March, 1850
“What is it that bolsters this Spiritualism?” Shadrach Barnes asked the committee of men. “It comes from out of the mouths of babes and those same babes contend it true.”
He swept his arm past where I sat. I felt raw and alone so high up on my chair though I mightn’t have been there at all, in a way, for I sensed the proceedings might carry themselves from beginning to end far removed from my presence.
“I am told that the wage of a Roundot mineworker is five dollars a day,” Barnes said. “Five dollars a day, less the cost of his tools, to brave the darkness and the depths.”
Amos Edwards, front and centre, who co-owned the mine with his brother Elijah, shifted a little in his seat and slowly crossed his legs.
“Fanny, behind me, garners double. Double and then some,” said Barnes. “Six sittings a day, one hour for a sitting, two dollars an hour—that’s a twelve-dollar take. Fanny, a girl of seventeen, making two times as much as the grown men of Roundot, and then in the comfort of her parlour, where the air is as crisp and as clear as a bell. As crisp and as clear as a bell,” he repeated, “unless you count the Spirits in it.”
Laughter took the small committee, none so loud as Amos Edwards. Shadrach Barnes paced back and forth, careful not to turn around.
“Roundot might’ve called many men to its aid. I, of course, am only one. And being that man which Roundot chose, to wit, a disciple of science and reason, I have studied long and hard for three days past inside this room to determine for all, to the best of my knowing, whether Fanny Conant can communicate with spirits. My inquiries have focused on the rap, by and large, the so-called grammar of the spirits. The inhuman sound that they use to express the sort of words I’m saying now. Yet far too human, I should say. As I have tried, gamely, to prove. And yet which due to some vile cunning, some legerdemain unknown to me, Fanny Conant has concealed and still conceals how it is made. But what can we really expect from a girl who claims to commune with the dead?” said Barnes. “It is a question I ask, gentlemen, not of you, but rather instead of Fanny Conant, who has only to look inside herself to see the evil of her ways.”
“Here, here,” said Amos Edwards, rising slightly from his chair.
“Tell us what evils afflict her, Professor.”
“I myself have developed a number of theories on how Miss Conant works the trick. Medically speaking,” Barnes said and gave pause to finger the mandible prongs of his scope, “the rappings themselves may be ascribed to one of several dislocations. The ankles, the toes, the hips, the fingers, and most favourable to this end, sirs, the knees. Why the knees? Since wide, the knees. The knees are the broadest and thus the most pliable, specifically the tibia and femur,” he said. “The former grates upon the latter when the muscles either side of the former are exerted, producing a percussive sound, and ample force to jar a table. Fanny Conant effects—or affects, I should say—a quite ingenious jamboree. Fanny is for the bandstand, sirs, to herald with flautists the coming of spring!”
The laughter came bolder this time, more relaxed. The gentlemen were settling in. I felt my eyes begin to dart, searching out the room’s egresses.
Where were my parents? They had profited from me. And then they too had been too scared. Their daughter, held below the town and brought every night to the church of the elders. Or maybe they waited, distraught but resigned, in front of the great double doors in the dark. If I were to stand on the tips of my toes to see through the window surmounting the lintel, might I have seen them on their toes attempting as hard as they could to be near me?
Shadrach Barnes was down below. He was binding my feet with a sort of thick bandage. He did not speak as he did this, and I could see only the crown of his head. He wrapped and clipped and tied the bandage without ever once looking up at my face.
“Of course, when they do it in China,” he said, “the women inflict it on themselves. The effect of the binding is purely cosmetic. They like to go on slender feet.”
“Be sure she’s not too nimble, sir,” said the Minister Willets, his eyes resting on me. “She isn’t far from getting up and bolting through that door.”
“She is just about right, I think,” said Barnes, and tightened the knot that he’d made in the bandage.
There was a fiddling at the door, and then it burst open, admitting the nighttime.
Someone laughed invisibly.
An object trailing smoke rolled in.
And as it rolled, the door slammed shut, and the room was suspended a moment in silence. One of the aldermen gathered himself and he walked down the aisle to survey what it was. His footsteps sounded very loud. The object was still trailing smoke when he reached it and then it exploded in his face. It was fondly what the boys would call a sparkling torpedo.
The alderman yelled and shot upright. He clutched his eyes and limped away. A couple of local Roundot boys separated from the darkness beyond the open door.
They carried torpedoes of all shapes and sizes, ones to lob and ones to hold, and they lit them at once, as in some ceremony, and came on holding flames like monks.
The women, who’d been standing in the back of the room, who I’d hardly been aware were there, cried and came forward, a tide of them, running, to tamp the things before they went. The mine-owner, Edwards, looked shrewdly content. He leaned and whispered something in the county judge’s ear.
Shadrach Barnes stood patiently, his hand upon his chin.
The pack of torpedoes went up, a sortie. The women, too late, fled clutching their bonnets. The room was filled with brilliant shapes and oppressively violent cracks and bangs. I stared for a moment, unable to move. And then I remembered my feet, lashed together.
Sweat was spreading through my clothes and trickling down my bandaged legs.
Shadrach Barnes was still, like me. He was standing at the head of the long line of tables and watching the proceedings down the middle of the aisle. He stood with his arms crossed, his necktie bunched up, strange, wild lights playing over his face.
“Now wasn’t that a proper shock?” said one of the wives, who had mounted the table and was holding protectively onto my arm. “I trust you’re holding up all right through all of these hooligan antics, Miss Conant.”
Please don’t make me go downstairs, I tried to convey with my eyes, without speaking, but the woman would not look at me, as if she’d been instructed.
I tried to pull my right arm free, but the woman who held it was uniquely strong so I hauled myself off of my chair into space, not caring what happened, just wanting my freedom, and I went swinging out in a sort of drunk circle anchored by the strong one’s arm. A second woman joined the first upon the stage and wrenched me back, assisted by a stouter third. I kicked with my legs but they targeted no one, just lifted me slightly off the ground.
“This isn’t right,” I think I yelled. My voice was unthinkably loud in the silence. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right.”
“Do not be alarmed,” said Shadrach Barnes. “Miss Conant is afflicted with the bilious derangement. It is yet another symptom of the mediomania that compels her to sit there and lie to our faces. Spiritualism, womanism, bloomerism, abolition—all variants of the selfsame affliction. And now, gentlemen, they have driven her mad.”
Everyone nodded thoughtfully as I was dragged across the room.
“Go easy now, miss,” said one of the women. “You’ll only make it harder on yourself if you fight.”
“Motion to reconvene,” said Barnes, “when I have dredged this mystery further. Thanks to you boys for the most rousing show. And to the rest of you, goodnight.”