“By the time your letter reached us—and it was clever of you to address it to me—Dr. Kane had suffered a second stroke.” Here Morton flushed in embarrassment and his gaze wavered, but he went on. “I read your letter to him. The one you enclosed for me to give to him. So, you see, he knew that you had not forsaken him. He knew that you were on your way.”
With great self-control, I managed not to wince. It had been a very private letter, meant only for Elisha’s eyes. I simply never imagined that he would be unable to read it himself. Still, I lifted my chin and smiled as best I could through my tears. “Thank you, Mr. Morton. There is no other person I would have trusted with it.”
“There is something else,” the young man said, still uncharacteristically distressed. “I knew by then that your ship was not going to arrive in time, that it wasn’t even going to depart from the United States in time. But I lied to him. I told him you were already on your way—that you were only a couple days from Havana. It seemed to bring him some comfort, and I knew that he would not live long enough to learn of the falsehood. Did I do right, Mrs. Kane? It has weighed heavily upon my conscience.”
The poor distraught man looked trustingly to me for comfort. Did he know the irony of asking me, of all people, whether it was right to deceive a person in order to ease his pain? “Yes, Mr. Morton,” I said to him. “Heaven forgives the falsehoods told in kindness. You were…a good friend to him, William. You have been a good friend to both of us.”
“I saved a few items for you,” he said then, clearing his throat and making a conscious effort to recover his usual reserved manner. He reached down and picked up the bundle of letters. “These are your letters. They include the last one to Havana as well as those he was carrying on his person at the time of his trip. They are the ones he always carried, the ones he favored. There was a lock of your hair in one of them. I removed it and…” he drew a breath “…it was entombed with him. I saw to it personally.”
I accepted the package gratefully, aware of how the tears ran freely down my face. “Thank you,” I whispered. Then I nodded at the larger item on the floor. “That cannot possibly be what I think it is.”
Morton smiled proudly and for his answer, unwound the sheet to reveal the portrait beneath. It was faded and cracked and worse for wear, but still, it seemed impossible for it to be here at all. I looked up at Elisha’s secretary, completely dumbfounded. “I cannot believe it. Surely it was abandoned with the Advance?”
He shook his head. “When we prepared to leave the ship and make our final journey southward, Dr. Kane allotted eight pounds of personal items for each man. This portrait used up most of his allowance, but he never considered leaving it behind.” Morton’s gaze was fixed somewhere over my shoulder and thousands of miles to the north. “You have to understand. Dr. Kane kept his personal life private. He never spoke of you to them—and yet there was not a man among us who didn’t know he was carrying that portrait with him. Every time we unloaded and repacked our cargo, we took special care that “The Commander’s Little Lady” should come to no harm.
“He took it with him to England,” Morton went on, “planning to have it repaired or duplicated. He had the portrait with him in his room at Havana. It was the one thing his mother did not dare take away,” Morton’s eyes narrowed in remembrance. “After he…was gone…she gave it to me and ordered me to burn it.”
Morton met my gaze proudly and lifted his chin. “But she forgot one thing. I didn’t work for her. I worked for Dr. Kane.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Maggie
Two days after my visit with Mr. Morton, I rose from my bed at dawn and walked out from the house. Five blocks from Mrs. Walters’s street there was a cemetery, and at this time of day, I knew that I would be the only living soul on its premises.
The ground was wet with dew, and beads of moisture lingered on cobwebs spun between the headstones. I wandered, directionless, feeling the hem of my dress grow damp as I meandered through the patchy spring grass. I read each name, the dates, the inscriptions, idly noting the stories revealed by the stones. Here lay a husband and wife with one child between them, all deceased within days of each other. An illness, surely, something deadly and contagious. Here lay a man with a wife on either side of him, the first one dead scarcely more than a decade after her successor was born. A second marriage in middle age for this man, with a much younger wife. But he had outlived both of them just the same, surviving twenty years beyond the passing of the second woman.
The graveyard was full of sad stories. Mine was no more tragic than any other. With a sigh, I sat down upon a stone chosen at random, sat and waited patiently. If the ones who slumbered beneath me had any voice to speak, I would listen. I was ready to receive their messages; I prayed for a sign, any sign.
There was nothing, of course. This was not my first pilgrimage and would probably not be my last, but nothing ever came from it, no glimmer of understanding. Even he who was most precious to me could not reach me, and the echoes of his voice in my mind were nothing more than memories.
No, the dead do not return. God has not willed it. I have never done anything but rap out messages from my own willful imagination. I have used my influence to spread my own sentiments and ideals, and however well intended I may have been, I have done nothing but sell lies to the weak, the desperate, and the gullible.
