Gus appeared early the next morning with a napkin full of marzipans—Mrs. Hobson had brought them from Boston as a gift to his parents—and sat down beside me in the grass while I weeded our vegetable garden.
“They’ve stopped locking you up?” I asked. I didn’t mean to sound snappish.
“It was only because—” Gus broke off, tilting his head so sadly that I softened. “My mother thought that if I was seen at the wake, or the burial, people might think it implied some kind of formal connection between our families. I was so angry I smashed a vase. That was when they decided to shut me in my room until it was all over.”
Gus was blushing. Ugh—here was the real reason everyone had assumed that I’d be desperate to win over Gertrude Farrow. Did they all see, now, that I was not intriguing to snare her son? I felt shame heat my cheeks at the idea, and possibly that was yet another motive for my refusal to act as medium—it was a chance to prove, before witnesses, how little I cared for his mother’s approval.
Gus spread out the marzipans. They were a luxury, one I’d tasted only in his house after Christmas. It took all my self-control not to devour them at once. I made myself wrap some up in my handkerchief to slip later to Anna.
“You were magnificent yesterday! So clear in the middle of all that, that sentimental muddle! I was worried—but I should have known you couldn’t be taken in by empty spectacle! I wish Margo—but she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, and I don’t know if I can tell her. Because then—”
He delivered this rather disjointed speech in mournful tones. If he told Margo it was magic she’d seen, he’d have to explain why he thought such a thing was possible.
“You mean that Mrs. Hobson is a sorceress and not a medium,” I said.
Gus nodded. “That’s what Darius says; he says he can sense the magic in her, just the way he can in—in me. It hurts me more than I can say to see Margo fooled like that.”
I liked agreeing with Old Darius even less than I liked agreeing with Gertrude Farrow.
“So why don’t you tell Margo everything? Unless Darius outright forbids you to, and even then it’s not like you to fawn.” Gus flinched; anger snapped in my voice. Then something struck me. “Or, no—I can see that it would be awful to tell her, when she really believes your cousin is coming back to her. I didn’t know she’d ever had a child.”
The Reverend Skelley had said that recent bereavement damaged the critical faculties. I understood with a shock that old griefs were just as potent—if grief sank deeper with time then that action might make it less conspicuous, but in no way was it gone. Instead it burrowed in the depths, and its winding holes never closed.
Of course Margo should have been straightforward with me, of course she should—but all at once my fury at her seemed overblown.
Gus reared back, his face pinched. “Of course you didn’t know. No one ever mentions it, because the baby was all of four months old when it died! It was hardly more than a worm. I can’t understand why Margo is suddenly so possessed by the idea of a creature that couldn’t even talk.”
I had my first intimation that perhaps Gus had reasons besides a disinterested love of truth for wanting me not to be a medium.
“Even with a baby, though, or a very young child—I know that in the case of my brothers part of what my parents grieved was the loss of potential. That they could never know who my brothers might have become.” I fumbled my way with difficulty through these feelings so far beyond my experience.
“If Margo wants potential, she has me now,” Gus said. “Maybe I should tell her everything for just that reason! It would be kinder to disillusion her quickly, instead of letting it all drag out.”
“That there are no such things as ghosts, or spirits, only magic that creates the illusion of them.” I still felt tentative, as if moving blind through strange territory. Something had touched me, and I was no longer quite so righteously self-assured. “Even though it will wound her terribly to know the truth.”
“No,” Gus said. “There are.”
“There are what?”
“Ghosts—that’s what I meant to tell you after we saw Nora Downs. Darius says so. It’s only that they don’t behave like that.”
My discomfiture at this speech approached nausea: it was violent, visceral, clenching. I sat back on my heels, sweaty and furious, with weeds bleeding sap in my fists.
“And why would you credit what Darius says, when it’s obvious he’ll spin any nonsense to keep you entranced? Ghost stories, Gus, really? He treats you like a child!”
“Catherine,” Gus said, his words falling over mine. “Catherine. I know Darius made a mistake in the way he approached you—he knows, too, now, I think he’s even sorry. But you know what he is, you saw for yourself! Well, in the other realm ghosts aren’t even all that unusual, and everyone can see them! As plainly as a hat, or a spade.”
“On the moon, you mean?” I asked. Very nastily, I admit.
Gus looked at his lap. “I was wrong about that,” he confessed softly. “But there’s a city. That part is all true. I’d give anything to take you there someday.”
