The Dark (66 page)

“V
ery pretty,” I said, as my patient put the invitation back into the lily box.

“I didn’t attend. Nor Leah. But then, we weren’t invited. And England seemed so far off.”

“That’s because it is, Maggie-duck.” I chuckled for a time at this. I had vowed not to drink in front of my patient, which is why I had visited the tavern beforehand, where I had imbided, I allow, more than I intended.

“Katie’s first son, Ferdie, he was born in a caul. The midwife said it meant he would be fey. That he would be able to scry the future. Be safe from drowning.”

“Hah. That is superstitious balderdash and bullshit, to boot.”

“Well, yes, and even Katie took the midwife’s predictions with a grain of salt. Still, she wrote that Ferdie smelled just like Heaven’s garden and that light just beamed out of his blue eyes. And her husband, Henry, witnessed the babe writing in the air, and in Latin yet. A most singular babe, don’t you think?”

“Oh, who doesn’t think their babe is some singular perfected thing?”

“There’s more. Spectres were often seen about little Ferdie. The nurse swore that little hand-prints appeared on his pillow. Spirit music played when he slept, and so on. Their next son, Henry Junior, was born in’75. He seemed a more ordinary sort of babe, as the second ones generally are.”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” I muttered.

S
T
. M
ARYLEBONE
P
ARISH
C
HURCH OF
L
ONDON
is near empty this morning but for the Jencken family near the great doors, and but for Maggie, who has come to visit Katie at long last.

Katie sweeps up to her. No more sombre, spinster shades for Katie Fox Jencken. She has returned to the numinous shades she favoured in her youth. Her gown today is of nakara and gold, her hat of the same violet-grey shade as her eyes. She looks quite the gracious and mysterious lady. Particularly aside me, Maggie thinks, though without umbrage. She could still draw admirers if she chose, on this she and Katie have agreed. She still has a good figure. The bishop’s blue she favours suits her well.

Maggie runs her fingers over a pew. Near on, Katie’s husband, Henry Jencken, cheerfully traipses after Ferdie, aged three, and Henry Junior, aged twenty months. At fifty Henry still has hair of wheat-gold, still moves effortlessly, though he is tall and thickly built. He is a respected and successful barrister; a Spiritualist convert who was thrilled to meet the famed Katie Fox. Henry’s mother—once a baroness—apparently left her husband and grown children for her handsome doctor, the man who became Henry’s father. Left, that is, position, respect, wealth, reputation. Everything, in truth.

“You see, people do sacrifice lots for love. Everything, even,” Katie told Maggie when she first arrived. “Differences in social standing shouldn’t matter at all. Neither should family griping and opinion.” She didn’t mention Elisha’s name nor offer criticism of him. But the innuendo? Surely she knew Maggie wouldn’t miss it.

“Does your Henry like me?” Maggie now asks.

“He likes you very much, Mag. Everyone does once they’ve met you. And I’m so glad you’re here. And I’m so glad, oh glad, that you’re just as cured as I am. It so really helps to confess.” As Katie had when Henry was courting her. “I’m a drunkard, Henry,” was what she told him. “I drink to oblivion, like a gutter wench.”

“I know and it matters not. I love you. I love you. I love you,” Henry had replied.

At the incantation of these words, Katie told Maggie, she ceased to be that drunkard. She still craved the drink, yes, but Henry’s love and regard she craved the more.

“Well, I just got tired of it all,” Maggie owned. “That’s why I stopped drinking.”

Katie leads Maggie down the church aisle. Tells her all about her wedding. “And here, Mag, there were just mountains of flowers. And there, in the chancel, that’s where the knocks came from. Everyone heard them. And the breakfast feast was wondrous. I wish, oh wish, you could have been here. All of Henry’s family attended.”

Maggie says she’d been too sick, and Katie hastily agrees, neither wanting to remind the other that Maggie-of-the-bad-influence had, in fact, not been invited.

