Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  Lavinia came out of the spring room and saw the two girls. She called out, “Vernelia, there is enough light left for us to make a first batch of candles today. Now, come and help.”

  Vern threw Kate an imploring glance and Kate said, “Don’t worry, I’ll go look.” Then Vern ran across the yard and into the back.

  Kate glanced again at the window of their shared room before following.

  The salty stink of spermaceti poured out the door. Vern had set up the candle mold on the floor of the spring room. The wicks, like six worms, dangled over the sides. In the kitchen, she and Lavinia hovered over the pot, Vern with her face scrunched up. Kate walked through the dining room to the hall. She noted that Amy was out beside the road with Papa. She went quietly up the stairs.

  In the doorway of the bedroom she stopped to look and listen. The room was silent, still. The beds stood where they’d been pushed into place. Amy had insisted on the area nearest the fireplace. She was always the coldest of them. Vern’s bed was right here by the door. Kate, of course, had the bed beneath the noise. There was nothing different about the wall there, but she found herself viewing it edgily as if she half believed Vern’s story. “Oh, my girl,” she muttered, and made herself cross the room and sit on the bed.

  After another minute of silence she said, “Hello?” Nothing happened. “Is anyone here?” she asked. The room remained silent. She got up and went to the window and looked out at the bare branches of the big tree nearest. There wasn’t so much as a breeze stirring.

  Kate returned to the bed. She considered the wall again for a moment, then leaned forward and knocked on it as if on someone’s door. When a full minute passed and nothing happened, she sighed and got up. Vern was not going to like the suggestion that she’d imagined this.

  Kate was halfway to the door when the wall knocked. She turned. Knock wasn’t the right word—it sounded more like a board had snapped in two. She expected to see a crack in the plaster, but the wall was unblemished. Well, she thought, it certainly isn’t the sound of chestnuts dropping on the roof. It also wasn’t proof of anything.

  She took a step back toward her bed. “Repeat?” she asked.

  The tap sounded again.

  Kate stopped dead. The back of her neck prickled. “You—you’re answering me?”

  Again the wall cracked.

  “Oh, my Lord,” said Kate. She backed away, then turned and ran.

  The tap sounded twice.

  In the parlor she sat and tried to sort it out. The noise hadn’t been random. It had answered, or at least it had seemed to. But it had taken a while to begin, as if whatever the cause was, it had to come from somewhere, to travel to reach the wall.

  Vern claimed she’d heard a voice but Kate hadn’t. Of course that didn’t necessarily signify anything. So if it was a ghost, what sort of ghost was it? And why was it in this house? She thought about the things Mr. Jasper the carpenter had related—about the couple who had disappeared. Might it be one of them trying to communicate? Certainly it wasn’t anything like the terrifying ghost Mr. Irving had conjured up in Sleepy Hollow, or the more awful one that had ridden in a coach in that novel about the monk that Vern had read with relish at the same time as she described it as “horrid.” There was nothing ghostly about this at all, really. And the spirit (if such it was) had told Vern it was here to protect her, so maybe it was no ghost at all. Maybe it was an angel. An angel, Kate thought, would be preferable.

  The parade of consolation lecturers through their house had introduced the Charter sisters to a notion of spirits that ran counter to the spooks of gothic tales. However odious the speakers themselves, their talk had always been filled with the gentleness of the spirits, the closeness of that world to our own if only we could recognize it.

  Kate recalled one man in particular who had told of his own wife’s death. It had come the year after their child had succumbed to a fever. His wife in her final hours had heard their little boy laughing and playing with other children in Heaven. The closer she’d moved to death herself, the more her perceptions of him crystallized. She heard him calling to her from that distant land. Finally, she had raised her hand and her fingers had curled as if around a child’s tiny hand. Kate remembered his tears as he spoke of his wife holding a hand he could not see; but he had felt it, felt the presence of the spirits come to collect her, of all of Heaven entering the room, and his anguish had been tempered by his happiness that their little son who’d gone before had eased his dear mother’s translation.

