The shelf was a bit too short for Mrs. Gubbins, so she sat slightly smushed at top and bottom, and on her right by a candy tin rusting around the edges. She had a lace-trimmed cap, one button-eye dangling below the other, a nose shaped with firm stitching out of the fabric of the face, and a long stingy mouth embroidered in what used to be pink. In her letters Josie joked that Mrs. Gubbins was the filthiest doll in the world—Mrs. Grubbins, more like!—but Alec smiled to think of how much more dirt she had acquired in the meantime.
Alec reached through the layers of dust and cobwebs and pulled the doll from the shelf. She had dainty hands, the fingers formed with sturdy needlework in the same manner as the nose, and was surprisingly heavy for a rag doll. Why did she leave you here?
“Who sent you the key, Alec? Do you know?” Mrs. Frost went on, almost to herself, “How could they know?”
Alec shook his head. “But I know whose doll this is.”
She hesitated. “Josephine’s little sister?” He nodded. Mrs. Frost sat down heavily on the spare room bed, cradling her forehead in her hand. “I . . .”
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know how to believe you,” she said softly, and when she looked at him there were tears in her eyes.
Alec put the doll back on the shelf. “I don’t know what to say, Mom. It’s all here. It’s real.”
She held out her arms and he folded himself in. “I’m trying to believe you, sweets.” His mother looked at the doll sitting in the cabinet, and the doll looked back. She smiled. “I think I’m almost there.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you,” Alec said later that evening as he opened the front door for Danny. “I was too excited.” There was much more in the cupboard besides Mrs. Gubbins. Together the boys opened the rusted candy tin, and found a sort of time capsule: a postcard from London addressed to “my dearest girls” in extravagant cursive, a deck of cards, a kazoo, and a tiny spinning top, made of metal, with a pointed wooden dowel through the center. He ran his thumb along the words embossed there: The Famous Confection. Alec smiled. This had been Cassie’s. He’d make it spin on the same floor.
It didn’t matter that the postcard was stamped with a date of a hundred and five years before, or that the handful of peppermints no longer looked remotely edible, or that they hadn’t spoken through the board in months. Josie had been the last person to touch these things. She felt closer than ever now.
A black cardboard box on the bottom shelf contained a half dozen strange objects, beige and cylindrical. “I’m pretty sure those are wax cylinders,” Danny said. “They used to record on them, just for a few years before flat discs got to be standard.”
Alec spotted an envelope at the bottom of the box, and it had his name on it in Josie’s writing.
My dear friend,
These recording cylinders were given to Cass (along with a phonograph) by Mr. Berringsley, who is as convinced as I am that she is destined for the stage. We have observed a series of very curious things about it. While my sister may follow the phonograph instructions to the letter in order to record her elocution exercises, it has not captured her voice at all; no, when we install a cylinder a voice from the future speaks to us, answering all our questions, and we may go on chatting for hours while the cylinder spins, even though wax cylinders are meant to record only two minutes each.
Indeed, you and I will speak—yes, speak!—again, and here is what you must do. You must procure a phonograph, though given your connections this will not prove much of a challenge. Load one of these cylinders—any one you choose will be the right one—and listen for us. Danny won’t be with you the first time we speak, but do tell him Cass and I look forward to our introduction.
Your friend,
Josie
“Yeah right I won’t be there,” Danny said. “I’m not gonna miss this for all the Doritos in Thailand.”
The boys resolved to ask Danny’s dad for a phonograph after school the next day. It was only later that evening that Alec gave any real thought to the return address, and who “a friend” might be. The handwriting was neat and girlish—not the penmanship of a grown-up—and whoever she was, she maybe spent as much time in Central Park as he had, back when they lived in Manhattan. She was a perfect stranger and yet she knew who he was; she knew about Josie and Cass, and why he needed to open the spare-room cupboard; and she expected that someday they would meet.
So Much Fuss
25.
