sets down the tray and kneels to gather up these strange likenesses, which invite the same dazed ingratitude live birds do when Maggie chances to notice them. They might be hard at work stitching the world together with their beaks, for all she knows, holding the stuffing in, but such work is theirs to do.
Setting the drawings down, Maggie crosses to the window. She has no wish to be scratched and already knows to forgo pleasantries. She jerks the curtains open to a tangle of garden, remembering the flawless nest she found on David’s lot, now concealed in a hatbox in Leah’s closet.
Mad Clara’s too self-possessed to wince or protest, but some scarce-visible part of her stiffens in a crouch.
Maggie has an overwhelming urge to clap in this stranger’s face. Everything about the woman orders Maggie out, as if a return to solitude is the one thing that will mend Miss Gill’s evidently measly life.
But charity isn’t Maggie’s strong point.
She waves at the streaming twilight, the jumble of books and papers, abandoned watercolor washes, inkpots, pens. “Won’t Lizzie dust in here? It’s choking.” She has no business berating an elder—her “better,” at that—but the week’s events have made Maggie Fox bold. They’ve shown the world for what it is, a sham of vast proportions. Maggie holds it all by a thread, and she never knew. Never dreamed how simple it would be to reach out and gather the world in like spring flowers.
Clara Gill seems feral and strange and possibly entertaining, and if Maggie has to endure being away from Kate and from home with all its haunted doings, from a citizenry buzzing with her name on its lips, the least she can do is craft a day’s amusement. Never again will she suffer an instant’s tedium. For the world has split like an old scar, and leaping underneath is her own heartbeat, the bright pulse of her future.
Maggie feels such impatience these days to cut through the sludge of manners, to slice and stab with wit and candor, to arrive at once at the heart of matters. She’s changed—her experience with the spirits, because of the spirits, has changed her—but the world hasn’t. Not a whit. People are as meek and dogged as ever; they bow and lower their eyes and take her hand limply and speak of tedious things much as they ever have; meanwhile, every minute, Maggie is spilling out, barely contained.
A craving to confide in someone older than Kate, kinder than Leah, wiser than Ma, and blunter than Amy Post—someone unusual enough to be useful—now overwhelms her. Maggie can’t resist. She must know and know quickly, and so parks her hands on her hips, tilts her head rakishly, looks straight into the madwoman’s face, and sticks out her tongue.
Mad Clara only stands there, stubborn, shimmering with the soft violence of a rain cloud.
“You want to smile,” Maggie all but whispers, looking away—half-mad herself with presuming. (Say something. Be unlike the others. Be as I am.) “I see you do. Why won’t you? If I have to be here, let me amuse you. Amuse me.”
Clara walks to a chair beside her narrow spinster’s bed, silver mane rocking like a pendulum. She sits, straight of back, folding her hands slowly in her lap.
A moment passes and another, heavier still, and Maggie waits.
“You’re amusing,” the woman concedes in a faraway voice—looking up and then down at her bony hands again, elegant hands—“if one is partial to monkeys.”
Maggie feels her face rearrange itself into a grin. Mimicry is one of many games she excels at in league with Kate, and she’s sore tempted to retort in Clara Gill’s good British accent, but she breathes a hard breath instead, turning to lay out the contents of the tray with great deliberation: Mr. Gill’s bread-and-butter sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg on a dainty ceramic pedestal, ragged-sliced pears on a willow-pattern plate, a potbellied teapot. She looks at her handiwork, tugs discreetly at the old right-tending boning in her corset, seeks out that gaunt face again, afraid.
Mad Clara’s stare unsettles without censoring. She may be as impatient as Maggie is to get on with it, whatever it is for her, and for a moment more seems partial to surprise, receptive; but then something changes in her face. Crossing briskly to the tray, Clara pours out dark, reddish tea, her expression blank. Her cup rattles in the saucer as she strides back to her chair, which abrupt action must have set her mad, mute heart beating like a drum.
“Say if you take milk,” Maggie offers, weary now on her companion’s behalf as the clock ticks on the mantel. Tick tock. Tick tock. She wonders are the men and boys back now, digging in the basement in Hydesville? Are birds dropping into the trees around the cottage, lured by fuss and sunshine? Are ladies in drawing rooms all over Rochester whispering her name?
Her companion’s face is implacable again. Maggie wants the last word and means to have it, but Clara’s eyes are a bit mad, a bit hawk-like. Maggie is no mouse, and she’s the sane one in the pair—at least as likely to be believed in a skirmish—but she’s also outside her element. Crazed or no, Miss Gill is a grown woman whose now cold stare reminds Maggie of her life before the rappings—a child’s life that wasn’t much to speak of. She resents the setback.
“I’ll be going, then.”
Her feet haven’t crossed the threshold when a voice barely perceptible, rusty with disuse, says, “Wait.” Like a white flag waving.
But the world is calling now, the waiting bustle and murmur back at Leah’s, the house in Hydesville with a story larger than Maggie’s own life, the spirits who’ve followed and will not now abandon her. News is spreading all over New York State, and wouldn’t Solomon Beecher, home in Hydesville, beg to kiss the famous Miss Fox behind the woodpile now?
Maggie waves at the tray, feeling tall in the doorway. “I’ll be back another time,” she promises.
9 Pixie-Led
April 1835
London
The beast keeper murmurs something to the parrot on his shoulder and thumps his own chest with a fist.
“Be still, my heart.” The bird’s tone is smug and oddly soulful, a world-weary old man’s. “Squawk! Still.”
From a corner of her eye, Clara watches it nuzzle the keeper’s ear, as if in caress. She does not lift her head nor stop her hand, charcoal racing over the ivory page, though she wants nothing more than to look at him straight on, has been wishing it for days since first she glimpsed his comings and goings with shovel and pail in the big circular hall. She longs to memorize the outline of him, work her way in from the shadowy edges with a bit of color, breathe him back on the page through her restless right hand.
But he might catch her at it, and with sketches due for Sir Lever’s approval Friday, it won’t do to digress. Clara settles instead on the young man’s portable shoulder ornament.
Usually the parrot is caged in the aviary in the other building, where it taunts more majestic inmates—golden eagle, griffon vulture, secretary bird, none of whom Clara has sketched yet. If the bird’s comely perch sets it down, Clara will know where to find it.
Father is off in search of this boy’s employer, Mr. Cops, a family friend who has given Father and his assistant—Clara, that is—leave to stay on at the menagerie after public hours. They come almost every afternoon, but Father never seems to note the young man at work with shovel and rake, spreading fresh shavings; sneezing as he hurls hay bales here or there; and sometimes, to her well-concealed dismay, disappearing through the door of the keepers’ apartments. Like the animals, which are ever hopeful of a scrap of meat or a snatch of song, Clara can sense where he is at any given moment.
Unless the public—prone to hanging on the lead gates, hooting at the inmates and disturbing the garrisons—clamors for the spectacle of meat flung to the carnivores, Clara remains in the hollow aisles into evening, sketching by gaslight while Father loiters in Mr. Cops’s library. Locks clanging, the keeper moves among those beasts that will not maim him. Gruff and tender,