The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  Amy leaves, suggesting rest, sleep. No, courage is what I require, Leah decides. She thinks of the Corinthian Hall investigations, of the mob at Troy, of Buffalo and the naysayers there. Mulls over all the difficulties she has overcome ever since she was a girl and her father left, and then Mr. Fish demanded marriage, and then Lizzie came squalling into the world, and then, well … and so on and so forth.

  Leah drinks down more elixir. The headache is receding. Another day, perhaps two, and she will be herself again. Know thine enemy, Leah thinks, and reaches for the newspaper and reads again the traitorous lines:

  I was getting suspicious of the spirits’ origins and so when Katie was sent to me during the cholera I asked if I could help in the manifestations—we had other kin staying—and Katie said yes. She said that when my cousin Orville consulted the spirit, I must sit next to her, and touch her arm when the right letter was called.

  Leah reads how Katie then told Ruth the knocks were made by the toes—shades of Burr, who could not see it? Apparently Leah’s own daughter, Lizzie, was in on the discovery that one could make loud raps by cracking toes against a headboard or, indeed, any conducting surface—floors, table legs, doors.

  Leah licks a plumbago lead and writes in the margins, When? In Rochester when Mrs. Fish brought Lizzie and Katie there? Lizzie is known to be a mischief maker. And it hardly explains the initial hauntings in Hydesville.

  Lead poised, Leah now reads Ruth’s in-depth instructions on this fine art of “toe cracking”: how one must warm the feet first and then practise many hours. How it is best to begin when one’s toes are young and pliable. How one should vary the pitch and loudness of the sounds, and look earnestly here and there so the knocks seem to come from the ceilings and walls, from farther off or closer. And Katie said that I had better have a child at the table with me, and make folks believe that the child was the medium, for they would not suspect a youngster of any trick.

  Leah’s plumbago lead nearly drills through the newspaper as she writes, And what of the trances? What of the tables moving? Of the sounds of coffins being made? Bells ringing? What of spirits writing through the hands of others? What of the known fact that women are incapable of deception and guile, being so frail, silly and weak, and bereft of true intelligence?

  Next comes the foolery about how to read a countenance. The worst, however, is the accusation of accomplices, such as the Posts’ “Dutch servant girl” who had, apparently, often made knocks with a broom.

  And what of Katherina pledging on a bible that Ruth is telling lies? That she recalls nothing of what Ruth claims? Leah writes. The bible is a nice touch, she decides. And likely Katie would pledge on one, if Leah asked.

  She puts aside the plumbago, then carefully tears the story from the newspaper, folds it smaller and smaller still. She studies her handiwork. Here are Ruth’s lies rendered small and inconsequential, the size, really, of a medicine tablet.

  She wonders, even as she opens her mouth, if some mysterious force is guiding her own, is directing her to swallow that folded newsprint and wash it down with the entire bottle of Isaac’s elixir. She wonders if, indeed, she has stumbled upon some rare and peculiar magic. And then she doesn’t wonder at all. She is intent only on struggling through a webbing that is warm and viscous. When she breaks through she is a young girl again, afire with projects, belted with emotions. She is in a field that is dark-edged with forest, and she is staring, pole-axed with astonishment, as the forest undulates as if in readiment to break free. She is running towards the forest when her father appears. Her true father, John-Before. He tips back his Coke hat and grins. “Don’t you polka-dance with the Devil like I did, Leah-Lou. Best you stop now, you hear.”

  Leah wakes, hours later, to a bell-clear mind. I shall stop, Pa, she thinks, and vows to God and the spirits to never again overindulge in stimulants, alcohol, or soporifics of any kind. She will henceforth drink only tea and coffee and the occasional glass of watered wine. She will order her sisters to also cease overindulging. Surely with some firm encouragement they will be happy to do so.

  That night, Leah sleeps well for the first time in days. Come early morning she finds Calvin in the dining room. “Leah! You’ve rallied. I’m so glad of it,” he says after much throat clearing.

  “My pardon? Ah, yes, I am a grand sight better. Tip and top of the scales, thank the spirits.”

  She is layering her sweet roll with butter and quince jam when Isaac rushes in. He brandishes a telegram. Tells her in breathless detail of Chauncey Burr’s latest nefarious attack.

