Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  “You walked in your sleep, Papa.”

  “Did I?” He seemed completely disoriented, and had to regard the pike again. “I must have. I was walking with God, Katie. God was at my side. We were walking through a beautiful meadow and the sky was full of rainbows. It was Heaven, surely.”

  “Yes, Papa.” She took his hand and drew him toward the house. He stumbled along willingly, but no longer strong in his stride. In his sleep he had been as steady as the father she remembered from childhood.

  “God’s been speaking with me awhile now. It’s because time is short. All that divides this world from the next now is vapor.”

  “Then you’ve seen Mother?”

  He stopped walking. “Your mother, Katherine? No, I haven’t seen her. That—that’s odd, isn’t it? I haven’t seen her at all.” Trembling, he allowed himself to be led back inside, and up to his room. Kate lit a candle and used it to light the Betty lamp that hung near his bed. She tucked him in, then sat beside him. He was like a child in that bed, a little boy wearing the expression of someone much older who’d forgotten something critical and now, having been shown it, knew that their faculties were crumbling.

  By candlelight Kate read to him from a book of Washington Irving’s stories, a piece called “The Wife.”

  “‘Those disasters which break down the spirit of a man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity.’”

  In many aspects this brief essay about the surprising strength that a friend of the author’s, having fallen on hard times, discovered in his wife, was all about her own mother. Kate would have selected any other of the stories by the fictitious Geoffrey Crayon, Esq., but Mr. Charter—as he had often done before—petitioned her to read that seemingly cruel and painful piece.

  Near the end, the wife in the story linked her arm into her husband’s and told him, “Oh, we shall be so happy!” More than once, her father had listened to this passage with tears upon his cheeks. This night, though, he dozed after only the first page.

  Kate closed the book. Instead of returning to her room, she rocked awhile in the chair, staring into the greasy black smoke of the Betty lamp and speculating that whatever had accompanied her father down the stairs, it certainly wasn’t God. She couldn’t help but recall Amy’s suspect Angel of Death, and how she had been able to make herself known to Kate from far away. From the heights of that damned house.

  The crusade of the Next Life returned early the next afternoon. A handful of people preceded the main body up the road, announcing the imminent arrival of “the most holy reverend.” They grinned with a kind of fanatical madness, a joy that did not belong to the earth.

  It was October the thirteenth. No one had ever thought they would return so late.

  The road was soon occluded by squatters. Word somehow spread even to the far side of the turnpike, so that people came walking back from the direction of Harbinger and crowded around the pole, their eyes wide with desperate hope, asking Kate and her father if Fitcher had yet been spied. Even as she told them he had not, a great roar came from farther down the road, and as everyone looked in that direction, he appeared above the crowd.

  Fitcher sat a horse this time, like a commanding general awash in his victorious troops. He greeted everyone as he passed, waving his walking stick. He leaned down and touched their outstretched hands. People parted for him, but stayed close, trying to touch him, his stick, his boots, even the tired horse. They squealed, they cried. Some reacted to the touch violently, flinging their arms up, twitching like Shakers. They had to be dragged aside, set down in the grass. Foam bubbled on their lips, and some babbled insanely in foreign or improvised tongues. A plump woman began to spin about in circles and slapped those nearest before they scrambled back out of her windmilling way. The tension had cracked like the wall of a dike, and pent-up frothing fanaticism burst out.

  Fitcher rode through like an avatar. His smile was benign eminence. At the pole, he reined in but did not dismount. For a moment he stared down at Kate with cold consideration, as if contemplating a meal, and she felt herself flush in response. Her cheeks burned and she stepped aside, behind her father.

  Mr. Charter reached up to shake Fitcher’s hand and welcome him back. On the horse behind him, visibly transformed, rode Lavinia. Kate did not immediately recognize her. Lavinia had let her hair down, and she wore men’s riding clothes—breeches and a boiled white shirt. The severity and darkness of her had vanished. Her sharp features had filled and softened. Kate found herself thinking that her stepmother was surprisingly lovely. Lavinia turned her horse and rode onto the lawn.

