The Visionist: A Novel

by Rachel Urquhart

  I had not expected my pale threat to make much of a difference to Hurlbut, but his face went white at the mention of a witness, and he nodded rather more readily than I would have expected. His trouble, whatever it was, must have been greater than I realized for him to accede to my demands so easily.

  Then he gathered himself together and shrugged unconvincingly. “It would only be a bother to me to make your old mother and father miserable now,” he scoffed. “And you’ve proved to be of little real value over the years. I believe I’d get better service from an errand boy for most of the things I demand of you. So, Pryor, though I don’t expect you’ll bow before me in gratitude, I grant you your freedom. Run along home. But first, fulfill your end of the bargain—and quick, before I take it into my head to change my mind.”

  I took my time reaching into my pockets, checking first one and then the other before holding the envelope just beyond reach, forcing him to lean in before he could snatch it out of my hand. A leather pouch full of coins dropped to the ground at my feet. “Pray, what do you plan to do with your treasured farm, sir?” I asked innocently as I bent to pick it up. “Lead a simple country life?”

  He looked at me with disgust before turning his attentions back to the packet. “I plan to invest in the future, Pryor,” he answered. “The past is a tar pit. Industry’s the thing. I want to see land put up to work as hard as those who put up with working it. You know, I spoke to the farmer who owned the Ashland property before he died in that accidental fire. Strange, the timing of things. He was going to sell it to me—said he just had a few family matters to see to first.” Hurlbut sighed at the memory, tapping the packet impatiently on his thigh as a smirk washed over his face. “Wish now I’d offered to take the girl who was watching us. You understand. To lessen his load a bit. A pretty thing she was—flaxen-haired under the grime. Alas,” he said, sighing heavily, “the father was a greedy brute—probably would have asked quite a price for her. At least now that he’s gone, his land will come cheaper.”

  “Ah,” I answered. “Couldn’t get the girl, so you went for her mother instead, is that it?”

  “Your insults tire me, Pryor. Pray leave me in peace to examine what you have so triumphantly traded for the rescue of a vagrant. I’m just sorry the lady doesn’t come dragging a coffin behind her. You’ll be in need of one within the week, I can assure you of that.”

  He tore at Briggs’s seal—cracking it and sending bits of chipped wax flying—then pulled the paper from its fold, held it close to his face, and began to devour the words that spilled across it. All was quiet at first, save for the occasional impatient snort-and-paw of one or the other of our horses. The morning light was growing brighter and it filled me with strength and optimism for the coming hours. That is, it did until I heard May Kimball’s shriek carried eerily on the wind. She had been watching us from my carriage, and the sight of the envelope held fast in Hurlbut’s grasp caused her great distress.

  I made a move towards where she sat, but Hurlbut grabbed my arm and shook his head. “Not yet, Pryor,” he said with evident pleasure. “I don’t mean to delay your reunion, but I need more time to be certain that what you have brought is the thing I need.”

  I hated using her this way, but perhaps May’s cries made the paper seem more valuable. Hurlbut passed his beady eyes back and forth over each and every line as I held my breath. Finally he sighed, tucked his prize into his coat pocket, and patted it smugly. Without another word he spun away and fairly skipped back to his carriage, clapping twice to summon Cramby. His door snapped shut, and Cramby clambered onto the driver’s bench, cheeks flushed with what I could only assume was triumph.

  For my part, I thought it best to stay in character to the last so I indicated nothing in return. Indeed, as I walked back to my carriage, which rocked with May Kimball’s sobs, I felt my legs wobble beneath me. Checking my pocket watch, I saw that there remained just enough time to take my passenger to the travelers’ inn in Albion, where I had arranged to pay a young woman to help May Kimball bathe and put on a dress I had procured from a former client. It would be a miserable fit, I was certain of that, for it came from the storage trunks of my dear, full-figured spinster, Elvira Drean. Her quest for a suitable man gave her scant use for simple frocks. My gain, I say: Mistress Drean’s delusions allowed me to ensure that May Kimball was clean and comfortably clothed when she accompanied me to the Shaker Meeting. I wished I could avoid having to bring her at all, but Elder Sister Agnes would turn her back on me if I did not deliver my end of the bargain. Besides, I no longer felt safe letting her out of my sight. As it was, the day ahead was full of uncertainty. I could leave nothing to chance.

