Maggie breathes deep, then enters the reading room.
“Have a seed, my cheery dearie, my sweeting,” Leah coos to Vivace, an Amizonian parrot of emerald green. She bought him in New York along with a wicker cage shaped like an Ottoman temple.
“I’m-so-sweet. I’m-so-sweet,” Vivace caws back.
“I’ve been invited to Troy,” Maggie says, holding up the letter. “By the Boultons.”
Leah pats at a flounce. Her dress today is a primrose concoction all figured with lace and hung with galoon. You’d think she was expecting the Queen-of-Where-ever, Maggie thinks.
“The Boultons? Of Troy? Ah, yes, they were such a help with the tour. A most respectable family. And they had that lovely large home, nearly a mansion … Well, do you plan to go?” Leah asks this as if she has no say in the matter.
“I do plan to. Yes, yes, I do. If I can’t go back to New York, then I’d like to be in a new place. They’ve asked me to stay for a fortnight or more, for as long as I please, in fact.”
Leah shrieks, and Maggie starts back.
“Bad Vivace, biting me like that! No fly-about for you today.” Leah wags her nipped finger at the cage, says to Maggie, “Indeed, you could get some practice raising the spirits by yourself. The Boultons are known in society and have a wide circle of prosperous, upstanding friends. And that sister-in-law of Mr. Boulton, she took a shine to you. I suppose you require a friend, what with Katherina at the Greeleys. And a change is always good, I say.”
Maggie thinks, And I could get some respite from you, sister-of-mine.
Leah looks troubled, as if she has heard Maggie’s thoughts. “Dear Margaretta, I know you find me difficult at intervals, but since all this began I have come to love you, not just as a sister, but as another daughter, in particular since Lizzie refuses to come home and hardly even writes, wretched girl. And, honestly, I do loathe it when we are discordant. We must stay as one mind, my girl, we simply must.”
“One mind, of course,” Maggie says. For what choice does she have when their thoughts collide like so many blinded birds?
“And so, yes, do go and stay the fortnight,” Leah says. “And be charming to all and sundry. And do secure as many cards as possible, though without seeming forward. And certainly do not allow people to place their monetary gifts directly in your hands or, spirits forbid, aside your bed. Allowing them to slip notes into your reticule is best. And do not worry on how I shall fare without you and Katie. Our sitters have come to love my trancing as much as your knocks. And I will ask Amy or Adelaide to stay with me now that Alfie has left our employ, the thieving ingrate.”
Worry about Leah? Maggie thinks. Gosh, that’d be a first. “I’ll try my heart’s best not lose sleep over your situation, Leah,” Maggie says, and as if she is perfectly sincere.
Leah contemplates her, then shrouds Vivace’s cage with white sheeting. “But do be careful when alone there,” she says. “I recall now that some of Troy women, those who were not associated with the Boultons, were awful and common and of jealous aspect. Indeed, I must say, Margaretta, that whole town gave me something of turn.”
A few days later, the Boultons’ brougham rattles through the town of Troy, then down, down a frost-heaved road. The brougham has Moroccan seats and glazed windows. November dusk, and the glassed-in world shifts by in greys and blacks. No ice. No snow. No moon. No whiteness at all, except that of Maggie’s face reflected in the scene.
Alice Boulton holds Maggie’s gloved hand in hers. She is newly wed to Mr. Boulton’s brother and she giggles and whispers like the schoolgirl she so recently was. Mr. Boulton, Dundreary-whiskered, in a frock-coat of checks, orders caution of the driver. “We want not a speck of harm to come to our guest.”
Finally the Boultons’ home. It is on the far imaginings of town, but so inviting, what with its gables and columned portico, its colour scheme of lilac and olive and jonquille yellow. It is homey and grand at the same instance, Maggie decides. But what of that lumberyard alongside? What of the stacks of shorn trees that form a giant’s labyrinth? And that close-on wood with its dense brambles?
“We shall have a gay time!” Mr. Boulton proclaims with manly certainty.
