The Dark (70 page)

In the carriage Dr. Wadsworth claps in triumph. He is enjoying the intrigue. Has no compunctions about drafting the telegram to the New York authorities.

Dr. Wadsworth says, “We must follow it with a barrister’s letter. I have a friend who will assist us. Not to worry, Mrs. Kane.”

“I can’t thank you enough.”

“As long as the true Uncle Edward does not—”

“He won’t. The man is somewhere on the continent. He’s not spoken nor written to Kat since her Henry died. He’s abandoned her.” Maggie leans towards Wadsworth. “Everyone has abandoned her, excepting me. I’m the only one who can save us both. Our souls, that is.”

Wadsworth eyes her. “And how shall you do that?”

“Revenge.” Maggie thought it would be a difficult utterance, but it is a soft, whispery word. One could easily utter it a hundred times without stumbling.

“I do hope you’re not plotting any, any, hmm, bodily harm. I had a time in my life where such actions seemed jolly fun, but the consequences, my dear, they are …” Dr. Wadsworth breaks off, his heavy brows raised.

“Not to worry. You can kill without weapons, you know.”

“My dear, your nerves are stretched like catgut. Ah, but I have just the thing.”

The “thing” is poppy tea mixed with honey and nutmeg. The effect is like that of laudanum—which Wadsworth does not allow Maggie because of the alcohol base—but much stronger. She becomes featherlight. Happiness whirls inside her, like the coloured ribbons round a maypole. Objects—vases, paintings, tables—are all limned with radiance.

Wadsworth and a maid lead her to a bed soft as clouds in which she slumbers on and on until just past midnight, when she wakes with a start. She panics for a clock-tick then recalls that she is in England.
England. That’s where I am. At Wadsworth’s home. There’s hope yet. I’m not alone and ranting. Not yet
.

She walks on her tough, knobby feet to the windows. On the cobbled street a man staggers under the yellow head of a gas light. His shadow stretches and grows monstrous. A mongrel noses at rubbish. Maggie nods to herself, all purpose, then yanks on a grey gown and black cloak. She takes up a pocket-lamp and walks down the corridor, now down the stairs. She is not afraid of waking the household. When she chooses, Maggie can be absence itself. Her sliding feet make no noise. The stairs do not creak at her weight. Not even the cats note her. It is from long practice, from all that disappearing while she let the dead take over her self and soul.

The moon shines out obligingly as she nears a small, squat church. The gates to the graveyard are unlocked. How unlike an American cemetery, she thinks, with its greened expanses around each plot. Here the graves are crammed tight as passengers on a omnibus. She wonders how deep the graves go, how many coffins have been stacked one upon the other over centuries, millennia. Then realizes that in this ancient island country the dead must easily outnumber the living.

She chooses a grave at random:
Hortence Mithelwaith. Beloved Wife. Beloved Mother
. Dead these hundred years. “Speak to me,” Maggie whispers. “Please. You must. A token. That’s all.” Distant sounds of the living stirring in their city. Nothing else.

Maggie moves from grave to grave. The moon has turned a molten silver and she can read the dedications without her pocket-lamp. Here are the veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. There, those who died during the reign of the virgin Queen. There the victims of London’s Great Fire. There the victims of Cromwell’s terror. Childbirth. Disease. Drowning. Accident. Some of the dead even reached a good age.

She reads the oldest stones by tracing her fingers over the worn indentations. All are silent to her pleas—the wealthy with their tombs, the newly dead with their sharp-carved statuettes, the long-dead infants with their gravestones worn to nubs the size of a hand.

By the time Maggie leaves she is certain at last of what she has always suspected.

A week later, Maggie staggers to the railing of the steamer
Italy. Trot trot to Brandy. Trot trot to Gin. Better watch out or you might fall in
. She chuckles at her clever rewording. She might be a toddler herself, so unsteady are her steps and so scattered are her thoughts. But she is not going to gin. Nope. She is going to New York, and for revenge.

Voices behind her: “Tsk-tsk.” “Oh, my, my.” “Disgraceful.”

“What of it?” she yells, but at the seagull that bobs in the air before her, as if on a child’s string. “The damned letter has been sent.”

The seagull caws in agreement. Does Leah have seagulls in her aviary? No, a seagull would be a painful mirror, what with its greed and opportunism, its scavenging ways and, oh, its ability to escape. But Leah won’t escape much longer. Maggie and Katie might well go down with her into infamy, but that can’t be helped. “We’re trussed together, we three!” Maggie yells at the seagull. “Like so much cordwood, that’s what Leah said once. All we need is a raging fire.”

Maggie’s letter might even now be set to type for the
Herald
newspaper of New York:
I read in your edition of Saturday May 5 an account of the misfortune that has befallen my dear sister Mrs. Katie Fox Jencken. The sad news nearly killed me. My sister’s two beautiful boys are her idols. Spiritualism is a curse. God had set his shield against it. I call it a curse, for it is used by heartless persons and vilest miscreants as a cloak for evil doings
. And so forth.

Maggie trembles. She has set in motion something terrible and momentous that cannot be stopped nor slowed. “Have you, now? Really, Maggie Fox, you should be damn accustomed to that sort of thing by now.”

She looks around to see who has spoken, then understands that it was her own self.

Before Maggie sent that letter to the
Herald
, she sent a letter to Katie detailing her plans to publicly confess, and asking if Katie agreed. For with Maggie not yet in New York, Katie will have to face the consequences alone. She will have nowhere to hide. In private there will be Leah’s wrath. In public there will be a maelstrom. And that is only the beginning of the end. New York’s Academy of Music is booked. Maggie will soon be onstage. Will soon be proving to the world, once and for ever-all, that the dead do not return.