I did not say that I had no use for any city populated by the likes of Darius, because Gus gave a small gasp and I saw that he was fighting back tears. I softened at once.
“Gus? What’s the matter?”
“Oh!” Gus was struggling for self-mastery; he tried to smile. “It’s just that I couldn’t bear it if everything was spoiled, all because Darius had to act like an idiot in front of you.”
Hearing him describe Darius’s behavior in these terms mollified me considerably.
“Tell me about these ghosts, then,” I said. I didn’t want to see Gus break down in tears. “In the other realm. How are the Spiritualists mistaken?”
There was nothing like an opportunity to display his superior knowledge to help Gus rally. He straightened at once.
“Well, the voices, for a start. Ghosts can’t talk. Sometimes they howl, or whine. But they’re as dumb as cattle! So all that babble about how happy they were—anyone who knows anything about what ghosts are really like would know that was impossible for them!”
I find I must pause my story here, and let an interval of silence greet this first intimation of my future state.
“And what else?” I asked after I’d turned over this information. The marzipans were gone, all except the ones I’d saved. Grass pricked my bare feet, curled not far from Gus’s elegant shoes. Their navy leather shone through careless patches of mud.
“Well, Darius says that sometimes there are—magical emanations, almost certainly unconscious ones—around ghosts. But their magic isn’t the kind we saw—even with magic, their relationship with the physical world is different somehow. Levitating an object is the simplest magic there is, but a ghost can’t lift so much as a feather! So something like that speaking trumpet, or even the bell—only someone living could do that.”
I regret to say that Darius has been proved correct in this particular. I cannot levitate a knife, say, and embed it in a throat of my choosing. I find the immaterial far more biddable. Slippages, absences, gaps, the darkness dwelling in the world’s excisions: these are now my kin. A shadow will recognize me; a crack will sit up for me like a puppy for its mistress. Solid objects, though, are unfriendly.
“It was savage of Mrs. Hobson, then. To let Reverend Skelley take such a beating, just to make her display more convincing.” If my anger at Margo was waning, on this point I found it undiminished.
Gus shrugged. “She probably didn’t even know what she was doing, really. Darius says she’s not a citizen, so everything she does is—just magical overflow, slop. Mindless instinct. Ugh, what a foul old charlatan she is!”
There was a great deal to parse in these words. “A citizen? You mean of your magical city?”
He nodded. “Catherine, listen: all that matters there is talent. Darius says it’s a true meritocracy, not the sham we have in this country, and no one there would care—” Here he stopped, blushing furiously. I chose not to understand. “I have to be getting back. I told my tutor I wanted to read Wordsworth in the woods, and he’s enough of a sap that he believed me, but he’ll start to look for me soon. Here!”
He held out his volume of Wordsworth. It was a lovely one, bound in burgundy leather, with gilt filigree on the spine. I accepted it with only the faintest fluttering of conscience.
“I’ll say it fell out of my pocket in the brambles, and that I couldn’t find it,” Gus said. “I suppose I’ll have to scratch my arms on some thorns on my way back.” We were smiling at each other, and here I must in honesty recall that genuine tenderness passed between us, a warm transfusion, along with our childish glee over the theft.
“Your mother won’t do anything against my father, will she? Because of what I did?”
Gus looked startled at the idea—I’m sure it had never occurred to him that my defiance might have consequences worth worrying about. “Oh, I don’t think so! She always says that he’s the only groom in town who doesn’t drink.”
Our moment of communion had passed, and we parted without the smallest touch, much less an embrace—it had been far out of the ordinary for us, when he’d pressed my hand after the séance. I finished weeding, then set to picking peas for supper, wondering at how their tiny tendrils knew to grip the stakes. Did plants have feeling in some sense, even though they had no brains? It seemed that they must.
But interspersed with these wonderings were glimpses of flying books, and keening ghosts, and a city where citizen had some otherworldly meaning I couldn’t quite grasp. These visions repelled me, and I dug my bare toes into the soil as if I hoped to plant myself in all things warm, and sunlit, and solid.
I suppose it was an hour or two later—the peas were shelled, the dough rising—when Anna came running with wide eyes and a note in her hand. It was from Reverend Skelley, inviting us both to tea in his garden.
She threw her arms around my neck, snuffling—she had a cold. I was so glad to see her animated again that I did not mind when she wiped her moist little nose on my shoulder.