The Dark (68 page)

T
HE CHILDREN
, dirty and shoeless, rush at Katie as if to push her into the canal. They hoot and catcall as she staggers aside. The world, aside from the rat-children, is fine enough, is green-leafed and sun-warmed. Passersby tut their disapproval. Ah, she is coming into Rochester’s Exchange Street. Perhaps she will shop for a hat, one topped with a stuffed bird as is all the rage. Yes, she’ll slaughter all of Leah’s birds and become a milliner. She could use a change of occupation. She swivels and falls to her knees. The children mimic her and howl with laughter. A boy prods her with a stick. A girl snatches at her shawl. The boy comes at her again, his stick held back like a heathen’s spear.

“Cease that! Get thee gone! Wretched, wretched children!” The woman’s voice is blade-sharp. The children scatter like pigeons. Are they flying? No. It is only the leaves in the sky above. Someone, perhaps herself, singsongs as she is taken away.

“Katherine? Katie?”

At the cautious utterance of her name Katie looks up to see Amy Post standing afore her in her familiar dark dress with its lace cuffs and collars, her familiar kind expression.

“I’m in your keeping room, Amy,” Katie says and with the pride of a child at her lessons. She pats at her badly-pinned hair. Her tartan dress is dirt-streaked and hangs alarmingly at the back, Katie having neglected to wear a bustle. Well, fiddle-de-damn, Amy
doesn’t wear a bustle either, Katie thinks, and then recalls that Amy is a member of the Society for Rational Dress. But not a member of any Spirit Society. She has not attended sittings for years now, not even when Isaac died. When was that? A decade or more ago? Yes, and that was when Amy said she knew full well that Isaac was in the Glory; that he was with their beloved Matilda and Henry at last and that she, Amy, would be with them all soon enough. Amy said that those who continually seek confirmation of the beyond are alike drunkards continually seeking their next bottle. At this remembrance Katie looks about for brandy, or sherry; surely there is at least sherry in Amy’s house.

Machteld, who looks nearly as old as her mistress these days, lumbers in with apple cake and tea. She ignores Katie, as she has for over thirty years now. Katie sips the proferred tea and frowns.

“It’s rosehip,” Amy explains. “Stimulants of any kind, might not, might not be of benefit for thee, dear.”

“Thee, me, three,” Katie says, and giggles into her cup.

“When did you arrive, Katherine? How long have you been here?”

“Here? Hah, hah, you mean in Rochester? A day or two or four. I was at the Hotel Brunswick. Oh, the séances were crowded with riff-raffy sorts, but fiddle-dee-dee it’s jim-dandy to be back and having jolly times again. I was going to call on you. I was! Oh, but you don’t approve of us these days.” Katie wags her finger. Amy looks grim. She must be in her eighties, Katie thinks. Who lives so long except the righteous and the good?

Amy sighs. “The policeman was about to arrest thee for public drunkenness, but I dissuaded him and promised to take thee to my home and, for heaven’s sake, where are thy senses?”

“I sold them. I lost them. And I just wanted to see the canals. Our pa was a canaller, you know. Ma says he vanished like the earth swallowed him whole, but he were out working the boats. For ten years he was gone. The canals were the best place for a sinning man, I heard. But then the Great Awakening came along and changed everything so.”

“I shall telegraph Leah so that she may come for thee.”

Katie lurches forward. The tea sloshes on her dress. “Damn,
where’s my shawl? Oh, the children. Damn them … What did you say about Leah?”

“That I shall telegraph her so that—”

“No, no, no, not her. She can’t know. She’ll take my boys. She’ll use ’em up. She wants everything of mine. She wants to keep me from Mag too. Oh, but I want my Mag, Maggie! Who else has ever loved me for me, me, me, me? Who? But she’s planning to go back to England, ain’t she? Some rich doctor invited her. She says she’ll make pots of money for us both from Dr. Wadsworth, that’s the whom-ever’s name. That means I’ll be mud-stuck with Leah.” Katie’s voice twangs. Leah’s years of grammar training vanish. “Leah’s sore afraid of Mag ever since Mag walloped her good, that’s why Leah keeps off. She don’t love us, Amy.”

“She does. She must. And I love thee, dear. And the Lord, Our Saviour, loves thee.”

“Does He? And does He say we should be quit of this whole thing? And quick, hah, quite quit quick! Maggie said we gotta.”

“Which … ‘thing’?”

“Spiritualism, ’course. We gotta tell the truth of it to the world, Mag said. I agree. I think I agree or something. Sure I do.”

