We Hear the Dead (15 page)

“You can trust them,” Annabel said simply. “They are supporters of our cause. Amy Post recommends them.”

Leah narrowed her eyes and looked questioningly at Mr. Bouton.

“We have a wagon,” he explained, “with a false bottom.”

And with those words he revealed himself to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad, one of those men who personally transported fugitives from slavery to the border of Canada. This was the reason he had been able to call upon an organized group of men to guard his home. This is why he had not wanted police in the house, and why the police wanted nothing to do with him. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, he was a criminal.

My chatty friend Annabel, who had filled her letters with pages and pages of information about her life in Troy, had never hinted or given me any reason to suspect what they really did here. I did not even know that she knew Amy Post, let alone that I had been recommended to her as a sympathetic friend. I looked around at the tiny, airless room in which I had been kept and realized that I was not the first occupant to seek safety here.

“If you can tolerate the wagon,” Mr. Bouton went on, “my associate can conduct you as far as Albany.”

“You have done right by my sister so far,” Leah acceded. “We will place ourselves in your hands for deliverance.”

Maggie

A diversion was needed to get us out of the house. Annabel assured us with confidence that her brother was a master of misdirection. She little suspected that she was addressing two women quite accustomed to deception, and I marveled at the number of secrets that seemingly open people kept from one another.

Robert Bouton planned and executed a double diversion that began with a round of fireworks going off near the lumberyard that served as cover for our tormentors. While they were erupting with a frightening show of light and color, Mr. Bouton drove his carriage practically onto the front porch, and a short-statured person concealed in a hooded cloak dashed from the house into the carriage, which promptly took off in a cloud of dust.

It was supposed to look like me, trying to escape by carriage under the cover of the firecrackers. In fact, it was Annabel's young man, John, nearly bent double to conceal his height, and the carriage was filled with ammunitions. Anyone thinking to waylay a helpless girl would receive an unpleasant surprise. This was the real distraction, and it served us well, for we saw two men take off on foot to pursue the carriage, and shortly thereafter a wagon with two more men appeared on the road careening in the same direction.

Leah and I took this occasion to clamber through a window at the back of the house and into an open wagon waiting nearby. One of Mr. Bouton's friends bade us lie down on our backs in the bottom of the wagon, and then he lay the false floor on top of us.

It was as though the lid of a coffin had been closed upon us.

I panicked immediately as the light and air vanished and thrust my hands out to scrabble at the wooden planks, drawing in breath to scream. Leah threw her arms around me, as best she could in the confined space, and held me down. The wagon lurched forward, and we slid unpleasantly backward in the first moment and then hurtled feet first at an alarming speed, helpless and blind in the darkness.

If I had been in my right mind, I might have felt pity for the others who had traveled in this wagon, fleeing enemies just as single-minded and relentless. Elderly men, women with infants, the injured and the sick had lain here, pressed together, unable to move and much less capable of withstanding this ordeal than a healthy young girl. Instead, I indulged in a shameless terror. Frightened and disoriented, I was immediately beset by a terrible nausea, but I knew that to vomit would only make our situation worse. And so I clamped my lips together and fought the heaving of my stomach.

Shortly, a greater agony overshadowed my need to retch. We lay upon rough planks located directly over the axle of the wagon, and every bump or rut in the road was translated through the wood and into our bones. The pain quickly grew overwhelming as we felt our backbones jarred until it seemed they would break into pieces.

All the while, Leah was speaking quietly into my ear. I do not remember everything she said. I believe at one point she spoke, incongruously, about her butcher in Rochester, whom she believed was shorting her on the weight of the meat he sold. Her voice served as a distraction, an anchor to sanity, as it was meant to do. I might have replied that I did not think we would live long enough for the butcher to cheat her again, but I did not.

How long would we be trapped in this makeshift coffin? Mr. Bouton said it was only until we were out of sight, but surely we should have already reached that point? Did that mean we were still in view of our enemies? Had we been followed? I was tormented with visions of our driver forced off his seat at gunpoint, the wagon driven to the edge of a ravine and pushed over.

Suddenly we came to a halt. Overwhelmed by fear that the worst had happened, I began to scream. Nothing Leah did could quiet me. And then the false bottom was wrenched up and the face of Mr. Bouton's friend appeared in the bright light of day. “Hush, Miss Fox!” he chastened me with a smile. “You're safe now. We're five miles out from Troy, and you can come sit in the wagon like civilized folk for the rest of the trip.”

