CHAPTER
NINE
Utterly drained after her strained, strange day, Clara went home to await Rupert, as he never traveled to speak with colleagues for longer than three days, and his stabilizing presence would be helpful in returning her still clenched body to peace after so near a seizure.
Awaiting him in the parlor, she allowed herself to drift off on the divan. Her unsteady rest was filled with dark, vision-like dreams of epic proportions. Perhaps Lady Denbury had left a bit of her dream prophecy gift behind after her last visit.
In this scene, she stood alone at the center of the Bowling Green, the apex of Manhattan Island’s fraught, violent history, the heart of its colonized commerce. Ghosts of the Lenape tribe, brutally driven from the land first by the Dutch, floated about the perimeter of the park where she stood with a candle in one hand and a Ward in a glass vial in the other. Louis was not with her, though she heard the faint murmuring of spirits. Shadows moved at a distance. Closer.
The shadows began to march. First one or two, floating down Broadway. Then more, pouring from the side streets onto that angled old thoroughfare like floating rats, silent and entirely opaque, cut out of purest darkness and bleak lifelessness.
Back in the first days of researching Louis’s death, she’d seen a host of shadowy silhouettes in the disaster site. She’d mistaken them for the ghosts of the dead scientists, and when they told her to destroy the files, she didn’t realize they were the enemy.
They’d been trying to trick her all along, and now they were coming for her.
She stood all alone at the tip of one of the most powerful islands of the world, with no power but herself, with a dread horde making its way toward her. The shadows stopped just outside the green’s wrought-iron fence, a spiked perimeter dating to the Revolutionary War. In those days, the king’s crowns had been ripped from the tops of the finials; their iron pickets were still jagged, a century later.
The darkness hovered. The spirits wafted back, terrified of violence anew. Clara held tight to her light. The presences threatened to close in but were held back by one lit candle, one glass vial of personal protection, and one small prayer of hope.
How long could her own magic, or anyone who hoped to build and maintain a Ward, hold back this wretched, teeming horde?
The sound of the front door opening and closing roused her from her nightmare. She opened her eyes to see the senator standing on the parlor threshold. The room was dark; the sun had set, and she’d slept longer than she intended.
Clara groggily blinked up at Bishop. “You’re late.”
“Did we have an engagement?” he asked blankly.
“You’re usually home by this hour on a day you return,” Clara said wearily, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.
“I didn’t wire—”
“You’re never gone on meetings longer than three days. You have encouraged me to stay aware of your patterns so I can remind you when you work too hard. I know these are extenuating circumstances, but still.”
The senator smiled. “So I have, and asked you to remind me of it when I bristle at being questioned. I’m sorry I’m late.”
“So? Tell me, then. What kept you?”
He examined her as he crossed the room. “You look tired. Care to share why?” Bishop asked, moving to the samovar and pouring a cup of tea. Clara realized that during his journey from door to table, he had picked up her cup, which he was now refilling. He returned her cup and took a seat on the settee.
“It was a day that tried faith,” she began, then, distracted, said, “I don’t even know where to start. This city is in grave danger, and you look as if you’ve taken healing waters. What different states we are in…”
Their quiet housekeeper moved about the room, setting out a plate of small sandwiches and a snifter of liquor at the senator’s disposal. He thanked her warmly before turning back to Clara.
“I am particularly invigorated after a talk with young Spiritualists being raised in the tradition,” Bishop began eagerly. “Flexible senses, grade-schoolers, what a thrill. Nothing like a mind that hasn’t had all its doors hammered shut with the nails of limitation nor the foundations of its imagination poured over with the tar of complacency.”
Wishing she could see past the dark visions that had beset her, she pushed back. “How can you look into youthful eyes and tell those souls to hope and dream, to feel, to be a sensitive when the insensitive world will do its best to swallow them up? If not swallowed whole, then the darkening world will nip up parts of them, one by one, their flexible brains and bodies will harden to loss and pain and being told they cannot do, or be, or want, due to what they look like, their sex, their class, their hearts…”
“Clara, where is this coming from?” he asked softly. “I’ve known you to have melancholic tendencies, but you’re not usually so bleak—”
“Today I saw the dead come back to life. Dead bodies, electrocuted, it was terrible…”
“Where did this happen?”
“City Hall Park, in a ‘demonstration’ by Master’s Society operatives rising from the dead to haunt our world. Rupert … seeing a body shudder like that, convulse…” She stared up at him, overwhelmed. “Is that how I look when I seize? It’s so horrid.”
Bishop moved to sit next to her. He placed a tentative hand on her knee and, when she did not draw away, squeezed it in comfort. He was ever careful and gentlemanly when he touched her.
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “I focus on trying to keep you safe, not what you look like during the episode,” he added warmly. She smiled as if this were a particular balm. “Did you seize today?”
“Nearly so. It seems impossible to describe this surreal day. I saw a man become a dynamo, the man I’ve seen cause the Pearl Street disturbances. During the event I met a soul sister whom I might endanger by no fault of my own. Her friend may have died during the incident. Tonight in dreams I saw a world where human dignity and imagination will be aborted, snuffed out by a lightless, sightless cloud.”
