The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  “There should be, you are so right.”

  “At least one day I shall be sung of by school children. They’ll gnash their little teeth over having to read my epic when they’d rather play skin-the-eel. That’s immortality enough for me, an epic with my name, like Achilles or Odysseus. You, my pet, can have my soul if you wish. Decorate your parlour with it. Or let it seep into your lucent skin, as you please.”

  “You sound like an, an atheist.”

  He chuckles into her neck. “What a dread thought. Oh, I don’t doubt the existence of God’s Paradise any more than I doubt the existence of the Open Polar Sea. What I doubt is whether I’ll enjoy myself there. It’s unchanging by all accounts and my soul is like a leaping fish, my mind aswim with my ideas, projects, ambitions. Pity I can’t have a thousand lives, all conjoined perhaps, like bubbles in a tin tub. Imagine: in this life my heart is strong as a metronome and I’m a designer of grand edifices. In the next I command an army. In another I find Franklin and his men, safe and alive. In yet another life we grow old together, you and I, my pet; I write amusing little books for a living and we sit by the hearth of an evening and have our passions still.”

  He shakes his head. His dark hair is arrowed with grey, his pale eyes fierce with intensity. “I’m delighted you enjoyed the mass and all the gold and embellishments. You could do worse than to be a Catholic, Maggie-love, for they are not allowed to raise the dead.”

  The dead are distant these days, she tells him. And she does not miss them. Not at all.

  “Then perhaps we should both become Catholics. They’re given to visions and I had visions in the Arctic that would have made a pope proud. You recall the cosmoramas? Ah, no, you failed to meet me there. Well, my visions are alike to those. Imagine, Tuttie, peering into a scene of such veracity you swear it can be touched: the Temple of Karnack, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colosseum of Rome. And yet something is awry. The proportions? The shadows? It is as if you are the false vision. Does that make sense?”

  Maggie says it does, certainly.

  “My first vision was of my family. They were feasting at Christmastide. The vision was so real that I could smell the roasted pheasant. My family was laughing and talking, having a merry time. My mother looked terribly beautiful. She said she wished that I were with them, but she said it in such a manner that I leaped up and cried out that I was here. Here! And then they vanished, and I was alone again in the ship’s hold, and it was dark as pitch but for the blubber lamps. And my men were groaning like spectres in their frozen sacks, and the ice was slowly crushing the ship, like a giant crushing the ribs of a choice victim, and then there was that sense of betrayal, the stench of it even. Ah, but I’m rattling on like some near-naked mystic.”

  “You must have been so hungry, poor Lish.”

  “Yes … Just thank God for roast rat. It’s not so bad with a touch of salt. I shall cook some for you.”

  “How awful!” Maggie declares, and laughs with him. This could be our tomb, she thinks. It’s even nicer than the Kane tomb at the Laurel Hill Cemetery. It has windows at least.

  “Tuttie, listen, you must promise me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Do not read William Godfrey’s account. It is all lies.”

  “Why in tunket would I? He’s a Judas to you and a deserter. I despise him.”

  “Good. Stopper your ears when he is mentioned. Listen to none but me. Swear it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “That’s my sweet girl.” He kisses her hand. Says, “Now I must tell you of my second vision. It was of you. You came as an undine—Undine, the water nymph. She is—”

  “Oh, yes, Undine. That’s a Germanic story. I know it from Miss Turrner.”

  “Ah, yes, your Teutonic studies, I’d forgotten. Well, let me continue. I was hunting for seal. There I was, crouched before a round of water in the ice. I was in my furs and must have looked like a bear halfway to being man. My gun was poised. And then the green water rippled and you climbed over the rim. You were so graceful, as if you could swim in air as well as water. Your hair was unbound and tumbled wetly to your knees. A pale dress clung to your form. You did not shiver. You did not seem cold at all. Your skin had the sheen and cleanness of ice. Your lips were the red of the reddest carnelian and you were not … not wearing a shift, nor a corset.”

  “Those undines don’t have souls. Now I remember.”

  “Ah, yes, dear heart. Until they marry a mortal man and then they, too, are mortal and know all the sorrows and pains of mortal life.” He kisses her hand. “As we are married.”

  “We are?”

