she is, in her way, but would the widow raise that specter in polite company? No. They’ve absconded. Father and his Mrs. Bray are out in the hall now, hovering between the drawing room and Clara’s realm above. She sees the widow, or her reflection, in the glass of a heavy walnut hall stand heaped with coats and top hats on pegs. One gloved hand grazes the multitude of umbrellas in the stand as if to assess their quality.
“Your daughter has so much to offer.” The voice drops to treacherous, flirtatious. “As you yourself attest. Why let her live like a recluse?”
Clara can scarce make out the words now. She has to strain and imagines how her face, poised between the banister bars, would appear from below. An apparition. Were they not so absorbed in each other, they might sense her up there spying, but they don’t; they won’t, Clara knows. For one with so little social care or opportunity, she’s learned to read people precisely.
Father remains out of view, but the widow—or her reflection—moves in accord with him, speaking with her hands. “I know a capable physician….”
Does he love her? Say he’s invited Mrs. Bray and the others here to announce his intentions. What then? Submitting to the will of a busy housemistress (someone like Aunt Alice, perhaps, who lived with them throughout Clara’s youth in London—a woman with bold opinions about how Mr. Gill’s dependents ought conduct themselves) is beyond humiliating at Clara’s age, even if her temperament allowed.
“… a gentleman who attends nervous conditions … sensitive to the artistic, in women especially …”
“One doesn’t ‘allow’ Clara anything….” Father laughs uneasily. “Goodness.”
Well that he remembers how to speak, how to salvage for his child the smallest dignity.
But the widow’s intent is obvious, monstrous. “You’ve sheltered her well, sir. It does you much credit and your daughter no good.” The hand in the mirror reaches. “Now, then. Who heads this household?” Clara has a glimpse of trimmed whisker as he tilts his head to receive her caress, all obedience. “Let us go together and fetch her.”
Clara stiffens, and the disapproving cat leaves a chill. The upper hall is full of shadows that she, like the rangy tom, might dissolve into.
As the widow in the looking glass peels off a glove, Father appears in the mirror, trying almost playfully to detain her. Instead, she steps out into full view. Striding the length of the hallway below, she runs her plump hand, loosed and creamy, over framed rows of zoological drawings: Clara’s.
Sometimes Clara can desert her senses the way the cat did her lap, absent herself from nubby carpet and waxed wood of banisters and chiming clocks. But however expert her stillness, they’ll spot her and say (sternly), What are you doing out here? What do you want? As if they hadn’t set out to find and disturb her. As if they were not in the least responsible.
“She’s in frail health,” Father says with such grave patience that Clara loves him again.
The widow considers, accepting the lie as she might a satisfactory bolt of fabric from her dressmaker. Father scoops her glove from the floor, she accepts his arm, and they return to their noisy party.
Mine, Clara thinks. This is mine. But a peal of laughter behind the drawing-room doors rebukes her. Tell me again, Will, she pleads. Why have they come? All these strangers?
Clara listens for an answer.
Clara listens.
2 Mr. Splitfoot, Do As I Do
Hydesville, ny—the same night
Here is how the Fox sisters teach the dead to speak.
Maggie and Kate are giddy with fear on the mattress when Ma comes running with the candle. “We’ve found it out,” they cry, and Ma’s monstrous, flickering shadow rounds the bedroom wall. She nods hard, poor soul, hefting the candle higher, and her hand shakes.
“It” is the rapping that’s robbed them of sleep and peace for so long, a hellish business, and who can bear it? Not Ma, surely.
She’ll have to, thinks Maggie, who is filled with fate as a sail is for going. Yes, they’ll go, she understands, from Wayne County with its brittle fields and trees—an unrelenting patchwork of brown and white to which spring takes its sweet time coming—and it won’t be long. Even Ma’s weary, pious face can’t prevent it.
As if reading Maggie’s thoughts, her younger sister, Kate, springs out of bed and snaps babyish fingers. “Follow me,” she orders, and how can Maggie not? Who can take their eyes off Katie Dear, so like a blithe spirit herself, all hush and mischief in her threadbare shift? Snap snap, and then, in the shadow of Kate’s trailing hand, rap rap, audible as a heartbeat, deep inside the house.
“Here, Mr. Splitfoot.” Kate claps milky hands three times. “Do as I do.”
Rap rap rap.
The phantom makes the very walls quake, it seems.
Beneath the spectral racket, Maggie hears the usual soft sounds of night, the ordinary unease of their little rented saltbox cottage: mice scrabbling in the walls, moaning March wind, creaking cold floorboards. These were lonely sounds before and chilled her, but now and suddenly she misses them. Almost. Their empty promises.
She watches the shadow-flicker of branches dreamily. They’ve not been in the cottage—meant to serve till Pa gets the new farmstead built—long enough to inhabit it, really. Ma hasn’t hung their few gilt-framed pictures. The walls, paperless and water-stained, are bare but for the cameo of Grandmother Rutan over the washstand.
Maggie would sooner leave “Mr. Splitfoot” out of it. Already, in just these few days’ time, she finds it hard to unravel the sounds she makes or imagines from those without—from her sister, from the earth or the air. It’s like when you’re rapt with your chores and hear a voice humming but only later, an instant later or an hour, recognize your own voice. Now’s no time for the Devil to come calling.
“Three raps mean yes.” Kate’s voice rings like a rifle shot, and Ma might be a mouse caught in the flour barrel for all her astonishment. Even dour Father has been reeled in now, the hand scarred with old burns from the forge supporting his weight in the doorway, his eyes unreadable behind a candle-glare of spectacles. Yes, our ghost is still here. Did you really think he’d go so easily?
Maggie can’t but take a certain pride in having disarmed the man who’s so cheerlessly charted their collective course. Until tonight.
Rap rap rap.
They are all wild-eyed for lack of rest. Should Maggie scold Kate or applaud her—treacherous girl—for taking it this far? Too far. Her sister won’t meet her gaze. They have no plans. They know no allegiance in this game, if indeed it is a game, and now for once Maggie’s unwilling to say that it is or isn’t, to ask it, to know. But it’s theirs, whatever it is, and Kate’s sport is catching.
“Now do as I do!” Maggie waves her arms, signaling three times like a mighty hawk flapping phantom wings or a hell-bent angel. Her winged shadow swells, shivering inside the black dance of branches on walls and wardrobe and the graying old quilt Ma spent a whole season of evenings squinting over by the hearth, stitching and squinting.
Rap rap rap, replies the ghost.
“It can see as well as hear!” she exults, but Ma hears only their visitor now. Maggie looks to Kate, smiling with her eyes like Mona Lisa. Kate does not look back, but Maggie smiles anyway. Their ghost commands what they cannot.
“Are you a disembodied spirit?” Ma sways in the balance. “Speak now! I’m so broken of my rest I’m almost sick.”
Rap rap rap.
“Tell me my eldest child’s age.”
A