  Polly

  STRIPS OF MUSLIN from the attic workroom—they were soft but how much blood could they hold? She would need so many that she feared another sister might detect the theft. Then again, what did that matter now that she was leaving?

  Polly bent over and sucked her breath in sharply. The child would not out easily. She had taken but a single sip of the Black Hellebore at daybreak. She had tried to hold back, but she could stand not a second more of Silas’s presence in her body. And, she had told herself, it was Sabbath Day morning; she would be gone before nightfall.

  But she never imagined that the tincture would act upon her body so quickly. The bleeding had commenced, and though it had been less than an hour since she stuffed the first strip up under her dress between her thighs, already the cloth was soaked through. She bundled up another and held them both beneath her skirts, squeezing her legs together. Tearing at the thin fabric used for making the shadow forms of dresses, she remembered standing still for the first time on a wooden box as the young seamstress took pin after pin from her pursed lips and, beginning at Polly’s wrists, worked her way up each of her arms, down the sides and darts of her figure, then along the edges of the long skirt and hem. Wrapped in white cut to fit her body, she had felt special for the first time in her life. She had entertained the notion that she was possessed of the gifts the believers had assigned her. Stupid girl, she thought now. The muslin dress form and the heavy cotton and worsted wool frocks that had followed had been nothing more than costumes—ones she’d had no right to wear.

  She understood better now Charity’s and Elder Sister Agnes’s warnings. The Black Hellebore could kill her—why, as she tasted its bitterness, she had almost wished for it—and after that first sip she sensed that she had set into motion a convulsive process, one that would be painful to the end. Worried that, once they were reunited, her mother would try to talk her out of taking the medicine, Polly had begun the purge earlier than planned. It was not that Mama would ever want her to birth Silas’s child. It was that the alternative was so dangerous. May would have seen the baby brought into the world and then disposed of it rather than risk watching her daughter die from trying to bleed it out. Polly had taken her first sip here, in The City of Hope, because she knew that once the bleeding started, someone would have to get her to a doctor to help her through. As another stab of pain pierced her gut, she wondered at the wisdom of her reasoning.

  She hoped she could last through Meeting. That was all she had to do. Then Mister Pryor would throw a cloak over her and walk her to his carriage. She would be gone from The City of Hope, and the believers would never realize how or why. That was how the eldress wanted it.

  She looked at the floor beneath her feet and saw that a single drop of blood had fallen. I am in Fate’s hands, she thought. A cramp bent her double. It was hard not to think back on Silas’s face. Such a laugh he seemed to be enjoying at her expense. She could hear him, the slap of a single word. Whore. She tore at more of the muslin.

  Though she would not speak to Polly, Charity had slipped another vial under her pillow since she’d delivered the Black Hellebore. An elixir named White Poppies. Made from pods of white poppy, Madeira wine, and sugar water, the potion was boiled down to a syrup “impregnated with opiate matter and uncertain in strength.” So read the recipe,
written out on aged paper in the nurse’s journal to which Charity often referred when mixing medicines. Polly remembered it well, for it had been the tincture Charity had asked her to make for Sister Rebecca when The Laudanum was too strong. Indeed, Polly wondered if there had been poppies in the tea Charity had given her the night they had gone to the healing room together. The liquid had helped her escape into the story of the golden robes and the procession to the sacred mountaintop. It had opened her mind so that she could see everything Charity described and believe her every word.

  Her sodden dressing needed changing, and as she pulled her skirts awkwardly round her thin hips, she bound several strips in a kind of harness about the tops of her legs. She knotted the cloth tightly and thought, for the first time since she’d heard of it, how the young brethren soaked such lengths in freezing water before retiring, wrapping themselves as she did now to discourage carnal desire from poisoning their souls as they slept. She had found the muslin harnesses amidst their damp sheets on many a morning and washed them, as was her duty, hanging them to dry by the stove while closing her mind to their intimate nature. The irony was not lost on her: that she should bear closer witness here to the private lust of men than would ever have been required of her among the people of the World.

