March, 1850
My first couple of hours in the basement that night I lay on my back with my eyes on the ceiling. The room was intensely dark and airless. I could not see my lifted hand.
I woke, suddenly, to a key in a lock. Someone came on in the light of the hall. He cut a bedraggled shadow in the door, like a man weighted down by the heft of his life. His hair and the long pointy beard that he wore rendered blonde in the light and the room went to blackness.
Then I heard him in the darkness, edging his way toward the bed.
I tried to back up but he came on too fast. And yet he didn’t use his hands. He used just himself, his own bulk, to tip toward me, and he buried his head in my breast like a cat.
I accepted the weight and we lay, like stacked wood. He curled a leg up and then over my hip, his face still nuzzling in my breast. He didn’t kiss or bite, just pressed and possibly smelled me, his nose in the fabric.
I saw him through feeling his warmth and his weight.
I saw him though he was not there.
I felt the rise and fall of him, the vast proportions of his chest. I wanted to stop him, to thrust him away and tried to for a time, I think, my arms reaching out for some fixed point of purchase.
“You lovely child,” he said to me. “You lovely, lovely child.”
He moaned.
“Tell me I am small,” he whispered. “Tell me I am barely there.”
I cradled his face and I peered at it closely.
His eyes were shut tight, like a child in night terror. I ran my fingers over them: the eyeballs lightly spasming, the lashes heavy on the cheek. I touched his nose, his mouth, his beard and all the while he lay so still. His eyes began to open slowly. He seemed to want to see me there.
But then, before his iris showed, I had lowered his head to my breast.
Q
The inquiry continued for another two weeks. This was what they told me after. But a week, I found out, is no longer a week when the days no longer feed each other.
That was all it was: existence.
I heard the feet of youngsters, skidding, the marching of the teachers as they gathered them to hand. Sometimes a squeal or a bark of commandment sifted through the boards like dust. Some of the boys, I could only assume, were the very same ones who had lobbed the torpedoes.
One of the teachers from the school would bring me what remained of suppers. She was a fat and buxom woman who put me in mind of a South Indies icon, gliding along despite her girth, then crossing her arms to watch me eat.
When the sounds of the schoolhouse went silent above me, the wives of the men of the spirit committee would come to clean my face and hair.
“My dear,” said Shadrach Barnes one night. “Today you must give up the trick.”
But he spoke without heat. And his words, they lacked purpose. He only seemed to say them as a matter of course. So Amos Edwards stepped in then to take up Shadrach Barnes’ slackness. He walked along the table with a queer erratic violence as if his movements were not his.
“To me,” he said, “the greatest mystery is what Fanny Conant is trying to prove. The girl speaks in sophistries, riddles, evasions. Sometimes she declines to speak! Yet what she wants is clear enough. There is precious little mystery in Miss Conant’s motivations.” And the coal-baron turned to address me directly, facing away from the men of the crowd. “Frederick Conant works my mine. Frederick Conant is your father. And Frederick has come into more than a penny since when you first beheld these spirits.”
Roughly his fingers encircled my ankle and dragged it, wriggling, from the stage. I nearly lost my balance then, tottering upon the chair.
Barnes came on a couple of steps.
Edwards presented my foot to the crowd, jerking me down bit by bit from the stage.
“This cheap, vile enchantress,” he said. “This soubrette—”
“—I say, sir,” said Shadrach Barnes.
“You say what?” said Edwards, spinning. All of the archness was gone from his face. “You say a great deal, Doctor Barnes, but what of it. What has any of it come to while we sit here like fools!”
“You are tired,” said Barnes. “I understand. We are all of us equally tired, Mr. Edwards. And yet we are all of us men, after all. Gentlemen, once upon a time.”
Amos Edwards cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said and stepped away.
Q
Shadrach took me down that night but did not stay to lie beside me. He seemed at once protective of me and terribly worried what others might think.
And then I awoke to a scratch at the lock. Soon he’d be crossing the room to sit down. And yet he seemed timid or possibly drunk—his key, I mean, the way it scratched. They had gotten him drunk. They had put notions in him. Find where she sleeps and defile her, they had told him.
