummages up yet another bottle, and presently Maggie and Katie are giggling as if they are children again and afraid of nothing in each others’ company.

“I’
m off,” I said, and shoved my knitting, the vestiges of lunch, the clanking bottles, all of it, into my satchel.

“Where-ever to, Alvah?” Maggie Kane asked, all concerned.

“I have a duty towards my other patients, if you must know. Are there no other dying ones in all creation? Are you the only person who is giving up the ghost?”

“Some days it seems so.”

I needed more to drink, I admit, what with this talk of apparitions, of the war. And yet even as I walked out of the garret I thought of the defeat at Bull Run, the moment I heard of it, the moment I knocked Mr. Mellon flat with the cook pan for withholding August’s letter.

As an impediment, Mr. Mellon was of no consequence. The quartermaster was a different matter. He thought me a looter. (I was as bedraggled as one by then.) Mass graves had been dug, but with a combined dead of near a thousand, well, it wasn’t a sight one would soon forget. God sees even the fall of a sparrow, as I’ve said, but not, apparently, the fall of a thousand boys in a green field. It was hot, too, the late July heat of Virginia.

“Leave off here,” the quartermaster ordered.

I told him my story and he shrugged and suggested I search for my August in Washington, which was where the wounded had all been carted. “And a good thousand had been taken prisoner, ma’am. You could be searching till doomsday, not to discourage you.”

No amount of hand wringing and begging would convince him to let me look among the battlefield. So I returned at dawn and scuttled past the sentries. Light edged the world and silhouetted the unburied, their stiffening arms reaching up. I searched, too, all the hospitals near to Washington and far. I set out notices on storefronts, in newspapers (there were thousands of similar notices). My sole hope was that August
had
been taken prisoner and that he would survive the war in one of the horrid Confederate jails. The only thing I could do, then, was to wait for the war to end, wait for him to return, which of course he never did.

“Stay, Alvah. Please,” Maggie said, for I stood transfixed in the vestibule still. She shook her laudanum bottle. “Share this with me.”

M
AGGIE PEERS UNDER HER SOFA
. She smiles in relief. A half-full bottle lolls there. The frigid winter of’62 has melted into the sweatshop summer of’63 and the air in Maggie’s latest let is so moribund, the sitting room so small, that she might as well be stuffed in a bottle herself. There is no separate bedroom. No true kitchen. Barely space for Elisha’s shrine. But the address is still good. True, she is even farther from St. Anne’s than before, but arriving in time for mass or confession has become impossible anywise, what with her mantel clock stilled at two from a fall to the tiles one evening. And what more can she confess? How many Hail Marys can a body utter in one day?

She fans herself. Searches for her reticule under the pillows and oyster wrappers. Counts out the coins. The tally is enough for a small supply of brandy or a large supply of wine. Tomorrow she might tidy, even though Katie is her only visitor these days and Katie hardly cares.

In the street Maggie stands baffled. Two people rush by in their usual New York haste, but there are few horses, fewer carriages, and no hawkers at all. She notes then the distant, muted noise. A newly operating factory, she supposes. She presses her handkerchief to her face, steps over an open sewer, then round a heap of waist-high rubbish.
Christ-in-all, but we need rain
, she thinks. It would arrest the summer stenches, batten the dust, drown the flies, rub clean the distant sky.

She passes a man who is cursing his broken crate of duck eggs, two scabby dogs who are rutting and howling, and a lone begging child to whom she gives a half-dime. She comes onto 43rd. Only now does Maggie realize that something is awry. That muted noise? It is no factory, new or otherwise. It has become a roaring fronted by the shatter-sounds of glass, the crack-thud of gunshots. Maggie shrieks and hikes her skirts and tears down the street, the mob surging just behind, but she cannot outrun it, not ever. Her scream is buried alive. The mob will see her tarred and feathered. Will see her burn atop a pyre.

But I swore off rapping, she thinks bewildered, terrified. Yells out, “But I’m done!”

The mob engulfs her … then carries her along. It has not come for her. Not her. She stumbles along in the press of it. A high reek of alcohol and sweat. A confusion of limbs. Hide in plain sight, she thinks desperately, and makes no attempt to detach. Then, after a time, she doesn’t think at all. She is swept up into a vast and savage joy. She is destruction and power and is now looking up at the
Tribune
building in Printing House Square. Her mob has joined another and the singing is at least a thousand strong: “
So
,
hang Horace Greeley from a sour apple tree. We’ll hang him high! We’ll flail his hide!”

A howitzer angles from an upper window. An oily liquid hurtles down from another. Ink, Maggie realizes as a crying woman staggers past, her hair dripping black. Musket shots plume. The shots are joined. Just then she sees the militia outside the building. The soldiers are all grizzled antiques except for a few boys. Some are poised with rifles. The old soldiers are frantically barricading the lobby doors with desks and newspapers. To no avail. The mob overwhelms the barricades. The lobby is breached.

Maggie weeps and wails, then rushes from Printing House Square, paying no mind to her direction.
Horace! Poor Horace! God-of-all!
The mob is after him, she realizes, because he supported Lincoln and therefore the draft. It’s after him, too, because of Bull Run. But that debacle wasn’t his fault. He only encouraged through his paper that the Union should meet the Rebels there, a bad decision, yes, but not his. He is no general. No politician.

Her eyes sting hot from the smoke. Smoke? She has come onto 44th near to the Colored Orphan Asylum. Flames lick out a window. Mattresses, clocks, furniture and dry goods are being hurled to the mob below.

“Stop this! Stop!” Maggie calls out. “Children aren’t to blame, not for this.” She tugs at a man’s arm. He thrusts her off. Near on the asylum’s matrons—white women all—are trying to shepherd the more than two hundred children away from the jeers and taunts of a splinter mob.

Maggie is about to offer her help when a man steps out from the mob’s edges and does just that. Cries, “If there’s a man among you, with a heart within him, come and help these poor children.” He is a handsome man with an Irish lilt and a jaunty cap on his pale hair.

The mob pauses as if realizing the truth of his words. Ceases taunting the children. Turns away from them. The Irish man smiles in triumph and relief. Maggie does also. Then watches in horror as the mob seizes the one person who dared speak reason. Maggie witnesses an instant of pale skin as his shirt is torn away. Sees his arms reach out, and then the mob takes him.

A paint-red sunset and Maggie is now lost. At least this region of Manhattan is calm. At a looted apothecary she steps round the slugs from a shattered urn. The slugs are sliming their way to certain death past scattered bottles of cocainated teething syrup and brandied elixir.