Kate
Life in Auburn with Rebecca Capron and her daughters was pleasant and lively, and an opportunity for me to explore my powers without Leah telling me what to say. Although I missed Maggie no less, it was difficult to be lonely with the four Capron girls always about, laughing and teasing and including me as one of their own. They were impressed with my gift but not terribly impressed by me—within hours of my arrival they had teased me, petted me, borrowed my dresses, and lent me their own. I was just another girl.
This is not to say that I didn’t sit with Mrs. Capron and other interested parties in spirit circles most evenings. If anything, they believed me all the more for my ability to channel the spirit messages with reverence and then, a little while later, join the girls in a mock battle with pillows and flying shoes. “She’s such an innocent thing,” I overheard Mrs. Capron tell her friends. “She doesn’t understand the significance of what she does.”
In spite of this, Mrs. Capron did not think I was a featherhead and praised my schoolwork. She said that I was a very apt pupil. There was a particular girls’ school near New York City that she wanted me to attend the next fall, and she knew of a newspaper editor and his wife who might be willing to have me stay in their home.
Such a move held little appeal to me. Although it would be exciting to live near a big city, New York was much too far from my family, and I was not quite the city girl that Maggie was. My home would always be with my family, although I was resigned to life in Auburn for now, with the Capron girls making a temporary substitute for my sisters.
It was easy enough to bribe the girls with sweets and other promises to tell me all the stories they knew of their mother and her friends, who gathered each night to speak to the spirits. The Capron sisters hardly had to be enticed at all to listen at keyholes and repeat gossip they had heard, and no one ever linked this girlish pastime with the intimate knowledge of the rapping spirits. Without Leah to direct me, I was free to deliver messages from the spirit world that fostered my chosen purpose: to comfort the grieving, proving by the words of their beloved departed that there was life beyond death.
One might fault me for continuing the carnival tricks that Leah had encouraged, but Mrs. Capron had come to expect them, having learned of the spirit antics from her husband. There was little enough I could do on my own. Leah had made me rip out the hidden seams in my dresses and remove all balls before I left for Auburn, and it was a good thing that she had, because the Capron girls viewed anything belonging to one as available for use by all. Often, the best I could do was to cause the candles to go out while we sat holding hands, and then duck my head under the table in the darkness and bump it around a bit.
I altered the candles myself at night, after everyone else was asleep. Being as cautious as possible, I took them to the kitchen and laid out slabs of bread and jam before going to work on my task. Thus, if anyone came downstairs unexpectedly, I could scoop the candles into my pockets and be scolded for nothing more than an unladylike appetite. It was lonely work. I longed to tell Maggie of things I dared not write in my letters—how I had known the answers to some questions not through reading the face of the asker or listening to gossip but simply through knowing. Maggie would have argued as she always did. “Everyone gets a bit of luck sometimes!” she would have cried, or “You must have been told the story and just forgotten.” I missed her stubbornness and the challenge of a good debate with my closest and dearest friend.
Letters could not replace her, although I savored each correspondence as a breath of air from home. Things had apparently taken a bad turn at Corinthian Hall, and Maggie was badly frightened by the experience. However, Leah’s letter said that the event had only converted more people to a belief in the spirits, and I would venture to guess that she was correct, for even in Auburn people were outraged over the riot. And because Maggie’s letters spoke mainly of the flowers and candy she had received from sympathetic visitors, I assumed she had recovered from her shock and was determined to make as much profit from her misadventure as possible.
After several weeks, Mrs. Capron began pressing the issue of the private girls’ school in New York City again. The newspaper editor of her acquaintance had offered me a home while I attended that school next year, provisional upon his meeting me.
Eventually I was coerced into meeting this Mr. Horace Greeley, despite my reservations, and it turned out that he was no different from any of the people who came to see me. He had lost his son to cholera and, more recently, a dear friend to a shipwreck at sea. As a newspaperman he wanted to be skeptical, but even more badly, he wanted to believe.
After our successful spirit sitting, Mrs. Capron and Mr. Greeley spoke enthusiastically about my scholarly potential, worthy of a position as governess or schoolteacher. And yet what each of them wanted most from me was something I was already capable of giving them—spiritual peace. How odd it was that those who most needed my spiritual gifts tried so hard to educate me into a role where I could not use them!