  She did not believe that she would bleed more than could be held by the handfuls of cloth she thrust into her apron. As another swipe of pain moved through her, she jerked her hand from her pocket, dislodging her thimble. It had been a gift from Charity, who had scratched POLLY in neat letters around its rim. Polly was never without the finger cup, but as she watched it roll away in a great arc, she felt too awful to get down on her hands and knees and pick it up. No matter now. One of the sisters would find it after she was gone. Perhaps she would use it to keep from pricking her own dainty finger as she sewed her countless loops and knotted her countless knots.

  This was how Polly’s time in The City of Hope had been marked: in tiny gestures—the kneading of bread, the sweeping of floors, the collecting of eggs—tasks that took place not simply in the kitchen, the hallway, the chicken house, but under an endless sky of faith, blue as the ceiling beneath which they danced and sang inside the meetinghouse. The hugeness enveloped every sister and brother day upon day upon day. Little marked by change, protected from the disturbances of a world they refused to acknowledge, full of infinite small acts, each believer’s life was a ticking down of purpose as meticulous as a merchant’s count.

  Polly held her breath, bent down, and wiped her blood off the floor. Knocked on its side, out of reach beneath the woodstove, her thimble looked as defeated as a fallen toy soldier.

  She passed the rest of the morning lying on her bed, but she knew that eventually she would have to rise and ready herself. Now, she had but a few moments to change her dressings before joining her sisters and walking to the meetinghouse. In the last few hours, she had almost fainted from pain and loss of blood several times, and now, as she took the vial of White Poppies from her bodice, she finally allowed herself its sweet relief. Folding and packing tight the muslin strips, pinning them to her strange harness, she felt a wave of grief wash over her with such power that she swayed as she shut the door to her chamber and turned away from the room she had shared so happily with the only friend she had ever known.

  I must keep moving, she thought. The White Poppies were on her side it seemed, for the pain lessened with every step she took. She managed the stairs, and by the time she reached the bottom, she was floating. Nothing could touch her now. She entered the sitting room of the dwelling house, pale but resolute.

  “Why, Sister Polly,” said Sister Honora. “We were worried about you. What, on this Sabbath Day, can have engaged you for so long?”

  Polly looked up and faced the sister who spoke. “I thought I had forgotten my thimble in the sisters’ attic,” she said. “Had I left it, I am afraid I would never have found it again. So I went to retrieve it. I am sorry for keeping you so long…”

  She pulled her mind back from the daydream induced by the White Poppies. It had been a stronger dose than she realized. She would need to be vigilant.

  Elder Sister Agnes eyed her a beat longer than usual. “Indeed,” she said quietly. “Now, if you will indulge us, Sister Polly, the Spirits await, and though they are eternal, their patience is not.”

  Polly nodded and began walking as quickly as she dared, holding her skirt from behind lest the blood begin to show through her garments. Above her the sky looked heavy and gray, as though snow might be coming. The cramps swept through faster now, so she slowed and tried to breathe out her pain. She was certain that once the dancing had begun, she would be able to hide her distress. She willed her strength into every step she took.

  Was all of life pretense? she wondered. Even in this holy place, did anyone see another for who they really were? Did the believers know their own souls? How mistaken they had been to trust her. How selfish she had been to let them. And yet had not both benefitted from the game? Charity spoke often of the better life that had blossomed since Polly’s arrival in The City of Hope. And until this latest and cruelest curse, Polly had felt herself healed by the strength of the believers’ conviction. If, somehow, her presence had made it possible to work and worship in peace and union, how could matters have gone so terribly wrong?

