The Dark (64 page)

“Sir! Your language.”

“Sorry for that. Sure you ain’t thirsty? I’s got more than sarsaparilla. I’s got Scotch whisky and French claret. I’s got the Russian vodka and Barbary rum, the best you can find. What I ain’t got is apple cider. I could never abide the taste nor smell of it. As like ’cus children thought apple-chucking at some poor peddler was all swell fun. Happened plenty. I never doubted they woulda stoned me given the chance.”

“I fail utterly in seeing how this … information is of any assistance to me,” Leah says, and grips her reticule. Makes ready, if need be, to use the scissors in the near pocket.

“You will see, Mrs. Underhill. But I’s got to tell you that when I first heard about him, that peddler what got murdered and buried, like I said, in your kin’s cellar floor, why I groped my throat for a wound in some kind of sympathy. Then I started appreciating the thought of my kind haunting the settled peoples. And when I came back through Arcadia, your business of raising the dead, why it had already become just that, a good business. That’s when I saw a niche. Our Fates are knit up, just like I wrote to you at your wedding, recall? I’s started small, just like you and your sisters, and I’s got competitors now, just
like you. But I’m still the best and the richest. I’m the originator. The creator—small c, course—much like yourself.”

“Creator? You are a blaspheming, hideous cretin, taking advantage of a modest woman who—”

“Modest? Hah! Now, don’t get in a lather. I just want to thank you ’cus I’m a grateful sort and I know what happens to those who ain’t. And I want to give you a proper thank you. You sent back the copy of the Blue Book that I gave you for your wedding so I’m guessing it weren’t good enough—”

“I was finished with public séances.”

“Weren’t good enough to have those hard-won listings of séance lovers and their tragedies and habits and heart’s-desires. Nor to own intelligence on the dead. But if I could put Spiritualism on the straight path, shut the traps of the naysayers, would that suffice?”

Leah steps back, nearly trips on his brass cane. It is topped with a hound’s head she notices, a vulgar embellishment.

Pettifew’s manner turns beseeching. “Please, Mrs. Underhill, please, ma’am. Just listen here.”

“Why-ever would I listen to you? You, sir, are madder than a March hare.”

“I know a resurrection man. We give him his fee and he’ll be hush and quick. All’s we need is a body. Don’t matter who. Any battlefield will yield one up, any old churchyard. Then you put out word that the peddler’s ghost is talking again. Says he wants his bones buried proper, with prayers and all that. Folks will dig up the cellar again. And they’ll find the bones this time. And then you can say, that it were always true. And then your detractors, your enemies, them naysayers, they’ll be sure silenced up. It’ll credit Spiritualism. Give it heft again. Make believers. Make my buyers come banging on my door, and heap me with dollars. You too. It’d be of benefit to us both, Mrs. Underhill. What a team we could be, you and me.”

“Team?
Team
? The only man worth being a team with was …” She doesn’t say his name,
Chauncey
, but the thought of him, oddly, gives her courage. She backs away. Turns just as Pettifew thrusts his card in her gloved hand.

“That’s his address on the flip side of my card. Those letters. ‘R.M.’ They stand for resurrection man, ’course. Contact him up when you’re ready.”

“I could never carry out a deceit of that order,” Leah says. She is using her coldest voice, but Pettifew doesn’t shiver, as some have been known to do.

“Oh, I doubt that, Mrs. Underhill.”

“You, sir, are fortunate my pa is no longer alive. He’d cut your throat for true.”

“All right, all right. Just think on it, my proposal.”

She can sense him watching her as she threads her way out, her heart athud. Pettifew must live in these wretched rooms, she realizes, because clothing is strewn here and there, as well as crockery and tumblers. Mostly, however, there are the wares of his trade: reaching rods thin as a child’s finger and of that metal called aluminum, lead weights to sew into the hems of dresses, shoes with interior tappers and loose shanks, hollow rods to play trumpets from a distance, and gyroscopes to help any item spin. There are magnets of all sizes, phosphorous kept high up in glass jars, reams of tissue paper and pencils of clear wax. There are pots of luminous paint, vials of sympathetic ink, and bolts upon bolts of white shrouding. There are five lanterns with cutaways of faces and human forms, and these hang alongside seven false hands that are coated in silk to approximate the skin’s softness in the dark.