And they do. For three days exactly. Fine meals and brisk walks. Singing and music-making. Charades and draughts and reading aloud. The Boultons and their friends do not demand much of the spirits, are grateful and delighted with any answer to any question. They promise not to tell what is transpiring at the Boultons’ home and press fingers to lips like children promising inconsequentials. Not tell? Maggie thinks. Who does not tell of ghosts? The tell is the key to unlocking the dead, to releasing them from their every nook and crypt.
A party in East Troy? Certainly! Maggie would love to attend. Would love to wear her latest gown. It has pagoda sleeves and cartridge pleats and is sewn from a green satin that shimmers like an insect wing. “What an exotic you are!” Alice exclaims. Maggie smiles, delighting in the idea of being an exotic—that is, a someone else from somewhere else.
At the party Maggie dances with a handsome son of the house, eats up Madeira ham and sweetbreads, tastes a ginsling, a martinez. Practises breathing in sips. Her new corset cinches her waist into a doll-like circumference and makes her feel the perfectly grown-up seventeen that she is.
“Come, ladies. We’ve stayed too late. We must get home before night gathers,” proclaims Mr. Boulton, and he gives Maggie his arm. They wait in the brougham while the driver fires the dash lanterns, then snaps the reins over the two Clevelands. Maggie cozies with Alice under a furred robe. Across from them, Mr. and Mrs. Boulton smile benevolently. Maggie has not felt such contentment for the longest time. She is far from Leah, who is demanding more and more of her. Far from her fussing mother. She misses Katie, true, but Katie needs oversight, protection, and this scarcely generates relaxation. Thus reserve is shedding from Maggie hour by hour. If I remain here, she thinks, I’ll become another kind of girl entirely. She can’t imagine what kind exactly; but she is curious, hopeful, as if in expectation of a gift.
“How pretty you look when you smile so,” Alice says. “Are you thinking of a beau?”
Maggie is about to give a witty reply, something to do with bureaus and borrows, when they jerk to a halt. They wait.
“Winter is truly with us,” Alice sighs.
Before them is the Hudson River—very wide, very deep. Behind is nothing. No other carriages or conveyances. No visible houses.
Mrs. Boulton calls to her husband, “Where’s the ferryboat, dear? Should not the boat be here?”
The men must have been there all along, just outside the cast of the dash lights. Five. Six. Heavy coated. Hats worn low. Not gentleman. Nothing of the kind. They range around the brougham and slouch against the doors. One scrapes at the window with his fingernails. Another strokes the horses with exaggerated tenderness. The driver stands up, his whip held ready. “Sir?” he calls nervously.
Laughter. Spitting.
“Drunkards. Louts. That’s all. That’s all,” Mr. Boulton assures the women. He steps out, letting in tendrils of cold. “Who are you? Name yourselves. And where’s the ferryman. I demand—”
“You can’t put your faith in the ferryman, see?” says one.
“Best go round by the Long Troy Bridge,” says another.
“Sure, and we’ll take you there,” offers a third.
“Or maybe that witch inside will float you over!”
“Maybe Miss Consort will open her legs and let the Devil out. He’ll help ya.”
A whip cracks. The Clevelands snort and hie. The driver shouts, “Get back!”
Mr. Boulton grabs for the brougham door. Hands grip his collar. He smacks at them. Lurches inside. Yells at the driver, “Get on! Make haste!”
Maggie, Alice and Mrs. Boulton scream in tandem. One of them—not Maggie—begins to pray.
The horses haul the brougham around so fast it nearly tips. Mr. Boulton shouts through the call-slot, “Not the bridge! The way
by town. We’ll be murdered if we go by the bridge.” Turns to the ladies. “Not murdered. I meant … well, bully.”
The horses are at a near gallop, dangerous in the dark, but preferable to being chopped up and tossed into the frigid river. The louts race after them in a flat-wagon drawn by a lone horse that, lashed by whips, somehow keeps chase. Maggie, Alice and the Boultons are tossed about like dice in a jar. The women sob. Mr. Boulton utters apologies and assurances until a jounce makes him bite his tongue. Blood trickles down his fine whiskers. Maggie feels like to faint. Open her legs? Witch? Devil’s consort?
“It’s not my fault,” Maggie cries when the Boulton house is finally attained. The pursuing wagon is nowhere in sight.
