Fiske glares good-naturedly at Chauncey. Not easy, to glare good-naturedly, Chauncey thinks, but Fiske Fisko has a knack for it. And a knack for tolerating the Reverend Chauncey Burr. And why not? The two of them have made a very comfortable living with very little work.
“What have you discovered then, Fisko, by your sniffing and spying? Can’t have the ‘competition’ getting the damnedo jump on us. What of it? Have you got a Hamletian ghost tucked into your odiferous armpit?”
Fiske folds himself into a chair. “No to that. Got some information, though.”
“Spew it out, man! Quit masticating like a half-starved bovine.”
“They’re a lengthy affair, let me tell you, them so-called spirit circles or promiscuous circles or whatever you want to call ’em. Cost me an entire dollar. I’ll expect that out of our takings this night, though.”
“Oh, your dollar shall be returned to your seamy palm. Do not trouble your skull with minute calculations a mortal breath longer. What more?”
“Quite a show, it were. First you sit round a table in a half-dark parlour and hold hands to ‘keep an energy chain.’ The mother, she’s not the key player. No. It’s Leah Fish, the eldest sister, who’s the keeper of the keys, and a Hun in petticoats, I tell you. Anyhow, she droned on for a good half-hour, with prayers mostly. Then there was some music playing. The music was just outside the room, but the ‘sitters’ all carried on like it was angels away at it. The little one, she’s twelve if she’s a day, and looks like she’d disappear in a puff of wind. And the other sister—Margaretta, Maggie? She’s got up like she’s the same age or so, but I reckon she’s near plucking time, given her smirking ways. Dark-haired items the both of them. And I tell you, don’t they look as pretty and sweet as ever you saw.”
“Clever. Clever. They’re working that modern bloody cant that children are sweet little innocents. But we know the truth of it, righto. Demon drink, like the medievalists would have it. No scruples. No nitpicking twixt right and wrong. Sly as cats. Fortunate you were never a child, Fisko, but hatched from some fu—”
“So by this time there’s some sitters in a state and—”
“A state? What ho? State?”
“Much like our electro-biology experimentations, but the sitters are doing it on themselves. Suggest their dead pa is sitting there and they’d believe it. One old feller did in fact. A fat lot of weeping went on then, I tell you, though. Now the knocking—”
“Apparati? Accomplices?”
“Doubtful to that. I asked to investigate. ‘Go on,’ that Leah Fish woman said, ‘if you dare to think us frauds.’ ” Fiske chuckles. “She’s got bollocks, that one. Anyhows, I found nothing. No strings. No levers. No dwarves crouching under the table. Nothing.”
“What ho, then, of the answering?”
“The ‘spirits’ dodge the hard questions. For the main they favour questions of the after-life. They sure go on, anyhow, about how lovely it is. Dead folk say they’re doing swell and ‘how are you?’ That’s the idea of it. They say: ‘you’ll be travelling’; ‘you’ll be happy.’ The usual ‘no’ or ‘yes’ answers you’d expect from some Gypsy. Oh, but didn’t the company think it marvellous, though. One woman started blathering in tongues and everyone looked to her in admiration like she were playing the harp or some such and not looking an idiot.”
“The ghosties talked? Was that it? Aloud in some bloodyo soliloquy?”
“Yes to that, in a fashion. The ladies had a board with the alphabet and letters. The person asking the questions got to work it. They’d move the pointer over the letters and the spirit would rap when they got to the right one. A tedious business, I tell you, though. Another thing: they got a fella to write down several names on a paper, said the spirits would rap when the fella pointed to the one he was thinking of. Got it bang on.”
“Watchful as damnedo vultures over a carcass, those Foxes, what ho?”
“Exactly. Anyone with a trained eye can read a countenance.” Fiske steeples his fingers. “It’s the knockings that were a stumper. They weren’t all pretty little rat-tats. Some were loud as hammer strokes or … or like buckets being hurled at the walls. Some even made the chairs vibrate. They were, yes, a stumper like I told you.”
Chauncey is undecided whether to reply, or hurl something, or both, when Reynolds beckons at them from the door. “Time for this final show of yours,” he says.
