The Pierced Heart: A Novel (9 page)

But this I did not say.

He touched my cheek then, and said I was pale, and no doubt exhausted by the exertions of last night, and I must rest before we begin the task of packing for our journey. I smiled at him because I wished to reassure him, and because there was, after all, some truth in what he said. And what remained unspoken, I can scarcely understand myself, far less explain. When he was gone I went to my casement and looked down upon the street. The sun was sinking, and though the roofs and attics were aglow with gold, the pavements were sunk in shadow, and an old woman in a wool shawl and a threadbare bonnet was shuffling painfully along with her empty basket over one arm. Empty because she is going to the market, where there will be remnants now on sale at half the price of their morning freshness—I know, because when I was a little child I would accompany my mother through the streets at the same hour of the evening, and with the same aim in view. Though when I remember that part of my past now it is not in pictures but in perfumes—the wooden tables with their crates of bitter oranges, their coils of stinking sausage, and their slabs of oozy yellow cheese, mingled with the stale sweat of the tired and short-tempered stallholders. It is strange how strong these impressions are for me, how powerfully an aroma caught randomly in the air can draw me down and backwards, to that one scent I still yearn to recapture, which my mother always had about her, which I cannot ever convey in words, and have never encountered since.

A few moments later, as I idled still at the window, I saw a playbill come slithering in the wind towards where the old woman had paused for a moment with a neighbour. It was splashed with mud and torn at the edges, but that did not matter. I could see the strip of paper pasted to its face, and I knew that it was one of ours. And then, as I watched, the sheet of paper lifted and folded itself for a moment about the old woman’s walking-stick, and when she shook it loose and saw what it was, I saw them both gasp and cross themselves, and I
heard one whisper harshly, “
Der Teufel tut sein Werk durch den Wahnsinn dieser Verrückten.
” The devil does his work through the delusions of this lunatic.

And then I turned and reached blindly for my chair, my breath coming hard at that word I fear so much, knowing that I will wake again tonight, in the midst of the dark, cold and shaking at the moonlit window with no recollection of how I got there, just as I awoke, once, barefoot in the street, being led into the shadows by a man I did not know.

It was my father who saved me. My father who found me and beat the man away, and then carried me, trembling in his gentle arms, back to my bed. My father who has, every night all these years since, locked the door to my bedroom and taken away the key. But now, it is different. Now, when I catch him looking at me in the glass, there is something in his face I have not seen before.

Fear.

It is a paradox, and, perhaps, a punishment. For fear has been our lives, and our calling. We have fathomed it, we have fashioned it, and we have sold it. How often have I heard my father boast that he is satisfied only when our spectators are rendered prostrate in their seats, moaning and shivering in delicious horror. Delicious, Father says, because fear is the very neighbour of ecstasy, even if it is rarely acknowledged to be so. And I had only to look at the women in our audiences to believe him, their bosoms heaving, their lips parted, and perspiration beading their brows. We have laboured, he and I, with the sole intent of intensifying that sensation, of finding new ways to chill the blood, and freeze the heart, and the fame we have gained, and the money we have earned, have stemmed in large part from that joint endeavour. I will not claim the credit is all my own—that would be an exaggeration, and unfair—but there are those in our profession who whisper that when he worked alone my father was nothing but a sorry imitation of the man who once apprenticed him,
little more than the travelling showman he had been before he met my mother, with a crate of pretty puppetry, and a repertoire of tricks and mirrors and sleight of hand. But
I
know the truth of it—
I
know he had always dreamed of being a scientist and bitterly regretted that his family was not rich enough to permit him to pursue such a study;
I
know that Monsieur Robertson saw that desire in him, when he opened his door one morning and found my father slumped asleep on his step, having walked all the way to Paris to see the world’s most famous
phantasmagoria
, and beg its proprietor for a position, however lowly. It was Monsieur Roberston, in the years that followed, who taught my father all the intricate deceptions of our trade—the use of a gauze curtain dipped in wax, the mounting of the magic lantern on wheels, and the edging of the lantern slides in black, that our spectres might glimmer wraith-like as they loom and recede, and hover weightlessly in the empty air. It was Monsieur Robertson who first brought us to Vienna, and Monsieur Robertson, when he was a very old man, and I still a very young child, who saw me, one wet afternoon, playing with the apparatus, and trying to figure to myself how it worked. When my mother came in and saw what I was doing, she upbraided me sternly for touching the lantern slides, knowing how fragile they were and how long each took to paint, but he interrupted her hastily, saying that I might have an aptitude for the craft, and should be encouraged, and he smiled, saying that I had been christened well, for my name meant “light,” and I might bring illumination to the darkness, as he himself had always striven to do. And so it was that I became apprentice as my father had once been, learning not merely the science of our deceptions, but that far greater and more laudable science of optics. It was my father who taught me the use of the solar microscope, and the mathematics of Archimedes, and all the secrets of the patented fantoscope, which Monsieur Robertson had entrusted to no other but him.

I know my mother disapproved of this, lamenting my sad lack of a proper education, and telling me, privately, when my father was not there, that such subjects were not suitable for young girls. And there
came a time when I blamed myself for saddening her so, and not noticing that she was growing thinner, and her skin paler, and the shadows were darkening under her eyes, until it was too late, and in my twelfth year she was taken from me. I remember so little of that time now, only scraps and fragments of memory that do not fit with what I have since been told. But I tell myself the explanation is simple—that I loved my mother so much that the pain of her loss was too much for me to bear—that my mind has sought to bury that pain, and it is no wonder therefore if my recollections are confused. I do know that for weeks I never left my chamber, and my father cancelled his performances and remained at my side. Perhaps it was all that time motionless and bed-ridden, perhaps it was because I woke one morning with the white sheets wringing in blood and I had no-one but my father to explain to me what it meant; all I know is that when I was finally well enough to be carried to sit in a chair by the window, I had lost some part of myself that I have never since been able to retrieve. All my happy lightness of heart had gone, all my spirit, and audacity, and careless childish courage. And in their place, the sleepwalking, and the nightmare.