  After hearing him she’d thought that perhaps ghosts were not something to fear. If there was a ghost in their wall…well, there was certainly something in there.

  She had nearly talked herself out of being afraid by the time Vern found her.

  “What happened? Did it speak?” Vern asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you heard it. It was there.”

  “Something was, though not at first. But then it answered. It knocked on the wall when I spoke to it.”

  “Oh, God, Kate, how can we possibly stay in that room? What does it want?”

  “I thought it wanted to protect you.” Then Kate glimpsed the slightest secret smile from Vern, and knew at once that frightened though Vern might be, she was also secretly thrilled.

  “You’ll sit with me, won’t you?”

  “Sit?” Kate asked.

  “We have to try and communicate with it. But not alone. We shouldn’t be alone with it.”

  “No, I suppose we shouldn’t.” She shook her head as she heard her sister’s words again: How can we be in that room? “After dinner, then. We’ll come up and see what we can find out.”

  Eyes bright with excitement, Vern squeezed her hand.

  Sometimes Kate felt as if she were the eldest by years.

  “And you are dead?” Kate asked.

  The wall cracked once.

  “‘Yes,’ he said ‘yes,’” Vern interjected.

  “I know that, I heard the sound, Vern. Once for yes, twice for no. You needn’t answer for him.”

  “Oh, but, Kate, I hear his voice! I hear his words. I can’t help myself.” She smiled a little sheepishly, expecting her sister to be sympathetic. Kate had no trouble hearing the taps, just as before. She’d been so bold as to put her hand against the plaster to feel the vibration as the disembodied communicant knocked—just to be certain that the sound was coming from inside the wall. Each tap occurred only when a question had been asked, and only in the exterior wall. But only Vern heard a voice. Kate, though she strained for even a whisper, an echo, heard nothing. As much as she would have liked, she couldn’t even make the wind outside warp into the cadences Vern described.

  Her sister had gone from terror to enthusiastic defense of the ghost as a ghost without any prompting; Kate hadn’t even mentioned her thoughts about angels. She would have been more concerned if she hadn’t seen this behavior in her sister before.

  The last time Vern had shared such excitement, it was over that French boy with whom she’d decided she was in love, Henri. He had been in Boston only six months when Vern met him. His parents’ house stood opposite theirs and halfway up the street. Vern had been out for a stroll with her parasol when she saw him, and it had been love at first sight—or at least she’d proclaimed it so, undyingly. She’d gushed and sworn and made incredible statements about what Henri intended for the two of them, about how she would throw her heart from a cliff for him, or leap off a tower to her death if she could not have him and how they were going to run away together if Papa refused him—the more ridiculous the assertions, the more adamant the claim. Henri obviously felt something in return: He’d pledged her his heart. And, as it happened, he’d done a good deal more.

  It wasn’t until Vern had finally been shaken to her senses by the threat of pregnancy that her ardor cooled somewhat. By then Mr. Charter and Lavinia had determined to sell the house and come here. The timing allowed Vern to make of Henri a martyr to love. “Mal au coeur,” she
had repeated in her sulks, and whether this was a phrase Henri had said or Vern had selected it for herself, Kate never knew. Either way, it was ever so histrionic.

  Kate couldn’t imagine what would be necessary to shake her sister’s fervor this time.

  In the hour after dinner, they learned—if that was the right word for it; if Vern’s claims could be trusted at all—that the spirit’s name was Samuel, Samuel Verity. The full name seemed to preclude the possibility that he was a true angel. He had been dead for twenty years. He’d been a Shaker, come from Dublin, and had caught an ague and died before his nineteenth birthday. Kate received none of these details. She watched her pie-eyed sister tilt her head and then nod enthusiastically as she received each covert message, crying, “Yes, yes, I understand, did you hear, Kate, did you hear what he said?” As she did not, Kate insisted on her own method of verification, and to each question, the knocking sounded on cue.

  Vern practically leaped up with glee as the spirit confirmed what she said it had said, too excited in her triumph to notice that in requiring corroboration Kate was not accepting her account. She had certainly forgotten about being afraid.

