looks them over, looks away.
Life as Clara knows it is ending. The widow has found her slipper-hold, clearly. She’ll have ideas and advice. Tidy wisdom. Even now, her small hand rests on Father’s sleeve, enlisting him for the sake of a unified front.
Floundering in her skirts again, the widow struggles to her feet with Father’s help. The wretch can’t kneel in all those layers—Clara doesn’t suppose the widow would kneel—so strides forth with hand extended as to a child. “Come, join us downstairs for tea. Your father will look fondly on your willingness.”
Clara knows that when it comes to guarding what’s dear, enough is never enough. Ferocity is not enough. She winces to make the widow disappear, but plump fingers close round her bony wrist. Clara feels a fluid buzzing in her body, a riot of blood and nerves. She is unused to being touched or coerced. Unused to many things. Unused.
“Up, now, and spare his mind, won’t you?”
Who is this woman? The question roars in Clara’s eyes, but her father won’t meet their gaze. Look at me.
The widow is a member of Amy Post’s circle, not a Quaker but a reform-minded sort with a mind to do good at any cost. Her husband, much respected and many years dead, was a physician. This Clara knows. But who is she? Clara would demand if she could. Who is she to us? And, What have you told her? Answer me.
Forsaken, she admits a surge of the same bloody reel that soothed her the last time meddling women influenced her father … eyes craving glass, fists resolved to rake her own flesh with willing shards. Clara never acted on it, of course, this or a thousand other petty acts of violence. But like a magic-lantern show, like any good diversion, the reel gave her pause. It gave her rest. The insurance of youth: that when the time came and no amount of subterfuge would do, she might act against her own flesh to free the unhappy spirit.
Look at me, old man.
The widow lets go Clara’s wrist almost gently, but her words keep like a clamp. “You must rally, Clara. You’re no longer a young woman … quite. I don’t like to say it, to press a wound, but you’re approaching an age … we might say that with your habits, you’re unlikely to marry or bear children.”
Father purses his lips, not quite nodding.
“A woman in your circumstances must care for her elders, not tax them. You’re neither frail nor a fool. Take responsibility for your life. I beg you. Relieve him.”
“I thank you, mum, but I believe we endured very well before … without you.”
The widow sighs, her interest waning. “Enough drama now.”
Even this deep in dismay, Clara must credit her opponent: Mrs. Bray will have the last word. She will have her way.
She turns once more and desperately to Father, who keeps his back to her, facing away as he ever has when a strong woman has hold of him. Clara speaks to the back of his head, to the vulnerable neck nicked by his barber’s shaving blade, in a voice quietly savage. “The only consolation I require, sir—you know this, and you know why—is solitude.”
4 Outwitting Death
Night again, another haunted night, and Maggie glimpses the whites of eyes shining like moths in the long black bar between the curtains. Boldly she throws open the panels, an actress taking the stage. She finds at least one eyeball pressed very near the glass out there, and a mashed, waxen cheek or two.
Raised candles make shifting fragments of it all, grotesque half-masks. There are other figures, a great many others fanned out behind, and a huge flickering bonfire in the east meadow. These are not drifting phantoms or witches’ rites but pilgrims, legions of them, come from Newark and farther still to an otherwise unremarkable farming hamlet to get a glimpse of the girls who raised the dead.
When at last Mr. Charles B. Rosna and his audience taxed her beyond reason, Ma removed her girls from “the spook house” to brother David’s farm two miles away.
But soon David’s roof and walls resound with rapping also.
The theory arises that the spirit isn’t one but many spirits, craving the receptive company of the Fox sisters, who needn’t be magnetized—two different newspapers have taken note—to converse with them.
This theory is championed by Leah, the eldest Fox sibling, who arrives some weeks into the affair with trunks and lady friends and her daughter, Lizzie, in tow, exclaiming, What’s all this? and Why didn’t you write me? Leah learned of their trials when a friend saw page proofs of a report soon to circulate in Rochester in pamphlet form. “I came at once,” she pronounced.
Bet you did, thought Maggie.
But no matter. It’s clear to everyone that Maggie and Kate Fox are at the center of this strange affair. Spirits are resolved to be where they are, and when the rapping followed to David’s so too did half of the crowd, even with investigations and excavation still ongoing at the cottage.
The migrant squatters have wreaked havoc on David’s property. With his fields trodden, he makes a poor host. His patience is daily and sorely tested, and his wife, Elizabeth, when not trekking back and forth to the well or sating neighbors grim with controversy, spends thankless hours plucking chickens and crafting puddings, pies, and cakes for the diggers, who return jittery, soiled, and hungry at night.
David and Elizabeth’s little daughter, Ella, is in bliss, though, running wild in plain sight with the neighbor children and the gypsy hordes. It’s a topsy-turvy world, and Maggie vows not to let the rare if barely contained aggression of disbelievers, or muttered words like chicanery and witchcraft, distract from the fun that she and not a few others—for once in their tedious lives—are having.
“Come look, dimwits,” she commands when Kate and Lizzie stray in, nibbling sweetmeats. “It’s like All Hallows Eve out there—”
The other two approach the teeming window but reel away in a rapture of giggling. Emboldened, Maggie plays indignant, lifting her arms like Moses poised to part the waters, aware of being watched by multitudes. It’s a novel feeling, and Maggie likes it rather too well. “That’s enough now.”
When she snaps the curtains closed, a muffled cry of disappointment erupts behind the glass. One child even raps on it, though Maggie—pleased that good Christian country manners are adhered to, even in strange days—hears the mother scold him for it. Many things about her community she finds trying. Others are as warm and familiar as her favorite shawl, and she’ll miss them.
Some dozen transient females in that house have laid stake to Ella’s bedroom (men, as many or more, have claimed the master bedroom). Bedsteads have been stored in the attic, and top and bottom mattresses crowd together like rafts on a sea of hardwood. A tangle of doled-out bedding lies over it all like ship’s rope. Kate leaps deftly from raft to raft, pausing to bounce in place. Lizzie, likewise bouncing, bites the cookie out of Katie’s hand, and they laugh like crazies.
“How will we sleep?” Kate laments, falling still, her bodice specked with crumbs. She seems melancholy all of a sudden, genuinely perplexed, and Maggie vows in mind to protect her … always. But then Kate and Lizzie are sidling out of the room, murmuring into each other’s shoulders, already bored.
Alone