Now Kate…Kate possessed some gift denied to me…or else she was mad. Yes, that traitorous thought had hidden for some time in my mind, fearfully suppressed. She trusted the voices that spoke in her head; she believed the images that flickered across her vision. My dearest sister needed close watching, and I knew it was my duty to be her guardian and confidant, to protect and shield her when this burden threatened to overwhelm her. Kate was my anchor to life. She was perhaps the sole reason I did not flee to Elisha’s tomb and pound upon the door, demanding to be let in so that I might lie down beside him…
I lifted my hand, idly wiping a tear with a wrist bare of ornamentation. The diamond bracelet was gone, traded for the money I needed to hire a lawyer. I had literally ground my teeth in frustration as I handed it over at a pawnshop, just as Robert Kane had predicted I would do, and I cursed the man for forcing me to lower myself to his expectation. But my legal suit would be filed at the Philadelphia Orphan’s Court within the week, the bracelet sacrificed for the chance to hold my head up as the wife of Dr. Kane.
I had already been told it was a slim chance.
Sunlight crept weakly across the cemetery grounds. Here and there green bundles of pointed leaves thrust upward from the ground where devoted relatives had planted daffodils and tulips beside their loved ones. Life went on. Every inhabitant of these grounds had left someone behind to shoulder grief and struggle on. How many of those little yellow and red flowers were planted here to serve as markers for futures blighted, diverted, and cut short by an untimely death?
He had left me with nothing but a dubious inheritance and an even more dubious marriage. With even the bracelet gone now, I had not the wherewithal to support myself save by that means that he had so despised. It would have broken Elisha’s heart to see me back where he first found me, taking money for lying to people in the dark, living a life of sinful deceit and secret shame.
But Elisha had been no saint. Although he had raised money from the public for an adventure grandly titled “the Second Grinnell Rescue Expedition,” I knew very well that his eye had been on a more selfish prize—the glory and fame of discovery. Franklin’s fate mattered less to him than forging a reputation for himself. He was not as virtuous as I had once naïvely thought, his motives not nearly as pure as he pretended.
We both were frauds. He was a hero in the public eye, and I, a counselor to the bereaved. But in private, Elisha had not enough courage to defy his family, no matter how heartily he persuaded me to desert my own kin. And I was unable to recognize wise counsel when I heard it. I didn
’t even follow the advice I gave others. We had been a well-matched pair indeed; all our good intentions blended so neatly with our faults that we never anticipated the dead end of the road upon which we walked.
Every decision in our separate lives had led inexorably to this: that he lay on that cold pallet he had so feared, while I remained trapped in a web of falsehood I had woven long ago with an unthinking, high-spirited prank.
If I could have foreseen it, would I have avoided it? At what point would I have paused in midstep and then put my foot down upon some other path?
With a sigh, I rose and brushed idly at my skirts. There was time enough later for pointless speculation and self-recrimination. I had years to reflect on what I had done with my life, and whether there had ever been a moment when I could have diverted from my fate and chosen a happier future. This morning I had an important errand to complete, and my stop in the graveyard had only been to bolster my resolve, to remind me of the consequences of procrastination.
Today I was going to follow a bit of advice that I had given others countless times. I had rapped out this message over and over again to grieving souls, believing it to be sage advice and yet never heeding it myself. For some time, this failure had preyed upon my conscience, and today I intended to unburden myself of at least one regret.
I was going to make my amends to one who had never done me any harm.
***
It was a huge brownstone home, larger than I had expected, in a very expensive neighborhood. I faltered for just a moment on the sidewalk outside, then resolutely mounted the front steps, trying to shake out the damp and bedraggled hem of my skirt.
I wondered if I would have to explain myself to some servant and dreaded finding the words to do so, but this much, at least, I was spared. My knock was answered by a tall, portly gentleman with a round face framed by sideburns and kindly eyes. He was trying to button up a waistcoat over his shirt while smiling a puzzled and tentative greeting to his unexpected early morning visitor.
“I’m Maggie,” I said simply.
For a long moment he stared at me blankly, and then recognition and astonishment lit his face. He gave up fumbling with his buttons and stammered for an appropriate greeting. “Of course—I should have known you at once,” he finally said. “Please, Miss Fox—Maggie—come in.”
He ushered me into the house and down a hallway amply adorned with mirrors and sconces and narrow, elegant tables filled with vases of flowers and small china ornaments. These, I supposed, were the trappings of success, but they were not the sort of things that tempted me. I would have traded them all for another day with Elisha.
My host was eyeing me anxiously. “We were just at breakfast,” he said.