Leah reaches the hall by squeezing past two spirit cabinets. They are still being constructed and the tubes and wires snag on her dress.

At last, the door. Leah doesn’t turn, but she is certain she can hear Pettifew’s dragging gait, his raspy muttery pleas.

Leah clambers into her carriage.

“I was about to come and retrieve you, Mrs. Underhill,” Gatherford assures her, and in such a way that he recalls to her that cowardly, gossip-mongering driver who took her out to see the Hydesville house twenty years ago. She looks at him closely. “Gatherford?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Drive, if you please. To Mother’s.” She settles back. Soon she will be telling her mother all about Pettifew, his establishment, his horrid proposal. Leah has been confiding completely in Mother these past few years and this confiding always calms her.

Their greater confidence began five years ago, just after the draft riots of’63 when Mother called upon her and, with arms akimbo, said, “Leah. The girls have accused you of directing them like the dancers in one of those tawdry burlesque shows. They have spoken of … fraud and—”

“My word, Mother, they were most certainly imbibing,” Leah said, and steered the conversation to a Brazilian parrot she had just acquired for her aviary, and who could sing in four languages, including Latin. “And look upon this Chittering grand, Mother. Finer than the Littles of Rochester ever had. It plays in perfect tune, as if delivered from Heaven and not just from England. Do you not sometimes think it miraculous how far we have come from our former poverty and station?”

Her mother claimed that was not the point. The point was deceit and lies. Chicanery. Legerdemain. “They confessed to me, Leah. Yes, they did. Apples. Apples on strings, it was, and then toes snapping on the headboards, and fingers and … but you told them it was a lark. Fun. And that money could be made.”

“Merciful spirits, you should not take too seriously anything my sisters say. They are so often befuddled from overindulgence—”

“They have stopped all that. Yes, they have.”

“Perhaps. But these outrageous claims of theirs cannot explain all that people see and hear. And have these clever scientist fellows ever caught us out? If there was fraud they would have discovered it by now.”

“But what of Mr. Burr? Did he not prove—”

“Oh, Chauncey is dead. Or gone. Or both. I never saw him again after the court case. Never. Not once. That man is being chewed at by worms for all I care.”

“But the girls said that even you—”

“Certainly at times the spirits do not co-operate as one would like. But sitters demand so much. And then, of course, it is often
necessary to add some personal touches. But surely you understood that, Mother dear. Surely.”

Her mother surely had not. She had thought her daughters blessed.

“And what does my father say of all this business?” Leah asked. She twiddled her diamond dove broach, a wedding present from Mr. Underhill.

“He said very little, didn’t he? Except you might need a bigger box, and with a bigger surprise inside.” Her mother let out her tears then. It took a long while for Leah to mollify her.

“Henceforth I promise I will be has honest as I can with you, Mother. I promise.”

Leah recalls this conversation, turning it in her mind, probing it for places where she might have put a word wrong. No, she steered it well, as she has steered everything well.
A bigger box? A bigger surprise?
Is that, indeed, what her father had said? She realizes she still has the card Pettifew slipped in her gloved hand. It reads “Pettifews Ingenuities.” That is all. She scans the address on the flip side. It is for a wretched neighbourhood of Manhattan. Would she knock on the door and ask cryptically for R.M? It is the kind of intrigue that Dr. Kane would have loved, but not Leah. No.

