The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  The Fates asks for the knocks, but the knocks, faint or otherwise, do not come. Maggie feels equal measures of relief and trepidation. Perhaps everything will end now. Just like that. Done.

  And then? Knockings. Loud. Unmistakable. The Fates hop about as if the floor were afire. Somehow, I’m again rescued, Maggie thinks wearily. At this the door bursts open to show Amy Post.

  “What have they done to thee!” Amy cries. “This is beyond all cavil. It has gone far enough.”

  No face is more formidable than Amy Post’s when she is angered. The Fates look chastised. Embarrassed. As well they should. Amy is the fierce upholder of all that is true and just, everyone in Rochester knows this. Maggie reaches for her dress. At that moment she glimpses Machteld trotting briskly down the corridor with a broom, as if, being a maid, she likes to sweep wherever she finds herself.

  It is the evening after the doctors’ investigation and Maggie, nerve-shot and sleep-deprived, sits beside Leah on the Corinthian Hall’s platform stage. It is the final night of their display and the hall is filled to a jam, the crowd an even rougher assortment than on the first night. Ranged about Maggie and Leah are Amy and Isaac Post, George Willets, Lyman Granger, Lemira Kedzie and the Reverend Lemuel Clarke, a firm believer now. Katie is not with them this night. She had one of her little fits and is resting up with Mother at Troup Street. Damned good thing, Maggie decides, because the mood of the crowd is decidedly unpleasant.

  Eliab Capron takes the lectern. He looks smaller than usual. Polishes his spectacles and calls for attention. The crowd settles with difficulty. Money passes among four young swells with soap-locked hair. They spit tobacco. Laugh high. Are they betting? On what? Maggie has never been to a cockfight, of course, but surely this is how a cockpit smells—of onions and ale, of cheap cigars and cheap perfumes, of people steaming in their own woollens, of the desire for blood. Leah told her only the most respectable people would attend. Respectable? What of that burly man with the black-spade beard who, on that first night of their demonstrations, jumped up like a jack-in-the box and called the crowd a lot of deluded dumbwits? What of the man who’d said he’d eat his hat if he couldn’t find the means of their deception? And the one who said he’d throw himself over the Genesee falls if he didn’t uncover all. “I so hope he can swim” was what Leah said before taking the stage tonight.

  Maggie looks to Leah for counsel and support, but Leah is too busy smiling blithely at the crowd to notice her sister. The sympathy Maggie felt for Leah during the doctors’ investigation abruptly vanishes. Indeed, Maggie longs to slap the dimples right off her face. She twists her hands instead, then looks down to the comforting sight of Calvin waiting just below the platform stage.

  And Machteld.

  Machteld looks up at Maggie and presses a finger to her dour lips, then bites it so hard Maggie expects to see a line of blood. “I not like you,” Machteld told Maggie just before they entered the hall for this evening’s demonstrations. “No. But I love Amy. I love Isaac. They save me. Understand?”

  “Well, yes,” Maggie replied. “Do I got a choice?”

  Onstage Eliab is speechifying. The far audience demands he speak louder. Eliab polishes his spectacles again. Rustles his papers. Maggie thought he would be better at this. Hadn’t he insisted she and Leah rehearse endlessly for the show?

  Eliab finds his voice again. “Nothing could be proved. The committee found no means of deception. None! You’ve heard the good doctors’ report. They have ruled out ventriloquism. They have ruled out electrical currents.”

  The crowd cheers loudly, or jeers; it is difficult to tell. There is the sound of boot stomping. Hooting. Maggie stares at her clenched hands. Amy and Isaac look out over the audience with expressions both distant and reproachful, a look Leah imitates well. “Leah, Leah,” Maggie calls over hoarsely. “What in tunket have we done to deserve this? It was only—”

  Maggie chokes back her words as a young swag leaps onto the stage, his top hat at a tilt. Josiah Bissell. His father, Maggie recalls, had been a hellfire preacher during the revivals of the’30s, and had lost a celebrated feud with the hard-drinking, Sabbath-breaking canal men, a feud that Maggie’s own father once told her of, and with a curious pride. This elder Bissell is now one of the wealthiest men in Rochester. Thus it is no wonder his son, Josiah the Younger, looks down at Maggie now, and with the arrogance of God’s favoured.

