The Dark Page 10

  “Lizzie!” Calvin cries, and throws out his hand as if Lizzie were teetering on a precipice. Which she is—and the pit of ignominy for her entire family is beneath her, the desert of her own ignominy above. And if Maggie rescues her? The pit. The desert. They will be her and Katie’s fate as well.

  Lizzie claps her hands over her ears as accusations fall about her like stones.

  “It’s Lizzie’s fault.”

  “All her fault they won’t speak.”

  “Shall I never hear Harriet again? And because of you?”

  “Cruel girl.”

  “Come now, people, have pity. Mercy even,” Reverend Clarke says.

  “Meanie, meanie, meanie!” shrills little Betty Granger.

  “This has to do with her behaviour of yesterday,” Leah cuts in, her voice above the other voices, above Lizzie’s sobbing. “She must repent and beg forgiveness. And on her knees.”

  A slow rap-rap of agreement.

  Lizzie buries her face in her hands.

  “Will the spirits speak to us again if Lizzie begs forgiveness?” Leah asks. Nothing in her voice suggests she will relent, Maggie realizes.

  “I can’t help it,” Lizzie says. “I just said what I thought and if I’m to blame I can’t help it. I can’t.” She sobs a torrent. The Reverend Clarke offers a brief hand on her shoulder. Maggie doesn’t dare offer comfort, not with Leah so near. Katie sits slumped like a rag doll.

  Leah tells the sitters how yesterday Katie was overtaken by the spirits while harmlessly dancing. How Lizzie shouted she wanted the spirits to go away. How she blasphemed. “My daughter does not trust the spirits, dear people. She believes, actually believes, they would cause us injury. She believes they would allow us to be labelled frauds.”

  Frauds. The word stands giant and stark.

  “Yes, Elizabeth Fish would have us labelled as frauds,” Leah continues, softly now.

  The reverend swipes at his brow again. Agrees a plea for forgiveness might be warranted. Maggie understands his thinking. For if she and her family are frauds, would they dare utter the word? Would they dare place that thought in any mind? No. Certainly not. Only the innocent would dare. Only the innocent have nothing to fear under eyes both mortal and divine.

  More raps. They are are followed by bangs, thuds. The air in the room is thick and heady, like the air before a storm.

  “Now, Lizzie. Now. Repent!” the company hollers. There is more name-calling: “wicked girl,” “heartless thing,” “unnatural creature.” Maggie hears Katie call out, “Repent, you niddy-noddy!” At this, Maggie, to her own surprise, calls out, “Yes, now, Liz. Get it done with.”

  Maggie had meant to keep silent as a show of sympathy, but she has been swept along. I’m only fourteen, she thinks. And Katie is only eleven. It isn’t fair.

  Lizzie does not hold out long. She clutches her hair. Drops to her knees. Chokes back her sobs. “Forgive me, spirits. Oh, do so. Forgive me and, and, come back.”

  “And?” Leah asks.

  Lizzie squints at her mother’s face. Sniffs. “And I’ll never doubt you again, spirits. Nor ask you to leave. Oh, crumb, but I promise. I promise. Je promets.”

  “Spirits? Will that suffice?” Leah asks.

  A heavy rapping. The company sighs. Maggie smiles with relief. Now things can go on as they have before. She will even get Lizzie to laugh about this incident once they are back at Mechanics Square. And then Maggie, with Katie’s help, will cajole and jest and Lizzie will indulge her young aunts, as she did when she visited them in Hydesville, and help pass the dreary hours.

  Lizzie meekly asks if she may leave; Leah says no, absolutely not. The Reverend Clarke wants to test the spirits with questions of his personal life and Leah does not want the spirit chain broken. Lizzie looks stricken. For pity’s sake, Maggie thinks. Wouldn’t it be a kindness to let her go?

  The reverend asks the colour of his favourite pen-knife. When his mother died. If his son has passed his exams. The answers are all correct. “How can they know this?” he wonders aloud. “My dear friends might know all this, but no one else.”

  “Would the spirits like to hear the music?” Leah asks.

  The spirits would; they are always in the mood for music.

  Leah sits at the Grangers’ fine organ. She scales on the reedy keys and then sings “Barbara Allen,” her voice swelling out strong and toffee-warm. And without a single faltering note, Maggie realizes.

