November, 1859
E.H.B.’s chambers were on the top floor. I’d received word from Constance to go there at once. I brought with me a galley of The Banner of Light, published monthly at the Center, in which I’d made good on my reticent promise of featuring the jeweller’s picture.
The caption: Spirit Picture Taken! Endorsed by the Medium Fanny A. Conant!
I found her engaged in preparing a session—“making up” the séance room.
Rounding the end of a cherry wood table with her polishing cloth barely touching the top, she was humming in tuneless, domestic low tones. Beneath four lamps with crimson shades positioned at its cardinal corners, the séance table streamed with light.
“You wanted to see me, Mrs. Britten.”
“This Mumler,” she said.
“Mrs. Sunderland’s friend.”
“Oh, curse it all, Fanny, this is rather awkward.” E.H.B. was English and you could not mistake it whenever a critter came up in her throat. “Help me, Fanny, if you will. My joints don’t hinge as once they did.”
She knelt again below the wood and scrabbled for something just under the surface. I knelt and I followed her hand underneath, feeling along her until I had found it—a confluence of wire extensions centred in an iron ring, every one of these wires fastened each to a corner where they ran to the bases of four standing lamps. If any of these wires were tugged the ring would function as a pulley, feeding the wires toward the head of the table and bringing the lamps to the ground with a crash.
Kneeling, I ushered the wire to its limit and fitted it over the base of the lamp.
Next I found out the rectangular leaves that boxed in the legs and concealed their oiled castors. The slightest push from E.H.B. would set the table gliding like a stateroom pianola.
“The lengths we’re driven to,” she said, “to insure that our ravings are heard by the public.”
“Is William Mumler such a threat?” I said to E.H.B. abruptly.
Not responding to me straightaway, she said, “That.” Then she crossed to the wall opposite where she stopped. “I rather thought—we thought, us girls—it seemed premature to go to print at this stage. At least until we have the tale of how he made this spirit picture. What with so many liberties poised in the balance—ours and the Negroes who live south of here . . . Can you hear me, Miss Moss?” she spoke into the wall. “What about when I say: in peace? What about when I say: harmonium?”
I heard movement behind the wood.
“What about when I say: washed clean?”
At that the panel opened out and a girl by the name of Miss Moss ventured forth, lifting her skirts above the cut. She did it with a certain grace—a certain grace, I’ll grant her that. Now she stood there businesslike, her finger pressed against her lips. “Your words were muffled, Mrs. Britten. Clearest when you said: washed clean.”
Miss Moss was one of several girls who were on at the Centre for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge—the CDSK, as we called it for short. Such girls, whom we employed as spies in séance rooms beneath trapdoors, or in the crush of lecture halls would feed or perform us the things that we needed, the trickeries inside our trade. Miss Moss was only one of these. But the one thing that bothered me more than her angling to become a trance-speaker as I had become was the secret that we had entrusted her with and so had we with all the girls: that the spirits were only a means to an end, a way to enshrine the ascendance of woman; how this ascendance had its gambits, no different than anything.
E.H.B. said, “Very well. Washed clean shall be our watchword then. Are you wretchedly cared for back there, I should ask? It must be incredibly dusty and dark.”
“I’ve lain in wait in tighter spots. The chair is a welcome addition, Mrs. Britten.”
“You’re very welcome, dear,” she said. “Now off to clothes and make-up with you.”
E.H.B. watched until Miss Moss was gone. “A premier actress of the parlour. Prodigy at touching shoulders.”
I felt my mood sour and my mouth project down. E.H.B. must’ve noticed; she looked at me large-eyed. I think that she meant it to seem like a kindness, but all that I saw was advantage and shrewdness. Miss Moss was a pretty addition, no more, to the ranks of our weary and roundabout circus. She would enter the trance, as we players all did. She would do this and never completely return.
“Tell me what it is I should do and I’ll do it.”
“You make this far too easy, Fanny.”
“I will not print it then,” I said.
“You needn’t go that far,” she said. “You must only allow us to meet with him, Fanny. Katherine Fox and yourself, as you’re probably aware, are speaking together a week from today. I wonder if they shouldn’t come. Do you happen to have it with you, Fanny?”
“The picture?” I said.
“Should you happen to have it.”
I folded the galley out before her. She scrutinized then lightly traced the image of the jeweller’s cousin.
“She becomes rather faint past the waist, doesn’t she? I wonder is this Mumler clever. And the woman looks faintly familiar somehow. As if I had known her in some other life.”
“I will fetch her along with the jeweller,” I said.
“Many thanks for that, my dear. I should like to perceive round the corner, is why. So much unexpected floats into our midst and I would hate, frankly, to add to it much. Constance?” E.H.B. called sharply. “Are you hearing what we’re saying, dear?”
“As a spring,” said a voice hidden somewhere beneath us.
“And how has your research been coming along?”
“Perfectly well, Mrs. Britten,” it said, and the room erupted neatly with a feminine form who stepped from a trapdoor concealed in the grain. As predicted, it was Constance. Than subtle Miss Moss she was starker by far—a hawkish, uncomplaining girl. And though she was every last bit as ambitious, at least she wasn’t coy about it. She held an extensive notation of papers, foxed at the edges from reading downstairs. She scrolled down the names on the page with her finger.
“Horace Greeley will be there.”
She spoke only to E.H.B.
“Horace Greeley . . .”
“He and Mary. Lost their only son to croup.”
“Their only son?”
“Well, Raphael.”
“We had better remember their names, hadn’t we?”
“The Spirit protect you this evening,” I said.
“Miss Conant,” said Constance, and turned to regard me with what I can only describe as intensity. It was loneliness, learned. It was rivalry, given—perverse and burning kin to love. I’d have ventured to say that the girl hated me had I not known her look so well, having worn it myself for three years, in the basement, walking these halls with my basket of mail.
All that I heard as I turned from the room was the shuddering crack of the floor tipping closed.