Lavinia Clifford seldom hosted a party. One’s guests had a way of making themselves tedious well before the evening’s end, and one couldn’t very well dismiss them in contempt when they happened to be one’s bread and butter. Besides, parties cost money, and stray bits of hors d’oeuvres mashed into the carpet or between the seat cushions would try Mrs. Pike’s patience for days to come.
But Mrs. Clifford’s birthday was approaching, and Mr. Berringsley announced that he intended for her a present so marvelous it could only be given at a dinner party in the old French style. They must invite prominent members of the New York Theosophical Society, and serve only the finest champagne and foie gras.
Josie sat at the window watching the guests arrive, Emily’s copy of The Woman in White splayed on her knee. Cass was busy at the school table, and Josie went over to look at four drawings spread across the desk. “See,” said Cass, “this is the big London store with all the animals in their cages, and this is Mr. Berringsley buying the tiger and walking it home to his flat, and here is the tiger sleeping in the bathtub, and here is the tiger getting angry for being kept on the leash and eating Mr. Berringsley for breakfast.”
“We’d better make sure Mother doesn’t see that one.”
“Mrs. Gubbins says you should never try to keep a wild animal. It is a very stupid thing to do, she says.”
The sound of another motorcar brought Josie back to the window seat, and she watched an elegant couple stride up to the house with a pang of longing. “It is the ultimate indignity,” she sighed as the doorbell rang, “not to be invited to a dinner party under one’s own roof.”
“Don’t be silly.” Cass was adding one last flourish to the gory drawing. “You don’t care for Mr. Berringsley anyhow.”
“Neither do you, apparently!” her sister retorted, and they fell over themselves laughing.
Mrs. Pike brought up their dinner, and when the housekeeper returned for the empty serving tray she said, “You girls are wanted downstairs. Mrs. Clifford is asking for you.”
Cass and Josie stood in the doorway of the drawing room, which with all its chatter and sparkle seemed to belong in a different house altogether. The whole of the ground floor was redolent of musky perfumes, pipe smoke, and roasted chicken, and there were many people they did not recognize: sophisticated women in beaded gowns that left their arms quite bare and tall bearded gentlemen in black evening jackets. The upright piano had been moved into the drawing room for the occasion, and a stranger sat playing some exuberant show tune with the nub of a cigarette pinched between his lips. Cass took her sister’s hand and squeezed it. They would wait and observe until their mother called upon them.
Someone was speaking, but the voice burbled past her ears like water in a brook. A figure in a wooden mask, painted with three vertical blue stripes on either cheek, sat at the center of a circle of women and men—she recognized the crimson silk dress the figure wore—and Josie realized with a start that it was her mother. The eyes inside the mask moved to meet hers, glittered for a moment, and turned back to the conversation.
“But why should a medium of genuine ability engage in fraudulent acts?” a man was asking as he dropped a pinch of tobacco into his pipe.
“The pressure of performing, of course,” said a long-faced woman in a dress of pale blue lace, who seemed to be about their mother’s age. “What if, for whatever reason, the spirits remain silent on the day of some visit by a bereaved
friend or lover, or a psychical researcher like Dr. Jennings? Does the medium announce to all those assembled that no one is whispering to her today? Certainly not. It would destroy her credibility.”
The man lit a match, and it flared as he inserted it into the bowl of his pipe. “Yet she also destroys her credibility through fraudulent acts, the cheesecloth ‘ectoplasm’ and suchlike.”
“Some would argue that it is all for the greater good, Mr. Devers,” replied the woman in the blue lace gown. “She must fall upon her lesser, yet more reliable powers of practical intuition.”
“By ‘practical intuition,’ do you mean her ordinary powers of observation?” asked Mr. Devers as he puffed on his pipe. “The scuff of the boots, the circles under the eyes? In other words, discernment, in its most cynical form? I believe it is called ‘cold reading.’”
“I must say I disagree with you, Mrs. Snyder,” said Miss Berringsley, who was seated on the other side of Mrs. Clifford. “Fraud and trickery are fraud and trickery, and there can be no excuse for it.”