  Reverend Clarke bows his head. “The visible and the invisible worlds have met together this day. I’m convinced even to the marrow.”

  Convinced, yes, and now suggesting that all and sundry should know of it.

  Maggie presses a palm to her brow. Isaac’s remedy must be wearing off, because her head-pain has returned, and in one telling shot.

  CHAPTER 7.

  The garret’s ladderback chair creaked as I settled in. I spread my skirts to create a dish for my knitting. My patient smiled. “You look to be floating on air.”

  “Air?”

  “Your skirts, they hide the legs of the chair so that you seem magicked, so that—”

  “Not everyone is small as a mustard seed. Some of us need a tad more space to hang our hats.” (I am, as I said, a fleshy woman and of decent height.)

  “Do you live near to here, then?”

  “Not so near, nor far.”

  “A walking distance?”

  “At times.”

  “At times you need the omnibus?”

  “At times I walk.”

  “You must have a very practical home.”

  “I move hither and yon, if you must know. To the precincts where I’m most needed. Such is my duty.”

  “I see. I moved a great deal also. No place seemed a home. I moved and moved. Was never quite here, nor there. As such, I don’t wish to move again, is that clear, Mrs. Mellon?”

  “As Heaven’s bells,” I said, and frowned over a lax cable stitch.

  “Yet if I were ever to name my favourite place it would be the Troup Street cottage.” She paused, waiting for some response, but I was too intent on my task to give one, though I was thinking, certainly, of my New England cottage, of the whales slaughtered on the beach below, their bloody flesh laid out in strips long as roads, their illuminating oil filling barrels upon barrels. Of the scrimshaws that Mr. Mellon carved (his one and only talent). And of the sand carpets my son and I delighted in making for the keeping room. We changed the pattern each week. I should add that my son had an artist’s keen eye, and these sand carpets were a marvel to all who saw them.

  “Leah chose it, of course.”

  “Chose? Chose what?”

  “Troup Street, the place I should like to return to, if ever I could. But I can’t.”

  “No,” I said. My patients are ever on about returning. But we are knit in our places and must make the best of it. I told her this fact, and she agreed. But she told me of Troup Street regardless, and when Leah first beheld it.

  “WE ARE ARRIVED, MOTHER,” Leah announces, and stops outside the cottage on Troup Street on this blustery March day of’49. The cottage is incongruously modest amid the mansions and stately homes of Rochester’s Third Ward, but the path to the cheery red door has been cleared of any snow, the boxwood hedging is neatly trimmed, the lion’s-head knocker fresh-oiled and agleam.

  “It is the pitch-perfect residence for our spirits,” Leah declares, as Mother huffs up beside her. Leah’s sisters remain behind at the Mechanics Square walk-up. Their opinions on the new rental hardly matter. And they have been acting oddly—guarded, even surly—since Lizzie’s departure, which was just before the Yuletide. But those two will sing a new tune, Leah thinks, once the merry times begin. For the Reverend Clarke has indeed been telling all and sundry about his meeting with the spirits. And these all and sundry have been clamouring to meet the spirits. And both sides, the visible and the invisible, need to be entertained in proper style. Leah finds it nearly impossible to believe that only a year has passed sin
ce the peddler’s ghost started up, and then promptly knocked open the door to more worthy spirits. But only nearly impossible. Nothing is wholly impossible to believe. Not any longer.

  The red door swings open at Leah’s touch. No rattling. No difficulties. Ah, Elizabeth. Lizzie. The girl, granted, had been contrite after her abominable behaviour at the Grangers’, but she still wants nothing to do with spirit sittings. And her reluctance will raise questions, questions that might weaken the spirit chain. Leah explained this to Lizzie no less than three times, and yet she remains obdurate; thus Leah had no choice but to send the girl to her father’s in Illinois. Lizzie had been reluctant, true. She had wept and wailed. Likely because Leah has always talked about Bowman Fish as if he were pure evil. He is not, of course. Leah has met pure evil aplenty in her life, and Bowman is not of such mettle. No, Leah has lately understood that Bowman is a man much like any other. Prey to animal urges. Believing a woman the same.

  Leah turns to her mother. She is plucking at a yew tree and muttering what might be a spell.

  “My heavens, Mother, cease that, you will give the neighbours cause for gossip.”

  “But the yew … It takes its nourishment from the dead, doesn’t it?”