“Mayhap thou need a different cause. A cause is always a goodly thing to keep one from melancholic thoughts. Isaac would have agreed.”

“Pish, you were always trying to convince Leah, weren’t you? Abolition. Suffragette-ism, or what-ever it’s called. Because, oh, wouldn’t she be a force for any of your causes.”

Amy is quiet, then says coolly, “I shall fix a bed for thee. Thou should bide here, not alone in a hotel and—”

“I’ll tell you why she weren’t biting,” Katie interrupts. “Because that harridan bitch don’t wish for women to be considered nothing but stupid and childlike. She likes it that us females are reckoned passive as straw dolls and without guile at all. Didn’t that thinking serve us right-dandy, though? Didn’t it save us? Mark me, Amy, if we’d been the Fox
brothers
we woulda been rotting in a jail by now. And we woulda mightily deserved it.”

Amy folds and unfolds her hands. “Thou deserves a rest, that is all.”

“H
AVE YOU EVER PLAYED
blindman’s bluff, Alvah?”

“Certainly, when I was a youngster.”

“That’s what I was doing. That’s why I fell out of the bed, yesterday—”

“It was just now, not yesterday. It’s the same day, duck, as … today.”

“I just wanted to try again, that’s all. Katie and I played blindman’s bluff often at the Hydesville house. Once, when I was the blinded one, I lost her. I thump-thumped about the room, banging into furniture, and the place seemed of a sudden so very large and
not my home at all. I tore off the rag, but I could not see Katie. I looked in every nook and corner. And then I felt a swim of air. I whirled and there she was. ‘Where have you been?’ I cried. ‘I’ve been here all along,’ she said.”

“Games,” I said, a bit asulk. (I was doing my best not to drink and my nerves were fragile threads.) “I do believe you’re still at them.”

I
F ONLY
L
EAH COULD BELIEVE THAT
Katie loves her boys “beyond measure” as she claims. If only she could believe that their welfare is Katie’s sole concern. Indeed, if Leah believed any of Katie’s claims, even a whit, then she would not be seeking out this god-knows-where office in this god-forsaken neighbourhood of Manhattan, the same neighbourhood, she realizes, as that for R.M, whose address Pettifew wrote on the back on his card. R.M. is likely long gone, of course, which is of no concern to Leah, as his ghoulish skills will, no doubt, never be needed. Resurrection Man is what R.M. stands for—though Grave-Robber, Leah thinks, is a more fitting title.

She pauses and then carries on. Daniel warned her not to go, but Leah was adamant. For Katie’s behaviour is in direct odds with her claims. Her poor sons are being left to fend for themselves while she is more and more often out on drinking binges. Oh, Leah has tried and tried, but no amount of cajoling can convince Katie and the boys to return to the Underhill home. “At least let the dear boys stay with us,” Leah said. “Daniel and I shall care for them as if they were our own.”

Katie’s eyes focused for once. “Hah, you’ve got your own—Lizzie, remember her? And look how that played out. She won’t even visit you. In fact I wouldn’t wonder if she hated you. No, no, no, the boys won’t ever never live with you. You’ll twist them up and spit them out.”

Twist
them? And here Leah was willing to forgive Katie’s public drunkenness in Rochester, the account of which had been reported in the
New York Herald
. And didn’t the Taylors recently have to drag her out of a miserable saloon? They reported that Katie was
despondent because Maggie left for England without saying good-bye in person. That Katie was drinking with a vengeance that put her earlier habits to the pale.

Leah circles round an ash barrel, lifts her bustled skirts out of the various excrements, thinks of how Katie’s so-called motherly concern vanishes utterly when she is on a spree. Utterly! She uses her boys as an anchor. That is all they are to her: an anchor to keep herself from total debauchery and all its sluttish potential. She is selfish, selfish, selfish.

A beggar man cups an ear in Leah’s direction. “Who’s selfish? Me for my poverty and bum leg?”

God and the Spirits help me, Leah thinks as she drops a coin in his hand, the girls have driven me to muttering.

The sign for the SPCA bears the silhouette of a dog cowering from a club-wielding man. Leah mounts the narrow stairs to the office on the third floor. She stops twice to catch her breath. Lately her skirts seem weighed down with bricks, her shoes with lead. Responsibility, she supposes, only now showing its weight. On the office door is another silhouette, this one of a horse staggered in its traces. She sees no images of beaten, neglected children. She was assured, however, that this is the place to come to report such things, has been since a few years back when a SPCA lady came across a naked, half-starved girl wandering a New York slum and brought her back for care. Soon after this the stray children of New York began arriving at the SPCA office in droves.