Katie’s telegram in reply to Maggie’s letter read only:
DO WHAT IS BEST
.

“Damn me, damn me now,” Maggie mumbles. Tastes what might be salt spray, or tears. She looks up. The deck is deserted. A flag snaps on a pole. A forgotten book claps its pages. Grey sky and grey deck. And now a man walks briskly towards her.

“Tuttie, pet! Where is the diamond bracelet I gave you? Where are the Honiton undersleeves? And your hair is in a dreadful arrangement. No matter. Christ, but it’s cold in that other place. I never cared you were a fraud, you know, for I was much the same.”

He is so close Maggie can see the boy-blue of his eyes. Then he is gone. She looks frantic over the rail, as if the deep is where he dwells. “Come back, please, Elisha. You tell them first. You tell them we were wed. Tell them you loved me,
Maggie
. Say my name, you damned prat. You cad.”

He doesn’t answer. She peers farther over the rail at the waving waves. Calls his name again. The gulls call back as if in mockery. She hikes her petticoats. One leg over. She flinches as the cold metal bites the bare skin between her stockings and pantaloons. He touched her there once. And farther on and farther on. It has been such a long time since she clambered over fences, railings. Was the orchard the last time? Just before she and Katie met the peddler. Yes, back when the world was good. Back when she and Katie were good. How did that encounter lead to millions of people joining hands and asking the dead to rise and speak? It makes no earthly sense.

Both Maggie’s legs are over now. She is on the other side of the rail, on the thin ledge over the leaping sea. She clings to the rail behind. A finger slips. Another.

“Ma’am! What in hell!” A thick forearm clamps her waist. A meaty hand grapples at her neck. “Quick now!” “I got her, sir!”

And then a medley of voices as the living rush to claim her.

“H
ere you are, Maggie-duck, a small gift.”

My patient took it with delight. It was
Godfrey’s Narrative of the Last Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin 1853–4–5, by W.M.C. Godfrey, One of The Survivors
.

“I sought it out, after your tale of yesterday, the ship, the sea and you seeing Elisha while you were in the grip of alcohol visions.” This mention of alcohol reminded me of my gin allotment which, according to my bracelet watch, was as of this instance. The allotment, I allow, had been growing by the day.

“Elisha was as real as you,” she said, peeved. The book fell on her lap. She was growing weaker by the hour, I should add.

“Mayhap, but do the dead return just to nag us? It seems unlikely, even for your Elisha, by which I mean it is high-time you laid the man to rest.”

“She patted
Godfrey’s Narrative
. “And this will help?”

“What? Are you afraid of disobeying your shilly-shally man?”

“Elisha did order me not to read it.” She smiled faint. “But then I did return to spirit rapping against his wishes, and this cannot be a worse offense. Go on then, be my dear reader, Alvah June.”

The first page showed an etching of the handsome, strong-jawed Godfrey himself. I read aloud to my patient of Elisha’s growing paranoia in the long Arctic dark. Of how Godfrey and some others left the ice-locked ship during the first winter and struck
for the south. Of their failure and return. Of Elisha’s unreasonable hatred for Godfrey. Of how he accused Godfrey of deserting on the occasion when Godfrey was out hunting for them all. How Elisha tried to shoot Godfrey, both men moving at a shuffle because of the cold and scurvy. Godfrey over the ice. Elisha to the gun-stand on the brig. How the shots sludged about Godfrey until he shuffled out of range, and then shuffled another eighty miles more to the Esquimaux settlement and safety. Later Elisha apologized and asked Godfrey to return to
The Advance
and make the journey home with them. Godfrey did so, only to have his reputation destroyed.

“Can you just imagine, duck, trying to run as bullets plume about, but being unable to because of the cold, the scurvy? To be forced to just shuffle, shuffle to safety?”

“Oh, I can imagine that easy as cake.”

“As can I, easy as pie.” We both thought this no end of amusing.

We came to the book’s final page: “
She was a young lady of small stature, rather full of face, brilliant black eyes and eyes of a corresponding hue, and while Dr. Kane looked with mortification and self-blame on his own wavering, it seemed almost equally impossible to take or to renounce the hand of Margaret
.”

“Your name writ out at last,” I said.

My patient’s smile then was of a different mettle than before, not mischievous, not sly, relieved perhaps. And I admit to pride at offering this succour.

“A shame you did not seek out this Godfrey and make a match of him. The two of you seemed of a piece.”

“Other lives as bubbles in a tin tub,” she murmured. These were Elisha’s words, but her voice, I should mention, was wholly her own.

T
HERE ARE RUFFLES
of applause as Maggie walks slowly onto the stage of New York’s Academy of Music this October evening of 1888. A sheaf of papers is in her hand, a red-faced manager at her side. She is not downplaying her fifty-four years. She wears her
greying hair drawn severely back, spectacles and an austere dress in her favourite bishop’s blue.

The crowd mutters at this unentertaining sight. A man yells, “Where’s them lovely girl ghosts, all gauzy draped? That’s what we want exposed!” This is such a knee-slapper that the crowd—which is mostly men—takes a while to settle.

Maggie searches out Katie, who, attended by Ferdie, watches from an upper box close on to the stage. Maggie wishes back the supremacy of candles, for in the lime and arc lights Katie’s skin appears wax-white, her arched nose a shadowy blade, her eyes puddle-grey. And candlelight would be kinder, also, to the red velvet swagging, which in the lime light appears a noxious, mottled orange.