The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  The studio clerk gestures Maggie in, his smile too encouraging by far. Maggie pats at her tears, composes her face, then escapes away into a haberdashery, where she snatches up a pair of white kid gloves. Elisha will approve of these, she thinks. He likes white stuff. And he loves me. I know he does.

  The clerk packages up the kid gloves, and then a white lace collar that Maggie adds at the last instance. She does not ask the price of either. What lady expresses an interest in money? What gentleman would cheat her? The clerk eyes her with a bemused curiosity, at which Maggie realizes that many in the arcade are eyeing her in the same fashion. Her cheeks tingle. Her breath grows short. She feels indelicate, coarse, noted. She rarely goes out alone and she certainly never goes shopping alone. She always has her mother as chaperone, or Leah, or Amy. Or Katie at the least. Someone.

  As it happens, the gloves and lace cost nearly all the money in her reticule. Maggie did not intend to spend so much; she never does. The brief satisfaction from her purchases vanishes completely once she is outside again. The leaden skies threaten more rain and for protection she has only a crocheted shawl, a cap decked with silk flowers, and her useless house-shoes. Not pattens. No bonnet. No cloak. And why is she wearing this dress? Yellow with black stripes? Double damn-it-all, she thinks, I look a fat bee. I look mawkish and old. Why can’t I ever make a right decision?

  Get yourself on back to Mrs. Sullivan’s, she orders herself, and keeps her eyes down and walks with resolve, as if she knows where she is going; but there are few signposts and soon Maggie is lost in this half-built city amid the marshes. Wasn’t Washington burned down by the Canadians and British some forty years past? For what reason, though? She resolves to ask Elisha, even though he has said that ladies shouldn’t trouble their heads with politics.

  Elisha.

  What matters if he writes to Kat and says he’s going to buy her a set of Honiton lace, too? Maggie thinks. He can buy her a pasteboard crown for her little head, for all I care. What matters if Kat won’t show me his latest letter? He loves me, not her.

  She halts, bewildered. The street ends abruptly: no path, no outbuildings, and nothing but a marsh ahead. The brick buildings are vacant. The street adjacent peters to nothing. Just another marshy field, a distant forest, though here at least is a sign for a dry goods, another for a barber-dentist.

  A man peers suspiciously at her from out a doorway. A woman hangs a red rug over a balcony and flails at it, as if punishing it for some ruggish crime. Maggie can hear wheels rattling somewhere close, but nothing moving in this particular street. Where are the children running aside their hoops? The dogs? The pigs? The beggars and shoe-shines and hawkers of half-rotten vegetables? Where are the dustbins? The horse manure? The area does not seem deserted, exactly. Rather, it’s as if it has never been inhabited. Is more like a theatre prop of a town, but without play actors, without an audience, or imagination even. The streets are named for letters: H Street, E Street, and so forth. The crosswise streets are numbered. Such planning should make finding one’s way an easy task. Instead it is alike some puzzle designed to strengthen the brain. Or a card game where one must keep count. Maggie has never done well at card games nor puzzles, though Leah always has.

  She stops. Tries to orient herself. Elisha warned her about Washington. God, but she should have attended him better! “You will be lucky to find a true gentleman in all the place” was what he said. Warned her of senators and their vulgarity, told her of one senator who had killed his favourite hound with a shovel. Penwit? Fenworth? She often has trouble recalling details when she is in Elisha’s whirlwind.

  Just as Maggie turns up C Street, a black dog lunges for her. She shrieks and runs towards a larger cross street, her skirts lifted with both hands like some washerwoman. Stumbles over a carriage block. She is sobbing and furious. At herself mostly: Here she saunters to the Underworld and back nearly every day, yet in this backwater town she is totally lost. And where in damnation is the Maggie who braved that hell-hound at the Hydesville orchard only six years past? That Maggie wouldn’t have been afraid of some mongrel.

  Behind her the dog twists and yelps at the end of his chain. He is knee-high. Riddled with sores.

  An old woman detaches herself from a wall and limps over to Maggie. She wears a coal-scuttle bonnet and a dress of faded calico and carries an overlarge basket. She must work under fierce suns, for her skin is scoured and browned. “Poor miss, you look as if you’ve lost your way.”

