“This Elizabeth,” he continues, “‘Lizzie’ … apparently her relations are experiencing … difficulties in Arcadia. Mrs. Fish’s maiden name is Fox. I thought I’d catch you up, as you may hear of it when young Lizzie returns this week.”
“Difficulties,” Clara says vaguely—though her real concern is when young Lizzie returns—“is a euphemism for scandal, in my experience.” Her hand speeds over the page. By now Clara’s avian subject has long eluded her, like everything else. She looks up, and her father seems so earnest, so hopeful that she can’t but smile back at him. “And how would such gossip find me?”
“I’m an old squirrel,” he admits, lifting her chin, “eager for chatter. But you are curious?”
Her jaw tenses, and Father’s palsied hand settles at his side again. To admit curiosity is to admit defeat. Clara mustn’t relax her guard. She’ll lose, but gracefully, with her pride intact.
“It’s said these girls can communicate with the dead,” he adds wryly.
Clara replies with deathly silence, and he doesn’t press. She can be as vile and childish as she likes these days, and Father, a man made audacious by secrets, intolerable ones, carries on unmoved. She’ll tolerate. She always has.
“This leads me to other business.” He clears his throat. “I’ve decided to keep her on … hire Lizzie Fish on permanently if very part-time … and perhaps her young aunt, too, when the girl arrives. It’s been discussed. Mrs. Fish supports the idea.”
Clara needn’t ask who else supports it. Who discussed it with Mrs. Fish.
“Both girls come highly recommended by the Little family and the Posts. I guess in that few short days I grew reacquainted,” he adds, “with … domestic niceties.”
“Did you.”
He leans in collusion. “You’ll grant we’re an austere pair, you and I.”
How he can afford to transform the household this way with commissions scant and his “sabbatical” extended through the fall is not her concern. It’s not her place to ask. “They won’t fix a decent cup of tea,” she complains. “Americans don’t, you know.”
He smiles back at her. Patiently.
Clara opens a drawer in her writing desk, and the sketchpad vanishes inside. Lacing pale hands in her lap, she sits back resolutely. “As you please.” Her pencil rolls to the floor.
“You disapprove?”
“Is it within my rights to?”
Silence. The widow’s influence, then, is certain, insidious. There is no undoing it. First will come the servants, Mrs. Bray’s personal selection. A housekeeper to boss and batter Clara with lists and expectations courtesy of the incoming mistress. The trunks will follow, chintz and frippery, and of course the wedding dress, well dusted for a second run. At length, Clara will be shipped off to strain plums for a great-aunt she didn’t know she had. “So be it,” she almost croaks, for her throat has screwed up, cutting her breath.
“You might find their young company amusing. Given the chance.”
“And bless you and Mrs. Bray for giving it to me.”
“Clara?”
She looks at him directly, mournfully, and away. Down at her folded hands. “Sir?”
“Trust me now.”
“I will not.” Her voice is a fierce whisper, and when she lifts her eyes again, her father’s shine with the sting.
6 The Invisibles
Ma and Maggie arrive in Rochester the day after Leah’s household relocates to Prospect Street. The piano movers are on hand. They’ve positioned the instrument wrong, and with Leah noisily redirecting them, and Kate trying to keep the cat from underfoot, and Lizzie hollering for the sake of it, and Ma and Maggie and the hired coachman lugging bags and parcels indoors and tracking in mud, the reunion is unceremonious at best.
No sooner has Leah hustled the piano men out again than she turns to interrogating Ma, who has yet to remove her shawl. Maggie feels a terrific urge to race out after the coachman and have him see her home again. But where is home? Sobered, she helps Ma with her overclothes as Kate and Lizzie stand stupidly by, tormenting the cat.
Leah nods over the piano keys, tapping out tuneless notes and wincing. “What news at home?”
Hanging Ma’s things, Maggie glances up under her lashes at Kate, her favorite person in the world, and her look goes unanswered.
Ma seems pleased that much-older Leah—twice married and twice estranged—speaks easily of “home” when the cottage in Hydesville never was her home, but she’s having trouble gathering her thoughts.
So Leah intrudes on them: “What more have the men found in the cellar?”
Ma begins to gush like a stuck pig, like the cellar floor when the men first took their picks to it. She wails of the crowds at both the cottage and David’s; of the digging that just goes on and on, weather allowing; of the mess and disorder and Ella running wild in the thick of it all; of David and Elizabeth with their weariness and worn nerves; and of the fickle ghost and the baffled investigators.
The more panicked and weepy Ma becomes, the more roused seems Leah. Maggie can almost feel her circling, assessing the story’s edges, searching for a place to turn her claws in.
Chilled to the bone from the canal ride, Maggie sits on her hands to warm them. She’s trying to keep still, marveling at her sister’s composure.
Now and again Leah taps out a note with her thumb—C, E, F, A—that wilts on the air. To call in a tuner will be an extra expense, but Leah makes her living teaching piano. She can teach even the dumbest brat to master Mozart because her patience never flags.
If Leah was upset that no one sent for her when it happened, that she had to hear the news like a stranger from neighbors and journalists, she didn’t let on. Instead she hurried to Hydesville and made herself useful. “Don’t cry, Ma.” She stands now and crosses to their mother, taking her hand, patting it like a puppy. “You can stay here as long as you like.” Leah takes them in one by one, all beneficence. “You all can. But you believe in this spirit? These spirits?”
Maggie stares forward blankly. With Kate and Lizzie like strangers, there is no safe gaze to seek refuge in.
On the other hand, their ghost has made Maggie brave. Always, in the past, she was the cautious one, the one who planned and recorded, who said but rarely did. Tell me a tale, Katie begged when they were children in Canada. You have a secret, Maggie! Tell it now…. And Maggie told, in grave whispers, for it was one way to hold her sister still and present. Kate was ever in motion, whooping, chasing crows from the fields. She ran whirling and the birds seemed not so much afraid as under her sway. They rose thundering together into the slate-gray air, and Maggie half-feared her sister would rise with them, but Katie only laughed and mocked her care. Kate was and is the most careless, uncomplicated creature Maggie knows, and Maggie loves her well for it.
At the cottage and at David’s, “the girls” rarely spoke of the spirits or planned their path but moved together like dancers, step step turn. The music became a thing outside them, spectral music with a life of its own, and whosoever might stop the music could be damned.
When Leah came and took Kate away to Rochester, leaving Maggie behind with Ma to suffer the tedium of David’s farm, Maggie thought her heart would burst, but she rallied, soldiering on alone. Thanks in part to “A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County”—the very document, penned by a Mr. E. E. Lewis, that alerted Leah in Rochester to their predicament—western New York