The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  A couple stroll by, arm in arm, talking with close confidence. The gentleman tips his hat at her. Leah smiles benignly back, thinks: How dare that Chauncey, that so-called reverend, that Burr stuck in my side, how dare he suggest we would make a “team”? She considers how his buttons were askew, his fur collar bedraggled, his dark beard growing this way and that. He looked, in all, like the hard-used plaything of some giant child. A grand team! What damnable poppycock.

  She shifts the package in her arms. The store was almost impossible to find. The advertising card Alfie gave her bore only the address and name. No directions at all. When she found the store at last, it was down an alley and up several outside stairs. The sign, “Pettifew’s Ingenuities,” was barely noticeable, the store not much larger than a horse stall. Only a few items were on display—thick canes, brass piping, women’s fans of unusual size, quires of waxy paper, spools of thread, jars of inks. And not a label to be seen. A man, Mr. Pettifew himself, as Leah rightly supposed, put aside his periodical. He greeted her without rising from his high stool. He had thick, stooped shoulders and a narrow-cut beard. A visor banded his near-hairless skull. The place was poorly lit by its one cheap gas fixture, but Leah could tell an ugly man in any light.

  “I am Mrs. Miller. I have come for a package. I do hope it is ready. I have no time to tarry.”

  “No one ever does,” Pettifew said, with what may have been a snicker. He brought out a package with great care. Gave her instructions and warnings along with her change. He eyed her as he did so, as if they were acquainted, as if he knew what she was about. “You care to take a gander at my other offerings? I’ve got the best and rarest, and since you’re … well. Let’s just say I’m honoured, Mrs. Miller.” He cleared his throat. “There’s something I’m working on. It’s a secret listing for those of your ilk.” He showed her a book then; it was big as a ledger cheaply bound and blue.”

  “I’m going to call it the Blue Book.”

  “How very original.”

  “You could add to it. It’d be a rare honour if you did. I want it to be the best, see, the finest.”

  “I think not.”

  “Consider on it, for the next time we see each other.”

  The next time? Leah thinks now as she steps away from the stair-post of the brownstone. I cannot imagine there will be a next time. Her thoughts of Pettifew and even Burr have made her heedless and she stumbles on a protruding brick. The package lolls in her arms. She gasps and clutches it, sensing every dread ounce. Steady. Steady, she warns herself

  At last she attains 26th Street and her lovely brownstone. “Thanks be the Spirits,” she murmurs. A chestnut tree arches over the stoop. Well-dressed people are dotted here and there. There is a lessening of refuse. A plentitude of gas lamps and decent paving. I have already ascended in this damnedo life, Mr. Burr, as you can see. Yes, such is what Leah will say to that Chauncey, if he dares come call upon her.

  Once inside, Leah eases the package onto the hallstand, then takes her bonnet off with both hands, as if the bonnet were a helmet. She studies the woman in the looking glass. The face is not much lined for her thirty-eight years, provided she does not scowl. The hair is not much greyed, provided she is vigilant with the hennaed oil. The thickening of her features is something only Leah would note … and God and the Spirits why would she care how Chauncey Burr visions her?

  She takes up the package and makes her way to the front parlour. The girls are out at a sitting, she recalls. She dearly hopes they will not “encounter” that odious Dr. Kane on their way home. Honestly, she cannot comprehend Maggie’s attraction to him, given the way he patronizes her and winds her up like a top. He will never accept Maggie for what she is.

  In the front parlour, Leah’s birds racket welcome. Warblers, finches, wrens, even several exotic parrots flit in a cage that is man-high and fashioned alike a Chinese pagoda; about this cage range five or six smaller cages aflutter with budgeriear, chats, and tangiers. An indigo bunting fixes on her, his look quizzical and wide-of-eye, as if in miminry of some of Leah’s clients.

  “Good afternoon, my darlings,” she says.

  “Good afternoon, you’re looking well, dear Leah.”

  Leah peers at the birdcages, then at Horace Greeley as he walks in from the back parlour. Mother trails behind him. “Leah! Poppet! Wherever were you? Have you been shopping? What do you have there?”