  Behind her flowed a multitude. If the last crusade had doubled the population of Harbinger, the takings of this one threatened to quadruple it. The mass of people extended as far as could be seen back down the road. They moved forward slowly, turning the confines of the road into a warren enclosed by trees. They spilled out onto the lawn of the house. They circled Fitcher now that he had stopped. One of them held Lavinia’s horse as she dismounted. She seemed to move with the fluidity of someone half her age. Kate noticed, and observed that her father noticed, too.

  “It is a great success,” Fitcher proclaimed. “A triumph. We’ve collected hundreds more on this campaign. Our new world will thrive with new life.” He twisted around to overlook his flock, and called out, “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house!’” The mob cheered, and the sound rolled like a huge wave down the road, echoing back from farther than could be seen.

  “Now, we must go on, only a little farther. We will charge them nothing here,” he said to Mr. Charter. “We’ve all their goods, their monies, and it will all come to us in Harbinger. Their dedication is not in question. Now, you must come to the house, too. Move in. It’s time, you know, only mere days remain to us and I do not want you to find yourselves outside the fence when all around is obliterated. We can’t lose our gatekeeper, or his family.” His gaze flicked to Kate, then to Lavinia. Then he straightened in his saddle and shouted, “Onward!” They cheered him again.

  As he rode under the upraised pike, he began to sing the new words Mr. Isaac Watts had written to the tune of “Antioch,” which Kate had heard only a few times in church: “‘Joy to the world! The Lord is come! Let earth receive her King; Let ev’ry heart prepare Him room…’” Unlike Kate, the crowd seemed to know the song well. They picked up the words and sang along. Their song roared past. It was, thought Kate, a beautiful song, but it sounded like a martial chant to her now. In the sky to the west, the front of a storm was rolling in.

  “You have allowed conditions to deteriorate, Katherine,” said Lavinia. “I’m disappointed with you.”

  “Lavinia,” Mr. Charter interjected, “it has been difficult for her, for us both. Without you.”

  No doubt he hoped that would placate her, but Lavinia would not be misdirected from her chosen target. “It’s scandalous, what if the Reverend Fitcher had wished to come in? Why, I couldn’t have stopped him, and the conditions here would not have been to my detriment, I can assure you.” She brushed crumbs off the tablecloth, which was itself stained here and there from recent meals.

  No, thought Kate, you’re now queen of all you survey. We’re only here to serve. What she said was: “Ma’am, I fear that with my father’s weakness at the forefront of my thoughts, I have not attended to household matters that didn’t directly impinge upon our day-to-day lives.”

  “And insolent.” Now she turned on Mr. Charter. “Do you see? While I was gone, you did nothing to curb her habit of insolence. If anything, it has increased. Insolence like a weed.”

  Mr. Charter listened, his head lowered, but his eyes following Lavinia as she circled the room. She ran her finger across various surfaces, staring sourly at the result each time, passing judgment upon them both with a look.

  She said, “Two days remain. We must
close up this house and take ourselves to the next estate, and here she isn’t even in an appropriate state of mind to walk through the very gates.”

  Mr. Charter snapped, “In the name of God, woman, shut up!”

  Both Kate and Lavinia turned to him, disbelieving. He still sat hunched, but trembled with a rage he could not contain. “She has done exactly what needed doing. She has looked after me as I wished. If this house is in some way dissatisfactory, it is because I cared nothing for the dust on a mantel or the crumbs on a table—and I still don’t.” He strode from the dining room, and went outside. The wind had blown up. A throng with no end continued to push along the road toward Harbinger.

  Lavinia stood stiff, her cheeks flushed, her eyes flashing like lightning. Kate had to walk by her to leave. She tried to hold her tongue, but her own anger overwhelmed her common sense.

  “I believe,” she said softly, “your reign is over.”

  The wind whirled about the house. It pulled up tiny cyclones of dirt and leaves. One gust caught the tied-up turnpike pole, wrenching it free from the rope that held it upright. Mr. Charter and Kate, busy gathering up stray items and tethering horses, saw it slip loose but couldn’t reach it. The pike crashed down on the stump and splintered in two. It was sheer good fortune that no one was beneath it when it fell.