  “I have! Thank you. Do you know the way to Mrs. Sullivan’s boarding house? I seem to have misplaced it.” Maggie smiles.

  The old lady smiles back. Her eyes are a clouded green.

  “Sure, but you can wander these streets till time’s end. I’ll be a help, then.” Her voice hints of some foreign place. Ireland? England? An old place, surely; she has that sort of gravitas. She grips Maggie’s forearm as if to find the bone beneath. Guides her now down this street, now that. Walks fast for an old woman with a limp. Her basket bump-bumps her thigh. She smells of onion, tilled earth, peppermint.

  Here is Mrs. Sullivan’s at last. On F Street, as it happens. Maggie vows to attend to addresses better in the future.

  “Will you be all right, then?” the old woman asks. One green eye roams over Maggie’s face, the other stares down the street.

  “Most certainly. You’re kind, very kind,” Maggie says, and looks askance.

  The woman taps her pupil with her fingernail. “It’s glass.”

  “My, but it looks real. Completely.” Maggie thanks her and hurries into the boarding house, certain the one eye is fixed on her.

  “Maggie Fox! Where have you been?” Mother Margaret exclaims over the manly din emanating from the parlour. “We were so worried, weren’t we? General Hamilton is here and a passel of senators and you’ve kept us all waiting, haven’t you? Did you forget? Did you?”

  “As if it matters,” Maggie mutters. “There’s no end to the parade.”

  “What parade? I don’t hear it, do I?”

  “Nope.” Maggie tucks her package out of view behind the hallstand. Her mother dislikes her spending overmuch, which means spending at all.

  “Laws, then … Come now. Come, will you?” Mother Margaret takes Maggie’s arm and Maggie enters again into the parade of the curious and the grieved; and on this day, as it happens, the presumptuous and the rude.

  “Ah, the vision of Miss Maggie herself!” exclaims one General Hamilton, looking her over, hem to collar. Around Hamilton soldiers stand resplendent in their gold-buttoned coats, in their sky-blue breeches sided with dress swords that whack the bric-a-brac. “I designed the uniforms myself,” General Hamilton tells Maggie. His face is craggy and genial, his epaulets the size of small wings.

  Maggie sips her hot brandy. Blinks back tears. Katie casts her a beseeching glance. She looks a picture in her pearly gown. Maggie wishes again that she had worn something besides her yellow and black striped dress. I look old and stupid, she thinks, and not a bit like Kat.

  “What could be troubling your pretty mind, Miss Maggie?” General Hamilton inquires.

  “I lost my way. I don’t like Washington at all. It’s a horrid city altogether. Like, like the labyrinth in that Greek story.”

  “Now, now, Washington is as easy to navigate as a draught’s board.” General Hamilton drops his voice. “Unless, that is, one is having an affaire de coeur and is off on a secret rendezvous, and not with a bullheaded man, of course, but a man of more modern structure.”

  The brandy pools on Maggie’s tongue.

  General Hamilton leans in conspiratorially. “I heard you’ve stolen away the heart of our brave Dr. Kane. Indeed, it is all the talk.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes, ‘indeed,’ and I’ve heard further talk that you are to be married before he leaves for the Arctic.” The general crosses his legs with surprising delicacy given they are thick as trees. “I hear so many things. I’m a confidant, you know, in this gossipy town. I’ve heard
, for example, that our first lady, Mrs. Pierce, will be coming to you, most privately, of course. She is inconsolable and our president-in-waiting hasn’t been sober for weeks. That Benjamin was their last child left. Did you know there shan’t be an inaugural ball! Imagine that? Well, it was most untimely, and most unfortunate the Pierces were witness. Train wrecks are never short of terrible. Indeed, the iron horse is best avoided when a trusty carriage can be found … Ah, are these cookies?” He takes one from Mrs. Sullivan’s offered plate. Mrs. Sullivan simpers at the famously unmarried general.

  A man, thin and dandified, eyes Maggie. “Miss Fox, were you not at the ball of Mrs. Bachard’s? I’ve a bet that you were there.”