Five miles? It had seemed like a hundred.

***

It was more than a week before we made it back to Rochester. Leah rented a room in an Albany hotel for a few days to give me an opportunity to recover from my fright. I took to the bed and cowered under the covers, trembling at footsteps in the corridor and gasping in fright at the sound of loud voices on the street. Leah was sympathetic for a time, but her impatience won out in the end and I was roused from bed by a firm grip on my ear and forced to dress myself. We traveled home by train. I was silent and unresponsive throughout the trip, refusing to speak to our fellow travelers, who must have thought I was Leah's idiot daughter.

Something had broken inside me. I did not feel safe at home, and nothing that Kate or Mother could do would repair the damage. I lay upon my bed for days, staring up at the ceiling, wondering whether my enemies would come to Rochester. I imagined that the people in the street were watching the house and sent Calvin, time and again, to hasten away any strangers who seemed to be loitering. This did not please Leah, for the fact was that many people did come to look at the house of the Rochester “rappers,” and most of them were merely curious or seeking an appointment with us.

I turned seventeen in December. The family made a great fuss over me, with new dresses and books and hair ribbons, but I remained spiritless.

Mother tried to give me Kate's tonic. Calvin tried to interest me in the phosphorescent “hands” he was making as a new spirit trick. Amy Post came and read me letters about the National Women's Rights Convention.

The only person who brought me any real comfort was Kate, who simply lay down at my side and held my hand.

The winter passed, and I haunted the house like a mournful specter from one of the novels I loved so much. When I caught glimpses of my own reflection in the looking glass, I saw a thin and pale young woman with large brown eyes and a sad, downcast mouth. Sometimes I sat with Kate in the spirit circles, but I no longer felt the stirring of humor when the table danced upon its legs or when my sisters used a collapsible pole to brush the clothes of the sitters in the dark. My sense of mischief had been snuffed like one of the trick candles we employed.

It was Leah, of course, who finally decided to break me of my melancholy.

“I'm sending you to Philadelphia, Maggie,” she announced one morning in early June. I looked up from my breakfast dish in some alarm. She wasn't even looking at me but was pouring molasses on her oats as if there was nothing unusual about her words. “There is a community of spiritualists there, and in particular, one Mr. Simmons, who has offered to sponsor your visit to meet with them.”

“I won't go!” I gasped.

“I have told him you won't stay at his home.” She laid down the molasses and raised her eyes to mine. “I explained
some
of the particulars of the incident at Troy, and he agreed that your comfort and safety would be foremost on his mind.”

I shook my head at her, but she simply continued as if I had already agreed. “Mother will go as your chaperone, and Mr. Simmons has reserved the bridal suite at Webb's Union Hotel for the two of you.”

“The bridal suite?” I asked in spite of myself.

“It is apparently their finest room,” she replied. “Mr. Simmons will personally interview your visitors, and the hotel staff will be instructed to allow no one to your parlor without his prior approval. Truly, Maggie, it should be a restful and pleasant trip. I know how you enjoy a city, and Philadelphia is second only to New York. You will do good for us in the name of spiritualism, and it will do you good to go.”

“Can Kate come?” I reached across the table and took my younger sister's hand.

Leah's eyes showed a twinkle of satisfaction as she recognized that I would bow to her will. “You know I cannot have you both gone at the same time. We have a business to run, and every one of us must do her part.”

Thus, I agreed to the trip, although not without reservation. I confided the depths of my fears to Kate. “You did not want me to go to Troy,” I recalled. “I thought at the time that you were jealous because I wanted to visit Annabel Bouton, but perhaps…” I couldn't believe I was admitting that Kate might have some second sight, but here I was, just like one of our sitters, clinging to the hope that she could offer me some comfort. “How do you feel about my traveling to Philadelphia?” I asked.

“I have no bad feelings about it,” Kate replied. “I only have the sense that the trip will do you good, and I scarcely need the sight to know that!”

I sighed. “I wish we could go together.”

“Someone must stay and obey Leah's every command,” Kate said wryly. “Otherwise she will have no one to bully save poor Calvin, and his fate would be upon our heads!”