Leah makes to toss the card out the carriage window. Pauses. She slips it into her reticule, then orders Gatherford to halt at her favourite flower shop. There she purchases her usual bouquet of rustic flowers. Twenty minutes more and she is at the high gates. The rain has been scant and the little stone bench beside her mother’s marble gravestone is quite dry. Her mother’s grave is smack aside her father’s, and Leah supposes that he, too, enjoys Leah’s frank chats, her revelatory confessions.

“And can you countenance the impertinence of Pettifew’s proposition, Father? The horror of it. Oh, I suppose you could. It would be your kind of trick in the box.”

She tips her head, but her father doesn’t answer. There is only the song of vesper sparrows, and the mimic calls of crows.

I
woke to a faint, sliding sound. I had nodded off on the ladderback, I allow, and for an uncertain gap of time.

My patient said “Good Morning” (though it was evening) and I searched in my satchel for a bottle. There were a good few, all empty. I came upon my stethoscope and pocket mirror, my books
On the Etiquette of Mourning
and
Ars Moriendi
and my half-worked coverall with its tangled trails of yarn.

On a whim I drew August’s letter out of the satchel’s side pocket. Out wafted a faint scent. Neroli. Rose oil. I sniffed at it. And then I understood. “You!”

“No need to point. There’s no one else here.”

“You. You’ve been snooping in my satchel.”

“Sit down, Alvah, you’re being rash.”

“Rash? Hah! Oh, you and your ways. Ever ferreting information. Stopping at nothing. You’ve near as admitted it all yourself: employing spies, reading obituaries and gravestones. Ghoulish of you, that’s what. Do I look a ninny? A just-born?”

“Nothing like.” She patted the bedside. I, in turn, patted the pot of
Mrs. Howe’s Neroli and Rose Miracle Hand Cream
. Then I held up August’s letter. “Your little hands have been on this.”

“I’ve not a glimmer what you’re talking about.”

“It smells of the cream. Bitter oranges—neroli and rose oil—”

“Perchance you helped yourself to my handcream. You help yourself to my laudanum, so why not?”

My anger fled me and I apologized for my lapse in professionalism.

“We all have trying days, disastrous days,” she said. And then she told me about a day that was trying and disastrous indeed. For her and Leah both.

A
SUN-SHOT MORNING IN
J
UNE OF
1871, and Leah sweeps into her stately dining room and inspects the gleaming silver fish-knives, the silver bone dishes, the salt throne and ice-cream hatchet. Sings:

From the aviary, as if in response, comes the muted cacophony of her birds. From the corridor comes the rabble sound of children. The Underhill home on West 37th is often flush with young relations. Leah loves to watch them at their games; she nearly always guesses the winner correctly.

“Good morning, my dovely one,” Daniel says as he strolls in. He uses the endearment “dovely” because of her love of birds. He has learned, however, never to use it in public.

“Good morning, yes, Mr. Underhill,” Leah says as she sits at her end of the table. The children have already eaten so it is just the two of them, as must happen on occasion.

Daniel counts out the silver-domed platters that Cook has set on the sideboard. “One, two … five. That is top!”

“Ship at starboard!
Nil desperandum, nil desperandum
,” Vivace calls out from the aviary. He is Leah’s favourite talking parrot, and the fourth of that name.

Daniel lifts a silver dome. “Grilled tomatoes! Well, I am twice
happy you convinced Cook they’re not poisonous. What else—ah, kippers, hung beef, coddled eggs …”

Daniel loads his plate, settles at the table’s head and snaps open a copy of the
New York Times
. His house-wrap falls open above his nightshirt.

“My dear,” Leah says, and gestures upwards. He smiles amiably and adjusts the wrap. He no longer discourages her insistence on ordinary formalities. No longer pulls her onto his lap when they are alone at meals. For this Leah has to thank
Godey’s Lady’s Book
and its advice on using fine foods to supplant a man’s more animal appetites.

On the reverse side of Daniel’s paper is a caricature of Horace Greeley. His white whiskers are exaggerated in an unkindly fashion, his expression bewildered as a babe’s.