Читать книгу Captivity - Deborah Noyes - Страница 15

Soon, as at the cottage and David’s house and Leah’s former home on Mechanics Square—anywhere the Fox sisters hang their bonnets—the new apartment on Prospect Street resounds with rapping. Nightly there is scuffling and shuffling, shuddering and malevolent snickering. Ma despairs and takes to bed red-eyed, complaining of curses. Merry with malice, the spirits lift the mattress she shares with Leah, letting it fall with a great, jarring thud that leaves Ma howling and Leah grim and shaken, massaging her lower back.

If, during such antics, Maggie strays in mind, conjuring the Posts or other solemn persons she respects, she chafes and softens her stance, but shame can’t outshine the thrill for long.

Dozens of press inquiries and investigator requests and beseeching tracts from mourners arrive weekly. Their lives have swollen to twice their natural size, but Leah, whom Ma has entrusted with the administration of their fortunes, persists in promising something larger still.

The excitement is hard to bear, but in its midst, ordinary life must go on. There is never enough money, fame and popularity notwithstanding. Ma and Kate keep house while Leah traipses about teaching piano (and spreading word of wonders). Maggie is elected to join Lizzie, who cooks and does light housekeeping for pay in the home of a neighboring family. “He’s an old English gentleman,” Leah assures. “A friend of Amy Post’s. Lizzie’s done very well with it.”

Maggie doesn’t care for being a servant or for being away from Kate. She doesn’t fancy the idea of things happening at home without her, not one bit, and hems and haws, but Leah is adamant.

“Another student quitted me last week.” Leah glares as if it were Maggie’s fault, as if Maggie might have done something to prevent it. “You’ll fix lunch and do a touch of cleaning after is all. It’s three days a week. Lizzie will see to it the other days.”

Kate can’t resist the chance to speak a truth no one else will. “So we’re serving-class now? I thought we were improving our prospects, not …” She winks at Maggie, warming her through.

Maggie holds Kate’s gaze, playing along. “Won’t he make his daughters cook?”

“He has one, all right. But she’s mad and won’t leave her room,” Leah complains. “Our second day there, she scratched Lizzie like a monkey on her face. I thought to put the wretch over my knee, but now we leave the tray outside her lair. Mr. Gill is too mild to punish her.”

The notion of a madwoman draped over Leah’s broad lap, crushing her petticoats, is delicious. “Does he beat her?” Maggie begs. “And does she run all up and down the river at night with flowers in her hair like Ophelia?”

“I’ve said, haven’t I? Mr. Gill’s the mildest kind of gentleman. But you remember Mrs. Bray? She’s hinted, in strictest confidence of course, that the Gills have suffered and leave behind some scandal in London….” Leah sighs, adding with barely concealed satisfaction, “Now, go introduce yourself. See what Mr. Gill has for you. Lizzie has an errand for Mrs. Little, but she’ll come along tomorrow and instruct you fully.”

Leah marches Maggie to the door, facing her toward Sophia Street. “It’s just six doors down from the Posts’. The Gill residence. Ring, and they’ll let you in and show you your work.”

The Gill house smells of must layered under lavender. Master Gill answers the bell himself, and his teeth, the worst Maggie’s ever seen, recall the doomed peddler moldering in the cellar in Hydesville. But he’s otherwise sober in appearance, high-collared with neatly trimmed mustache and sideburns. With his mouth closed, he looks the perfect gentleman, and he scarce notes that she isn’t his lately hired help, not loud-mouthed Lizzie but a stranger off the street, and a newly famous one at that. Come to it, Mr. Gill seems to notice very little. Waving her in, he has the aspect of a mole.

He leads her to the kitchen, pointing her amiably here and there as she inspects columns of bone china in the cabinet. The front row sparkles, but all else sports a fine fuzz of dust that Maggie wagers is tacky to the touch.

The wallpaper is formerly grand, grim, you might say, if not for the pictures. Some are fine and delicate, ink-and-watercolor in gilt frames, others just pencil sketches tacked up at random and tending—like that baboon with the murderous shine in its eye—toward morose.

By the time Maggie finishes her inspection, Mr. Gill has a tea tray all done up for service and is shakily portioning out his own sandwiches, shifting his plate off to a sideboard. “Come,” he says, waving her to the doorway.

They stand side by side in musty shadows, and he gestures down the long hall, then back at the tray, watching her face anxiously as if she might object. “Third door on the left. Clara likes a whole pot. We’ll make me another when you’ve done with her. Find me in the drawing room.”

Does she, now … and will we?

Maggie can’t abide being addressed as a servant, especially in view of her newly elevated status. She imagines a girl like the baboon from the drawing leaping onto her back, but curiosity wins out. It usually does. “You’d like me to pour it for her?”

“Please. If she’ll allow.”

Not if you please but if she’ll allow.

Flashing that frightful smile, he returns for his plate of bread-and-butter sandwiches, heading down the hall with it in the opposite direction. Maggie looks warily after. Mr. Gill seems unduly satisfied about something, brave in his mild way, which bodes ill. But Maggie remembers Lizzie—fearless here before her—and won’t be bested. Lizzie can’t triumph, especially with Kate in the balance.

“And you’ll see she opens the drapes if needs be?” he calls over a bony shoulder.

For the fun of it, Maggie dips into a dainty curtsy. “I will, sir.”

The figure hovers between velvet curtains as if to slip through to another world. She’s slight, facing away, and her stance slippery, but there’s little else worth remarking on, little at least that smacks of madness in all the melodramatic forms Maggie enjoys. Maggie lives not far from the State Custodial Asylum for Feeble Minded Women, after all, the gabled recesses of which fund the best sort of gossip.

A shock of silvery hair hangs in lank splendor down Mad Clara’s back, but her satin gown is simple and clean, old-fashioned, nearly the shade of her skin. It’s a color like absence. She’s all watery insubstantial, it seems, till she hears Maggie and turns, leveling those shocking eyes on her—fierce, intelligent eyes in a gaunt face. That’ll cut glass, that look.

“Hello, miss. Your father said to open the drapes.”

Mad Clara only stares as if to say, Try.

“I won’t if you prefer not.”

“I prefer … not.”

“Where will you have this?” The tray’s a strain on Maggie’s wrists, but she won’t sigh in complaint.

“There on the table. Push those papers aside.”

Maggie does with her elbow, and drawings float to the floor like leaves. Birds, mostly. Lovely ones. Maggie recognizes a thrush, a catbird, others that are mere skeletons, spare and shining as spider-webs. She 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.