Final, yes, and the Corinthian Hall is all-filled. Energy pulsates from the crowd and into Chauncey Burr. This is the sort of energy he would like to harness. One could set a city ablaze with it. It recalls his days as Universalist minister, a fine occupation that he misses still.
Chauncey and Fiske make their way up to the platform stage. It has no stage wings. No proscenium arch. But then, this is not a theatre for frothy plays, but a forum for serious lectures and the occasional concert.
Once onstage Chauncey thrusts his thumbs in the lapels of his frock coat that is black as coal, then paces ponderously before the audience, as if freighted with thought. Halts up. “Gentlemen. Ladies. I am no magician,” Chauncey booms as if just realizing this for himself. “I am no illusionist. I offer no deception. I am merely a discoverer. We men of the science of electro-biology are set apart from superstitions. Effect without explainable cause? Effect is ever explainable. Mark me!”
And they do, and this because Chauncey talks to the rabble as if they are as learned as he. Reminds them of the Italian Signor Galvani as if they might have shared a grappa with the man himself. “Imagine the hot light of Italy, ladies and gentlemen, this same hot light that illumined the great Galileo as he probed the heavens. Signor Galvini is bent over a table dissecting a frog upon an electrified plate. And then, a twitch of the frog’s legs. Another. The frog near springs from the table,” Chauncey yells, startling the audience. “Apologies, people! That was Signor Galvani’s shocked wife witnessing the vivified frog … She’d planned on frog’s gizzards for supper.”
The crowd laughs.
“But Signor Galvani was no medievalist, was he now?” Chauncey continues. “He did not imagine that frog resurrected, did he? What sort of a religion would that have spawned, eh?” The audience laughs again, there being nothing like a pinch of blasphemy to spice an entertainment. “No, good citizens of Rochester. The explanation is this: electricity had been vibrating through the plate upon which the frog lay. And thus we come around to an understanding of electro-biology. We understand that all living things are sparking with electricity. That is what animates us with life. A man trained in its particulars can control the electric fluids of another and thus direct his movements. Herr Franz Mesmer discovered this, true, but he believed movement was caused by moontides. We in these modern times, however, know that electricity is the cause.”
Fiske says nothing. Stands stiff, acting as the faintly sinister assistant. Chauncey calls for gentleman volunteers. Up they come—some nervous, some amused—and sit as instructed, looking out to the crowd. Chauncey talks rapidly and softly to each in turn. “You shall be awake. You shall be in full control of your faculties. You shall not be humiliated. Concentrate only on my voice. Do not mind the din of the crowd. Here. Here. Only this. The world was splendid and all’s swell that ends swell.”
Fiske hands the first man a glass of milk. Chauncey tells him it is wormwood. The man frowns and spits. The crowd roars in laughter. Another man is told his leg is caught in a snare. In vain he pulls. Yet another is told he is drunk as a lord. He totters and stumbles and is herded about by Fiske to the claps and cheers of the audience.
The last man, when told to admire the charms of a goat, looks at Chauncey with disgust and strides off the stage.
“Some have less of the charge than others,” Chauncey mocks, and yet he admires the man. Chauncey also cannot not be mesmerized and led about like an automaton. He is master of his own will.
Back in the dressing room Chauncey scrubs at his makeup. The applause should have been louder, longer lasting. The audience wa
nted more. But bloodyo what?
“Fiske Fisko, what is the date, exactly, of the ghost ladies’ little demonstration?”
Fiske glances over the pamphlet. “November the 14th. Two bits gets you in. You thinking of getting on the committee?”
“What fugging committee?”
“The one the audience gets to choose. Five respectable types they’re to be, though. And they’re to do their own private investigations and then … look here, damn it, read for yourself for once.”
Chauncey runs oil through his hair, then cracks his knuckles—a sinister and practised sound.
“Right to that,” Fiske mutters. Reads: “ ‘The committee is to report at the following evening’s lecture whether there is collusion or deception in the knocks. COME AND INVESTIGATE.’ That’s in capitals.”
Chauncey grabs the pamphlet from Fiske. “Capitals, is it!” He thwacks the dressing table instead, right aside Fiske.
Fiske jumps. “Hell, Chaunce, what you—”
“What? What Fiske Fisko? Didn’t see it coming? Hah! Our petticoat competition won’t see us coming neither. Make ready, man.”