  The line of sisters entered the meetinghouse, and though all of the believers were silent, she could hear the din made by the World’s people. Many had come today—for they had heard tell of the recent Visions—and they seemed to await the spectacle with boisterous anticipation, speaking loudly with an ease and oblivion Polly could not understand. Did they not realize that this was a holy place? Could they not hear their own cacophony and know it to be an affront to Mother and Her Spirits?

  The sisters and brethren arranged themselves into two lines facing each other, and she drew in her breath, forcing herself to look just beyond the brother opposite her, stamping her feet and shuffling to and fro, away and then towards the string of brethren backing and advancing in unison before her. It was easy to fall into step. She knew the songs and movements as well as did the most practiced sisters. The flow of the dance soothed her as the believers wheeled and rocked in their somber patterns.

  She felt the blood begin its slow trickle down her leg and adjusted her petticoats beneath her skirts. Floating in a White Poppy haze, she did not notice when the dancing came to an end and all had gone quiet save a lone sister’s voice.

  A believer was having a Vision, Polly could tell by the cadence, the lilting slowness that marked the sound of one who finds her soul filled with light. A fortuitous moment of deliverance, she thought, for it would animate and distract the others. Her gaze fell upon the crowd in the spectators’ gallery. The visitors, seated on benches, appeared to be from another land. Some of the women had rouged their lips and bared their breasts in a manner that shocked Polly. Men decorated themselves in the colors of parrots and peacocks, pictures of which she remembered seeing in books when she was a child. Could she have forgotten the ways of the World? These sinners looked absurd, drawing such attention to themselves. Like a spoon beating an empty tin cup, their titters rang nothing like the full laughter of the believers. She wondered for a moment how she could go back to living a life of such feeble purpose.

  A sharp cramp reminded her that she had no choice now. She knew she must go, and as her eyes scanned the crowd, they snagged on the face of the inspector. As Elder Sister Agnes had promised, he was there. Her heart sank at the thought of what he would say. He appeared to be looking straight at Polly, his face filled with…was it pity? He nodded, and in the slow reverence of the gesture, Polly detected something she could not name. Perhaps it was the White Poppies at work, but it seemed to Polly as though he was trying to communicate with her. She shook off the thought; she must concentrate on the hours that lay ahead.

  The crowd—enraptured by the Vision in progress—did not notice her swooning. So much the better. All eyes were
on the sister, all ears on her trancelike chanting. As distantly as it echoed in Polly’s addled mind, the voice was familiar. Polly moved into the mass, craning her neck to see. How the sound haunted her—sad, mellifluous, intimate.

  Charity.

  The White Poppies had wrapped a kind of gauze about Polly’s head, and the words came through muffled and unclear. Her friend was speaking her name. Why? The voice began to rise in pitch; the bodies of those around her grew tense. What was she saying? Polly forced herself onto the balls of her feet, stretching in her soft dancing shoes. Charity had finally been blessed with the gift she deserved. She would know holiness in its full glory, and the force of her goodness would be made plain before all the other believers. Here, Polly thought, was a true Visionist. Here was a believer deserved of Mother’s faith. No one was more steadfast. No one Polly had ever known was possessed of a soul so pure.

  Her ankles went weak, and she had to stand down. The air pulsed with foreboding as the believers parted and cleared a path. A faint smile spread across Polly’s face. She meant to show her friend her love, but a glance at those surrounding her proved something was amiss.

  Charity swayed as she spoke. “And the angels said, ‘The one you have known to be the holiest Visionist, the first ever to appear in your midst, is not to be trusted.’” Eyes flashing, Charity stared at Polly as she continued. “Yes, my brothers and sisters, I speak the truth. The Holy Mother’s angels appeared before me and said, ‘She hides a filthy secret within her flesh and worse, within her heart.’” She paused, and there were shouts of protest from within the tight knot of believers. “And then further, Mother’s angels, they bid me listen to Sister Polly when she sleeps, for only then, they said, would she reveal her true nature. And what did I hear? Our Visionist’s real voice! Carnality rules her soul! Why else would she have been made ill in past weeks? Punishment! Concealment! My brothers, my sisters, she has indeed acted as a vessel, but I ask: Whose message has she borne unto the faithful?”