“Of course it’s not,” Mrs. Boulton says shakily. “Come, dear. It’s over now.”
But it isn’t over. Strange, how Maggie has spoken so much of death in these last two years, has encountered death by disease and accident and murder and old age and suicide, and thought it all ordinary. At times romantic. But it is neither. Dying is an extraordinary thing; and the terror of it far eclipses any joy of living.
Finally to bed. Finally a half-calm, thanks to opiated wine and Alice’s soothing presence. Then the drapes billow in and the windows shatter and glass skids over the floor. Gunshots. Yelling and pounding feet. Alice and Maggie hide under the quilt, as if this will keep them safe. From outside comes shouting: “Bring out the witch!” “Show us Satan’s whore!” And worse.
The girls scream as the door bursts open. Mr. Boulton and another man shout for them. They take Maggie to a room that is as small as a closet. “You’ll be safe here,” Boulton declares, and locks the door behind him. He has forgotten to leave a lantern or even a candle. Maggie huddles on the narrow bed, crying and shaking, even praying. Forces herself quiet at the limping, dragging noise in the corridor beyond. The sound is slow. Relentless. The peddler? God help her, has he returned? “I’m really sorry,” she sobs. “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean it. Damn, double damn. Go away! I’m not going to die alone and ranting like you said. I won’t!”
The dragging-limping sound ebbs. It is only someone hauling a mattress for the barricades. Surely. Maggie, exhausted beyond measure, buries her head in the coarse, stiff sheets.
Maggie is in that closet-room four days. Is let out only to use the privy, and to eat. The Boultons give her an argand lamp, books, and occasionally someone or other for company. All this is of little comfort. Outside the house a small mob continually mills, threatening and cursing anyone who comes and goes.
Men from East Troy arrive for their defense. That same night, Maggie hears splintering wood. More smashing glass. A horrendous commotion. The house—it has been breached. She presses against the wall as if to seep into it. Become a mere stain.
The house quiets at last. “We sent them off for now,” Mr. Boulton tells Maggie. “They don’t mean to kill anyone, we’re … well, bully, we’re hoping not.” Mr. Boulton eyes are dark-rimmed. His cravat and checked coat are gone and he wears a wide belt thrust through with a pistol. In all, he looks more a pirate than a gentleman, and is oddly more handsome for it. He assures Maggie they have procured means for their defense, that he would give his life to defend her, as would the other men. “We are a fortress here,” he adds.
“But where’s the sheriff? Where?” Maggie asks. “Or the police? Anyone?”
“An excellent question,” Mr. Boulton says. “I’ve sent word to town.” He looks at her helplessly. “Police are only found in cities, I’m afraid.”
Maggie attempts a smile. “A fine guest I am … Have you telegraphed Leah again? Have you?”
Mr. Boulton assures Maggie he has. He has found means to telegraph her three times now.
Leah arrives on the evening of the fifth day and fills Maggie’s closet-room with her presence. “Well, there you were!” she exclaims as if Maggie has been playing hide-and-go-seek.
Maggie falls into her sister’s arms. “They want to kill me!”
“And me,” Leah replies, easing Maggie off with a shudder. “On the train a most disreputable man sat near me and asked me questions that proved he had heard of my journeying here.” She takes off her gloves. “It seems he thought I would be much older in appearance. Anywise, I promptly told the conductor that I—a woman alone on his train—was being harassed by a low character and the conductor escorted the man firmly elsewhere. When I arrived, there was Mr. Boulton. He said he knew me because I was just as pretty as you. The flatterer! He had a pistol. Well, you know that. And sitting in the lovely brougham was yet another man with a pistol. Pistols! My heavenly spirits, I have never seen so many. I can hardly speak. A moment … there. Indeed, a mob is in the yard just now. Did you know that? Or have you been in here the whole time? They might have had at me, too, sister, but those brave men lifted me out of the carriage and bore me inside. I did warn you, did I not, about Troy? Well, now it shall be right as rain.” She looks about the room. “Honestly, but you cannot stay in here forever.”