Mrs. Snyder turned to her hostess for the approbation no one else was willing to give her, and Lavinia’s mask made it seem as if her guest were bending at the foot of a pagan idol. “I hope you will not take offense, Mrs. Clifford. You never cheat, of that I am convinced.”
The medium removed the mask from her face, and fixed her cold eyes on the speaker. “Is that so, Mrs. Snyder? How can you be so certain?”
Mrs. Snyder made an attempt at laughter, and the moment seemed on the verge of extending itself intolerably before the pipe-smoking gentleman caught sight of the two figures in the doorway. “The Clifford girls, at last!” he said, and their mother beckoned them into the room.
“Here are my daughters. Say hello, children.” Dutifully they obeyed, and Mrs. Clifford rose from her seat and dug her fingernails into Josie’s shoulders. “I fill your wardrobe with fashionable frocks, and this is the rag you wear to meet my friends?” she hissed into Josie’s ear. Her breath smelled of spirits.
“Mrs. Pike didn’t say anything about changing our dresses,” Josie whispered back.
“Never mind now.” Her mother stood up and cast a smile around to all in their immediate company. “Miss Berringsley would like to hear you recite something, Josephine.”
Josie turned to Mr. Berringsley’s sister, who regarded her with one steady eye. “I have only learned a few pieces, ma’am. I could recite ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’ or ‘Ozymandias,’ or perhaps ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’?” She’d been midway through learning “Goblin Market,” but hadn’t the heart to continue after Emily’s departure.
“I could recite something,” Cass broke in. “I’m an awfully good actress. Everybody says so.”
“Next time, dear,” Miss Berringsley replied. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ Josephine—that is, if you would be so kind”; and Josie was not as nervous as she might have been, for Miss Berringsley was not the mocking type. A hush fell over the drawing room, and Josie delivered her rendition of Tennyson’s poem with only one brief hesitation. It was Emily Jasper’s belief that a poem with a plot is far easier to commit to memory, and, in the warmth of that applause, Josie knew then how right she’d been.
As the clapping died away, Mr. Berringsley clinked a spoon against his empty sherry glass. “It’s time!” he cried, as one person dimmed the lights, two others carried in a pair of large objects draped in black cloth, and yet another brought in a three-tiered birthday cake on which a multitude of tiny candles danced and flickered. “My dear Lavinia! Are you ready?”
“So much fuss!” murmured Mrs. Clifford, but her cheeks glowed with pleasure.
The song was sung and the candles extinguished, but then something very strange happened. From one of the tall black-shrouded objects on the banquet table an inhuman voice squawked, Alas! He is betrayed and I undone!
The guests gasped, giggled, or whispered among themselves as Berringsley said, “It seems the cat is out of the bag. Or the birds, as it were.” And he drew the black drapes from a pair of gilded cages. “They are Vasa parrots and have come to you all the way from Madagascar by way of London.”
Again one of the birds cried out. Othello! Othello! Forgive me! Othello!
“Perhaps I should mention,” Mr. Berringsley went on, “that they are called Desdemona and Othello.”
“Marvelous!” cried Mr. Devers of the ivory pipe. “You’re a magician, Berringsley.”
“Ah, no,” laughed Mr. Berringsley. “I am merely a patient man.”
“Those are funny names,” said Cassie.
“They’re Shakespearean,” Josie replied.
Alas! He is betrayed and I undone!
Mr. Berringsley turned to the girls and bowed to meet their faces in his disconcerting way. “Splendid, is it not? I taught her myself.”
“Can she say anything else?” Cass asked eagerly.
“She can, if you teach her.”
“Can we teach her to talk back to us? Can she answer my questions?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Does Othello know how to talk, too?”
“He does, but he isn’t as talkative. You see, Desdemona is the dominant bird.”
“Are they brother and sister or husband and wife?” Cassie asked.
“Oh, most certainly husband and wife.”
“Then why don’t they live in the same cage?”