  “Consider the Quakers. They have no need for intermediaries to sanctify their marriages, only declarations of love, devotion.” He kisses her neck, her collarbone. “I take you as my wife, Maggie Fox. Now say you’ll take me. Say that I am your husband.”

  She does so.

  “Now stand fast.” He unhooks her gown and unties her five petticoats, sliding each one down her legs, all while she is obediently stilled, scarcely breathing. He studies her standing there in the pool of her fallen garments. Maggie shivers. The room has become cooler, larger.

  He unpins her hair. It is oil dark in the lamplight. He arranges it over her shoulders. His fingertips continue down her spine to the lacing of her corset. It hinges open at his deft tugging. She wears only her white chemise now, her white pantaloons, her black stockings that are tied just over her knees.

  He steps back. “Am I your captain?”

  He is, absolutely.

  “Do you obey me out of love? Only love?”

  She does. She does.

  “Then you are now Mrs. Elisha Kent Kane.”

  “I am. I do.”

  “And I am yours, yours.”

  Now he orders gently, firmly that she take off her pantaloons, her stockings. She does. Her face burns, but she does not look away from the pale regions of Elisha’s eyes. He shrugs off his vest, his shirt. His body is thin and ribbed, but he does not look weak. His hands and neck and face are dark against the white of his torso. It is an odd figuring.

  “Recline there on the settee. Good … how delicious you are. And now I must tell you of my voyage and how it began. How up and up Smith Sound I went.” He runs his hand under her chemise, over her knee and thigh. “I wanted to go farther than any man had gone. And there I found a safe harbour and there I stayed locked within.”

  Maggie can barely breathe. His fingers find her furrows, her untrammelled interior. Is this pleasure? It must be, for she wants him to continue his exploration to wherever such things lead.

  He kisses her throat, her lips. He eases the chemise away from her breasts. “Ah, such a discovery. So lovely, so …” He strokes them, presses briefly so hard that his thumbs leave an impress. Presses her hands aside as he suckles, like a babe might. Maggie bites her lips at the quick, gorgeous pain. Is this a natural thing? Is this what is done between men and women in darkened rooms across the city? The world?

  He wears his trousers still. Now he takes her hands and presses them between his legs. Why is he whispering of envelopes, and that he has none? Why is he thinking of letters at this time?

  He groans and says she has achieved him. They lie in silence for a time, until his fingers walk up her arm, her shoulder, to rest in the dip at her throat. “You would not betray me, my love, my darling, would you?”

  “Never. Never. How could I?”

  “You’d not desert me? My men … some did so.”

  Again she swears no.

  “There can be no secrets between us now.”

  “No, Lishy, no. None,” she agrees. Yet he still does not ask how it is the dead can speak. It is beneath him to ask. She understands that.

  So she tells him at last. Shows him. Her legs and feet are bared; it is a simple matter. He takes each of her toes. Makes the child’s rhyme of piggies and markets and crying home. Says he knew. She is not as clever as she had thought. “It’s just that I wished
that you would tell me, willingly and without guile, and now you have.”

  Maggie’s mouth is dry. Her feet cold. She tells him more. Of how the haunting of the Hydesville house came to be. Of the peddler. And why his corpse was not found in the cellar floor.

  “I thought mayhap he died from the wound I gave him.” Maggie confesses. “I did hit him square in the head.”

  “A capital shot from the window. Remind me not to cross you, my pet.”

  “And then I worried that he’d get the law after us. And then I worried about the curse. Now I don’t worry at all. Not when you’re with me.”

  “I’ve killed men,” Elisha murmurs, and kisses her.

  CHAPTER 30.

  “Whatever are you fixing on?” I asked my patient. She had ceased her tellings (which had become more intimate that I needed hear, to be frank) and was now staring on the Edison bulb there in the vestibule. The bulb crackled and faltered, but held its sallow radiance.

  “Perhaps it is possible,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve been mistaken all these years.”

  “About what? The peddler?”

  “Because I did see Elisha once after he died. And I’ve been hoping all these years that he would appear again, and that the vision of him would not be figment of my brain, nor of opiates, and that he would speak. He had answers to all things.” She smiled wryly.

  “No one has those,” I said, but she continued as if I weren’t there at all.

