target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_1fa0ddb7-37f8-5e67-9ca9-29ecf6230e30.jpg" alt="Image"/> The place in Rochester’s Mechanics Square, it turns out, is as haunted as David’s house, and the cottage before that. It only took the right residents to notice.
“We were scarce out of Hydesville,” Leah begins, swollen with self-importance, “and still on the canal when the trouble began. There we were, minding our business, dining with the other passengers, when the spirits went to town with a great show of rapping. Then and there. The table jumped, and water came splashing from our glasses, but with the noise of the boat going through the locks, no others noticed. Thank heavens.”
Ma frowns determinedly.
“We got home to Rochester around five P.M. Kate and Lizzie went straight out to the garden, I remember. They weren’t gone long when I heard a noise.” Leah sighs, gathering strength for the telling. “Like a pail of bonny clabber being dumped from the ceiling onto the floor. There was a terrific jarring after that, and the windows rattled—I’ll never forget it—as if we were by a battlefield. As if someone had fired off heavy artillery. It shames me, but I was paralyzed by fear. The girls rushed in, all wonderment, and walked me to my bed. There we huddled under the blankets, much alarmed, trying to sleep, but the moment the candle was extinguished the children screamed. Do you remember, girls?”
Both nod, a bit too dutifully, Maggie thinks.
“Lizzie said she felt a cold hand over her face and another stroking her shoulder and her back.”
Maggie looks to Lizzie, who can’t check a self-satisfied smile. The poor housecat has given in to its fate and gone limp and tender in Kate’s arms. Perhaps to hide that gloating smile, Lizzie mimics the cat, jabbing her forehead into the crook of Kate’s neck, craving affection. Kate again seems as distant and mysterious as the moon.
“So I took out the Bible and read a chapter, and while I read, the girls continued to feel touches. I never did, I confess. Finally we slept—I won’t say easily. We woke with the sun to the smell of roses. The birds were singing in the trees of the public square. The night now gone seemed unreal. I kept my own counsel but had my doubts, and toward evening, Jane Little and other friends came in to spend an hour. We sang and I played piano—” She looks around for impact, lowers her voice. Lizzie’s eyes widen as if she’s hearing this for the first time. “And while the lamp burned, I felt the throbbing of the dull accompaniment of the invisibles keeping time to the music, though the spirits remained kindly concealed so as not to alarm the company. We retired at ten,” Leah concludes—at least Maggie hopes this is the end—“and slept quietly for two hours.”
“And then?” Maggie demands, predicting an encore.
“And then …” Leah draws out her words in agonizing fashion “… woke with the house in a perfect uproar.”
Leah rises out of her chair. She starts stomping about with her hands moving like a mime’s to narrate how doors opened and closed in the dark. “Someone, followed by a great many others, walked up the stairs and into our bedroom, jostling and whispering. All I can figure is that it was some kind of show … with pantomime and clog dancing and raucous clapping … and then their footfalls moved away and downstairs again, the doors thumping closed behind them.
“On it went,” Leah says, “night after night, the whispering, giggling, and scuffling of this spectral assembly. There were death struggles and murder scenes of fearful character—I dare not describe—but in time it was as if we dawned on them, slowly, and they included us. They gathered in strong force around us.”
Ma listens, transfixed, and Maggie can’t but wonder: Why would Leah lie? She isn’t the better part a child, as Kate and Maggie are. Despite Leah’s wry pragmatism and occasional inclination to wink or stoop to child’s play, she’s a grown woman, dour with her days’ burdens. Why would she lie?
Maggie must conclude that Kate and Lizzie have carried on without her, which leaves her feeling even more out of place and out of sorts than when she arrived. These spirits are not Maggie’s. They are no part of her design.
“It’s useless,” Leah sums up grandly, “to record all that’s come to pass these last few weeks. At length I engaged these rooms. This is a brand-new building, I’ll have you know. Construction’s just completed. There were no former tenants, so it harbors no history, no crimes. Come,” she says brightly, “let’s have a look around and see you settled. Ma, you look exhausted.”
Is it any wonder? Maggie thinks expansively. Lonely and tired in view of Kate and Lizzie, their tittering and giggling, Maggie lags behind on the tour. Things were difficult and dull at David’s, and then that long journey in on the packet, and here they all are, competing warily for some prize she can’t name.
Leah points out that the house is really two houses on a single foundation. “The cellar’s there, and this kitchen staircase leads up to the second floor and the dining and sitting rooms. On the third floor, we’ve just the one long room that runs the length of the house. We put three beds there and curtained off a space for storage.”
Maggie hears Leah’s tour voice, traveling along with their footfalls upstairs, but she’s stopped short in the pantry. It looks out on the fenced back garden, but beyond that, plainly visible from the pantry window, are the bleak stony tips of monuments. Her mind reels and orients itself. Prospect Street. That must be the Buffalo Burying Ground. So much for “no history,” she thinks, a smile twitching on her face.
She’ll have to work quickly, she knows, and with great energy to draw Katie back from Lizzie’s sway and Leah’s. It’s always the way: when the other two get their hooks in, she has to lure and coax and charm Katie back.
But yes, Mr. Rosna has made her brave. If Maggie could navigate David and their parents and the never-ending flow of curious strangers, reporters, and investigators back at the cottage, she won’t be cowed by Lizzie now. Lizzie’s no match for Maggie Fox, even if Leah is.
Now that Maggie is home again—home will ever be with Kate—she’ll lie awake nights studying what she can make out in moon- or starlight of her sister’s turned-up nose with its spray of freckles, the sweet mouth with its habit of holding untruths, and feel an awed pulse of gratitude.
Home.
All is quiet until midnight, when distinct footsteps are heard moving steadily up the stairs and into the little green-curtained storeroom. From within, sounds—shuffling, giggling, whispering—the spirits, muffled in chintz, anticipating their own mischief. Out they come and give the beds a shake, lifting the sleepers off the floor, letting them down with a bang, patting them with cold hands before retiring again to what the Fox women will dub “the green room.”
“Can it be possible?” pleads Ma, in the dark. “How will we live and endure it?”
7 In the Fever of Not Trying
It’s said these girls can communicate with the dead. How to reconcile Father’s blunt words with the ridiculous monologue ensuing downstairs in the drawing room?
With her closet door open, Clara hears the whole thing through the dumbwaiter shaft: the widow braying like a tiresome donkey, like the wife she isn’t yet, like the busybody she’s doubtless always been. Shall it be a Tuesday/Thursday schedule for Miss Lizzie and a Monday/Wednesday/Friday for the other—Margaretta, presumably, though the elder, Leah Fish, has yet to confirm which of her two younger sisters she’ll farm out for labor and
