The Dark (71 page)

Katie nods and puts her hand to her heart. Maggie faintly smiles, then adjusts her spectacles and holds the papers before her. Her voice is wooden and she does not look at the crowd as she reads her confession, even when she can barely be heard over the hisses and catcalls from Spiritualism’s believers. The cheers from its detractors.

“… It was forty years ago and we were very mischievous children and we wanted to terrify our dear mother, who was a good woman and easily frightened. At night when we went to bed, we would tie an apple on a string and cause the apple to bump on the floor so that it sounded as steps. Mother did not think us capable of a trick because we were so young. Children, mark me, will always find means to accomplish mischief.”

Maggie tells of Leah arriving and taking them off to Rochester. “She knew straightaway. She’s always known. Her daughter, Lizzie, helped us at first but then she was wisely quit of the whole thing, as I wish to God Katie and I had been. One has to learn the rapping when one is young—that’s why Mr. Chauncey Burr years ago could never make his exposé plausible. And certainly my sister Leah, Mrs. Underhill, could never manage it as we did. And this, among other things, made her jealous and bitter. In time she exhibited us to a lot of spiritual fanatics. She would give us signals to tell us how to answer. She had confederates seek out knowledge of the sitters and she could read a face like a book. In time we could too. In this way she made as much as one hundred fifty dollars a night.
She gave us a measly stipend, and she pocketed the main of our earnings. It was us who began the practice of sitting in the dark around a table, holding hands so that the sitters could not know what went on about them. We called them ‘spirit circles’ or ‘promiscuous circles’ because both men and women were there, but everyone calls them séances now.”

Then the crowd is treated to the sight of Maggie’s knobby, naked feet. She puts them on a low table and waggles them like a child playing in the sand. The manager calls for quiet. There is a rap on the upper proscenium, then on the stage itself, then knocks in the aisle, on the far doors. A number of worthy doctors are called up. They hold Maggie’s feet. Declare they can feel the pulsations.

Boos and hisses. Cheers and applause. The crowd seems quite evenly divided. Some people are walking out in a huff. Some are laughing. Some are already exchanging wagered money.

“She’s a lying bitch, that one,” a man yells.

Maggie staggers back. She knows a moment of utter terror. She visions the crowd transforming into a mob and tearing her to pieces. She visions tarring and feathering, red-hot pokers, the usual lot.

Maggie shudders and brushes at her dress. She gathers her courage, then stalks to the outmost edge of the stage. Her red-faced manager reaches for her, mightily worried. The crowd quiets. Something is not going according to plan. The excitement is palpable.

Maggie drops her papers and glowers at the crowd. Her voice is clear and loud. She no longer speaks as if by rote. “Hear me! All of you! I am the widow of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the Arctic explorer, and I swear I would call him to me if it were possible, but there is no such thing as the departed returning to this life. I’ve tried to do so in every form, and know it cannot be done. I visited a graveyard at the midnight hour. I stood over each grave and called upon the dead to give me some token of their presence. All were silent.”

The manager grips her elbow. He mouths apologies to the audience and tries to steer Maggie offstage. She shakes him loose and points at the crowd: “Mark me! The dead do not see us, nor hear us, nor interfere in our worldly affairs. It matters not how we entreat. It matters not how we pray. Our words all fall into the pit.
For the dead do not return. Not any that go up to Heaven! Nor any that go down into Hell!”

She looks to Katie. Katie nods.

Silence from the audience. Cravats are straightened. Hats adjusted. There is a moment of fearful unease. For the living, Maggie well knows, might be terrified of ghosts, ghouls, banshees, doppelgangers; they might be terrified of the rotting dead tottering out of their graves. But that terror is nothing compared to the terror of knowing that the dead dwell across some endless void. Indeed, that the dead might not exist at all.

Katie grips Ferdie tight as he and the red-faced theatre manager force a path through the heckling crowd, Maggie and Katie close behind. Ferdie holds protectively on to them both. The cab waits in a vat of gaslight. They are being jostled on all sides. Maggie is tight-lipped with fear. Her bravado has vanished.

Maggie and Katie stumble against him at the same instant—a small, elderly man in a swank Chesterfield coat. Maggie glimpses a sleek grey beard, a mouth twisted in outrage, a cane topped with a gleaming hound’s head.

“I’m sorry, I am,” Maggie cries. “We were so young and stupid.”

“I’m sorry too. Really, really,” Katie echoes.

“Please forgive us!” they say in unison, and clamber into the cab with the manager’s blundering assist. When Maggie dares a look behind, she sees this elderly man fronting the crowd. He smiles a contorted smile. Takes two limping steps, and then the cab rattles him from sight.

“I
see that you’re all-disgruntled, Alvah,” my patient murmured.

I was amazed she could see a dust-mote in her deteriorating condition and told her this fact.

“Allow my guess. You’ve dropped a stitch. Or no, your bracelet watch has stopped again.”

I was knitting away, fast as I could (I had nipped at some of her laudanum so my hands were steady enough), and had not dropped a solitary stitch. And the bracelet watch was set as firmly on my wrist as ever.

“Aren’t you the fine fisherwoman,” I said, then set down the cover-all. “The Medico Society is displeased with me, if you must know. To be more than frank, they are ready to give me the heave-ho and relieve me of my duties, to boot. They say I spend too much time with you. That I am failing in my duties and my reports have been muddled.”

“Relieved? Of your duties? I didn’t think your sort could be.”

“Everyone’s game is up and ended, sooner or later.”