  If it did appear, Elisha’s ghostly self, apparently, would be as young as when they first met, there at the Webb hotel in Philadelphia. This time, however, he would be the one framed in the arched window, caught in a nimbus. He would be pale, his hair glossy-dark, his eyes even more blue than when he was alive, as if the Arctic waters had settled in. Not a large man, but a handsome man, and a famed one, for a time.

  “What will he say?” I asked, trying to hide my interest.

  She was quiet for the span of three breaths. Her face lost all expression. “Do you not pity those who come to you in grief, Tuttie? You give them false hope. You make a parlour game of their loss. And surely we, the dead, do not wish to be hauled back to the living world with its stinks and melancholies, its misfortunes scattered random as buckshot. Listen, my sweet, touch me here, this is all we have.”

  I should mention that her voice changed when she spoke this. Became deep and cultured and manly. And the garret had become, I swear, as chilled as a springhouse.

  “And did then you see him again? Did you?”

  “I’ll get to that,” my patient said, entirely her own perplexing self again.

  ELEVEN DAYS AFTER THEIR PARLOUR TRYST, Maggie and Elisha clutch each other on the stoop of the Tenth Street town-home, oblivious, nearly, to the passing stares.

  Elisha beseeches, “Command me to stay. Give me one word.”

  “Stay.”

  “But, pet, I cannot! Duty calls to me.”

  “I thought it was Lady Franklin.”

  Elisha frowns.

  Maggie could slap herself. She knows her attempts at wit distress him. And now that they are married she must attend the right cues, say the proper lines. She simply must.

  “Tell me you will dream of me.”

  She reminds him that she doesn’t dream. Or that she can’t recall the dreams. Adds hastily that she will try.

  “Try very hard. For I intend to come to you while you sleep in your sweet bed. I shall enter your dreams, your …” He stops. Clears his throat. Gives her a stack of envelopes lined with muslin. “These are addressed to my London lodgings. I want no prying eyes to view our correspondence. And these ones are to signal an emergency. If you send the one with the three little stars—see there, in the corner—then I will return to you immediately.”

  She vows to write each day, asks, “You have the lock of my hair? My letters?”

  He presses her hand under his travelling coat to the lump in his inner pocket. “They are close to my heart, as always. And Morton has packed Mr. Fagnani’s portrait of you as well as my cherished ambrotype.” He clasps her. “I can calmly part from all the rest, even from my mother; it’s parting with you, Maggie, that kills me.”

  Then why go? Maggie would like to ask, but does not. He has his work. He must meet with eminent natural philosophers and fellow explorers, must accept accolades, give lectures, must listen to Lady Franklin’s ludicrous insistence that the search for her husband continue.

  Morton, waiting beside the carriage, gives one of his odd little waves.

  “I’m being told to make haste. Listen. I tell you again: If I should perish I’ve left a legacy for you, my dear wife, in my will. The legacy is in the trust of my brother Thomas, who loves you as a sister. Look to him. Thomas shall care for you. But you must renounce the vulgar spirit rappings. Promise me again.”

  “I promise. I promise.”

  “Now wait, wait there in the doorway so that I might see you until the last instance.”

  The carriage draws away. Grows smaller and smaller yet, but Maggie doesn’t move, not even when an omnibus obscures the carriage entirely. But Maggie is not worried. She will see him again. Hasn’t Elisha, for all his talk of his own death, survived two Arctic winters, near starvation, a brutal trek? And no matter how wretched British food and British weather are reported to be, it seems unlikely that they, of all things, will be his undoing.

  28 December, 1856

  Dear Tuttie: I am quite sick, and have left London for Havana on doctor’s orders. I have received no letters from you; but write at once to E.K. Kane care of the American Consul, Havana.

  Over two months later, in March of 1857, William Morton, Elisha’s faithful valet, stands before Maggie. He is hatless and dishevelled and unshaven, is drunk as a lord or a pauper; nothing in between. He tells Maggie every detail of Elisha’s last days, and in doing so he breaches all propriety, all common sense.

  He begins with himself and Elisha striding with Yankee confidence through London, that antiquated city with its musty aristocracy, its fetid river. Perhaps it was the brumous fog, the lingering sea-sickness from the three-week steamer journey, but Elisha was shivering, coughing. “A severe chest cold, no more,” said the good doctor Holland.