  That something incredible confronted her in the room, Kate could not deny. Yet as the time went on and she became more and more the observer and not a participant in the discovery, she lost her earlier belief that what was happening here was in fact spirit communication. There was no reason for her to think this. The rapping came when it should have. The things Vern said were corroborated again and again; yet the suspicion grew that she was playing an unwitting part in some elaborate parlor trick, performed for their benefit—or at least for Vern’s benefit—and that there was a great deal more devil than God in the miracle.

  The sun had sunk below the trees, but the two girls carried on their interrogation even as the room darkened.

  Then all at once the light from a candle threw their shadows against the wall, and they both twisted about like two children caught misbehaving.

  Amy stood in the doorway, holding one of the half-burned candles from the kitchen. She took one look at them seated on Kate’s bed and facing the wall and her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Whatever are you two doing?”

  While Kate tried to ease into the subject—“Amy, come sit with us and see what you make of this—” Vern blurted out, “Oh, Amy, there’s a ghost in the wall and he’s talking to me, and even Kate has heard him, you must come and listen, too, you must!”

  In the face of such unprecedented behavior—even at the peak of her ecstasy over Henri, Vern would never have confided in Amy—Kate could only sit mutely dumbfounded. This sister was no one she knew.

  Amy squinted at them. From where she stood, she had come upon another secret kept from her. “I suppose if I hadn’t come upstairs,” she complained, “you wouldn’t have told me about this at all, would you?”

  “Amy,” Kate placated. “Don’t be silly. It’s just that—” She stopped, trapped by circumstance. She could not confess here that she mistrusted Vern, and couldn’t deny that neither of them had spent even a second considering the exclusion of their hapless middle sister; it would have required elaborating on the ghost’s having told Vern not to reveal his presence to anyone else—which of course she’d immediately violated, though without any apparent repercussions. The best Kate could muster from her cramped choices was, “We’ve only been listening a little while.”

  “Well, let’s hear him then,” Amy said. She set her candle down on a dresser and came around and planted herself on the bed between them. She crossed her arms. “Spirit, are you here?” she asked to the room at large. Her tone made it clear she gave no credence to the notion.

  The words were barely out of her mouth when the wall snapped right in front of her. Amy’s eyes rounded and her mouth hung open, but as quickly her jaw pushed out. “That’s the ghost of a woodpecker you got.” She would not give in easily. Kate could have predicted it.

  “He says you’d do well to believe in him,” Vern scolded.

  “What do you mean he says? You got all that from one tiny little noise?”

  Kate then explained that their eldest sister was the only one who heard the voice of this supposed angel. She hoped Amy would recognize that it was the two of them united against Vern, but instead of establishing any such camaraderie, the revelation made Amy more resentful. “It’s always Vern,” she whined. “Vern gets to do everything first. Vern gets to break the rules and we two have to cover for her. When she sneaks out of the house at night, we’re supposed to watch to make sure she doesn’t get caught. Never mind that she’s gettin’ away with doing it!”

  Both her sisters stared at her in surprise. Kate answered, “Amelia! What a thing to say!”

  Amy’s eyes darted from one to the other, a nervous glance that made it clear she hadn’t meant to reveal quite so much. Her knowledge of Vern’s promiscuity was a trump card. It was power. In a moment of anger she had tossed it away. She had no choice now but to forge ahead. “You two think you’re having secret conversations but sometimes you aren’t so secret. I hear lots of things you think are just between you. Sometimes you think I’m asleep when I’m not. And sometimes you think you’re all by yourselves but maybe there’s a window open or a door. I heard Vern telling you all about that Italian boy.”

  “He’s not Italian,” Vern objected. “He’s French. And he’s wonderful.”

  Amy laughed harshly, and even Kate shook her head. “Papa’d take a strap to you till your skin came off if he knew. Probably throw you out of the house, I expect.” She stuck her nose in the air and imitated her older sister: “‘Oh, you girls will find out one day what we women really need from men. When you’re older and more sophisticated.’ Pshaw! I don’t know what sophistication’s got to do with it. All I see is, they want to get your drawers off and you’re helping them by going around without any on in the first place.”