  “He is slandering you directly now. He calls thee, forgive me, a woman of notoriously bad character. I have telegrammed Cleveland. It is too dangerous to keep your engagement. And Ruth and her …” Isaac’s voice trails off, his gentle face terrained with worry.

  “It might well be dangerous. Indeed, I might expire under all the gross scrutiny but, dear Isaac, you know that I must confront this horrid Burr, and now.”

  “But our friends there have put him under bonds in your name and—”

  “And that is why I must go. Our friends cannot face him alone.”

  Calvin starts to say something, wisely changes his words to a cough.

  “And Isaac, do fetch one of your lovely tonics for our Calvin. Honestly, I can barely hear him talk these days.”

  Four days later Leah steps onto the Cleveland docks. Fine-bonneted ladies jostle each other to take her hands in greeting. Whiskered gentlemen bow. Behind Leah, Calvin waits along with Leah’s sister Maria and Maria’s son, Charlie, who is all of three and has the disposition of a badly trained terrier. Leah insisted Maria accompany her, having come to realize that Calvin is not a suitable sole escort, not given the way he presses her shawl about her, or gazes at her, or utters her name at every turn like some incantatory charm.

  While Calvin unloads their baggage, Leah surveys the countenances before her. She senses not a whit of disrepute. Still, something is amiss. She shrugs off her concern, however, once the greeters thank her for opening the portals to the spirit world, once they express horror over Reverend Burr’s slander, his mountebank shows. They say nothing of Ruth Culver’s accusations.

  One lady cries, “You’re calm as a clock. Why, I’d be having hysterics if I was you!”

  Another declares she’d have her husband challenge Burr to a duel.

  A third, the finest dressed, says, “Violence solves little. You must publish a rebuttal against this Mr. Burr. Destroy him with pen and ink.”

  Leah holds up her gloved hand. “If you ladies had passed through one half the abuse I have, you would not wonder that I am personally quite indifferent to all my enemies may say against me.” At this, a gust of wind peels wide Leah’s bonnet, making a comic flower of her face. She swats the brim back in place. “Shall we make haste? The weather is refusing its co-operation.”

  The group leads her to the waiting coach. Maria and Charlie follow close behind. Calvin stays at the dock’s edge to grapple with their luggage. A valise tips and Calvin lunges to save it from the waters, then vanishes from Leah’s view. She gasps with relief when she sees his silhouette standing victorious, valise in hand.

  “You looked so worried when I fell,” Calvin says later, and chuckles hoarsely. They are in their Dunham house rooms, refreshing themselves before the first callers arrive. Maria and Charlie are napping despite the wagons and coaches rattling below, despite the muffled hubbub in the tavern alongside. The storm has retreated and the spring day has turned clement.

  Leah looks up from the secretary. She has just finished a letter and is searching out a blotter. “The lily box, dear Calvin, honestly, it might well have plummeted into the depths. What would we have done then?”

  “But I was guarding it closely, Leah, like always,” Calvin says, his voice tetchy, and more nasal than usual.

  “All I meant, my dear, was that if the box is lost, then we are lost.”

  Calvin sighs and pushes a curl out his eye. Leah supposes he is hands
ome, even as his older self ghosts itself upon his young man’s features. In twenty years his generous mouth will be a slash, his square jaw pouched with fat. Think of him thus, Leah tells herself as she straightens the complicated ruffling on her gown of teal and peach, as Calvin presses himself up with both hands to answer the ringing of the caller-bell.

  The caller, their first in Cleveland, is Mr. Joel Tiffany. He is a lawyer, a spirit believer, an abolitionist. Has a pompadour of dark hair and a profile chiselled to a wedge. He is shortly joined by Mr. John Gray, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Except for a white shirt and collar, Mr. Gray’s suit is entirely of black, as if life were fit only for mourning. These singular shaded “ditto” suits are the latest fashion, and a dull one of which Leah does not approve at all.

  She pours the tea. Tells Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Gray how Katherina and Margaretta will be arriving in Cleveland soon. Tells of all the remarkable manifestations, and how baffling they are. “And I have been assured,” she stresses, “that neither of you gentlemen are the sort who attend gossip and lies, nor the jealousies of distant kinfolk such as that Ruth Culver, who is not truly kin, but related by marriage.”