Close on a month later and Chauncey and Fiske spill out of the Corinthian Hall into the November evening. They halt outside the entrance and let the crowd roil round them. A woman slips on the wet and flashes her red petticoat, drawing hoots, a catcall. Horses and hacks clatter in the street. A newspaper boy hollers about the latest revolution in distant Europe. The ill-bred spit tobacco juice into the snow. And all this racket is as fuel for Chauncey’s racketing thoughts. He hikes his muskrat collar, lights his pirate-head pipe, then rounds on Fiske, as if Fiske were responsible for the sideshow of superstition they just witnessed.
“Their promoter, that elf, that cheapjack magician Capron and his bloodyo jabber about a New Age. That’ll never stand the test of time. The corporeal and the spiritual dwelling together? What a damnedo mishmash. When I was in the pulpit did I trumpet electric magnetism and mesmeric forces? No, I did fugging well not! It was all God and the Holy Ghost and lakes of hellfire. Science and religion should never meet. It insults them both. Faith and bended knee on the one; rigour and intellect on the other.” Chauncey slaps his own knee, adds, “What ho? Mediums, that’s what he called the females, eh? Making his own lingo already?”
“Sure to that, but some were mighty convinced, though,” Fiske puts in. “ ’course they as like used plants in the audience for the correct answering. But those knocks. I tell you, I’m still stumped as to them.”
Yes, indeedo, those knocks, Chauncey thinks, they emanated, loud and sharp, from all areas of the hall. And all the while that Leah Fox Fish might have been on some high throne the way she held herself, the way she bestowed her benevolent, dimpled smile on the crowd. Chauncey barely noted the supporters flanking her onstage, barely noted her doll-sized sisters Margaret and Katherine. No, only Leah worthied his gaze. Her rounded figure, her hair agleam like a crown of copper in the kerosene light.
“What you thinking, Chaunce? You got that squint-eyed look.”
“The crowd, they should have chosen me for the damnedo committee. I’d have investigated, what ho!”
Fiske kicks at the tobacco-pocked snow. “Mayhap you shouldn’t have called the audience a lot of deluded dumbwits.”
The competition for the audience’s attention had been fierce, Chauncey allows. One idiot vowed to eat his hat if he couldn’t uncover the Fox women’s means of deception. Another vowed he’d hurl himself over the Genesee falls if he failed. “The truth is ever a painful item, Fiske Fisko.”
“Could be that the doctors, the ones the audience picked for the committee, could be they were plants too, though.”
Chauncey studies his pipe. The pirate’s fierce eyes resemble Chauncey’s own, he likes to think, as does the pirate’s grin. “I suspect not. A doctor’s pride knows no bounds. To agree to assist? Why? To what endo?”
“If the docs weren’t plants, if they’re not in on it, then they’ll find the females out. Doctor sorts like that, they’ve got smarts galore.”
“Hah, bloody, hah. They’ll not find out a fugging thing, Fiske Fisko. To find out a charlatan you need be a … Fiske, an idea has just sprung to my brain.”
“An idea? What sort?” Fiske asks, stepping back.
“An exposé sort. We’ll hang it on the what-end of our lecture.”
“Exposé?”
“Of the Fox knocks, you cotton-brain. We’ll show how the ghosties are created by legerdemain, by the mesmeric forces of a person’s own mind seeing and hearing what it chooses.”
“But those knocks, you don’t know how they’re done? Do you, though?”
“I’ll fathom them in good bloodyo time. See if I don’t. What ho! We’ll set it up like in Hamlet. When that lawyer goes knock-knocking at the Gates of Hell. Hah, what a comedic aside. But instead of a sniffling lawyer knocking it’ll be the Fox women. And I’ll be the gatekeeper asking who’s there, and they’ll admit who they are at last, and on their knees: The Fugging Fox Frauds Three! That’s who.”
“I don’t recollect a lawyer knocking. Mayhap a tailor and a farmer, though. And isn’t that from Macbeth?”
“Who gives a ratter’s arse which pommy bastard wrote it. Let’s say we knock-knock the Fox females straight to ignominy!”
CHAPTER 11.
“Do you hold with bloodletting?” my patient asked.