“Should I tell you how Leah’s game ended?”

I picked up the cover-all again, determined now to finish. “Now that I would very much like to hear.”

L
EAH POLISHES THE SILVER BUTTER PICKS
, the ice-cream hatchet, the silver sugar chipper, her thoughts spinning, fiery as a Catherine wheel.

Her new-hired housekeeper—a heavy-faced, insolent creature—tosses the latest editions of the newspapers on the sideboard. The newspapers just miss Leah’s bona fide French toile vase, the one that had been her father’s. Leah acquired it after he died, and now it sits centred on the sideboard.

The housekeeper trundles off. Leah hesitates, then takes up the newspapers. The reports are gleeful, even savage. There is Margaretta taking the stage at the renowned Academy of Music, waggling her big toes for all to see, cracking and snapping those obscene digits. The dead do not return? Who is Margaretta Fox to say that? Who is she to say that Heaven and Hell are inescapable?

Leah hurls the butter picks and ice-cream hatchet, then any other silverware that comes to hand—the salt throne, the silver fish-knives. Their thudding on the oriental rug sounds alike muffled, staggered steps.

“Mrs. Underhill.” Daniel has appeared in the dining room. His face, though calm, is edged with a look Leah has never seen before, nor does she wish to again.

She presses her hand to her chest. Daniel is holding the lily box. He lifts the thick lid, then takes out her supportive letters, her commendations and medallions, and sets them aside with the professional detachment of a banker with a strongbox. Into the silence the birds in Leah’s aviary begin their racketing songs, not a comfort this day, only a further enragement because, really, how dare the birds sing when such disaster has befallen her?

“Daniel, dearest. The curio cabinet. The key. It was my private—”

“Oh, I would never dare use your key.”

“Then how—”

“I broke the glass,” Daniel says. “With a hammer.” He pressures the top of the lid, just so, then shows the underside. The interior hatch has opened to reveal the hidden compartment. He does not take out her father’s letter, which is jammed in there. At this, at least, Leah is relieved.

“The magic of phosphorous, appearing in a closed box of dirt,”
Daniel announces. “Should I attain one hundred ten years, I will ponder how I could have allowed myself to be fooled by this simple device.”

“Mr. Underhill, I shall explain …” She rushes to him. She is cumbersome these days what with her flounced skirt trains, what with her girth, and thus she stumbles to her knees. She looks up, and with the same wronged-damsel expression as when she raised her burned hands from the garden dirt, back when Daniel first fell in love with her. Surely he will believe in her now. The man believes in ghosts, for heaven’s sake. Why not her avowed words?

“Daniel, it was my father’s idea. Truly. Oh, he acted the reformed roustabout, but his heart was never changed, nor reformed nor … and he made that box for me, yes, but then, then he tampered with it and insisted I use it for the phosphorous test. He could not bear for my good name to be destroyed … Mr. Underhill!”

But Daniel has turned away. Has left Leah to struggle upright on her own. “I have been a good wife to you. I have. Spirits-have-mercy, I know you would have liked a bit of this and that. Shall I try on occasion? Would that help? Would that please you? Daniel? Danny? Come back here this instant.”

He pauses but does not turn. “I suggest you visit with your people in Arcadia for a number of weeks, Leah, until this unfortunate business abates.” And then he is gone.

Leah presses her hands to her temples. The staccato-beat there threatens to topple her, but it steadies. She steadies. She sweeps up the newspapers. If only she could toss them forthwith into a fire, but the dining room hearth is cold, as are all the hearths—the heat chugs invisibly up through the radiators instead. Candles? Oil lamps? All are stored away. Her electric lights shine bright, too bright, and seem lifeless of a sudden without the burn of flame.

She searches out a lucifer. Stuffs the newspapers into the swept-clean hearth and lights the match. There is a whiff of sulphur, and then the flames consume the etching of Margaret Fox Kane, her toe pointing as if in accusation, straight at Leah.

The dead do not return. Not any that go up to Heaven. Nor any that go down into Hell
. So reads the caption for all to see.

Leah sits down heavily on the floor.

Four days later and Leah arrives at her brother David’s farmstead. From his veranda she surveys the red barns, the stone dry-house, the whitewashed hog pen, the drab oat fields beyond. No more peppermint fields. No more seas of blossoming pink. Peppermint is being grown cheaper elsewhere.

In the near distance are the remains of her father’s house. The blackened earth is overlaid with witchgrass and fox grape, the foundation colonized by raccoons and burrowing owls, and the glass shards—from windows, vases, tumblers—are smooth-worn and glint from the burned ruins when the sun draws high.

Leah misses her father mightily these days. Even prays to him for help and guidance. He has yet to answer, the dear stubborn old coot.

Across the foreyard her brother, David, sharpens tools on a lathe. The wheel hums as he works the pedal. A duck waddles by a fence. Cows low to be milked. Odd how David has never wanted more, Leah thinks. Odd how David, like so many others, has only wanted his patch of dirt.

A shriek of childish laughter. Three children race into the yard. The two boys are David’s sons. The third, a girl, is a straw-haired tubby thing whom Leah does not recognize. A neighbour, she supposes. Tubby-Girl directs the boys to stand stock. She hauls a tin box out of her pinafore, dumps the contents into the dust. Marbles. Cards. A Jacob’s ladder. A knife. The knife is what she wants, for mumblety-peg, as it happens. Leah excelled at the game herself as a girl. Only once did she stab a foot with the thrown knife. Whose foot? David’s? She hopes not.