“I’ll be happy to wait in the parlor,” I murmured.
“No, no, of course not! I will just set another place—”
I was about to explain that I might not be welcome when we rounded the corner into a large dining room. An oversized table dominated the space, set with candles and tea service and surrounded by nearly a dozen chairs. There was only one person seated there, however.
She looked up quizzically at her husband as he entered, but when I appeared beside him, she laid down her fork hastily and rose to her feet. She was grayer than I remembered and more plump, but her face was unchanged. While I stood there, suddenly struck dumb with too many emotions to explain, her eyes abruptly filled with tears.
“Oh, Maggie!” she cried. “I am sorry! I am so truly sorry!”
And Leah opened her arms wide in welcome.
Afterword
Maggie Fox returned to spirit rapping intermittently after the death of Elisha Kane but was no longer comfortable with or successful at making her living by deceit. Her reconciliation with Leah proved to be tentative and uneasy. The younger woman never again allowed Leah to rule her life, and before long, the two sisters parted ways and thereafter enjoyed no more than a cool cordiality.
Maggie never received any money from Elisha’s estate, despite the overwhelming success of his book. Desperate to acquire a means of supporting herself, Maggie eventually did what she swore she would never do and published an account of her romance, complete with Elisha’s letters, in a book called The Love-Life of Doctor Kane. Unfortunately, Kane’s family spent a small fortune to discredit her, and they were so successful that for a long time historians scoffed at the idea of a common-law marriage between Kane and Fox. Modern researchers, however, have found enough evidence in family letters to support her claim.
Kate Fox did marry and had two sons, one of whom was diagnosed in adulthood with epilepsy. After her husband died, she lived a difficult life, battling addictions to morphine and alcohol.
In 1888, Maggie publicly announced that she was a fraud and revealed in front of an audience how she had created the rapping sounds with the joints in her feet and ankles. She apologized to the public at large and disparaged the entire spiritualist movement. A year later, she recanted her confession, claiming that she had made it only for money, which she desperately needed. Belief in spiritualism continued unabated.
Ann Leah Fox Fish Brown Underhill died in 1890, attended by her devoted and wealthy third husband. Kate and Maggie died in 1892 and 1893, respectively, suffering from ill health.
Spiritualism survived well into the twentieth century, when its validity would be hotly debated by such people as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. The Fox sisters are still credited today with the birth and popularity of the movement.
The accomplishments of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the most widely celebrated adventurer of his day, were soon overtaken and surpassed. The ice-free water discovered by the men of his expedition was not, in fact, an open polar sea, because no such body of water exists. Eventually the bay in which the doctor’s ship had been trapped was renamed Kane Basin. Other than this nominal accolade, his fame soon receded and gave way to obscurity. In the annals of American exploration, he is nearly forgotten.
A Final Word
In the year 1904, beneath the little Hydesville house where the Fox sisters began their career, a crumbling cellar wall finally collapsed, unearthing the hidden tomb of an almost-complete human skeleton.
Want to Read More?
Kane, Elisha Kent. Arctic Explorations. Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning Inc., 2008.
Lewis, E. E. A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County. Available at http://www.woodlandway.org.
Sawin, Mark Metzler. Raising Kane: Elisha Kent Kane and the Culture of Fame in Antebellum America. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008.
Stuart, Nancy Rubin. The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005.
Weisberg, Barbara. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to acknowledge all the people who encouraged me to rescue Maggie and Elisha from the shadowy depths of history and bring their unique story back into the limelight. In particular, thanks to…
My husband, my first reader and most ardent admirer, who didn’t mind my having a “love affair” with a long-dead explorer and even took me to visit his crypt in Philadelphia.
My parents and my aunt, who became spirited book promoters, and my sister, who emailed me in tears when she read about Maggie’s broken engagement. Their enthusiasm provided me with the incentive to keep writing.
All the family, friends, and community members who read this book in one form or another, providing invaluable feedback and encouragement, including the Crists, the O’Donnells, and several book clubs in the Chester County, Pennsylvania area.
My students at Avon Grove Intermediate School, who witnessed the book undergo many revisions and eagerly kept track of the publication process. I need to especially thank Emma, who thought of the ti
tle.
And finally, Kelly Barrales-Saylor, who tracked me down because she believed in the story and then guided me through the sometimes painful process of making important choices in the telling of this tale.
About the Author
Dianne K. Salerni is an elementary school teacher, author, and online book reviewer. She has previously published educational materials for teachers, as well as short stories. We Hear the Dead is her first full-length novel. With her husband and her two daughters, Salerni lives in Pennsylvania, where she is at work on her second novel.
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