  Maggie covers her face with her hands.

  “Margaretta!” Leah orders. “Never show fear. They are alike wretched dogs. Stand fast and we shall not be hurt.”

  Josiah the Younger holds out his arms. “Hear me! I’ll be the chairman then of the next committee. That of the True Doubters.”

  A rough in a cap and stained jacket scrambles up beside Josiah. Hollers, “they’s got lead balls in their dresses!”

  “Yous got in them your trousers, Packard!” someone hollers back, and this ribaldry encourages more of the same. Maggie hears a demand to have the women stripped. Hears calls for tar, feathers, faggots for a fire. The hecklers are laughing, as if in jest, but lines are being crossed, Maggie knows, lines of modesty, of chivalry, of common sense. Her head buzzes. Her hands tremble. So this is terror, she thinks.

  “I’ll see the proof, ladies!” Packard shouts. He lurches towards Leah as if to heft her skirts. Yelps as she kicks his shins. Everyone on the stage is standing and talking wildly now. Calvin is fighting his way through the audience towards them. Alfie and Machteld hang back. Onstage, spindly George Willets thrusts himself between Maggie and the riff-raff. “Off the damned stage, you and you! Get away from them. These women won’t be lynched unless it’s over my dead body.”

  “That’s fine comfort, George!” Leah calls.

  “Yes, don’t thou give them any ideas,” Isaac shouts.

  Maggie screams, clutches George, then Amy. Reels back as a torpedo-cracker, tail flaming, bounces on the stage. It erupts in a reek of cordite and smoke. Maggie coughs and retches. Her eyes stream, burning tears. A man grips her shoulder. She wrenches away. “Leave me! Let go, damn you.”

  “Easy, miss, easy.” She might be a skittish horse the way he says it. He declares himself the chief of police. “My men have been among the crowd all along.” He gestures at three baton-carrying men in workaday clothes who are elbowing through to the front row. More torpedo-crackers explode on the stage. A woman faints. There is rabid laughing, flailing arms, wailing voices. Maggie huddles against the police chief. Or is he? He could be a confederate of the younger Bissell’s come to take her hostage and compel the truth from her. He will put red-hot irons to her feet. Poke out an eye. Force her to confess about the peddler at last; though something will stop even that confession at the last instance. She chokes back a horrified laugh at this thought. Looks about and realizes she has been shuffled off the stage, down the aisle to the door. Ah, the door. Leah is behind her along with Calvin. Amy and Isaac are in front with Machteld. They all attain the street and the snow-wet November night and cram into the waiting hack. Eliab Capron leaps in at the last instance. The driver cracks the whip. A small crowd makes chase, but swiftly gives up, laughing as if it were all a lark.

  Maggie sits cramped between Calvin and Leah. She is numb with exhaustion. Eliab, however, taps his feet in excitement. “It might be called a success. Yes, it just might.”

  Amy stares at him. “A success?”

  “What dost thou mean, Eliab, for God’s sake?” Isaac demands.

  “Yes, what precisely?” Leah asks.

  “A riot,” Eliab says. “It will appear in all the papers tomorrow. Yes, I have it! I will report how the mindless, bigoted mob was enraged when the spirits proved themselves genuine. Hah, if the spirits want to be known to the wider world, then the spirits shall have their wish.” He rubs his hands, as he often does—against the cold, Maggie supposes, although it looks, unfortunately, as if he is anticipating money. He tells them of his pamphlet, half-written already. “It will do justice to our wondrous scientific age.
But it will only be the precursor of the great tomes to come. For surely these communications from that other realm are all part of the natural world, all part of the grand scheme. The time is ripe as … ripe. We must act swiftly.”

  “My dear Eliab,” Leah says, in admiration. “You would do Mr. Barnum himself proud.”

  At which Eliab smiles. At which Amy and Isaac look troubled. At which Maggie telegraphs her thoughts to Katie, as Katie asked her to do, for might not clairvoyance be possible?

  Katie, Kat what have we done? Alas and such, we should have left our ghost in the cellar keep. In the dark and the quiet there.

  CHAPTER 12.

  “And did you?”

  “Did I what?” my patient asked.

  “Transport your thoughts. I, too, have heard that such is a possibility.”