Maggie now listens gravely as Katie boasts of this wedding breakfast, how the table levitated, how the raps sounded, how the son of the Duke of Wellington sent Katie a bottle of costly perfume, how Prince George himself sent her a fan. When Katie speaks of admirers among the gentry, of astounding events, she reminds Maggie of Leah, except that Leah’s posturing and bragging irks Maggie no end; Katie’s she finds endearing. Leah and Katie write to each other, Maggie knows. It is a subject the sisters avoid.

“Ferdie, love, stop that,” Katie says of a sudden. Ferdie is stomping on the fish schools of coloured lights that swim on the flooring. The lights are a manifestation of the stained glass windows, but Ferdie doesn’t realize this. The lights disappear with the passing sun; Ferdie stares in bewilderment. Maggie laughs. Henry Senior laughs. Katie laughs. Henry Junior, squirming in Katie’s arms, screams in fury.

“Ferdie is tall for his age, don’t you believe?” Katie asks Maggie, once she has settled Henry.

“I do.”

“Such sturdy legs. And doesn’t he just favour his father to beat all?”

“He’s the same stamp, all right.”

“Oh, Henry, don’t be a fuss-it,” Katie says to still-squirming Henry Junior. She sets him down and he toddles towards his brother. Henry Junior is unsteady on his feet, but he is managing; he will become an ordinary child just like his brother, Ferdie. Katie is insistent about this. And yet she watches him every minute.

“I’ve been thinking of Mary Greeley,” Katie says after a pause. “I could never understand the way she went on about Pickie. I found it all so godawful tiresome. But I understand her now. I’d go stark raving, too, if anything happened to either of my boys … Horace went mad, too, they say, I mean after Mary died and then the presidential campaign, poor man.”

“ ‘The worst-beaten man in history,’ that’s what the papers called him.”

“I hate that he died like that, Mag. All alone and ranting, in some nasty old asylum.”

“What did you say? No, no, don’t repeat it. Never repeat it.”

Katie looks puzzled, as if she has forgotten the peddler’s curse, as if her current good fortune is enough of a protection. Maggie, on the other hand, can never forget the words:
You’ll die alone and ranting for your lies, you hoyden bitches
. Really, how
could
she forget?

“Never speak like how?” Henry Senior asks jovially from behind them. Ferdie yanks on his coattails.

“We were talking of Horace Greeley, dear, and his … assets,” Katie says.

Henry shakes his handsome head. “You were speaking of money? Why, darling? You needn’t worry about monetary matters any longer. As for Mr. Greeley. Well, I cannot approve of his blighted finances. Those poor daughters of his. A man should ensure a watertight legacy and … damn it!” Henry points at Henry Junior, who has gone rigid as a stone saint. He convulses. Spittle flows from his gritted teeth.

Katie rushes over with a shriek. She holds Henry Junior fast while he jerks and bucks. It is over in a moment. He slumps against his mother. Maggie wraps her arms around them both. Henry Senior holds tight to the crying Ferdie. The few parishioners stare. Some mutter protecting prayers. Maggie is tempted to unnerve them further with a loud knock or two. No time for that, mind.

They hurry out to the carriage and off they jolt. Henry Junior drops off into a fast asleep. “He always does after his fits,” Katie tells her sister. Ferdie keeps himself occupied by shouting at the fruit-mongers.

Henry Senior leans towards Maggie. “You’re so eminently sensible. Advise us. Should we send for a priest? Should there be an exorcism for our little Henry?”

Maggie considers the question. Considers the compliment also: sensible? She might just be, yet. She remembers Katie as a girl, how she would vanish out of herself, her face as blank as Henry Junior’s. “No priests. It isn’t the spirits or devils, you two, and you know as much.” She looks from Henry to Katie. “Your son is afflicted with neuralgic convulsions, just as Katie was. The doctors call it epilepsy these days. The afflicted sometimes hear voices or lose themselves in time … I suspect he will grow out of it, as Katie did, I think.”

Henry stares at Katie. “But you never told me you had this … condition?”

“I told you I was a drunkard, Henry—that seemed enough confessing. Anywise, I’ve never talked about all that. Neither has Mag.” She frowns, exasperated at her sister.

“There’s an art to confessing, just as there’s an art to dying,” Maggie pronounces. “And like any art, it will surely become easier over time.”