She turned to Bishop, and her voice sounded tortured to her own ears. “How can you give young sensitives hope on the best of days, let alone when we stand on the precipice of a nightmarish world…?”
Bishop stared deeply into her eyes. “Because I can’t school children in suicide, Clara,” he replied. “I must school them in empowerment. How else to diffuse the stifling storm clouds of the present and the future?”
Nodding slowly, Clara allowed this to be no argument, knowing he believed in his spiritual saplings down to the roots and admiring the quality. But creeping, needling, crawling unease had eroded the optimism and confidence that she usually held as dear as she did her guardian.
“Let me unpack. Then we’ll go out for dinner, anywhere you like.” He kissed her on the head and went upstairs.
Although she didn’t want to be left alone with her melancholy, there was a memory trying to get out, something that required her focus. Something about Louis forced itself forward for review.
“What is it like to hide part of who you are, as you do?” Clara once asked Louis, the memory as fresh as if it were yesterday.
“Difficult. Complicated. Different for everyone, depending on their circumstances. A shame. An injustice,” Louis murmured. Clara nodded at her lover in empathy. “What’s it like to not be taken seriously because of your sex, disbelieved because of your gifts?” he countered.
Clara smiled at this; his ability to bring disparate sides together into peers was one of his great gifts.
“Ah,” Louis said, mirroring her smile. “See, bridge building. If what was up here,” he said softly, caressing her forehead with his fingertips, “was the basis for all judgment, merit, love … and not the color of my ancestor’s skin or the notions of gendered roles, we’d truly be free. I don’t want to be confined to bodies, Clara. I want to be animate energy. That is what I want in Eterna. That is how we can transcend. To discard the trappings, to live in truths. Raw, soul truth.”
That’s what Clara put into the Ward that made it work, when she’d clasped hands over Stevens’s and put force into that vial, energy that held the demons back. The same proved true with Stevens, his truth leading to the banishment of those shadows. This renewed her fastidious attention to the work ahead, the Warding process. That’s what her dreams supported.
Chemistry was not Clara’s forte, but enforcing ideas by heart and mind was the key. She longed to share with him that she truly understood what he meant by the energy of the soul as an active, protective force. It had been some time since she’d seen Louis’s spirit, and she missed the opportunity to commend him.
Over dinner, at the Astor, in a velvet-curtained alcove glittering with gaslight and crystal, she told Bishop all the details of the City Hall Park disaster, coming face-to-face with Brinkman, the new contact that was Rose Everhart and what that connection to her department might offer. Bishop was regretful he’d not been able to help shield her in the park but was proud of her fortitude and efforts.
Back home after dinner, turning to address the senator at the pocket doors of the parlor, she opened her mouth to ask if he might sit with her further, over a cordial, but he did not pause with her and instead walked past, continuing upstairs to his study. This stung strangely. A discomfiting sensation swept over her; Clara thought it was the onset of one of her senses blinking out one by one, a symptom of a possible oncoming spasm, and stepped onto the landing, thinking instead she might call up to him for help.
Unease grew in her stomach, blossoming like a diseased flower. She rushed upstairs, bursting in upon Rupert in his study. He looked up at her over his spectacles, raising one eyebrow in inquiry.
Once she was standing there, looking at him, she had no idea what had caused such a wave of concern. Horrified, she realized it was just a simple pang of loneliness. After he’d been away on business, she was not yet ready to be separated from his familiar and bolstering presence quite so soon … Had she allowed herself to become so emotionally compartmentalized that the natural urge to ask for company was taken as a dire emergency?
“Whatever premonition you just had that has you looking tortured,” Bishop said with a little laugh, “well, it wasn’t about me. I’m here, I’m safe.” He smiled. “Though I’m flattered you thought of me … Are you feeling any better? You look a bit drawn.”
She shook her head. “No. I … should … try to rest.”
“Yes, do,” Bishop said.
“Good night,” she murmured and rushed out, embarrassed not because of anything he’d done but by the conflict between an assumed frailty and the necessity of community. She deemed it frail to need someone, yet community was the cornerstone of humanity.
It was either ironic or a bit psychic of him, then, to call out down the hall after her, “I’ll be here if you need me.…”
He hoped to be needed; she was growing weary of loneliness. But how could two adults navigating an emerging peerage address “need” and still maintain intrinsic, equitable strength?
She flounced upon her bed, her aching head in her hands. The only sound other than her breathing was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of her room—an heirloom from the old Templeton house. She had placed it in her room as if through that piece her family would be with her, watching over her proudly, even though her parents’ souls had gone on to what she hoped was an Elysian place so long ago. Until now, she’d never thought of the massive clock as ticking up to an apocalypse, but it was hard to retract the notion.
A burst of cool air, accompanied by a visible ripple in the atmosphere of the room and a gray-white flickering in the corner of her eye, made Clara jump to a sitting position.
“Hello, love,” she said to the entering ghost. “I’m trying to get used to your startling me.”
“I’m so sorry, my dove,” Louis replied.
“I’m glad of your presence nonetheless. Eterna and everything around it has become something entirely different from what I thought.”