  “No, don’t believe that, Mrs. Mellon. One can’t hear another person’s thoughts. Not a glimmer of them, no matter how closely linked two people are; no matter how much they love each other. I should know, for Katie and I tried. We even made a game of thought-guessing, just like we made a game of so many things. Often we were nearly correct. It helped when we were in the same room, of course, because then we could attend each other’s every breath and twitch. One’s body can speak buckets.”

  I vowed then to keep my own body alike a cipher. I did not wish to be read. I was, and am, a private person, and I did not need my past held up like a cheap bolt of cloth. “Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos,” I said, to change the topic.

  My patient looked bewildered. I took up my knitting and clipped at the stray skeins with my shears. The mittens were forming nicely. It seemed my creation might go on without another hitch. “The Fates,” I continued. “From the doctors’ experiments? You said you forgot their names. I searched them out for you. The first, Clotho, spins the threads of life, or the cloth, I suppose. The second, Lachesis, she measures it out, by which I mean how long you will live. And the last one, Atropos, she cuts the thread of one’s life, with a knife or scissors, it depends.”

  “Atropos?”

  “Yes.” I set aside the knitting and tucked in her blankets, making concise triangle corners. “Even the highest gods fear her. She can’t be bribed, nor tricked, nor turned aside, not like all those other Greek deities.”

  “Best to just accept her, then?” my patient asked, and with that mischiefed cornered smile.

  “Yes. Best for everybody, to be frank.”

  APRIL OF 1850, and Maggie sits on the bed that she and Katie share and searches through a heap of tasselled reticules, kid gloves, jet beading, paisley shawls, jewellry of paste, collars of lace. Katie is on her knees by the bureau. “I’m done,” Maggie announces, throwing up her hands. “Done like a dog’s dinner, done-it-all, damn-it-all.”

  “Fuss, you can’t give up now,” Katie says.

  “I can so. I swear on somebody-or-other’s grave, I’m done searching and—”

  “There you are. At last!” Katie interjects. “Naughty old thing, you’ve been hiding from me.” She holds up her spanking-new May-month bonnet, the one she bought specifically for their outing today. The destination is a surprise for their mother, and a well-deserved treat for all. In the five months since the Corinthian Hall exhibition, the Troup Street cottage has been so thronged with spirit-seekers that Maggie barely has time to change from morning dress to tea dress to dinner dress. She is allowed floor-length dresses now. Katie too. And all of these dresses are tailored to Leah’s precise specifications with wide-banded hems and discreet little pockets. Costly, yes, but there seems to be money aplenty now. Leah has even upped Katie’s and Maggie’s stipends; as well she should, for Maggie can cipher better than most girls and now that the rates are set at a dollar per head (shillings and reales accepted also), and with three sittings a day, and fifteen people at one sitting, and then private sittings at five a head that makes, well … a lot. And Leah, Maggie must admit, does keep a fine table. And she has curtailed their chores considerably. Laundry is sent out. A cook comes in. Candles and soap are bought. Anything can be bought, Maggie has realized.

  Katie says, “I really hope Leah lets us stop at the arcade. I’ll just die or something if I can’t have a pearly broach or two. You’re allowed jewellery now, why not me? Oh, fiddle-dee, but I’ve spent my stipend. I reckon that means I’ll be in for a lecture about budget and prudence.”

  Maggie inspects her braid. “Budget and Prudence? I haven’t seen those tiresome old spinsters for an age.”

  Katie giggles. Maggie smiles. Because she, too, now enjoys the prosperity the spirits have brought them. She, too, enjoys the “game,” as Katie calls it. And besides, everyone is in on it: the grown, the aged, children. Everyone wants to play. And ambivalence is such an exhausting state, Maggie has found, like balancing on a fence post in a gale. Better to just jump and land in the muck of one side or the other. And Maggie has jumped, though she can’t pinpoint when exactly she did so. Perhaps when she realized she could have all the pretty clothes she desired. Perhaps when she realized the game has become so easy and automatic that she is scarcely aware of the rappings’ source; and then there are all the people, even judges and doctors, telling their mother she should be proud of her gifted, lovely daughters who offer such succour, and their mother replying that she is proud, and moreover that she is no longer afraid of the spirits, but considers them friends. And isn’t the talent catching? Maggie thinks in wonderment. First silly Betty, the Grangers’ daughter, announced that she, too, could hear spirit knockings. Then George Willets felt ghostly rustlings on his collar. Next Abigail Bush heard scratchings in her cupboard and Katie’s adored John Robinson’s fingers tingled for no reason. Even prune-faced Ruth Culver in Arcadia has written that the spirits rattled her husband Norman’s cuspidor, and that, in her opinion, the spirits were at her house first.

