The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  Webb Union Hotel, Philadelphia

  14 October, 1852

  Dearest Margaretta,

  How are the spirits and their beloved mortals—that is to say, our clients—faring in Philadelphia? I am sorry for the disagreement we had just before your departure. You were quite right to take Mother and embark on a personal tour in response to the requests from the many upstanding believers in that gracious city. I merely hope that you and mother are keeping up with all requests and scheduling and the arduous business of it all.

  Now, if I may be so bold: Do remember to keep the disrespectful and disbelieving away from your door. And do not neglect to take your morning breaks for study—you may need secondary skills one day should your spirit powers falter. And, most importantly, do not allow any young bachelor sorts to patronize your sittings more than twice. Such men are not interested in amorphous spirits. They only feign interest so that they may ogle your more corporeal charms, as I am sure you realize now you have turned the mature age of nineteen and are, as you said so clearly before you left “able to manage my own d____ self without harping from you, or from that busy-bird Lemira Kedzie, or from anyone at all.” I agree completely. When we sent Lemira packing out of Cleveland, I feared that in her disgruntlement she might peck our eyes out with that sharp, lengthy nose of hers.

  Another item: Do not worry on how Katie and I are faring in New York. We have Calvin and Alfie to help us and I am considering taking on a personal maid. It must be said that moving here, as we all agreed together this summer past, has been best for our entire family. The sit-for-raps, as the New Yorkers have so jargoned them, are all the rage and our brownstone boasts lines of clients each and every day, and these clients are often of the wealthiest and most upstanding circles. Indeed Mr. Partridge, the match magnate, is chanced to become one of our most faithful clients, but only, I suspect, if Katherina can see fit to bar the spirits of his workers, whose constant complaints about the phossy jaw are becoming alike a tedious song. Might you join me, Margaretta, in convincing our sister that West 26th is our private home, not a Union Hall? She seems particularly concerned about the spirit of a young boy who died in a factory mishap, an explosion, I believe. He reminds her, she says, of our little nephew Charlie, though I cannot see how, as little Charlie is quite alive thanks to me.

  Do write me as promptly as you are able. I look forward to your return. Though your affection is an every-changing tune, my affection is a constant one, as is my desire that we stay in harmony of purpose and mind, even when apart.

  I am sealing this now for Calvin to post. My clients are arriving and they are asking I play The Vale Of Our Own Genesee, a lovely, melancholy song that does remind me of Rochester and the unforgettable times we all of us had there, together.

  All love and kisses to Mother

  Your faithful sister, Leah

  Maggie sets aside Leah’s letter on the tortoiseshell tray. The owner of the Webb hotel, a gimlet-eyed man with slick-curled hair, brought this tray up to Maggie himself, along with a breakfast of devilled eggs and champagne and an invitation to a Philadelphian soiree that Maggie turned down with the aloof politeness she has honed over the last year in response to all manner of male impertinence.

  Maggie takes a drink of champagne, says to the letter, “Now, Leah, as for that Mr. Partridge, I can only hope Kat does pry an apology out of him.” After all, Maggie thinks, Leah was the one who went on about the “greater good” in Cleveland. And this, along with a recent influx of aggrieved spirits has made both Maggie and Katie realize that the needs of the living and dead do not always match up like a pair of store-bought shoes. The living most often want succour, yes. But the dead? They often want justice these days, or at least contrition from the living, an apology or two. And, really, Maggie wonders, why can’t Mr. Partridge just apologize to that burned-up boy, even if he wasn’t to blame for the boy’s death? An apology would show that the man has heart, that he is capable of insight and humility, that he is more than just a moneyed prat. And then, who knows? That poor little ghost might just leave him be.