“Yes! It’s so much more complicated!” Louis cried. “It isn’t just about the Ward keeping the demons out. It’s about souls, it’s about reanimated bodies. I don’t know how to help with those things. I’m afraid Warding won’t be enough to address all these facets…”
“So you saw what happened today?” Clara asked.
“I did. It was terrible. I tried to shield you but could be of no help in the tumult. I couldn’t get your attention and you nearly seized again.…” The ghost sighed, floating to and fro about her room, as anxious as Clara, making her lace-trimmed white curtains billow in his breeze. Their moods always had reflected immediately upon the other.
“Rupert is suspicious of my taking advice from you,” Clara confessed. “In our work as mediums, we tried to keep detachment—”
Louis sighed. “He’s worried I’ll worsen your ‘fits.’ I am sure he wishes to banish me. Exorcise me. And perhaps that would be for the best.” The ghost looked at the floor he floated above. “We can hardly be lovers.”
“We never knew if we had a future. You said it yourself. You wanted to return to New Orleans. I will never leave New York. Your present state notwithstanding, our futures were forever separate—”
“You’ll go where your heart leads, Clara,” Louis said softly. “Let it…”
Clara said nothing, as she wasn’t sure what … or where he meant. She was a woman of instinct. But when it came to her heart, instinct became mystery.
“How is the state of things out there?” Clara gestured outside, uptown, pointedly shifting focus.
“Dire. I’ve been appearing anyplace I have a tie, New Orleans being one. There is something off in the air wherever I go. Your Bishop is going to have to convince Congress, and quickly. With his powers of mesmerism—”
“Powers that he is never comfortable using on a group. He’s highly—”
“Clara, do you understand the severity of this? What you saw in the park is just one instance of a maelstrom. You’ll see. By now other events will have been reported in local southern papers, and news will travel quickly north.”
“What will?”
“Entire graveyards in Louisiana have been disturbed. Like they … rose up at once, in energy and, in some cases, exhumations, a raw unsettling as if tremors of the ground were opening up graves. Some spirits were present, much like that spectral host gathered at the Trinity lot. Everything in the spirit world is awake and alert, and I believe practitioners of any faith, ritual, or sensitivity must feel it, too. I should keep an eye on Andre, of course … I hope he’s safe. He intervened on my behalf to send back a dagger I’d taken as a proof of interest and loyalty to your Bishop. I hope there aren’t any cursing rages turned on him instead of me.”
Clara swallowed at the multiple discomforts. Bringing up Andre, and Louis had a way of saying “your Bishop” that always made a certain locked, fossilized sentiment deep in her heart shift with a sudden reanimate life. But she couldn’t get lost in all that.
Before Clara could ask for further details about Andre’s personal missions and what he was actually doing for Eterna rather than taking up space, Louis continued.
“Concurrent with this gruesome exhumation it seems there have been a few of what could only be described as ‘industrial accidents,’ costing lives and altering the products and means of production.”
“Related to the graveyard incidents?” she asked, trying to get her mind around places of eternal rest and places of industry as similarly targeted when it seemed such a polarity. “Effie said that in England, industry is targeted, and assumes here as well.”
“That’s what Bishop needs to address as a national call to Wards—”
“I doubt a Ward could have stopped the reanimation today, or an industrial accident, can it?”
“Warding is one of the initiatives to keep the shadows at bay. The spirits tell me that everything going on has a similar taste. Sour and sulfuric. Pure malevolence. That’s what we have to stop from
crossing our mental and physical borders.” The look on Louis’s near-transparent face made Clara feel even worse. “This is just the preface,” he said mordantly. A spirit’s melancholy was the most desolate breed one could fathom. “I am sorry I had no sense of this while I lived, Clara, else I’d have shifted my work away from bodily immortality and toward the protection of the immortal soul.”
“I suppose this is the same work, after all, just changing for the needs at hand,” Clara stated. “And you’ve no need to apologize, Louis. I pray apologies every day to heaven for your death.”
“I suppose we must absolve one another, then,” Louis said gently.
“Yes, let’s,” Clara said with a smile.
“I’ll return with anything helpful. I need to check on Andre. I don’t know what he’s been up to, and if I’m not careful, he’ll be lost to drink.…” With that, the ghost departed. Clara felt the warmth that came in the absence of his draft as an odd reversal, an aching opposite, as she’d grown so fond of having him near in any capacity, alive or dead.
Indulging in the sentiment of missing him for a moment, she curled up under her covers and was soon asleep.
* * *
The next morning, up in the offices, while Clara was torn between making coffee or tea—the weightier matters on her mind made the simplest decisions seem impossible—Franklin entered with wires and a newspaper.
“I read the account of yesterday’s madness in the Tribune. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, it sounded dreadful,” Franklin said, setting the papers down before Clara.
“You were out doing what our mission demands. How can I fault you for that?” Clara said. The senator came in on Franklin’s heels and handed Clara a cup of coffee, settling at least that unimportant dilemma.
Thanking the senator for the beverage, Clara realized sheepishly she had been far too preoccupied with her own dealings to have any idea what Franklin had been up to. Thankfully, he had news and elaborated.
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