Maggie finds Leah’s insouciance irritating, but encouraging, also, as if it is a small matter to be mobbed and threatened. Still, it takes much coaxing about having a nice glass of claret to get Maggie out of her closet-room.
“Not now!” Mr. Boulton exclaims when Leah and Maggie enter the kitchen. He waves them back. Glass litters the floor. The doors and broken windows are barricaded. Men sit against the walls and crouch behind the settees and chairs. They grip rifles, pistols, even Bowie knives should the fighting come hand to hand.
On the table is the cooked carcass of a chicken. Mr. Boulton brandishes a half-eaten drumstick as he gives orders to the men. Even the besieged get hungry, Maggie thinks, and this thought somehow wearies her more than anything. She risks crossing the kitchen for the bottle of claret over on a far, high shelf. She takes it to her closet-room, leaving Leah to plot and plan with Mr. Boulton.
A day more and at last the mob disperses. At last they can safely leave.
Once home at the Troup Street cottage, Maggie stays abed for a week. At night giant men rape her on a woodpile. They burn her alive while a hooded priest offers chicken and Methodist prayers. A mob transforms into a tentacled monstrosity and swallows her whole. She vomits and cries and in general carries on, her nerves reverberating like piano wire. She piles high the quilts. Barely eats. Subsists mostly on toddies and mulled wine.
Leah offers advice on recovery: “Put it behind you.” “Our good friends would never let us come to harm.” “Stay with me.” “Follow my advice.” “I only ever have your best interests at heart.” And so forth.
Calvin, once back from his military exercises, is more understanding. “I’ll protect you all, honour bright,” he says, and takes her hand. He has lost weight, Maggie notices. He coughs and shakes his head when she voices concern, then stands and draws back the bedroom drapes to show the vault of sky, the potent light of afternoon. “Perhaps we both need more the sun. The bright rays. Look!” At this he gestures outwards like a magician tired of his own tricks.
The following afternoon Maggie forces herself out of bed and down to the reading room. She huddles in a wingback chair near a smoking fire. Vivace trills wistfully from his Ottoman cage.
Leah paces the small room. “I have the horrid sense, Margaretta, that it was Josiah Bissell, that delinquent lout, who was behind the Troy attacks. He was the ringleader of the Corinthian Hall attack, so why-ever not?” She gasps. “Or else his father. My father … ours, once said the elder Bissell was a devil who used God’s words.” She pokes a finger into Vivace’s cage, strokes his feathers. “I saw some men, no doubt in Bissell’s hire, lurking about last night. Thank the spirits for Calvin. I sent him out to scatter the miscreants.”
Didn’t those “miscreants” just turn out to be the night-soil men? Maggie thinks, vaguely troubled. It is as if Leah has forgotten that Maggie witnessed last night’s affair. More troubling is that Leah’s unpredictable displays of courage, such as Maggie witnessed in Troy, are becoming
offset with unpredictable displays of paranoia. First she became convinced, back in New York, that Alfie skimmed from the takings, and now she sees these imaginary adversaries from Troy. Oddly, however, Leah is not troubled about the Reverend Chauncey Burr. She surely should be, Maggie thinks. Burr has begun a full “exposé” of them in New York. Leah has been receiving daily telegrams and newspaper reports about it from friends. In response she is nonchalant, even proud.
Maggie reaches out of her huddle and picks up a copy of the Tribune, the one that shows a caricature of the nemesis, Burr, himself. He stands on one foot. His other, gigantic and bare, sticks straight at a sparse, nose-holding audience.
“Leah, do any believe Burr?” Maggie asks from the comfort of her wingback chair, her voice a croak, then wonders, why-ever do I ask? I know the answer. This Burr could write the answers on the sky and none would heed him. The secret has become a monstrous thing that stops ears, blinds eyes, thieves all reason.
“No. None believe him. None!” Leah cries with triumph. “His claims are ludicrous, as is the man himself. He came to one of our sittings in New York. That man. I suspected him straightaways. He acted the gentleman, oh, but he had a ruffian’s smile, and a voice that was as deep and dark as, as … his nefarious plans.”
“I’m wondering, Leah, wondering if this next tour, the Buffalo tour, is a such a swell idea.”
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