Read Online The Dark by Claire Mulligan - Free Book Online Page B

the worn horsehair mattress as if on a Queen’s featherbed. Yes, it is for the best that I brought my sisters here, she assures herself. How, in truth, could I have left them so long with our aging parents? It is a wonder things have only now gone awry.
    Leah fastens on her stays, then her underpetticoat, then five more petticoats over that. The stiff-cording on her petticoats is frayed. The seams on her stays so threadbare that the very boning prods her skin. The money from her music lessons is never enough, not for new clothes or new intimates, not for the smallest of nest eggs. Her future yaws before her. As does Lizzie’s. And her sisters’. Those three cannot expect decent marriages without dowries. For that matter, just how will Leah manage into old age if she doesn’t marry again? Marriage. The thought of it fills Leah’s head with a hot, white noise. She rubs at the faint cross-hatch of scars on her forearms. The rubbing is mere habit now, a calming reflex of sorts, though as a child and filled with the usual superstitions, she had rubbed the scars for luck.
    She is grinding the coffee, when the post boy comes with a letter from Arcadia. She searches out enough coins to pay him, then breaks the seal, unfolds the letter. The writing is upright and cramped—her father’s. When has he ever written to her? Never, that is when. She reads, at first fearful of bad news, then in puzzlement.
    15 June, 1848
    Dear Leah-Lou,
    I reckon you and the girls are settled in Rochester by now, and I have been pondering over our conversation in the field out back here of David’s house. And I’ve been praying, too, for God’s guidance, but He has been quietude itself of late, and so I am taking it upon my own self to steer you to a safe and knowing course.
    I need confess straightaways that I’d been indulging in whiskey that night of the hauntings, the first occasion in near to fifteen years. And that I was awoken by uncanny sounds before your mother and your sisters were, even though I’d been sleeping soundly, as the soused are like to do. And when the knocks started I knew straightaways unholy trouble was drawing nigh, though how much trouble I surely miscalculated. I knew it weren’t the ghost of some peddler who’d gone and had his throat slashed, and that no mouldering corpse would be staggering out of that cellar, not even come the Last Trump, not even if we dug down to Hell’s watchtower. Not to say the saltbox weren’t a dour place. Straightaways on moving there your mother complained about the frowsy smell, and about those grey threads, thin as hairs, snagged round the spigots and latches. Straightaways she demanded I scrape my boots so as not to traipse in those rank clots of dirt she was ever finding on her new-cleaned floors. I scraped my boots. I surely did. Not that it mattered a holy whit. Your mother was determined to find that house haunted, just like all the places we’d lived in since I got back after those ten years gone. She had the Sense, she ever claimed. All the females in her family claimed the Sense. Your grandmother Rutan followed phantom funerals and the like, but there was, too, a great-aunt who could find any lost thing, and a midwife cousin who could make babies live just by scalding her hands in a cauldron. It were all blaspheming hogwash and I prayed constant for your mother’s soul, and for mine, too, ’course. But our voices must be a clamouring riot to God’s holy ears, and all a sinning man can do is hope the Lord attends one solitary word.
    Anywise, recall, Leah-Lou, that this “peddler’s” ghost arrived at the tail-end of the winter of’47-48, the most God-forsaken winter the almanac’s got on record. I blame my lapse in sobriety on that endless and frigid spell of darkness that seemed so deep you’d reckon it didn’t stop at Heaven’s gates, but went on
infinitum
, to use that Latinate word. Your mother saw portents falling thick on the world.Woodland creatures were