Mr. Berringsley smiled. “As in any human marriage, it is beneficial that the male and the female spend a certain amount of time apart.” Then in a low voice he said something to their mother that Josie did not catch.
Cass was so near Desdemona’s cage that the tip of her nose was poking through the thin metal bars. “Say ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.’ Go on, Desdemona!”
“Gracious, that’s a tricky one even for a smart bird like Desdemona!” laughed Mr. Berringsley.
“That’s enough, now,” said Mrs. Clifford. “Children, run along up to bed.”
“Those parrots have been his precious secret for months,” Josie heard Miss Berringsley say as they went out of the room. “Ever since we returned from London, you know. I must confess that we were horribly afraid one of the birds would die before your birthday!”
The girls lay awake, listening to the hum of laughter, piano music, and conversation that went on well into the night.
A Telephone Through Time
26.
Mr. Penhallow frowned. “What can you want with an antique phonograph?”
“Alec found some wax cylinders in that funky cabinet in his house,” Danny said, as Alec hurriedly opened the box and pulled out a cylinder to illustrate. “We just want to listen to them. I mean, I guess if you’re afraid the phonograph’s too fragile, we could just play them here . . .?”
Alec shot his friend a glance, but he relaxed when he saw the look on Danny’s face. His dad wouldn’t go for that, not with customers in the shop, and Danny knew it.
Mr. Penhallow shook his head and sighed. “If you break it I’m selling your Xbox on eBay and the rest of it’s coming out of your allowance ’til you’re thirty, you got me?”
Danny grinned. “I got you. We’ll be careful, Dad, we promise.” Eyeing his browsing customers first to make sure no one was almost ready to check out, Mr. Penhallow ducked into the stock room to find a box for the phonograph.
While they waited, Alec looked around. There were two gramophones in the shop, each with its own cabinet, and only one phonograph, and though there were three shelves of records there were no wax cylinders that he could see.
“Hey, check this out.” Danny handed Alec a picture of two young women, sisters, sitting on a hill overlooking a lake. One of the girls was gazing out at the water with a sad look on her face, but there was something odd about the other one. She was sitting slightly tipped forward and her eyes were close
d. Like Josie’s portrait, this picture was signed and captioned by the photographer. Penelope & Isabella, 1911.
“Postmortem photography was totally a thing back then,” Danny was saying. “You see how she’s got her hand around her sister’s waist to keep her up?”
“But they’re so young,” Alec said. The two girls couldn’t be more than twenty. Danny shrugged. “TB, I guess.”
Alec suppressed a shudder. There were so many more things a person could die from back then.
He’d washed Mrs. Gubbins’s dress, apron, and bonnet in the bathroom sink, wiping her face and hands with a damp cloth, and now she sat on his bookshelf like a new woman—albeit no less mad-looking than when she’d belonged to Cass, since he hadn’t yet fixed her dangling button eye. It almost felt as if the doll were supervising them as they set up the phonograph on Alec’s desk.
They installed the recording cylinder as Mr. Penhallow had shown them, and when Alec turned on the machine it made a whirring noise as the cylinder spun. A tiny voice came through all the crackling and static, and they strained their ears to listen. Round and round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran…
Danny’s phone buzzed, and he groaned as he saw who was calling. “Mom? Please can I just stay a little while longer? . . . but can’t I see Aunt Brenda later? She’s here all week!” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t meant to be rude. I’ll be home in two minutes.” Danny stuffed the phone back in his pocket with a grumpy look.
Alec grinned. “I had a feeling.”
Voices on the Phonograph
27.
Josie waited to knock until there was a pause in the clackety-clack of the Royal typewriter.
“Yes?” her mother called. “What is it?” The girl opened the door and went into the room. Her mother rolled her eyes. “Can’t you see I’m working?”
“I won’t keep you long.” Cassie’s footsteps skittered down the stairs as she began. “It’s been more than three months since you sent Emily away. When will we have a new tutor?”
The Boy from Tomorrow Page 13