  “That is mere superstition. Besides, the owner assured me the place is not haunted. There have been no murders committed here. Nor has this house seen any deaths from strange maladies or from unexplained circumstances. No, it has known only the ordinary deaths, of infants and the aged and such. Now follow me.”

  Her mother does, though with cautious steps and darting, fearful eyes.

  The vestibule is commodious, the hallway broad and painted a clear-day blue. The kitchen is tucked discreetly at the back of the cottage, along with the family keeping room. The parlour is set prominently in the front and is connected to the larder by a back stair. It has no furnishings except a sturdy organ, a chandelier hung on pulleys, and a nickle-plated parlour stove, nicely ornamented and surrounded by a wrought-iron guard.

  “I suppose it is nice room,” Mother says. “But parlours, well, they do seem wasteful, don’t they? Being only for entertainment and for setting out the dead.”

  “No decent family can live without a parlour these days, Mother.”

  The mention of family must have brought Lizzie to Mother’s mind, for now she is grousing on about sending for her. “It has been long enough, hasn’t it? Yes? Now, poppet, I—”

  “Ma … Mother. We have discussed this to bits. I shall send for Elizabeth the moment she regains her senses. Only, she must learn to govern her rage, a governance that I suspect shall take long and diligent practice.”

  Her mother sighs. “Well, you know best about all that. I suppose the organ is fine, isn’t it?”

  “In an antiquated fashion,” Leah says, and taps the keys. Winces. “It requires tuning. And we shall need purchase sandwich lamps and a good-sized table for the sittings. An ovoid one, yes, to show the equality of all souls, and—”

  “Shhh, Leah,” Mother Margaret whispers, her eyes aswim with fright. Something, someone is in the room with them. Leah hears a suspiration. Her mother gasps. Leah slowly turns, then peers into the dimmest corner of the parlour, calls, “Hallo?”

  He is of middling height and middling build. His skin has a greyish cast, as does his hair, his eyes, his clothes, his teeth. His expression is glum but not threatening. His voice when he bids them good day is flat-toned, unassuming. Leah doubts a more unnoticeable has ever lived. “Mr. Alvie Kincaid,” she says in delight.

  “Alfie, ma’am, not Alvie. Alfie Kincaid.”

  “Yes, that is it.” She turns to her mother. “Oh, stop fretting, Mother, the landlord informed me he came with the place.”

  At Troup Street, once Mother and the girls are settled in, Leah arranges spirit circles for every weekday evening, and then for Saturday afternoons as well. The Posts, the Bushes, the Grangers, the Littles and the Willets; these are the regulars attendees, though Mrs. Lemira Kedzie visits often from Albany, and Ruth and Norman Culver come often from Arcadia. None of Leah’s close family visits, however, not David, not Maria, and certainly not Leah’s father, though Leah has asked him to do so many times in letters, as has her mother.

  By mid-summer of’49 the regular attendees are bringing friends and relations. Some are respectfully curious. Others respectfully dubious. All leave offerings: baskets of delicacies, tins of beeswax candles, bottles of costly whale oil for the lamps, bottles of wine, champagne, brandy. Leah asks for no monetary payment. The Fox sisters are answering a call; they are doing a great service. Foremost they are ladies. And ladies do not have paid “jobs.” However, if monetary gifts are obscured within the baskets and tins, Leah cannot object. Money is required, after all, to keep a good table, to pay the dressmaker (homespun is out of the question now), and to pay Alfie for his increasingly diverse services. Leah thinks him the ideal servant. Maggie and Katie do not. They think him nasty and unsettling. Those marl-coloured eyes. Those teeth.

  One of Leah’s regular callers to the Troup Street cottage is Mr. Eliab Capron. He is pin neat, his dark hair smooth as a cap. He is a Quaker. An abolitionist. A natural philosopher. A newspaper man. A doubter. “Foremost I am a man of science,” he proclaims on this afternoon visit. “I cannot believe so readily in ghosts. Nor will I be swayed by what I wish to believe. Indeed, I am certain there is a scientific solution to the spirit phenomena. Consider the cholera that is wreaking such death and havoc in England and our own Southern states, even as I speak. Now, to the untrained eye it might appear that God has allowed one of his apocalyptic Horsemen out for a careless gallop, but on closer scrutiny the culprit is clearly only noxious, polluted air.”