  She finishes her champagne and her devilled oysters, then rises and looks about the table for a napkin; none are in sight, and so she discreetly wipes her fingers on the tablecloth instead. She would have used Leah’s letter for the task, but her sister’s writing paper is too heavy and thick for wiping. Maggie smiles ruefully at this thought, then opens up her book of German verbs. Her first clients are not due until the afternoon, and thus she can enjoy some peace and quiet here at this elegant suite, the bridal suite, as it happens. “Not that a lady need be a bride, with a groom or husband or, well, I mean. Ah, your key!” Such is what the hotel owner stuttered when Maggie and her mother booked in two weeks ago. He roved his gimlet-eyes about Maggie’s person, slicked down his already slick hair. He clearly had no idea where to slot Maggie in his understanding of women. She socializes with upstanding citizens, but she is not a member of high society. She “works” and earns money, but she is not a lowly governess or factory girl. She is celebrated and applauded, but she is not a brazen actress or chorus girl. Oh, Maggie could see him silently puzzling out the conundrum. She didn’t care, not much anywise. She is accustomed to dwelling, as the spirits do, in some nebulous, unnamed stratum.

  Maggie looks up as Mother, accompanied by several whom-evers, bustles into the suite. “They’ve just come on a social call, Margaret dear. They know we’re not taking clients until after one o’clock, don’t they?”

  They do, and are happy to wait so that they are the first in line to question their dead relations.

  “I’ll ring that nice owner and ask him to bring us up some more oysters and tea cakes,” Mother tells Maggie. “Yes, and you continue studying your French.”

  “Not French, I gave up on French,” Maggie reminds her, and opens her book and shivers in her dress, an out-of-season white muslin trimmed with illusion (she had meant to wear her brown sateen, but it had been soiled by a claret spill).

  “And no more champagne, Maggie Fox. Leah says it wreaks havoc on your constitution, doesn’t she?”

  “All the time,” Maggie grumbles, and takes up the book and sits by the suite’s one arched window, in the nimbus of its October light. Warmed now, she peels the undersleeves of her white dress off the pale length of her forearms, then forces her attention to her German verbs, determined to find a pattern within their shifting, unpredictable rules for the past, present and future tenses. Werde sein. Wirst sein. Wird sein.

  The air thins.

  She does not look up. Spies him, instead, out of her eye’s corner. He stands in the doorway as if pole-axed—a slight, handsome man with startlingly blue eyes and extravagant whiskers, and dark hair that hangs to his collar in bohemian fashion. He is obviously of high station, given his fine, all-black suit. And he is obviously staring at her. Maggie often endures such blatant masculine stares; thus she has taken to considering her “self” as dwelling in a private room. She will exit this room when she chooses, no sooner. But this man’s stare is a battering ram. Maggie looks out the arched window to the Philadelphian street, its squeezed-high houses, the red-gold palette of its few trees. The sky is an impossible cerulean blue; the same shade, she realizes, as the eyes of this presumptuous man.

  The man apologizes to Maggie’s mother. Claims he has made a mistake. He is looking for the spirit raisers.

  “You’ve found them, haven’t you?” Mother says. “We are they. Or is it ‘them’? Anywise, we’re not taking anyone till after one. And who are you, if I may ask, sir?”

  “Forgive me,” he says, and utters his name. Maggie still refuses him attention. She turns back to her book of German verbs. The sun warms her neck, her spine. Meanwhile, the whom-evers in the room exclaim and gather closer to this man, this Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. He has no need to boast. The whom-evers do it for him.

  “His father is Judge Kane, and wasn’t his mother a famous beauty in her time?” asks a woman with a blithe, high voice.

 
; “She was Miss Jane Leiper. Lafayette escorted her to a dress ball when he toured here. She went as Mary Queen of Scots. Everyone knows this,” says the usual know-all man found in every congregate of souls.

  “Wasn’t the doctor in the Mexican war? I heard he was sent on a secret mission of some kind to get rid of General Pot, or was it Scots?”

  “Scots. And it’s hardly secret if everyone knows of it,” says Know-All.

  “And hasn’t he explored the seven continents?” continues Blithe Voice. “And didn’t he climb a Chinese volcano of some sort and meet, too, the heathen King of Dahomey? And wasn’t he the one who cured the Sultan of Whampoa, or was it Goa? And, yes, that was it, he nearly died in a fall when he was trying to scale a statue in Karnack.”

  “It was the fall out of the barge on the Nile that nearly killed him,” Know-All declares. “And it was not a Chinese volcano, it was in Talel. Is no one listening to me?”

  “And isn’t he returning to the Arctic to find Sir Franklin, this time with his own ship under his own command?” Blithe-Voice asks, clearly not listening at all.