  “I was not. I do not attend balls, sir.” She looks to the general for assistance with this impertinent man, but the general seems fascinated by the brocade on the man’s breeches.

  Dandy-Man sniffs. “If it was not yourself, then it was certainly your, uh, what is the word?”

  Maggie stands up, upsetting the general’s plate of cookies. She ignores their chuckling, helps herself to a cup of punch at the sideboard. Above the sideboard hangs a collection of silhouette portraits. Some of the portraits look recently done. Where do you find a silhouette-cutter these days? Maggie wonders, what with ambrotypes and daguerreotypes being all the rage. And why would anyone want themselves rendered as a mere outline? As a dark, blank space?

  Katie comes up next to her. Maggie ignores her.

  “I could just kill myself to get away from these awful fellows. I mean, really, couldn’t you? … Is that punch any good?”

  “Good enough,” Maggie mutters. Katie ladles herself a cupful. Looks up at the silhouettes. “I hate those. They don’t tell you a thing about a person, and I’m sorry, Mag. I am. Elisha wrote me just to, to, uh, fiddle-it, I don’t know. He said you were fickle. You fickle? Hah! Here.” She gives the letter to Maggie, whose eyes fasten on this passage, then that:

  Katie, the older you grow the more difficult it will be to liberate yourself from this thing … Maggie esteemed me too lightly … I shall not call, for I am a person of strong will.

  “Now, don’t be a worry-all,” Katie continues. “Your Mr. Intrigue will call on you. You’ve made a total conquest of him.”

  Maggie folds the letter away into her reticule. “Sorry, Kat, sorry for rushing off. I …” She pauses, then tells Katie of the old woman who guided her back to Mrs. Sullivan’s, of her glass eye, the click-click of her nail on the pupil. “She reminded me of … of him, that old peddler.”

  Katie frowns at her empty punch glass. “Pish, I don’t see how.”

  “She had a limp, like I said, and she carried that basket like it was everything in the world. And she smelled like he did.”

  “I don’t remember how he smelled.”

  “You must remember how he smelled. You talked about it for days after. I had to stuff your pillow with lavender to stop you complaining.”

  “You were lots older than me then. I was a child and children forget things.”

  “What are you jawing about? Much older ‘then.’ The difference in years between us hasn’t changed.”

  “Fiddle and damn! I haven’t forgotten. There. But I’d like to, and you’re not helping with your talk of that smelly old peddler. He was so mean. He deserved to be turned into a ghost, he did. You’re the one who said so.”

  “Hush,” Maggie whispers as the soldiers and senators look over.

  “I’m sorry, Mag, I am. I mean, what were we thinking? But it’s not as if we can change it. What’s done is done and here we are, and it’s not so bad.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And that old lady who got you back here, why she was just some old fuss-budget, not some, some—what’s the word?”

  “Doppelganger, it’s German,” Maggie says, thinking how Dandy-Man hadn’t been able to wrestle the word up either. “A fetch is what Ma would call it, I’d guess.”

  “That’s it. Well, those doppelganger-fetch things, they don’t always mean disaster, do they?”

  “You’ll have to ask Ma,” Maggie says, half in earnest.

  Mrs. Sullivan enters with a tray of Johnny Appleseed cake. Apples. Apples. There is no getting away from them. The peddler certainly couldn’t, not on the public road, nor at the Hydesville house once he caught up with Maggie and Katie there.

  “Come, girls, will you?” their mother calls. “The gentlemen are ready for you. And this is Senator Penworth.”

  Penworth. That was the one Elisha talked about.

  Gentlemen, hah! Maggie soon thinks as they sit round Mrs. Sullivan’s table with an assortment of senators and higher military sorts. Senator Penworth stares at Katie’s bodice and proclaims, “This is all a humbug but it is worth a dollar to sit in the sunlight of Miss Kate’s eyes!”

  Guffawing and knee-slaps. Mother Margaret croaks a protest that no one attends. Why would they? Maggie wonders. She looks like a harried scullery maid in her brown-stuff gown, her hands twisting in her apron.