  People on the road scrambled to tie down their belongings as wind billowed tarps and worked tent pegs loose. There was thunder in the west keeping its distance; and sheets of lightning flared beyond the trees; but no rain had yet fallen when Elias Fitcher rode into view like some dark apocalyptic horseman from up the road. The wind flapped the ends of his long coat, but seemed reluctant to assault him as it had everyone else.

  He dismounted and left his horse tethered to the broken pike. He walked with solemnity to the house, gesturing on the way for Mr. Charter and his daughter to leave off assisting others and follow him.

  He led them into the parlor. Kate noticed that Lavinia was already there, reading her Bible by lamplight; she had changed from her riding gear into a print dress, and twisted her hair into its usual severe bun. Seeing the reverend, she closed the book, placing it upon her lap. Her hand went to her hair, as if to let it down again. She had eyes only for Fitcher. It was as if neither her husband nor her stepdaughter existed.

  “How fares Harbinger?” asked Mr. Charter.

  Fitcher turned away from Lavinia. “We’re drowning in people at the moment,” he replied. “We’re having to hold them at the gates until we can find space for them to occupy. People are doubling up. The dormitories now have people lying in the aisles and between and under each bunk. It will all work out. We will get them all in. We must accommodate everyone, leave no one behind who truly wishes to join me.” He hesitated a moment before continuing: “I have tragic news.”

  Kate said, “Amy.” It was like a gasp.

  The three adults glanced at her. “Indeed,” Fitcher replied. “Your sister has succumbed to illness. I suspect malaria, but can’t be certain. There is sickness in the encampment—not surprising when so many are forced to share space, and conditions are not hygienic. Believers they may be, but many of these people are less than tidy about themselves. Of course I wasn’t on hand to maintain order, with the result that people sprawled about.”

  “I saw them, I was at Harbinger last week.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “No one knew where Amy was. No one could tell me.”

  “That is because she had stopped appearing at meals. Someone should have investigated, of course, but in the chaos of all the new arrivals and the concomitant problems they brought, she was simply overlooked. Many thought she had gone off with me and I hadn’t assigned anyone to watch after her. There was no cause, she seemed so sanguine when I left.”

  “Amy’s dead?” Mr. Charter asked.

  “Regrettably. She must have taken to her bed, and never got out. I—I found her. She’d been dead for weeks. That room…the heat. It’s too awful to describe.”

  Mr. Charter had sunk down upon a chair. “There must be a funeral—”

  “Mr. Charter, there will certainly be a memorial service, but I’ve had the body buried already. Her illness is likely communicable, and the state of the corpse prevented me from keeping it above ground for even an hour. The smell in that room…With all of these new arrivals, dear Lord, the last thing we can afford is a plague in the final hours before we would be saved.”

  Her father looked lost, cast adrift. His head swayed between Kate and Lavinia. Finally he faced Fitcher. “All my girls,” he said.

  “Not quite all, sir,” Fitcher answered. His blue eyes cut the distance to Kate. “I find myself once more bereaved, once more without a mate for the Day of Judgment at hand.”

  Lavinia squinted at Kate with rancor.

  Mr. Charter sighed deeply. His head hung down below his shoulders. “You must take Katherine, then,” he said.

  “Papa!” she cried, but he didn’t respond. He didn’t seem to know she was there. When he raised his head, he was looking at Fitcher and his face had gone slack, as if the man within had absented himself. It was the expression he’d worn when she’d spied him descending the stairs the previous night, talking to the unseen companion—to God, he claimed—promising to honor his promise to wed her. She’d thought it was a memory, that in his despair he was recalling her mother. Now she recognized the look: the expression that the mesmerist’s subjects had all worn while under his command.

  “She will go with you. There’s no time left, is there? She’s young but strong.” His head bobbed, puppetlike.

  “Headstrong,” corrected Lavinia. Fitcher gave her a glance, and she stiffened up and looked away.