  “My, my, but that Arctic!” puts in an elderly female voice. “Such a terrible place! Imagine an ice-wagon the size of a continent!”

  “Not his own ship—Grinnell’s ship, the Advance,” Know-All says, exasperated. “Henry Grinnell is sponsoring the second expedition, just as he did the first. The papers are full of it. One only has to read them.”

  “My, my, but is there anything the man cannot discover?” Elderly-Voice wonders.

  Maggie lays a red ribbon in the pages. Closes the book with a sigh.

  Mother says to the whom-evers, “My daughter doesn’t read those vulgar newspapers, does she? I don’t allow it. She has her studies to attend to.” She turns to Dr. Kane. “We can’t make exceptions. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Forgive me, of course,” he says. Then presses and cajoles, and soon enough, Maggie finds herself seated at the table with this Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. Mother and several whom-evers are seated with them. Maggie promptly forgets about their presence, her attention caught up with this celebrated man.

  “I wish to know of my brother,” Elisha says, though in a bored manner, as if he doesn’t wish to in the least.

  “Do we need the alphabet board, Maggie? Do we?” Mother asks.

  “No, no,” she replies, at which the knocks sound on the table, then the walls. Maggie cants her head towards Elisha, “He is in Heaven, your dear Willie.”

  “You know his name? Impressive.”

  “I do not know it.”

  “Thus he is in Heaven. Capital to have the intelligence. And how old is he, in Eternity?”

  “Fifteen. He hopes you are proud of his death. He tried for a good death, a brave one, so that your mother would not be so grieved.”

  Elisha studies his cuffs.

  Knocks sound along the floor, an interior rain. “And he says he’s forgiven you completely,” Maggie adds.

  “But I did not, that is, I did not apologize.”

  “There’s no need now, really, it’s clear you’re sorry.”

  “Miss Fox. I came here to merely, merely to … no matter. Now I must—”

  “He loves you. Willie. He knows you did all you could to save him.”

  Elisha pinions her with his blue gaze. “You are a riddle of a girl, Miss Fox. Yet this much is also obvious: this is no life for you.”

  Elisha comes again, this time with his colleagues—men of learning and high standing—bearded and amused, professional discoverers all. They don’t worry Maggie. But Elisha? It is as if he has already discovered her.

  He says to his colleagues, “She may help us find Sir Franklin. Then we needn’t brave towers of ice and days of endless night. We need merely sail the Advance to the spot and bid him a capital day.” Elisha says this seriously, yet he gives Maggie the slightest smile. Maggie gives the slightest smile back. Feels a grand relief. He is not pursuing her, then, not in that fashion.

  And the sum of the spirits’ knowledge about Sir Franklin? He may be alive. Or. He may be dead.

  “Much like any of us,” Elisha muses. During a break for tea he passes Maggie a note: Were you ever in love?

  Ask the spirits, she writes back, suppressing a laugh.

  Is this him? The one she has imagined so often of late? He is thirty to her nineteen, true. But he is handsome and though not overly tall he gusts with energy and confidence. And he is heroic, though not, it must be said, a true hero yet. That will come when he finds Sir Franklin. When he conquers the Arctic for America. Maggie knows this because she does read the newspapers, though always once Mother is asleep. Mostly she reads the obituaries, but also the Society Page, and the news both local and foreign, there being much to keep up with in these hectic times.

  Maggie’s outings with Elisha throughout November involve numerous carriage rides about Philadelphia and its environs. For chaperones they have Maggie’s mother and Elisha’s valet, William Morton, a ruddy Irish youth with pea-green eyes.

  Elisha tells Maggie of the fever that nearly killed him at sixteen. “The physician said that with my injured heart I should never reach thirty and so my father advised me that if I must die young, I should die in the harness. I couldn’t agree with a sentiment more.” Elisha strokes his jaw. “But God, I despise being ill. I want to leap out of my skin, to not waste a day, and this because each day has been given me for some greater purpose. I feel that as a certainty, Miss Maggie. Did you know that I am a veritable connoisseur of fever? I’ve survived rice fever, Nile fever, rheumatoid fever, septic fever even, after the lance wound in Mexico. Sometimes I think of Death as a sly uncle. Pocket watch in hand. Tapping with his cane. ‘Get on with it, boy! No time to waste. Get yourself a name!’ Any second he’ll snap his watch shut, and … it’s not fair. I’ve more to do than most men. I do. It’s why I carry on with five, six projects at once. I feel like one of those Indian deities with their many arms whirling about and brandishing tools and weapons and, ah, forgive me, death is a tiresome topic, let us speak of life.”