But of the latter, I have never spoken. Not to my father, and not, absolutely, to the string of doctors he has brought these last days to see me, who have looked into my eyes, and taken my pulse, and questioned my father as to my symptoms, and then looked smugly wise and diagnosed hysteria, or nervous debility, or
chlorosis
. There was one—a wheezing fat man with a face all noduled with warts—who even went so far as to suggest that it is my playing of the glass armonica, which is to blame. He had seen, he said, many such cases where the use of this instrument has induced not merely melancholy but madness, by reason of the intolerable tingling vibrations that seem to penetrate the skin, and unbalance the tranquillity of the quietest mind. I tried to tell him, then, that he was wrong—that no-one knows more of melancholy than I, and this new misery is not of that order. But my father silenced me—he clung to the man’s words, desperate to believe that my symptoms might have so simple an origin. And to
placate him I have not touched the armonica since, vital though it is to the effect of our enactments. But it has made no difference. There has been no respite, frantic as my father is to see one. For it is not my playing that is the cause. I tell him, again and again, that I am not mad—not
mad
but
sick
. But all he does is smile sadly upon me, and caress my hair, saying that all will be well. That I must trust him, and all will be well.

29 J
ANUARY
,
MIDNIGHT

And now the last performance has been given.

There were so many people who wished to congratulate my father, so many pressing about us and begging, some in tears, for a private consultation before we departed, and holding out towards me the belongings of the dead, as if those forlorn possessions had the power to entice those who once owned them to return. The toys of lost children, the robes of babies taken before their churching, the wedding ring a young wife must once have worn. The grief—and worse, the hope—washed towards me like a wave, and I found myself drawing back as if they sought to suffocate me, as if it were their sadness that takes unseen form and sucks my breath like an incubus in the night. I saw my father’s look of alarm, then, as the crowd of faces and voices closed about me and I felt his hand suddenly upon my shoulder, cleaving through the people and drawing me free.

“My daughter is unwell,” he said loudly, as some muttered and pointed. “She is exhausted and must return home now to rest. Please, make way.”

And so it is that I have been sitting here now alone these two hours, among the boxes and trunks that are to go with us tomorrow, hearing the bells chime the quarters, and remembering, remembering.

It is still all so clear to me, that September morning, when he came rushing to my bedroom, clutching a page of newspaper a friend had posted to him from New York. I have found it, he said, smoothing the page out on the bed and pointing—It is exactly what we have been
seeking. A new attraction for our spectacle, a new wonder that will create a clamour of excited gossip among the public, and command respect even from the learned and aloof. And when I took up the paper and started to read I knew at once what he meant. The article was from the
New-York Tribune
, dated some three weeks before, and it related how three young sisters claimed to converse with the dead by means of rapping on walls, or tapping on wooden floors. The spirits seemed quite amenable to this method of communication, submitting most accommodatingly to different numbers of raps for Yes and No, and for the letters of the alphabet. And yet it seemed that many hundreds of citizens of that great city were more than ready to give credence to it.

I looked up at my father and smiled. “It is easy to see how one might counterfeit such a phenomenon. The wonder is that anyone else should believe it.”

He gripped my hand, his eyes bright with eagerness. “But they do, Lucy,
they do
. These sisters are attracting the most immense audiences. My friend’s letter tells me there have since been dozens of these public
séances
, attended by people who will pay well to see them. And yet the only spectacle those people see is this bodiless ‘rapping,’ nothing more. There is no unearthly light, no phantasms, no ghostly
voices. All those
feu d’artifice
effects
we
might produce—that we
already
produce.”

And of course he was right, at least in this. We had long employed the tricks of ventriloquism to give our apparitions speech, and the illusion of the magic lantern might as easily clothe in flesh the faces of the departed as it did the spectres and sorcerors that were our stock in trade. But I was, all the same, uneasy.

I looked again at the cutting, and then up at my father’s face. “And you would be content to create such a delusion—content that we should proclaim to the world that we can commune with the dead, in the full knowledge that it is nothing but a lie?”

“What harm could it do? Why should we not trumpet this ‘new era,’ as these American girls do?”

“It is one thing to conjure images any rational person knows to be harmless illusion; quite another, surely, to claim that we bring back the loved ones they have lost. It would be such a deception—”

“Everything we do is a deception. Of one kind or another.”

He gripped my hand once more, avid for my assent.

“And how would you feel,” I began tentatively, “if someone were to deceive
you
in such a way? Trick you into believing you could speak to my mother—hear her voice again? Would you not feel it a terrible betrayal—the most terrible betrayal of them all?”

“No,” he replied softly, wiping away the tear that had stolen down my cheek. “Not if I never discovered I had been deceived. I think I would be comforted, and overjoyed to see her one last time.”

And as he stroked my hand, and I smiled at him through my tears, I found that I agreed.

We spent many days, after that, exploring how we might harness all the guile of our art to this new end. The magic of the lantern might easily command the dead to appear, and we knew, from long years, that the wish to believe is the strongest power an illusionist may exercise; that we had only to show a ghostly face for someone to
claim it as wife, or sister, or mother long years dead. But we had need of some mechanism, some imposing device, that would convince those who saw it that it was by the advancement of science, not the profane practices of superstition, that this new wonder had been achieved.