  Katie tips her head. “Hear that? Something’s been delivered.” She pulls Maggie out of their bedroom. Chants, “‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said the spider to the fly. ’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy. The way into my parlour is up a winding stair, and I have many curious things to show when you are there.’ ”

  The parlour is dusted and shined and smelling of linseed oil and empty of all souls. Maggie can scarcely believe she lives with such finery. The parlour now boasts drapes of valerian red, blue glass lamps fired with spermaceti oil, an ovoid mahogany table that sits up to twenty, and Leah’s pride: a sideboard chock with carvings of slaughtered bucks and trussed birds and dead gaping fish. A newly delivered gift basket, sure enough, sits on this sideboard. Katie plucks out an orange, then a tin of sugared almonds, then a bottle of champagne. “It’s a really fancy one,” she cries, and expertly pops the cork and pours them both a glass. Maggie likes it as much as Katie does now. They might never drink weak old cider again.

  Leah’s voice floats to them. “Girls! We must leave forthwith. We are reserved.”

  “We’re just getting refreshed,” Katie calls back. She smiles at Maggie. “Be nice to old sis, Mag. She’s been trying really hard, you know, to make it all less work for us. And her new technique works just swell, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yes, but I still like the old way better,” Maggie says, thinking how two weeks ago Leah halted playing the parlour organ in mid-chord and fixed her gaze on the candelabra, its swimming little flames. The sitters were astonished when the voice hauled up from Leah’s lungs was deep, sonorous, and not her own. A woman half-fainted, then claimed the voice was that of her dead father. Since then odd voices have bubbled out of Katie as well. Leah is calling it magnetic somnambulism. Katie and Maggie are calling it trancing, mostly because the word is easier to pronounce and spell and these new, talky spirits get tongue-caught over long words. And like the older, quieter spirits, they are terrible spellers all.

  “There you are, girls,” Leah says, coming into the parlour. “I have sent Mother to wait outside. Now, do keep a secret for once.”

  The Four Corners is
bustling as usual. The air is shot with the blatting of tin horns, the rumble-turn of wheels, the clatter-clop of horses, and the hollers and hammering of labourers as the canal and aqueducts are readied for the spring and summer traffic. The secondary canals are already flooded with water, and as they pass one Maggie catches a whiff of that smell common to populated waterways, that is, the smell of offal and factory waste and chamber pots galore. Or, as Maggie considers it, the smell of spring.

  She wends with Katie, Leah and their mother through the lattice of ash barrels, manure heaps and hawkers’ stalls. Calvin is busy with his militia today, and so they behave as unchaperoned females must and keep their greetings brief, their gait brisk, and their gaze cast down, mostly, to the muck-caked boardwalks. None of which lessens Maggie’s certainty that the four of them are being seen, noted, thought of. Attend! There they are, the spirit-raising females. But where is the father? What have they done with him? Save for this “brother” Calvin who comes and goes they have no guidance from any man. No protection. It is as if they have scant concern for their reputation, for their precarious toe-hold in society, that is to say, the world.

  Yes, Maggie can easily guess what the watchers are thinking, whispering, it is evidenced in the secret language of glances and sighs, of tightened brows, crossed arms, of quickened breath and quick-changed topics, of drumming fingers and shifting eyes. It is nothing like the language she and Katie once fashioned up to fool their mother. No, this is the language of the unsaid and unwritten, a language she is comprehending better and better each day. Would Maggie prefer illiteracy of it all? No, she is quite certain not.

  “A moment, my dears,” Leah says, and stops, as she always does, at the bookstall on Exchange Street. Prominently displayed is the first tract ever written about their family, the one by E.E. Lewis. Maggie vaguely recalls the man, his fingers blued with ink, his goggly eyes. He had wanted to talk to her and Katie but their mother said no. She’s a good ma, Maggie thinks, and knows by Katie’s fond glance that Katie thinks the same. They hook their arms through their mother’s on one accord.