  Vern just gaped.

  Amy continued, “You always think that ‘poor little Amy’ is so simple and stupid that she won’t realize—”

  “Amy, that’s not so,” Kate objected, although it was and she knew it.

  “Sure and it is. And probably I am stupid, but I don’t care.” She folded her arms, posing in a sulk.

  Vern couldn’t decide what to object to most—the accusations of her carelessness with Henri (even as she sat there she was reenvisioning how she lay with him and how she had to guide him into her because finally despite his boldness he knew less than she did about what they were up to), or the notion that she intentionally and cruelly kept her sister in the dark, when the truth was, she was protecting herself and wouldn’t even have told Kate except that she just had to talk to someone about how much in love she was. She could never have made such confession to Amy, because she’d been Amy’s mother for six years now and couldn’t exchange her ironclad role for that of a love-struck girl. Kate, despite the fact that she was a year younger than Amy, was more grown-up about things. More to the point, Kate didn’t judge her. Amy surely would, on the spot, as she was doing now. Amy, the open book, was as quick to judge as Lavinia.

  While Vern and Kate sat in entangled silence, Amy kicked off her shoes and pulled her stockings down. She sat and admired her own feet, curling her toes as if she hadn’t a care in the world. She idly asked, “Who is this spirit, then, hmm? Why’s he in this house in particular? You say he’s a Shaker, so how come he’s not with them over at New Lebanon? He isn’t the one who lived here before us, is he, so what’s he doing in our house?”

  Kate had wondered much the same things but had not voiced her doubts, being too curious about the phenomenon itself. She also had information about the history of the house that neither of her sisters could know. Had the former occupants met this spirit, too? Might the ghost have had something to do with their disappearance? Certainly, if it was a ghost, it must know what had happened. She even wondered if Vern had got the last name wrong. She could almost persuade herself that “Verity” might be “Pulask
i”—she didn’t know how well Vern heard the voice. Although the notion frightened her, she wanted to have a session with the rapping spirit by herself.

  Amy told Vern, “I don’t think I believe in your Samuel.” Then she leaned over to Kate and whispered loudly, “I think Vern’s having us on.” She raised one foot straight out till her toes touched the wall. Then she turned her foot under and made her ankle crack as loud as the tapping within the wall. She twisted it back the other way and her ankle bones cracked again. “I do believe,” she said, “I got a spirit in my feet.”

  Vern’s lips pressed so tight, the color bled from around them. “I very much doubt it,” she replied. She got up and stormed into the hall.

  Amy giggled and cracked her ankle again.

  Kate sighed. “Oh, Amelia, why do you always think we’re plotting against you? When have we ever?” Then she stood and left the room as well.

  Until that moment Amy had felt terribly clever. Now her audience had gone. She lowered her legs and crossed her arms again, pushed her lips out; but there was no one left to see her sulk.

  It must have been a breeze drawn by her sisters’ departing that caused the candle to gutter and go out then. The room fell dark. It became instantly sinister. Amy glanced from one end of the bed to the other. She didn’t want to be alone in here with a spirit. A spirit—and she admitted to herself what she had refused to say to her sisters, that she did believe in ghosts and believed they must surely be hungry for the living. For her.

  She stood, but stumbled over her cast-off shoes and stockings and pitched toward the wall. She slapped her palms against it to steady herself, and the wall cracked so loud it should have split in two. The vibration shot up her arms as if the thing had burst out of the plaster. She cried out and launched herself away from the wall. She stumbled again on her shoes—they seemed to be sliding around, tripping her every step. The wall cracked behind her as if it would split down the middle. She flung herself across the bed and came up running in blind panic for the door. Her bare toes struck the leg of Vern’s bed, which impossibly had slid into the middle of the room. She shrieked with pain. She hopped, fumbling, clutching at her foot. Tears flooded her eyes. She ran clumsily and all but fell into her sisters’ arms.