Hubert Haddad - Rochester Knockings - A Novel of the Fox Sisters

For a long time the only proximity Margaret had known was an epistolary intimacy with this ambassador of the wind. In his letters Elisha showed a sentimentality both heightened and recriminatory. Brimming with requirements for the present and the future, he of course disapproved of her spiritualist activities and urged her to break with that entourage of charlatans, convinced that Leah had exploited her two young sisters for greedy ends. Having had the opportunity to meet Mrs. Underhill up close in New York, his verdict remained unchanged.

Deeply moved at being able to be an object of passion without her spiritualist trappings, Margaret quietly allowed herself to be persuaded. Presented to his patrician Pennsylvanian family, to the parents and allies of the rich heir, she kept her role of promised one with all the required discretion. She could not hold his hand or touch his shoulder in public, though he begged her to be all his in her letters, to scent them with her perfume or to include a lock of her hair. Resolute, after going to the point of threatening her manager with prosecution, Elisha eventually forbade her psychic exhibitions. Reduced to a trifle by the man she loved, Margaret was tempted to strike back. When he was giving lectures in Boston or Washington at the invitation of scientific societies, she tried in vain to win back equivocal powers. But the credulous excitement around her was missing. In morgues or cemeteries, on certain nights of intolerable solitude, she went to invoke the silence of the dead that, in the lightheadedness of the unspeakable, sometimes strangely resonates from the depths of the grave or the void. No one ever answered, however, no spirit, no expeditionary from the kingdom of shadows, and she no longer had the heart to crack her knuckles to deceive that fact. Margaret could have recited her letter of surrender word by word: “I explored the unknown as far as the human will is capable. I went to death in order to obtain from it any manifestation, even symbolic. Nothing ever happened, nothing. I was in cemeteries in the middle of the night. I sat down alone on a tombstone, hoping that the sleeping spirits would rise up to me. I tried to obtain a sign. No, no, the dead will not come back, and no one knows how to escape hell with impunity. Spirits cannot come back. God didn’t want it.”

Flattered that she would accept leaving an unhealthy glory behind for him, but doubting that it was her deliberate choice, Doctor Kane showed her his gratitude in a missive full of leniency, addressed from Boston where he was giving a series of lectures: “I understand well the necessities that were yours, poor child, don’t I in the end have quite similar obligations? Facing the crowds come to hear my wild stories of the Far North, I sometimes feel just like you. My brain and your body are sources of attraction and I admit that there’s not that much of a difference. .”

Thwarted in its prerogatives, the religious establishments of every denomination — from Methodists to Anglicans — then tried hard, in the name of the Christ Resurrected, to win back the sheep under the influence of imposters, while the academies of science on their end were sanctioning those apostates of Cartesianism and the same experimental method that the already elderly chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul was working to formalize. He and Michael Faraday, spearheading a general outcry, harshly criticized the spiritual doctrine’s new claims to objectivity. Doctor Kane, who was pulling out all the stops to disenchant his beloved once and for all, likewise summoned Catholic dogma and its theater of punishment. Shamelessly, in a bitter play, he made her a list of the mortal sins to which she’d been exposed. More than the arguments of accurate science, the Catholic fulminations decided her renouncement. With a devil that Elisha didn’t believe in, he managed to disabuse Margaret; didn’t he have the right to use all means imaginable? The spirits that not long ago she actively believed she was divining, along with the quite convenient deceptions linking the invisible to physical occurrences were thus nothing more than the work of the Prince of Darkness. . For she had no doubt about the irrational. All the instruction that her volatile fiancé was imposing — at the home of his Aunt Susannah, who’d been assigned the task of chaperoning her — only deepened her belief in mysteries and her fear of endings.

In order to please her lover on the page, Margaret solemnly read The Wide, Wide World of the very Victorian Elizabeth Wetherell. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass seemed equally incredible to her. Was it really possible that, even if black, an infant could be torn from its family, that innocent women of color could be hung upside down and whipped to the point of bleeding, and that a miserable little black boy had to swap bits of bread in order to learn how to read from the little white boys almost as poor, but at least in school? Taken with the invocatory game of reading — this sweet interview with phantoms — she also discovered, though not without trouble, a translation of Friedrich de La Motte-Foucqué’s Ondine, which recounted the story of a water sprite who, in order to acquire a soul, marries the knight Huldebrand.

At least she was taking a rest from the general din of the dead, and for her it was a blessing to be excited in her living body, even at the expense of a meager intellect. Tables stopped turning for her and the bones of armoires stopped creaking. She hardly had news of Kate anymore, also in the hands of educators. Considering the multitude of scholars converted to spiritualism, the instruction couldn’t be a panacea against the bedlam of spirits, but undoubtedly it was enough to enlighten simple souls. Leah alone persisted with her symposia as well as salons, firmly established with the authority of being founder of this new doctrine, despite the competition now coming from Europe under the auspices of the French pedagogue Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail — a.k.a. Allen Kardec — who evangelized his religion of salvation through metempsychosis wherever it had some resonance, particularly in Brazil and the Philippines. Encouraged by her fiancé, who was indignant about the press’s intrusion into one’s private life, Margaret no longer read the publications of the mediumship societies where her name had so often appeared these last several years. “Don’t trouble yourself with the world,” he wrote her. “Never answer the questions of journalists. How horrible a life is autopsied while still alive!” As she’d done with her private diary, yesterday she fueled the stove with three notebooks filled with articles carefully cut out and pasted.

Finally satisfied with her renunciations and at how she’d applied herself to learning, Doctor Elisha Kane promised to marry her upon his return home. By the way in which he phrased it, Margaret could read between the lines the conditions implied in this promise: that she would remain steadfast in her conduct and that his impending expedition would go without pitfalls. For this had to be one of the most dangerous and risky operations ever undertaken. It was nothing less than chartering a specially streamlined vessel to break the barrier of the polar Arctic in order to find the trail of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition. Chief Medical Officer during the initial foray financed by the rich philanthropist Henry Grinnell, Kane had decided to lead under his own command this second mission leaving from New York. His services in the United States Marines or the Africa Squadron, like his missions in China and Europe, hadn’t cured him of a sense of adventure. The vocation of explorer only meant something with the discovery of new spaces. He worshipped the Scotsman David Livingstone, doctor and missionary who departed on the quest of locating the sources of the Nile and who would not rest until he’d made that latitude legendary on the map of the world. Or his defunct compatriot John Franklin, who, on his three journeys to the boreal arc, would end up mapping most of the northern coast of Canada, continuing up the Mackenzie River to the Beaufort Sea, and finally, aboard two ships fitted with steam engines and reinforced to last years, ventured in search of the northwest passage, wandering in the Greenland ice floes and disappearing with his crew in 1847. But for the most part, wasn’t it more exciting to discover, ice pick in hand, an unknown mountain than to lose oneself in conjectures on the smoky hallucinations of the afterlife?