  Mr. Gray and Mr. Tiffany shift nervously at the mention of Ruth, begin their platitudes. Leah holds up her hand. “I appreciate your concerns, and I apologize, but the matter needed to be spoken of. I do so hate when the unsaid lingers in the room like so much cheap cigar smoke.”

  The learned men agree to this. Express admiration for her candour, her expressive turns of phrase. Leah gives her dimpled smile, then asks if the learned gentlemen have any opinions on the matter of the spirits.

  The learned Mr. Tiffany surmises that the spirits have been awaiting this epoch of discovery and invention. “For the human mind is at its zenith and is as capable of understanding complex phenomena as it shall ever be.”

  The learned man Mr. Gray surmises that the spirits use the forms of the Fox women as a catalyst.

  Leah looks abashed.

  Mr. Gray apologizes, red-faced. “Use, that is, their inner forms. Their superior feeling … or something similar.”

  Mr. Tiffany clears his throat. “I regret to report that some are being infected by Burr’s slander and by the, ah, report of this Ruth Culver, which—”

  “Ruth Culver is clearly in Burr’s clutches, and his wallet,” Leah interjects. “I surely cannot guess what other method he might have used to seduce her … mind.”

  Mr. Gray says in a rush, “Burr has posed the risible idea that you and your sisters have a machinery concealed about … about your person, that is, your apparel. He has said it must be a great convenience to wear such, ah, concealing skirts.”

  Mr. Tiffany lifts his hands in resignation at Mr. Gray’s untoward talk.

  Leah smiles graciously. “Then he should don skirts and petticoats and know the delight of such womanly apparel for himself.”

  Mr. Tiffany chuckles. Mr. Gray, emboldened, continues. “He suggested, or else someone did, that this machinery has an intelligence to properly answer the questions, be they posed orally, or solely with the mind.”

  “What a silly suggestion. A computing machine such as that would be so large it wouldn’t fit under a teepee, never mind our skirts.”

  Mr. Tiffany smiles in wonder. “Mrs. Fish, you are indeed tremendously intelligent. Just as everyone says.”

  “In truth, I have never thought of myself that way,” Leah says. She is not feigning modesty. She has, indeed, never considered herself as intelligent, tremendously or otherwise. It is just that Leah has found, to her surprise, that most people are quite stupid. “Though I must say, dear Joel … may I call you Joel? You see, I have been among the Godly Quakers so much that I have taken on their ways.”

  Mr. Tiffany says he would be delighted if she called him Joel. It seems then as if they’ve known each other for years.

  “To continue, I must say that your support puts you in the company of many gracious people of the highest standing … Calvin?”

  On cue Calvin, who has been sitting apart from them, fetches the lily box and opens it to show a thick sheaf of letters. He reads aloud excerpts from this admirable gentleman and that exceptional lady.

  “… without doubt the raps were not made by any human form.”

  “My life was changed. I am filled with joy at Eternity’s proof …”

  “The Fox ladies have the highest most reputable characters.”

  “Never have I met a woman of such noble intent as Mrs. Fish …”

  Calvin now reads out a letter from Mrs. Patcheon of the cracking knees. Says how she is eager to hear the spirits her own self. How the Fox sisters’ raps are nothing like the slight and obvious sounds that she can make. Next come the engraved medals. Calvin hands them round. People ascend heavenly ladders. Spirits comfort the living. Children, a good many, are grouped in clouds, touched by rays. They are smiling. Laughing. The medals bear inscriptions thanking Leah and her sisters for all they have done. Last read is a letter from “anonymous” confirming that Mrs. Ruth Culver was paid by Reverend Burr for her lies, most likely with thirty silvered coins.

  Calvin tucks everything back in the box, his hands lingering on the carving of the entwined lilies.

  “Impressive,” Mr. Gray says.

  “Such testimonies will stand in any court,” Mr. Tiffany adds.

  A good hour later Calvin reads aloud the letters again, this time to an audience of some twenty callers, callers who have been arriving in a constant stream and now fill every corner of the Dunham suite. They murmur approval when Calvin finishes reading. Some even clap.