  “Nothing, Mother, nothing. No, don’t touch. Must you always touch …” She slides the package onto a side table. “Horace, this is a surprise.”

  Horace apologizes. He was in the neighbourhood and came to offer advice on this connection between Margaretta and Elisha, since advice was what Leah asked of him in her last letter.

  Leah owns that she had asked for his advice, albeit a time back, but no matter, here he is, better late than never and all that. She sits Horace down in their best gentleman’s chair. Mother brings in the tea and Horace’s favourite oatcakes, then sits quietly.

  Horace begins. “Now in regards to this incessant reportage of Maggie and Dr. Kane, I have to apologize, in that—”

  “No need, any small advice from a worthy man such as yourself is greatly appreciated.”

  “What I should say is that I have only thoughts at the moment.”

  “Thoughts? Ah. What sort?”

  “Most disagreeable and perplexing ones. The attention paid to Maggie and Elisha, to their every last movement and utterance is, I’ve realized, part and parcel of this newfangled rage for trivial personages, this ‘celebrity,’ a word, I can assure you, that was not minted by my pen.”

  Mother pinches Horace’s sleeve. “I cannot bear to see my angel’s name appearing in print this way. One fellow … a reporter? Is that what they’re called? Anywise, he asked me such questions, and in the street! ‘Are they engaged?’ ‘Are they not?’ ‘What do you, the mother, think of this?’ Such a perplexity. One might think there is nothing else of import happening in the world, mightn’t one?”

  “I agree completely,” Horace says mournfully. “The world is shifting, ladies. The trivial holds sway. Gossip is taken as conversation. Here Kansas is bleeding, the slavery question is becoming a battle cry and all the papers can write about is where Miss Fox and Dr. Kane are dining and what she is wearing to the theatre. Will they marry? Won’t they? I can’t fathom it. They’re not royalty. It is not as if their marriage will herald some transfer of power. Furthermore, love should be private; it cannot withstand such searing light.” He nibbles at an oatcake. “But few attend me any longer.”

  Leah feeds her own oatcake to Vivace the parrot. “I assure you, dear Horace, you are attended. And your name will last down through the ages, unlike your friend Barnum, the prattling huckster.” She says this last kindly, and with her best dimpled smile.

  Mother puts in, “Our Maggie said Elisha gave her a lock of his dead brother’s hair—Willie, was it? Also a ring, one that he found in the Arctic on that first expedition. Doesn’t that indicate … something? But then he insists she call him ‘brother.’ I had a brother, but I certainly never carried on with him thataway, did I?”

  “What is your opinion, Horace?” Leah asks. “Are there rings in the Arctic, growing amid the summer mosses?”

  “I suspect he embellishes,” Horace sighs.

  “He is a man obsessed with secrets,” Leah says. “How I despise secrets. We must … what is the term in vulgar card games? Ah, we must force his hand. He must either marry Margaretta or renounce her. I have some intelligence about our Dr. Kane, dear Horace. There have been other girls who—”

  “Other girls? Other?” Mother cries.

  Horace presses his hands over his ears. “I must return to the office. I must.”

  Leah raises her eyebrows at her mother. Her mother twists at her lappet string on her fusty old cap. Wisely keeps her counsel.

  Horace uncovers his ears, says firmly, “I shall write that the papers have perverted their columns to the gratification of an impertinent curiosity
and so forth, but I cannot publish rumours and innuendo. I wish I could help you more, but in these times I feel a great ineffectiveness, as if all my words have been for naught.”

  “I have learned that if you wish something to be done, you must do it yourself,” Leah says. “Seek public office, Horace, that is my advice. Even the presidency. Why-ever not? Then you would not have to cajole and convince and wear out your fingers writing. You could merely give orders like a maestro. Snap, and it would be done. Imagine how grand that would be.”

  Mother looks startled. “Have the spirits said our Horace should seek office, Leah? Have they?”

  “God and the Spirits, Mother, my advice is surely just as useful as that of any dead person.”