  “You shall stay at my estate,” declared Mr. Edward Sabine, a fellow Arctic explorer, a geologist and so forth.

  “But you must get well. You must return to find him!” cried Lady Franklin, bending to Elisha’s sickbed, snatching the medicine from Lady Sabine to feed Elisha herself.

  “Franklin’s dead as a fucking door, you stupid crone!” Elisha yelled. “Cannibalized, that’s what, and by his own men. I’ll wager they gnawed on his stringy thighs and popped his eyeballs down their thankless fucking gullets!”

  Lady Sabine reeled back in shock. Lady Franklin gripped the spoon as if to gouge out Elisha’s own eyeballs. Morton soothed and assured them both that Dr. Kane was raving. That he was not in his right mind, not at all. Days passed before Elisha regained any semblance of his mind, right or otherwise.

  “William Damned Godfrey, he’s planning to publish, isn’t he now?” Morton continues to Maggie, his brogue thickening by the minute. “As like he’ll say it were Elisha’s fault those miscreants betrayed him and struck off on their own. Bloody Godfrey, he’ll be spouting that Elisha acted the tyrant. But he didn’t, now. Is a father at his wits’ end with his misbehaving children a tyrant? Oh, there’ll come nasty rumours. It’ll be said Elisha tried to murder him. Murder! Godfrey would have deserved it so. Godfrey, that mutinous prick. And sure, but that damned Wilson and Bonsall and Hickey have told treasonous accounts. Sure, Miss Fox, but Elisha’s book will outlast them all, won’t it now.”

  Miss Fox? Maggie nearly stops crying.

  Morton takes the liberty to pour them both a sherry. The glasses slosh overfull. “We didn’t find old Franklin. But sure we discovered the Open Polar Sea. Sure, but I spied it my own self. That is, Hans and me did. He was the Esquimau boy Elisha hired because he was handy with the spear. And w
hat thanks did Elisha get? Hans deserted, too, and for good. He found himself some Esquimau girl and stayed with her up there, though wasn’t her home the bitterest place on this earth? Who’d give up that much for a girl?”

  Morton drains his glass. Maggie does likewise.

  “Anyhow, surely what we saw weren’t just a stretch of open water. Things can’t be two ways at the once.” He talks then about how, even though Elisha hated the hot places of the earth, he was sent to Havana for his “health.” How he suffered on that voyage from England. Heart. Stroke. Apoplexy. Elisha uttered these words like an apology, Morton said, and the words hung by themselves. His limbs refused him obedience. His speech become as thick as an Esquimau’s speech. At one point Morton swore Elisha sang the same dirge as did a young Esquimau man they locked in the hold of the Advance for thievery. The Esquimau escaped. Elisha was glad he escaped. Morton was also glad. His emotions were in tandem with Elisha’s; they were of one mind.

  Morton holds up a finger before Maggie’s face as he says this. Studies the finger and then pockets it, his expression strange.

  Elisha’s mother arrived in Havana as soon as she could. She was escorted by her husband and Elisha’s brother Thomas, but it was to his mother Jane that Elisha looked, and as might a sweet boy who so wanted to please.

  Jane Kane pressed her hands to Elisha’s chest. “Be still,” she said kindly, and Elisha’s eyes leaked tears.

  “Not because he was afraid like, not at all.” Morton explains. “He thought of death as like some impatient silly aunt tap-tapping her knitting needles. Those were joyful tears for his Mam’s simple kindness.”

  “An uncle,” Maggie sobs into her handkerchief. “With a cane. That was his Death, not a wretched aunt. No.”

  “Sure, but I knew his mind. Better than anyone.” It is as if Morton hasn’t heard her. As if he has forgotten she is Elisha’s wife. Is that why Morton didn’t telegraph her and bid her come to Havana? Because he doubted their marriage?

  “Only the Mrs. Kane was there, there for Elisha’s last words,” Morton slurs out. “His father, his brother, out they’d stepped for a nonce. It was only her and me, and I’d been told to stand apart, as if Elisha and me hadn’t been alike one soul, as if we hadn’t been through all kinds of Hell together.”