It’s the name Leah uses when she means business, which she mostly does. Maggie relents when her chin gets sore from her sister’s squeezing. “I’ll listen, but I can’t work miracles. I can’t, to suit you, walk on Mud Pond or make shillings from pinecones.”
“You’ll do something better.”
For the first time, Maggie meets her sister’s gaze freely.
“You’ll open a passageway between the mortal and spirit worlds,” Leah adds, nodding as if to reassure her, This is true. “Know what you’ve been given. You and Kate. Me. The Fox sisters,” she adds slyly. “We’ll outwit death. We have that duty.”
Maggie laughs again, nervously. There’s nothing especially funny in the notion (is it morbid or the opposite? Holy somehow? Lifelong Methodist teaching’s done nothing to prepare her for this), and already, in that early moment, the burden begins to wear on her. She senses that she’ll keep the invisible dead like an anvil round her neck her life long, but she’s grateful, too, and ready. Maggie Fox is ready.
“Our brother’s fit to tear out his hair. ‘Better to die together,’” Leah mimics, “‘than live so disgraced.’ He’s been carrying on all day—”
“Well, they’ve stomped all over his plantings—”
“Till Chauncy called in and agreed to help dig, I thought David would send everyone away. I felt sure he would. But he didn’t, Margaretta. He didn’t.”
Maggie hears another wagon arrive. The bodies of neighbors and eager strangers bat against the glass of the bedroom window; a dog barks; and a moth circles the lit tallow candle on the night-stand, singeing its wing. The little hiss is audible even under the groaning of David’s crowded house, the comforts of laughter and clinking glassware, the muffled fray of Ella and visitors’ children issuing threats and challenges (goaded, no doubt, by Kate and Lizzie) and scrambling under furniture.
Maggie nods her consent, and Leah smiles, laying a hand on her sister’s head, as in benediction.
All winter long, Maggie dreamed of returning to Rochester, of strolling beside the windy Genesee in warm weather, in big bell sleeves and a brand-new lace bertha bedecked with ribbons while gulls wheeled on high and great flocks of geese came over pointing their hopeful arrows south, of attending lectures and shows, of taking tea with the Posts and their lively circle of reformers.
But look, she and Kate managed to bring the excitement home instead. How clever!
Why would Leah thwart that—if not to please herself? What does she want? Maggie can’t sleep for wondering. Long after Leah and the other women settle around her in faint moonlight, she lies there rigid, seething with the injustice of it.
Kate and Lizzie sleep back-to-back, joined at the fold like the wings of a butterfly. The youngsters doze at lanky angles, breathing jaggedly. At the rim of the sprawl lie stouter frames: Ma and Leah, Elizabeth and Maria, Mrs. Post and Mrs. Capron and Jane Little … here and there, snoring and twitching in the night, other wives and daughters stationed at David’s while their men commute to and from the cottage. Maggie listens, charting the dwindlings of human concern, sensing at length—within that lullaby of not-quite stillness—some other, unseen presence.
Fate is in your favor, it assures, relaxing Maggie out of anger, soothing her into sleep.
The breath of the girls and women has steamed the window near the bed. In the other bedroom, some half-dozen men sleep soundly. Outdoors, the pilgrims snore in their cold encampments.
Looking out into a blue half-light, Maggie smears her hand across a pane twice and for a peculiar moment imagines her brother’s trampled fields swarming with the dead. Spirits traipse here and there, tufts of light, farmers and farm wives, soldiers and babies and old ones—some marked by their style of dress and half-familiar. They are made of light mostly, and ride lightly over the earth, treading no soil. And they are everywhere.
She blinks her eyes, suspecting her own mind has planted them like a strange crop in the field. The strangeness of seeing them is new, but Death itself is no stranger, surely. Not a day goes by in Arcadia when one among her community isn’t lost to fire or drowning, typhus, yellow fever … a mule’s kick. These deaths are real and ever present, reported daily in neat columns of newsprint along with farmers’ reports of stray pigs, sentimental poems, ads for patent remedies, or word of the war with Mexico, the abdication of the French king, Whigs battling Democrats.
But what if they aren’t gone over Jordan after all? What if they are just across the way, a hand’s reach, waiting to be seen and heard from?
Now, that’s strange, and she will seize the strangeness in her hands and shape it. She will not be afraid. In truth, Maggie Fox is afraid—how vast a thought it is—but not of the spirits themselves, who seem to her just strangers full of secret need. Out she goes into the blue dawn and passes them in the field, holding out her hands to feel them streaming through, to fancy their shuffling woe crowding close round her like cattle. Too close. She breaks away and strides past a stand of crooked trees under which bruised apples have lain all winter long, frozen many times over.
The sun rises as she walks and warms her. She comes out on the cart road again and dips back into the dappled wood, thinking ahead to the sweet smell of the battered peppermint fields, which sport their pink flowers like finery.
Maggie wanders without a thought, and when a thought does come, it stops her in her tracks, and her eyes brim with tears. Here she is, out on a muddy track ruining her good boots—when all she wants is to mill about in city drawing rooms in a lovely big-bustled gown and be admired. Kate will get there first, it seems. Without her.
Recalling the harmonious tangle of limbs back in Ella’s bedroom, and Kate and Lizzie asleep with their foreheads touching, Maggie is already lonely. Katie … stay. But Katie won’t. She can’t, Maggie knows, not once Leah has her hooks in.
Maggie spots a perfect little basket near the crook of a young tree, an oriole’s nest, brittle and fine. Pinching it down, she cradles it carefully, as once it cradled eggs.
She walks all morning with the nest on her palm, and the dead do not follow. They are gone when Maggie enters David’s kitchen, where the women are assembling breakfast. Even the murdered peddler two miles away at the cottage lies asleep, she expects, soundless in his mud-and-limestone bed below the floorboards.
5 Difficulties
The Widow Bray might be a general for all her strategy. It’s weeks before she insinuates herself again, with Clara’s guard down.
When her father knocks, he finds her sketching. Her room is open to the elements, honey-lit, all breeze and bird chatter. He enters tentatively, crossing to a seat on the edge of her bed, and Clara feels the point of her fountain pen straining on the page, her fingers pinching hard. Father never intrudes this early in the day. When at last he states his purpose, his voice sags with apology. “You’ll recall the girl we hired on to help with the party?”
Clara regards him blankly.
“Elizabeth, the younger of the two—daughter of