  Once Horace is seen out, his droopy white hat in hand, and once her mother is bustling elsewhere, Leah takes up her package and wends through the front parlour to the back parlour. This back parlour is closed off by a green baize door and is where the main of their séances are held. It is well-appointed with candelabras and lamps, as well as the new-installed gas lighting, a gleaming ovoid table and hooked rugs so thick that Leah’s footfalls are deadened to silence. She walks to darkest corner of the room, where, concealed by a sliding panel, there is another door. This one leads down to the kitchen. Leah ordered it put in because, really, who needs to see how servants come and go?

  Alfie is huddled aside the stove in the downstairs kitchen. “You found the place, then?” he asks, his voice a rasp.

  “I did, obviously. Though it was a trial. There was not a cab to be found. And on the return I had to take a horrid omnibus. On my own! And who should cross my path? Oh, never mind. Here it is.”

  Alfie shuffles over. He unwraps the parcel with his accustomed care. The cotton wadding falls away. The glass canister is wax-sealed and water-filled. Leah peers at the whitish pebbles within. “My spirits, but they do not look special.”

  “They’ll sure be special if they hit the air. This amount here would set the whole house afire.”

  Leah eyes the pebbles again. Tries to imagine herself blown to pieces. “The flesh is all we have” was what Chauncey had said. She wills that palpate sense to cease. “That Mr. Pettifew person recommended lard on the hands, and gloves as well when handling even the smallest of fragments.”

  Alfie wipes his nose with his sleeve. “Sure. You can’t be too careful with phosphorous.”

  CHAPTER 26.

  “Elisha suspected that the creatures of the deep, to light their way, used a kind of phosphorous too,” my patient said. “He said the Arctic waters were often all aglow, and with the faintest blue. Alike the resting place of stars, my pet.”

  I had slept poorly the night before, hence my peevish tone when I replied. “Since when are stars blue? What rot. What nonsense. Is your Elisha a naturalist? An astrologist? The resting place of the stars? Hah. More likely the resting place of the blue devils. They are as unnumbered as the stars. As elusive, to boot.”

  “I agree, there is no end to the blue devils and the melancholies they cause, the nagging torments,” she said. Or perhaps I did.

  “He decided then, my Elisha, that he would light his own way, make firm decisions and not ever be swayed. He told me that such was the way of all great men.”

  “And did you believe the cad?”

  “Ah, alas and such, I had to believe in something. Someone.”

  “ELISHA CAME HERE? When I was out? That can’t be true, Kat. It just can’t.”

  “But it is. I mean, we don’t ever lie to each other. We swore on our own graves, remember?”

  “I guess I do,” Maggie says, though she doesn’t, which is odd. She is generally excellent, as is Katie, at recalling the minutia of conversations.

  Muffled rattle-bangs. Maggie glances out the window. A carriage-in-four clops leisurely down their street. A coalman upends a sack into the coal bunker of their brownstone. He wears his coating of soot and black dust as nonchalantly as a gentleman wears a frock coat. A post boy runs past him. He is carrying the message that Maggie just gave him. Katie had peered over her shoulder as she wrote it. Yes, come for me, Lish was what it said.

  And now the wrenching sounds of Calvin coughing his life’s blood away, just down the hall. Maggie still cannot think of Calvin as Leah’s husband. He has always been too much of a brother to them all. And Lizzie certainly does not think of him as a stepfather. She is the one who cares for him most days. Maggie’s and Katie’s company, however, she avoids like the plague. But then, Lizzie loves Calvin, Maggie knows; the fact is stamped on Lizzie’s face as clearly as the signs of grief and woe on the faces of her clients. Nonetheless, Lizzie has stepped out again with one George Blauvet, a suitor of suitable standing, according to Leah, though Calvin doesn’t like him. He has come to appreciate Lizzie too late. Yes, too late, Maggie thinks, and it occurs to her again that some invincible prankster is at work in their lives.

  Mother is busy in the kitchen preparing a selection of delicacies. Maggie and Katie are to be preparing themselves. A whom-ever of the highest order is arriving later this afternoon. “It will be the greatest triumph yet, my girls. All must be pitch-perfect.” Leah told Maggie and Katie, no less than four times.