  Leah stirs a fourth sugar chip into her coffee. Without her young sisters to counsel, she can pay close attention to her callers, closer than usual. The callers are nothing remarkable. Are similar, even exact, to so many other clients she has lately met. Leah puts down her spoon. That is it. The sameness. That is what troubled her on the dock. Oh, the names change and the countenances and the clothing. But not greatly. Rather as if the same actors are tricked out to play many characters at a boardwalk show. She seeks out Calvin’s face. He is not an automaton with a nodding head and stock phrases of agreeable sentiments. He is real. Actual. She reminds herself to chide him for reading the letters as if by rote. To add more verve and steel. Reminds herself to never be alone with him in any intimate space.

  The next evening, Leah walks through the Cleveland streets alone. She wears a borrowed shawl of Mrs. Dunham’s so as to appear as a woman so ordinary she does not require an evening escort. Calvin feels poorly, as does Maria’s little Charlie, which means Maria also has an excuse not to be useful. Leah stops at the entrance to the Melodeon Hall. The “Reverend” Burr is drawn overlarge, his thick arms held wide. Three women, all with dark hair and stupid expressions, cower from him. Their Fox tails stick out from under their skirts. The name is unfortunate, Leah has to admit, and is tempted to kick the placard to Kingdom Come.

  She checks her pocket watch. The show will carry on for another hour yet. She walks down the street to the hotel where this Burr and his brother are staying. The lobby smells of cigars and carbolic and camphene. Timing in life, as in music, is everything, she reminds herself, and so she waits and observes until she marks out a likely candidate: The head waiter. He is an older man with a jaded countenance, a weary stoop. Leah watches as he cautiously navigates the stairs down from the guest rooms, a dome-covered tray in his gloved hands. He has been in the suites of the Burr brothers at least once a day, he tells her when she asks after these celebrated men. He carries meals up to them after their lecture-demonstrations.

  “The lectures that seek to discredit the Fox sisters? What gentleman would speak in a public forum against a genteel widow and two innocent girls?” Leah muses. “The ladies cannot engage him in the public arena. They cannot call him to satisfaction. He is taking supreme advantage.”

  The head waiter agrees. In his day, Burr would have been called out to duel for his impertinence. “Mr. Burr, he does tip,
mind … Ah, but not as handsome as you, ma’am,” he says, and tucks away the folded bill Leah has pressed upon him.

  The next morning, promptly after breakfast, Leah offers the head waiter’s report to Mr. Gray at the offices of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She next calls upon Mr. Tiffany the lawyer. Tells him that since no gentleman has yet challenged Burr to a duel (to quote the head waiter) it appears the law is left to defend her honour.

  An editor and a lawyer. What a perfect duo to have onside, Leah thinks, and cannot recall ever being so satisfied.

  CHAPTER 19.

  “Thank you for this,” my patient said as she took the pot of Mrs. Howe’s Neroli and Rose Miracle Hand Cream. “But what-ever is the occasion?”

  “No occasion, duck. It’s just a little gift. A little gift, I’ve found, often cheers my indigents in their last days. And besides, one should look one’s best when meeting one’s Maker.”

  “Well, yes.” She peered at the lid, then indicated Doctor Noble’s Tonic For All Female Complaints (which was the only laudanum brew I could find that day). “Why, there she is, and there again.”

  The images on the hand-cream lid and the tonic label were indeed much alike, were of tall and broad-shouldered young women with plumped-high hair, buxom hour-glass figures and narrow skirts raised to the ankles. We chatted for a time about this new, distinctly American female, by which I mean modern, the sort who goes to college and picks out her own husband and plays tennis and rides those bicycles and determines her own fate.

  My patient said, “Nor would she think it the least romantic if a suitor took her to a cemetery to view her own potential grave.”

  “I suppose not, but it is a practical idea and does prove the suitor is considering the longer draw. Did your Elisha—”

  “He will present when I want,” she said, like a surly child of a sudden. “Not a moment sooner.”

  THEY SLIP INTO THE DUNHAM HOUSE unannounced and unexpected: Maggie, Katie and Mrs. Lemira Kedzie, their newest confidante. Lemira is thinner than when the girls first met her at Amy and Isaac’s house three years ago. She still wears her black hair in a high topknot, however. And she still reminds Maggie of a wood-pecking bird, what with her considerable nose, her constant nodding. They are all three still in their travelling clothes: sturdy shoes, cottage cloaks and half-veiled bonnets, the better to remain unnoticed, for the moment, among the nearly thirty callers who crowd the Dunham suite.