  “That is what I was hoping you’d say, Mr. Charter. Fallen though I am, I know that I am saved. I must have a wife pure and strong enough to stand with me when we face God.”

  Kate considered pointing out to him that he had literally hundreds of women to pick from now. There was no reason to choose her, except that it had been his goal from the start, from at least the moment he had encountered them aboard the steamer. “‘And the king made her queen instead of Vashti,’” she quoted, and Lavinia’s eyes blazed. She knew then how much lay between Fitcher and her stepmother. She hadn’t suspected until then that there might have been a much greater plot at work than any of them had imagined; it would never have occurred to her or her sisters that he might have been collecting them. Collecting them all.

  Twenty-nine

  THUS WITH THE FIRST OF THE rain lashing them, the Charter family rode in their wagon behind Elias Fitcher to Harbinger House.

  Beyond the turnpike, people clogged the road and only moved aside reluctantly when it was clear the wagon would not stop. In the dark of the storm, whipped by rain, they kept their heads down, and snarled like beasts as they shuffled aside. Lightning flashed again and again, capturing the human nightmare in a series of still pictures for Kate: a dark woman at the side of the road, wailing and tearing at her hair; two men staring out from the open flaps of a rotting tent; three bodies hanging like pale fruit from the trees, the nearest bearing a sign with the word SUCCUBUS painted on it. All of this they passed before they’d even reached the bridge.

  Someone must have been camping at the bottom of the gorge; the flickering glow of a bonfire outlined the bridge in hellish hues. The crowd upon it was a huge, many-headed thing, a shape in constant flux. Seated on the wagon, Kate was reminded of the Geneva wharf as she’d viewed it from the gangplank of the Fidelio. Fitcher’s horse cut through them, the wagon rumbling after, both forcing people to push against the rails. Someone dropped a bundle off the side. The fires below lit it for the instant it was in view—at least Kate hoped it was a bundle. It could so easily have been…but she would not think something so awful. What she did think was that this could not be the pathway to Heaven, that these could not be the chosen and the saved. Was that why they had been kept from entering Harbinger? Perhaps, yet she found herself wonder
ing how Elias Fitcher, as she was coming to understand him, could open the gates to eternal life.

  Their wagon trundled on to the gates. The house appeared through the trees as a quilt of lighted panels against the night. The torches on the exterior had been put out by the storm.

  She looked up but could not see the pyramid at the top.

  A mob hung on the gates. They swiped at the guards inside, who were refusing them entry. When Fitcher rode up, most of the mob moved aside, but a few clung to the bars despite his instructions to get out of the way. They held on until the gates parted, then sprinted through, only to be met by men wielding clubs. Scuttling back, they fell against Fitcher’s horse and against the gates, where they were beaten and flung back out like squashed rats, all of this occurring before Mr. Charter had even driven inside. Kate wondered if he saw the barbarity, or if he was even conscious of what was happening around him.

  Fitcher dismounted and came to her, lifted her out of the wagon. “My dearest Katherine,” he said. “Finally.” From beneath her hood she spied Lavinia looking darkly over her shoulder at them. Fitcher closed his hands around hers in their lace gloves. “I confess to you, I was smitten by you most of all from the very first.”

  “You did not much disguise it, sir.”

  “As much as I sealed up my heart, the plain truth leaked out, did it?”

  “Through your eyes. Their color hides nothing. Your intent is clear.”

  He smiled and offered her his arm. “We go directly to the chapel, for there’s no time for preparing, no time for the ceremony Vernelia knew, or even for the ghost of that accorded Amelia. You understand.”

  “I don’t stand upon ceremony,” she said.

  “Excellent.” They strode up the steps and into the house. Mr. Charter and Lavinia followed, though not together, not presenting anything like a united front any longer. Lavinia walked with fury, Mr. Charter in his trance.

  The Hall of Worship had become a makeshift encampment. Bundles and belongings crammed the aisles; clothes were draped over the pews. The red runner had turned black with dirt. The candles along the walls were all lit, as well as a few scattered lamps and pewter lanterns. The air stank of oily sweat.