  “No, we don’t lie to each other, Kat,” Maggie says, “but it still can’t be true. And why would Elisha talk to Leah? He calls her the Tigress. He can’t abide her.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know everything. Fush-it, just because you can’t believe it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. We say that all the time, don’t we? And where are you, key? Stop hiding. We’ve not much time.” Katie fumbles around on their bureau past the faux pearls, the diamonds of paste, looks behind the daguerreotype of herself and Maggie, the one they had made before just before their Washington tour. They chose a thick gilded frame for the image. A fronting of thick glass. Katie-the-light. Maggie-the-dark. Together as can be.

  Maggie slumps on the bed they share. It has a rosewood headboard, a mattress stuffed with the finest wool, the softest feathers, and yet for the last few nights Maggie has barely slept, not even with the help of her usual rum toddies.

  “… and your Dr. Kane is nothing but a deceptive cadence of a man,” Leah said yesterday and all out-of-the-blue. She and Maggie had been bickering, yes, but over something-else-not-Elisha. Expenditures? Imbibing?

  “A what?”

  “A deceptive cadence, a musical chord that leads you to believe it shall resolve itself. But it does not. And never ever shall.”

  “And what am I, then?” Maggie asked, in her voice a challenge.

  “Hmm, I am afraid, Margaretta, that you are the common-room organ that is being well and truly played.”

  Why in the bloody tunket did I ask? Maggie wonders now. She twists at Elisha’s ring of onyx and silver. Looks to the daguerreotype again, at the selfsame ring there on her imaged hand. He said he found the ring on his first expedition to the Arctic. Found it? Where? Damn, but nothing makes sense.

  “There you are, you rusty old thing.” Katie holds up the key, then kneels to the trunk at the end of their bed. She twists the key, lifts the lid, reaches in for a brass horn, a glass-domed bell, a spool of silk thread, a spool of catgut, a sheaf of waxy paper, shoes, a stylus. Makes a ditty as she sets these items on the bed: “Thanks to Pettifew, though our needs are ever-few. Would that our lustrous guest would—”

  “Illustrious,” Maggie says dully.

  “Sure, and, oh … look, Mags.” Katie tosses out a sash, a long wind of white muslin, a brass diadem, feathers. “You wore all this for your Mr. Intrigue’s ambrotype. Why, you looked just like a pagan princess or something with your hair all tumble-down.”

  Maggie has to agree with the “or something.” All Elisha’s behest she had worn no corset under the tight-pinned sheath. He watched—too intently—while the ambrotypist arranged the props and lanterns. An impropriety was at work, Maggie knew, but decided she didn’t care.

  “You heard not a drop of the conversation, then? Between Leah and El
isha? You’re certain of that?”

  Katie sits back on her heels, hand on the trunk rim. “Oh, fine and all. Look, I was coming on back from Calvin’s room. We’d been sharing that French cognac and some cigars—you know, the ones that help his breathing—but we ran out of the cognac. And so I went to get more from the front parlour, but stopped at the top of the stairs … Oh, remember way back at David’s house when the ghost first started rapping, and when Leah arrived from Rochester, and we were listening from above-stairs and—”

  “Kat. What happened between Leah and Elisha?”

  “I really just wanted more cognac or a rum flip and—”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t hear the whole conversation. I swear on my cold, dead body.”

  “All right.”

  “So, Leah said she knew about Elisha’s ‘exploits’ and ‘conquests’ abroad. She said he had to cease toying with your affections and all that. But what she really, really wanted was to know if you’d told Elisha anything about our, you know, sometimes-tricks, the ones we have to use when the spirits are being old fuss-budgets.”

  “I haven’t told him a damned thing!”

  “And Elisha said he knew the all. The all, Mag. He said he’s not gullible, but that he doesn’t care. Alfie slithered up just then, so I went on back to our room.”

  “Hell. What … conquests? Did she say?” Her heart sinks. Mountains. Rivers. Pyramids. That is what was meant by conquests. Yes.

  “No, they talked then about reputation and all that, and whose was more important, Leah’s or Elisha’s. Elisha’s or Leah’s. It seemed a draw, more or less.” Katie closes the trunk lid. Locks it. Surveys the objects on the bed, then leafs through the newspaper clippings and obituaries for the president’s son. Maggie has already read the material dutifully. Train wrecks, as General Hamilton opined back in Washington, really are never short of terrible.