is in your favor, it assures, relaxing Maggie out of anger, soothing her into sleep.
The breath of the girls and women has steamed the window near the bed. In the other bedroom, some half-dozen men sleep soundly. Outdoors, the pilgrims snore in their cold encampments.
Looking out into a blue half-light, Maggie smears her hand across a pane twice and for a peculiar moment imagines her brother’s trampled fields swarming with the dead. Spirits traipse here and there, tufts of light, farmers and farm wives, soldiers and babies and old ones—some marked by their style of dress and half-familiar. They are made of light mostly, and ride lightly over the earth, treading no soil. And they are everywhere.
She blinks her eyes, suspecting her own mind has planted them like a strange crop in the field. The strangeness of seeing them is new, but Death itself is no stranger, surely. Not a day goes by in Arcadia when one among her community isn’t lost to fire or drowning, typhus, yellow fever … a mule’s kick. These deaths are real and ever present, reported daily in neat columns of newsprint along with farmers’ reports of stray pigs, sentimental poems, ads for patent remedies, or word of the war with Mexico, the abdication of the French king, Whigs battling Democrats.
But what if they aren’t gone over Jordan after all? What if they are just across the way, a hand’s reach, waiting to be seen and heard from?
Now, that’s strange, and she will seize the strangeness in her hands and shape it. She will not be afraid. In truth, Maggie Fox is afraid—how vast a thought it is—but not of the spirits themselves, who seem to her just strangers full of secret need. Out she goes into the blue dawn and passes them in the field, holding out her hands to feel them streaming through, to fancy their shuffling woe crowding close round her like cattle. Too close. She breaks away and strides past a stand of crooked trees under which bruised apples have lain all winter long, frozen many times over.
The sun rises as she walks and warms her. She comes out on the cart road again and dips back into the dappled wood, thinking ahead to the sweet smell of the battered peppermint fields, which sport their pink flowers like finery.
Maggie wanders without a thought, and when a thought does come, it stops her in her tracks, and her eyes brim with tears. Here she is, out on a muddy track ruining her good boots—when all she wants is to mill about in city drawing rooms in a lovely big-bustled gown and be admired. Kate will get there first, it seems. Without her.
Recalling the harmonious tangle of limbs back in Ella’s bedroom, and Kate and Lizzie asleep with their foreheads touching, Maggie is already lonely. Katie … stay. But Katie won’t. She can’t, Maggie knows, not once Leah has her hooks in.
Maggie spots a perfect little basket near the crook of a young tree, an oriole’s nest, brittle and fine. Pinching it down, she cradles it carefully, as once it cradled eggs.
She walks all morning with the nest on her palm, and the dead do not follow. They are gone when Maggie enters David’s kitchen, where the women are assembling breakfast. Even the murdered peddler two miles away at the cottage lies asleep, she expects, soundless in his mud-and-limestone bed below the floorboards.
5 Difficulties
The Widow Bray might be a general for all her strategy. It’s weeks before she insinuates herself again, with Clara’s guard down.
When her father knocks, he finds her sketching. Her room is open to the elements, honey-lit, all breeze and bird chatter. He enters tentatively, crossing to a seat on the edge of her bed, and Clara feels the point of her fountain pen straining on the page, her fingers pinching hard. Father never intrudes this early in the day. When at last he states his purpose, his voice sags with apology. “You’ll recall the girl we hired on to help with the party?”
Clara regards him blankly.
“Elizabeth, the younger of the two—daughter of Mrs. Fish?”
“I wouldn’t know Mrs. Fish from Mrs. Fowl.” Clara’s disdain for the architect fast closing in on her father’s affections is vast. Best keep mum, she thinks, or risk slandering Mrs. Bray. “I wouldn’t know one girl from another,” she manages. “I didn’t employ them. I never saw them.”
“This Elizabeth,” he continues, “‘Lizzie’ … apparently her relations are experiencing … difficulties in Arcadia. Mrs. Fish’s maiden name is Fox. I thought I’d catch you up, as you may hear of it when young Lizzie returns this week.”
“Difficulties,” Clara says vaguely—though her real concern is when young Lizzie returns—“is a euphemism for scandal, in my experience.” Her hand speeds over the page. By now Clara’s avian subject has long eluded her, like everything else. She looks up, and her father seems so earnest, so hopeful that she can’t but smile back at him. “And how would such gossip find me?”
“I’m an old squirrel,” he admits, lifting her chin, “eager for chatter. But you are curious?”
Her jaw tenses, and Father’s palsied hand settles at his side again. To admit curiosity is to admit defeat. Clara mustn’t relax her guard. She’ll lose, but gracefully, with her pride intact.
“It’s said these girls can communicate with the dead,” he adds wryly.
Clara replies with deathly silence, and he doesn’t press. She can be as vile and childish as she likes these days, and Father, a man made audacious by secrets, intolerable ones, carries on unmoved. She’ll tolerate. She always has.
“This leads me to other business.” He clears his throat. “I’ve decided to keep her on … hire Lizzie Fish on permanently if very part-time … and perhaps her young aunt, too, when the girl arrives. It’s been discussed. Mrs. Fish supports the idea.”
Clara needn’t ask who else supports it. Who discussed it with Mrs. Fish.
“Both girls come highly recommended by the Little family and the Posts. I guess in that few short days I grew reacquainted,” he adds, “with … domestic niceties.”
“Did you.”
He leans in collusion. “You’ll grant we’re an austere pair, you and I.”
How he can afford to transform the household this way with commissions scant and his “sabbatical” extended through the fall is not her concern. It’s not her place to ask. “They won’t fix a decent cup of tea,” she complains. “Americans don’t, you know.”
He smiles back at her. Patiently.
Clara opens a drawer in her writing desk, and the sketchpad vanishes inside. Lacing pale hands in her lap, she sits back resolutely. “As you please.” Her pencil rolls to the floor.
“You disapprove?”
“Is it within my rights to?”
Silence. The widow’s influence, then, is certain, insidious. There is no undoing it. First will come the servants, Mrs. Bray’s personal selection. A housekeeper to boss and batter Clara with lists and expectations