  Dandy-Man pounds a minstrel tune on the parlour organ. Maggie sits cross-armed and sullen-faced at the table. She pushes up the rug with her foot as General Hamilton saunters to his seat. He stumbles. Looks mystified. Mother, beleaguered, tries again. “Sirs! You’ve come to ask questions of the spirits, haven’t you? Compose yourselves, will you? And behave as gentlemen. Please?”

  Poor Ma, Maggie thinks, a few years back she would never have spoken forcibly to those above her station, which means nearly everyone.

  The men smirk and dally and finally settle. One asks if ghosts are wanting the vote. Women were, why not ghosts? There is much laughing at this.

  A soldier whom-ever says, “I hear you ladies can manifest up ghosties that look like nymphs or pagan princesses. I hear you can see through their getups. That, I’d pay mightily to see! How about it?”

  The spirits do not dignify this with an answer, nor the next question from Dandy-Man: “Can these spirits be trained to come when called, like dogs? Because all this is taking a deuced long time.”

  Senator Penworth rattles the cuspidor with a well-aimed spit. “Hah, that brings to mind my favourite bitch what died not long ago. Call her up, will you please, ladies?”

  “Dogs have no souls, Penworth!” a young senator asserts.

  “This one did. She was smarter than most people, and I loved her like my own daughter.” Penworth pretends an aggrieved tone. “I move that we not support any Paradise that disallows dogs.”

  Cheers of “hear, hear” and such. More laughter. And then a sound alike a hammer blow, followed by five more blows. The table shudders and the glassware trembles. The room quiets. The men look at each other in astonishment.

  Maggie glowers at Senator Penworth. “That’s for every time you hit poor Clementine with a shovel. She’s furious you killed her and she’s coming back to haunt you snap-quick. She’ll rip you to bloody pieces while you sleep, just see if she doesn’t!”

  “I’ll be damned,” Penworth says. “And now how’d you know her name, you pretty minx?”

  “The spirits told her, who else?” Katie puts in.

  Penworth looks about. His friends are shrugging, half smiling. “Now, now,” he says. “I’d not meant to thwack Clementine so hard.”

  Maggie rises in a huff from the table. The men stand also, at least those who still can. Katie sits back and drinks her brandied coffee. Mother looks, of course, bewildered.

  “What say we take a roam about the White House, gentlemen,” General Hamilton suggests. “Damn fine claret to be found in the Blue Room.”

  Maggie sweeps by Hamilton, and then Penworth.

  “And damned pretty maids to be found in the White House hall,” she hears Penworth say, to more laughter.

  In the vestibule Maggie grabs her package. She will try on the new kid gloves and lace collar above-stairs. She wishes now she had bought more accessories at the arcade—a chatelaine perhaps, or some gimping, some zigzag ricking. Nothing puts her mind at ease mo
re quickly than shopping, except, of course, trying the latest cocktail.

  She makes to rush above-stairs, nearly careers into Mrs. Sullivan.

  “This came for you, Miss Fox.”

  “What? When?”

  “Just now. My stars, but I just can’t say what I make of you and your sister.”

  “You’re in swell company, then.” His fingers tremble as she takes the intricately folded handkerchief and finds, inside, an intricately folded note.

  After all the “gentlemen” leave, Maggie and Katie help their mother tidy the parlour of glasses and bottles.

  Katie says, “If Leah had been here they wouldn’t have dared insult us. Oh, fiddle-dee, but I need a clean glass. My lips won’t touch anything those nasty men have touched. Ma, where are the clean glasses? My nerves are all in shreds!”

  “Here, now settle yourself, will you? But only a half-glass, poppet … that is enough … Leah said you’re not to overindulge even if it’s for your constitution.”

  Katie drops into a chair. “But I hate it here. I wish I were dead. I wish I were lying in a cold, cold grave.”

  “Never say such things, Katherine. It tempts Fate, doesn’t it?”

  “Can even Fate be tempted?” Maggie muses. She is looking out the window, smiling away.

  “That is not what I mean—oh, never mind.”

  “Fine and damn-dandy, then.” Katie’s face is flushed, her words overloud. “I don’t wish I were dead, but I wish I were poor as a church mouse then. Yes, I’d rather live on a crust of bread and old water than endure this life.”