  “My heavens,” Leah says. “I must confess that all this science and philosophy is beyond our womanly ken. Do explain further, but slowly, if you please.”

  Leah, along with Maggie, Katie, Mother Margaret and Calvin, is receiving Eliab in the Troup Street parlour. They sit about the new ovoid table. Alfie has just brought in tea and a plate of Calvin’s lemon drops. Katie pops a lemon drop in her mouth and smiles at Eliab. Maggie, however, is frowning into her teacup, as if seeing unwelcome answers in the soggy leaves.

  “I will gladly explain,” Eliab begins. “Do not hesitate to stop me if you cannot follow. You see, I believe Miss Katherine is the prime portal. I believe her bones conduct sounds from the earth’s core. Perhaps the rumbles of earthquakes undetectable to human ears, or else the bangs of distant thunder.” He turns to Mother. “Mrs. Fox, might I have your permission to take Miss Katherine to Auburn with me, the better to conduct experiments. All with the utmost discretion, by all means.”

  “Katie? What are your opinions?” Mother asks.

  “You want my opinion? Mine?”

  “Her opinion?” Leah puts in.

  “Don’t girls have opinions? I believe I did. Certainly you did, Leah. Gracious evers, did you have opinions. Well, Katherine?”

  Katie takes another of Calvin’s lemon drops. “I’ll go hither and thither, but I won’t slither.”

  Eliab smiles uneasily. “My wife and I will treat her as our own daughter.”

  “She may go. Yes, she should. I think so,” Mother says.

  “I must say that—” Leah begins.

  “Poppet, if Mr. Capron can find an explanation to help end the hauntings, then who can argue? Who?”

  “Not I,” Calvin says.

  “Not me neither … either?” Katie says.

  Maggie sets her teacup aside with a clatter. “Nor me. Argue? Nope. But I wonder if Lizzie would? We could telegraph and inquire, but she’s so really so far off now.”

  Maggie’s tone is innocent, Leah notes, but her expression is grouty, devious. Honestly, Lizzie has been gone for nearly eight months now. You would think Maggie would have forgotten her by now. Leah sniffs. “Nor I, then. We cannot have discordance.” She glances at Maggie. “From anyone.”

  “So, we are all agreed,” Eliab declares, and rubs his hands tog
ether. He looks to Katie. “You are the most remarkable girl, Miss Katherine. Alike … yes, as you said, Miss Margaret, a telegraph machine—”

  “I did?”

  “Yes,” Eliab says. “One that transmits betwixt the mortal and the immortal worlds and—”

  Mother slaps the table. “No! I’ll not have my daughter compared to a machine, will I? Not one that men touch and operate and … No, no. That is that.”

  “I agree, certainly, Mrs. Fox,” Eliab says hastily. “Yet, then what of a … a conductor, a conductor of energy. Or more precisely, a ‘spirit conductor.’ ”

  “A conductor? As in a railway man?” Mother asks.

  Eliab stands as if already at a lectern. “Yes. For is not the struggle for the dead to reach the living alike the struggle of those enslaved to reach freedom? Perhaps only now the dead are discovering the appropriate, yes, yes, conductors! Those who are pure of heart. Whose minds are free of the traps of intellect. The fetters of bookish knowledge. Yes, you girls are conductresses on a railroad, one that is no more wrought of wood and iron than the so-named railroad that takes slaves to freedom, but yet is of similar mettle, of similar God-given purpose.”

  Leah tsks. “My dear Eliab, conductor brings to mind a hulking man in cover-alls, yanking at a whistle. It is untoward. And comic.”

  Eliab taps his chin. “Comic? That won’t do. This is a matter serious as … serious can be. Then what say of … of medium? Ah, in that you ladies are like the medium of water or ether through which the spirits flow.” Eliab moves his hand as if writing some tome on the subject.

  Katie pops another lemon drop into her mouth. “I like that. Medium. Um-um, mum. It reminds me of hum.”

  “And dumb,” Maggie mutters.

  Leah says, “It is a splendid suggestion, pitch-perfect. Medium is neither hot nor cold. Neither this nor that. It is exactly in the middle, which is where we are—in the middle between the living and the dead. And be assured we appreciate greatly, dearest Eliab, how seriously all this is being taken.”

  “Laws, I don’t know. I suppose it will suffice. I think so,” Mother says.