***

It was a restful trip, and we were lucky to enjoy a stretch of warm, early summer weather. Philadelphia, while quite a large city, seemed more personable and warm than New York, and our hotel suite was better than promised, with a sunny sitting room and a spectacular view. We were hosted by Mr. Simmons and a number of spiritualists from his Quaker meeting. They were polite and gentle folk, quite typical of Quakers, and the demand for spirit circles was far less than I had expected. They seemed content to have me there, to meet me, and to talk about spiritualism.

In the afternoons we held public circles at our hotel in a parlor given over to our use. Any of the known Quaker and spiritualist associates could attend for a dollar's fee and converse with the spirits on matters of religion and philosophy. For a slightly larger fee, we also held private meetings with people wanting a more intimate conversation. Mr. Simmons met with prospective clients ahead of time, and it turned out to be quite easy wheedling information from him before meeting the sitters. Leah would have been proud. Mother was a great help, as she was a natural gossip, and her forthright, friendly manner not only put our guests at ease but also encouraged them to talk freely about themselves.

Occasionally, someone of high stature in the city would approach Mr. Simmons, and he would send this person directly up to our parlor without prior warning, never realizing he was lessening my chances for a successful sitting. Such was the case one afternoon in our second week there, when a diffident knock came upon the door and Mother opened it to a stranger.

I was seated in the window seat of the parlor at the time, enjoying the sunny warmth and reading a book. I scarcely looked up when I heard a mild voice say, “I beg your pardon. I have made some mistake. Can you direct me to the room where the spiritual rappers can be found?”

I smiled and turned back to my book while Mother assured the gentleman that he had found the correct room. She invited him in and ascertained that Mr. Simmons had met him downstairs and directed him up, a sure sign that he was an important person. Under those circumstances, it was probably inexcusable that I continued to direct my attention to my book, but I was keenly aware that the visitor kept glancing in my direction as if unable to help himself. It was my first deliberate flirtation since I was in Troy, and after a moment's enjoyment of the old thrill, I put down my book with a sigh and approached the sitting table with a mind toward getting down to business.

He was a man of slight stature, scarcely taller than I was, well dressed, with dark hair. As I seated myself across from him, I noticed that he had remarkable eyes, very wide and warm brown in color. They were kindly eyes, and I smiled naturally at him and watched those eyes widen in reaction. It was easier to manage these unannounced sittings if the client's attention was drawn to a pretty girl instead of being on the alert for manipulation.

“You have come to us today because someone dear to you has died,” I said, by way of introduction.

“Yes, my youngest brother, Willie,” he helpfully replied.

I nodded sympathetically. I looked at his careworn face, showing the ravages of recent grief and sadness. “You feel some guilt,” I went on, “because your younger brother is gone but you have survived him.” This was not a difficult guess, but I appeared to strike some deep feeling in the man. He started in his seat and looked nearly overcome with emotion.

“I have never been a completely well man,” he admitted. “My health has been delicate for years—although I have never let that prevent me from living my life,” he quickly amended, as if I might think less of him for being sickly. “But I always assumed that if any one of us might die young, it would be me. Not Willie.”

I had gathered enough information at that point to commence the sitting. Mother drew the curtains, bringing the room to semidarkness, and we called upon the spirits to join us.

It was not a remarkable sitting. Young Willie appeared and rapped out a message for his brother, encouraging him to continue living as he usually did and to enjoy every day that came to him. There was no need for guilt, and the spirit of Willie expressed surprise that his beloved brother would succumb to such a fruitless emotion.

Feeling that I had the upper hand, I invited the gentleman to ask a question that would prove the identity of his brother's spirit and gave him a pen and a paper on which he could write four answers. Our visitor accepted these items with a strangely anguished look at me, and then bent to his task, quickly penning the words “medicine” and “engineering.” He paused a moment, lifting the pen from the paper, and then wrote “languages” and, after another pause, “law.” Then he lay down the pen and looked across the table at me with some apprehension.

I smiled, trying to put him at his ease. “You may ask your question,” I prompted.

“When I first went away to university, what did I study there?” he asked. I directed him to point at each of his answers in turn and when he reached “engineering,” I caused there to be a sharp rap. He stared at me in puzzlement and amazement, and I gazed innocently back at him. My mother and I rose, to signal him that the sitting was over.