The person who entered was not him.
This person was thinner, and shorter, and balder. He moved jerkily, as if he were nervous, as if he were conscious of me through the dark.
“Say your name,” I told the shape.
I heard it catch a breath, then nothing.
It turned sideways and closed the door. There was something familiar in its profile. I braced myself against the bed, curling my hands into claws.
That was when Amos Edwards’ face loomed like an unhealthy moon from the dark. His hair stood in wings along his head. His teeth were yellow, strong and clenched. He was breathing roughly from his nose, with pauses in between the breaths. Before he even reached the bed I smelled the liquor in his pores.
“Let us see, girl. Let us see,” this man was saying, bearing down.
I clawed at his face, but he remained. And then he was wrenching at my clothes.
“Let us see. Let us see. Let us see. Let us see.”
He whispered it fiercely, fumbling with his belt.
With one of his hands he had me pinned. The other one fished inside his pants.
He did not seem to really want me. There was no heat beneath his skin. He was doing this not out of wanting to do it but rather because I had wanted it less.
Then there was a blinding light. Edwards stopped fumbling, his trousers half down. He turned around to see the source and as he rotated away, it grew brighter.
Shadrach Barnes stood in the door.
“Mr. Edwards, a moment?” he said from the hallway.
“Hem,” said the other. “If you might—with the door . . .”
“I shall not budge until you do.”
Shakily, slowly, Edwards rose, refastened his belt and walked toward Barnes.
I was sitting there stiff with my hair in a tangle, my dress still up around my thighs.
Then the room was dark again and I could hear the two of them conversing in the corridor. I heard one of them and, much later, the other making up the basement stairs.
I lay there benumbed and yet calm in the dark. I could still smell the scent of the coal-baron’s liquor. And I would lie there, gaining strength, rebuilding from the inside out so that when someone came for me it wouldn’t be me that they found lying there but an artefact, an icon, a figure of lead whose aspect they would flee before.
So let them come and come again. Let them fall on me in legions. Let them think they’d used me up when it was I who would sap them.
“It’s time for you to go, Miss Conant.”
Shadrach Barnes stood in the hall. A cadre of shadow-shapes shifted behind him.
“Go,” I think I said. “Go where?”
“It is no longer safe for you here,” said Barnes.
“Was it ever?” I said. I was laughing at Barnes. “Or only now that he has come?”
“It has never been safe,” said Shadrach Barnes with something naked in his voice. “It has never, for a moment, been safe for you here.”
“And what if I’m content to stay? What if I am not afraid?”
“I don’t doubt that you aren’t,” he said. “But you are not in your right mind.”
“My mind,” I said and tasted scorn, “feels as right to me as ever.”
“The girl is in shock,” he said, not to me. “Prepare yourselves. She’ll not go easy.”
“You’re right, but still you’re wrong,” I said. “Not all of you together would be able to lift me!”
“We will do our best,” he said, distracted by something occurring behind him.
I struggled upright at his words, eager for what, I could not say. The figures behind him clustered forward, shifting in the light.
“Try to make me go. Just try. I have lead all through my bones!”
“Mrs. Edwards, Mrs. Willets, Mrs. Jaffrey,” said Barnes, stepping away from the door. “On my mark.”
The women filed in then broke apart. I sensed them pushing past me in the dark air of the room. I extended my arms as a sleepwalker might, waiting for them to brush my fingers, and when one did I pushed her back.
“Keep away,” I yelled at her.
“Please don’t do that, Fanny dear.”
“Kindly calm yourself, Miss Conant. We are here are your behalf.”
Edwards’ wife came in from the left. Her neck was an urn; she was big-boned and strong. She seized both my arms at the wrists, pinching hard, and pinioned them behind my back.
“Do you know what he did? Your husband?”
“Miss Conant, for goodness’ sake,” said Barnes.
Jaffrey’s and Willets’ wives were upon me, dragging me off of the bed toward the door.
“Any minute,” I said, “your arms will tire! And then you’ll have to set me down!”