“What is that? … Ah, this,” I said, and held up the steel fleam I was using to prod alive the foot-stove’s coals. “The letting does ease some people. Older folk for the main. The efficacy is mostly in their heads, but it can’t hurt. We’ve all too much blood in us from what I’ve seen.” At this I shut the little door and set the stove at the end of her bed.
“You are a fine physician, Mrs. Mellon. Has medicine always been an interest of yours?”
“I am not precisely a card-holding physician,” I allowed. “I am a lay physician. Women were not allowed the doctoring profession in my day, not in any fashion.”
“So you’ve had other occupations.”
“Certainly. Women must earn money how they can. Money does not rain from clouds and … The fumes! Here,” I said, and trudged to the garret’s linked windows and hefted at the sash of one of the small side windows, grateful to have my back turned away from my patient. I felt an old shame, I allow. For just after the abolition war I engaged in an occupation I would rather not mention, although I daresay it is an older profession than doctoring.
The stubborn sash at last creaked open, but just a crack.
“Charcoal fumes,” I continued. “They can create visions and figments, I’ve heard. Indeed, all your ghosts might be naught but trapped, invisible vapours working havoc on the brain.” I was still facing the window and was looking through to the smoke palled buildings across and below. I noticed my reflection in the glass just then, and I was amazed at how pale I was, how muzzy my features.
“Mayhap that is all they were, then,” my patient murmured, as if to herself. “Fumes. Vapours. Reflected forms.”
“Who? Your knocking spirits?”
“No, no, the Fates, the three old women who assisted the doctors at the ‘investigation’ that followed the Corinthian Hall display. They were cramped, sin-ugly creatures, all dark-garbed and fetched up from God-knows-where. I dubbed them the Fates because I forgot their names as soon as they were uttered. I was beginning to do that a great deal, choosing to forget names and, oh, many other things besides.”
“TO ENSURE YOU’RE NOT CONCEALING any mechanicals beneath,” the doctors explain as the Fates tie Maggie’s skirt about her ankles, then tend to Leah’s shirts. Amy Post and Machteld wait in a room down the corridor of these dusty, untenanted offices. No one else has been allowed to accompany Maggie and Leah.
The doctors number four in all. One of them presses Maggie’s throat with his cold, blunt fingers, then slides a stethoscope over her chest. It is all Maggie can do not to slap him.
Another doctor—a
short-necked, squat man—does the same to Leah; Leah reaches for Maggie’s hand. “Toad,” she says to Maggie, and in the barest whisper. Maggie nearly laughs aloud. Because who fears toads? Creatures of such serious mien, and yet such stupidity withal.
Maggie and Leah are now instructed to stand atop glass plates, which are in turn set atop two close aligned tables. “We are testing,” this Dr. Toad explains, “to ascertain, I should say, test, whether the knocks are caused by what is known as electrical energy. And whether this energy is somehow vibrating between you two women. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Well, yes,” Maggie says tartly, and nearly asks if Dr. Toad believes them children or half-wits.
“We do understand, good sir,” Leah says. Because you explain so very well.”
“Spirits? Give us a knock if you please.” This from Dr. Blunt-Fingers, as Maggie now thinks of him. Leah still holds Maggie’s hand. She scratches Maggie’s palm.
No knocks. Only faint taps, a good dozen of them.
Dr. Blunt-Fingers scowls. He turns to the Fates. “Escort them into the anteroom. There please disrobe them entirely.”
Entirely? Maggie cannot recall ever being entirely naked, and certainly not in front of strangers. “I can’t, Leah. I just can’t. It’s grievous. Awful.”
“Just this once, dear sister,” Leah says quietly. “We must pass this test. We must.”
Maggie shakes her head, then wearily nods.
Once the two are in the anteroom, once they are disrobed by the black-garbed Fates, Leah’s calm demeanour nearly cracks. Her lips are clenched as if she’d rather scream, and that vein at her temple is throbbing as if fit to burst. Maggie feels a knife-keen sympathy for Leah then. Leah’s breasts swag to either side. Her belly is striated with purple. In comparison, Maggie’s figure is as smooth and unmarked as a marble statue. Poor Leah, Maggie thinks, bearing a baby so young, bearing up for us all.
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