  And he does talk Life, henceforth. Talks of what he will do, not of what has been. Doesn’t boast overly, as Maggie presumed he would, of his adventures abroad. And when she talks, he attends her every word. And every day he writes her letters, even on the days when they meet.

  On this particular day he writes: You are a strange mixture of child and woman, of simplicity and cunning, of passionate impulse and extreme self control.

  Maggie peers into a looking glass. He sees me thus, but am I thus? It is an odd, disjointed feeling to be seen so differently from one’s own perceptions. Cunning? With passionate impulses? He makes her sound so intriguing. She has a modest wit, a decent penmanship, a face prettier than some. She knows that. But she does not have Leah’s musical gifts, nor Katie’s ethereal beauty. And besides talking to the dead, she can’t claim supernatural talents either, unlike Leah, who sees thoughts captioned over people’s heads. Unlike Katie, who seems to hear the utterances of insensate objects. Unlike Mother even, with her knowledge of the old magic, its spells and remedies.

  Maggie puts down the looking glass. Leastways Elisha sees her as something more than a nervous battery, a blank conduit to the Other Side. A witch. In time, he might see her as a nice, ordinary girl, caught up in extraordinary circumstances, which is how she sees herself.

  At the beginning of December, Elisha departs for New York for several days, on exploring business, he explains. Maggie now has time to write to Katie of this admirer, of their outings, of his presents—white camellias, white handkerchiefs, a white ermine stole so well dressed the creature seems to breath at her neck. All this white because of the white dress she wore when he first beheld her sitting by the arched window of the Webb hotel. “And you were haloed by golden light, alike the spirit of light herself,” he told her. “And so raptly attentive to your book of French poetry.”

  “Oh, it was a German one, a manual, on verbs.”

  “An ir
relevance.”

  5 December, 1852

  Dear Kat,

  … and Elisha is so interesting! And such fun. He can do impersonations even better than you or me. He did one of a fussy old lady that had me in stitches. You’ll just adore him!

  Maggie writes his name slowly, twice dipping her pen to ensure the name is dark and bold and lavish. Elisha Kent Kane. Before she can post the letter, however, she receives one from Katie. It is much more coherent than usual, but then Katie, like Maggie, has so improved her speech and deportment and mature habitudes that it could never be guessed that their father is an out-of-work blacksmith, their place of origin a back-country hamlet where the dominion of night is still respected and feared.

  11 December, 1852

  Dearest Old Mag,

  A very pleasant gentleman named Dr. Kane called on Leah and me. He said he met you and Ma in Philadelphia, and he has offered to escort me from the railway to the Camden steamboat and then all the way back to Philadelphia to see you. Oh, I can barely wait! I want every detail!

  How has Elisha managed it? Maggie wonders. As if he can be everywhere at once. As if he is one boot step in front of her.

  Four days later, and Morton, Elisha’s valet, opens the carriage door for Maggie, Mother and Elisha, and they rattle-tattle out of Philadelphia along the newly laid macadam. Elisha has not yet told them where they are bound, only that it is a place near to his heart’s heart. The mid-December sun is glaucous and unseasonably warm. The tattered snow shows its under-green.

  Elisha wraps his overcoat over Maggie’s shoulders. “Your delicate form! Such wintry air!”

  Maggie decides against telling him that as children she and Katie used frosted windows for writing slates; that they were quite accustomed to wintry air, both inside and out. Get Gone was what they scratched on the kitchen panes one frigid Hydesville morning a few weeks before the peddler came to them. Their mother gasped in terror at sight of the ghostly script, and this was of keen amusement to both Maggie and Katie. Recalling this and other past collusions, Maggie wishes again that Katie could have joined them today, but her sister was exhausted from her journey to Philadelphia by steamboat and rail and wanted only to curl up with a toddy and then a mulled wine. “Just give me all the hoary old details,” she told Maggie.