The next ten years are wondrously uneventful. Henry Jencken becomes flush with wealth. Katie becomes a vowed teetotaller. Their children grow and thrive. Henry Junior’s fits subside in severity and frequency. The only symptom now, Katie writes Maggie, is that from time to time he stares in incomprehension, but then again, who doesn’t?

Maggie travels often to England from New York. “Our house is yours, dear Maggie,” Henry Senior says. Maggie becomes the most excellent of aunts. Is nothing like Leah in this role. Does not view children as natty accessories to life. Does not delight in their gullibility and indiscriminate affections. She sees them as genuine people, albeit people afflicted with great passion and little understanding. Maggie certainly agrees with Katie that the boys should never be sent to an English boarding school. Agrees they are safest with Katie. Henry does not try to stand against them both. Besides, he would give Katie the sun and the starry firmament if it were in his power.

Katie often begs Maggie to make England her home. And Maggie often considers it. She has made many friends among the Spiritualists in England. Is making a clean start with them. Not a difficult task. The English are more tolerant of eccentricities, Maggie has found, and their investigations into spirit phenomena more respectful. Sir William Crooke himself is conducting many experiments with Katie. From Katie’s letters Maggie learns that this Sir William has invented a radiometer that transforms light into matter, has discovered a green element he calls thallium and is now busy proving the existence of “radiant” matter, which is matter in a fourth state independent of corporeal space and human time. “Or
something
,” as Katie writes. And yet Sir William cannot explain the knockings,
table levitations, glowing orbs and such, other than it must be an undiscovered physic force at work. And he is truly baffled at how Katie can simultaneously answer one question with automatic writing, and another with raps, all while conversing freely. That a woman can do those three things at once is beyond the pale, he apparently told Katie, to her great amusement.

What Maggie likes best about the English, however, is that they have no first-hand sightings of her drinking sprees. Nor will they ever, Maggie has vowed. She and Katie drink only moxie now, that harmless nerve tonic, or sip tea, and with their pinkie fingers crooked. But, no, she will never move to England. America is where Elisha is buried. It is where he is remembered as a heroic leader; where he is, frankly, remembered at all.

And Leah? Paddling through her sixties she is as histrionic and healthy as ever. Styles herself a grand dame of New York. Has money spilling out her heaved-tight corsets. Has an adoring husband. A select few clients who swear by her. Worse, she claims to be writing her memoirs—God help the reading public. Maggie will never read her claptrap. This she has already sworn.

Over luncheon at the Jenckens’ one autumn morning of 1881, Maggie mocks Mr. Henry Seybert—a Croesus-rich philanthropist in Philadelphia who pays her handsomely to raise everyone from Newton to the angel Gabriel. In an old man’s quivery voice Maggie says, “And I’d like five Old Testament prophets today and three martyred saints. Please do not forget Plato and Homer. And, oh, yes, just a dash of the Holy Spirit. Oh? You’re worried that attempting so will damn you to Hell? Come to think, I do wish you’d raise General Benedict Arnold from the fiery pit. I have a question or two for the fiend.”

Henry laughs heartily and tucks into a slab of roast beef. His brother Edward, who is visiting for a time, chuckles and wipes his mouth of chutney. Katie laughs also, then, growing serious, says it might be time for Maggie to retire. “I don’t like at all the thought of you rapping in boarding houses and for the lowly whom-evers. Please consider again living here with us. Really do this time.”

Henry quaffs back a tumbler of ale. “Yes. I should like that and so would the children. Wouldn’t you, Henry? Ferdie?” The boys chorus agreement, adding that Mummy doesn’t scold them so much when she has Auntie Maggie to play with. The adults all laugh. Even the cook laughs as she sets down Henry Senior’s favourite selection of trifle, blood pudding and buttered tarts.

“So, you’ll consider it seriously? Moving here?” Katie asks.

“Yes,” Maggie says. And this time she is serious. But once back in New York, before she can even pack up her apartment, she receives the dire news: Henry Jencken Senior has dropped dead in his English country home, his heart shutting off like a tap.